This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #144, on the subject of Shutting Off the Jukebox.
You may have seen the story: someone complained to a restaurant about being subjected to the music during dinner.
I have much sympathy with this attitude. I often find in public places that I am subjected to music I don’t want to hear–crying-in-your-beer country songs about adultery, popular rock songs about drug use, bland elevator music about nothing at all. I would like to replace it all with music I enjoy, rather than risk having those “earwigs”, the songs that get stuck in your head for hours that you don’t like but have heard often enough that they stick with you once you are reminded of them.
But it wasn’t that kind of music to which the patron objected. It was Christmas music.
Again, call me sympathetic. There is a lot of music played this time of year I really find offensive–all those terribly secular songs like Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Clause is Coming to Town, or Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, that have nothing to do with the real point of Christmas. Yet when it comes down to it, those were exactly not the songs to which the patron was objecting. The restaurant was playing “religious” Christmas music. I don’t know what in particular was being played–the Robert Shaw Chorale offers quite an extensive collection of sacred Christmas works, but so do Amy Grant and Casting Crowns, in a very different style. What the patron recommended, though, was replacing Christmas music with “holiday” music, which I presume means songs like Silver Bells, Jingle Bells, maybe Deck the Halls, instead of perhaps The First Noel, Silent Night, or Joy to the World. And so it seems that exactly the kinds of songs he finds offensive are the ones I would prefer, and the ones he would prefer are the ones I find offensive.
And that’s why we have our freedom of expression laws. As we noted, the point of Ray Bradbury’s wonderful Fahrenheit 451 is precisely that if we permit everyone to veto any expression he finds offensive, there will be no expression left. We can turn off the jukeboxes and retail store sound systems, and protect all our customers from the possibility that we might play something that offends them. While we’re at it, we can shut off those music-playing-while-you-are-on-hold telephone systems, too.
We will be the poorer for it, of course.
As far as playing religious Christmas music, it should be noted that religious Christians are the reason we celebrate the holiday. I know that people are going to object that many religions everywhere celebrate a holiday on or near the winter solstice, and Christians only put Christmas there to usurp the holiday celebrations that were already happening–but that’s not what I mean, either. In the nineteenth century people were expected to work six days a week, with time off on Sunday for church, and the Federal government followed that pattern. However, late in the century it was observed that on Christmas Day so many Federal workers called out “sick” in order to go to church that it was impossible to run government offices on the skeleton crew that reported for work. Thus a decision was made simply to give everyone the day off with pay, and it was soon put into law (along with New Years Day, Independence Day, and Thanksgiving Day, which had previously been established as a national day of Thanksgiving but not a holiday). Banks followed suit, because there were certain things banks needed to do when they were open that could not be done if the government was closed, and gradually the rest of the world caught up. We can debate the ethics of Christians calling out sick to go to church, but the fact is that it was that action which gave us paid holidays. Very few Christians go to church on Christmas Day anymore, but at least we celebrate it with our music and other festivities. So if you don’t like the religious music, at least say thank you that there were enough people who thought the day was important enough to warrant a religious celebration that the rest of us got a paid day off work.
But beyond that, every single one of us has to tolerate some music we don’t like, because every single one of us dislikes something others like–whether it is a distaste for Beethoven or Beatles, for Rap or Rock, for Country or Classical, show tunes or ska, Ives or Jazz, there is no music that pleases everyone, and “no music” does not please everyone, either.
The jukebox worked on something of the “majority rule” system: the owner tried to stock it with the records people were most likely to pay money to hear (the origin of “Top 40” radio), and the people picked the songs they wanted. Not every public facility can accommodate everyone’s tastes, and so the owner or manager or someone in an executive position (even if it’s only the night waitress) picks something. In some places, those choices are based on scientific consideration of what kind of music will get customers to spend more money; in some they are based on what the management thinks people will enjoy; in some it is based on what the manager likes, or what is available. Most of us have no say in what kind of music people play in the establishments we frequent.
The person who complained was within his rights, and certainly in some sense was right to do so: the management of a retail business of that sort should be aware if his music is hurting his business, and so needs to know the opinions of his customers. It was not, however, entirely unpredictable that a large number of customers, and an even larger number of people in the outside world, would enjoy the Christmas music and encourage the owner to continue playing it.
The customer who doesn’t like it will have to decide whether the benefits of eating there are worth the aggravation of music which he does not like, or whether there is another restaurant which caters to people who want different music, or no music at all, whose food, service, and prices are as good. That’s the way it works.
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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #143, on the subject of A Geographical Look at the Election.
For most of my life, I remember presidential races which ended sometime late on the night of Election Day when one of the candidates took the stage, conceded the election, and congratulated the opponent; then the other candidate took a different stage, thanked his supporters, said a few respectful words about his opponent, and started working toward his term in office. Politics was still something of a “gentleman’s game”, and the losers lost gracefully and the winners won graciously.
This time, the losers refuse to accept their loss. It is one of those elections–not for the first time–that majority of voters supported the losing candidate, and so there has been blame cast on the Electoral College system, and calls for recounts, and most recently suggestions that the Russians hacked the election process. With the Wisconsin recount actually increasing the margin by which Trump took the state, the Michigan recount discovering massive fraud in many of the precincts won by Clinton, and the courts blocking the vital Pennsylvania recount, they are getting desperate.
For myself, I am worried that the polarization of America is going to lead to some sort of civil war. I look not so much at the population but at the geography of the matter, and have reason to worry.
This electoral results map of Illinois, copied from Politico, is typical of “blue” states taken by Clinton: a few patches of “blue” in the populous areas within a sea of mostly red.
In Alabama, Trump took fifty-four of sixty-seven counties–over eighty percent–leaving just thirteen for Clinton. Perhaps more significantly, he had over seventy-five percent of the vote in twenty-three of them–Clinton successfully doing so in only two. Of course, Alabama was a strong win for Trump overall, with 62.9% of the vote to Clinton’s 34.6%.
Alaska was not so strong a victory for Trump, with only 52.9% of the vote, but a lot of voters went to third-party candidates there leaving Clinton a paltry 37.7%. The state apparently has only one county, so while the state is not massively for Trump, it does seem to be massively against Clinton.
Arizona was a close one, with only 49.5% of the vote going to Trump and a strong 45.4% going to Clinton. Eleven of fifteen counties went to Trump there.
Arkansas was another strong Trump win; of seventy-four counties, Clinton took only eight–under eleven percent–leaving sixty-six for Trump, along with 60.4% of the vote to her 33.8%. He also took more than seventy-five percent of the vote in nine counties–more counties than she took total–with her best about sixty-two percent in one county.
California of course went strongly for Clinton, with 61.6% of the vote to Trump’s 32.8%. However, of fifty-eight counties, Trump actually took the majority of the votes in twenty-five–about forty-three percent, leaving thirty-three for Clinton.
Colorado was a close win for Clinton, with 47.2% of the vote to Trump’s 44.4%. However, Trump had majorities in forty-one of sixty-four counties, almost two-thirds, leaving Clinton only twenty-three. Further, in eleven of those counties Trump took at least seventy-five percent of the vote, a feat Clinton only achieved in one of them.
Connecticut was a bit better for Clinton–she took 54.5% of the vote to Trump’s 41.2%. She even took most of the small state geographically–six out of eight counties. She did not get as much sixty percent of the vote in any one of them, though.
Delaware also went to Clinton, with 53.4% of the vote to Trump’s 41.9%. However, only one of the three counties went for Clinton, the other two supporting Trump, one of them very strongly.
The District of Columbia is not a state and has no congressional representation, but it does get three electoral votes; 92.8% of its tiny population went for Clinton, 4.1% for Trump. Obviously it does not have counties, so like Alaska it is a single unit.
Trump took a slight edge in Florida, with 49.1% to Clinton’s 47.8%; I’m surprised Jill Stein didn’t call for a recount there, but that might be a politically sensitive issue there. However, the geographical disproportionality is tremendous there: Of sixty-seven counties, Clinton took only nine–a little more than one eighth–leaving fifty-eight for Trump. Further, he took better than seventy-five percent in eleven counties, and she did not approach that level in any.
Georgia was Trump, at 51.3% to Clinton’s 45.6%. Again, though, the geography is overwhelming: Clinton had thirty of one hundred fifty-nine counties, giving one hundred twenty-nine–over eighty percent–to Trump. In forty of those–a quarter of all the counties in the state–he took over seventy-five percent of the vote; Clinton reached that mark in only two counties.
62.3% of Hawaiian voters went for Clinton, and only 30.1% for Trump. Here Clinton had a strong showing, taking majorities in all four counties, all between sixty and sixty-five percent against Trump’s twenty-five to thirty-five percent.
Idaho was 59.2% for Trump, 27.6% for Clinton, but it is even worse than that. Clinton only placed first in two of forty-four counties, and there were seven counties in which she placed third behind an independent candidate popular in the western states named Evan McMullin, coming out of the Republican party and thus reducing Trump’s support.
Clinton took Illinois with 55.4% of the vote to Trump’s 39.4%, but the geography again is against her: of one hundred two counties, she took only eleven, giving ninety-one–almost ninety percent–to Trump. He took nineteen of those with better than seventy-five percent of the vote; Clinton’s best showing was just shy of that.
Indiana went to Trump with 57.2% of the vote to Clinton’s 37.9%. On top of that, only four counties favored Clinton, the other eighty-eighty going to Trump, and her best showing was not quite sixty percent, while again Trump took more than three quarters of the vote in nine counties.
Iowa has ninety-nine counties, of which ninety-three went to Trump, only six to Clinton. He took the state with 51.8% of the vote to her 42.2%. It was a more moderate victory–he took three quarters of the vote or more in only four counties.
Trump not only took Kansas with 57.2% of the vote to Clinton’s 36.2%, he took one hundred two of its one hundred four counties, fifty-three of them–more than half–by at least three quarters of the vote.
Kentucky has one hundred twenty counties, and Clinton took the majority of votes in two. She did take 42.7% of the total vote, losing to Trump’s 62.7%; he took more than three-quarters of the vote in fifty-seven counties.
Trump had another strong win in Louisiana, with 58.1% of the vote to Clinton’s 38.4%. Louisiana doesn’t actually have “counties” because it calls them “parishes”, a throwback to the fact that it was originally organized as a French territory, but they serve the same function, and Trump took fifty-four of sixty-four, leaving ten for Clinton. He took thirteen of those with seventy-five percent or more of the vote; Clinton took one of hers at that margin.
Maine is one of the two states that apportions its electoral votes according to the percent of voters, and so Clinton’s 47.9% of the vote got her three of those votes, Trump’s 45.2% garnishing him the remaining one. Although the map looks a lot “redder” than “blue”, it’s because the seven coastal counties Clinton took are a lot smaller, geographically, than the nine much larger inland counties that when to Trump. All of these were close.
Maryland strongly favored Clinton, with 60.5% of the vote going to her, 35.3% to Trump. The map, though, shows that Clinton’s support was localized to the suburbs of Baltimore and of Washington, D. C.–she took six of twenty-three counties plus Baltimore City (counted separately from Baltimore County, which she also took), leaving seventy percent of the counties for Trump. She had strong victories in two of her counties, taking at least three quarters of the vote, but he did as well in one of his.
Massachusetts is entirely blue–Clinton took every one of fourteen counties. She got three quarters of the vote in one of them, and state-wide took 60.8% to Trump’s 33.5%.
As we noted, the recount in Michigan has uncovered massive voter fraud in many districts taken by the Democrats. However, the numbers before the recount gave Trump 47.6% of the vote to Clinton’s 47.3%, and despite the claim that it is supposed to be a “blue” state, the map is mostly red–seventy-five of eighty-three counties went to Trump, leaving Clinton with eight.
Clinton squeaked out a victory in Minnesota, with 46.9% of the vote to Trump’s 45.4%–but again the blue state looks very red. Of eighty-seven counties, only nine went to Clinton, seventy-eight to Trump.
The geography is not quite so lopsided in Mississippi, where Clinton took twenty-four of eighty-two counties, not quite a third, four of them with better than three quarters of the vote; but Trump took the other fifty-eight counties, seventeen of them with at least three quarters of the vote, and took the state with 58.3% to her 39.7%.
Show me Missouri, and I see a solid Trump win with 57.1% of the vote to Clinton’s 38.0%. Geographically I see an even stronger showing, as Trump took majorities in one hundred twelve of one hundred fifteen counties, leaving Clinton to claim only three, plus St. Louis City (counted separately from St. Louis County, which she also took). Trump took at least three quarters of the vote in sixty-six of those counties, more than half; Clinton did so well only in St. Louis City itself.
Montana also went to Trump, 56.5% to 36.0%, and again even more dramatically looked at geographically. Clinton took only five of fifty-five counties, about nine percent against Trump’s ninety-one percent, fifty counties. He took eighteen of those by at least seventy-five percent of the vote, one of them by over ninety percent. In two of the five Clinton won she actually took less than fifty percent of the vote, but beat Trump due to strong showings by Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson.
In Nebraska, Clinton took majorities in only two of ninety-three counties, and in both she had less than fifty percent of the vote, Libertarian Gary Johnson making a strong showing. She took only 34% of the vote to Trump’s 60.3%, and he sixty-three counties by at least seventy-five percent of the vote, four of them by over ninety percent.
Clinton took Nevada, 47.9% to 45.5%, but she only took two of the seventeen counties in Nevada, the other fifteen going to Trump–and she didn’t actually have a majority of the voters in one of the counties she took, while Trump had at least three quarters of the votes in four of his counties.
Are you noticing a pattern here?
Our “new” states start, alphabetically, with New Hampshire, where Clinton took 47.6% to Trump’s 47.2%. Although it is a lot closer, again geographically Trump is favored, taking six of ten counties. All of them were close.
New Jersey was 55.0% for Clinton, 41.8% for Trump, and for once she got the slim majority of counties–twelve of twenty-one, leaving nine for Trump. Most counties were close; in none did either candidate take three quarters of the vote.
In New Mexico, the vote went for Clinton, 48.3% to 40.0%, but the geography slightly favored Trump. He took the majority in nineteen counties, Clinton in fourteen.
New York, where Clinton was once Senator, went for her by 58.8% to 37.5% for Trump, who considers it his home state. Still, of sixty-two counties, Clinton took majorities in only sixteen, leaving Trump forty-six counties, less than one percent shy of three quarters of them. She took three quarters of the vote in four of those counties, all of them containing parts of New York City.
By the population, Trump edged out Clinton in North Carolina with 50.5% of the vote to her 46.7%. She did better here geographically, taking twenty-four of the one hundred counties, not quite a quarter. Trump took at least three-quarters of the vote in nine counties; Clinton did so in only one.
Further north we have North Dakota, which Trump took with 64.1% of the vote to Clinton’s 27.8%. Trump also took all but two of fifty-three counties, twenty-one of them with at least three quarters of the vote.
In Ohio, Clinton took only seven of eighty-eight counties, and 43.5% of the vote against Trump’s 52.1%. In a dozen of his eighty-one counties Trump took at least three-quarters of the vote.
Where the wind comes whistling down the plane in Olklahoma, it blew solidly to Trump, with 65.3% of the vote to Clinton’s 28.9, and every one of seventy-eight counties, and in more than half–forty-three of them–he took more than three quarters of the vote.
Clinton took Oregon, 51.7% to 41.1%, but again the map is mostly red–she took eight of thirty-six counties, two ninths, less than a quarter. Clinton took at least three-quarters of the vote in one county, Trump in three.
Pennsylvania looks very close by the numbers, with Trump’s 48.8% squeaking past Clinton’s 47.6%, and a court ruling preventing a recount, but again geographically it does not look close at all. Of sixty-seven counties, Clinton took only eleven, leaving fifty-six for Trump. Clinton took one of those counties by better than three-quarters of the vote; Trump did so in seven.
Rhode Island, the smallest state geographically, where Clinton won with 55.4% of the vote to Trump’s 39.8, has only five counties; Trump took only one.
The geography is also better for Clinton in South Carolina, although still there she took only fifteen of forty-six counties, and only 40.8% of the vote to Trump’s 54.9%. Clinton took better than seventy-five percent of the vote in one county.
Not so far south in South Dakota, sixty-one of sixty-six counties went to Trump, five to Clinton, as he took the state with 61.5% of the vote to her 31.7%. He took sixteen of those counties with three quarters or more of the vote–more than three times as many at that rate than she took at all, although she did take three quarters of the vote in one of her counties–and one of his he took by better than nine out of ten votes cast.
Three of Tennessee’s ninety-five counties did not go to Trump, who took 61.1% of the vote in that state to Clinton’s 34.9%. He took forty-eight of those by at least seventy-five percent of the vote.
It sounds good to say that in the next state Clinton took the majority in twenty-five counties, and with at least three-quarters of the vote in three of them–until you say that the state is Texas, and of its two hundred fifty-four counties that’s slightly less than ten percent, leaving two hundred twenty-nine for Trummp. He took one hundred thirty-eight of those with at least seventy-five percent of the vote, eight of them with at least ninety percent. He took the state with 52.6% of the vote to her 43.4%.
To say that Clinton placed first in only three of Utah’s twenty-nine counties is to understate how poorly she did there. In only one of those three did she get more than half the votes, and that barely, and in fourteen of the twenty-six Trump won she placed third, behind that previously mentioned independent candidate popular in the western states, Evan McMullin, who also did well in Idaho, and who also tied her in a fifteenth second-place position here. Despite this three-way race, Trump took five counties by at least seventy-five percent of the vote, and took 45.9% of the total against her 27.8%.
Clinton did manage very nearly to sweep the small state of Vermont, taking 61.1% of the vote to Trump’s 32.6% and holding a majority in all but one of its fourteen counties.
She also took 49.9% of the vote in Virginia, where Trump got 45.0%. Virginia counts most of its cities separately from the counties in which they are situated. She took twelve of the ninety-four counties and twenty-eight of the thirty-nine cities–generally small blue dots on a largely red map. That’s ninety-three voting districts going to Trump, forty to Clinton, and he took sixteen of his counties by at least three-quarters of the votes, which she accomplished in five of her cities.
In Washington, they stopped counting after just over ninety percent of the precincts had reported; only seven of the thirty-eight counties were complete, of which Trump took six. If we include all the counties, unfinished, Clinton took about twelve, Trump about twenty-six. (One county, counted as for Clinton, is close enough that the uncounted votes may be about sixty times as many as the difference between Clinton and Trump there, so it is being generous to say she took that county.) Of the votes counted, 54.4% went to Clinton, 38.2% to Trump, so although almost nine percent of the state remains unreported, it would not be sufficient to reverse the state outcome–only the national total.
West Virginia went strongly for Trump, 68.7% to Clinton’s 26.5%. It is not surprising that he took majorities in every one of its fifty-five counties, twenty-two of them with at least three-quarters of the vote.
The recount in Wisconsin, as mentioned, reportedly found a few more votes for Trump; the originally reported totals gave him 47.9% against Clinton’s 46.9%. Clinton’s strength gives her only thirteen of the state’s seventy-two counties, fifty-nine going to Trump. She did take better than three-quarters of the vote in one of the counties on her list.
The last state on an alphabetical list, Wyoming, is also the one in which Trump had the best showing at 70.1% to Clinton’s 22.5%. He did not take every one of the twenty-three counties–only twenty-two, leaving one for Clinton. He did take fifteen of them with at least three-fourths of the votes.
So what’s the point of all this? If you did the math (of course you didn’t, that’s my job), you noticed that if we count by reporting counties/cities, Trump took two thousand six hundred twenty eight, to Clinton’s four hundred eighty-three–84% of all the places in the country where voting was counted. You might also note that if we average the percentage of votes each took in each state, Trump took 48.97% to Clinton’s 45.24%–that is, a greater percentage of people counted state by state preferred Trump. He clearly is favored geographically.
So who cares? Why should it matter if more places want Trump to be President, if we live in a democracy, and more people want Clinton?
And that is exactly what the Democratic party wants you to think: all those people in all those places which are mostly outside the cities don’t matter and should not really be considered in how we, the urbane people from the urban centers, want to run the country.
They are actually counting on this for the future of their party: the demographics say that people who live in these high-population-density areas tend to vote Democratic, and they are increasing in numbers faster than those in the more sparsely populated Republican areas, and so using the fact that we are a democracy they can bully the outnumbered rural and light suburban people into their plans. As one of my rural friends commented, “How rude”.
But the fact is that we are not a democracy. We are a federated republic–and the difference is important. This is not you, me, and some maybe one hundred fifty million other voters deciding how to run our country. We are not, first and foremost, a union of individuals, but a union of states, of political entities comprised of individuals. This is about New Jersey and Utah, California and Colorado, Florida and New York, about three thousand counties in fifty states and one political district, coming together to agree as to how they, as separate political entities, will govern themselves collectively. It says, inherently, that the people in the boondocks will be heard, will have a say in how they are governed.
Yet the people who want to cancel the Trump victory want to disenfranchise these people in the name of “democracy”. These are the same people who complain that the country has tried to disenfranchise blacks, women, and other minorities. Their entire political strategy is based on disenfranchising those with whom they disagree–despite the fact that these are the people who, in the main, provide our corn and our beef, our potatoes and our milk, our national petroleum, even to a large degree our fresh water. Do you really want to tell these people that you don’t care about them, that they should not have a say in how their country is run?
The rural people won this time; they’ve lost a few over the past decade, and that’s the way the system works, passing the lead back and forth between the progressives and the reactionaries for a while, eventually (usually) settling to a middle ground which is more progressive than we were and not as progressive as the radicals wanted us to be. But if you take this victory away from them, it’s going to hurt in ways that are likely to come back–not, perhaps, a civil war, but certainly a change in the way the producers of our necessities regard the massed consumers who are living in the urban areas and pretending that the people on whom their lives depend are inconsequential.
I don’t think that it will happen, that Trump’s victory will be overturned, but I thought all of those calling for it should give some consideration to what they are really saying.
The statistics in this article were compiled by hand from Politico; I apologize if there are any mistakes.
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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #137, on the subject of Conservative Penny-pinching.
Over a year ago, I addressed the the notion that people who are against abortion claim to be concerned for the lives of the unborn up to the moment they are born, but after that they no longer care. Then just over two weeks ago I was at a gathering where someone made exactly that claim, and I realized something–something I hadn’t felt when it was merely arguments on a page: the assertion that people who are against abortion are unwilling to do anything to help the born is not only untrue and irrelevant, it is insulting.
Why it is untrue and irrelevant is covered in that previous article, web log post #9: Abolition. Because of the way the meeting dissolved then I was unable to call his attention to that response; knowing, however, that I would see him again, I printed it and delivered it to him two weeks later.
His response was civil, even friendly. However, he kept saying that “they” were taking all the money away from helping people, from helping young girls who were just children having children. I asked him who “they” were, and he said “conservatives”; I pointed out that the people mentioned in the article, working hard to provide assistance to exactly those people, were in the main “conservatives”, but his feeling was that it was not “those conservatives” but some other group of “right wing conservatives”. Having worked with those people, I observed that some of them were certainly “right wing”. Yet he insisted that there was this conservative effort to take money away from helping the people who needed it. It was not at all clear just who was taking what money from whom, but he was certain it was being done, and being done by “conservatives”.
If we’re honest, we have to admit that there are a lot of people who don’t care about the poor, and indeed many of them are “conservatives”. At the same time, many of them are “liberals”–I don’t see a lot of Hollywood millionaires giving ninety percent of their income to charities, or spending their evenings working in soup kitchens or at homeless shelters. There are also a lot of people who do care, at both ends of the spectrum and through the middle. Not every liberal politician who argues for aid to the poor does so because he cares; some do it because they want votes. Wealthy liberals who call for more government spending on welfare programs are not really offering to give their own money to these, but suggesting that the government should give them more of yours. Conservatives are wrong to think that all liberals pretend to care about the poor in order to use them to advance socialist and progressivist policies; yet it is equally wrong to think that this is not true of any.
However, in our conversation I couldn’t help feeling that, at least in part, he meant conservatives were taking money away from Planned Parenthood. You don’t have to be too far to the right of left-wing progressivists to believe that the government should not be funding an organization that in turn promotes and funds the slaughter of children. The argument has been made that Planned Parenthood spends none of its government-granted money on abortion services, but as we noted in post #2: Planned Parenthood and Fungible Resources, no matter how they do their accounting it is evident that they could not spend as much on abortion as they do were their other programs not subsidized by federal money. Certainly people who believe that killing unborn babies should be criminal are going to cut funding for any program that promotes the practice. That does not mean that these people have no interest in helping pregnant teenagers and others struggling with unexpected pregnancies, any more than that those who want to bring an end to capital punishment and stop funding executions have no interest in stopping murders and other violent crimes. You will say that it’s not the same thing, and in a way you’re right, and in a way you’re wrong. If you tell me that grapefruit juice is not orange juice, you are certainly correct; if you tell me that because grapefruit juice is not orange juice it therefore is not citrus juice, you are mistaken. It is quite possible to be very much in favor of a stated objective, whether it is helping pregnant women or reducing violent crime, and still object to a specific method of achieving that objective, whether it is killing unwanted children or terminating murderers. It is quite possible to want to do something about a social problem without resorting to an extreme measure like killing people. It is also possible to believe that such an extreme measure is appropriate and necessary for one type of problem but not for another. The problems are not identical; only the solutions are similar.
Of course, some people argue that the unborn are not actually people. To his credit, he did not suggest that; he rather suggested that they were unwanted human beings that should not be forced to come into a world that does not want them. It strikes me that this is very like an ambulance crew saying they’re not going to take this injured homeless person to a hospital because he’s a worthless human being and he might as well just die anyway. It is rather arrogant for any of us to put a value on someone else’s life, whether or not that person has yet smelled air.
Perhaps, though, he is not talking about abortion funding; perhaps he is talking about welfare. In thinking about this issue I did a bit of research, and learned that the Federal debt is presently increasing by about one trillion dollars each year. The population of the United States is a bit above three hundred twenty-five million, so that’s about three dollars for every person–every man, woman, or child, legal or illegal, in the entire country. Of course, those who are in the country illegally aren’t going to pay that, and there is not much logic to expecting those who are receiving the benefits to pay part of that. At some point we are going to have to stop spending as much or find a way to collect more.
So where could we cut it?
The total federal budget for 2017 is just above four trillion dollars–that’s four thousand billion (4.1472 trillion). Sixty percent of that–about two trillion five hundred million–goes to what is loosely called “welfare”, that is, money that goes to taking care of people who can’t afford to take care of themselves, that “safety net” about which we are always talking (2.4971 trillion). In fairness, the biggest piece of that–a bit less than one trillion–is social security (972.6 billion), which includes all those retirement checks and the federal disability program (and the salaries of the people who run it), giving a meager income to people who genuinely cannot or can no longer work. More than a trillion goes to medical assistance, that is, Medicare (605.0 billion) and Medicaid (527.4 billion) including the Obamacare expansions, providing health services to people who cannot otherwise afford them. Less than half a trillion goes to everything else we loosely consider “welfare”, social support services (392.1 billion).
It is argued that we should cut our outrageous military spending, but that outrageous military spending is less than a trillion dollars (0.8536 trillion), less than the medical care spending, less than Social Security. We’ve been working on reducing military spending for a long time, and it is a much smaller portion of the budget than it was in the past–but in that time our “entitlements” and “welfare” programs have exploded to take the largest share of the budget. Together, that’s over eighty percent of the budget; all other programs combined come to only seven hundred ninety-six and a half billion dollars, less than twenty percent, less than the military portion. Saving money there is a bit like trying to make a package lighter by using less tape to seal it.
It is not unkind for me to cut my son’s allowance in order to pay the utility bill; he might think I should pay less to the utility company, but he would be upset if we said we couldn’t afford to run his video games or heat the water for his showers. That national debt that’s going up another trillion dollars this year is very nearly twenty trillion already–sixty dollars for every person within our borders. We keep saying that we’ll pay it off when things get better, but they’re getting worse and the amount is increasing like a bad debt owed to a loan shark. Economists argue about whether it is bad for nations to go into debt, just as they argue about whether it’s bad for people to go into debt, but although we’ve at times managed to reduce the debt we have not paid it off entirely in a long time, longer than my lifetime, and the people who are lending us the money (what, did you think we borrowed it from God?) are beginning to think maybe we’re not so good a risk as they once thought. Many economists assert that a high national debt depresses the economy, raises the prices of goods, and reduces the availability of jobs. Somehow we have to reduce our spending. It certainly is important for us to help the poor, but this ongoing forced philanthropy might not be helping so much as we want to think, and can’t continue at this level forever.
One way or another, there is going to be less money for those in need, because the way things have been going there has been less and less money for all Americans. We laugh when in Fiddler on the Roof Nahum the Beggar complains to Lazar Wolfe about the smaller donation he gave this week, “So if you had a bad week, why should I suffer?”, but the truth is that when the rich have less money, everyone has less money, and when we make the pie smaller everyone’s piece gets smaller. Not everyone can work; not everyone can contribute to the productivity of the nation–but if we don’t find a way to get more people working productively, there won’t be enough money for those who can’t.
Someone once challenged the original Mr. Rockefeller that his millions (which were then worth a lot more than they would be today) should be shared among everyone. Rather than arguing the point, Rockefeller agreed, reached into his pocket, and handed the man a dime as his share. If you stripped the top one percent of everything they owned and gave it everyone else, it would be a small amount divided so many ways, and there would be no comparable wealthiest people to rob the next year. You cannot feed the poor by robbing the rich; you have to teach them to fish, that is, give them jobs, not money. How to do that is much debated, but it seems that part of it has to be to reduce the amount the government is spending, and the obvious place to do that is where it is spending the most.
That hurts, but it may be necessary.
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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #136, on the subject of Recounting Nonsense.
Many people are upset that Donald Trump won, or conversely that Hillary Clinton lost, the Presidential race. There have been quite a few suggestions even now for how this loss could be turned to victory. Not surprisingly, one of those calls is for several states to recount their ballots to determine whether, after all, Hillary might have won. President Obama has brushed off such a suggestion, saying that the integrity of the system should not be questioned at this point, and the Clinton camp had decided not to pursue any recounts because they had no evidence of any irregularities. However, a petition has now been filed in one state which Trump took which had been expected to go to Clinton, with announcements that two more are pending–and although Clinton’s people are joining in the petitions to protect their own legal interests, they are not the filers.
The irony is that the person filing these petitions is Green party candidate Jill Stein. That is particularly ironic, because Stein’s candidacy is one of the reasons Clinton lost.
Take Wisconsin, a state in which the final count gives Trump 1,409,467 votes, 47.9% of all votes cast, and Clinton 1,382,210, 46.9% of all votes cast. Libertarian Gary Johnson placed a distant third with 106,442 votes, 3.6%, and Stein was an even more distant fourth, 30,980 votes, 1.1%. The Green Party stands to the left of the Democratic party, particularly on environmental issues, and had everyone who voted for Stein voted for Clinton instead, she would have received 1,413,190, about 48% of the vote, taking the state by an even more narrow margin than that by which she lost it. Of course, not everyone who voted for Stein would have voted for Clinton, many of them simply not voting, others selecting other candidates–but it is at least arguable that Stein cost Clinton Wisconsin.
(It should also be noted that if everyone who voted Libertarian voted Republican instead, Trump would have had more than half the votes in the state. The Third Party Problem impacts both parties, not always equally.)
It has been announced that a petition will be filed in Pennsylvania before the deadline. Here the third party impact is less clear: Trump took 2,912,941 votes, 48.8%; Clinton took 2,844,705 votes, 47.6%. Stein only took 48,912 votes, a mere 0.8%, not enough to put Clinton ahead but enough to narrow the gap sufficiently to make it more likely a recount would reverse the outcome. (Here Libertarian Johnson took only 2.4%, 142,653 votes, which again would have put Trump over the 50% mark had they gone to him.)
Michigan is close enough that some observers have not considered it settled, and a recount almost makes sense for the loser: Trump’s 2,279,805 votes is 47.6% against Clinton’s 2,268,193, 47.3%–and again, Stein’s 50,700 votes is 1.1% of the total, more than enough that it would have put Hillary in first place (but again Johnson’s 3.6%–173,057 votes–would have put Trump over the 50% mark).
It is overall a bad bet; Clinton must claim Pennsylvania, or she cannot overturn the election, and she must also claim either Wisconsin or Michigan. Those two states together are not enough electoral votes to reverse the result, but Pennsylvania is not enough by itself without at least one or the other of those. It could happen, but it’s very unlikely.
Stranger things have happened, but probably not this.
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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #135, on the subject of What Racism Is.
This began as a Facebook thread, but found its way here for several reasons. One is that the issue is important, and in the hierarchy of ephemera that comprises the Internet a web log post has a longer life than a Facebook thread, and so reaches more people over a longer period of time. Another is that most (not all) of those participating in the Facebook thread disagreed; either I failed to communicate the essential point adequately, or there is a fundamental disagreement about the nature and definition of “racism”.
President Clinton’s Initiative on Race
An “ism”, generally, is a set of beliefs or sometimes attitudes expressing itself as a world view and thus impacting the actions of the “ist”, that is, the one embracing the “ism”, or tending toward “ist” actions, those which express the “ism”. There are many–Marxism, socialism, and Nazism; legalism, Gnosticism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Taoism. The one perhaps nearest in kind to racism is sexism, and they share some similar features. Both involve using a biological category as a basis for distinctions that are generalizations about the group applied to individuals within it. Sexism is the belief or attitude that one sex is better at some things than the other, when those specific supposed advantages are not specifically linked to the essential elements that are the basis for the distinction between the two sexes. The statement that only women are designed to carry and deliver offspring is not in itself sexist because that is part of the definition of what it is to be female, in humans; the assertion that they therefore should stay home and have babies is sexist, because it places a different obligation on women than on men which is separate from that biological distinction. (It is different in sea horses and some other aquatic life, in which once the female has handled the fertilization of the eggs she provided, she passes them to the male for safekeeping until birth.) It is sexist to assert that men are smarter than women, in part because that is not one of the defining distinctions but in larger part because it is simply not true–men are better on average at certain cognitive tasks (especially space relations), women at others (especially linguistic abilities), and overall intellect is about equal at both the means and the extremes. More difficult is the assertion that men have greater upper body strength–a statement that is true at the means and the extremes, that the male torso is built slightly differently than the female with upper body strength in view, but which is not true in every individual case. So sexism is the attitude that one sex is better than the other in specific ways which are not actually linked to sexual differences, and it can point either direction–the statement that men are terrible at relationships and commitments is sexist not because it isn’t true as a generalization that women are better at such things than men, but because it is not universally true either that all men are bad at these nor that all women are good. A misandrist is just as much a sexist as a misogynist.
Thus a racist is someone who thinks in racial categories and believes that everyone who shares a common racial ancestry automatically has specific traits universal to that group which are not part of the defining traits of that group. Obviously it is true that there are some genetic factors that unify individual races; it is equally true that the pure genome of every race is vanishing from the world (blue eyes have become more rare as a percentage of the population than ever before). It is not sexist racist to state that blacks all have high quantities of melanin in their skin, hair, and eyes, because that is part of the biological definition of negroid anatomy. It is racist to say that all blacks have great rhythm and musical ability, even if it is intended in a complimentary or admiring sense, because it is an untrue generalization based on race.
There is, however, an attitude or notion that only whites can be racist, and that all whites are. Part of my point is that this attitude is itself racist: it generalizes about a group based on racial distinctions to assert that some defect is true about all individual members of the group, and further asserts that it is not true about anyone who is not a member of that group. Racism is seen as a specifically and universally white characteristic. That is not true. Ask any Mexican in the United States whether there are racist blacks. Hispanic subgroups–Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans–are often racist toward each other. There has long been racism between various white racial subgroups. The grandmother of a college friend of mine was known to have said, “Ya, but vat is a Svede but a Norvegian vith his brains knocked out?” All those Italian jokes we heard as kids are racist; the obstacles they and other immigrant groups such as the Irish faced in employment were expressions of racism against whites–and to the black radio commentator who once opined that all they needed to do was change their names, even those who at that time were not racist could identify ethnic backgrounds by everything from idiolect to pigmentation. The racism against Jews seemingly knows no racial barriers, as they are stereotyped by people of every national and ethnic background, often to the point of violent persecution–and in the main, Jews are white.
In Verse Three, Chapter One: The First Multiverser Novel, in the chapter in which Lauren Hastings meets Joe Kondor, when he opines that the reason she failed to notice that the bird people populating their new world were segregated based on the colors of their feathers is that she is white, it surprises her that he would think it discriminatory of her not to have noticed such a connection, but not to have thought it discriminatory to suggest that it was because she was white. That was because she was not racist–racial categories do not matter to her at all–and he is, but does not recognize it about himself.
When Barrack Obama was elected President of the United States, many thought this marked the end of racism in this country, because a black man had been elected President. Unfortunately, that assessment is itself, once again, racist: if it were true that racism had ended, no one would have observed that the man was black. My children were not at all racist, and my wife and I often found it difficult to elicit from them whether their schoolteachers or classmates were white or black without asking directly, because it was not a category by which they identified people; they offered height, weight, age, hair and eye color, but not race. Not being racist means that in your own mind race is not more than a category of biology which is irrelevant outside of a few mostly medical matters (for example, sickle cell anemia is a genetic disorder specifically linked to the black genome). Yet after his election racism continued, even demonstrated by his own family. We have previously observed how Michelle Obama’s Target story demonstrates her own racism, that she believes a short white woman would have asked her to get something off the top shelf not because she, at five foot eleven inches, is tall, but because she is black. The assumption was, once again, that the woman was racist because she was white, when any child would have recognized that the only racism here comes from that assumption, not from a short person asking a tall person for help.
All of which brings us to the West Virginia story which started this.
I am old enough to remember that it was fairly common, at least in my part of the country, to refer to someone as a “big ape” to mean that he was large and physically awkward or clumsy–lacking physical grace would be a polite way to say it. That’s what the expression means to me, and if I were to call someone an ape–which is, frankly, just plain rude to call anybody anything insulting–that would be my intent. I don’t think that were I to use that particular insult, I would make any distinction based on race, because the expression does not mean that to me and never did.
I am educated enough to know that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was generally believed, even by many abolitionists, that Negroes were not human, but were the most advanced primates to come out of Africa, eminently trainable and even able to understand and mimic speech. It was as it were an article of faith among the slavery faction, to the point that one Civil War Confederate general wrote in his journal that were it to be demonstrated that blacks could fight in the armies of either side, the South would lose on principle, as that would prove they were in fact human, not domesticated animals, and that it therefore was morally wrong to enslave them. I know that the epithet of being an “ape” or a “monkey” was still in use in the early twentieth century to convey the belief that blacks were sub-human. I have never in my now somewhat longish life actually heard anyone so use it. I would not first think of that meaning were I to hear someone call someone an “ape”, because in my experience the other meaning is still in common use and this one is not, any more than were I to hear someone identified as a “bitch” I would take that in its early meaning of a profligate woman instead of the modern sense of a nasty one.
It might, I suppose, matter that I have lived much of my life north of the Mason-Dixon Line–but only because the men who drew the line had it turn south from the southern edge of Pennsylvania along the western border of Delaware, and so placed New Jersey on the northern side completely. The line along the southern edge of Pennsylvania, if continued eastward, would pass through our state; we are in that sense on the border, and there are enough “rednecks” in the southern reaches of the state that the Confederate flag is not completely absent from personal displays.
Yet it should equally be noted that that same line follows along the northern edge of West Virginia–it, too, is a border state, albeit a southern one, and part of it extends north of that line as defined by the southern edge of Pennsylvania. Where I live in New Jersey today is south of a substantial portion of West Virginia. Historically West Virginia was a slave state and New Jersey a free state, but that was over one and a half centuries ago. West Virginia is not “deep south” like Alabama, and New Jersey is not “remote north” like Vermont and Massachusetts. An expression that is common or uncommon here is probably similarly used as near here as West Virginia. There might still be people in the country using the derogation “ape” to refer to someone as sub-human, but it is the less likely usage.
From this, it appears to me to be at least plausible that the woman in West Virginia who described First Lady Michelle Obama as “an ape in heels” did not mean it in a racial sense, but only in the sense that the nearly six foot tall basketball-playing woman lacks the sort of grace we had in Jacqueline Kennedy or Nancy Reagan or Betty Ford. I can imagine that after she said it via Twitter an electronic gasp passed through the audience and she thought, as many who accidentally say things they did not realize had sexual implications until after the words were out of their mouths, “What did I say?” Maybe someone had to call her attention to the racial meaning of that slur, which was not in her thoughts at all. Then, realizing how people would take what she said, she blushed brilliantly and retracted it.
I could be entirely wrong. People who know this woman might be aware of facts unknown to us, perhaps that she is terribly racist and probably would call a black woman an “ape” in the sense of “sub-human primate”. They might as easily know that she is not at all racist and would have said something like that completely oblivious to its racial implications. We cannot know whether this white woman made a comment she knew was a racial slur, or whether she meant something differently insulting about a first lady who is perhaps athletic but not graceful.
Which brings the second half of the point. Most readers, and indeed the media generally, leapt to the conclusion that because this was said by a white woman about a black woman, it must have been a racial slur. That, though, requires thinking about the situation in racial categories–that is, judging it from a racist perspective. If the comment had been made by a black woman, would we not conclude that she meant awkward? If it had been made about a white man, would we be shouting that calling him an “ape” was clearly a racist attack on his status as a human being? In point of fact, to reach the conclusion that this comment “must have been” racist, you must work from the assumption that because it was said by a white person living south of the Mason-Dixon Line (as it was actually drawn) about a black person, the white person is by default racist and intended it as a racial slur. However, the statement “all whites are racist” is the attribution of a negative characteristic to all members of a class defined by race–and thus a racist statement by definition–and you do not cause it to cease to be racist by limiting it to “all whites living south of the Mason-Dixon Line”.
So I do not know whether the woman who stated that Michelle Obama was “an ape in heels” is racist–but I do know that all the people who, knowing no more than that a white woman in West Virginia made such a statement are insisting that it must have been intended as a racial slur because of who said it, certainly are. If they were not, it would not have occurred to them that the race of the speaker in any way impacted the intent of the statement.
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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #131, on the subject of The Fat Lady Sings.
The votes are in, the polls are closed, the counting has nearly been completed, and it is clear that political outsider Republican Donald Trump has received more than enough electoral votes to become the next President of the United States. It’s over.
The losers are sore; they don’t want it to be over. Consummate politician and Washington insider Democrat Hillary Clinton received slightly more of the popular vote (less than one half of one percent, six hundred thirty thousand eight hundred seventy-seven (630,877) more votes than Trump out of one hundred twenty-seven million five hundred ninety-two thousand one hundred seventy-six (127,592,176) cast). There are a lot of people who think that this means she should be the next President. Some of them are petitioning for Electors pledged to Trump to “jump ship” and vote for Clinton instead, even if they are required by state law to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged. Break the law, they say; pay the fine and save the country from this despicable Republican. However, a lot of voters want this “despicable Republican” to be President, and there is a degree to which his victory is a vindication for one of the principle concepts of the Electoral College.
We’ve discussed the Electoral College before, in Coalition Government, and to a lesser degree before that in The Birth Certificate: Ballot Requirements; it is that system by which we the people do not vote for the President but for the Electors who will vote for the President. Ironically, it appears that the Framers of the Constitution wanted it to be a system that usually failed–the way the text is written, if several people are running for President it is unlikely that one of them would receive a majority of Electors, which means that the Legislature would get to pick who it wanted for its Executive (that is, “the person who executes the directives of the legislature”) from the shortlist provided by the College giving us the sort of “executive does what the ruling party wants” streamlined government typical of the Parliament/Prime Minister structures of other countries. It rarely happens that way, because very early we learned that a two-party system results in one of the candidates usually getting fifty-percent-plus-one of the votes in the College, and so most people vote for one of the two major parties and the President generally is chosen in the first vote.
Yet this underscores another important point: The President of the United States was never intended to be primarily a representative of the People of the United States. The office is established in such a way that he represents the States, the electors being chosen by the States according to such permissible methods as each State chooses. Most States choose to vote as blocs: whichever candidate gets the majority of voter support within the state, that’s the candidate for which the state votes. The point is not for the voters to vote for the President; the point is for the voters to tell their individual States whom the State should support for President. The States then appoint the person wanted by the majority of the States, weighted by population.
And that is what happened here.
James Nolt wrote an excellent article in The Street (Pundits Just Don’t Get It: Here Is the Real Reason Why Trump Won), in which he observes that the “rust belt” states went to Trump. These are the homes of the manufacturing unions–steel workers, automotive workers–and they have seen their jobs vanish overseas. Trump promised to do something about it. These are the homes of struggling farm laborers, displaced by immigrant farm workers. Trump promised to do something about that. His plans sound radical–cutting back on the immigration of low-wage immigrants, placing high import duties on foreign manufactured goods–but they are plans that go against the status quo, that oppose the progressivist universalist concept of a world market where workers who have to pay American-level prices have to compete with workers willing to take third-world-level wages. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Wisconsin, West Virginia, the Dakotas–these states all want someone in Washington who will change the rules of the economy game so that ordinary working class people once again stand a chance.
I suppose that Bernie Sanders might have appealed to them with his socialist views. He was not an option. Trump was the only candidate in the race that supported policies that gave hope to those workers, and whether or not those policies are practical, whether or not they can be implemented, whether or not they would work, workers wanted to give him that chance.
What it means is that the Democratic Coalition is cracking: labor no longer believes the Democrats have their best interests in view. Support for more immigration is not in the interests of labor. Support for free trade agreements is not in the interests of labor. Republicans may have worked to break union strangleholds on jobs in some states, but Democrats have taken the union vote for granted while ignoring labor concerns, and now they’re losing it.
States where people want economic change, and not the more-of-the-same promised by the Democrats, voted for Trump. And the President of the United States is chosen by the States, the clear majority of whom (of fifty-one (which includes the District of Columbia) twenty-eight certain, one more still counting but probable, one of four votes from Maine) supported him. (Clinton took twenty certain, one more probable but still counting, and the other three votes from Maine.) Those States were heard. Trump is now President-elect, and we can hope that whatever he does will bring jobs back to America.
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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #130, on the subject of Economics and Racism.
When I was in law school, one of my fellow students explained to me how he got his masters degree by proving something everyone already knew. As I read a recent article, I couldn’t help thinking that the several cited studies were guilty of exactly that. They demonstrated that the prevalence of racism in a society is inversely proportionate to its economic health: as unemployment rises, so does racism. That doesn’t say that economics are the cause of racism, but that they are a contributing factor. I really hope that doesn’t surprise you.
It is inherent in our human existence that we want to survive. We see this survival instinct in creatures as low as cockroaches. Linked to that notion of survival is the desire for comfort and abundance–if we have better shelter, we are safer, and if we have more food, we are protected against hunger. Thus almost every one of us wants more than he has. That is not limited to poor people, or even middle class people–wealthy people usually find that there are things they want that they can’t buy. It is a phenomenon known as rising aspirations: the more money you have, the more things you want to buy with it. And it’s actually easy to understand why that is.
Economies fluctuate. They get better and worse. This happens globally, nationally, and even on the individual level. You have a job, and you make enough that you can afford to splurge on lunch out twice a week. Then you get a raise, and now you have more money. Now you eat lunch out three times a week. Your personal economy is booming. But then the price of bread goes up, there’s a new gas tax–the extra money is no longer extra, and you have to cut back to eating lunch out once a week. You feel like you’re going backwards, and in a sense you are. So is everyone else, of course, but you don’t feel the pinch on anyone else. You think you should have more than you have, that you should be able to eat lunch out three times a week, or even every day, because you work hard and you deserve it. You want to know why you aren’t doing better than you are.
You also think that your children should be able to do better, and your siblings, your family generally; and that sometimes extends to your ethnic group, particularly if you are in an ethnic group that has faced discrimination in the past–the Italians, the Irish, people who arrived in America poor and struggled in the working class to rise to a higher level. We deserve better, is the mantra. It extends beyond to “people like me”, and becomes contrasted against “people who are different”.
And what you see is that there are some people who are not part of your group who are doing well, doing better than you are. You are out of work, and these others have jobs. You are struggling to pay your bills, and these others have nice cars, nice houses, jewelry, meals at restaurants. They have it good.
It doesn’t matter whether most of those people who are not part of your group are in situations as bad or worse than yours; the fact that some of them are doing well means that those “different” people are getting the money, the food, the jobs, that “should” be going to you and your people–because you deserve better; and that means that people who have what you don’t have have taken it from you. It’s not fair, and it’s their fault.
And it is so comforting to have someone to blame, to be able to say to yourself that it is not your fault, not some deficiency in you. It’s because those Jews cheat to get ahead, or those Hispanics are taking all the jobs, or those Chinese are willing to work for a substandard wage.
Racism, seen thus, is our own attempt to view ourselves as better than someone else. The details are trappings, added to justify our judgments.
Thus when the economy is poor, when unemployment is high and money is not going as far as we remember, racism rises as we blame those who are different from ourselves for putting us in this situation. It doesn’t matter whether it’s whites deriding Hispanics for taking jobs at low wages, or blacks blaming whites as oppressing them and keeping them out of work, or Hispanics accusing blacks of mistreating them, or everyone blaming Jews for continuing to be successful in hard times. Our racist attitudes increase when we need someone to blame for our own hardships. Yet even if it is true that our economic hardships are not our fault, that does not mean they are someone else’s fault: economies fluctuate, and not everyone can be on the top of the curve. The fact that you are not reaching your aspirations does not mean it is anyone’s fault, even if it clearly is not your own.
It would be so much better if we could pull together and get out of this economic slump.
If only it were so easy.
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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #127, on the subject of New Jersey 2016 Election Results.
We provided some advance explanation of the two Public Questions which were on the ballot, and did a quick rundown of the major candidates in the twelve congressional districts, and now we’re following up with the election results. After all, with a lot of these events there is a great deal of coverage in anticipation of the moment, and then if you blink, you miss the outcome. That shouldn’t be.
In the Presidential race, New Jersey consigned its fourteen electoral votes to the loser, Democrat Hillary Clinton, as Republican Donald Trump won comfortably.
Map of New Jersey’s Electoral College vote, from Google, 3:00 Wednesday morning.
Public Question #1: Constitutional Amendment to permit casino gambling in two counties other than Atlantic County, went down hard, about four to one against. That means for the present casino gambling will be confined to Atlantic City, and the city will have to figure out how better to manage what it has.
Public Question #2: Constitutional Amendment to dedicate additional revenues to state transportation system, ran very close, but sometime after midnight had clearly passed by a narrow margin, under fifty-five percent of the vote favoring it. That means the state government will be forced to put the gasoline tax revenue into a dedicated account strictly for use by the Department of Transportation, which was the justification for the tax originally.
In the House of Representatives, all the incumbents were re-elected easily except in Congressional District 5, where Republican incumbent Scott Garrett was hurt by Libertarian Claudio Belusic in his race against Democrat Josh Gottheimer. The Libertarian’s two-point-two percent of the vote was the best of any Libertarian candidate in the state (Libertarian Presidential candidate Gary Johnson took two percent of the vote in the state, the best showing of any third-party candidate), but even apart from that Gottheimer would have edged out a victory, with fifty-point-five percent of the vote in his favor.
This tips the balance of New Jersey’s Congressional delegation, which for the past several years has been evenly split with six Republicans and six Democrats; with Gottheimer replacing Garrett we will be sending seven Democrats and only five Republicans to Washington. Nationally the Republicans still hold the House, with two hundred thirty-six seats, a few lost from their current majority. In the Senate, Republicans also lost one seat (in Illinois), but still hold a bare majority at fifty-one.
Here are the incoming United States Congressmen from New Jersey by district:
Donald Norcross, Democrat, Incumbent.
Frank Lobiondo, Republican, Incumbent.
Tom MacArthur, Republican, Incumbent.
Chris Smith, Republican, Incumbent.
Josh Gottheimer, Democrat, Newcomer.
Frank Pallone, Democrat, Incumbent.
Leonard Lance, Republican, Incumbent.
Albio Sires, Democrat, Incumbent.
Bill Pascrell, Democrat, Incumbent.
Donald Payne, Jr., Democrat, Incumbent.
Rodney Frelinghuysen, Republican, Incumbent.
Bonnie Watson Coleman, Democrat, Incumbent.
That gives us the shape of our Federal Government for the next two years.
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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #126, on the subject of Equity and Religion.
I saw an article online, from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, entitled Amendment 3: A Stealth Attack on Religious Freedom The title intrigued me, since I had no notion of what was happening in Missouri, so I skimmed the piece–and was rather surprised at what I found. It struck me that the author did not have a very good grasp on exactly what “religious liberty” is, so I decided to pursue the matter here.
The purpose of “Amendment 3”, apparently Missouri’s version of what we in New Jersey now call a Public Question, is to create a cigarette tax and use the money to fund early childhood education. The tobacco industry has not made a lot of noise about it, at least directly–they have learned that people who smoke are very unlikely to stop simply because the amount of money they burn increases. It seems like a positive idea, that if people are going to kill themselves slowly at least they can help fund the education of our children.
At issue is text that says the disbursement of funds raised will not be limited or prohibited by the State of Missouri Constitution’s “Prohibition of public aid for religious purposes and institutions” clause. That means that if whatever method of distributing the money to help with preschool education would otherwise mean that a Lutheran- or Baptist- or Muslim or Jewish-run facility would qualify for some of that money, that facility is not automatically disqualified simply because it is administered by a church, mosque, synagogue, or other religious organization. Opponents of the measure say that this is an attempt to bring funding of religious organizations in through a side door, and so force people to pay for religious education with public money.
It is not at all clear that that is what this is, and in fact from the description it sounds rather as if it is an attempt, not to show religious preference, but in fact precisely not to show it. It is saying that the fact that a group of people trying to provide early childhood education happen to be believers of a particular religious philosophy will not disqualify them from being funded by this program–exactly what freedom of religion means, that we will not discriminate against you on the basis of what you believe. As long as the program is administered impartially, part of that impartiality has to be that a program is not disqualified based on religious connections.
That is important for multiple reasons.
Social programs and particularly education have always been spearheaded in the Anglo-Saxon world by Christians and Christian organizations. Our Ivy League colleges and many other schools and universities were originally founded by Christians to educate doctors, lawyers, and ministers. Christians were the first to attempt to help the poor in England through education of their children. In America, many settlers would arrive in a new location and build a church and a school as the fundamental institutions of society. Meanwhile, the Jews have long put a heavy emphasis on educating their children, going back more than centuries, possibly millennia–a Hebrew boy became a man by proving he could read from the Torah, at least as early as the first century. Religious people have been proponents of education, and education for all, even when the approved thinking was that education was for the privileged and powerful, to maintain their power and privilege.
Encouraging a group to do what we want them to do and they want to do anyway is good politics.
Besides, if the objectors are saying that it is a violation of the principle of freedom of religion to fund any organization that promotes a religious position, they’re going to have to stop funding public education as well. St. Louis is a particularly interesting case, as it is the home of the headquarters of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church–not the most conservative Lutheran group, but conservative enough that they honestly believe in a six-day creation. You might disagree; I don’t know that I agree. However, whenever the State of Missouri uses its collected tax money to teach the scientific views about the Big Bang Theory and the Theory of Evolution, it is spending money to promote a religious idea–the idea that the Missouri Synod Lutheran belief in six-day creation is wrong. Our objectors say that they do not want their tax money spent to fund organizations that will promote religious notions with which they disagree; now they know how their Lutheran neighbors feel.
The only way to treat religious people and their organizations fairly is to make the question of religious belief irrelevant to the question of funding social efforts. Otherwise, it would be the same as saying that the government will not fund a day care run by a black man, or a preschool run by a woman. Not discriminating on the basis of religion means that religious views are not a factor in the decision. That’s what the amendment is saying.
How those programs are going to work has not yet been determined. The simple way, though, is for the government to provide scholarships or tuition reimbursement for needy families trying to send their children to whatever preschools are available. Some have argued that this kind of “voucher” system unconstitutionally funds religious schools because the parents can give the money to those schools and the government winds up paying the church, as it were. However, to do otherwise unconstitutionally discriminates against religious groups, requiring that parents send their children only to schools which reject religious views entirely–itself a religious view–or forego the government assistance they cannot afford to be without.
It would be akin to refusing to provide food stamps to any family that says grace before meals.
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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #125, on the subject of My Presidential Election Fears.
I mentioned (originally in #68: Ridiculous Republicans back in March, most recently this past week in #123: The 2016 Election in New Jersey) that this election was going to be about whom you vote against. A lot of people are afraid, very afraid, that one of these candidates will win–probably equally applicable to both candidates, and some voters are afraid of both. I have thought about it, and agree that there is reason to be afraid, but I think I am afraid of only one of them. So permit me a moment to explain.
I am not afraid of a Donald Trump Presidency.
I recognize that Trump presents a lot of bluster and arrogance. He is perceived as a buffoon, a cartoon, a joke. However, he probably has laughed all the way to the bank more than once. He is a successful businessman, with experience in the real world both nationally and internationally. He knows how to run a business, even several businesses.
The perception of Trump from the outside is that he will make many rash decisions. One does not become ludicrously wealthy by making rash decisions–bold, yes, rash, no. Rather, there are two things which someone successful in business learns very early, or he does not continue to be successful for long:
Hire experts who know their subject, listen to their advice, and follow it.
Hire executives who know their jobs, and let them do them.
This, incidentally, appears to be how Ronald Reagan ran his White House: surround yourself with people who know what they’re doing, and trust them to do it. I don’t say that Trump is another Reagan; I do expect that he would follow that same effective pattern. Presidents who think they know how to do everything and try to control it all are generally viewed as lesser successes–Wilson, Carter. Those who know how to obtain good advice and delegate important tasks and decisions prove to be the best executives–and the President of the United States is ultimately an executive, not different in kind from the president of a multi-national corporation.
I don’t know that he has always been completely honest, but I believe that he has avoided doing anything illegal, and I think that he means what he says even if he’s a bit dramatic at times. I think in those senses he is trustworthy. He might rattle the big stick quite a bit, but under the bluster he obviously has enough sense to make things work.
As far as some of his “crazy policies”, well, despite the nonsense our present President has tried with his executive orders attempting to end run the legislature, Presidents do not get to do whatever they want. I don’t see even a solidly Republican Congress rubberstamping his ideas, and I’m doubtful we’ll have a solidly Republican Congress. The laws that do get passed will be no more nor less ridiculous than those passed in the past, because we have a good system that works well in that regard. The legislative branch is totally independent of the executive, and has a fair amount of influence over executive appointments and actions, so there is a check in place for all of that.
I am afraid of a Hillary Clinton Presidency.
The simple reason is that I do not trust her. I believe that she lies to obtain power, wealth, and fame. I don’t see that changing simply because she gets it. There are serious concerns about whether she and her staff are guilty of treason in leaking classified information through carelessness–and while one might thereby excuse it because everyone makes mistakes, there are also serious allegations of influence peddling when she was Secretary of State. There is the potential that she will be indicted for any of these offenses before she can take the oath of office.
I do not want our President to be available to the highest bidder.
I do not want our President to lie to us about her intentions or her actions.
I do not want our next Supreme Court nominee, or appointee to the State Department, or any other government official to be selected from the short list of Clinton Foundation donors.
I have had enough of government corruption and overreaching with the present administration, and would like to see it ended. A Clinton Presidency would more likely escalate it. There is good evidence that she has lied, cheated, and stolen in the past, and no evidence that she will do otherwise in the future. I would prefer not to give her that opportunity.
I believe that we are all in God’s hands; that does not mean He will protect our nation. We will get either the government we need or the one we deserve. That might not be the one we like, but God knows what He’s doing. My fears might become reality, or they might be allayed; I might be wrong in my assessment of the dangers in either direction. However, I am going to vote against the candidate I most fear. We do not need a Democratic version of Richard Nixon.
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A generalist: learning less and less about more and more, one day to know nothing about everything.
