Category: Politics

Truth and reconciliation

Senator Lindsey Graham has lamented the chaotic way that old accusations of sexual abuse are resurfacing to derail men’s careers.

“If this is enough – 35 years in the past, no specifics about location and time, no corroboration – God help the next batch of nominees that come forward,” he told reporters. “It’s going to be hard to recruit good people if you go down based on allegations that are old and unverified.”

I think we can all agree that the current haphazard approach to reporting, investigating, and punishing sexual violence from the distant past, with mores changing and memories fraying, is not ideal, not for the victims, not for justice.

Ultimately, I think what we need is a Sexual Truth and Reconciliation Commission (STaR Commission). As in post-Apartheid South Africa, the Commission would be empowered to offer amnesty to offenders in exchange for confession of all sexual offenses, and full and frank accounts of the facts from the period of the War on Women.

Of course, before we can have the Truth and Reconciliation, we need first to overthrow the old regime of gender-apartheid and hold free and fair gender-neutral elections. That will be some time yet. By that time, we can hope that computer technology will have progressed to the point that it will be possible to store and distribute the complete record of the crimes.

Kavanaugh’s evil twin and the Hitler diaries

I was in high school when the Hitler diaries flashed across the media firmament, and I was fascinated by the eagerness with which so many responsible people accepted as plausible what were quickly unmasked as transparent frauds. An important selling point was the observation that the diaries never mentioned the extermination of the Jews, and I remember very specifically an article in Time magazine that teased the possibility that Hitler himself may not have known of the extent of the Holocaust, with speculation by historians that underlings may have acted on their own. I had an insight then about what would motivate people to seek out evidence that someone they “know” — even if knowing them only by their reputation as a famous monster — was innocent of an important crime. Just by learning about a historical figure we inevitably develop some psychological identification with him, he becomes one of our acquaintances, and then to mitigate the cognitive dissonance we are attracted to exculpatory evidence, even better if it is such as tends to diffuse responsibility rather than creating other specific monsters.

The writer Richard Marius once told me that after he had written his biography of Thomas More, where he had to come to some resolution on the purported crimes of Richard III, and decided that Richard was guilty of everything, he got harassed by people calling themselves Ricardians. They insisted that the criminals were Henry VII, or Edward Tyrell, or some anonymous unknowable others. Again, Richard III is a famous villain, but since he is famous, people identify him, and want to believe him not such a villain.

The French aphorism tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner goes deep. Bare familiarity is enough to create a motivation to pardon everything.

I see a connection to the way conservatives jumped at the theory that Christine Blasey Ford had indeed been sexually assaulted, but that she had mis-identified Brett Kavanaugh as the perpetrator. This doesn’t change anything about the number of evil people in the world, but it renders them anonymous. (Ed Whelan crossed a line when he went full Ricardian and accused a specific classmate of Kavanaugh’s. In principle, this serves all relevant purposes of the free-floating accusation, but by libelling a specific private citizen it created too many other complications and even, dare I suggest, moral qualms.) Continue reading “Kavanaugh’s evil twin and the Hitler diaries”

Ambush!

The big story in all. the UK press is about the humiliation experienced by Theresa May –and by extension the entire British nation — from being ambushed by unanimous criticism of her “Chequers plan”.

Guardian on Salzburg "humiliation"

It’s unusual to have an ambush that has been so comprehensively announced in advance. Fortunately, to help unravel it we happen to have a transcript of the top secret radio communications that preceded this ambush:

UK: Maybot here. We’re coming through the Chequers Pass.

EU: Don’t come this way. We have a big force, 27 strong, blocking the way. We can’t let you pass through here.

UK: No, we have to go through here. If we turn back our own rearguard will shoot us.

EU: We don’t want to attack you, but the Chequers Pass leads into dangerous territory. We can’t let anyone through.

UK: Maybot, approaching Chequers Pass.

EU: There are multiple other passes. Please take one of them.

Warning shots are fired.

UK: Ambush! Treachery!

Onus: on us

When the onus is on some party in a negotiation, the point is to say which of several possible parties really needs to make a move. People have been pushing the onus back and forth in the Brexit negotiation:

EU Says Onus Is on U.K. for Brexit Progress

The onus is on Parliament now to protect our post-Brexit rights

Philip Hammond sees Brexit onus on Europe

But now Theresa May has announced at an EU summit that

the onus is now on all of us to get this deal done.

While I grant that her claim seems orthographically undeniable — onus = on us — I wonder what the prime minister could possibly be talking about. There literally are only two parties to the Brexit negotiation, the UK and the EU, so who else could the onus be on? Or is “us” her fellow heads of government in Salzburg, who have the responsibility to take the decision out of the hands of the bumbling bureaucrats of Brussels?

Pathetic Republicans

The name of the Republican Party derives ultimately from the Latin res publica, meaning “public matters”. Which suggests a posture diametrically opposed to that which Senate Republicans have taken to the Kavanaugh sexual assault accusation. It seems obvious that, from a public policy perspective, there are broadly three possible stances you could have toward these allegations: 1) They are facially incredible; 2) They are credible but irrelevant to his fitness to serve on the Supreme Court; 3) If true they may (or certainly do) disqualify him from the Supreme Court, so it is essential to take pains to ascertain their truth or falsity. (I suppose there is a fourth as well, the mirror of (1): We believe the accuser, so the nomination simply needs to be withdrawn.)

Republicans seem to have settled bizarrely on the first part of (3), but then veered off into personal pathos. The accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, has requested that an independent investigation determine some essential facts before her testimony, and that other witnesses be called. Republicans have rejected this, and seem generally to represent her testimony as a personal favour to her, to assuage her suffering.

Senator John Cornyn:

We don’t know if she’s coming or not but this is her chance. This is her one chance. We hope she does.

Why is it “her chance”? Presumably it is the nation’s chance to avoid having an attempted rapist and perjurer on the Supreme Court. I understand that the disposition of a crucial witness is important, but surely that cannot affect the need to resolve the matter before an irrevocable decision is taken. Senator Bob Corker:

I just felt that it was important that if she had these types of serious allegations that she ought to have the opportunity to be heard. And I hope she is going to take advantage of that. If she doesn’t — that’s a whole other thing.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell:

Dr. Ford has talked to the Washington Post, indicated she wants to talk to the committee, and we’re going to give her that opportunity on Monday.

Pseudo-centrist and sometime feminist Susan Collins is particularly concerned about Brett Kavanaugh’s feelings:

I think it’s not fair for Judge Kavanaugh for her not to come forward and testify.

The subtext is, if she doesn’t help us, we’ll just have to move ahead and confirm him. Which suggests that they really don’t think this is important, raising the question, why are they inviting her to testify at all? Surely the Senate Judiciary Committee is not the place for a public therapy session, particularly when the witness will be bringing great public opprobrium on herself, regardless of how the hearings turn out.

Had enough Kavanaugh?

To adopt for a moment the president’s rhetorical style:

The Federalist Society isn’t sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
We need a total and complete shutdown of men being appointed to positions of power and influence until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in male supremacy, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life.

Written wordplay

Isaac Asimov, in a side-remark in his Treasury of Humor, mentioned a conversation in which a participant expressed outrage at a politician blathering about “American goals”. “His specialty is jails, not goals,” and then seeming to expect some laughter. It was only on reflection that Asimov realised that the speaker, who was British, had spelled it gaols in his mind.

I was reminded of this by this Guardian headline:

Labour has shifted focus from bingo to quinoa, say swing voters

The words bingo and quinoa look vaguely similar on the page, but they’re not pronounced anything alike. Unlike Asimov’s example, this wordplay is in writing, so spelling is important. My feeling is that wordplay has to be fundamentally sound-based, so this just doesn’t work for me. Maybe the Guardian editors believe in visual wordplay.

Alternatively, maybe they don’t know how quinoa is pronounced.

Trump’s branding

In reading Donald Trump’s rant on the anonymous freak who wrote in the NY Times that, yes, Donald Trump is a raving loon, but no need to take any extreme measures like electing Democrats, because the people supposedly working for him have everything under control, I was reminded of a weird tic that Trump has that I’ve never seen remarked upon. It’s in this line:

“We have somebody in what I call the failing New York Times talking about he’s part of the resistance within the Trump administration. This is what we have to deal with,” he told reporters in the East Room early Wednesday evening.

Now, if you’re trying to insult someone, you say, “He’s an idiot.” You don’t say, “He’s what I call an idiot.” Calling attention to the fact that this is merely your private designation saps the force of the insult.

Trump is enormously proud of his ability to brand people with epithets (even if no one else actually uses them). So proud, that he needs to call attention to his invention at every opportunity, even against the objective of the epithets. One of the many ways that he acts like a toddler (or a Hollywood producer). “Look Mama, I made it self!”

I imagine a version of the Odyssey featuring Homer’s trademarked characters “what I call grey-eyed Athena” and “Odysseus, or as I call him, ‘sacker of cities'”.

Squatting on the truth

Is the phrase diddly-squat obscene? I’m wondering because the word appears in Boris Johnson’s latest newspaper column:

the reality is that in this negotiation the EU has so far taken every important trick. The UK has agreed to hand over £40 billion of taxpayers’ money for two thirds of diddly squat.

It’s not that I find the word personally offensive — I’d rank it as low- to mid-grade obscenity — but surprising and out-of-place. Even for the desperate-for-attention Johnson this seemed like a surprisingly inappropriate word choice, simultaneously childish and scatological, rather like an eight-year-old trying to impress with his newly acquired potty vocabulary.

But maybe the word has different connotations in the UK than in the US — or maybe even within the US opinions differ. To my ear, the “squat” here is a more graphic substitution for “shit”, and “diddle” has the slang meaning of illicit groping or intercourse. The OED tells me that the original form — apparently American — was doodly-squat, with “doodle” a now rare slang term for excrement.

Anyway, I certainly hear the word as scatological, but I wonder how others perceive it.