Shakezula Thinks I Have No Business Commenting on Transgender Rights

Posted on 12 Aug 2016 by Frank Moraes

Angry Teacher Explaining Transgender Rights Last week I wrote, Bill Maher, Donald Trump, and the Existential Threat. It was not about transgender rights. But I did note, “As with same sex marriage, I don’t think [transgender bathroom use] is a particularly big issue.” I added, “When LGBT people are still commonly beaten up and even murdered, these other worthy causes strike me rather more as easy and non-threatening things that the straight community can do until the descriptor LGBT itself because pointless.” But Shakezula and others at Lawyers, Guns & Money thought I was very wrong. In fact, Shakezula even responded that I had “no business commenting” on the subject.

I Wasn’t Writing About Transgender Rights

Remember that my article is not about transgender rights. The article is about the notion that Donald Trump is an existential threat. It argued against the idea that we should all give up our liberal principles because of This Year’s Existential Threat to Truth, Justice, and the American Way. I did come back to the issue of transgender rights. At the end, I wrote, “It is not the time to pretend that we aren’t liberals — to back off on transgender bathroom rights or anything else.” So I think you can see that the problem we have here is not that I don’t support transgender rights, but that I admit to a hierarchy — bathroom rights not being at the top of the list.

Let’s consider same-sex marriage for a moment. Most liberals these days think that it is the very definition of LGB rights. Yes, it is a sign of the progress we have made. But if you want to pick a single issue that galvanized the LGBT rights movement, it was the AIDS epidemic. And yes, the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died of AIDS was far more important than same-sex marriage. That doesn’t mean that I’m unaware that different kinds of prejudice work together. For example: voting rights and lynching.

The truth is that we all prioritize, and I was deeply offended that Shakezula seemed to think that I had no business commenting on transgender rights if I don’t follow his orthodoxy. Not that I think he was commenting on me specifically. There were only 16 click-throughs from that trackback. And I doubt that any of the commenters made it past the second paragraph where they got their outrage fix.

A Comment That Could Start a Conversation

The whole thing started with this comment, which I think explains everything. Commenter JL wrote:

Huh, I followed this link back and while this person thinks Maher is wrong, they also don’t think that bathroom access is a very important issue for trans people compared to harassment and murder. That’s an impressive misunderstanding. Bathroom discrimination for trans people is connected with suicide attempts, excessive absence/dropping out of school, avoiding going out in public [PDF], physical violence, and physical health problems like UTIs and kidney infections.

Now, I’m actually aware of all this. But if I weren’t, I would want to be. So shouldn’t that comment be made here where I would see it? After all, anyone can comment here. It isn’t like at Lawyers, Guns & Money where one must register to comment. But no. The comment wasn’t intended for me. What’s more, it wasn’t intended to increase transgender rights. It was meant to preach to the choir and prove how worthy and liberally pure JL is.

Outrage Is More Important That Engagement

So let’s sum up. I wrote an article encouraging liberals not to abandon their principles just because Donald Trump is running for president. I specifically mentioned not retreating on transgender bathroom rights. And I get a bunch of “holier than thou” liberals who most likely read at best part of my article complaining that I didn’t understand transgender rights. And by extension, the rights of any oppressed group.

Nice going people! Especially you Shakezula! Very liberal. Very open-minded. So very helpful.

Afterword

If I sound angry, it’s because I am. Over the past few years, I’ve become more and more intolerant of what I see as “middle class liberalism.” One of the commenters wrote, “I feel that anyone who dismisses bathroom access as a ’boutique’ issue or as a not very serious problem should be willing to forgo any use of public bathrooms. For a start.” Well, has this commenter ever tried to find a bathroom in San Francisco as a homeless person? I suspect not. I suspect that very self-righteous commenter has never been homeless and broke. I have. Many of my friends have been. I am not surrounded by the effete class. The “boutique” is Lawyers, Guns & Money, where financially stable people can increase the happiness of their lives by pointing out just how “noble” they are. What a pathetic show of self-righteousness!

Angry Teacher by Robin Hutton. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Free Trade: From Promise to Scam

Posted on 11 Aug 2016 by Frank Moraes

Matt Taibbi - Free Trade Clinton promised that free-trade agreements would emphasize new environmental standards, would expand the rights of workers in signatory countries, that we would not trade with countries that employed subsidies or tariffs against us, and that displaced domestic workers would eventually see gains after being retrained and redeployed for new jobs that would eventually appear to replace the lost ones.

“To the men and women of our country who were afraid of these changes,” Clinton said, “the gains from this agreement will be your gains, too.”
It was never articulated this way, exactly, but the basic promise of free trade was that the American middle class would experience temporary losses that over time would be balanced out by increased growth worldwide.

It was trickle-down economics, only repackaged with an international spin: After a long trip around the world, the wealth eventually gets back to you.

Twenty-three years later, we see how all of this has turned out. There have been some improvements in the economic condition of foreign workers.
But we never excluded politically oppressive regimes from free-trade deals, never made sure that trade partners weren’t also massive human rights violators, never seriously worried about environmental enforcement. Mostly, we just made cheap, un-free foreign labor available to Western manufacturers.

Even a onetime die-hard NAFTA cheerleader like staunch Clinton supporter Paul Krugman, who once compared free trade’s critics to the anti-evolutionist followers of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey Trial, now admits that the case for “ever-freer” trade is a “scam”…

—Matt Taibbi
A Republican Workers’ Party?

Matt Taibbi image from Democracy Now! video clip. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Trespass Has Many Delightful Meanings

Posted on 11 Aug 2016 by Frank Moraes

Trespass: Park closed from Sunset to Sunrise. Violators will be trespassed. The excellent freelance writer Jon Penland took this picture on his travels around the county, and posted it on Facebook. When I first saw it I was amused. The sign reads, “Park closed from Sunset to Sunrise. Violators will be trespassed.” But I didn’t hate the sign. It’s actually charming. And I like that all the words are spelled correctly. It makes me think of the spell check poem: they did manage to get the words right. But why capitalize “sunset” and “sunrise”? I assume because they just didn’t know any better.

I was going to razz Jon about his pedantry. But I don’t know him that well, and he wouldn’t understand that I would actually be razzing myself. I once found a flier from a local transit system with many errors in it. So I marked it up and mailed it back to them. But it was thinking back on that act that I realized that I was wrong. The truth was that the flier, while wrong, was perfectly clear. And it came from a transit system, not a publisher. So what’s the big deal? Ever since, I’ve tried to be more understanding.

Is Trespass Wrong In This Context?

It looks like the writer meant “arrest” or “prosecute” where they wrote “trespass.” However, the use of “trespass” in this way is not actually wrong. Look at the definitions of the word. One is “to do something that hurts or offends someone.” Certainly, being arrested would fall within this definition.

But even more, another definition of trespass is “the legal action for injuries resulting from trespass.” I wasn’t aware of that definition, but maybe the writer of the sign was. Maybe the big joke is on all of us and the sign, while unusual, is precise. I doubt it, but it does take some of the fun out of laughing at the sign.

Consider also how one of the most famous passages from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:12) is often translated, “And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Now the sign is starting to seem more reasonable. And in this context, it has an almost Quentin Tarantino feel to it: the cops aren’t just gonna arrest you; they’re gonna trespass your ass. Say it like Samuel L Jackson! It’s fun: trespass your ass!

Odd Language Is Edifying

I don’t want to take away anyone’s fun. It’s nice to laugh at odd signs. But we can also learn from them. We can delight in their idiosyncrasies. It reminds me of this great scene from A Late Quartet. In it, Christopher Walken’s character tells a story about Pablo Casals (which is apparently true) where he praises a young musician who performs poorly because of a few brief moments of delight and transcendence.

I don’t hold it against anyone who laughed at this sign. It is odd. It is almost certainly the result of ignorance. And I laughed at it myself. But if we look for the good in it, it’s actually lovely. Right or wrong, it offers us a new way of looking at the language.

And to take us back to the Sermon on the Mount, I have no trouble forgiving the trespass of that sign (if it be a trespass). I have trespassed so much worse in my own life!

Peter Thiel: Totalitarian Collectives Bad; Authoritarian Leaders Good

Posted on 10 Aug 2016 by Frank Moraes

Peter Thiel I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”

But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.

—Peter Thiel
The Education of a Libertarian

Image of Peter Thiel by Dan Taylor. Licensed by CC BY 2.0.

Thomas Friedman Don’t Need No Lifelong Learning!

Posted on 10 Aug 2016 by Frank Moraes

Thomas Friedman - Artist's Conception Two weeks ago, Thomas Friedman wrote, Web People vs Wall People. “Web people” are the Good Guys who accept what Friedman believes: that the more interconnected the world is, the better. The “Wall People” are, of course, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders followers who don’t think much of this whole globalization thing. Leave aside that Trump supporters are mostly xenophobes who are well to do and don’t really care about economics. You get the idea of his argument.

But I was really struck with something that he said, that sound suspiciously like what Bill Clinton was pushing in 1992. He said that Hillary Clinton was “refraining from telling people the hardest truth: that to be in the middle class, just working hard and playing by the rules doesn’t cut it anymore. To have a lifelong job, you need to be a lifelong learner, constantly raising your game.” That’s interesting, I think.

Lawrence Mishel Is a Livelong Learner

It reminded me of something that Lawrence Mishel wrote last year, Failed Theory Posed by Wall Street Dems Puts Hillary Clinton in a Bind. It it, he noted, “There was a time where it was plausible to argue that more education and innovation were the primary solutions to our economic problems.” But since then, we’ve learned a lot. Friedman famously said, “I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.” Two words and he’s for CAFTA! Mishel is a brilliant economist who looks at actual data — and learns.

So here is Mishel, roughly the same age as Friedman, continuing to learn. But Friedman, the man stealing ideas from a politician 25 years ago hasn’t learned a thing since at least 2005 when he published The World Is Flat. I guess it’s just the poor who need lifelong learning and not overpaid columnists who write constantly about economics without actually knowing anything about it.

Thomas Friedman Married Well

And Thomas Friedman isn’t just wealthy. I read this from the great Norman Solomon:

Throughout his journalistic career, Friedman has been married to Ann Bucksbaum — heiress to a real-estate and shopping-mall fortune now estimated at $2.7 billion. When the couple wed back in 1978, according to The Washingtonian article, Friedman became part of “one of the 100 richest families in the country.”

That was in 2011, when Thomas Friedman and his wife were building a $10 million house. I don’t care. As Solomon noted in the article, this doesn’t make Thomas Friedman’s arguments invalid. But it does make you wonder. There is no doubt that globalization is a great thing when you are part of one of the hundred richest families in America. And everyone has a frame. Friedman’s not too open about his frame.

Thomas Friedman Stop Learning Long Ago

But it’s amazing to think. We went through NAFTA and it didn’t work as promised. (Since then, various different justifications have been offered.) We’ve been through the Dot-Com bust. We’ve been through the Great Recession. We have seen worker salaries stagnate — including those of the college educated. And what did Thomas Friedman learn from all this? Zip! Nada! Not a damned thing!

Yet there he is: a columnist at The New York Times! And it’s not just that. Those in power listen to him (or he’s just an apologist for them). And he’s here to tell us that all we have to do is open ourselves up to education. I have a better education than Thomas Friedman — in a supposedly valuable STEM discipline! And as a professional freelance writer, I am by definition a lifelong learner. But it hasn’t helped me that much. It certainly hasn’t helped me the way marrying into the General Growth Properties family did Thomas Friedman.

Lifelong learning is for the prols! It’s for the people who didn’t marry well. It isn’t for Thomas Friedman!

Image of Thomas Friedman as Ralph Wiggum was created by me using The Simpsons still licensed under Fair Use.

Jason Iverson Is Dead

Posted on 09 Aug 2016 by Frank Moraes

Some twenty years ago, living a life so radical and subversive that it fills me with anxiety just to think of it, I met Angela Ellingson. We were infatuated with each other, I suppose — although not in any sexual way. We were more like 5-year-olds on the playground who thought each other very keen. But friendship had clearly bothered my girlfriend at the time (later my wife) and her boyfriend at the time (later her husband, it would seem). We were kindred spirits: militant, bookwormish, and broadly curious.

Her boyfriend Jason Iverson, was also a friend of mine. He took on mythic proportions in my fiction. He was interesting and intelligent, but what fascinated me about him was his day-by-day control of a life that was, by my way of looking at things, out of control. Where I hid from troubles Jason confronted them and generally prevailed. He was the kind of man that I’ve always wanted to be like. Or at least more like.

Jason Iverson Died

Two years ago, I wrote, “There are few people from the past I want to have any contact with. But I wouldn’t mind hearing from Angela or Jason.” So when I joined Facebook, I looked up Angela. Her last post was on 11 April 2015 and it read, “Happy Birthday Jason, I miss you.” That was ominous. So I clicked over to Jason’s page where the last post was on 20 September 2014, written by Angela:

I know many of you already know this as Jason and I shared many friends, but not all. Jason died on Monday, September 15 from complications from being hit by a car while crossing the street of Friday the 12th. I am not going to continue his Facebook page forever as I think that is kind of creepy but I wanted his friends to know what had happened. He apparently had a blood clot that reached his brain causing a stroke while he was asleep, but as he wasn’t being monitored it wasn’t noticed immediately. He was resuscitated but he as he was without oxygen for 17 minutes after it was noticed he was in distress, he was brain dead and his mother and I had him removed from life support as he was already gone.

Senselessness

It seems inconceivable to me. Jason was always “the man.” How could such a thing happen? Although it does have resonance for me. I often tell people that drivers are trying to kill me as I walk about. It is meant as a joke. But to most drivers, pedestrians are like insects flying across the street: nothing to worry much about. As a result, I’m hyper-vigilant. When you are a pedestrian, you are in a war zone. What I mean by my little joke is that you should treat drivers as if they were trying to kill you.

I’m extremely sad that Jason is dead. And that it should have happened due to something I worry about excessively, makes it all the worse. He was a musician who I never got a chance to play with, and now I never will. Now I’ll never even talk to him, although I do remember our last conversation where he related an amazing true story of his life.

As for Angela, it must have been — and probably still is — crushing. They were together 23 years. I’ve never managed much more than a few years in any relationship.

Image of Angela Ellingson and Jason Iverson taken from Facebook, licensed under Fair Use.

Pot Stickers and Cervantes’ Six Teeth

Posted on 08 Aug 2016 by Frank Moraes

I was frying up some pot stickers. Why? Well, I don’t feel well. And steamed pot stickers, while doubtless much better for me, are edible but hardly delightful. And as I was frying these things, I had to flip them each two times. That’s because they have, roughly speaking three sides. And every time I flipped them, I was lightly splattered with very hot oil.

Now before anyone starts writing comments about how I can flip my pot stickers without burning my hands, let me tell you: I know. Feel free to send in your best tips, but don’t think me such a fool that I am unable to do so. The reason that I don’t take precautions is the whole point of this article.

Pot Stickers Aside: Facebook Rant

(Well, the actual point of this article is to see if the ridiculous amount of work I did trying to get my posts to display automatically on Facebook worked. I’m not that hopeful. I find it interesting that in a day, I’ve received 9 “post engagements” on Facebook but not one single click. This, I take, as an indictment of Facebook and humanity as a whole. As I’ve long said, Facebook is just a photo sharing site, and that’s quite right. I’m amazed that people post images with statistics that don’t go along with links to the actual data. But I digress.)

Thicker Skin and Cervantes’ Teeth

So there I am frying up my pot stickers and having my hands lightly burned and not caring. In fact, I hardly even noticed. But it occurred to me, if I had been doing this when I was 8 years old, I would be crying. Over the years, physical pain has doubtless dulled my senses as well as my perception of the pain. And so we come to what I think of as real men, like my father, who seem to deal very well with pain. It must just be that over time, these men had gradually grown what is, in the pot sticker case, a thinker skin.

This reminds me of Cervantes. In the prologue of Exemplary Stories, he mentions that he had only six teeth “in bad condition and worse placed, no two of them corresponding to each other.” The great writer was doubtless exaggerating. But I’m sure that he did have rather bad teeth and had a number of them pulled without benefit of Novocain. Is it possible his last tooth extraction bothered him as much as the oil splashing on my hands? I suspect so.

I’m not concerned that people will consider me a wuss. One of the greatest pleasures of old age is learning not to care what people think of you. But it makes me feel better about the people who came before me who suffered so much. I want to think that it wasn’t as bad for them as it sounds to us.

Update

It worked! It worked!

Pot Stick Image by Andrea Nguyen. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Atheists Need to Understand Theology

Posted on 08 Aug 2016 by Frank Moraes

I joined Facebook recently. I did it in a moment of panic because I saw that FranklyCurious was available. So if you are on Facebook, you might friend or like or whatever the hell it is one does on the damnable thing. Here’s my account: FranklyCurious.

A guy named Steve Hall posted the image above. It’s quite well done. At the same time, it made me bristle. The quote is from Stephen Hawking and it reads, “What was God doing before the divine creation? Was he preparing hell for people who asked such questions?” It appears to have been said during a talk at Cal Tech three years ago. And I’m sure he said many smart things during that talk. But these two sentences are stupid.

Fundamentalists’ Frame

Although amusing, this kind of statement puts the discussion in the fundamentalists’ frame. In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas well understood that such a conception of God was both facile and heretical to the Catholic Church. This is a good example of why I find myself a very lonely atheist. How can I be part of the atheist community when the vast majority of people in it think about God and religion with as limited a frame as the most backward fundamentalist? If atheists can’t address eight century old thought, what good are they?

“What was God doing?”!

Really?! That’s what Hawking thinks the nature of religious belief is? Would he ever ask the similarly silly question, “What was the universe doing before it sprang into existence?”?! Yet he seems to have taken spiritual guidance from people who know even less about theology than Pat Robertson.

Negative Theology

The only kind of theology that I’ve ever been able to get my head around is negative theology. This is a form of theology where people try to understand God by determining what God cannot be. And the most basic idea in negative theology is that God cannot be a thing in the sense that the Sun is a thing or even the multiverse is a thing. Such a conception of God denigrates the concept. God is simply something powerful. “I am God to my pet rat,” for example.

This is also why atheist proofs are so silly. “Could God create something so heavy he couldn’t lift it?” Such paradoxes are based upon the conception of God as we see it in cartoons: a white bearded man on a throne in the clouds. I understand: this is indeed the way most theists look at God. One of the biggest problems with religion today is that most believers would not see a problem with the question, “What was God doing before divine creation?” But that is their problem, not mine. I am no more interested in arguing with them about such theological caricatures as I am in discussing Bigfoot.

Atheists Need to Learn

But here is a very big problem with the atheist movement. They’ve been pretty good at converting fundamentalists to atheists. But I don’t consider these new “atheists” as believing anything but that their former religious beliefs were silly. What happens when they get a clue? What happens when they learn that there is more to religion that the dogma of a controlling and power hungry church?

One day, atheists will have to sit down with serious theists. As for now, they mostly ignore them. And when they don’t, the atheists are so ignorant of theology that they can’t even understand what the theologians are talking about. And the atheists — with great hubris — take this to mean that the theologians must be wrong. It’s pathetic.

One can’t be an atheist without knowing what it is to be a theist. And most atheists don’t seem to even know what God is supposed to be. What they seem to be against is ignorant people with childish beliefs. If that’s the case, we should call such people areligious. They don’t know or care enough to have an opinion about God, and thus don’t deserve to be called atheists.

Image taken from Facebook and licensed under Fair Use.

Bill Maher, Donald Trump, and the Existential Threat

Posted on 07 Aug 2016 by Frank Moraes

Bill Maher - Trump Existential Threat On this week’s Real Time, Bill Maher made the argument that Donald Trump is such an existential threat to the country that we must all put our pet issues aside and just get Hillary Clinton elected. His focus was on transgender rights. He noted that in 2008, Obama was not publicly in favor of same sex marriage. Obviously, he was privately. Maher’s point was that Obama was being strategic. He didn’t want to torpedo his campaign for the sake of an issue that would bring out the crazy conservatives to vote against him.

Over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, Shakezula was not pleased. He[1] particularly didn’t like the notion of transgender rights being a “pet issue.” I understand and sympathize. But I do think he grabbed onto that one statement rather harder than is reasonable. For one thing, Maher was talking about bathroom choice for transgender people. As with same sex marriage, I don’t think it is a particularly big issue. When LGBT people are still commonly beaten up and even murdered, these other worthy causes strike me rather more as easy and non-threatening things that the straight community can do until the descriptor LGBT itself because pointless.

But Is Trump an Existential Threat?

None of this means that I agree with Maher. The truth is that each presidential election is framed as an existential threat to our republic. Both parties do it, although clearly there is the stink of demagoguery in the Republican arguments that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were extremists. But there is a lesser bit of nonsense that comes from us Democrats. Certainly Trump would be a far worse president than George W Bush was. But then, Bush was a far worse president than his father. If Donald Trump becomes president, I guarantee you that the Republicans will offer up an even worse candidate than he.

None of this should come as a surprise. Richard Nixon is now seen as quite the reasonable politician except for that little paranoia problem. But he was responsible (with the aid of his inside man, war criminal Henry Kissinger) of extending the Vietnam War for at least four more years, leading to the deaths of at least 21,000 American troops. People now talk about Reagan’s willingness to raise taxes as some super-ability, as though the “no new taxes ever” philosophy of the Republican Party is normal in any functioning democracy.

Trump Would Be a Catastrophe — Like All Republicans

Donald Trump RNC Bounce Do I think that Donald Trump would be a total catastrophe for our nation? Yes! Although like with George W Bush, I don’t think we would get a Trump presidency. For six years of the Bush administration, it was Dick Cheney running the executive branch. I have no idea who would be running the country under Trump, but I know it wouldn’t be Trump himself, because he has no interest in it. But the biggest problem with a Trump presidency would be that he would likely get to appoint two Supreme Court Justices — just like Bush. And good luck with transgender rights under those circumstances.

But that’s going to happen even if Trump dies on 9 November 2016 and we get “reasonable” Mike Pence as president. Or, for that matter, any nationally known Republican. The truth is that the Republican Party is simply terrible. Trump may be stupid, ignorant, and gauche, but he isn’t especially different from other Republicans. He’s the symptom, not the cause of Republican dysfunction.

Liberals Need to Be Liberals

So as liberals, now is not the time to panic. There is no more existential threat than usual. It is not the time to pretend that we aren’t liberals — to back off on transgender bathroom rights or anything else. If this election is an existential threat to our nation, then they all are. And that means that liberals should always be abandoning their beliefs to win this one election. And we’ve seen what this has brought us: a Democratic Party that is in the mushy middle and is too often unable to beat a party made up primarily of mad men.

[1] I assume that Shakezula is a man, given that posts at his personal blog are posted by “Jules.” If anyone has contrary information, let me know.

Image of Bill Maher by Angela George, licensed under CC BY 3.0. Donald Trump image via Wikimedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Joseph Stiglitz on the Neoliberal Management of Globalization

Posted on 06 Aug 2016 by Frank Moraes

Joseph Stiglitz - neoliberal globalization How can something that our political leaders — and many an economist — said would make everyone better off be so reviled?

One answer occasionally heard from the neoliberal economists who advocated for these policies is that people are better off. They just don’t know it. Their discontent is a matter for psychiatrists, not economists.

But income data suggest that it is the neoliberals who may benefit from therapy. Large segments of the population in advanced countries have not been doing well: in the US, the bottom 90% has endured income stagnation for a third of a century. Median income for full-time male workers is actually lower in real (inflation-adjusted) terms than it was 42 years ago. At the bottom, real wages are comparable to their level 60 years ago.

—Joseph Stiglitz
Globalization and Its New Discontents

Joseph Stiglitz image by Raimond Spekking, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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Monthly Archives: August 2016