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About Those Gas Prices

March 21, 2022 – 9:28 am

As someone born into the era of big tail fins and bumpers with breasts, it’s not news to me that we Americans get irrational about our cars.

So of course we also obsess about gas prices. If the rent or the cable bill goes up, we’ll grumble and pay it. If the price of beef skyrockets, we’ll eat more chicken. When there was no toilet paper on the shelves, the most common response was frantic desperation, not anger. But high gas prices bring out the pitchforks and torches: This has to be somebody’s fault, and we’re going to make them pay.

So maybe it’s Biden’s fault or Putin’s or Exxon’s or environmentalists’. Let’s see if we can sort this out, starting from the beginning.

How bad is it? Various commenters had already been talking about “record gas prices” for several weeks, but prices didn’t actually start breaking records until March 7. Even then records were not being broken by much, and only if you didn’t adjust for inflation. In July of 2008, national average gas prices hit $4.11. Cumulative inflation in the last 14 years has been 32%, so gas prices won’t equal 2008 prices in inflation-adjusted dollars unless they hit $5.42. AAA’s current national average price is $4.25.

The price a year ago, when Covid was keeping most people close to home, was an unusually low $2.89. So there’s been a steep increase since then, but not to off-the-charts levels.

Rockets and feathers. The apparent reason for the increase was that the price of oil went up. But oil prices crashed back down this week, and gas prices are still high. (Though they are trending somewhat downward. AAA reports a drop from $4.33 in the last week.) This is the main reason people give when they blame the oil companies for price gouging.

The following chart was on the Trending Economics web site Saturday morning.

So a year ago, the world price of oil was about $60 a barrel. It started creeping upward as economies recovered from the Covid emergency, reaching $90 by late February, when the Ukraine crisis began to get serious. Post-invasion and post-sanctions, it jumped up to $123 on March 8. Then it fell back below $100, and ended last week at $104.70.

The complaint is that gas prices go up immediately when the price of oil rises, but they don’t fall immediately when it drops. This is not your imagination.

The trend is called “rocketing and feathering,” according to oil industry analysts. Gas prices rocket up and then they come down slowly like a feather in the wind.

Think about how this works: Suppose you run oil tankers back and forth between, say, Nigeria and the United States. A trip takes weeks, maybe a month, depending on conditions. So the oil you loaded in Lagos was worth about $90 a barrel, but by the time you get to America, the price has risen to $120. So what do you sell for?

The way a lot of people’s economic intuition works, you ought to sell for $90 plus a reasonable profit on your expenses; say, $93 or $95. (Those numbers are based on several minutes worth of googling, so don’t use them for anything other than illustration.) This way of thinking is called “just price economics“, and it was popular in the Middle Ages.

But the world doesn’t really work that way. Of course you sell for $120, making a $30-a-barrel windfall profit. On other trips you might have windfall losses, so you’d better take the money now.

That’s how rocketing works, all the way up and down the path from oil well to gas pump: Increases get incorporated into the price immediately. Imagine you own a local gas station. Your last delivery arrived when you were selling gas for $3.50 a gallon, so in theory you could still sell for $3.50 and make a profit. But your next delivery is going to cost $4 a gallon. So why would you sell something for $3.50 when it’s going to cost you $4 to replace it?

But now picture what happens when prices fall: You paid $4 a gallon for the gas in your tanks now, so you’re going to be reluctant to sell it for less than that, even if you can replace it for $3.50. You’ll lower your price when you have to, i.e., when the gas station across the street lowers its price.

How fast prices fall depends on how much competition there is. If there are bottlenecks in the market — say, a small number of refineries producing gas for a large region — the businesses that control that bottleneck are in a position to insist on getting at least a just price. And they will. You would too.

The conclusion I draw from all this is that no one in the rocketing-and-feathering scenario is particularly villainous. Price drops would happen faster if markets were more competitive, as in the classic Adam Smith model. But this situation is very different from monopoly pricing, where sellers are only restrained by consumers’ inability or unwillingness to keep paying. (True monopolists don’t need an excuse to raise prices or to keep them high.) Supply-and-demand is working, albeit with a little sluggishness.

A long-term partial solution — nothing would solve it completely — would be more rigorous antitrust enforcement. Short-term, a direct government payment financed by a windfall profits tax would deal with the painful symptoms.

Why is oil so high? Oil is an unusual commodity, because in the short term, neither supply nor demand have much elasticity. An oil field isn’t like a car factory that can run longer shifts, pay overtime, and deliver more cars to the dealers in a matter of days. In the medium term, an oil company can drill more wells, and reopen wells that weren’t economical to run at lower prices. Longer term, it can explore for new oil fields. But none of that increases supply immediately.

Similarly, when the price goes up by 10-20%, you still have to get to work, and you’re probably not going to cancel your vacation plans. Airlines aren’t going to cancel flights. It takes time to arrange a carpool, replace your gas-guzzler with an electric, or move closer to your job.

The result of that lack of elasticity is that oil prices swing more wildly than most commodities. It goes way up and way down because that’s what it takes to change people’s behavior. (Remember what a market price is: The price at which buyers want the exact quantity that sellers are offering. So price moves that don’t cause people to enter or leave the market aren’t big enough.) So when demand crashed at the beginning of the Covid lockdowns, the price on the most volatile oil markets briefly went negative. (Imagine the grocery paying you to take away their excess milk.) Here’s the 25-year version of the graph above.

Not a lot of other prices relevant to your life went up 7 times between 2002 and 2008, only to crash all the way back by 2020.

I learn a few things from this graph.

  • If you just look at the 2020-2022 part, the price is skyrocketing. But if you take a longer view, you see a lot of zigging and zagging within a wide range. It’s a mistake to imagine that the Covid-lockdown price of $20 was “normal”.
  • I’m not surprised that oil production doesn’t instantly ramp up in response to a high price. If I’m deciding whether to drill a well that I expect to be productive over 5-10 years, how can I be sure the price won’t be much lower for most of that time?
  • The price increase didn’t start with the Ukraine War. Oil prices went up because the world economy was recovering (and speculators anticipated further recovery). The effect of war and sanctions sits on top of that rise.

Is Biden to blame? Mostly no, but there are hooks you can hang that argument on if you really want to.

First, there’s inflation in general. Like many other governments, the US policy response to the Covid lockdowns focused on avoiding a depression, which was a real possibility. So the Federal Reserve pumped a lot of money into the economy, and the government distributed money directly to individuals and businesses. Both policies started under Trump, but Biden continued and even increased the depression-avoiding spending with his American Rescue Plan.

Two consequences come out of that: the intended one of keeping the economy afloat, and the unintended (but somewhat expected) one of inflation. So unemployment is now at 3.8%, down from 6% a year ago and 15% two years ago. It’s close to the pre-Covid 3.5% that Trump claimed as evidence of “the greatest economy ever”.

The price of those jobs is inflation, which was up to 7.9% before the Ukraine invasion and the sanctions against Russia. Personally, I think that’s a price worth paying. But other people may disagree, and many more will argue in bad faith, criticizing Biden for the inflation without crediting him for the jobs.

Second, we come to the sanctions, which again are a trade-off. Getting Russian oil off the market leaves a production gap, which raises prices. I don’t have a good explanation for why oil has almost returned to its pre-invasion level, but I wouldn’t count on it to stay there.

It’s possible that a President Trump might have been able to call his good buddy MBS and get the Saudis to produce more to make up the gap. (Of course he won’t do that now, because a larger oil supply would just benefit America, and not Trump personally.) Other possible sources of increased oil production would be the other sanctioned countries: Iran and Venezuela. (Iranian oil might not be sanctioned at all if Trump hadn’t scrapped the Iranian nuclear deal.) But none of that has worked out either.

Finally, there’s the question of American production. And here is where the case against Biden is flimsiest. The accusation is that American oil production would be much higher if Biden weren’t so hostile to the oil industry. If he had only kept building the Keystone XL pipeline, or opened more federal land to drilling, or not rejoined the Paris Climate Accord, or maybe had just smiled more at oil executives — then we’d have so much production the world wouldn’t need Russia.

This is nonsense, and I can’t explain it any better than Jen Psaki did.

  • Keystone XL wouldn’t be operating yet anyway. It wasn’t scheduled to open until 2023.
  • Pipelines don’t produce oil, they just move it. The Canadian oil Keystone XL would move is getting to market by other means.
  • Psaki claimed (and I have no way of checking) that the oil companies have 9,000 unused drilling permits. It’s not that they have nowhere to drill.
  • US production went down when the price of oil went down, but it is ramping back up. Next year the US should produce more oil than ever before.

Some of the points here are related to the next blame-object, environmentalists.

Are environmentalists to blame? As Fox News reporter Peter Doocy put it (in a question to Psaki): “How high would [gas prices] have to get before President Biden would say ‘I’m going to set aside my ambitious climate goals and just increase domestic oil production, get the producers to drill more here, and we can address the fossil fuel future later’?”

The unstated assumption behind that question is that climate change isn’t really that big a deal. Global warming is the liberal version of made-up conservative issues like critical race theory and cancel culture. So in the face of a real threat like Russia, and a real consequence like $4 gas, why can’t liberals just get off it?

But the vast consensus of scientists who study this issue is that climate change is a big deal, and will have catastrophic consequences (some of which are already apparent) if humanity continues to burn fossil fuels at an ever-increasing rate. There will always be competing problems that present more obvious short-term dangers. If we let those problems delay action on climate issues, we will never take action, with dire results.

Breathing is more of a short-term necessity than eating, but if we are to survive, we must envision a future where we can do both. In the same way, we have to find a path into the future where we deal with both aggressive autocrats and climate change.

Right now, Germany’s decision to close its nuclear plants makes it more dependent on Russian natural gas. (The proper role of nuclear power in limiting carbon emissions is a debatable issue that I haven’t studied.) That choice has certainly made the current situation more difficult.

But in a longer view, the faster we get to a sustainable-energy future, the less dependent we will be on fossil-fuel exporting countries, many of whose governments are repugnant. The price of wind energy has not increased at all in the last few months, and Vladimir Putin cannot affect it.

https://jensorensen.com/2022/03/16/gas-prices-giant-truck-suv-ev-cartoon/

In conclusion, higher gas prices have two main causes: The general inflation that comes from choosing to stimulate job creation as we come out of the Covid economic downturn, and the reduced supply of oil as Russian oil is pushed off the market. Those are both policy decisions that were made for good reasons.

Other Biden decisions, like canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, have had little to no effect. Anything the US government could do now to stimulate oil production wouldn’t produce results for many months or even years. Meanwhile, market forces are raising US oil production without any new government encouragement.

Oil companies are gaining windfall profits as the price of oil rises, but I don’t see anything sinister going on there. They could altruistically decide to charge less, but none of the rest of us do that. If those profits are a problem, they could be taxed.

And in the long run, the pain caused by the current high gas prices is one more reminder that we need to become less dependent on fossil fuels. Trying to get out of the present crisis by finding more oil somewhere is just trading one problem for another.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (8)

How did Christianity become so toxic?

March 14, 2022 – 10:42 am

Six ways conservative theology undercuts the teachings of Jesus.

If you devote much of your time to trying to make the world a better place, you’ve probably noticed a paradox.

On the one hand, some of your most dedicated co-workers are church people. You may not have realized it right away, because they’re not the kind of Christians who say “Praise the Lord” whenever something good happens. Rather than preach at you or try to lead the group in prayer, they just show up and share the work: ladle the soup, stuff the envelopes, hammer the nails, make the phone calls. Only after you spend some down time talking do you start to understand what motivates them: They think some guy named Jesus had some pretty good ideas about healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and welcoming the stranger.

But at the same time, when you look at the bigger picture, it’s hard to escape the idea that Christianity is your enemy. The loudest, best-funded, and best-organized groups working to make the world harsher, crueler, and less forgiving are the ones waving the cross. There’s nothing subtle about it. All their rhetoric is about what God wants, what God hates, and the “Christian values” that the law should impose on Christians and non-Christians alike.

And strangest of all, those “Christian values” seldom have anything to do with healing the sick, feeding the hungry, or welcoming the stranger. These followers of the Prince of Peace aspire to be “spiritual warriors“. They revere a man whose self-sacrifice brought forgiveness to the world, but their focus is on punishment.

The name of Jesus shows up in every paragraph of their rhetoric; his teachings, not so much.

The value of cruelty. Pretty much any time you want, you can pull examples out of the headlines. Recently, the people Christians want to punish have been kids who express the wrong gender identity or sexual orientation, as well as the adults who support them.

Until Friday, when a state judge put a stop to the practice for violating the state constitution, Texas was investigating nine families for “child abuse” because they’d been seeking medically approved treatment for their child’s gender dysphoria. One child’s mother commented:

I know what the law says. And yet it is terrifying to have a [Child Protective Services] worker come into your home and threaten to take your children away for doing nothing more than loving them unconditionally.

https://www.reformaustin.org/political-cartoons/refugees/

Florida’s new Don’t Say Gay law will stop kids who are uncertain about their sexual orientation from confiding in teachers or school counselors: By law, school employees have to break their students’ trust and out them to their parents; otherwise, the school district could be sued. And if you’re a teacher or principal who sees elementary-school kids being bullied because of their gender expression, you can’t start a conversation about that without risking a lawsuit, because such topics are not “age appropriate”.

As soon as you picture either law in practice, the cruelty is obvious, and it’s hard to see who benefits. But if you ask the people behind these efforts what motivates them, one answer almost always comes up: their Christian values. The Tennessee version of Don’t Say Gay includes this in its list of justifications:

WHEREAS, the promotion of LGBT issues and lifestyles in public schools offends a significant portion of students, parents, and Tennessee residents with Christian values” …

Where on Earth did these “Christian values” come from? Not Jesus.

Did Jesus have “Christian values”? If you’ve never read the gospels, but you’ve listened to the people who invoke his name, you might think Jesus talked about sex and gender constantly. But in fact you’d be wrong. Homosexuality never comes up in his sermons and parables, and Jesus never rebukes his followers for getting their gender roles confused.

Sex is on the mind of the Pharisee who faults Jesus for letting a prostitute touch him, and on the minds of the men he stops from stoning an adulteress, but little in the text indicates that Jesus himself made a big deal out of people’s genitals or what they did with them. (Examine, say, the parable of the sheep and the goats. None of the failings that keep people out of Heaven are sexual.)

If you believe that Jesus defines Christianity, then persecuting gay and trans people isn’t a Christian value at all.

Other Christian values. Those are recent headlines, but these last few weeks have been nothing special. If I’d written this article in a different month, I might have talked about the Christians who were doing their damnedest to help a deadly virus spread freely and kill as many people as possible.

“Religious liberty” now includes churches’ right to host superspreader events, which many of them have been eager to do. Rather than thank God for the scientists who found and tested a vaccine so quickly, many Christians spread lies and conspiracy theories about the vaccines (“For those of you who say you are Christians, what will your life review look like at the end of your life? Will the Lord say to you: ‘You coerced people into being injected with this gene-modification technology that irreversibly disrupts your chromosomes?’”). Wearing a mask in church became evidence that you didn’t trust God’s protection. (But if you really trusted God, wouldn’t you jump off a tall building?)

In other weeks, the headlines have been about Christian attempts to shut down discussion of systemic racism, or to stop children from learning America’s racist history.

Making women bear their rapist’s child is a Christian value. (“As plain as day, God spoke to me. … And I said yes Lord, I will. It’s coming back. It’s coming back. We are going to file that bill without any exceptions.”) But miscarriage-inducing herbs have been part of women’s folklore since the beginning of time. Isn’t it strange that Jesus never mentioned them?

Keeping refugees and asylum-seekers out of the country is a Christian value. Some prominent pastors defended breaking up immigrant families, while others invented elaborate sophistries to explain why the Bible’s many references to immigrants don’t mean what they say.

The Bible warns us not to bear false witness. But Christian churches have become the prime breeding ground for the most vicious and baseless conspiracy theories.

Jesus told a young man to “sell your possessions and give to the poor“. But now getting rich is a Christian value, and successful Christian preachers live in palaces and travel in personal jets.

Joel Osteen’s house

“Put away your sword,” Jesus said in Gethsemane. But now gun-toting vigilantes are Christian heroes, and the faithful are carrying concealed weapons in church. (What was that about trusting God’s protection?)

You know who’s also a Christian hero these days? Vladimir Putin. A Republican candidate for the Senate praised Russia as a “Christian nationalist nation” and told CPAC

I identify more with Putin’s Christian values than I do with Joe Biden.

As far back as 2014, Franklin Graham was lauding Putin for the even harsher Russian version of Don’t Say Gay:

Isn’t it sad, though, that America’s own morality has fallen so far that on this issue — protecting children from any homosexual agenda or propaganda — Russia’s standard is higher than our own?

And of course I have to mention the righteous politician who in 2020 garnered 80% support from White Evangelicals: a compulsive liar and conman, who has cheated on all three of his wives and traded the first two in for younger models, who can’t name a single Bible verse and admits that he has never sought God’s forgiveness. What a guy!

How did this happen? You might imagine that the teachings of Jesus would be a pole star for Christians, and that any time they started to drift away, the Sermon on the Mount would guide them back.

Clearly that’s not happening. But why not?

The reason is simple: Jesus told stories and gave advice, but he never laid out a systematic theology or worldview. He used imagery that was designed to upend the way his disciples were thinking, but he never told them step-by-step how they should think.

So in Jesus’ stories, mustard seeds — which were the scourge of Mediterranean gardeners because once mustard got into your garden you never got rid of it — were good things. An employer paid everyone the same, no matter how many hours they worked. A priest and a Levite could be bad neighbors compared to some nameless Samaritan. It was all pretty confusing.

Jesus hinted that you’re not really supposed to understand right away. The Kingdom of God, he said, is like yeast; it works on you invisibly. His images and stories are supposed to sit in the back of your mind and ferment, not proceed logically from axioms to theorems.

And while that’s a fine guru-to-disciple teaching technique, it leaves an opening for people who do lay out systematic theologies and worldviews, and do tell people what to think. Over the centuries that’s what’s happened. A conservative worldview has built up around Jesus’ teachings and almost completely sealed them off.

Here’s a simple example: According to John, Jesus once made this enigmatic statement: “The Father and I are one.” But he never explained exactly how that worked. The result has been centuries and centuries of theological battles about the precise nature of the Trinity, arguments that have occasionally erupted into gruesome executions or even warfare.

In short: People got lost in the mystery of that one line, and wound up on the other side of the world from loving their neighbors.

How conservative theology leads people astray. Today, when you come to an Evangelical church, the main thing you are met with is a worldview that contains simple answers about what’s going on in the world and how you should respond to it. Sometimes those answers are proof-texted back to something Jesus said (though more often they point back to Paul or Leviticus or some verse in Revelation that could mean just about anything). But invariably the logic only works one way: After the idea is presented to you, you can squint at one of Jesus’ more puzzling statements and say “Oh, that’s what he meant.” But you can’t walk that path in the opposite direction; what Jesus said would never lead you to the idea if some community-endorsed authority hadn’t already put it in your head.

I’m not claiming this is a complete list, but here are six ways that a conservative theology and worldview tilts Evangelical thinking in directions that eventually put a wall around Jesus and his teachings.

  1. Focusing on the Devil opens a person to conspiracy theories.
  2. Believing that we’re in the End Times justifies suspending normal reasoning.
  3. Traditional religion values tradition more than religion.
  4. A focus on individual souls and individual salvation makes systemic or social reasoning heretical.
  5. Fundamentalism promotes bad-faith reasoning.
  6. Christian imagery and rhetoric tilts towards autocracy.

1. The Devil is the prime conspirator. The conventional wisdom isn’t always right, and occasionally powerful people do conspire for nefarious purposes. But the problem with conspiracy-theory thinking is that it’s too easy: You can always come up with some way to fit current events into whatever story you want to believe. No matter what actually happens, you can make it prove that whoever you like is the hero and whoever you hate is the villain.

So if you want to live in the real world rather than some dramatic fantasy of your own choosing, you need some standards that filter out the crazy conspiracies. The most important standard is to realize that conspiring is hard. People all have their own motives and purposes, so keeping a large number of them on the same page is difficult, especially if you have to do it secretly.

So the first questions a rational person asks about a conspiracy theory are: How many people would have to commit to this, and why would they? What keeps them all pulling in the same direction? Why don’t they rat each other out?

Those questions sink most conspiracy theories. Take the central Q-Anon theory for example: that the world is run by a ring of child-sex traffickers, and has been for a long time. Now picture yourself as a rising star in the world of money and politics. At what point would the conspirators reach out to you? And what if child sex wasn’t your particular kink? It just seems really hard to make this work.

But now imagine you believe in the Devil. (Satan does show up in Jesus’ stories, but those references are easy to misread. Our current picture of the Devil stitches together diverse Biblical characters with different names, and didn’t fully congeal until a century or so after Jesus. Neil Forsyth described the process in The Old Enemy.) The Devil doesn’t need a motive to launch some evil plot, because for the Devil, evil is its own reward. Minions of the Devil, likewise, do things just for the sake of being evil.

If you can imagine a core of people like that, who don’t need the conspiracy to bring them wealth or power or status or any other visible benefit beyond the simple opportunity to do evil, then just about any conspiracy becomes feasible. The door to believing whatever you want is wide open.

2. Strange things happen during the End Times. In the summer of 2013, 77% of Evangelicals told the Barna Group that they agreed with this statement: “The world is currently living in the ‘end times’ as described by prophecies in the Bible.” Evangelicals not only believe this, they seem to enjoy thinking about it: The Left Behind series of novels (based on a literalistic interpretation of the Book of Revelation) has sold more than 80 million books and inspired six movies.

Paradoxically, a belief that the world is ending soon has always been prominent in Christian circles. As far back as the first or second century AD, St. John could close his Book of Revelation with

He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

That’s Jesus’ second coming he’s talking about, the one Christians are still waiting for. Nearly two thousand years later, John’s “soon” has still not turned into “now”.

But in spite of this extended delay, the persistence of the end-times belief is not hard to understand. Basically, it’s a form of self-aggrandizement, because it makes our lifetimes special. Nobody, apparently, wants to believe that they live in a humdrum era.

Now think about the everyday significance of that belief: More than three-quarters of conservative Christians approach the evening news the way the rest of us approach the final chapters of a novel. They expect diverse plot threads to start coming together. Connections that would ordinarily be wild coincidences are almost required. (Of course the serving girl with amnesia is the Duke’s long-lost niece! I should have seen that a mile away.)

What’s more, as the final battle of Good versus Evil approaches, the participants should become easier to identify. So of course there’s an international conspiracy of blood-drinking child molesters. How could there not be?

3. Traditional religion is more traditional than religious. Religious teachings are one of the prime ways that a community maintains its institutions and passes down its folk wisdom. The practices in one part of the world may be completely different than those somewhere else, but you can be pretty sure that in both places, some local deity wants things to work that way.

New empires often bring new religions (which usually complete the circle by justifying the new imperial order). But community practices change much more slowly than military or political power structures. So old practices get woven into the new mythology and the new belief system, as if they had been part of the new religion all along. The annual fertility rite of a pagan deity continues, but instead is blessed by a Catholic saint. And no matter how many Islamic scholars say that the Quran does not endorse honor killings, many common people in Muslim countries keep on believing that it does.

In 21st century America, “traditional values” and “Christian values” are often used interchangeably, but they ought to be very different concepts. Countless varieties of bigotry are traditional in America: racism, sexism, antisemitism, anti-gay prejudice, and many others. Like any dominant religion, Christianity has often been co-opted to justify abusing “outsiders” (however that term has been defined at different times in different places). But custom shouldn’t turn prejudices into Christian values.

4. Bias towards individuality. One of Jesus’ most mysterious phrases is “the Kingdom of God”. He said it a lot, and anyone who claims to know exactly what he meant by it is kidding somebody, most likely himself. Sometimes it sounds like a vision of an ideal future. Other times it seems more like a metaphor for the state of consciousness Jesus had achieved and was trying to teach. Once in a while it resembled an afterlife.

Nobody really knows. It’s even possible that Jesus meant different things at different times, or that the gospels occasionally misquote him.

But in the conservative theology I was taught growing up, the Kingdom of Heaven was a literal place that I could hope to reach after death. I’d get there as an individual, because we all have individual souls, which will be judged at the end of time. There’s no such thing as a collective soul (except in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walter Wink’s creative reimagining of angels).

My teachers never admitted that all this stuff about souls is speculative. It’s not really spelled out anywhere in scripture. (If the sheep and goats story is supposed to be a description of literal events, it’s just about the only parable that is.) Heaven is speculative also, and (like the Devil) has meant different things in different eras.

Once you’ve made that speculative leap, though, any kind of social thinking is going to give you problems. If good and evil are only accounted for in judgments about individuals, then good and evil must only exist in individuals.

Systemic racism, then, can only be a heresy. If racism is evil, then that evil has to be accountable to individuals, not to systems. If stealing is a sin, then the man who steals a loaf of bread is guilty, and not the society that left him no other way to feed his family. If enslaving people is evil, then George Washington, Robert E. Lee, and many other people we might want to admire were evil. Slavery can’t be blamed on society, because society will never stand before St. Peter and be sent to Heaven or Hell. So maybe slavery wasn’t really so bad.

Theologians created these problems by going too far out on a limb. They’ve constructed a semi-logical structure around some hints in scripture, and that structure leads them into absurdities and injustices.

5. From apologetics to bad-faith denial. Apologetics is the art of using rational argument to support positions that originate in faith. It often looks like philosophy, but it isn’t, because practitioners aren’t reasoning in order to find truth. Instead, they believe they’ve already found truth through their faith, and are now just trying to persuade others. So apologists start with their conclusions already established, and try to tie them to convincing first principles via logic.

Apologetics can be an honorable practice if the apologists are open about what they’re doing. (And philosophy can even benefit if the arguments are sharp enough. Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae proudly claims to be apologetic, but philosophers still read it.) The practice goes back at least as far as the Middle Ages, and is still taught in seminaries.

But for most of its history, apologetics was an esoteric field of study. Parishioners in the pews might believe what they were taught or doubt it, but they didn’t really care whether St. Anselm’s proof of the existence of God was sound.

That all changed in the 19th century, when geologists discovered a world far older than Genesis described, and biologists developed a theory of human origins very different from God shaping Adam out of dust. Science was now invading turf that had previously belonged to religion, and many religious people believed they had to fight back.

That was the origin of fundamentalism.

But a problem soon became apparent: If you restrict yourself facts and logic, Genesis is just wrong. If you’re going to argue that it’s right (without invoking faith), you have to cheat. You have to make bad-faith scientific arguments and hope you can sell them. So fundamentalists did that. They’re still doing it.

The result was that fundamentalist churches encouraged their members to reason badly, and to accept any kind of nonsense if it supported a literal interpretation of the Bible. In essence, they built a back door into their members’ reasoning processes. But in the long run, that kind of corner-cutting always has unforeseen consequences. In the subsequent decades, self-induced gullibility has made fundamentalists prey to intellectual hackers and conmen of all sorts.

Today, motivated reasoning is the rule in Evangelical churches, and has spread to topics that have little to do with the Bible. So Evangelical churches have become centers of climate change denial and Covid denial, as well as hotbeds of Q-Anon conspiracy thinking. Rose-colored views of American history — where the Founders are latter-day prophets, slavery wasn’t really so bad, and the Native American genocide shouldn’t be examined too closely — are practically dogma among White Evangelicals.

Evolution denial established the notion that if enough people don’t want to believe some true thing, it’s OK for them to support each other in denying it. That genie is out of its bottle now, and it will work ever-greater mischief in conservative churches until they recognize the problem they have made for themselves.

The Divine Monarchy. When monotheism replaced polytheism, the Universe began to be viewed as a vast autocratic system. You can see the transition happening already in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, written in the fifth century BC. There are still many gods at this point, but the sky god is sovereign to the point of tyranny. In the opening scene, the personification of Power explains to Hephaistos why he must complete the disagreeable job of chaining Prometheus to the mountain: “Zeus alone is free.”

Jesus often talked about the Kingdom of Heaven, but St. Paul supported worldly kings in Romans 13:

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.

If we know that Heaven is a kingdom, then maybe Earth should be a kingdom too. Maybe we should find the godliest man we can (of course it has to be a man), and do whatever he says. (And by the way, have I told you about the lying, womanizing, unrepentant, Bible-illiterate conman all the other Christians are voting for? Maybe he’s the guy.)

Today, Christians talk about “Christ the King” and say “Jesus is Lord!” with the enthusiasm of football fans saying “We’re #1!” But again, Jesus never laid out his political theory. If you think you know what kind of theocracy Jesus wants you to establish, or even who Jesus thinks you should vote for, you’re standing at the end of a long chain of speculation.

I can’t tell you what Jesus would think, but I can tell you what I think: If that long chain of speculation has you supporting cruelty, and if it gets in the way of healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and welcoming the stranger, then you probably did it wrong.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (59)

Notes on the War in Ukraine

March 7, 2022 – 9:07 am

[This is really a collection of short notes rather than a coherent article, but there are so many of them I decided to split them off into their own post.]

https://buffalonews.com/opinion/adam-zyglis-2022/collection_10d8d684-6f18-11ec-8781-d72e4b72c14d.html#2

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is in its second week now. Plan A was blitzkrieg: Occupation of the major cities, capture of Zelensky and the rest of the government, and NATO unable to get its act together on sanctions in time to matter. That plan failed due to fierce resistance from Ukrainians, poor planning and execution by the Russian army, and effective coordination between President Biden and the other NATO heads of state.

Plan B is the Grozny/Aleppo approach : bludgeon Ukraine into submission by knocking out utilities and shelling civilian areas. In the words of Tacitus: “They make a desert and call it peace.” That strategy will take longer, the Ukrainians might have too much spirit for it, and meanwhile the Russian economy is collapsing and oligarchs fear for their yachts.

Targeting of civilians appears to be deliberate. Negotiated evacuation corridors for refugees have failed.

In the country’s southeast, hopes that a second attempt to open up safe evacuation routes for civilians in Mariupol and Volnovakha might succeed — after a first effort failed on Saturday — were dashed within hours.

The governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said on Facebook on Sunday that the planned “evacuation convoy with local residents was never able to leave Mariupol today: the Russians began to regroup their forces and heavy shelling of the city. It is extremely dangerous to evacuate people in such conditions.”

This morning’s NYT says that US cargo planes full of weapons are still landing in Ukraine. [I got this wrong, as a commenter points out below. It’s a Ukrainian plane.]

So far, Russian forces have been so preoccupied in other parts of the country that they have not targeted the arms supply lines, but few think that can last.

Cargo planes are big slow targets. I’m not sure how the American public will react when we lose one.

Maybe the best single piece of advice for observing this war comes from Isaac Saul on the Tangle blog: “Don’t lose the plot.” There are a million ways to sidetrack discussions of Ukraine, and a million different rabbit-holes you can go down. And free people should be able to pursue any of those rabbits if they want to. But don’t lose the plot.

An authoritarian leader has invaded a country that posed no threat to him because he believes that country, and its 40 million innocent citizens, belong to him. He told his soldiers they’d be greeted as liberators, and instead they are rightly being greeted with guns and Javelin anti-tank missiles. NATO did not make Putin launch this war. Biden did not. Trump did not. Ukraine did not.

Putin did.

Nobody is being de-nazified and nobody is being liberated. Civilians are being slaughtered. Children are being slaughtered. Watch the extremely graphic videos of what’s happening if that is what it takes to understand it.

Young Russian soldiers are fighting a war they didn’t even realize they were being sent to. Fighters on both sides are dying, at first by the hundreds and now by the thousands. 18-year-old Ukrainian kids wearing kneepads are now headed to the front lines.

https://jensorensen.com/2022/03/02/bad-ukraine-takes-russia-putin/

Some guy on the internet (Igor Sushko, apparently a Ukrainian race-car driver) claims to be posting a translation of an analysis he got from an analyst in the FSB (i.e., Russian intelligence). Authentic? I have no idea. But it is a fascinating view of the current situation.

The analyst claims that nobody at the FSB knew a Ukrainian invasion was in the works, so they thought the contingency planning was “only intended as a checkbox”. They skewed their analyses to come out well for Russia, because that’s what higher-ups wanted to hear. But now the invasion is really happening and sanctions have been imposed, so the nation is depending on these fantasy scenarios.

We have no analyses, we can’t make any forecasts in this chaos, no one will be able to say anything with any certainty

He paints a gloomy (for Russia) picture both of dealing with Western sanctions and of the logistics of maintaining a force big enough to occupy Ukraine.

And here’s a similar explanation for why the Russian army isn’t performing well.

The Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to modernize its military. Much of that budget was stolen and spent on mega-yachts in Cyprus. But as a military advisor you cannot report that to the President. So they reported lies to him instead. Potemkin military

President Zelensky is asking for NATO to declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine. I understand why he wants that, but I also understand why NATO doesn’t want to do it.

A no-fly zone would mean that NATO planes patrol Ukrainian airspace and shoot down Russian planes that dare to go there. Russia has the world’s second-largest air force and might not back down easily, so maybe that works and maybe it doesn’t. But suppose it does. Russia’s next move is to shoot surface-to-air missiles at the NATO planes. Some of our planes will be shot down, and some NATO pilots will become prisoners of war.

Then NATO has to decide whether or not to defend its planes by targeting SAM launch sites. Now we’re directly killing Russian soldiers on the ground.

The question no one can answer is where this escalation pattern would stop. LBJ couldn’t answer it when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. Eisenhower couldn’t answer it when the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956. And Biden can’t answer it now.

Two NATO presidents most likely to be targeted by Putin the future — Gitanas Nauseda of Lithuania and Alar Karis of Estonia — look at the no-fly-zone proposal differently. Nauseda is for it, but he hopes Putin won’t call NATO’s bluff and force NATO to shoot down Russian planes. “If we are decisive, maybe this is the best way to achieve peace.”

Karis is more skeptical: “You probably understand what that means: It means the Western world is going into a war with Russia, and that means NATO is not a defensive organization anymore. This is against our understanding of what NATO is.”

Both of them would welcome US troops being permanently based in their countries, which was not being considered before the Ukraine invasion.

Two articles about the effectiveness of Putin’s propaganda within Russia, especially among older Russians who get their news from official sources.

The NYT talked to several Ukrainians who have relatives back in Russia about how their relatives simply don’t believe them when they talk about the war. Misha Katsurin wondered why his father in Russia didn’t call to find out how he was doing in a war zone, so he called instead.

“He started to tell me how the things in my country are going,” said Mr. Katsurin, who converted his restaurants into volunteer centers and is temporarily staying near the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil. “He started to yell at me and told me, ‘Look, everything is going like this. They are Nazis.’”

The BBC has a similar article.

“My parents understand that some military action is happening here. But they say: ‘Russians came to liberate you. They won’t ruin anything, they won’t touch you. They’re only targeting military bases’.”

Too good a story to check:

In Kyiv a woman knocked down a Russian drone from a balcony with a jar of cucumbers.

https://twitter.com/TsybulskaLiubov/status/1500166727065350155

And this is what it looks like when you toss a Molotov cocktail at Russian armor as you drive past.

One constant theme in the #Ukraine Twitter feed is a series of tweets and memes comparing Ukraine to Palestine, and calling out Western hypocrisy.

There is some racism and anti-Muslim prejudice involved in the different responses to Ukrainians and Palestinians, as I discussed last week. But the analogy only works up to a point: I see Ukraine/Russia as a much less morally ambiguous conflict than Palestine/Israel. I could discuss this at length, but the biggest difference is this: The Ukrainians are shooting at invading soldiers, not blowing up coffee shops in Moscow. If this conflict drags on for 75 years, Ukrainians may by then be blowing up coffee shops, but the morality of their cause will have become less clear-cut.

Here’s a painless way to get historical background on Ukraine, which is especially important in the face of Putin’s attempt to paint Ukraine as just another part of Russia.

Last week a commenter pointed out that I had ignored the story of racism against Afro-Ukrainians and foreigners of color as they try to escape the war. I found an informative podcast on the topic, which begins with how many Afro-Ukrainians come to be there: When the USSR was trying to promote Communism in Africa, Soviet universities accepted a large number of African students, some of whom stayed. Their children have never known any other home.

The Ukrainian comedy Servant of the People that made made Volodymyr Zelensky famous is available (with English subtitles) on YouTube.

Zelensky and Trump have switched places: Zelensky is a player on the world stage, while Trump has become a comedian.

Former president Donald Trump mused Saturday to the GOP’s top donors that the United States should label its F-22 planes with the Chinese flag and “bomb the s–t out of Russia. And then we say, China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it, and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch.”

That proposal “was met with laughter from the crowd of donors, according to a recording of the speech obtained by The Washington Post.”

Wednesday, Gov. DeSantis segued from talking about Ukraine to gratuitously insulting France. This is why the current generation of Republicans can’t lead alliances. Trump nearly killed NATO, and DeSantis would be no improvement.

The NYT provides advice in case you’re worried about a Russian cyberattack on the US.

https://claytoonz.com/2022/03/05/borschting-for-freedom/

And where in American society do you think pro-Putin disinformation might take root? In anti-vax groups. And in the “freedom convoy“:

The conspiracy theory, which is baseless and has roots in QAnon mythology, alleges that Trump and Putin are secretly working together to stop bioweapons from being made by Dr. Anthony Fauci in Ukraine and that shelling in Ukraine has targeted the secret laboratories.

I wonder how long it will be before fringe MAGA politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz start dog-whistling to this segment of their base, and how long before Ron DeSantis et al start following them.

For now, though, Republicans are trying to cover up their long-standing love affair with Putin. The Daily Show would like to recommend medication to help them forget: Tyranol.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (10)

What Can We Know About Ukraine?

February 28, 2022 – 11:04 am
https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-bramhall-editorial-cartoons-2021-jan-20220110-wtmocdmrkjearn62tqfkbixqdi-photogallery.html

For weeks I under-covered the Ukraine crisis on this blog, largely because everything I read was speculative, and I didn’t know who to believe. US intelligence said Russia was going to invade. Russia said it wasn’t. Ukraine said maybe, but not just yet. Putin’s government had a long history of lying, but US intelligence’s record wasn’t spotless either. I didn’t feel like I knew anything, so I didn’t write anything. (I recommend this policy to others.)

When last week’s blog posted, things were starting to happen in the real world rather than in the imaginations of interested parties: Russia’s forces were staying in Belarus past the previously announced end of the two countries’ military exercises. The pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine were making weird announcements — ethnic Russians should evacuate to Russia to avoid “genocide” — whose purpose seemed to be to give Putin an excuse to invade and save them.

So it looked like something was going to happen, but it was still hard to say what. Maybe Putin was just trying to start a panic in Ukraine, and wouldn’t actually attack. Maybe he’d invade the Donbas provinces he said he wanted to “liberate”, but stop there. The Biden administration said an attack on the whole country was coming.

Well, now we know. Biden was playing it straight with us all along, and US intelligence must have some really good sources inside Russia. The invasion began on Thursday, as Russian troops advanced not just from the east, but from the north (Belarus) and south (Crimea). The whole-country invasion was on. Now Putin was pledging not just to liberate Donbas, but to “de-nazify” the entire country. (Why a Nazi government would be led by a Jewish president like Zelensky has never been adequately explained.)

Since Thursday, the fog of speculation has been replaced by the fog of war. The problem isn’t that we’re all trying to imagine what might happen once things get started, but that too much is happening and too many people are reporting it through their own (possibly distorted) lenses.

Putin’s mistake. Even so, one general conclusion from the last few days seems obvious: Putin guessed wrong.

If the Ukrainian government were what he had been claiming — a corrupt puppet regime imposed on the country by the West — it should have folded under pressure the way the American-established Afghan government did in August. Nobody takes David’s side against Goliath unless they really believe in David’s cause. But the Ukrainian army has been putting up much stiffer resistance than anyone expected, and ordinary Ukrainians (as well as celebrities who could easily opt out) are taking up arms to support the government. (Instead, it may be the Russian army that faces problems with desertion and poor morale, though it’s hard to get solid information about that issue.)

Putin also guessed wrong about NATO. During the Trump administration, NATO had seemed to be on the road to collapse. Trump called it “obsolete” and claimed it was a bad deal for America. He openly questioned whether the US should fulfill its treaty obligations to defend tiny NATO countries like Montenegro or the Baltic republics, if Russia should attack them. He frequently insulted NATO leaders while praising Vladimir Putin, even siding with Putin against US intelligence. (He’s still doing it.)

But rather than shattering under pressure, NATO has pulled together during the Ukraine crisis. Getting all the allies in line has often slowed down the actions Biden wanted to take in response to the Ukraine invasion, but not for long. Agreeing to remove major Russian banks from the SWIFT system, for example, took until Saturday. But it happened. Just about all of Europe has closed its airspace to Russian flights. Arms are flowing into Ukraine from all over Europe, including non-NATO Sweden. The EU is sending fighter planes.

In addition, Putin’s invasion has changed the politics of Europe, and not in his favor. Germany has decided to substantially increase defense spending (a result all of Trump’s nagging couldn’t accomplish). Finland is suddenly talking about NATO membership, and Sweden bristled at Russia’s warning of “serious military-political consequences” if it should decide to join. Even Switzerland is cooperating with some EU sanctions against Russian banks.

The result is that while Russian forces continue to advance on major Ukrainian cities, the operation is moving much more slowly than expected, and the Russians are taking much larger losses. His troops may yet occupy Kyiv and install a favorable government, but if Putin had been hoping for a quick Crimea-style victory that would present the world with a fait accompli and make sanctions (or guerilla resistance) seem pointless, he hasn’t gotten it.

Here’s this morning’s assessment from the NYT:

There was growing evidence that despite its superiority over Ukrainian forces, the Russian military was having difficulties getting a foothold in many regions around the country.

In Kyiv, Ukrainian soldiers have managed to keep most Russian troops out of the city center. In the northeastern city of Kharkiv, where Russian forces have been pounding outlying villages and neighborhoods with artillery, Russian troops briefly pushed into the city center on Sunday, but were driven back by Ukraine’s military, according to Ukrainian officials.

After a short respite, shelling again commenced on Saturday against Ukraine’s busiest port city, Odessa, but there was no sign the city was in danger of falling into Russian hands. And in Mariupol, another port city, the Russian navy’s first attempt to mount an amphibious assault was thwarted, though another effort was in the works, Ukrainian officials said.

Instead, talks between the Russian and Ukrainian governments have started. Probably nothing will come of them, because it’s hard to picture what concessions either side could offer at this point. But we’ll see. Meanwhile, the shooting continues.

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1010628/a-us-history-lesson

Ukrainian morale. I spent much of the weekend glued to Twitter’s #Ukraine, where Ukrainians posted videos shot out their windows, and pictures of themselves and their neighbors, in addition to spreading stories and memes that are floating around in Ukraine. (In theory, anybody can post, including pro-Russian sources. But the tweets of Ukrainians and Ukrainian sympathizers have dominated.)

I had to keep resetting my cynicism filter. These are raw, unverified accounts, and many are posted by people who are trying to keep each other’s spirits up in the face of harrowing threats. Something you see posted ten times might be ten echoes of a single falsehood. (For half an hour, I was sure that hackers from Anonymous had taken over Russian state TV.) Undoubtedly mythmaking is happening, and maybe some of it is well-constructed propaganda. And yet it’s hard not to be moved by stories like

My thoughts keep coming back to this couple, who moved up their wedding date so they could be married before they went to war. “After their wedding, Arieva and Fursin, 24, a software engineer, prepared to go to the local Territorial Defense Center to join efforts to help defend the country.” I look at the picture below and wonder if they’re still alive. I hope so.

Twitter also provides many images of Ukraine’s incredibly photogenic women soldiers, from the first lady on down. And seeing Ukrainian MP Kira Rudik hold a Kalashnikov, as she prepares to defend her home, illuminates Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s gun fantasy. It’s like glimpsing the movie star who wears the dress your neighbor thinks she looks so good in.

And finally, there’s President Zelensky (who has to keep posting videos to refute Russian propaganda that he has left the country). As one tweet put it: “If Zelensky dies he’s a martyr. If he lives he’s a hero.”

Putin has worked so hard on his manly image; it must really gall him to see Zelensky upstage him like this.

International support. I wish I could remember where I saw this observation, but someone described Putin’s Ukraine invasion as the worst propaganda disaster since the Kaiser invaded neutral Belgium.

NATO countries that border Ukraine are all preparing for refugees. Suddenly the issues about immigrants have vanished. (I’m sure that being mostly White and Christian makes a difference.) #Ukraine tells of Romanians waiting at the border to offer Ukrainian refugee families a place to stay.

Rallies in support of Ukraine happened all over the world this weekend, like this one in Berlin.

The whole world seems to be lit up in Ukrainian yellow-and-blue.

Morale in Russia. The Russian soldiers have no idea why they’re fighting. Particularly in the western part of the country, Ukrainians clearly don’t want to be “liberated”. And because Ukrainians look and sound so much like Russians (and typically speak pretty good Russian), it’s hard to dehumanize them as “gooks” or “ragheads”, as Americans did in Vietnam and Iraq. Putin’s soldiers are killing their cousins, and they know it.

It’s very dangerous to protest in Russia these days, but thousands of people have been. From the outside, it’s hard to know whether that’s a radical fringe or the tip of a iceberg. Russian celebrities overseas have not denounced Putin directly, but many have spoken out generally against war and left the rest to our imaginations.

What is clear is that there is no broad upswelling of support for the invasion. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 was met with widespread jubilation inside Russia. That’s not happening now.

The delay in finishing off Ukrainian resistance is giving sanctions a chance to work. Ordinary Russians will soon feel the bite. The value of the rouble is plunging and there are worries of runs on sanctioned Russian banks.

Like its soldiers, Russia’s citizens don’t understand why this war is necessary. Putin can control the state TV, but information blockades are difficult these days, particularly when so many Russians have relatives in Ukraine. His claims about “liberating” and “de-nazifying” Ukraine can’t be very convincing. And while the government can hide its casualties for a while, eventually soldiers either communicate with their families or they don’t.

More worrisome to Putin, though, has to be the effect of sanctions on his fellow oligarchs. They’re losing billions, and losing access to the billions more they have stashed in the West. To the extent that Putin’s regime resembles a Mafia, the history of Mafia gang wars may apply: Often they end when one family’s capos decide that continuing the war is bad for business. They hit their own boss and make peace.

As Josh Marshall has laid out, none of this would matter if the Russian forces were having a quick and easy victory. The deed would be done, and the rest of the world would just have to get used to it, even if they didn’t like it. Ukrainians would be intimidated rather than angered. NATO politicians might posture, but in the absence of any effective actions to be taken, they would soon run out of steam.

But Ukraine is holding out, and that opens up all kinds of alternative futures.

By weeklysift | Also posted in songs and poems | Tagged | Comments (16)

What if public schools were the target all along?

February 21, 2022 – 9:43 am
http://www.progressive-charlestown.com/2014/05/wal-mart-money-drives-charter-school.html

Maybe the point of stoking phony issues like “critical race theory” is to make the whole notion of a public education seem untenable.

Every now and then, conservative pundits give Democratic politicians “helpful” advice, a practice related to concern trolling. Democrats could have so much more success, they tell us, if only we’d stop acting like — you know — Democrats. Give up on unions. Stop annoying White people by talking about racism, or men by calling out sexism. Abortion rights, climate change, police reform, gender equality, universal health care … it’s all just so much baggage. If Democrats would dump it and stand for nothing-in-particular, then we could appeal to that broad segment of the electorate that also stands for nothing-in-particular.

Or so they tell us.

Such advice should not be confused with actual Democrats lobbying for their priorities. No single campaign can be about everything, so there are always going to be debates about whether to emphasize your issue or my issue. And there’s always going to be a messaging discussion between those who want to focus on the next step (universal background checks) and those who would rather talk about the ultimate goal (stopping gun violence). Or whether some widely misunderstood slogan (“defund the police”) needs to be better explained, or maybe replaced with something that doesn’t need so much explanation.

That’s all normal intramural jostling. The Helpful Conservative, on the other hand, is usually suggesting some issue where we should just surrender: Write off the gays or the trans folk or the rights of Muslims; they’re unpopular, so you’d be better off without them.

The Helpful Conservative may or may not have read Sun Tzu, but he’s practicing The Art of War‘s most potent advice: The supreme strategy is to win without fighting. If liberals can be tempted into abandoning some part of their agenda, that victory that costs conservatives nothing.

While you should never take the Helpful Conservative at face value, there is still one good reason to pay attention to him: Sometimes his advice can help you cut through the confusing rhetoric of the moment and understand what the other side really wants.

Imagine no public schools. Earlier this month, Discourse, a journal published by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University, produced a classic piece of oh-so-helpful advice: “Dear Democrats: Here’s How to Save the Republic” by Robert Tracinski.

He sounds like such a nice man.

I am not one of you, but I would like to vote for you.

Of course you would, Robert. I believe you. I also believe that hot young babes want to be my Facebook friends. I’m sure they look just like the pictures they post.

More to the point, I would like independent voters—not to mention whole sections of the restive base of the two parties—to have a reasonable alternative to turn to, a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.

We need you to save the republic,

That’s great, Robert. Every night I drift off to sleep fantasizing about how I’m going to save the Republic. It’s so validating to hear that you also fantasize about me saving the Republic.

and here are my ideas for how to do it.

So by now the sugar-coating has dissolved in our stomachs and we start to digest the actual medicine.

His first suggestion is to get more housing built by eliminating environmental regulations, and I’ll just let that one pass without comment. (If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you can probably guess what I think.) But what caught my eye is the second suggestion: “End the School Wars”.

The “progressives” have tried to turn the schools into centers of indoctrination, pushing a tendentious narrative about “systemic racism.” The right has reacted with their own counter-attempt to control the schools, restricting discussion of certain ideas, policing school libraries and offering bounties to informants.

But most voters don’t want to be drafted into the culture wars. They want to be left alone, and they really want their kids to be left alone. The party that can offer a truce in the school wars will earn a lot of votes.

I have put forward one suggestion: school choice.

That “one suggestion” link goes to another Tracinski/Mercatus article that spells out what “school choice” means.

Imagine that instead of just shunting everyone into the public schools, your state government offered you a voucher or tax credit to spend on your child’s education. Do you want your kids to be inculcated with traditional values? Send them to a private religious school of the denomination of your choice. Do you want them to be so woke they can’t get to sleep at night? Fine, you can do that, too, and there are plenty of private schools that will accommodate you. Or, like the majority of us, do you want a school that will just teach the three R’s and leave you and your kids to iron out your political loyalties on your own? I suspect there will be quite a large market for this.

In other words: Do away with the public schools.

Just do that simple thing, and — poof! — all that bickering about Critical Race Theory and school mask mandates and book-banning and don’t-say-gay vanishes! All the right-wing demagogues will just have to go home! Fox News won’t know what to do with itself!

But on the other hand, maybe right-wingers will accept our surrendered territory and move on to the next battle, as Sun Tzu might suggest. The book-banning conflict, for example, could move on from the school library to the public library. (And look! There’s a plan to privatize all of them too.)

Once you start dissolving the ties that define a community, slowing transforming it into an atomized Ayn Rand sovereign-citizen utopia/dystopia, where do you stop? Managing any public resource leads to disagreement, and disagreement can lead to conflict. If someone fans that conflict to create division and hatred, they can always make a plausible case for disbanding the public resource so that we can all go our separate ways in peace. [1]

But what if that was the point of stoking the conflict to begin with? What if Mercatus isn’t making a helpful suggestion, but in fact is delivering the oligarchs’ ransom demand: Give up your public schools, and we’ll let the rest of your town live in peace.

The Siege of the Public Schools. I’m far from the first person to notice that the current conservative assault is taking its toll on public schools and their teachers. A week ago, a long Washington Post article detailed how confusing teachers in several states find the new anti-CRT laws.

Since the laws’ descriptions of what can’t be taught were written in terms of misconceptions spread by right-wing propaganda rather than by referencing actual curricula, it’s hard for teachers to know what they mean, or to be sure that tomorrow’s lesson plan won’t land them in a disciplinary hearing, or in court. Some bills vaguely prohibit teaching “divisive concepts“, while others set standards that are openly subjective: Students “should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” [2]

Some new laws imitate the Texas abortion ban by authorizing parents to enforce curriculum bans through the courts.

“What we’ve seen recently is, you can legislate things, like the Parents’ Bill of Rights, and sometimes the school districts don’t always follow it,” [Florida Governor Ron] DeSantis said. “We are going to be including in this legislation, giving parents private right of action to be able to enforce the prohibition on CRT and they get to recover attorney’s fees when they prevail.”

In New Hampshire, Moms For Liberty is offering a $500 reward to the first parent who catches a teacher breaking the state’s anti-CRT law, which could result in that teacher losing his or her license. There’s no wanted-dead-or-alive poster, and least not yet, but I’m sure teachers are picturing them.

Think about what this court-regulated system means in practice: There is no way to pre-clear your lesson plan or reading list. Because it doesn’t matter what your principal or superintendent or school board thinks “divisive concepts” means; you have to guess how some yet-to-be-assigned judge will interpret it.

So to be safe, teachers should teach nothing at all about race, or the history of racism in America. [3]

Ditto for sex and gender. A school board member in Flagler County, Florida filed a criminal complaint with the sheriff about the queer memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue being in high school libraries. Somebody, she thinks, should be prosecuted for that.

Florida’s Don’t-Say-Gay law, which is backed by Gov. DeSantis and seems on its way to passage, not only bans discussions of sex and gender that are not “age appropriate” (another concept that the law doesn’t define), but also requires teachers and school counselors to rat out kids who have confided in them about gender and sexual-preference thoughts they haven’t discussed with their parents. Parents can sue if they think the law is being violated.

Kara Gross, the legislative director and senior policy counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, provides another example: Elementary school students are assigned to draw pictures of their families and present them to their class. If a child being raised by a same-sex couples draws a picture of their two dads, Gross says, their teacher may face a decision between allowing the child to participate—and opening themselves and their school up to lawsuits—or excluding them from the exercise.

Again, it’s safest just to avoid talking to students about their lives outside of school. Stick to drilling them about the multiplication tables and spelling, or making them memorize dates of historical events rather than considering how those events shape the world they see around them.

The end result is that if you want your children to engage with schoolwork, and to understand that education isn’t just a set of hurdles to jump, but actually means something about their lives, you’re going to want to pull them out of public school.

And maybe that’s the point.

Whose agenda? When you begin to suspect that the public schools themselves are the target, you need to take a step back and ask: Whose target?

Because it’s crazy to argue that every angry parent who denounces “critical race theory”, whatever he or she means by that, is part of the conspiracy. Most of them are probably exactly what they appear to be: relatively normal folks who have come to imagine that something nefarious is happening inside their children’s schools.

Even that McMinn County school board member, the one who argued to kick the Holocaust graphic novel Maus out of the curriculum with this bizarre conspiracy theory:

So, my problem is, it looks like the entire curriculum is developed to normalize sexuality, normalize nudity and normalize vulgar language. If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, this is how I would do it.

probably does not intend to destroy the public schools. Quite the opposite: He thinks he’s saving the public schools from a vast conspiracy to “indoctrinate” kids and “normalize” sexuality, nudity, and vulgarity.

But where do people get ideas like that? And how did so many parents all over the country come to all get upset about the same things at the same time, and to label their bête noire with an obscure law-school phrase that appears nowhere in the curricula they’re protesting? How did legislatures all over the country so quickly put forward virtually identical bills to fight this scourge that hardly anybody had heard of a year ago?

There’s definitely a spontaneous element to this movement, but the overall shape of it is not spontaneous at all. There’s money behind this, and organization. Who are the funding-and-organizing people? What do they want?

I think they’re telling us what they want. They’ve whipped up a mob with lies and deception, and now they’re sending some pleasant well-mannered folks to tell us what we can do to make that mob go away.

Until they want the next thing, and then the mob will be back. Because the oligarchs never run out of dark fantasies they can spread, or gullible people who will believe them.

[1] Ignoring, of course, the Hobbesian war of all-against-all that is bound to follow, once we stop viewing each other as members of the same community.

[2] I suspect that in practice such laws will only protect White students. What if some Hispanic students are made uncomfortable by lessons about the Alamo or the Mexican/American War? Will their concerns get equal attention?

[3] Try to come up with an acceptable way to talk about slave-owners in the pre-Civil-War slave states. If you say that many of them were decent people doing the best they could inside an unjust system, you’re teaching “systemic racism”, which is banned. And the alternative view is what? That each one of them, individually, was an evil bastard? Might some descendants of slave-owners “feel discomfort” when they hear that?

The only option left, then, if decent White people were individually responsible for slavery, is to teach that enslaving people isn’t necessarily bad.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (10)

Who Should You Back in the Midterm Elections?

February 14, 2022 – 10:11 am

Deciding what to do with your time and money is the rare instance where speculating about the political horse race makes sense.

One of things I criticize most about American media’s coverage of politics is the endless horse-race speculation: Who’s going to run? Who can win? What issues will the voters respond to, and what positions will they support? What do the polls say about elections that won’t be held until after a whole lot of things have changed?

Speculating about the future is engaging and easy. It fills airtime cheaply, and nobody ever suffers for being wrong.

Endless conversation about things that might never happen is an entertaining way to cover sports, where fans love to argue about who should be traded for who, or where some hot free agent will land. But sports are fundamentally about entertainment; politics shouldn’t be. For the most part, the time we spend speculating about the future draws our attention away from what is happening here and now, and what our leaders are doing about it.

There is one exception, though, and I’m about to invoke it. In every election cycle, people who want to affect the direction of the country have to decide who they’re going to support with their time and/or money. You can’t work for everybody and you can’t give to everybody, so you have to make choices.

One way to choose is to follow your heart; if some candidate inspires you, devote your resources to helping them. Another strategy is to take a pragmatic approach more like triage: There are inspiring candidates who are going to win with or without the help of people like you. (AOC has gotten over 75% of the vote in both of her races.) Other races are lost causes. (It would be great to beat Republican Speaker-in-waiting Kevin McCarthy, but he won by nearly 25 points in 2020, and every prognosticating outlet rates his seat as safe.) So you want to give a push to candidates who might or might not win, depending on whether people like you rally around them.

Most of us do something in between. We’d like to simultaneously feel good about our candidates and make a difference in the outcome. That means looking at races that could go either way and seeing how we feel about the candidates involved.

Figuring out which races those are requires speculation. So that’s what we’ll do this week. (But I’ll try not to make a habit of it.)

The overall climate. Conventional wisdom says that 2022 is going to be a bad year for Democrats, for a number of reasons:

  • Off-year elections usually go badly for the party in power.
  • The marginal voters Democrats depend on are less likely to show up in non-presidential cycles.
  • Biden’s popularity is low.

The current generic-ballot polls (would you rather vote for a Republican or a Democrat?) have the GOP ahead by 3.3%. If that holds up, gerrymandering produces a substantial Republican majority in the House. Generally, Democrats have to win nationally by at least 3% to break even. In 2020, they won nationally by 3.1%, which netted them a narrow 9-vote House majority. By contrast, a 1.1% Republican win in 2016 produced a 47-seat majority. (So Republicans are right when they say the system is rigged. It’s rigged in their favor.)

And who knows, things might play out that way. But November is still 9 months off, and there are other factors that could turn the situation around.

  • The Republican primaries may fracture the party, producing damaged candidates either too Trumpy to win or not Trumpy enough to mobilize the base. Nominating bad candidates lost the Republicans Senate seats they should have won in Missouri in 2012 and in Alabama in 2017, just to name the two most obvious cases.
  • The GOP has no agenda, which should become more apparent as election day approaches. In general, Democrats are running to do good things, while Republicans are running to stop bad things. Republicans only win if the public is in a sour mood, which it currently is, but may not be in a few months.
  • A lot of that sour mood is the public’s frustration with Covid, which might not be as big a factor by November.
  • By November, inflation should be slowing down, but Biden’s job growth numbers will still be something to brag about. Moody Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi writes: “The hair-on-fire discourse over high inflation is understandable, but it’s overdone.”
  • The Democratic base could get energized if the Supreme Court reverses Roe in June, as it seems they will.
  • As the legal net closes around Donald Trump, he may decide to take the GOP down with him.

Summary: As you go into the midterm elections, be realistic but not fatalistic. The future isn’t written yet.

The Senate. The current Senate has 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans. 34 seats are up for election in 2022; 14 held by Democrats and 20 held by Republicans. Wikipedia has a table of how four different well-regarded sites rate the elections. They don’t all agree, but most tilt slightly towards Republican control. The most pessimistic is Inside Elections, which favors Republicans in all their current seats, but thinks three Democratic seats are toss-ups: Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, Raphael Warnock in Georgia, and Mark Kelly in Arizona. Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire also faces a tight race, though she’s currently favored to win.

All these predictions are subject to the same possible turns of the tide that I listed above. Raphael Warnock’s seat in Georgia is a good example. Current polling has Trump-endorsed Republican candidate Herschel Walker ahead of Warnock by 1%. But other than his name recognition from winning the Heisman playing football at University of Georgia in 1982, Walker is a terrible candidate. He’s not very articulate (especially if you put him on a stage next to Warnock, who is extraordinary), he has no political philosophy to speak of beyond loyalty to Trump, and he has a history of violence, domestic abuse, and mental illness. (No wonder Trump likes him.)

And finally, let’s be honest: A lot of the White racist voters Republicans need are going to lose interest in a contest between two Black guys. Republicans have a history of fantasizing about Black candidates like Colin Powell, Herman Cain, and Ben Carson, but changing their minds sometime before election day. Right now, when all most voters know about Walker is his name and his football career, is probably Walker’s peak.

But anyway, if you’re inclined to play defense, look at Warnock, Kelly, Cortez Masto, and Hassan to see who you feel best about. Warnock would be my choice, though I have supported Hassan in the past when I lived in New Hampshire.

If you expect Democrats’ fortunes to improve and want to play offense, the states to look at are Wisconsin (Ron Johnson), Pennsylvania (Pat Toomey is retiring), and North Carolina (Richard Burr is retiring). Of these, the most satisfying outcome would be to boot Covid-misinforming, coup-sympathizing Ron Johnson out of the Senate. The problem is that the Democratic challenger won’t be chosen until the August 9 primary. The current front-runner is Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes. I worry a little about the rural Republican base getting energized to fight a Black candidate from Milwaukee, but my quick look at Barnes suggested an Obama-like charm that might protect him. He did win statewide office as Tony Evers’ running mate in 2018.

Pennsylvania’s primary won’t be until May, and there is still a large field. But to me the promising candidate is Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman. He’s a little off-the-wall, but in a folksy way that should make him hard to demonize. (“John and Gisele have chosen not to settle in the Lt. Governor’s Mansion, instead opening up the pool in the official residence to children who typically wouldn’t have access to one. They live with their three children Karl, 12, Gracie, 10, and August, 7, in a restored car dealership in Braddock with the family dog, Levi.”) But if you hold the run-a-moderate-in-swing-states theory, Rep. Conor Lamb is probably your best bet.

In North Carolina, the field is wide and the primary is in May. The current favorite is Cheri Beasley, who was the first Black woman to be chief justice of the state supreme court. She narrowly lost a re-election campaign in 2020.

If you’re really ambitious, you might hope to knock off Marco Rubio in Florida. You’ve got a strong candidate to work with: Rep. Val Demings, who was on the short list to be Biden’s vice president.

The House. House races don’t get as much national attention as Senate races, so finding one you want to get involved in is harder (unless you happen to live a swing district with a good candidate). On the other hand, you’re more likely to have an influence on a smaller race.

In general, the people you would feel best about beating — Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Paul Gosar, etc. — are in very safe Republican districts. (That’s why they can be as extreme as they are.) I keep getting email from a Democratic guy running for MTG’s seat, and I definitely feel the temptation, but I keep reminding myself that there are more effective things to do than tilt at that particular windmill.

If you don’t have a good local candidate to support, take a look at the 16 crossover districts identified by Sabato’s Crystal Ball. These are House districts that elected a representative from one party, but voted for the other presidential nominee. In other words, they seem like races that could go either way, and so are obvious places to attack or defend.

In Maine-2, for example, Democrat Jared Golden was re-elected by 6.1% in 2020, while Biden was losing the district by 7.4%. In New York-24, Republican John Katko won by 10.2% while Biden was winning by 9.1%.

Sadly, the crossover Republicans tend to be the most reasonable people in their conference, so beating them won’t be all that satisfying. Katko, for example, voted to impeach Trump and negotiated the deal for a bipartisan January 6 commission that the rest of his party rejected. Possibly seeing the handwriting on the wall from both left and right, he’s retiring.

Likewise, if you’re on the leftward wing of the Democratic Party, the crossover Democrats aren’t likely to make your heart beat faster. Ron Kind is retiring, and of the remaining six, only Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania-8 has a 2020 GovTrack ideology rating more liberal than Nancy Pelosi; he was the 58th most conservative of 237 House Democrats while Pelosi was 48th.

Other seats rated as toss-ups are CA-22, CA-27, CA-45, CO-8, IL-17, IA-3, KS-3, MI-3, MI-7, MI-8, NM-2, NY-11, VA-2, and WA-8.

Governorships and other state offices. At this distance from November, it’s hard to guess which governor’s races will be competitive. For what it’s worth, the races that look close to outside experts are: Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Other than Kansas, those are precisely the Biden states Trump tried to steal, so having a Democratic governor in place in 2024 might be pretty important. Other than Arizona, where Gov. Ducey has been term-limited out, they all have Democratic governors now. Republican primary candidates are competing to see who can take the most extreme positions about the 2020 election, with most saying they would not have certified the results. (In Arizona, Trump-endorsed Kari Lake has pushed it even further: She said “I agree” when a crowd of her supporters chanted “Lock her up” about Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.)

For similar reasons, you might want to support Democratic candidates in purple-state Secretary of State races that you’ve never cared about before. Republican candidates are basically promising to cheat, if that’s what it takes to put their favorite fascist back in the White House.

Two gubernatorial races that seem like long shots would be very satisfying to win: booting out Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas. Abbott’s approval ratings are negative, but it remains to be seen whether Beto O’Rourke can cash in on that. DeSantis seems to be in better shape.

Local races. As we’ve seen in recent weeks, state legislatures and local school boards make important decisions. And as the Supreme Court whittles away at the power of the federal government (at least until Republicans can get back in control), that trend will only increase.

Local races are often the most satisfying to work on. You’re shoulder-to-shoulder with the candidate and working with your neighbors. And who knows? Once you get involved in local politics, you might find yourself running for office yourself someday.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (12)

Racism in the NFL

February 7, 2022 – 10:10 am
https://theweek.com/political-satire/1009806/dont-look-behind-the-shield

The lack of coaching opportunities for Blacks in the NFL is more than just the usual it’s-hard-to-break-into-management problem, and a new lawsuit explores why.

As far back as 1908, when Jack Johnson won the heavyweight boxing championship, sports have been a prime setting for America to work out its racial issues. Blacks might have been barred from most opportunities to excel, and what they managed to accomplish in spite of racial barriers could usually be minimized. But sporting events have objective outcomes. In the 1930s, for example, Whites who wanted to downplay Black achievements could claim that jazz wasn’t really music. But they couldn’t claim that Jesse Owens wasn’t really fast.

In sports, the 20th century was a long story of racial barriers falling and Black athletes succeeding. In 1947, Jackie Robinson was the only Black player in the major leagues. But he became the rookie of the year that season, and by 1949 he was the National League’s most valuable player. Willie Mays entered the league in 1951, and Hank Aaron in 1954. By 1981, the major leagues were 18.7% Black, but then percentages began to fall, possibly because Black athletes drifted into other sports. In 2016, major league baseball players were 63.7% White, 27.4% Hispanic, 6.7% Black, and 2.1% Asian.

Basketball is the sport most dominated by Black players: In 2020, about 3/4 of NBA players were Black, a number that has been relatively stable for some while. The change from majority White to majority Black happened fairly quickly: The first three Black players entered the league in 1950. By 1957, Bill Russell was the most important player in a Celtic dynasty that would win 11 championships in the next 13 years. Whether White owners and executives continued to have racist beliefs or not, there was no arguing with that kind of success.

The story of race in the National Football League has always been more complicated. The NFL had a handful of Black players when it was getting started in the 1920s, but instituted an informal color barrier from 1933 to 1946. That barrier was broken not through the efforts a crusading White general manager like baseball’s Branch Rickey, but out of legal necessity: When the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles in 1946, they played in the publicly-owned Los Angeles Coliseum. Public accommodations couldn’t be segregated even in that era, so the Rams needed at least one Black player. The Washington Redskins became the last team to integrate in 1962, when the Kennedy administration similarly threatened not to let them play in a stadium on federally-controlled land.

The quarterback mystique. But even as Black athletes in many sports succeeded in blowing up the myth of White superiority, racism established a fallback position: Some Blacks might possess a raw animal physicality, but only Whites had the intellectual and moral virtues that made athletes truly admirable.

And so an article about base-stealing baseball players might emphasize a Black player’s blazing speed, but a White player’s painstaking analysis of pitchers and their moves. Black basketball players might be imposing Goliaths like Wilt Chamberlain, but (as the sports magazines of my youth told the story) White players compensated through smarts, hard work, and an indomitable will to succeed. That racial distinction was rarely spelled in so many words, but whenever I heard an athlete described as “crafty” or “scrappy”, I could be pretty sure he was White.

Baseball and basketball are inherently egalitarian sports — everybody bats, anybody can shoot — so this pro-White image-making had limited effects. But football is more corporate and specialized. In particular, a racial mystique developed around the quarterback position: Of course arm strength and other physical gifts mattered, but intangible (White) qualities like leadership and courage were more important, and quarterbacks needed the (White) mental capacity to analyze defenses and make sound decisions under pressure.

As a result, it took decades for football’s conventional wisdom to recognize that Black athletes could be good quarterbacks. The prophecy was self-fulfilling: High school and college coaches didn’t want to “waste their time” training unsuitable Black players to be quarterbacks, so by the time the quarterback pipeline reached the NFL, it contained mostly White players. As that pipeline combined with NFL coaches’ own racial preconceptions, Black NFL quarterbacks remained exceptional and usually had short careers until Warren Moon and Randall Cunningham became stars in the 1980s.

Naturally, if Black athletes lacked the cerebral and moral virtues needed to be good quarterbacks, it followed that they couldn’t be good coaches either. All sports have had racial barriers to management positions, as the larger society still does in many fields. (Bill Russell once explained the dominance of Black players in the NBA by semi-seriously observing that young Black men weren’t distracted by their opportunities in banking.) But no other sport has such a wide gap between its majority of Black players and its tiny number of Black coaches: 69% of players are Black, but only one of the 32 head coaches (Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers). With only a slightly higher percentage of Black players, the NBA has seven Black head coaches.

Until a few weeks ago, Brian Flores of the Miami Dolphins had been a second Black head coach. But he was fired at the end of the season, a move that seemed mysterious: In 2019, Flores had joined a team mired in mediocrity. The Dolphins had managed only one winning season out of the previous ten. His first season had been even worse: 5-11. But then he turned the team around, going 10-6 in 2020 and 9-8 in 2021. 2021 had seemed like two different seasons: The team had started 1-7 (and if Flores had been fired then, it would made some sense), but then finished 8-1. Teams that finish with that kind of spurt usually have high hopes for the next season. They don’t usually fire the head coach. So Miami’s Channel 4 seemed a bit puzzled:

During a Monday morning news conference, the primary issues [team owner Stephen] Ross cited for the decision to fire Flores seemed to have little to do with the on-field product and more with communication within the team’s braintrust — though there were no specific examples offered of how the team determined Flores wasn’t the right fit in those regards.

Anyway, life in the NFL. Flores moved on to apply for other coaching vacancies. And then, for a minute, it seemed like he had found something. The Patriots’ Bill Belichick — Flores had been his defensive coordinator during the Super Bowl winning 2018 season — sent Flores a text congratulating him on landing the New York Giants head coaching job.

The weird thing was, Flores hadn’t heard anything and hadn’t even interviewed for the job yet. That was supposed to happen in a few days. After a quick back-and-forth it turned out that Belichick had gotten the wrong Brian: The Giants had decided to hire Brian Daboll, a White coach who had also been a Belichick assistant at one point.

But even though they were telling people like Belichick that the decision was made, the Giants didn’t inform Flores. They went ahead with his interview, then announced that Daboll was their new coach.

Why they would do that has a simple answer: the Rooney Rule.

Rooney Rule. Named after former Pittsburgh Steeler owner Dan Rooney, the Rooney Rule says that NFL teams have to interview non-White candidates for coaching and management jobs. It puts no quota on hiring, but Black candidates at least have to get in the door.

It was established in 2003 after a similar controversy: Tampa Bay had just fired coach Tony Dungy (who would later win a Super Bowl in Indianapolis), and Minnesota had sacked Dennis Green (after his first losing season in ten years). A study showed that Black NFL coaches had, on average, better records than White coaches, but were less likely to be hired and more likely to be fired.

Clearly, the rule didn’t solve the problem. Nearly 20 years later, the NFL is down to one Black coach again. Instead, the rule has become a box-checking exercise, in which Black coaching candidates are put through charade interviews without being seriously considered.

They have long suspected this, but the Belichick text was the first time it could be established in a particular case.

The Flores lawsuit. Tuesday, Flores filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York (where the NFL is headquartered). It’s a class-action suit on behalf of

All Black Head Coach, Offensive and Defensive Coordinators and Quarterbacks Coaches, as well as General Managers, and Black candidates for those positions during the applicable statute of limitations period

The suit asks the court to declare the league in violation of several non-discrimination laws, to award monetary damages (both compensatory and punitive), and for

injunctive relief necessary to cure Defendants’ discriminatory policies and practices

And that’s where it gets interesting. What would a court have to do to “cure” the NFL of racism?

The problem is that each team hires only one head coach at a time, and those decision depend on subjective judgements: How well does this coach’s management style fit the team’s vision and the talent on the field?

So far this year, five of the nine coaching vacancies have been filled (all by White coaches), but it’s hard to pick out any one of them as a racist decision. The Jaguars, for example, just hired Doug Pederson, who in his last job won the Super Bowl with a back-up quarterback.

The fact that a coin comes up heads once doesn’t prove it’s rigged. But if it keeps coming up heads again and again, it probably is.

What Flores claims. Several of the specific charges in Flores’ lawsuit have gotten attention from the media, but not enough attention has been paid to the suit’s larger narrative.

For example, the accusation that Dolphins’ owner Ross offered Flores a bonus for losing games so that the team could get a better draft pick (an officially denied practice known as “tanking”), has been widely reported. But the larger implication is that hiring Flores in the first place was a sham: He wasn’t hired to succeed; he was hired to be the fall guy for losing seasons that would build a team that some other coach (presumably White) could lead to victory in the future.

Another former Black coach (Hue Jackson of the Cleveland Browns) has told a confusing story that supports Flores up to a point: At first he seemed to imply that he also was offered money to tank, but later backed off to claim only that the management above him was trying to lose.

I told [the Browns’ owner] that what he was doing was very destructive, to not do this because it’s going to hurt my career and every other coach that worked with me and every player on the team. And I told him that it would hurt every Black coach that would follow me. And I have the documents to prove this.

The Miami tanking scheme (which Flores obviously did not implement), also throws a different light on the official explanation of poor “communication within the team’s braintrust” as a reason to get rid of him.

In other words, the NFL’s problem is even bigger than the numbers suggest: Of the few Black coaches hired, how many were hired to take the blame for an intentional failure?

Prospects. The Federalist Society, which wouldn’t be able to find racism in a Confederate plantation, outlines the difficulties Flores’ suit will run into in the hardball world of anti-discrimination law.

What the lawsuit doesn’t contain, however, is actual proof that the NFL is a systemically racist organization and needs to be punished for discriminatory behavior.

Most of Flores’ allegations don’t come close to proving legally actionable systemic discrimination, which must involve finding racist intent or internal statistical “patterns” of inequity. He points out that the NFL currently employs only one black head coach (and three minority head coaches, counting Ron Rivera and Robert Saleh) in Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers. But judging an organization by one year of results is not actionable.

I agree with their analysis this far: Flores can’t win purely on the evidence that he cites in his complaint. But the class-action lawsuit is an open invitation for other Black coaches and coaching candidate to join his class. Hue Jackson is telling his story. How many others will chime in?

Informally, there’s a lot of sympathy with Flores. I’ve heard ESPN analysts quote unnamed Black coaches saying “I’ve been on that interview” where Rooney-rule boxes are checked without any real chance at a job. But does that mean they’ll come forward?

https://claytoonz.com/2022/02/02/nfl-racism/

At some point, it’s not just about the law. The NFL needs public support. The racist blackballing of Colin Kaepernick is already a stain on the league, and so is the race-norming in the original concussion settlement. (Until a new settlement in June, Black players had a harder time claiming cognitive impairment, because the assumed baseline for cognitive function was lower for Blacks. In laymen’s terms: The league assumed Black players had less brainpower to lose.) Independent of what a judge might say, the NFL just can’t have a parade of Black players and coaches testifying about its racism.

And finally, there’s the discovery process. If Flores can get a look at NFL teams’ internal communications, who knows what he’ll find? The NFL is run by billionaires, and billionaires often assume the rules don’t apply to them.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (7)

McMinn County’s Maus Problem

January 31, 2022 – 9:32 am
https://www.timesfreepress.com/cartoons/2022/jan/28/maus/5265/

The decision was made January 10, but it didn’t go viral until Thursday, which also happened to be Holocaust Remembrance Day: The Board of Education of McMinn County, Tennessee had voted 10-0 to ban Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning graphic novel Maus, which tells the story of his father’s experiences during the Holocaust.

If you clicked the links and read the longer versions of the story, though, “banned” wasn’t exactly the right word. The county’s 8th-grade reading program for the year had been split into four modules, each with a theme and an “anchor text”. The theme of the third module was the Holocaust, and the anchor text was supposed to be Maus. The kids would spend a quarter of the year discussing Maus while they also read supporting texts that gave them the context to understand what was going on in Maus.

The motion that passed 10-0 was to “remove this book from the reading series and challenge our instructional staff to come with an alternative method of teaching The Holocaust.” The motion doesn’t, say, take Maus out of the school libraries or do anything to stop kids who want to read the book on their own. But it won’t be assigned to 8th-graders.

Why not? The module was ready to go. The teachers were ready to teach it. Why did the school board feel that it needed to step in?

What they said. We don’t need to speculate about this as much as you might think, because the minutes of the meeting are publicly available. This was not some decision made thoughtlessly at the end of a long evening spent hashing out other issues. The meeting appears to have been called for this single purpose, and the discussion goes on for 20 pages.

County Director of Schools Lee Parkinson begins by saying that “two or three” school board members had come to his office to discuss “rough, objectionable language” in the book. He recommends redacting it “to get rid of the eight curse words and the picture of the woman that was objected to”.

But the Board immediately turns the conversation in a different direction: “Is there a substitute for this book?” One of the teachers the director had invited to the meeting says no and offers to explain why:

If you would like, I have some stuff I can run through with you that explains what our curriculum is and how it works and walk you through how this book fits into the bigger picture of what our kids are studying.

It quickly becomes clear, though, that the eight words and the picture are not really what the Board members are worried about:

we don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff. It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff, it is not wise or healthy.

Another teacher explains why a text about the Holocaust might get ugly:

I can talk of the history, I was a history teacher and there is nothing pretty about the Holocaust and for me this was a great way to depict a horrific time in history.

The Board goes on to table the discussion for a later date, then reverses itself, considers the motion to remove Maus from the curriculum, and unanimously approves it.

But why?

What is McMinn County’s Maus problem? The official explanation of an action isn’t always true, but it’s usually a good place to start. The Board of Education says on the county schools web site:

The McMinn County Board of Education voted to remove the graphic novel Maus from McMinn County Schools because of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide. Taken as a whole, the Board felt this work was simply too adult-oriented for use in our schools.

If you’ve never read Maus — and I hadn’t until this weekend [1] — that explanation sounds sensible. I mean: nudity — some parents have a real problem with that. One of the Board members mentioned in the meeting that Spiegelman “used to do the graphics for Playboy” while another says:

My problem is, all the way through this literature we expose these kids to nakedness, we expose them to vulgarity. You go all the way back to first grade, second grade and they are reading books that have a picture of a naked man riding a bull. It’s not vulgar, it’s something you would see in an art gallery, but it’s unnecessary. So, teachers have gone back and put tape over the guys butts so the kids aren’t exposed to it. So, my problem is, it looks like the entire curriculum is developed to normalize sexuality, normalize nudity and normalize vulgar language. If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, this is how I would do it. You put this stuff just enough on the edges, so the parents don’t catch it but the kids, they soak it in. I think we need to relook at the entire curriculum.

If you’ve never paged through Maus, you might imagine at this point that it’s downright pornographic, with the kind of drawings you might look for in Playboy. But if you have, this whole discussion seems ridiculous. The “nude” scene is a corner of one panel on page 100 of the first volume. The author’s mother has committed suicide and her body is in the bathtub. You see the back of her head, a single curved line representing not-particularly-large breasts, and a dot indicating a nipple.

So the “Playboy” artist has given us a single nude image in a setting that is not at all sexual. The drawing lacks detail and is not the least bit arousing. Any 8th-grader looking for a sexy picture could probably draw a better one for himself. [2] The “profanity” is similarly unimpressive. Remember: Director Parkinson wanted to white out eight words in a book of 295 pages. And that solution was not deemed acceptable.

The idea that Maus is not appropriate for 8th-graders might be believable if people making that claim had gone on to suggest moving the Holocaust module to the 9th or 10th grade curriculum. But no one did. The people who wanted to take Maus out of the 8th-grade curriculum didn’t suggest any age group that should read it.

So the Board’s official explanation doesn’t pass the laugh test. Clearly, they decided they didn’t like the book, and then went looking for explanations they could defend, at least to people who haven’t seen the book.

So what’s the real reason? During the Obama years, a lot of people didn’t like the president. If they had reality-based reasons for not liking him — they were conservative and he was liberal; he moved too fast or slow to end the wars or the economic disaster he inherited; Obamacare led to too much or too little government involvement in healthcare — I usually took those reasons seriously. No president gets 100% approval; there are always reasons.

But when people explained their dislike of Obama by spouting nonsense — he wasn’t born in America; he was secretly Muslim or Communist; he did objectionable things (that previous presidents had done without controversy) like putting his feet up on the Resolute desk in the Oval Office — then I had to wonder if the real reason was something they didn’t want to admit, like racism. Often, I think, anti-Obama racism was unconscious. People didn’t like him because they genuinely believed wild things him on flimsy evidence. But they wouldn’t have believed those things about a White president.

Something similar could be happening here. Because the Board’s explanation doesn’t make sense, we have to consider motives they’d be ashamed to admit, like Holocaust denial or antisemitism. Lots of people went there. Author Neil Gaiman, for example, tweeted:

There’s only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days.

The following cartoon makes the same point by casting Board members as cats (which is how Nazis are portrayed in Maus).

https://www.pnj.com/story/opinion/2022/01/29/marlette-cartoon-all-american-book-banmarlette-cartoon-all-american-book-ban/9255940002/

It’s possible that McMinn County has a Nazi problem, but I don’t think we need to go that far. I’m speculating here (which is all you can do once you reject people’s stated motives), but I lean towards less conscious explanations: Something about Maus bothered the Board members (or the constituents who complained to them), and they went casting about for some way to justify their visceral reaction. They bought the absurd “vulgarity and profanity” explanation the way so many Obama-haters latched on to doubts about his birth certificate: Finding the real reason required too much uncomfortable introspection, so they grabbed the first justification they could find.

So what might the real cause of their discomfort be?

Matthew Parker (crediting the insights of the @JustSayXtian) approaches the question by listing the less “adult oriented” Holocaust books that Board members might have had in mind when they suggested replacing Maus: The Diary of Anne Frank, Number the Stars, The Book Thief, or The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. There’s nothing actually wrong with any of those books, Parker says, but they do something different.

Maus is a story centered on Jews, told in a Jewish way, in which there is horrible violence and no [Good Gentiles Doing Good Things] to save the day. There is no redemption, there is no salvation, there is only a story so terrible it has to be told and a need to remember.

People like this school board are perfectly comfortable teaching the Holocaust as long as it isn’t too violent, too sad, or too Jew-y. Because to them it isn’t a lesson about (largely if by no means exclusively) Jewish trauma, it’s a lesson about Good Gentiles Doing Good Things. The rest–our story, our tragedy, our people and families–are just set dressings for the moral and often explicitly religious lessons they want to take from the Shoah. [3]

Is it really about the children? Children, particularly in their aspect as “innocent” or “naive” children, are often used as screens for adult projection. If someone tells you a book is too disturbing for 8th-graders, they might well be saying that it is too disturbing for them.

The Holocaust, after all, is one of the most disturbing episodes in human history. If you can think about the Holocaust and not be disturbed, you probably don’t get it.

Maus captures that. Horrible things happen to Spiegelman’s father, and even more horrible things to people he knows and cares about. A few people help him, up to a point, but most don’t, and the few who do are mostly looking for payment or some other kind of advantage. Fellow Jews sometimes collaborate with the Nazis, and even family members can’t always be trusted. Vladek Spiegelman himself is a survivor, not a hero, and the scenes in the present illustrate the ways he was scarred by his experiences. Art Spiegelman can try to understand why his father is the way he is, but that doesn’t make him any easier to deal with.

So: People did and suffered horrible things; God didn’t rescue the victims; and if any good at all came out of all that suffering and death, it wasn’t worth it.

That irredeemable truth, in my opinion, is what the Board of Education doesn’t want to face. They’re not trying to protect teens from those ideas. They’re trying to protect themselves.

The Holocaust module. A part of my background that rarely comes up in this blog is all the education theory I read years ago. I went to an experimental public high school. We hosted an education conference every year, and I used to cover it for the student newspaper I edited. I did my homework before listening to the speakers.

One of the stories I remember reading (God knows where, after all these years) was about parents being told by their son’s grade-school teachers that his poor performance in reading was due to a learning disability; he belonged in a special class. What the parents knew that the teachers didn’t was that the boy was doing quite well in the Hebrew-reading class at their synagogue.

The difference, the author claimed, was that the Hebrew class was learning to read the Torah, which the teachers themselves thought was important. But the boy’s grade school was teaching him to read trivial stories that adults would never waste their time on. Reading Hebrew was worth his effort; reading English seemed not to be.

There is a widespread belief among children that school consists of meaningless hoops that adults expect them to jump through for reasons of their own. Even a lot of kids who do well in school believe this: If they’re forced to play this game, they might as well win. But that doesn’t mean they think education matters in any real sense.

The thing every true educator hopes for is to see the lights go on inside a student’s mind. There are magic moments in education, when a kid realizes that school isn’t just a waste of time, or even a way to compete with other kids for adult approval or success in some distant future. Instead, they surprise even themselves by thinking “I want to know this stuff.” Knowledge, they suddenly realize, is power. And all along, their good teachers have been hoping to empower them.

Often it’s one single book that sparks the change. “To Kill a Mockingbird made me a lawyer,” wrote Shami Chakrabarti. I remember reading Plato’s “Apology” as a 9th-grader (not in school; I found it randomly on a shelf), and realizing that a deeper kind of thought was possible. In a later generation, lots of kids didn’t see the point of reading until Harry Potter came out.

When the educators tell the McMinn Board what the English Language Arts curriculum is trying to do, it’s obvious those lights-on moments are what they’re shooting for.

When we were in school, we would hop from one book to the next. We would study one book a few days, do a test then move on to the next book. I want to tell you why curriculum is important and how the pieces of it are designed and how we have an opportunity to teach more than standards.

… The curriculum that we use is called EL, what does that stand for? I see some teachers here, what does that stand for? Expeditionary Learning. So, the whole idea is that students go on these expeditions, and they will spend two months or so on these different expeditions, and that’s their modules. In eighth grade that is four things. We do Latin America, we learn about food, The Holocaust and Japanese Internment.

… There are many lessons that can be learned through this book about how we treat others, how we speak, things that we say, how we act and how to persevere. I just wanted you to get an idea of why these lessons are structured like they are and how this text is just surrounded by excerpts and articles and the things we do to build that background knowledge and the opportunity we have to make a difference in our students lives.

This is the module that a Board member suspects was “developed to normalize sexuality, normalize nudity and normalize vulgar language.”

I listen to the descriptions of what the teachers are trying to accomplish and think, “Wow. I wish I’d had the opportunity to take a class like that.” This is the point that I think is getting lost in the news coverage: Simply defending Maus against charges of vulgarity and profanity makes it sound like the book clears a low bar. In fact, studying Maus, particularly in the in-depth way the module plans, could have been an amazing educational experience.

In the end, though, I’ve got no reason to be jealous of McMinn County 8th-graders, because they won’t get to take such a class either. The Board of Education has made sure of that. Maybe the students will get to study the Holocaust, sort of. But not in a way that might disturb them, or disturb their parents or their classmates’ parents. And not in a way that is too violent, too sad, or too Jew-y.

The Board wants another appropriate hoop for their kids to jump through. Study the Holocaust? Yeah, we checked that box.

Who is the victim here? Most of the coverage I’ve seen has made Art Spiegelman the victim, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Spiegelman’s name is in the headlines, his book is back on the best-seller lists, and Amazon seems to be sold out. People are reading Maus who would never had heard of it otherwise.

Another way of telling the story makes Jews-in-general the victims, and I can kind of see that. Especially in the current climate, when actual fascism is raising its head in America, and Nazi propaganda tropes about manipulative Jewish moneymen are showing up again in mainstream media, this incident is one more reminder that the lessons of the Holocaust have not really been learned. If I were Jewish, I think my anxiety level would have gone up a little this week.

The people I have the most sympathy for, though, are the 8th-graders of McMinn County. They had a chance to do something really amazing in school. Maybe that module, that chance to study something that really matters in some degree of depth, would have lit a fire under a few of them. Maybe they would have realized that school can be more than just busywork.

But that won’t happen, because powerful grown-ups (who have no idea what education is) have screwed that chance up for them. As grown-ups so often do.

[1] PDFs of both volume 1 and volume 2 are available online. I’m not sure how legal these reproductions are, so I intend to buy a copy when local bookstores have it in stock again.

[2] I truly feel sorry for kids who are picking up Maus now because they’ve heard it has nudity.

[3] Saturday’s NYT had an article about Poland’s attempt to shift the emphasis in Holocaust memorials to heroic Poles who attempted to help the Jews. The article does not mention Maus, but corroborates Spiegelman’s account of Poles profiteering off Jews rather than helping out of sympathy or kindness.

It’s also worth mentioning that slavery and the Civil Rights movement are often similarly reduced to stories of Good Whites Doing Good Things. We have a hard time facing up to the unrelenting grimness of American racism, so we tell these uplifting stories as if they were typical.

Is there any town in America that doesn’t have some connection to the Underground Railroad? With all those good folks working on the problem, it seems like the slaves should have been drained out of the South long before the Civil War.

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Merrick Garland Starts Getting Serious

January 17, 2022 – 10:18 am
https://billypenn.com/2021/01/08/malcolm-nance-capitol-insurrection-trump-paramilitary-insurgency-philadelphia/

The misdemeanor part of his January 6 investigation seems to be over.
But will he get all the way to the top?

In a speech on January 5, Merrick Garland described his strategy for investigating the insurrection. Lawfare summarized it:

Seemingly in response to criticism that mostly smaller fry defendants have been charged to date while those behind the planning of the insurrection have not, Garland described the department’s approach as consistent with “well-worn prosecutorial practices.” Large investigations, he explained, start with the more junior people and the more easily proved cases. The public at first sees short sentences (or no jail time at all) handed out, and an absence of the more notorious figures being charged. Garland strongly implied that more significant actions are coming down the pike. Junior people flip on more senior people. And perpetrators who were not directly involved in violence but played planning or other behind-the-scenes roles must be reached with more time-consuming and complex investigations.

This week, we began to see what he was talking about.

On Thursday, federal prosecutors charged Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and 10 others with seditious conspiracy for their role in the January 6 attacks on the US Capitol. That charge — the most serious yet to come out of the investigation — is one of several in the indictment unsealed Thursday, which alleges Rhodes and his co-defendants brought small arms to the Washington, DC, area; engaged in combat training to prepare for the attacks; and made plans to stage quick-reaction forces to support insurrectionists.

… The new indictments are a significant step up from previous charges in the case, which range in seriousness from disorderly conduct to obstructing an official proceeding before Congress, and have so far resulted in sentences up to 41 months in prison. In comparison, seditious conspiracy carries a potential sentence of 20 years in prison.

The new indictment lays out a plan that goes far beyond the mob.

While certain Oath Keepers members and affiliates inside of Washington, D.C., breached the Capitol grounds and building, others remained stationed just outside the city in [quick-reaction force] teams. The QRF teams were prepared to rapidly transport arms into Washington, D.C., in support of operations aimed at using force to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power.

So the plan was to overwhelm the Capitol with numbers, then bring in the guns to hold it.

The obvious question is whether the people plotting Trump’s January 6 strategy (the so-called “Green Bay sweep“) knew about this or were complicit in its planning. GB Sweep plotter Peter Navarro claims not, but his plan seems to have had a big hole in it, which an armed militia occupying the Capitol might have filled: A Capitol occupation might have pushed the election certification past Inauguration Day, opening up a huge can of worms could justify authoritarian action.

And Roger Stone is connected to both groups. Maybe that’s why he pleaded the Fifth rather than tell the January 6 committee what he knows.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/us/politics/jan-6-subpoena.html

All of which leads to this week’s second development: Electoral College fraud.

When I first ran across the Eastman memo, the game plan for Trump’s attempt to steal the election he lost by seven million votes, this part made me scratch my head:

When [Vice President Pence] gets to Arizona [in the state-by-state electoral vote count], he announces that he has multiple slates of electors, and so is going to defer decision on that until finishing the other States. … At the end, he announces that because of the ongoing disputes in the 7 States, there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States.

Multiple slates of electors? Where did that come from? There have been rare cases in American history where rival slates of electors were named by rival sources of certifying authority. In 1876, for example, Florida’s Republican-dominated Board of Canvassers declared Rutherford B. Hayes the winner and certified his electors. And then the newly elected Democratic governor appointed a new Board of Canvassers that certified Tilden’s electors. So both sets submitted their credentials to Congress.

But the Electoral Count Act of 1887 was supposed to straighten all that out. Each state prepares a certificate of ascertainment signed by the governor (an example is to the right), listing the state’s electors. I could imagine a state legislature deciding that the ECA was unconstitutional and submitting a rival slate, or a state’s supreme court declaring that the governor’s signature was illegal in some way, but I hadn’t heard of anything like that happening. So: what “multiple slates of electors”?

Now we know. In seven states that Trump lost, his defeated candidates for the Electoral College signed fraudulent documents declaring themselves to be “duly elected and qualified Electors”. The fake certificates are all similar, suggesting that somebody — Mark Meadows? — distributed a template. And they didn’t do this just for personal satisfaction. They sent the fake certificates to the National Archives and to Congress as if they were real.

Given how much trouble ordinary Americans would be in if we, say, printed our own drivers licenses, I have to wonder if this forgery is illegal. George Conway, Kellyanne’s lawyer husband, tweeted:

Anyone who prepared or submitted, or aided, abetted or conspired in the preparation or submission of, false electoral-vote certificates, would presumably be guilty of a host of federal and state criminal offenses. False electoral certificates ought to be easy pickings for prosecutors.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel agrees:

Under state law, I think clearly you have forgery of a public record, which is a 14-year offense, and election law forgery, which is a five-year offense.

Since this is a multi-state election fraud case, she thinks the federal Department of Justice should take the lead, and has referred the matter to them. (To their credit, Fox News reported this story. It’s enlightening to read the comments as Fox viewers try hard not to understand what Fox has just explained to them. I’m reminded of what Oliver Wendell Holmes said about a closed mind: It’s “like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.”)

So that ball is in Merrick Garland’s court too. He hasn’t said what he intends to do with it.

The fake electors themselves clearly know they’re in trouble. (They should ask Michael Cohen what happens to people who go along with Trump’s schemes.) Arizona State Representative Jake Hoffman was asked by a local reporter what authority he was acting under, and (after Hoffman dodged that question) how he knew to show up for the fake ceremony where Trump’s fraudulent electors cast their ballots. Hoffman said the reporter should ask the state party chair. The follow-up questions “Do you not know how you arrived at the place? Do you really not know how you got a call?” led Hoffman to walk away.

So this where we are: We finally know that Garland intends to move beyond the pawns in Trump’s mob. Now he’s at the knight-and-bishop level. But will he get all the way to the King? Does he plan to? So far there’s no sign of that.

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The Court and the Vaccine Mandates

January 17, 2022 – 8:46 am
https://theweek.com/political-satire/1009010/sorry-novak

The law gives way to power and politics.

As expected, the Court nuked the Biden administration’s workplace vaccine-or-test mandate, while upholding a mandate for health care workers. The heart of the 6-3 majority’s negative opinion was this argument:

The question, then, is whether the [Occupational Safety and Health] Act plainly authorizes the Secretary’s mandate. It does not. The Act empowers the Secretary to set workplace safety standards, not broad public health measures. …

Although COVID–19 is a risk that occurs in many workplaces, it is not an occupational hazard in most. COVID–19 can and does spread at home, in schools, during sporting events, and everywhere else that people gather. That kind of universal risk is no different from the day-to-day dangers that all face from crime, air pollution, or any number of communicable diseases. Permitting OSHA to regulate the hazards of daily life—simply because most Americans have jobs and face those same risks while on the clock—would significantly expand OSHA’s regulatory authority without clear congressional authorization.

Got that? The majority doesn’t claim that Covid isn’t a hazard at work, but that you might catch Covid lots of other places too. So if you could pick up black lung disease at the supermarket, OSHA wouldn’t be able to regulate that either. The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer labels this logic “laughable”.

OSHA regulates many, many hazards that are also present outside the workplace. The fact that you can die in a fire in your apartment is not an argument against regulating fire hazards in factories or offices.

Fires, falling down stairs, handling sharp objects, etc. are all “hazards of daily life”. But while Americans can mitigate the risks we face at home, we’re mostly at the mercy of our employers at work. That’s why we need OSHA. The Breyer/Kagan/Sotomayor dissent explains:

OSHA has issued, and applied to nearly all workplaces, rules combating risks of fire, faulty electrical installations, and inadequate emergency exits — even though the dangers prevented by those rules arise not only in workplaces but in many physical facilities (e.g., stadiums, schools, hotels, even homes). Similarly, OSHA has regulated to reduce risks from excessive noise and unsafe drinking water—again, risks hardly confined to the workplace.

People like me. Let me bring this down to a personal level: My wife and I, being over 65 and having a few other complicating factors, have been very careful about minimizing our Covid risk. We haven’t caught Covid “at home” because we don’t let a lot of people into our home. We haven’t caught it “during sporting events” because we have been staying away from sporting events. And we haven’t caught it at work because we’re retired.

Until the current Omicron surge, our friends and family had almost entirely escaped infection too. How? Partly by being sensible people who take science seriously, but also because those who weren’t retired were almost all in white-collar jobs that allowed them to work from home. (I’d love to see some statistics breaking down Covid risk by education or job category.) The ones I worry most about are the few who have in-person jobs that require interacting with the public.

In short, the workplace isn’t the only place Americans can catch Covid, but it’s the primary source of unavoidable risk.

Now, if you are somebody who thinks Covid is a scam, or if you’re just “done” with trying to avoid it, the Court’s ruling makes perfect sense: You’re interacting with unmasked untested unvaccinated people all the time, so what’s the problem if you meet a few more at work? But for those of us still trying not to get sick — and especially for service-industry people who have been considering when it will be safe to re-enter the job market — this ruling is a major blow. The Court has said that our government is powerless to help us.

What the laws say. The majority’s logic is tenuous on its face, but the best argument against the Court’s opinion is to read the bleeping law, which the dissent reproduces:

OSHA ’s rule perfectly fits the language of the applicable statutory provision. Once again, that provision commands — not just enables, but commands — OSHA to issue an emergency temporary standard whenever it determines “(A) that employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards, and (B) that such emergency standard is necessary to protect employees from such danger.”

Strangely, though, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh flipped to the other side of the argument in a similar case decided the same day: In a 5-4 decision, the Court let stand a different Biden administration vaccine mandate — affecting 10 million people rather than 84 million — on health care workers.

Reading that opinion (which is unsigned, but probably written by either Roberts or Kavanaugh), it’s hard to see the difference between this and the more general mandate. The regulating agency has changed (HHS rather than OSHA), and the agency is implementing a different set of laws, but the main difference is that in this case Roberts and Kavanaugh decided to take those laws seriously.

Both Medicare and Medicaid are administered by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who has general statutory authority to promulgate regulations “as may be necessary to the efficient administration of the functions with which [he] is charged.”

One such function—perhaps the most basic, given the Department’s core mission—is to ensure that the healthcare providers who care for Medicare and Medicaid patients protect their patients’ health and safety. Such providers include hospitals, nursing homes, ambulatory surgical centers, hospices, rehabilitation facilities, and more. To that end, Congress authorized the Secretary to promulgate, as a condition of a facility’s participation in the programs, such “requirements as [he] finds necessary in the interest of the health and safety of individuals who are furnished services in the institution.”

It wouldn’t be hard to use these paragraphs as a template and fill in “OSHA” and “workers” in place of “HHS” and “Medicare and Medicaid patients”. (If anything, the law is clearer in the OSHA case.) But Roberts and Kavanaugh couldn’t support such a revision. For some reason, the “core mission” of HHS matters in a way that the core mission of OSHA doesn’t.

Vox’s Ian Millhiser observes that the two opinions are “at war with each other”, and the “The Court is barely even pretending to be engaged in legal reasoning.”

Politics. Probably the Chief Justice’s thinking has more to do with protecting the Court’s image than upholding the law.

Roberts hates to make sweeping decisions whose judicial activism would be obvious to the public. Instead, he prefers to chip away at the federal power or individual rights that he wants to destroy, in decisions that are supposed to seem moderate individually, even as they stack up to create radical change. So he invented with a novel way to uphold ObamaCare while simultaneously undercutting precedents about the Commerce Clause and allowing states to opt out of Medicaid expansion. He left the Voting Rights Act in place while tossing its main enforcement mechanism. He’s been uprooting campaign finance laws bit by bit rather than declaring outright that Money is sovereign (which is clearly what he believes).

And so in these two cases, Roberts cuts the vaccine-mandate baby into a small piece and a large piece. He does what he wants with the larger piece, while letting the law govern the smaller piece to show how moderate he is.

Expect something similar in June when the Court rules on abortion: The other five conservative justices will want to reverse Roe v Wade outright. But Roberts will want to put loopholes in Roe to allow most (but probably not all) of the Roe-violating state laws to stand, while claiming that he technically “upheld” Roe rather than reversed it.

The question then will be whether he can persuade Kavanaugh, as he did this time.

Biden’s next steps. If the Court’s complaint about a broad mandate is that it’s not occupationally specific or tied to specific risks, OSHA could respond by breaking its mandate into occupation-specific chunks or detailing a more complex set of standards that would apply to all businesses, not just those with more than 100 employees. Apparently, it already drafted such a rule, but hasn’t issued it.

OSHA’s path forward to protecting workers from Covid-19 is clear. First, the agency should take the previous OSHA standard out of the desk drawer, dust it off, update the data, make any tweaks to ensure it fits the court’s new suggestion that it be risk-based and send it over to the White House. The standard should cover all workers in higher risk jobs, not only those employed by large employers.

That might or might not work, depending on whether the Court decides to play Calvinball and make up new rules as it goes.

The radicals. One related issue I speculated about last week was whether the Court would base its vaccine-mandate rulings on a “nondelegation” argument that would hamstring not just OSHA, but federal regulating agencies generally. The six-justice majority in the OSHA case (the usual conservative bloc) hints at such sentiments, but never actually invokes them.

But Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence with that ruling, joined by Thomas and Alito, does. The OSH Act can’t authorize the vaccine requirement, Gorsuch writes, because it is a general delegation of power from Congress, not a specific response by Congress to the pandemic. The power-granting subsection the dissent quoted can’t be applied because it

was not adopted in response to the pandemic, but some 50 years ago at the time of OSHA’s creation

It’s not hard to see where this line of thinking goes: Antitrust law can’t apply to markets that were inconceivable when the Sherman and Clayton Acts were passed more the 100 years ago. The Clean Air Act is more than 50 years old; clearly the EPA can’t invoke it to ban pollutants nobody knew about then. How can the SEC regulate complex financial derivatives that the laws don’t specifically mention, and that change faster than new laws can address? (Of course, this logic will never be applied to the Second Amendment, whose authors could not possibly have foreseen AR-15s.)

In this current age of obstruction and filibuster, the ultimate result of nondelegation would be the end of federal regulations across the board. Not because anti-regulation politicians took their case to the voters, won elections, and repealed OSH, the Clean Air Act, and the rest of our regulating laws, but because unelected judges (many chosen by presidents who lost the popular vote) made the entire system of regulation unworkable, independent of whatever the American people might have wanted.

A majority of the Court isn’t there yet. But three justices are.

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