Comfort, Comfort, Who Had the Comfort?

A week or so ago, there was this tweet, which I saw shared a lot:


Then there was this quote by Andrew Sullivan, from a New York magazine article about Turmp, that was getting a lot of approval on Twitter in the last couple of days:

One of the great achievements of free society in a stable democracy is that many people, for much of the time, need not think about politics at all. The president of a free country may dominate the news cycle many days — but he is not omnipresent — and because we live under the rule of law, we can afford to turn the news off at times. A free society means being free of those who rule over you — to do the things you care about, your passions, your pastimes, your loves — to exult in that blessed space where politics doesn’t intervene. In that sense, it seems to me, we already live in a country with markedly less freedom than we did a month ago. It’s less like living in a democracy than being a child trapped in a house where there is an abusive and unpredictable father, who will brook no reason, respect no counter-argument, admit no error, and always, always up the ante until catastrophe inevitably strikes. This is what I mean by the idea that we are living through an emergency.

And I understand what both of them are saying. I identify with it. I long for that comfort, the ease of not having to think what malevolent thing my government could be planning any moment.

But the fact that I understand them both is just an indication that I am part of the large, privileged group of people who have not had to worry much about this in the past. Black people, native people, queer people, trans people, and people who are more than one of those kinds of people have always had to live in worry, if not absolute fear.

Welcome to America as many people have lived it. It sucks.

I hope we remember that, if we manage to survive this more or less intact.

Supporting Planned Parenthood on Saturday Morning

Five thousand people turned out in St. Paul this morning to say they stand with Planned Parenthood. It was scheduled to coincide with a defund Planned Parenthood rally, located just outside the clinic.

This photo was taken from the roof, and I got it from Twitter. It's larger if you click on it:


The rest of the photos are mine. This guy was one of the first people I saw:


The sign on the left has coat hangers dangling from the bottom edge. He had the forethought to wear carpenter jeans, so the bottom ends of his two poles are resting in the pockets.

This young person addressed the many kinds of people that Planned Parenthood helps, which is often forgotten in the midst of sign-making:


A favorite, pithy message:


Creative lettering and drawing:


Two women whose signs presented topics that are not as common:


Yes:


Best use of a yard stick:


Sorry I cut off the top of her sign.

Finally, these three silent figures stood together watching the defund Planned Parenthood rally:


As I took this photo, they were asked to move away from the rally because their presence was too likely to cause a confrontation. Meanwhile, anti-Planned Parenthood demonstrators prayed in the faces of their counterparts half a block away at the barricade between the two groups.

A bit of a double standard.

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According to the St. Paul police via today's Star Tribune, there were 6,000 people there, with 250–400 of them at the defend rally and 5,600–5,750 at the support march.

About that Wall Ad

I don’t watch the Super Bowl and so didn’t see the Lumber 84 ad until the next morning. Someone shared it enthusiastically on Facebook and I watched it. If you haven’t already seen it, here it is on YouTube.

My impression: It’s a bunch of movie-like footage, clearly designed to manipulate the viewer into sympathizing with the main characters, a Mestiza woman and her daughter. It’s nicely shot. The mystery of what the girl is doing with all that plastic film detritus along the way was a bit perplexing until it resolved.

There were also these oddly interspersed shots of a white guy building something somewhere. If I hadn’t known it was for a business called Lumber 84, I would have been totally at a loss about what that had to do with anything, and even knowing that, it was confounding.

Then suddenly, after trudging and struggling for what seemed like minutes of air time, mom and girl are confronted with a wall (Trump’s wall, obviously), blocking their path. Mom sadly freaks out. Daughter reveals that her found-object craft project was a tattered American flag all along.

For no apparent reason they walk to the left and find a giant door in the wall, which swings open to let them through as soothing music plays.

Finally, the camera cuts to the builder guy as he drives along some anonymous American highway in his pickup truck with tools and lumber in the back. Words appear over the final frame: THE WILL TO SUCCEED IS ALWAYS WELCOME HERE.

Generally, I thought the whole thing was kind of incoherent but moving. Trump built a wall, but this one symbolic guy made a door and these two people got through. (Though no one else appears to.) Weird, but okay.

Well, no. It turns out the owner of Lumber 84, Maggie Hardy Magerko, is pro-Trump, pro-wall, but also in favor of the “big beautiful door” that Trump talked about at some point during the campaign.

When I heard Trump use the “big beautiful door” phrase, I assumed he meant legal immigration through H1B visas for people with skills, or who want to work at places like Wisconsin Dells or Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate. But the funder of this ad seems to think it means access for exactly the kind of people the wall would keep out: women who come over the border with kids, women with no apparent skills except survival. As long as they’re patriotic enough to make a plastic flag.

Which is highly unlikely, as we already were pretty sure, and now definitely know as ICE has begun deporting undocumented long-time residents with no criminal history of violence, like Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, who came to the U.S. when she was 14 and who has two children who are U.S. citizens.

Buh-bye, Guadalupe! Guess you didn't make that flag fast enough! Don’t let that big beautiful door hit you on the way out!

It funny-unfunny that the ad is so incoherent it can't get across the point of view its funder holds, and Trumpians are angry at Lumber 84 for being pro-immigration. We can only hope this incompetence continues at all levels until they are all driven out of power.

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Here’s what veteran journalist Maria Hinajosa has to say about the ad.

Pipelines Under Rivers

Writer Greg Seitz is the resident writer for the St. Croix Watershed Research Station, part of the Science Museum of Minnesota, and editor of St. Croix 360, community news and river stewardship for the St. Croix River region. For readers not from these parts, the St. Croix is a tributary of the Mississippi, forming much of the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Seitz today tweeted this series of thoughts on oil pipelines:

Oil pipelines under rivers is a topic I've been researching and writing about since late 2014. I constantly hear how it can be done safely.

Yes, I think pipelines under rivers could be semi-safe. Could be. That safety depends on rules and oversight. Pipelines have almost none.

There are 2.5 million miles of pipelines in America. A small federal agency – part of the Department of Transportation – oversees much of it.

There are 90 inspectors in the agency assigned to making sure companies follow the rules about pipeline safety. 90!

So, because it's not realistic to enforce stringent regulations, there are not stringent regulations.

Pipeline companies mostly get in trouble when there's a spill due to negligence. But negligence must be proven. That's what lawyers are for.

Rivers pose a particular threat to oil pipelines: the power of raging water. In a flood, they can dig deep into their beds – scour holes.

If they expose the pipe, then there is torsion on it. Logs, boulders, ice, or other debris getting pushed down the river strike it.

So pipelines should be buried deeply, right? And we better make sure they stay buried over the years, right? Nope.

Pipeline builders should study any river's potential to flood and scour, and bury their pipe deeper, but they don't have to.

There is no requirement that they make sure their pipes stay buried sufficiently deep under rivers as the years pass.

Scour was key in both the big pipeline spills into the Yellowstone River in the last seven years. One of which was complicated by ice cover.

So: I stand with Standing Rock. Forcing a pipeline under a river, low safety standards are an affront to humans and the water we share. #NoDAPL

Something to know as we watch the Turmp administration force its will upon the native people in North Dakota.

Unfalsifiable

We all know the Dear Leader seems to do whatever he wants because “his base” agrees with him, and that’s all that matters.

Well, if his base decided (or is deciding) he’s a lunatic destroying our country, how could they communicate that to him?

He doesn’t believe in polls. There are no elections for two years. And I’m sure that any people who call or write to say they’ve changed their minds about him would be called liars when they claim to have been his supporters.

The Turnip has set up an unfalsifiable supposition: “the people” support him, and if a bunch of people say they don’t support him, they’re not part of “the people” or the “majority,” and so don’t count.

It can’t be disproven. It’s faith, not facts.

Scary Trivia

Q: What is the longest running record of plant bloom times in the world?

A: The cherry blossom records in Japan, which were started in 850 C.E.

Why does this matter, you may ask? Because it shows how much warmer the world has gotten in the last 50 years:


You'll note that the labels along the left side are dates, with April 5 at the bottom and April 15 up around the red line. Somewhere around 1950 or 60 the black line went earlier than any previous date and then kept going.

For more than a thousand years, the date bounced back and forth between April 10 and April 20, but recently it headed down toward April 5. The data on this graph end in 2010, notably. When they are next updated, I imagine some new dates will need to be added at the bottom.

It's Wrong to Exploit Sick People

Remember how Joan Rivers died because she was addicted to plastic surgery? This form of body dysmorphia has featured on at least two fictional television show (Law & Order and House, if I remember correctly), but when it's a real person, it feels wrong for media to cover that person.


Why is it wrong? Partly because it feeds the person's illness to give them coverage, and partly because it normalizes their response to dysmorphia for other emotionally marginal people who can fall into the same affliction.

Stop it, Daily News. Get some real news.

More on Edel Rodriguez

It's a weird thing to realize you've been appreciating an artist's work for a while but you never bothered to learn his name. Yesterday I posted about some of the art we're seeing in the Turmp era, and realized that two of the pieces were by Edel Rodriguez.


Here are some other pieces by Rodriguez from the past couple of years, starting with the most current. These are all available on his Twitter feed, where he also shares snapshots of protest posters that people have made using his art.






The meltdown at the last debate:


This piece is from the fall or summer, but it could have been done now:


One of the earlier debates:


This one is called Please Curb Your Trump:




From those halcyon days when we all thought Republicans were destroying their party by flirting with Turnip:


If you get back far enough, you find work not related to Trump. Here are a couple on guns in America:




And finally, from the early days of Pope Francis:


I think it's safe to say I will recognize his work the next time I see something new.

Trump Inspires Great Art

One micro-thin silver lining of the Turnip era: editorial art. I've been putting a few pieces away to share all at once, and I have more than five now so it's time for the first round.

This piece was from Time magazine back in August. It's by Edel Rodriguez:


Unfortunately, this cover was too quick to predict Trump's demise.

This piece is from Mother Jones:


Created by Mike McQuade, it accompanies an article called Peter's Choice: I asked my student why he voted for Trump. The answer was thoughtful, smart, and terrifying.

This one doesn't appear to be attributed to anyone:


The signature at lower right is from the original, Soviet-era artwork (seen here). The Photoshop artist is unknown, as far as I can tell.

There will be many political cartoons. Here's one I particularly liked:


It's by Mark Wilson who goes by the name Marquil. This is his website: EmpireWire.com.

Italian cartoonist Matteo Bertelli had this take on Turmp's wall:


And finally, there's this illustration for an Atlantic article on Trump's conflicts of interest:


Visually arresting and pithy. Great stuff on an infuriating topic.

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After I posted, I realized I forgot the Der Spiegel cover that just ran after the botched executive order on immigration:


The art is by Edel Rodriguez (who also did the Time magazine cover art). Rodriguez is a Cuban-born American artist who came to the U.S. during the Mariel boatlift as a child. Some of his illustration work can be seen here. He is also a painter. About this cover, he said: “If I wanted to live in a dictatorship, I'd live in Cuba... it’s much warmer.”

Scarsella Guilty, But Unrepentant

On Tuesday this week, Allen Scarsella was found guilty on all counts in the shooting of five men in North Minneapolis back in November 2015. The five men, who are black and were part of the Black Lives Matter protest encampment that sprang up in response to the police shooting of Jamar Clark, were injured, one with long-time complications.

Watching the trial unfold through news stories, I was nervous the jury would acquit him. First, there was the fact that the 12 members were 10 men and only two women, none of whom were black. Then there was the defense argument that Scarsella and one of his friends had been punched during a series of altercations that night, that they claimed to see someone pull a knife, that Scarsella fired in self-defense and defense of his friend.

From my remote location as a reader, I wasn't buying it. Scarsella created the situation by going there in the first place, by bringing a gun, by provoking protestors. The prosecution did a great job of making it clear he had a long history of spouting obviously racist utterances, the kinds judges, juries and lawmakers seem to require (rather than seeing racist outcomes as evidence enough). Examples: Scarsella recommended decorating a gun with a Confederate flag to "get a chimp to chimp out so you could shoot him." He invited one friend to the shooting range so they could practice for the time when they would shoot black people. He was fond of the n-word. One friend who testified in his defense said this kind of talk, often exchanged through text messages, was just "locker room talk." Yeah, right, we've heard that before.

For me, even without those clear indications of a white supremacist mindset, Scarsella should have been found guilty. Minnesota is not a stand-your-ground state. He had a duty to retreat, to call the police, and barring either of those, to at least warn people that he had a gun before shooting. He did none of those things.

But still, I doubted the jury. Reasonable doubt is a high standard.

Those 12 people saw through him, though, with the help of the prosecutors, who pointed out that the claim of seeing a knife was never raised until trial: neither Scarsella nor any of his accomplices mentioned it when they were interviewed in the previous months. The prosecutors also raised the fact that Scarsella didn't call out a warning to leave him and his friends alone or he would shoot. He just shot.

This is an interesting account, posted to Facebook by one of our local reporters Lou Raguse of KARE-11:

I had a lengthy conversation with a juror in the Allen Scarsella trial. In short, I guess the case might not have been as "close" as I thought it was in covering much of the two-week trial. The juror said most of them had their minds made up that they would vote guilty as soon as deliberations began, but about three or so made sure they took it slow, took another look at all the evidence and talked it all through before they voted. [The jury deliberated for seven hours.]

One of the biggest things that stuck with this juror was the "complete lack of remorse" Allen Scarsella showed while testifying in his own defense. This juror was surprised by how articulate and professionally Scarsella was able to present himself, especially after watching the videos and hearing some of the ugly text messages. But the jury was not impressed with his testimony as a whole, and simply didn't believe much of what he said. And a "lack of remorse" is what really stuck with this juror.

The testimony preceding Scarsella came from his friend Nate Gustavsson. He said Scarsella saved his life by shooting in self-defense. The juror told me he made a better witness for the prosecution, because that testimony only helped their case. The juror was particularly turned off, and said other jurors were as well, when Gustavsson "got a little smirk on his face and described with admiration how great of a marksman Scarsella was in firing that night."

I asked about the racial makeup of the jury, and whether the jury was cognizant of that as they worked on such a racially charged case in the current social climate. The juror said no, at least not personally, and that "there was not a racist among them." I had reported, based on what I was told by some of the attorneys and also what I could determine with my own eyes that all but two of the jurors were white. It turns out, this juror told me, that there were actually three people of color on the jury. A third woman who immigrated from Canada was of Indian heritage. Shows you just can't tell from looking at people. As it were, the juror also said the current social climate played no role in coming to a decision in this case.

Back to the evidence, did Allen Scarsella see someone pull a knife? "Absolutely not," the juror told me. He contradicted himself throughout the investigation on that claim.

After receiving texts from Gustavsson saying, "I know how to stir shit up. Talk tomorrow. Bed now," did Scarsella and he really "never talk about it again" as Scarsella claimed? A lie, the juror said. "I think they talked about it that night on their camping trip.

So what was Scarsella's big plan here? To lure black men into the shadows away from the 4th precinct's surveillance cameras so he could shoot them, as he always fantasized about? The juror told me frankly, he doesn't know what his plan was. The prosecution presented a narrative that this was a "plan." And to me listening to much of the testimony, it was hard to believe that the way the incident went down was just how Scarsella wanted it to. That's why I thought this was a tough case for the prosecution. But it seems, at least to this juror, that it didn't really matter if there was a big master plan. Just that when Scarsella pulled out his gun and shot, it was with an intent to cause serious bodily harm, and not out of self-defense, which is what it took to convict on 1st-degree assault.

It was the eye-opening racism on display in the trial that really stuck with this juror. "I can't believe the amount of hate, online and right here in Minnesota," the juror said. Did the jury believe the words were all jokes, not meant to be taken seriously? "Not for a second."

So, great, Scarsella has been found guilty, and Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman says he will go for the maximum sentence, which is 12 to 16 years. Obviously, it's important that the sentence be in keeping with the seriousness of the crimes and the sentencing framework.

But I know sending this guy to prison is only going to make him worse. He's already a white supremacist who blames everyone but himself for his current circumstances. In prison, he'll connect with even more hard-core white supremacists, and what will he have become by the time he gets out in a dozen years?

Can anything be done to keep that from happening while he's in prison? Because if it's not interrupted, in 2029 or 2030 — if we're all still here (Donald Turmp willing and the climate change crick don't rise) — how will Allen Scarsella reintegrate into society?

Let's hope he doesn't find our culture operating on his wavelength more than it does now.

Some Things Cannot Be Said

Last night, Milo Yiannopoulos, an utter troll who is part of Breitbart News, was prevented from speaking at UC Berkeley by a large protest, which included at least one fire, though I'm having trouble piecing together what happened exactly.

Some people, like Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, and John McWhorter, advocate for complete free speech on campuses, omitting the fact that this isn’t necessarily about free speech, but about paying people and giving them university-supported spaces to speak.

But even if it were just about “free speech” without any payment (say Milo was just a guy standing on a street corner on campus), would it then be okay?

I wanted to post the words of a Twitter user I came across just after Turnip’s inauguration. This was shortly after neonazi leader Richard Spencer was punched by an unknown assailant while talking on camera. (You may have seen it.) On January 22, @meakoopa posted this:

I just finished a Ph.D. dissertation about "reason" in relation to the public sphere, so with apologies, I might risk a short thread re: punching nazis because there is an unstated self-evident logic that I feel like might be clarifying.

Every liberal democracy realizes early on there are some positions which must prima facie be aggressively excluded from public discourse. You can't even articulate WHY they are unreasonable because to articulate WHY they are unreasonable is to itself open the possibility of reason.

This is why you can't allow "just hypothetical" questions about whether Jews or blacks, as Spencer posits, are innately inferior/destroyable. Nazi theorists like Carl Schmitt VERY QUICKLY diagnosed this weakness in liberal democracies—you can collapse a democracy by insisting the democracy had a right to end itself: Hindenburg to Hitler, "the peaceful transition of power."

Intolerance cannot be tolerated, because this corrosive effect means the law can be co-opted by, and so protective of, fascism. Fascism wriggles into democracies by insisting on the right to be heard, achieves critical mass, then dissolves the organs that installed it.

WHICH MEANS the stronger it becomes, it cannot be sufficiently combated with reason. Because "reason" becomes the state's tool to enforce. The Overton Window becomes weaponized—as we are seeing in Kellyanne Conway’s and Sean Spicer's "alternative facts." The state decides.

[Classical] liberalism literally cannot see this—its insistence on the rule of law, not genocidal lust, is what turned the German people into good Nazis. Some positions must be excluded from discourse. Some positions you do not listen to—you can only punch.

A society that begins to entertain why some members of its polis might not belong invites catastrophic decay. Those voices must be excluded.

TL;DR - punching a nazi is actually a supreme act of democracy because it will not tolerate a direct affront of a fellow citizen's citizenship. The term to interrogate in "should you punch a nazi?" is SHOULD - what is the status of that "should"?

Legally: no; ethically: fuck yes.

All of American history is an exercise in one debate: "who is the 'we' who are the people?" (The thing that used to solve this debate - "God decides what is reasonable" - is not on the table anymore, and was always a deferral of the question.)

You cannot take as given that allowing free and open debate about genocide will stop fascism. Because it never, ever has.

Oh, and hey — if it makes you feel any better, our current Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, was a campus troll in the Milo mode during his undergraduate years at Columbia. In 1987 he was advocating for apartheid in South Africa, among other charming right-wing positions.

Yesterday, in response to the Berkeley protests, @meakoopa posted this to Twitter:

If you don't like riots, then don't create conditions in which a critical mass of people no longer feel protected by the conditions of order. Riots are, and should be, illegal. That does not mean they are not sometimes appropriate and even necessary. Western democracy was built by riots.

Peace is something governments earn, not impose.

And he noted:

The Frankfurt School (those who managed to survive Nazi purges) almost all relocated to California and are printed by Berkeley's press to this day. Berkeley hates Nazis.

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Update: I just found out that Judge Gorsuch started his trolling at least a few years earlier, in high school, where he founded a group called Fascism Forever. He served as president for all four years at Georgetown Prep. The hijinks were intended to raz the Jesuit faculty, who were too liberal for Gorsuch's taste.

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Update on the update: It sounds as though there may not have been an actual club called Facism Forever... that it was a joke entry in Gorsuch's yearbook text, referring lightheartedly to his reputation within the school.
 

It's Not So Simple

There's so much to disdain about Turnip and his administration, from substance to style. The substance is the most important, I know. But it's hard to disagree with John Scalzi, who says his primary emotion is a feeling of deep and abiding embarrassment.

Part of that embarrassment comes from my utter disbelief at how simple-minded their worldview must be. That's part of the reason they screwed up the rollout of the Muslim and refugee ban so badly: they have no ability to envision how complex the world is and how many people are directly affected by policies (like the 75-year-old woman who died for lack of medical care or the 5-year-old child who was handcuffed at Dulles).

Yet another example from Twitter today, between a Turmp fan and someone who actually knows what he's talking about:




See? A guy who knows something about terrorism understands that Irish Catholics aren't "naturally" terrorists: he knows there was a set of circumstances that drove some of them to it.

Which reminded me of the simple-minded cartoon from this morning's Star Tribune:


And gave me an idea of how to modify it:


Simple is not part of the equation when people are involved.