The Mayor from Jaws Explains Those Quotes He Gave to Bob Woodward

 

Everyone knows I want to be a cheerleader for Amity Island, right? You want to project confidence. So while I might have told some reporter from the mainland that we were facing “a  grotesque, Biblical monster of the deep,” “a bloody, churning nightmare of teeth,” or “a lean, mean tourist-eating machine,” there was no reason to tell the general public that. You don’t want to start a panic, fellas. Just think of the kids.

On the subject of kids, the media’s distorting my comment about the unfortunate Kitner boy being “a fit offering and sacrifice to our mighty fish-god Dagon” completely out of context. First of all, I was brought up never to criticize someone else’s religion. I don’t know how you were raised. Second, if I have the worshipers of Dagon right – and they’ve been fine, upstanding members of our Chamber of Commerce – then Dagon brings wealth and prosperity not just to his followers, but to the whole community. Who wouldn’t like a little more prosperity, am I right? Here on Amity Island we depend upon the ocean for our very lives. So you gotta keep those obscene, scaly, aquatic monster gods happy.

Look, if it wasn’t for me, this whole island would descend into real darkness and bloodshed. I’m talking about roaming mobs of young radical leftists – some of them nearly four foot ten – destroying our picket fences with their karate. If my opponent is elected Mayor, they’ll just run wild. Then the only white, pointed pickets you’ll see will be the row upon row of pitiless shark teeth closing down on you. I think I got off the subject somehow.

When I told that reporter, “We want to play this down, so the suckers don’t avoid the beaches,” I simply meant that it was time to reopen our beaches and our economy. It’s lost business that’s the real killer: not just people, but whole communities. Do you want to kill our community? Maybe I should quote you in a newspaper.

So it’s exactly what I was saying on twitter at the time, except a few minor details about the insatiable marine predator Carcharodon carcharias. Twitter has a character limit, as you’re well aware.

And when I said that “We should get everyone we can to go swimming and thrash wildly in the closest possible imitation of a distressed seal,” I was simply calling upon the spirit of loyalty and public service in our nearly 346-year-old community and its citizens. “Amity,” as you know, means friendship.

When I said “Have you seen some of those off-island girls’ bikinis? I wouldn’t mind eating them myself,” that was simply boat-locker talk, and a compliment to our beautiful young guests and the fashionable swimwear for sale here in our town. Life’s too short to get upset about stuff like this, particularly with a frenzied cartilaginous fish honed to homicidal perfection by millions of years of evolution around to shorten it.

 I don’t think the voters are going to hold a little banter against me any more than they did last election, when I was recorded talking about inviting Chief Brody’s wife for “a little midnight harpoon practice.” And speaking of the Chief, I don’t expect voters to mind me hoping “the shark eats that snotty New York bastard, so I can show his widow my blow hole.” People from New York can be prickly. 

 No one cares what I may or may not have said to a famous investigative journalist who explicitly asked permission to record me. Who are you going to believe? All that matters is, the sun is shining, the beaches are full, and we’re going to have the best Fourth of July we’ve ever had. You’re the one who says it’s September. I prefer to be an optimist.

Fear, Loathing, and Pandemics

An epidemic turns out to be a rotten time to have a germophobe President. Trump's more obvious pathologies -- ignorance, narcissism, magical thinking, pathological lying -- have gotten the obvious attention, because those are all real dangers to public safety. But Trump's germophobia makes him fundamentally unsuited to a public health crisis. His focus on making sure that he, personally, does not get ill, is just the mindset that increases the number of people who will. Selfishness helps an epidemic thrive. The outbreak can only be defeated by cooperation. It attacks the whole society, and the society needs to fight back together.

How do I not get it? is the wrong question to ask in plague time, although of course everyone would like not to get it. How do I not spread it? is the more important question.

If your goal is to be one of the lucky ones, to be spared while others fall ill, that will be counterproductive, because other people getting it raises your risk. The fewer people get it, the less likely you are to be one of them. (This logic can be particularly difficult for elites or the super-rich to grasp, since they're used to being spared from widespread problems.) If your whole strategy is just to protect yourself, that will likely fail. Viruses gonna virus. If your strategy is to help your whole community control it, your individual odds will probably go up.

I've found myself, for the last week or two, treating myself as presumptively infected. There's no sign I have covid-19 or anything like it, but I live with someone I don't want to get sick. So I'm acting as if I have something and trying not to expose my wife to any germs I might have. Likewise, I'm trying not to do anything in the classroom that might expose my students. I wash my hands a lot these days.

I'm middle aged, but not elderly, and there are no known covid-19 cases in my area yet. My odds if I come down with covid-19 aren't as good as they would be if  were 10 years younger, but they're not bad. Should I come down with a case, I will probably ride it out fine. But I don't want to spread the damn thing.

Pretty soon, this very infectious little bug is going to get close to Trump. I don't expect him to respond well.

Why Booing Trump Matters

Various elite media types clucked, scolded, and clutched their pearls after Donald Trump got booed at the World Series and some of the crowd spontaneously chanted "Lock him up!" Because when ordinary voters do it, it's "uncivil." When Trump does it, it's the Voice of the People. But the talking heads' discomfort was about something more important: cognitive dissonance. Trump being booed threatens their worldview. The American media cannot accept the fact that President Trump is unpopular.

Donald Trump is very unpopular. More than half the country dislikes him. The polls have always shown this. But the media and political establishments refuse to digest this. They always find a way to attach a but or a qualification.

Unpopular, but that's just the other party. (Forget what the polls say about independents.) Unpopular, but only in the big cities (where most of the people are). Unpopular, but not in "Real America" (where most of the people aren't). Unpopular, but that's just the elite.

There's no such thing as a small elite that makes up more than half the population. If you think about that for a second, it's obvious. So some people work very hard to avoid thinking about it for even a second.

Having a random World Series crowd lustily boo the President of the United States threatens the pundits' world view. It undermines what they "know" to be true. So they organize all the excuses they can to protect the conventional wisdom from the facts.

Here's the thing: Trump, as a reality TV type used to creating false appearances, has carefully managed every appearance of his Presidency, precisely because he was afraid of this. He knows he's deeply unpopular and is afraid other people will catch on. So this may be the first time in his presidency that he's been outside without hand-picking his audience.

And look: people hate him. 100% of Trump's genuine public appearances have resulted in him being booed and jeered. The last time I saw him enter a public place where he didn't control the guest list was election day, when he went to vote in his local precinct. He got heckled. The video clearly captures some guy shouting, "You're gonna lose!"

Donald Trump is an unpopular figure with a small, fiercely loyal cult following. That cult following is a real political fact, which needs to be confronted. But it is not at all the same as wider popularity, and it becomes impossible to think about him, or strategize against him, if you don't think about the actual situation. And yet, our media establishment refuses to take the depths of his unpopularity on board. They are not at all interested in what is really happening. They'd rather go out and interview one of his stalwart superfans again, as if that told us anything.

Because Donald Trump is right about one thing: if the false perception of his popularity went away, that would change things.

cross-posted from Dagblog. All comments welcome there, not here.

Impeaching the Black Swan

I have no idea how the impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump will play out. Neither does anyone else. The most important thing to remember when reading media coverage of the impeachment process is that the writer has no idea how the impeachment process is likely to go. This goes for everybody.

The standard conventional wisdom has been that impeachment will backfire on the Democrats in a replay of 1998, when the Republicans impeached Clinton but made him more popular. There is no real reason to believe this. I'm not saying it won't happen. I'm just saying there's no evidence it will. There's only reason to expect an exact repeat of 1998, and I'm using the word "reason" loosely, is that a lot of political journalists covered 1998 and therefore assume this will go the same way. That assumption has nothing to do with logic or evidence.

Impeachments of a sitting president are so rare that it's impossible to generalize about them. This has only happened three times in the last 230 years, and one of those times the president resigned before the process finished playing out. Every single instance of impeachment is an outlier. They are all black swans.

There haven't been enough presidents of the United States, or even presidential elections, to constitute a valid statistical sample. But we fudge that, and run the numbers anyway, not always admitting how unreliable the results are. But no one can pretend that three is a statistical sample. That's ridiculous. No one tries to extrapolate anything from a baseball player's batting average after only three at-bats, or should. But this is more like a situation where only three games of baseball have ever been played. Predictions based on that are folly.

Would you read a sex-advice book written by someone who's only had sex three times? 'Or someone who started having sex three times, and finished twice? Pontificating about how impeachments turn out is the same way. No one has enough experience to know what's likely, or what's normal, and what isn't.

Over-generalizing from limited experience is a common mistake and a basic part of many political journalists' approach to their work. If you've ever heard a political journalist talking about some candidate's "Sister Souljah" moment, you've been given a good example. The journalist takes a thing that happened one time during Bill Clinton's 1992 primary run and treats it as something that must happen in all campaigns always. Woe betide the Democratic candidate without his or her Sister Souljah moment. But in fact there is no reason to expect the Sister Souljah incident to be repeated.

There are some people who try to argue that a 2019 impeachment will be a replay of Watergate in 1974 rather than of Clinton in 1998. But there's no reason to think that, either. It's no more likely than a replay of 1998. This doesn't have to be a replay of anything. Something totally different could happen. If there were such a thing as smart money in this case, and there's not, it would probably be on previously unforeseen outcome.

All three of the previous presidential impeachments were weird and therefore hard to compare to one another in any meaningful way. This one is also strange. The first impeachment was of a president who'd been vice-president before the president was assassinated, which had never happened before either, and he was not from the murdered president's party but the opposing party, because of a national unity ticket during the Civil War, and ... you get the idea. Totally unrepeatable circumstances. Watergate was also very strange. The Clinton impeachment was maybe the most "normal," in the sense of the impeached president's wrongdoing being the least unusual (which is not an excuse for illegality but a comment on its statistical distribution), but that arguably makes the Clinton impeachment unusual in its own right, another freak occurrence. Impeachments are so weird that you learn nothing from one experiment that you can generalize to the next. Nate Silver isn't going to help you out of this one.

The circumstances we're faced with are extremely strange, and so is the current occupant of the White House. Trump doesn't fit many precedents or norms. He's a kind of black swan president himself, who sometimes gets treated in the press as if normal probabilities don't apply to him. Trump won despite being behind in the poll and despite losing the popular vote by a bigger margin than any electoral-college winner ever had, so there's a sense in the press that the normal political expectations don't apply and that Trump's awful poll numbers, for example, won't hurt his chances at reelection. (This is another version of the generalizing-from-one-result error. Trump won a massively unlikely victory last time, so some people expect him to win next time. It's a bit like expecting someone who just turned an unassisted triple play to do it again tomorrow.)

It's not simply that we lack the experience to know what will happen or what will likely happen. We don't have the experience to foresee everything that can happen.

If you've only rolled a pair of dice three times, most of the possible outcomes have never occurred. There are eleven basic outcomes, from rolling a two to rolling a twelve. After three rolls, you haven't seen most of those. In fact, you may not have seen the most likely outcomes yet. Seven is the most likely result, coming up once in every six throws. But if you've only thrown the dice three times, the odds of seeing at least one seven are only between 42 and 43%, less than half. You are more likely not to have seen a seven than to have seen one.

That doesn't mean seven can't or won't happen on the next roll of the dice. It remains just as likely as it ever was, as do all the other results you haven't rolled yet. (Similarly, if you have only seen three at-bats of baseball, you may not have seen a hit, or a strikeout, or a walk, which doesn't make them any less likely in at-bat number four.) Expecting the next throw of the dice to produce the same result as the throw just before it, and discounting the possibility of an outcome you haven't previously seen, is obviously a mistake.  But that is exactly how many people are discussing impeachment.

The current thinking is that the party that impeaches the president will be punished by the voters, because that's the conventional wisdom about what happened last time. (We can debate that, too, but for purposes of this argument I won't.) No one talks about any political risk for the party defending its president, or facing a backlash from voters for shielding a president who's committed crimes, because that's never happened before. But "never happened before" in this case means "has not turned up in a minuscule and not necessarily representative sample of three freakishly-strange events." That something didn't happen in the first three tries doesn't make it impossible. It doesn't even necessarily make it unlikely.

In the same way, the three results you have seen aren't necessarily the high-probability ones. You might have rolled snake-eyes or boxcars in the first three rolls, either of which only happens once every 36 times. A thing that happens only three percent of the time is something that could and does happen. To bring things back to American political history: in 1804 the United States had only had three vice-presidents. One of those three had shot another Founding Father dead. That didn't mean that future veeps had a 33.3% likelihood of killing a Cabinet secretary in a duel (which would get us up to sixteen killer vice-presidents at this point). It just meant that three examples is nowhere close to being enough to get a sense of what's normal. (Presidents Washington, Adams, and Jefferson weren't exactly a representative sample themselves.)

We don't have enough of a historical track record to know what's likely, or even the full range of what's possible. As the late, great William Goldman said about the film business, nobody knows anything.

Alea jacta est, kids. Buckle up.

cross-posted at Dagblog. Please post comments there, not here.

Should Our Allies Hack Our Elections?

Two things about the Mueller report are not up for debate: the Russians interfered in our last election, and no one is going to do anything about that. One party is hobbled by the need for bipartisanship, and the other so blinded by partisanship that they'll treat attempts to ward off foreign interference as political attacks on their own side. While we're making this about Trump, out foreign adversaries are preparing to attack our elections again. We haven't punished them or done anything to stop them, so why would they stop? All we've done is give them time to improve their methods.

But it won't just be the Russians. It will be other hostile intelligence services. The Chinese, certainly. The North Koreans. Maybe the Iranians, surely the Saudis. Everyone might as well try, since we've created no downside for them. They get a risk-free shot at influencing American policy against American interests, and if that fails they still get to weaken us. No matter what happens, we lose and they don't.

The question, if we're going to allow foreigners to hack our elections without doing anything about it except saying they shouldn't, is at what point even our allies have to join in. If your nation's most important ally is allowing hostile powers to interfere in its elections, and those hostile powers want to weaken your alliances and harm your national interests, at what point do you have a duty to try to sway American elections yourself? When does it get so bad that the French have no choice but to hack us?

Let me very clear: I am absolutely opposed to any foreign power meddling in our elections. I don't want the French or Germans or Canadians messing with this any more than I want the Russians and Saudis and North Koreans. Every foreign power should stay the hell out.

But if we don't stop outside meddlers, outsiders will meddle, and the number of meddlers will only grow.

When I am trying to think through something strategically, I try to imagine myself not as the other party, but as someone charged to give that other party the best advice possible. Instead of thinking about what I want, or what I hope or think or imagine the other side wants, I try to imagine what I would tell the other side to do if I were an adviser with a duty to lay out all the options. That gets me away from wishful thinking to strategic realities.

If I were a Canadian (or Frenchman or German) staffing Justin Trudeau or Emanuel Macron or Angela Merkel, I would have to put forward hacking the American elections as an option to consider, and I would have to make sure to offer the prime minister (etc.) a plan to do that effectively. No one counseling them can take that option off the table.

If you're Justin Trudeau, you're facing a real danger of your neighbor to your south crashing your economy, and his own, and Mexico's, for no particularly good reason. The President of the United States routinely threatens to shut borders and disrupt North America's integrated supply chains. That is hard to stomach on its own, because if Trump crashes the whole NAFTA trade bloc Trudeau's voters will be out of work and nothing else will get accomplished but dealing with economic catastrophe. But it's all especially hard to take when this danger actually comes from a foreign power. Should Trudeau let Russia do this to Canada? Would you let them? Or would you do what it took to protect your country?

Hacking our elections on the side of positive values and international commitments would be harder than just sowing chaos and tearing down responsible leaders, as the Russians have done. It has always been harder to build than to destroy, and it's almost impossible on Facebook. But on the other hand, our allies have a better sense of our culture than our enemies do. But if it comes to running psy ops against us, the Canadians have a built-in advantage. Who knows us better?

This will of course, be a disaster, and part of a larger disaster, as friendly and hostile countries play cloak and dagger to swing Rust Belt electoral votes. It's a nightmare. It's also probably inevitable.

The only way to stop it is to protect our country's elections, for real. And our political establishment isn't ready to do that.

cross-posted from Dagblog. All comments welcome there, not here

Talk Like Crazy People Are Listening

Dear politicians: talk like crazy people are listening to you. Because they are. We're a big country, with hundreds of millions of people and no guaranteed health care. That means there are a lot of Americans who are mentally ill, and a lot of those people can't get proper treatment. Every time you speak in public, remember that there are some disturbed people who will take what you say, whatever you say, seriously, and that they might act on it.

We've been having a lot of public debates about "responsibility," 'unity," "civility," and other complicated, nuanced words that are easy to twist around to mean different things. So I'm going to keep it simple. Every public figure speaking in public has got to remember that some crazy people are listening. Don't say anything that those people will understand as a call to violence.

But won't mentally ill people misunderstand things, and hear calls to violence that weren't intended that way? Yes. Exactly. They may well hear you calling for blood when you thought you were carefully staying on the right side of the line. That's why you should get nowhere near the line, at all, ever.

This rule is not hard. Don't act like it's not simple.

There are troubled people watching TV and listening to the radio and reading the internet all day, and they have trouble sorting out what's real. Don't scare those people into using bombs or guns.

But what if the talk-like-crazy-people-are-listening rule cramps my style? What if it takes away my big rally lines that excite the crowd, or the new spike in my ratings? What then?

Then you're risking people's lives for personal gain. What good do you think is going to come of that?

cross-posted from Dagblog; all comments welcome there, rather than here

I Am Part of the Resistance Inside King Lear's Court

King Lear is facing a test to his monarchy unlike any other faced by a fictitious British monarch. It is not just that he parceled out his kingdom and left himself nothing. Or that the country is bitterly divided between his scheming, ungrateful daughters. Or even that the kingdom may soon be overwhelmed by French invaders.

The tragedy – which he does not fully grasp – is that many of his own followers are working diligently from within to frustrate his goals.

I would know. I am one of them.

To be clear, ours is not the mealy-mouthed “resistance” of Cordelia and her sore-loser followers. We strongly believe in the division of this kingdom into unstable warring duchies. But we believe our first duty is to unchecked, unreasoning monarchical authority, and the King’s continued ravings bring autocratic one-man rule into disrepute. That is why many of his followers have vowed to do what we can to preserve tyrannical feudalism while thwarting King Lear’s more misguided impulses until his o’erburdened heart cracks and can bear no more.

The root of the problem is that the King is outdoors, yelling at clouds. We are not even sure if he knows it’s raining. But whatever he is shouting for us to do, we’re not doing it. We could be hit by lightning out there. If he asks later, we’ll just pretend we don’t understand iambic pentamenter.

Don’t get me wrong.  There are bright spots. Both Regan and Goneril are pretty hot – like, at least eights. We’re all much bigger deals at court than we were before everyone got banished. And seeing the old Earl of Gloucester’s eyes put out was, face it, pretty hilarious.

But these good things have come despite – not because of – King Lear’s leadership, which is impetuous, petty, and obsessed with setting up obscure punch lines for his Fool.

He veers off into long, ranting monologues that force us to check our footnotes. He shows up to important meetings dressed mostly in wildflowers. And he can angrily berate the furniture under the impression that it is part of his family.

This erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes like us. Some of his courtiers have been cast as villains. But in private, we have gone to great lengths to keep his demented soliloquies out on the storm-tossed heath where they belong.

It may be cold comfort as Britain descends into bloody civil war, but you should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to keep King Lear from messing it up for us.

So when King Lear say orders us to execute a stool for the crime of being an ungrateful child, we definitely don’t do that. And we don’t go bothering Goneril or Regan. We just take away the stool. Problem solved! And also, more office furniture for us.

Also, whenever Lear has one of his crazypants "character-growth" insights about doing more for the poor naked wretches or whatever, we don’t do that either. I mean, that money could go for something useful. We just say, “Ooooh, Your Majesty, how profound! It’s like the mad have really been the sane ones all along! Who’s really blind here, and who’s, like, symbolically blind?” Then he forgets and moves on to something else.

This isn’t vulgar flattery. This is artful, steady flattery. Thou. Art. Welcome.

Given the instability many have witnessed, there were early whispers of crowning some capable, legitimate successor in King Lear’s place to guide our country back to peace and sanity.. But no one really wanted to precipitate a dynastic crisis, especially when basically we already have one. So we will do what we can to steer this monarchy until -- one way or another -- it’s all over. Really, how much worse could it get?


cross-posted from Dagblog; all comments welcome there, not here

The Deputy Who Didn't Shoot

People, including the President of the United States, are heaping scorn and shame on the Broward County Deputy who was assigned to protect Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, but who did not go into the building to confront the Parkland shooter. He has lost his job. He will probably never live this down, and may never get over his guilt. I don't particularly admire him, but we should not pretend for a second that he is the reason that lives were lost. I might hope and wish he'd gone into that building, but his behavior was completely normal. He's not the first school-protection officer to behave in exactly the same way.

First, let's deal with a simple fact. He was outgunned. The shooter's AR-15 was superior to the deputy's sidearm in nearly every way. It's easier to aim, it has a longer effective range, it's more powerful, and it can fire many more bullets before reloading. The 19-year-old misfit had the law enforcement officer badly outgunned, because that's the country we have decided to live in.

The AR-15's superior firepower makes it more dangerous in the shooter's relatively untrained hands than the deputy's pistol was in his trained hand. The kid had enough firepower to kill the deputy before the deputy could get close enough to return effective fire, and the shooter had enough rounds in the magazine that he didn't need to be an especially good shot. He could just keep shooting. In a straight-up firefight, the expected outcome is that the shooter with the AR-15 kills the deputy with the handgun, not the other way around.

We shouldn't assume that the deputy would have stopped or killed the Parkland shooter if he'd gone in. In fact, he was much more likely to have been killed by the shooter. The deputy would have needed to get some kind of tactical advantage on the shooter, by for example finding a way to get close to him and then shoot behind cover. But entering the building would probably have put him at a tactical disadvantage. He was much more likely to find himself in a position where the shooter had the drop on him, or was firing from behind cover, or both. The deputy had almost certainly undergone active-shooter training which made clear to him exactly how dangerous going into a building after a shooter is.

This is what the old assault-weapons ban was about: about not having the cops outgunned by criminals, or by random kids. But we have decided that the Second Amendment requires us to live in a world where nearly everyone has access to pretty serious firepower. The country where teenagers outgun the cops is exactly what the NRA has been lobbying for, has been demanding, for decades now.

The Broward County Sheriff has also announced from now on school-protection officers will have, well, AR-15s. But that's not a good solution; upping the firepower in an arms race just increases the risk all around. And it's too late now. The shooting is over, and the deputy only had the weapon he had.

Now, does part of my heart wish that the deputy had heroically gone into that building anyway, knowing he was more likely to be killed than the save anybody? Do I wish he'd tried? Sure. Especially when I compare his position to the unarmed teachers who had to sacrifice themselves inside. But we're asking for extraordinary heroism here, even for futile self-sacrifice.

If your position is that the deputy should have gone in and died trying even if it was hopeless, that he had a duty to get killed, that's a position. But admit that's what you're saying. 

Instead of blaming the deputy for not risking his life against the odds, we should ask why he was put in that position at all. We have created, and accepted, a system where the deputy is more likely to be killed himself than to stop the killing. Let's not talk about what he did or didn't do without keeping that in mind.

There was also an armed county deputy at the Columbine shooting. He didn't go into the building either. So what the Broward deputy did is not unexpected; it's what happened before. The deputy at Columbine High did manage to exchange some fire with one of the shooters in the parking lot, but when the killers went into the building he did not follow. Later, he and the same shooter exchanged some more fire through a window, without any real result. You will sometimes find people on the internet looking for evidence of "good guys with guns" point to the Columbine officer and say that it would have been worse without him, but there's no evidence of that. The Columbine shooters managed to kill 13 victims anyway. It's not clear the deputy even managed to slow them down much.

The officer at Columbine waited outside the building until backup arrived. That was not cowardice on his part. It was what he had been trained to do. He did not enter Columbine High, where he was more likely to become a victim than to save one. In fact, a number of other deputies and officers showed up and all remained outside the building, focused on evacuating fleeing students and sometimes providing covering fire for them. They shot back at the killers when the killers shot out windows, but they didn't enter the school. Eventually a SWAT team arrived, a force strong enough to overwhelm the shooters, and that SWAT team went into the building, at which point the Columbine shooters killed themselves.

The Broward County Sheriff has said unequivocally that his deputy should have gone “in. Addressed the killer. Killed the killer." The last part is wishful: just because Sheriff Israel would want his deputy to succeed in killing the shooter, that doesn't mean that it would have happened. You can expect your deputy to try. You cannot mandate that he succeed. And Sheriff Israel has to know that his deputy was more likely to be killed by the killer. Even I know that.

As for demanding that the deputy enter the building and engage the shooter, that may be an expectation. But it may be a retroactive expectation. I am not at all sure how the deputy was trained. Taking a defensive position and waiting for backup may, in fact, be what the deputy had been told to do in this situation. Deciding after the fact that he should have done something else is, well, too late. Maybe Broward County deputies are trained to rush into dangerous situations without backup if the situation seems bad enough. I have known cops who rushed into homes before backup could arrive because they thought a situation, such as a domestic dispute, was getting too dangerous too fast. (To be fair, those cops weren't rushing into buildings where there was gunfire.) But neither would I be surprised if standard Broward County training turns out to dictate exactly what the deputy ended up doing.

And, for what it's worth, we have been training a whole generation of cops, across the United States, to be very risk-averse, with training that heavily emphasizes the danger they're in. One of the reasons we've had so many police shootings of non-dangerous civilians is that the cops' training has made them intolerant of even very minor risk, and encouraged them to use deadly force in self-defense even against things that later turn out to have been phantom threats. Those civilians got killed because cops are now trained to approach every tactical situation from a place of fear. They have fear of their lives drilled into them as part of their training. It shouldn't be a surprise that a deputy whose training likely emphasized mortal fear didn't rush to face a genuine threat to his life.

cross-posted from Dagblog; comments welcome there, not here

The Art of No Deal

As everyone has already noticed, a president who boasts about his deal-making skills, author of The Art of the Deal, has been unable to strike a deal to keep his own government funded. Worse, he actually blew up a deal in the making, and now negotiations from the White House side seem to have all but stopped. This is because the word "deal" doesn't mean what Donald Trump thinks it means. He doesn't want a deal. He wants a "win," which he defines as the other side losing. And that makes deal-making impossible.

Now, all the blame does not fall on Trump. We have years of legislative brinksmanship and hostage-taking to thank for this, all of it pioneered by the Republicans in Congress with their government shutdowns and debt-ceiling hijinks. McConnell and Ryan bear heavy loads of blame, as do the House Freedom Caucus, who often defy their own leadership, and the so-called "Hastert Rule" which allows Republican hard-liners to keep popular bills off the House floor. And White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who is supposed to be keeping chaos at bay, seems to have actually been sowing chaos.

But Trump has also messed this up, torpedoing deals in progress. The infamous "shithole" meeting wasn't just a moment where the President singled out black-skinned immigrants as undesirable. It's also a meeting where the President unilaterally destroyed a bipartisan immigration deal that would have moved the funding bill forward. The White House has been disputing the particular foul word the President used, but not his refusal to accept African and Haitian immigrants or his sudden decision to rip up a deal that was close to being made.

If you want to know why the government shut down, that meeting is the key. The President of the United States ripped up a deal and offered nothing in its place. That's when the wheels came off.

John Kelly is also to blame for sabotaging that deal. Senators Graham and Durbin were scheduled for a meeting with the President about the deal they'd been working out, and walked into a room unexpectedly filled with anti-immigration figures who had no real reason to be there, like Tom Cotton. That only happens if the Chief of Staff permits it, or causes it.

None of this should be a surprise. Trump's business career is littered with examples of him changing deals or tearing them up after the fact. Think of the many building contractors he's stiffed, waiting until they'd done the contracted work and then not living up to his half of the contract. And think of his multiple bankruptcies, in which he borrowed vast sums of money, didn't pay it back, and then tried to renegotiate his debts so that he wouldn't have to pay in full. (Now, bankruptcies happen and we have bankruptcy laws for a reason, but the sheer number of Trump's is revealing.) This is why Trump hasn't actually put up a building in a couple of decades, as opposed to entering agreements to put his name on buildings other people create; Trump can't get the funding for his own building projects, because he's known for not sticking to his deals.

The many stories about stiffing contractors suggests that Trump doesn't see business in the both-sides-win, let's-get-to-yes way that most successful businessmen and dealmakers do. He sees business as a zero-sum, I win-you-lose proposition about dominating the other party and making them accept his terms. That is much closer to the mindset of swindlers and racketeers, ho look to extract everything they can without contributing anything to the deal. It's pretty clear that Trump sees business as about beating the other guy. But that mindset encourages people not to deal with you. In fact, it makes it irrational to deal with you. Why give concessions to someone who won't give any back?

This mindset is also clear from the way Trump talks about virtually every treaty or trade agreement the United States has, complaining that they are "terrible deals" and talking about blowing them up. He doesn't think about what America gets back from those deals. He just threatens to blow them up, hoping to extract extra concessions without giving up anything in exchange. No foreign government is actually going to do that, of course. But Trump's whole career has been about trying to get something for nothing.

Trump the deal-breaker has been on display for the last week. First he blows up the close-to-finished deal that Durbin and Graham were trying to finalize. Then, in the opposite of normal negotiating behavior, he kept demanding more and more without giving anything in return.

The way it's supposed to work when you get close to a deal is that each side trades a little bit more until they have a bargain. It's what you do when you buy a house, or a used car. And usually what you do in that situation is offer small concessions in order to get other concessions back. You do the sidewalk repairs the city inspector wants and I'll throw you some money toward closing costs. You  come up a little on price and I'll throw in the washer and dryer. What you never do is increase your demands when you're close to a deal. If we're five hundred bucks apart on price, I don't suddenly increase my ask by another thousand dollars. I don't suddenly demand that you pay my closing costs AND throw in your washer and dryer. Of course not. But Trump does.

There was a deal in process and, two days before the deadline, Trump blew it up, apparently expecting to get more. That wasn't just moving the goalposts. It was increasing the ask. The Democrats were willing to trade some things in order to keep 800,000 kids from being deported, including other immigration concessions. Then Trump said that wasn't enough, and essentially that he wanted Dem votes to avoid a shutdown without giving them anything on the Dreamers. Oddly, the Democrats were not eager to go along with a deal where they were getting less.

Trump even threatened to reduce his offer even more, tweeting his opinion that CHIP should be taken out of the bill. Fortunately, that did not happen. But it sure would not have helped. Then Trump spends ninety minutes personally negotiating with Chuck Schumer and got an offer of funding for his ridiculous border wall in exchange for not deporting the Dreamers. Then John Kelly calls Schumer to retract the offer. This is not getting to yes. This is actively, doggedly, moving toward no at every opportunity.

Now the Republicans say they refuse to negotiate about the Dreamers at all until the Dems cave on the continuing resolution. So they're saying the Democrats have to give concessions before even asking for things. Demanding the other side cave is not negotiation.

I have no idea how long this shutdown lasts. It could be over Monday afternoon. It could stretch into February. It may end in a compromise. It may end with the Democrats caving. It may end with the Republicans melting down. I really don't know, and I'd be a fool to make a prediction. But there are two real possibilities that should go into the mix.

It would not surprise me if Senate and House eventually make a deal without Trump and send it to him to sign. He isn't helping negotiations. They might hash this through without him.

It would also not surprise me if Trump increases his demands at some point, either demanding more concessions from the Democrats or taking back part of the offer already on the table. That would be a mistake, but it would be one of Trump's favorite kinds of mistake.

cross-posted from Dagblog; all comments welcome there, rather than here

Trump Does Not Care If People Get Hurt

President Trump's impromptu press conference today was a shocking display of his moral depravity and his allegiance to bigotry. There are so many things wrong with it, in so many stunning ways, that everyone is trying to digest it and focusing on different parts. But one particularly scary thing has not yet gotten much attention: Trump shows a nearly complete lack of interest in preventing more bloodshed like this. That is unprecedented, and extremely dangerous.

Every previous president of the United States has been deeply averse to civil violence and has always worked to prevent it. That's only natural. Civil violence and disorder are the opposite of government; our leaders' power is vested in exactly the order that civil violence disrupts. Our long national struggle over civil rights, which has often led to street unrest by various parties, has highlighted this. Every president, whatever their party loyalty or racial politics, has made keeping order and avoiding violence a paramount goal. Presidents who were sympathetic with angry segregationists, or who needed them for electoral reasons, still wanted to prevent any violence or lawbreaking by segregationist mobs. Even politicians who were themselves personally racist did not want racist violence in the streets, because preventing violence in the streets was always seen as crucial. In the same way, politicians who were for progress on civil rights were nonetheless very much against any violence by, say, the Black Panthers, or any riots in African-American neighborhoods. Preventing riots is central to the President's job, and to the President's authority.

In a real sense, you can say that JFK became a pro-civil rights president because it was eventually his only way to get peace in the streets. When he entered the White House, civil rights was not on his agenda. Whatever personal liberalism he had on civil rights issues was strictly abstract; he was not going to act on that. But then he had to deal with furious, angry segregationist mobs and with Southern politicians from his own party who refused to control those mobs. Some of his phone calls with Southern governors (which JFK taped) are desperate and frustrating. And the transcripts make it clear that, more than anything else, Kennedy does not want to see anyone hurt or killed. Eventually JFK moves to back the civil rights agenda strongly because it's the right thing to do but also because he can't get any cooperation from the other side, so he just has to beat them.

But today President Trump did none of the things American presidents do to calm things down and prevent violence. He excused provocative behavior, claiming that white supremacists were "quietly protesting" when they were actually shouting about hating Jews. Worse still, he made it clear that he favored one side, and justified their violence to the greatest degree he could. He even said that some of the white supremacists were "fine people" and not white supremacists at all. NONE of that is what you do when you want people to stop doing something. All of it was aimed at excusing what they had done and signaling them NOT to stop. Ask yourself white the alt-right knuckleheads think when they hear Trump talking like that. What they hear is, "Keep going, fellas, I'm on your side."

That is just crazy. It shows Trump's complete, depraved indifference to public safety. And it exposes his indifference, or actual hostility, to the rule of law which his office embodies. The President is meant to enforce public order, and that legal order is the foundation of the President's power. And so every previous president has put questions of order-vs.-disorder before pettier questions of right-vs.-left or party-vs.-party. Trump has no seeming regard for public order, and sees things instead in ideological or partisan terms, as Us vs. Them. (None of his predecessors ever, even once, thought of any street thugs as part of "us.")  Or, even worse, Trump owes his allegiance to chaos itself. He is a representative of disorder, and thrives on it. That is a terrifying thought.

I would usually say that this is the kind of behavior that could get someone killed. But it's too late to say that now. Someone is already dead.

(cross-posted from Dagblog. All comments welcome there, not here.)

Ask the Blue States About Terrorism

Here are a few pictures from Copley Square in Boston, where the Boston Marathon ends:

But as you can see, they are not from April's running of the Marathon. They are from a January demonstration against Trump's Muslim Ban.

And yes, that means that Boston held a massive demonstration for Muslim immigrants' rights right next to the site of a shocking terrorist attack by two Muslim immigrants. Just for logistical reasons, a lot of protestors must have had to walk across the Marathon's finish line, and by the sites of the bombs themselves.

A sign that Boston has forgotten the Marathon bombings? Oh hell no. They are still all too fresh in that city's mind. A sign that Bostonians don't care about the victims, or aren't serious about fighting terrorism? Don't be ridiculous.

A small explanation is that Copley Square happens to be Boston's best place for large gatherings like this, so that you have the crowds of protestors in the same public square where you have the crowds of cheering running fans. But the bigger explanation is that Boston, like many so-called blue cities, is both anti-terrorist and pro-immigrant. If that seems not to make sense to you, let me just say: these people are literally standing in a place that they know terrorists have attacked. They are literally putting themselves on the line here, so you maybe you should hear them out.

One of the oddities of American political life today is that our approach to terrorism is being dictated by the people in the least danger of a terrorist attack.


Here are the top US targets for foreign terrorists:
New York City
Washington, DC
Los Angeles
Chicago
San Francisco

Maybe San Francisco makes that top tier, and maybe it belongs in the next one, with places like Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, Seattle, etc. etc. etc. But let's be honest: if Al-Qaeda or Daesh aka "ISIS" spends months planning a complicated attack on US soil, it's almost certainly going to be in one of those four or five top targets. Those are the places they care about; those are the places they've heard about. And those are the places that have large symbolic value overseas. International Islamist terrorists dream of destroying LAX and Times Square and the Capitol Dome. They are not interested in the so-called American Heartland. Islamist terrorists from overseas would never attack Oklahoma City, for example, because they don't really know where Oklahoma City is.

Now, that doesn't mean that Oklahoma City isn't a great place to live. It can be wonderful without being internationally famous. I've lived in a bunch of places that overseas terrorists have never heard of, and those places were nice. But the truth is terrorists aren't interested in underrated places that are nice to live. They're interested in attacking famous places. I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but national security is more important than your feelings or mine.

Now one of the things animating our red/blue split is a deep division on what to do with terrorism. Everyone agrees that terrorism is a serious problem. The general Red Team approach to terrorism is that this is a deep national emergency that calls for shutting down immigration, increased military strikes overseas, and heavy ethnic profiling of Muslims: in some cases outright demonization of Islam itself. The Blue Team strategy calls for a mix of police and military responses with diplomacy, patience and outreach. The Blue strategy is built around trying to isolate the terrorists and sharpen the divide between them and everyday Muslims. The Red strategy considers that a hopeless cause, and demands that we use the hammer as hard as we can, everywhere. Sometimes it considers Islam itself the problem. Blue voters see making the fight about Islam itself as one of the worst and most self-destructive things to do: basically pushing people into the terrorists' arms.

Now, these strategies work against each other. You can only follow one. Either you're doing outreach to Muslims, or you're denouncing Islam. And both sides feel that the other strategy is dangerous and self-destructive.

Because we're a democracy, we resolve this conflict by voting. And over the last few elections, the Red voters have won, and we're following the Red strategy. But here's the problem:

The places that the terrorists target are overwhelmingly Blue, full of Blue voters. New York, Chicago, LA, DC, San Francisco: all super blue. Almost, like, ultra-violet. A lot of the second tier targets are likewise blue: either the Democratic strongholds of Democratic states, or the Blue island in a Red or Purple State. Boston. Miami. Philly. Seattle. If terrorists ever attack Missouri, God forbid, it will be in Democratic-voting St. Louis. If, God forbid, terrorists attack Georgia, it will be in central Atlanta. That's how the terrorists' strategy works. They want large, busy, and well-known urban areas.Those are the places that are pro-urban, pro-trade, and generally pro-immigrant. They are also the places where the most American immigrants are.

In fact, the Red strategy has one precisely because it's favored in less populated rural areas. More people vote for Blue candidates, both for President and for Congress, but our system builds in an advantage for rural districts so that a smaller number of voters defeat a larger, but more geographically concentrated, group of voters.

So we're following the Red anti-terrorism strategy, but the Blue voters are the targets. They are the ones at risk. If we try the Blue strategy and fail, it's Blue voters whose lives are at risk. But if we follow the Red strategy and it fails, most of the Red voters will still be safe in their rural areas. Their mistakes won't get them killed. Daesh (aka "ISIS") is not going to be launching any attacks on Youngstown, Ohio or rural Wisconsin. Not now, and probably not ever.

So let me suggest that maybe the Blue-state voters, and the urban-blue-pocket voters may know what they're doing. They may have actually thought this through. Don't tell them that they don't take terrorism seriously. A lot of them live in New York City. And even if they are wrong, they deserve to be listened to, because they have skin in the game -- sometimes all of their skin in the game -- in the way most of the rest of us do not. If you find yourself puzzled and frustrated by the politicians and the policies they vote for, the approach to fighting terrorism that they support, let me translate what those urban Blue voters are saying to the rest us:

Publicly hating Islam is not helping. Stereotyping people is not helping. You are making it worse. Please, please don't get us killed. Thanks. 

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

How This White House Lies

Donald Trump is both one of the most gifted liars in American politics, a genius of dishonesty, and at the same time hopelessly bad at lying. His lawless firing of FBI Director Comey shows the ineptitude. Trump led with a story so weak that no one could pretend to believe it and then, within forty-eight hours had abandoned that story for one that was actually more incriminating. A White House that keeps changing its story is in crisis. A White House that changes it story to something more damaging is out of its mind.

The problem for Trump is that his approach to lying, which has been enormously effective for most of his career, is not working in this situation. The problem for Trump's press secretary and deputy press secretary, Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is not just that they are being sent out to lie, but that they are sent out to lie like Trump himself, without Trump's skill set, even in situations where Trump's approach is wrong.

There are two things that make a lie work. Some lies work because they are plausible. Others work because they are emotionally satisfying. Some lies are both, of course, but others work by being one or the other.

A plausible lie is one that seems believable from an objective standpoint. It's false, but the falsehood sounds likely: it's the kind of thing that actually does happen, it doesn't contradict any known facts, there's no real reason not to believe it. A stockbroker claims to be bringing in, say, 15% more money a year for clients than he really is; you would need to see his books to bust him on that lie, whereas if he claimed to be doubling clients' money every six months it simply wouldn't be plausible. If I pretended to be close buddies with some of the famous people I went to college with, it would take some time and effort, or some bad luck on my part, to bust me. A google search will show that I actually did graduate from the same college as those people did, in the same year, so for all you know we might once have had some deep conversation in the dining hall. The lie is plausible.

An emotionally satisfying lie, on the other hand, is one that satisfies the listener's emotional needs. It may not make them happy -- in fact, it may make them fearful or enraged -- but it hooks them. It fulfills their need to feel loved, it offers a way out of medical or financial trouble, it offers them a scapegoat for their failures, it confirms their belief that they have been persecuted. (See Michael Wolraich's Blowing Smoke for the addictive power of "feeling hard done by.") And if the listener wants or needs to believe badly enough, the lie doesn't have to be that plausible. If you really want to blame Mexican immigrants for losing your job, the fact that immigration for Mexico is actually declining does not matter a bit; you won't even take that fact on board. People on Twitter have been congratulating Trump for going to Israel when Obama did not, which is completely ridiculous. Obama did go to Israel, of course. It only takes five seconds to check. But the people the lie is aimed at don't want to check. They want to believe.

Most Washington Beltway types, the reporters and lawyers and Congressional staffers and so on who make up most of our political and chattering classes, tend to lie as plausibly as they can. If they're going to tell a falsehood, they will try to make that falsehood as probable-sounding and hard to check as they can manage. Sooner or later every White House Press Secretary has to tell a lie, large or small; when they do, they make it as plausible as they can, because they know they can't bank on their listeners' desire to believe. They're talking to an audience that wants to fact-check them, so they craft lies that can stand up to scrutiny from skeptical and dispassionate, or even hostile, observers. Washington, DC and New York City are cities of plausible liars.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is an absolute master of the emotionally satisfying lie. His genius is telling people what they want -- no, need -- to hear, and getting them to invest their emotions in the lie. And like many people with a gift for emotionally satisfying lies, he has a tendency to believe his own falsehoods, at least some of the time.

Emotionally-satisfying lies are key for people who need small groups of people to believe in them intensely. That includes con artists, cult leaders, and domestic abusers. (I am not calling the President a domestic abuser, and certainly not calling him a religious leader of any kind. I'm just talking about how he lies.) Those liars get their targets deeply keyed up, and deal with attacks on their credibility with various rationalizations and counter-attacks. They are just saying that because they're trying to drive us apart, baby. Don't listen when your mother tries to break us up. These lies don't have to make any sense; they just have to give the believers some way to keep believing. The most successful lie in history, alas, is probably the abuser's special: I only hit you because I love you. That lie works, until it stops working, because the victim cannot bear the truth that the abuser does not love them.

Most journalists and politicians, because they are plausible liars, don't understand how Trump functions at all. Those are not the lies they would tell. That is not the model they follow. Trump's lies only make sense when you understand them as aimed at people who are already in his bunker, sipping his delicious Kool-Aid. This is fake news! This is just people who hate Trump! It's core emotional appeal to believers.

Trump's big problem is that lies designed for bunker-dwellers break down under the scrutiny of the wider world. An abuser's victim may believe he hits her because he loves her; she may need to believe that he hits her because he loves her. But the District Attorney never believes that shit for a second. An abuser who brings those lies into a court of law is in for a world of (well-deserved) hurt. Implausible but emotionally-satisfying lies don't work for an audience that hasn't bought into them emotionally. A cult leader talking to people outside the bunker just sounds crazy and sad.

Emotionally-satisfying lies to a core audience have gotten Trump where he is today. But it's always, always time for plausibility when the police show up. Emotionally-satisfying lie do not help when you're under investigation. They will probably hurt you. Cops don't want to believe you. Lawyers and reporters don't want to believe you. Judges do not want to believe you. They want to hear the truth, and if you can't give them that you need a lie they can't poke holes in.

Trump needed to switch gears when the investigations began. He didn't, because he's probably not capable. He is emotionally dependent upon the same lies that his believers are.

Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders, on the other hand, have an even more intractable problem. They are forced to go out and tell the Washington press corps, the people for whom banal but plausible lies are designed, a series of Trump-like lies: emotionally satisfying to Trump, utterly implausible, and dead in the water to an audience who's not already strongly biased toward Trump. Largest inauguration crowd in history is a classic of its kind. Transparently false, but exciting for people who want to believe it. But that's a catastrophic lie to tell to the Post and the Times.

Certainly, with Trump seemingly in genuine legal jeopardy, his flacks should be sticking to the plausible fictions. But those obviously are not their orders. Instead, they are marched out with outrageously flimsy BS, like "Trump fired Comey for being unfair to Hillary," which not only fails to convince reporters but antagonizes them and makes them pay closer attention to everything you're trying to hide. Big, big mistake. And Spicer, for whom I feel the kind of pity I feel for some of the sufferers in Dante's Hell, is also forced to tell Trump-like likes without anything like Trump's talent for telling them. Spicer, really, should stick to believable bullshit. Trump's grandiose disregard for truth requires Trump's grandiosity and emotional conviction, his instinct for telling his rubes victims voters what they need to hear and his own deeply needy emotional commitment to his lies. These really are not the kind of lies you can hire a middleman to tell for you. You need to tell them yourself. But sooner or later, you will need to deal with the truth.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog