Entry 424: Tough Guys

A quick update on my last post: See this article about how Donald Trump's racist rhetoric might be backfiring politically.  This coheres with my "people are people" campaign strategy for a theoretical Democratic candidate.  Trump won the election in large part by whipping up racial resentment toward immigrants.  But it's one thing to talk tough, and it's another to experience the real-world effects once the tough talk is put into place.  Very few people actually like seeing children torn apart from their parents or hearing of people dying of dehydration trying to make a better life for themselves and their family.  And they don't usually like seeing people in their own communities deported -- it's the other immigrants they don't want in the country -- the "bad" ones.  The key to pursuing a strategy of racial grievance to woo voters is to do it in such a way that said voters don't feel guilty for their racism.  It's easy get behind deporting somebody who is in this country illegally in theory.  It's a lot harder to get behind gratuitously terrorizing people in your neighborhood who were always nice to you.

This is especially true when few of the promised benefits of cracking down on immigration actually come to bear.  As the article points out, Trump hasn't delivered much on this front -- there's no wall, crime rates haven't plummeted, and there is no spate of good, entry-level, industrial jobs in beleaguered communities (because immigrants aren't the actually cause of crime and unemployment).  Trump's base will never leave him, but a lot of his voters aren't in his base -- they voted for him and are supporting him reluctantly.  And the vast majority of them will do so again in 2020 (and they will vote Republican in the upcoming midterms).  But in super close swing elections, stealing one voter from the other side out of 1,000, or getting a small percent of the them to stay home, could be the difference.  "People are people," Democrats -- don't be afraid to say it.

Anyway...

In more personal news, I have a week of single-dadding on the horizon, as S has to take one of her work trips to Africa.  I'm not exactly looking forward to it.  It's not the extra time with my kids that gets to me; it's the added logistical hassle of being the only caretaker.  Not being able to leave the house, even for a few minutes, without two kids in tow is brutal.  You can't run a quick errand; you can't go for a jog; you can't stop by a happy hour event; you can't do anything.  S also spent a few days in Cuba recently for a girl's trip for her birthday, and her parents came up to help, and even though the kids don't really let them do any "work" (I have to get them up and dressed, brush their teeth, entertain them, bathe them, put them to bed, wake up with them in the middle of the night, etc. -- S's mom does cook, however, which is helpful), just having other adults around takes a ton of stress off my shoulders.  Also, this time they were able to pick them up from school/daycare, a relatively minor task -- it only takes about 20 minutes total -- but a huge help because it means I don't have to rush home from work, and I can go to my Krav Maga classes, which have become an important bit of self-care for me.

Speaking of Krav Maga, I've been trying to take it more seriously of late -- I really need to "test up" into the next-level class, but it's hard to stay committed.  Again, it's not the work, it's the logistics.  I really only have time to go three days a week, and I can't even keep up that schedule, because every time S goes out of town or is otherwise unavailable to pick up the kids for the night, I have to skip my class.  The next test date is July 7 (having it on a Saturday also doesn't help), but I have to miss all next week because S is gone, and then I'm missing two more weeks in June for vacation, and it's apparently not the type of test you should take unless you are "studying" hard leading up to it.

So, I'll just remain a level-one patzer a little longer.  It's not that bad, but I'm well past the inflection point and now getting diminishing returns.  I need more of a challenge.  The big thing is the intensity of the training partner.  Sometimes instructors-in-training come to level one to practice working with less skilled people, and I train with them, and I get so much more out of it.  On the days I get a particular weak partner, it's more of a conditioning class than a self-defense class, which is okay, but if I wanted to take a conditioning class I would just take a conditioning class.  (Actually, I do, once a week I do strength and conditioning instead of self-defense, and it's awesome.  You do all sorts of over-the-top, strongman-competition shit like flip tires and drag chains and carry boulders and swing sledge hammers.  I don't know if that makes you stronger than just doing the machines, but it certainly is more fun.)

One thing Krav Maga has taught me is how worthless a typical person would be in serious fight.  Sometimes we do stress drills, where you have to close your eyes, so you don't know when an attack is coming, or you have to do a bunch of burpees and then defend yourself when your tired -- and unless your muscles and mind are trained through repetition to handle the situation, everything just goes to shit.  This is true even in a relatively basic, controlled simulation like a level-one self-defense class; imagine what would happen when shit got real.  That's why this article from The Onion is so funny (the video too).  People -- well, men, really -- have such an inflated sense of their own physical toughness and ability to handle stressful combat.

And to bring it back to politics, this gets at another position I wish the Democrats would adopt: Republicans promote irresponsible gun ownership.  As much as some liberals might dream about making all guns illegal and sweeping through the country to collect the ones already out there, it's not a practical solution constitutionally, politically, or logistically.  But, what can be done, maybe, is putting stringent training requirements on the most dangerous guns.  If you want an AR-15, you have to prove you know how to use it, and, yes, this means government regulations.  The honor system ain't working.  One thing about trying this route is that it's something that law enforcement and the military understand and could potentially get behind.  They know how ridiculous it is to allow any dumbass off the street to buy a weapon of war.  I'd use that: Our military spends hours and hours training our soldiers to operate powerful weaponry in stressful situations, and we're so egotistical we think we can be just as safe and effective?  Right now our society is super divided on guns, because we're super divided on everything, and it's a black-or-white issue -- you're either "fer" or "agin'" -- even though most people are somewhere in the middle.  That's not allowed right now.  So, I don't know if anything would work.  But if I was a politician, this is the tract I would try.

Well, that's all for this week.  Until next time...

Entry 423: People are People

My experiment to eschew social media is going pretty well so far.  I haven't logged in to Facebook or Twitter for about three weeks now, and I don't really miss it.  I still fiddle with my way phone too much -- Sporcle, Words With Friends, MLB Gamecast, etc. -- but I think that my anxiety levels are down overall.  I'm not constantly wondering what's going on out there, because out there effectively doesn't exist to me anymore.  My outrage levels are much lower than before too.  I still know what's going on -- I still consume a lot of news -- but there is a lot less of the blood-boiling, click-bait-y "Stupid Liberal/Conservative Does Infuriatingly Stupid Liberal/Conservative Thing" type of story in my life now.  Honestly, however, I'm not sure if being less angry is a net positive or a net negative.  It's definitely good for my health, but outrage is a good motivating factor.  If anti-Trumpists are going to strike back in a major way this fall, we need some level of outrage.  We need to be pissed off.  You don't get millions of people turning out to the polls without a large dose of dander and discomfort.  So, I don't know -- I don't know what the right mix is between staying sane and fighting back like a cornered rabid animal.

Speaking of animals, Trump used the term this week to describe members of MS-13, the criminal gang of mostly Latino immigrants that nobody had really heard of until a few months ago when Republicans realized they needed something other than their record to run on this year.  I think this presents a good opportunity for Democrats.  They should position themselves diametrically opposed to Trump on crime.  They should adopt the phrase "stupid on crime" to counter his "tough on crime" rhetoric.  Make the two become synonymous.  Hammer home how bad ostensibly harsh measures are.  I think there is a large segment of the population open to this message.  People have seen and are continuing to see the futility of measures like the War on Drugs.  Here's what I would say if I was a congressperson in response to Trump's comments:

Members of MS-13 are not "animals."  They are people.  Not only is it immoral to treat people -- even people who do terrible things -- as animals, it's stupid.  The only way to eradicate gang violence is to call it out for what it is -- crimes by people against people.  It is a human problem.  To pretend it's something other than this, is to go down a path of continued failure.

"People are people" is another angle I would hit hard if I was a Democratic politician.  Every comment I said about immigration would start with the disclaim, "Look, they are people in a desperate situation trying to do what's best for themselves or their family just like you or I would do..."  I think there is a desire for that right not in contrast to Trump's ugliness.  I suspect even most people who favor stricter immigration enforcement can empathize with immigrants on a human level.  They don't want to see people ripped apart from their families or held indefinitely in detention centers.  Such a message will utterly fail with hardcore Trumpists, of course, but any message delivered by a Democrat will utterly fail with hardcore Trumpists.  The worst thing Democrats can do, in my opinion, is bend over backward to try to placate "real Americans."  At best, it will come off as insincere and be ineffective (Fox News and Republican politicians will cast Dems as disrespectful elitists no matter what they do); at worst, it will repel voters on the other side of the coin and erode the Democrats base.  I think this article gets it right -- the best thing Dems can do when dealing with Trump Country is to not make apologies for being "elitists," but instead to change the subject and continually hammer the GOP on economic issues.  The goal is just to pick off a small fraction of a small fraction of disenchanted Trump voters -- a possible margin of victory in a close election -- not change hearts and minds en masse, because that ain't happening any time soon.



The other thing about the "people are people" message is that it could, somewhat ironically, actually help with the "your don't understand real Americans" messaging problem, because Trump voters are people too -- even those who harbor hateful and prejudice feelings.  "Racists are people" is a corollary of "people are people," and I think liberals would be well-served to remind themselves of this sometimes.  The thing is, a lot of people in this country come directly from a lineage of white supremacy.  White supremacy was a legally codified, defining characteristic of our country for almost a century, and you can argue it is still a de facto one in many areas today, especially in much of the South.  (Based on the data I've seen, I believe a desire to hang onto the vestiges of white supremacy is the primary reason Trump was elected.)  So, if somebody grows up in an area with deep racist roots and everybody around them -- everybody they love and admire -- is racist, it is overwhelmingly likely they are going to be racist too.  What do we do with such people, tell them all to fuck off die?  That's not practical, even if it's what we want to do.  And it shouldn't be what we want.  We don't have to be tolerant of racism, but we can (and should) be empathetic towards racists, in the same way we don't have to be tolerant of violence and criminality, but we can be empathetic towards people who grow up in circumstances in which that's all they know.  People are people.

Another thing concerning racism we do that I don't like is we treat it as a binary -- you are either racist (bad) or not racist (good).  When in actuality racism encompasses a huge range.  There is everything from Dylan Roof down to your friend's dad who secretly hates the fact his daughter is dating a black guy and feels guilty about it.  Racism is not an zero-one variable, but that's how we treat it, and this makes it hard to talk about (and thus make any progress on) racism, because pointing out somebody harbors racist views is treated as akin to calling them a KKK Grand Wizard.

Anyway, I don't really have a good solution to any of this, other than to say we all should be more empathetic toward everybody.  Kumbaya, motherfuckers.

Until next time...

Entry 422: We Should All Mansplain Everything to Everybody

The other morning I noticed one of my car tires was running low on air, so I pulled into a gas station to fill it up on my way to work.  The entrance I used put me at a weird angle with the air pump, so I had to straighten up a bit to pull in properly, and just as I did so, another car came around the corner and took my spot at the pump -- pulled right in front of me, as I was just about to nuzzle up to the pump, like the Seinfeld episode when George gets his parking spot stolen.  The driver of the car, however, was not trying to be rude or cut me off or anything like that.  She used a different entrance than I used and couldn't even really see me approaching the pump.  She legitimately got there first -- she beat me to the punch by a few seconds.  I was annoyed, of course, but I had no beef with the driver.



What made things more annoying is that a few other cars pulled into some nearby pumps blocking my only exit from the gas station other than going through the space by the pump, which is currently occupied by the first car.  So, I'm totally stuck.  At this point, I would prefer to just leave.  There is another gas station I can use down the street, and it's super uncomfortable to sit there and watch her while she services her car.  I would hate to have somebody breathing down my neck like that -- and who knows what's wrong with it?  Maybe she has to do more than just quickly put some air in the tires.  But I'm hemmed in, just wait behind her.

She get outs of her car, and immediately I get the sense that she doesn't know what she's doing.  The scenario I've concocted in my head is that the light on her dashboard went on, and she thought Oh, crap, 'low tire pressure', what's this all about? and now she has to figure it out on the fly.  I've concocted this scenario because it's what happened to me a few months ago.  (One of my car tires has a slow leak in it, but still has good tread, so I've been debating whether or not I should replace it, which means replacing all the tires, or just fill it up every so often; thus far I've gone with the short-term cheaper, latter option.)  But also maybe I'm being biased because she's a conventionally attractive woman in her late twenties or early thirties.  You know, because hot chicks obviously don't know anything about cars.

Unfortunately, as she gets out of her car and starts to service it, the probability of my stereotype being accurate increases dramatically.  The air pump is one of those newfangled ones, with a little computer screen, where you set the desired air pressure, and then it beeps when it reaches that pressure.  And it seems likely to me that she doesn't understand how it works.  For one thing, she took a pressure gauge out of her glove box, which she doesn't need because it's built into the pump.  For another thing, she never set her desired PSI, so it's at the default, which is only 25 PSI -- most tires need 35-45 PSI to be fully inflated.  So, she keeps putting the hose on her tire, and it keeps immediately stopping because it's already at 25 PSI.  She can't figure out what's going on; she's using her gauge to measure the pressure, but it's not going up.

By the way, it's not her fault that she doesn't know how to use this machine.  If there are instructions, they aren't prominently located, and it's not like "Air Pump 101" is a high school requirement.  The only reason I know how it works is because I've done it before.  At first I did the exact same thing she's doing now, and then through trial-and-error, I figured it out.  However, I didn't have somebody looking over my shoulder when I was making the errors.  If I did, I might have just gotten into my car and driven away to another gas station -- which is kinda what I wish she would do at this point.  But I also kinda want to help her, because I think she needs help, and I like helping people -- it feels good.

So, I'm not sure how to play it.  I don't want to fluster her by just sitting in my car staring at her, and I also would like to leave, because sitting in a parked car at a gas station is not a particularly enjoyable activity for me.  But I'm hesitant to get out and start "mansplaining" this air pump to her.  What if she actually knows what's going on, and it's my own ignorance -- which is vast when it comes to cars -- that is preventing me from seeing this?  What if she's doing something different from what I think she's doing, and she's doing it right?  It seems unlikely, but it's definitely possible.  So, instead of getting out, I open up a Sporcle quiz on my phone and start trying to name the top-50 home run hitters in Chicago Cubs history -- Sammy Sosa, Ernie Banks, Ryne Sandberg...

After five minutes, I've named 42 of the 50, and time runs out, both on my game and on her pump.  Her tire still is low.  When she goes back into the glove box and gets the manual, I finally figure, Okay, enough is enough; I'm going out; I don't think she knows what she's doing; if I'm wrong and I'm a mansplainer, so be it; at least I will be at work on time.  So, I get out, and, in my least condescending manner possible (which still might be kinda condescending), I tell her how to use the pump.  She thanks me, scans her credit card again, sets the appropriate PSI, fills up her tire in about 30 seconds, and goes on her way.  I then pull up and use the rest of her time to fill up my tires, and that's that.  I saved $1.50!

I was thinking about this, and I realized I don't like calling out guys for mansplaining.  It's not because it hurts my feelings as a man or because it's feminism run amok or any other "men's rights" garbage like that.  It's because it provides a disincentive for explanation, when, in my opinion, we should be doing the exact opposite as a society.  Over-explaining is not that big of a sin, especially given the alternative.  I've been many in situations like the one above, where crucial information doesn't get relayed properly, because somebody assumes somebody else knows already knows something they don't know or doesn't say something because they don't want to be condescending.  It's an annoying social norm.  You hear people say, "So-and-so was treating me like I'm idiot!" and it's always assumed to be a bad thing, but sometimes you need to be treated like an idiot.  I'm often grateful when people treat me like an idiot, because I usually get all the information I need, and I know exactly what to do.  And if I already knew it, so what?  Why is hearing what you already know such a terrible thing?  Why is that so offensive?  I'm not saying I'm pro-condescension, but I'm definitely anti-anti-condescension.

Now, I get that mansplaining is not really about explanation at all.  It's about power.  The purpose is to belittle somebody because they're a woman, not to inform them.  But can't we just call that being a sexist jerk?  Being a sexist jerk is bad; over-explaining something to somebody, of any gender, is not that bad.  In fact, often times it's beneficial.  That's my hot take for the week: We should all mansplain everything to everybody.

Until next time...

Entry 421: Puzzle Published

No time to contribute a post specifically to this blog this week.  However, I had a puzzle published today, and I wrote about it here, so click that link if you would like to read about my puzzle and read me waxing philosophical on the unfairness of human emotion.

Good day.