GIN AND TACOS

Every argument about the presidential election on the internet follows one of two courses. The first is the bullet train to Fantasy Land, with references to bizarre conspiracy theories, inaccurate reconstructions of history, and predictions of things that will never, ever happen. The second is the Let's Be Realistic track, wherein people defend positions that cannot be defended on their merits by appealing to being "practical" or "pragmatic."

Whenever a person describes him- or herself as a realist, they are doing something they know to be wrong and of which they are ashamed. That's a free life lesson.

You'll notice this regularly in conversations about the Democratic nomination this year, and to a lesser extent back in 2008 when Obama started out as a nobody (albeit one with considerably more obvious "electability" than 75 year old Bernie Sanders).
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Every argument in favor of Hillary Clinton, once stripped of the fallacy that she is distinguishable on most major economic issues from Mitt Romney and that her new-found social liberalism was not determined by focus group three or four years beyond the point at which it was deemed electorally "safe" to take those positions, boils down to "Well, you have to vote for her." If you don't, you're electing President Trump! Remember Nader? Remember Hitler? Why do you want to elect Hitler?

The strange thing is that I don't disagree with this logic. I, and millions of others, will vote for Hillary Clinton simply because the alternative is even worse. This speaks directly to the problem at the core of American politics, though. It is very difficult to get anybody interested in, let alone excited about, a process in which we are constantly reminding them that they have to participate to pick between two things they don't like and choose the one that they dislike less. Does the Clinton campaign really hope to fire up the voting base with semi-authoritarian appeals that everyone to the left of Glenn Beck is essentially obligated to vote for her?
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Regardless of how "practical" or pragmatic that may be, does it sound like a winning message to you?

What are the reasons to vote for Hillary Clinton? There appears to be one: she can most likely beat any of the shaved apes the GOP is considering as a nominee right now. That's it. Vote for her not because she is good or honest or trustworthy or makes us believe something better about ourselves and our nation, but because she has statistically higher odds of winning the November election than the Democratic alternatives.

I'm not saying that's incorrect. I'm saying it's pathetic, and it goes a long way toward explaining why the campaigns across the political spectrum have to struggle mightily to get half of eligible adults to show up to vote in our most publicized and high-profile election every four years.
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Imagine you were told that you couldn't cheer for your favorite football team, but could only root for the Chicago Bears to lose every week and support whoever they happened to be playing at the moment. How motivated would you be to devote your time and money to attending games? That would start to feel pointless and boring pretty quickly, and more than a little soul-crushing.

I don't like posting about Work. Sure, I love telling the occasional classroom anecdote, carefully stripped of any potentially revealing or identifying characteristics but with its core intact, or talking about academia as a field but the "My boss is a pain in the ass" stuff has never been my style and for obvious reasons isn't a good idea for me or anyone else. Fortunately my father and I have jobs that are similar in one crucial respect even though they are quite different, so let's talk in completely anonymous terms about his field instead.

My dad is a local judge. One of the best, if not THE best, parts of being a judge is that the position is essentially held for life as long as you continue to show up to work and do at least the bare minimum amount of work required to claim that you are doing your job. True, state and county judges do not properly hold lifetime appointments in the same way that a Federal judge does in the United States, but let's just say the obstacles to keeping the job once you have it are not formidable in most states.
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In that sense, judges are very much like professors with tenure. You can do a really half-assed job if you so choose, but short of not showing up to do the job or violating one's contract (punching a student, disappearing for a month, not grading student work, etc) they can't fire you.

Similarly, I imagine that judges vary in their activity levels from the bulk of them trying earnestly to do their job well (either to advance professionally or just because of their personality) and some doing as little as possible. That is any and every workplace. One of the leading frustrations people have regardless of profession is the sense, or reality, that not everyone is doing their fair share. Such is life.

What amazes me when my dad tells stories about issues or conflicts at work (not about actual courtroom things, but interactions among coworkers) is how similar the stories sound to ones I hear from academic friends. Of course part of the explanation is that every workplace is the same on some level; people gripe, have petty feuds, gossip, and so on. From the White House to White Castle, that is just the nature of the proverbial office water cooler. But in my line of work and Elder Ed's, the fact that coworkers engage in pitched battles with one another makes even less sense than it usually does. Nobody can get fired. Why in the name of god do people feel the need to quarrel and cause problems when it is explicit that all anyone – everyone – has to do is to continue showing up and if that high standard is met, everyone gets a paycheck pretty much indefinitely?

The other amazing thing is that both of these professions fall under the "Challenging, not hard" category. In one sense we both have what amounts to the easiest job in the world; we sit on our asses all day and spend a varying amount of time talking.
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We have to write things. Mentally the jobs can be difficult and stressful, but as I like to say, being a professor ain't exactly coal mining. Intellectually it is trying. Physically it's the closest you can get to being paid to lie on a couch.

Despite every word of what I just said being true, people in jobs like this still feel the need – for reasons I have the most difficult time fathoming – to fuck with their coworkers. My best guess is that it boils down to insecure people with fragile egos that require constant stroking and the perception of "insults" where a normal person would either not see one or see it and think, "Yeah but who gives a shit?" If one judge tells another "You are a moron and you don't know anything about the law," why would anyone bother responding with anything beyond "Oh, OK."? And why would anyone care enough to say that to a colleague in the first place? We can't get fired. We have life by the balls. Why, under such conditions, would anyone care about their colleagues' opinions or feel compelled to offer their own unsolicited?

If I think you suck at your job it profits me nothing to say so. You will continue to get a paycheck and so will I. It does not matter what you think of me nor I of you. So really, what's the point?

People just need to make drama and conflict, perhaps. Even when none exists and nothing can be gained by creating it. Maybe it's the same impulse that led cavemen to paint on rocks, except in this example we replace the urge for creative expression with the urge to be a dick and start fights every time our fee-fees get hurt or we're bored.

Everyone keeps asking when Donald Trump is going to go away. Even The Onion has noticed his staying power, noting the number of times the candidate has said or done something that led observers to conclude, "That was the final straw; he's done now." It turns out though that a campaign can survive a lot when its core supporters are racists, people who aren't very smart, and racists who are not very smart. As superlative nonfiction author Mark Bowden, who covered Trump nearly 20 years ago for a magazine piece, says:

Apart from the comical ego, the errors, and the self-serving bluster, what you get from Trump are commonplace ideas pronounced as received wisdom. Begin registering all Muslims in America?

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Round up the families of suspected terrorists?
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Ban all Muslims from entering the country? Carpet-bomb ISIS-held territories in Iraq (killing the 98-plus percent of civilians who are, in effect, being held hostage there by the terror group and turning a war against a tiny fraction of the world’s Muslims into a global religious crusade)? Using nuclear weapons? The ideas that pop into his head are the same ones that occur to any teenager angry about terror attacks. They appeal to anyone who can’t be bothered to think them through—can’t be bothered to ask not just the moral questions but the all-important practical one: Will doing this makes things better or worse?

When your bread and butter is people who don't like to think, it's pretty difficult to drive them away by saying poorly thought out, offensive, and stupid things. And here he is, leaving every major poll about a month out from the first real live nominating events.

So when IS he going to go away?

Well. One school of thought has been that his leading position will disappear when actual votes are cast. In other words, people who say right now that they like him or choose him on polls simply because of his name recognition will get serious and choose a "real" candidate when it's time to vote. Another is that eventually he will say something so offensive that his supporters will abandon him for a candidate with a better chance of winning.
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I think both of these scenarios are improbable.

The most obvious problem, and also the best explanation for why Trump has yet to disappear, is that knocking someone out of first place requires someone else to step into that position. All of the other candidates in this field are so bad, so inept, and so ruthlessly unlikable that none of them can build enough momentum and support to threaten Trump except Carson, whose followers are of the same "What's the point of thinking?" variety. Were there a single good candidate in the field, you wouldn't have 17 candidates in the first place. There's no Mitt Romney this time around, no candidate who is safe, relatively sane, superficially affable, and ready to be handed the keys when it becomes apparent that everyone else in the field is just too insane.

My best guess is that Trump is going to go away once the primaries heat up, but not for the reasons so many people believe right now. This is a man of unprecedented arrogance who has never paid attention to a detail in his life; something tells me that he and his campaign are not going to shine when the time comes for old fashioned, ground level campaigning to begin. I'm guessing that Trump's ground game strategy is something along the lines of "I'm awesome, of course people are gonna come vote for me." The knowledge, ability, and willingness of a campaign led by an arrogant sociopath and made up of complete morons to campaign effectively in anything but the current "talk into the camera" part of the campaign must be lacking. Who is making up the precinct lists in Iowa? Who's in charge of the ground game in New Hampshire? What's the broader strategy for the first wave of primary states after Feb. 1? Has anyone involved in the Trump campaign at any level though of any of this? Certainly he can afford to pay campaign professionals; has he acquired the services of any competent, experienced ones? What are his volunteers doing aside from showing up at the occasional publicity stunt waving signs?

In short, it remains to be seen if Trump can campaign seriously because this is a man who has never taken anything seriously. He is so in love with his self-styled genius that it probably hasn't occurred to him that he does not know how to run a campaign at the nuts-and-bolts level. If his strengths are limited, as they appear to be, to drawing attention to himself in the national media, then the wheels will indeed come off this clown car when the actual ballots begin to be cast.

If not, and he proves smart enough to hire people who know what they're doing to run his campaign, then the historic awfulness of this Republican field could enable him to stick around for quite some time and even, if there is a prankster God who loves us, win the nomination. But that's quite an "if". My gut reaction is that neither he nor anyone like-minded has the attention span and intellect necessary to do the long, tedious work of actual campaigning.

Sorry for the lack of updates this week. I have plenty of things to write about but I'm having a serious case of the Why Bothers. I came painfully, achingly close to resolving my Central Illinois problem but fell short, and if academia continues along its current trajectory I might get another chance to get out in, oh, three or four years. So I feel an awful lot like I'm standing before a judge who just banged a gavel and sentenced me to three more years of wasting my life. That's the best case scenario, in which I will be 41 when I'mfinally be able to do things a normal human being does like start making friends, have things to do, begin working my way up from the bottom rung of my profession, maybe not spend the rest of my life alone, etc.

So yeah, that's where this week is at. I'll try to post NPF soon. Except whether or not I do, it doesn't matter. None of this amounts to anything anyway, and I'm basically doing it to create the illusion that I have someone to talk to. Not that three days per week chatting about the banalities of university politics and being ignored by totally uninterested students isn't fulfilling before I drive back home to stare at Netflix for a couple days on end. Have you ever noticed that if you aren't into stupid shit like church and don't like hanging out with your coworkers it's basically impossible to make friends as an adult? Or even to have a conversation with another adult once every week or two? Yeah, it turns out that very few people leave their house thinking "I hope an unattractive, unsuccessful 37 year old man who is alone strikes up a conversation with me." So in advance, please spare me your stories about how I *must* be doing something wrong because people are always talking to you when you go out.

I don't even know what this post is about. It's pretty clear that I'm at a dead end in my professional life and my personal life doesn't exist beyond chatting with people on Facebook that I knew 5+ years ago when I had a life. It is greatly reducing my motivation to do…anything, really. But especially this. Even when I think of something interesting to write about it's like, what's the point? It's not as if it will lead to anything or that more than a small handful of people will ever read it anyway.

I'm not a nihilist, I swear. It's just that everything is pointless.

Every major news outlet and most minor ones have reported that the husband and wife team of terrorists in San Bernardino "declared support for ISIS" on social media sites before engaging in the attack. This feeds smoothly into the narrative of a terrorist attack, but it misses the point of what, if anything, posting something on Facebook and its equivalents proves.

There is a useful distinction, obliterated in practice, between declaring support for ISIS and being affiliated with, or in some way receiving support from, ISIS. Logically, anyone with internet access can throw up a post saying, "Wooooooo ISIS #1 ruuuuuuuulez!" in the moments before they engage in activities they do not expect to survive.

Other equally useful declarations could be "Hail Satan!" or "J-E-T-S, JETS JETS JETS!" On the other hand, being in contact with and receiving necessary information or equipment from ISIS would be a different and more meaningful story.
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For years during the Bush administration I asked, whenever they crowed that their policies had stopped another terrorist attack in preparation, what "in preparation" meant and whether the plot had any realistic potential to be executed. In fact, it often turned out that the only thing keeping these one-lung plots afloat was an undercover law enforcement officer offering to provide hard-to-get materials. Is it a good thing that someone plotting a terrorist attack is interrupted in progress? Of course. But there is a relevant difference between a well funded, well organized, realistic plot that could have proceeded to completion without the intercession of law enforcement and a bunch of jackasses who couldn't successfully execute a liquor store robbery sitting around googling "how to make terorist bomb" and publicly available schematics of famous buildings. Presenting both categories as equals is misleading at best, deceptive at worst.

The FBI director has stated that the San Bernardino attacks were "inspired by" foreign terrorist organizations.

Tellingly, that is the same phrase movies use when they have only the most superficial relationship to source material.
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"ISIS operatives" and "copycats/wannabe terrorists" are two distinctly different things and, as usual, the distinction is absent.