"Both Sides" is the Way Out

"Both sides" thinking is the time-tested cure for contretemps, personal or political.

Step one: Refrain from shrieking like a stuck pig when you hear the phrase.

We need more bothsidesism...on both sides. That’s the only route back.

By turning our withering gaze on ourselves first, we start a process of transforming seeming-monsters back into friends and neighbors.

Alex Jones and Pro-Hamas

I was living five miles from Newtown/Sandy Hook during the shooting, where friends of mine died. When Alex Jones later smeared his excrement all over the incident, I didn't roll my eyes or rush to anger. I just felt physically sick, and mildly ashamed to be part of a species capable of such evil. I was vacantly shocked, like someone had shot a cannonball clear through my abdomen.

Progressive reaction to the Hamas attack (leaving aside for now the broader Israeli/Palestinian conflict) leaves me feeling that very same Alex Jones nausea/shame. I'm once again post-cannonball.

What I take away from this comparison is that our problems are not based on ideology. Alex Jones and progressives have nothing ideologically in common whatsoever. It's something more tectonic: the fabled "horseshoe effect". The yin/yang truism that the crazies at both ends are not only both crazy, but crazy in effectively the same way. They've caught the same virus, regardless of the antithetical slogans on their placards and bumper stickers.

The real problem is not the ideology, or even the extremist leaders spouting that ideology. The problem is extremism itself. Despite mountains of cold, hard experience, we seem unable to focus on this. Our attention won't quite stay there.

At the dawn of the Trump era I made a case for centrism (e.g. this). There still exists a super majority of reasonable people, if we could only recognize it - i.e. frame it that way. But we can't, due to a perennial problem too pervasive and unconscious to even have a name.

Reasonable, mild conservatives roll their eyes wearily at MAGA extremists, exactly the way reasonable mild progressives roll their eyes wearily at pro-Hamas extremists. We dislike the radicals on our side, but it's a vague, familial aversion, compared to the other side's radicals, whom we watch closely, loathing them with the heat of a thousand suns.

Hating and fearing the other side's extremists far more than own side's extremists makes it devilishly hard to see that the true problem is extremism, period.

I've had friends sever ties when I told them I'm friends with some reasonable Trump-voting Republicans. That's extremism, baby. It's one thing for a racist to mildly dislike black people, but quite another for them to violently repudiate white friends who befriend them.

Even those who see the truth of this seem to remain susceptible to the proposition of plowing straight through; to radicalizing your side's moderates via relentless anger provocation to finally, joyously, thrash, smash, and trash those awful people. It's a function of our engrained tribalism. The old shirts vs skins.

Even if we convinced people to take a good hard look at their own tribe's extremists, it would hardly guarantee benevolent reframing. Mostly, they'd either flip to the opposite camp (again: shirts or skins!), or else sink into cynical nihilism, because renouncing extremism leaves little to get excited about.

I implore you to get excited about moderation. Take yourself out of the market for beautiful mass movements and simple Utopias and fantasies of smashing, thrashing, and trashing the bad guys. Take yourself out of the market of being on A Team You Can Believe In, and just quietly elect quietly competent leaders...without disengaging from the process! Most of all: be intensely suspicious of any parties trying to stoke your anger when you're already furious.

What I’m suggesting is like walking a tightrope. And it's boring. But you know what would make a huge chunk of the populace crave some boredom? Civil war. Autocracy. Pogroms. There's nothing like cinders, smoke, and an empty belly to raise the cachet of boredom. Alas, boredom is a tough sell at the very peak moment of humanity.

Hyper-stimulated, infinitely-entitled Americans haven't felt attracted to quiet competence since the 1950s. We crave excitement and drama. Deeming ourselves uniformly exceptional, our politics - like every other aspect of our lives! - needs to feel like The Best!

To some tiny degree, I helped stoke that impulse. I'm still coming to terms with it.

Oblivion Tour: Paterson, NJ Turkish/Arab Wonder Zone

Welcome to Jim's Oblivion Food Tour, where, homelessly awaiting my visa, I amuse myself by driving aimlessly in a rented car, half-heartedly seeking out interesting eats (my cruise idea crashed when I learned I'd need a passport - no good, because Portugal's been holding mine for 3-1/2 months).

I already did a similar tour back in 2006, but that time my bills were paid by a corporation.

I won't be doing lots of glossy reporting here, as I'm still post-traumatic from that previous Chow Tour. But this is too surprising not to mention.

Paterson, NJ has always been an intriguing food town, just off-the-beaten-track enough to host little gems and pockets of surprising immigrants. I haven't been here in years, and, my god, it's now turned into a Turkish/Arabic metropolis nearly as teeming with restaurants, cafes, and bakeries as Dearborn, Michigan.

Most prominent is their Turkish community, very welcome since most Turkish places in the five boroughs have had the life sucked out of them. New Jersey Turkish boomtown was exactly what we all needed, and Allah provides.

I got a little obsessed with Taskin bakery. Like all Turkish bakeries, there's as much savory as sweet, and I drastically over-ordered on two consecutive breakfasts.

Sorry for the hasty photos. I am not your dancing monkey.

Note that they heated that stuff up for me (in an oven, certainly not a microwave).

Under the Taskin sun

Day one breakfast:

Front row(!) left to right: Lahmacun (mouth-melting), Taskin borek filled with meat (unimaginably crusty), Bazlama potato (home fries stuffed into a pancake). Second row: chocolate thingee, sarma pistachio (done properly with slightly rancid butter), Turkish coffee with a generous free lokma (fried dough ball)

Day two breakfast:

Front row: Cut-up su böregi (noodles and cheese; more on this below), UFO roll thingee, meat pie. Second row: Turkish coffee and kadayif.

I'd like to call special attention to su böregi, which I rediscover every few years, always making the same astonished connection to Jewish lokshin (noodle) kugel, which is the exact same dish. Here's the slab plus a close-up:

Some Jews make this dish sweet, and even add (yeeeeech) raisins. These are dangerous, unhinged Jews known as Litvaks, and you must avoid them and their kugel at all costs.

Moving on, this shot gives you a sense of the splendid local restaurant density:

Driving around, my dawning intuition bloomed into a conviction that Palestinians are here, and that they are making kunafeh. Palestinian kunafeh bears no relationship to the Lebanese or Turkish versions. This is cheese-based, and, as I wrote in my smart-phone app "Eat Everywhere", it's "one of mankind's most triumphant creations." I honestly believe it's the world's greatest dessert.

Problem is I'd just consumed a boatload of Turkish sweet and savory baked goods (not everything in the photos in single sittings; but close to it). So when, while driving around looking for a pharmacy, Nablus Sweets cropped up in my peripheral vision, and a buried connection linked it to Jordan, which linked it to Palestinians, which linked it to Palestinian kunafeh, I groaned. But facing the inevitability, I parked, and entered a bakery as vacant as a salt marsh and filled with treasure.

The photos are way way better if you click to expand them:

So many versions of basbousa that it made me a little dizzy:

The baklava, while obviously crazy-fresh, seemed to shimmer in a sepia haze from a distant century. It's not a photography trick. It really looked like this:

And here's the blessed kunafeh:

And a close-up:

So great. And no rosewater. The owner, a cool dude who speaks perfect English and immigrated in the 70s, told me that kunafeh from Nablus, Jordan never has rosewater. He was amazed I'd ever had it that way. But I have, in Palestinian kunafehs in Astoria, Brooklyn, Austin, and Dearborn.

We got into a long discussion of this, and of the world, and of human imperfection, and of politics, and I didn't agree with much of what he said, but I could see - as is often true - that opinions are like stick-on labels, completely arbitrary and not self-defining. I've lost the ability to confuse people with their stick-on labels. Opinions are flimsy and cartoonish, while individual people are neither.

The words coming out of his mouth were not my words, and included some phrases I'd normally deem disqualifying (though I'm no roaring progressive), but we were friends by the end. Actually, from the beginning. We agree on the big picture stuff that's what matters. He latches onto certain "takes" in his bewilderment, while I latch on to certain others. But we're both bewildered. Brothers in bewilderment.

He would not allow me to pay for my kunafeh. Which broke my heart because there should have been thousands of customers vying to get in, but there was only me. And even I wasn't a paying customer.

The moment when I earned my free kunafeh was when he explained how money interests had ravaged Syria, Sudan, and other places. Behind the authoritarianism, t's all about the money. Like most/all Palestinians, the guy was freely loquacious, but I stopped him cold in his tracks when I asked, with enormous sincerity, "But what's so great about money?"

He froze. He considered it. And he melted into a recognition as soft as his kunafeh. 

"Your beautiful baking makes people happy. I never saw a rich person get anywhere near as happy from an extra few bucks."

He couldn't argue.

Kanye's Next Move

I've never been more miserable to have been right. One month ago I wrote, re: anti-Semitism, that "my spidy sense has been peaking geometrically." Well, we've come a long way, baby...and none of it's good.


For anyone who's never read a word of history, let me tell you what happens next with Kanye, now that repercussions have finally begun to snowball and he's losing his corporate connections:

"This proves the malicious strength of the shadowy Jewish conspiracy; able to seamlessly choke and bleed the righteous for daring stand up to them with mere words!"

And here's the follow-up:

"...and such is the daunting eeeeeevil power and dark control of these inferior subhuman vermin!"

Pro tip: You know things have reached a tipping point whenever you spot this tell-tale amalgam of "feeble, weak, subhuman vermin" and "powerful, crushing, dominating cabal". They're two sides of the same anti-semitic trope, of course, but, like bagels, it's not just a Jewish thing. Whenever hatred of any sort arises, so does this odd coupling.

Was Obama an incompetent college-failing half-wit, as the Right said, or a tyrant/saboteur bending government to his dastardly radical Muslim vision, as the Right also said?

For that matter, was Trump a clownish moron, according to the Left, or the most daunting peril to the republic in its history, also according to the Left (and, admittedly, me)?

This construction is evergreen. It never doesn't appear. Whenever you notice this amalgam of subhuman/superhuman, idiot/genius taking hold in a society - with people so gripped by hatred that they can't spot their own gaping illogic - alarm bells should ring. You're approaching a bad result. It's a harbinger.


If you're flailing to justify your own buy-in to that loopy amalgam, as I am, it's time to re-frame a few things. It's perilously easy to get spun-up into an antithetical but quite symmetrical, mirror-imaged irrationality. In fact, that spin-up - into a chain reaction of reciprocol hatred - is the very problem, not a mere symptom, even if you feel certain you're on the Good Side (the other guys feel that way, too).

There is only one esacpe from this madness: stop hating and join with reasonable people - including the vast sea of somewhat reasonable people with "wrong" tribal affiliation - against extremists of both sides. I.e. pay less selective attention to the extremists on the other side, and get woke to the holistic peril of extremism, period. Also: stop wincing at "both sides". Any pain you feel from that phrase was deliberately instilled by the dangerous radicals who helped stoke this mess.

Joining at center is the only way out, whether it happens now via force of will, or later in the aftermath of tumult and trauma.

Composing the Anti-Extremist Supermajority

In honor of Rev. King’s birthday...

Having voted for Biden, I can take only scant solace in the slim majority of my "side". But that rueful view stems from a framing error. An easy flip of perspective reveals that I'm part of a supermajority which does not yet view itself as such. Here are the affirmations necessary to execute that flip:

I am opposed equally to extremists on either side, including those with whom I share some core belief or tribal affiliation.

Inspired and disarmed by the handful of conservatives who've placed country over party, I can't wait to return the favor. I will eagerly disregard arbitrary affiliations whenever the common good is endangered. That's what prompted me to publicly declare myself Muslim shortly after Trump's election. Humanity over taxonomy!

I decline to divide people along lines of political preference, exactly as I disregard false boundaries of race, gender, sexual preference, and religion. Those things don't determine identity. They don't define us. We need to stop doing that.

I am kindred to the vast majority of people with whom I sharply disagree. Most folks are surprisingly nice, even if their politics strike me as cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs. It has ever been thus. Every moderate, regardless of credo, is my brother or sister. And every extremist, regardless of credo, is our collective opponent. 

So I reside amid a vast, stable supermajority (which, for the moment, lacks self-awareness).

This supermajority is imperiled whenever moderates point with accentuated attention and horror at the other side's extremists. They have failed to properly frame, and we must hope they rectify their perspective before they're forced to do so by bloodshed. At the core of our national predicament lies disproportionate fear and disgust for the other tribe's worst actors. The solution - even for those fancying themselves to be on the blameless side of the equation (i.e. every damned one of us) - is to reframe the battle as moderation vs extremism, period.

In case the seam pops open again (old framings are persistent), I'll reaffirm this most high-minded framing: "Every moderate, regardless of credo, is my brother or sister. Every extremist, regardless of credo, is my opponent. Political preference doesn't define us, and nice people - of every stripe - constitute a vast, stable supermajority". It's reassuring; even comforting. And, best of all, it's true. We actually have to work hard to frame it any other way...though, alas, we do.


If your response is "Anyone who'd vote for that devil is, by definition, an extremist", then I have bad news for you. You've been trolled and provoked into extremism, yourself. One may take pride (lots and lots of pride) in styling oneself "an extremist against evil", but that's the signature proclamation of extremists. Those are the words perennially uttered as the atrocities commence.

History always unfolds via a succession of immoderately reactive pendulum swings. Will we human beings ever learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism?

If you're unpersuaded by my words, choose your favorite from the big three who encourage the counterintuitive reaction to opposition - MLK, Gandhi, or Christ. Focus on their teachings for a few moments before your spleen restores your extraordinarily clear and clean perspective. Give the fuzzy mildness of your humanity a chance to catch up with the brisk sharp certainty of your spleen. You know how you desperately wished for the MAGA crazies to come back to their senses? Be magnanimous enough to go first, even though you, naturally, feel sensible.

One final thought: if you can't spot extremism on your side, you are the extremist.

Empathy Framed as Concession

This nugget got buried in a posting from last weekend.

The single most dangerous psychological tendency of our era is the deep-seated feeling that empathy implies sympathy and support. These days, to say "I understand..." absolutely conveys, to the listener, some degree of approval. Understanding is a gift one grants on the merits. It's a concession. A kiss.

This represents the very seed of evil and brutality (though it has not yet fully germinated), and I'd gladly use up a genie wish to see it go away.

Really, I believe this will be our undoing. Aliens observing from Rigel-32n will point to this subtle shift of language. It may appear to be a quirky little linguistical thing, but it's really not. This is a ticking bomb; as insidious and alarming as a whiff of gas in one's kitchen.

When did this happen? You can't deny that it has; roll the phrase "I understand him" (or "I understand where he's coming from") around in your mouth and see. How did understanding become approval? How can we possibly live on a planet like that?


Update: I just got off the phone with a 92 year old friend. I asked him "If someone during the time of the McCarthy hearings were to say 'I understand McCarthy', would that have made people assume he was sympathetic?" He answered, with great agitation, "Absolutely! Why would you want to understand somebody like that?"

So this correlation is not, as I suspected, something new. It is, however, horrendously awful (no offense to my friend, of course).

John Cleese on Extremism

I keep repeating the following statement, hoping to nag everyone into recognizing the problem pretty much everywhere we look:

Will we human beings ever learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism?

The great John Cleese gets to the core of the issue in a two minute video clip:



I agree with Stephen Fry (whose own wisely delightful video I linked to here), who tweeted out this reply to Cleese:

"If I didn’t already think you were a genius I would now..."

Take the insight one step deeper by considering The Segregating Outcome of Selective Attention...

We notice the flaws to which we're all heir much more precisely in The Other, whom we instinctively observe with great care. Me and my tribe receive a blurrier, more forgiving appraisal, due not to vanity but to familiarity. We're less instinctively alert to the familiar, because it's innately safer.

...and you can get pretty close to a holistic view of the Human Problem (do also factor in the sorely-missing recognition that noticing stupidity and craziness doesn’t mean you’re smart and sane; it just means you’re observant). 

Thanks to Dave Feldman for hipping me to Cleese's video.


So much of life - including life well beyond politics - is explained by this dynamic. I've spilled much virtual ink hunting down its corollaries and origins. But I'll add a fresh (for me) one: Young people are particularly attracted to extremism out of eagerness to jump-start a sense of personal grandeur (it's easier than developing talent or knowledge). In fact, to widen the framing, anyone frustrated - whose grandiose self-image fails to jibe with real world evidence - is susceptible to extremism of one sort or another.

That's the thesis of Eric Hoffer's classic book "The True Believer". I'll beg you to read it. It's short and written with brilliant clarity. A fantastically quick and life-changing read.

Framing Reopening

We're currently experiencing a framing conflict, both between segments of society, and within each of ourselves. As ever, we don't frame it as framing. We stubbornly refuse to trace our thoughts backwards to their source. We just arbitrarily adopt a frame (based on tribal cues, like flocks of birds), and freeze right there for a while, satisfied that we've selected the "correct" one.

It is brutally inhumane to proclaim thousands of deaths tolerable in the interest of re-opening the economy. Life is precious. Let's not love money more than we love human beings. Let's wait and do this when we can spare every soul.

We accept 38,000 annual traffic fatalities, without flinching, as the cost of a functioning modern society. We continue to grow and serve peanuts even though the tiniest bit of one can threaten the life of .6% of our population. Two million Americans would have their lives imperiled by bee stings, but we've not only failed to exterminate the bees, we're actually distressed that they're dying out on their own.

Neither of these antithetical views is wrong. They're simply different framings, both of them obviously correct. It is unquestionably callous and inhumane to condemn thousands to death just so we can relaunch the economy. Yet every one of us is callous and inhumane in the face of thousands of actual or prospective deaths.

These aren't differing "opinions", because an opinion has built-in traction, whereas both these perspectives are easily interchanged (unless you've willfully frozen yourself). It's like owning two houses - each feels like "home" when you're in it.

I'm not saying we can believe two contradictory things at once, because we can't. We can only oscillate between the two, like choosing a framing for the optical illusion below. One or the other comes easily, but you cannot see both at once. That's the hallmark of framing: it can effortlessly shift (so long as you haven't frozen perspective) but only one can be experienced at a time. Serial monogamy!

Belief is contextual, and context comes from framing (an inner choice which we project onto outside circumstance). Beliefs, ethics, and opinions all stem from framing. Among many other things, this explains the apparent endless hypocrisy of human beings, who are actually quite consistent within each framing. And, once again, framing is easily shifted...just so long as you haven't chosen to freeze it - which I'd discourage, because frozen perspective is what depression is. The shiftiness of framing is a feature, not a bug.


Regarding the virus and the economy, what's not a matter of framing and is a matter of right and wrong is the need to proceed intelligently and cautiously, weighing all risks with thoughtfulness and responsibility. To open the economy impulsively, and without consideration of different framings, would be an abomination. That's the Centrist view (and most of the country is Centrist without realizing it).

Buried the lede again. Doh.

A Jewish President

Sometimes I try to make myself yearn for a Jewish president, just to see how that mindset feels.

"Oh,"...wait, sorry..."Oy, if only there were a president who looked more like me. With a large schnozz and curly hair. Man, that would be...."

What? What would it be, exactly?

My town's mayor looks like me, and it's not so great. Lord knows that guy doesn't have my best interest at heart. On the other hand, that's just a mayor. That glass ceiling shattered some time ago, so maybe I'm inured.

But, president! My god, that would be fantastic! It would show how far we've come! But who's "we"? Y'know, my people. People who look like me. Everyone deserves a president who looks like them. Because people who look like you have your best interest at heart.

A Jew, for example, will always share their sandwich with another Jew. When I spot a Jewish person, I know they'll stop whatever they're doing to hear about my hopes and dreams and fears. Because that's what one's people do.

But wait. Black conservatives didn't feel like Obama had their interest at heart. And millions of female Bernie/Biden/Pete supporters didn't feel that Elizabeth Warren had their interest at heart. So perhaps the "looks like me" thing is just a puffy trope, despite seething lamentations on Twitter about the field being reduced to penis-bearing organisms who've undergone numerous solar orbits with a paucity of melanin. Gross!

Still, one roots for one's team, duh. You just do! Don't try to confuse the issue! We might not agree with, or vote for, people who look like us. And, yeah, they might not have our best interests at heart. But, still: "go team", right? There's gotta be something to the perpetual Color Wars we've been playing ever since summer camp, right?

Weak tea. In fact: water.

Is there anyone who'd seriously deem it a triumph for the female gender at this point if we got a female president? I dig deep trying to muster shock and wonder at the notion of a female head of state. "Wow, Jacinda Ardern is prime minister of New Zealand....and, get this, she's a woman! A WOMAN! How'd that happen?" but there's nary a flicker. It just seems normal. Totally normal and unexceptional and non-triumphant.

It'd be equally normal here, too, aside from the rote pattern matching. After penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis penis and penis, some hope to see a vagina, because they live not in a world but in a scorecard.

Of course a woman can (and will) be president. Do I "want" that to happen? Well, it'd depend on the woman! I wrote a large check to Amy Klobuchar, so "yeah" for that one. I'd have voted for Elizabeth Warren, as I voted for Clinton, though they weren't my favorites. I wish Sally Yates or Marie Yovanovitch had run, but dread AOC's inevitable reign. Honestly, I find women a pretty mixed bag, just like literally every other grouping of humans.

The underlying assumption that everyone has a team - your people; who look like you and therefore have your best interest at heart and who'll share their sandwiches - is lovely. So lovely that I almost hate to dispel it with my boorish logic.

Something seems off about the world, and we always attribute it to whichever attribute we're self-conscious about, and this drives us to make common cause with a shared-attribute group - an alliance of convenience. The goal is to reduce the maliciousness, harshness and unfairness, and this desire would be noble if we wanted to see the world fixed for everyone...for example by being kinder and fairer and more thoughtful, ourselves. But no one wants to fix it for everyone, and we damned sure don't want to behave any better, ourselves.

"Us" is really "me and my alliance of convenience". In other words, "me".

Identification via Grouping

Believe the women! A woman would never lie, because women are honest and women are good. In fact, women are awesome, and that's why we need more women politicians. The men have really messed things up, as they always do, am I right? Time for something different! Time for a woman's perspective!

This is the trendy approach to victimized groups: "You say xxxx people are unworthy? Well, I say they're AWESOME!" Awesomeness, for some reason, strikes us as a precursor to equality and justice. It never works that way, but the fallacy is baked into many people's thinking.

Let me step out of my white middle aged ogre role for a moment and slip on a skullcap so I can go all Jewy (from ogre to awesome in one smooth gesture). Jews aren't awesome. Nor are we a scourge. Jews are just people. So while my "about-to-get-my-ass-kicked" apprehensions peak when folks start screaming "Round up the Jews, schnell!", statements like "Those people are SO GREAT WITH MONEY" come an awfully close second.

Of course that's a cliché, and we know to steer away from the old clichés, even if they seem positive. No woke American would ever flatter me with "great-with-money", or tout women's intrinsic expertise with housework. Those are BAD compliment clichés that make you BAD.

But fresh blanket clichés? Totally welcome! Women are more virtuous, more honest. Less of that TESTOSTERONE, you know? Of course, that doesn't make them passive, oh no. Women are WARRIORS. We need female soldiers on our front lines, because there's NOTHING a man can do that a woman can't! Except, that is, for lying, messing things up, and the rest of toxic masculinity. Mind you: women are NO DIFFERENT....aside from their sterling honesty and overall awesomeness. They're simply BETTER. And NOT DIFFERENT. And BETTER.

Sigh. Listen. No group is great or horrible. Groupings just don't work that way (unless, of course, you're specifically grouping for quality). "WOMEN SUCK" and "WOMEN ARE AWESOME" both stem from the same mistake. Extreme sexists/racists and extreme anti-sexists/racists actually think much alike (the Taoists nailed it with the observation that extremes inevitably morph into one other).

The big problem at the root of all this "-ism" stuff is fixation with group difference. Staunch avowal of superiority is just more of that pointless fixation. Jews aren't this or that. We can be terrible with money and we can eat wheelbarrows full of pulled pork (mmm....wheelbarrows full of pulled pork!). Most groups are ultimately granfalloons; arbitrary affiliations that don’t mean all that much.

My mind boggles, for example, when people talk about "The African-American Community", as if melanin were a basis for community. I'm just one guy, and the range of African-Americans I've known is far too vastly diverse for any meaningful bundling. However, a thin internal voice calls to us, whispering "C'mon...you know what it means. You know what black people are like. Don't pretend you don’t!" But that voice is the very epitome of racism! The "African-American Community" is a racist construct built by extreme anti-racists for political expedience. It's so horribly twisted up.

If you tell me how terrific it is that I'm Jewish, I don't care whether you use old ditzy clichés or brew up new ones. I know what you're focusing on, and it's not a healthy place to fix your attention, because I am not definable by ethnic/racial grouping. That's the basis for the whole problem: people can be categorized in so many ways that any one label is uselessly superficial at best.

I read Jim's blog because Jews sure are witty!

Transcending identification-via-grouping ought to be the goal. Statements like "Women don't lie" are not only absurd on the face of it (have you met women? So far as I know, every one of them is human in species, and humans lie their asses off). It's sexism in its purest form: again, identification by grouping.

I get it. There are legitimate goals to pursue; violence and injustice to eliminate and wrongs to right. But the ends don't justify the means. If you bugger truth to pursue your goal, any victory will be pyrrhic. Time after time we fail to learn this lesson.

Flattering labels don't make your labeling fixation okay. Blanket effusion doesn't make you super-extra non-sexist/racist. It doesn't work that way. You can't inoculate yourself against assholery by becoming the antithetical asshole (will we human beings ever learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism?). Why not try seeing people as multifaceted individuals?

As I wrote in "A Case Against Empowerment",

The opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. And the opposite of being a discriminated-against minority isn't becoming an empowered minority, it's pluralism. Boring old pluralism.

"Empowerment" language just heightens the preoccupation with labels and groupings. Furiously rambunctious monomaniacal figures like Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton set back the arrival of a Barack Obama more than they helped. No one voted for Obama because BLACK PEOPLE ARE TERRIFIC. That line of thinking never leads where people imagine it will.

Similarly, after decades of gay rights being championed by in-your-face dudes defiantly flaunting their nipple clamps, boring gay people made a measured case that everyone should be able to love whoever the hell they want, so long as it's consensual, and very swiftly won over a surprisingly huge swathe of the population.

The answer's out there, and it's been proven effective. But it's extremely hard for people to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism. That's because reframing is required, and few of us think to use that faculty (particularly when we feel something deeply at stake).


I once wrote that "Nationalism is always a noble-seeming mask for xenophobia. Show me someone who loves 'Us', and I'll show you someone who hates 'Them'."

This is true of any display of staunch group pride (however conditioned we may be to view that sort of thing as noble). There's inevitably a tinge of seething anger, and it's not, as many prefer to imagine, righteous indignation. It's something else. It's fiendish deja vu; an ugly poison you've seen before. There's no righteous time for poison. It is extraordinarily unhealthy for a society to deem certain hatreds (e.g. anti-Boomer) virtuous. Poison's poison. Why hate anybody?

Having been graced with Christ, Gandhi, and King - a trio many profess to revere, and who showed us a better way - we, alas, still choose to mire like pigs. 

Can’t we finally end the stupid perpetual color wars?

Feeling the Bern

"Bernie Sanders is currently favored to win the nomination, a prospect that would make Donald Trump a heavy favorite to win reelection, and open the possibility of a Corbyn-esque wipeout," reports the savvy Jonathan Chait.

History always unfolds via a succession of immoderately reactive pendulum swings. Will we human beings ever learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism?

Kindred Pragmatic Moderates vs. the Demagogified

Here's how a centrist/moderate sees both sides:

Liberals: Yield to my trendy sanctimonious furies and oblige my flamboyant victimhood...or else you can go crawl up and die.

Conservatives: Greed is good. Settle down, let the plutocracy work its totally benign magic unfettered, and enjoy the fattening of your 401K (if you don't have a 401K, try harder, loser).

Granted, that's more Conservatism circa 2015. But if "Greed is good" why wouldn't Trump deserve a personality cult?

How could any clear-headed, moral person support either side of this gross duality?

The answer: As I once wrote, the vast majority of liberals aren't actually liberal. They're just anti-conservatives. And most so-called conservatives are really anti-liberals. This explains why both sides shift around so shamelessly. They're entirely reactive, with no permanent grounding principles. Any scenario dominated by two "anti-" elements will be as gratuitously slippery as globules of oil in a puddle of vinegar. There's no "there" there.

I keep waiting for the massive forehead-smacking recognition to set in that anti-liberals and anti-conservatives are actually close to agreeing on lots of stuff (even on guns and abortion!), insofar as they can block out the loud-mouthed extremists of either side whose excesses constantly refresh the revulsion.

Good luck with that blocking-out, though. Both sides are correct in their disgust. The problem is a slightly milder and blurrier disgust for the extremists on your own side (incomplete registration of the excesses of one's own tribe is the prime mover in human affairs, as I briefly sketched here, where I made the case for a healthy misanthropy).

Extremists often wonder how anyone could remain centrist in these starkly divided times. My answer is that aside from a few million at either end of the bell curve, the overwhelming majority of us are actually kindred pragmatic moderates habitually affiliating as Dem or Rep mostly as bulwark against the excesses of the opposite extremists. The divisions among this super-majority are vaporous; as thinly symbolic as the division between sports fans. It's only a matter of time before more people get woke and opt out of the demented polarity. 

In the meantime, if you ever find yourself not just supporting but full-out loving/adoring some candidate (e.g. Trump or Bernie), that almost surely means you've been demagogified, and I pray you'll come to your senses and realize that the goal of politics isn't to tear it all down and build something more to your taste every round, but to select someone who'll competently make the sausage.

Competent sausage-making once sounded boring (though I can't fathom how it possibly could at this point) but it's actually an art; a neat trick not every administration manages.

After four years of observing entranced masses loving/adoring a guy for tearing shit down, it stuns me (ok, not really) that people viewing from the opposite end of the curve respond by saying "Cool! I want that...only more to my specs!" Will human beings ever learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism?

The Seeds of Tyranny

The Left has always been correct in sniffing the inherent latent fascism of the right. The Right has always been correct in sniffing the inherent latent Sovietism in the left. Both detect tyranny, and both are right.

Libertarians or anarchists might nod their heads smugly, but it’s no coincidence that libertarians tend to be over-privileged and anarchists unusually aggressive. Both are ideally positioned to gain all once regulation disappears and jungle law reigns.

The instinctual human competitive drive ensures that societies always move toward tyranny - ie a steady state run by a Big Boss of one ilk or another. Every game - however well-balanced - is susceptible to a winner, whose first priority is to toss out the balances. Our saving grace is that this competitive drive knows no satisfaction (plus there’s always an upstart boss in the wings), so overreach inevitably undoes the steady tyrannical state. Democracy might, if we're lucky, occur in the ramp-up (libertarianism if we‘re not), and anarchy after the smash-down. But tyranny is both inevitable and fragile, and it will ever be thus.


An article in the current The Atlantic is making the rounds. It’s called “The Corruption of the Republican Party”, and the sub-header reads “The GOP is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start.” That’s an incomplete observation. Everything carries the seeds of its own corruption! If you detect the rot only in the other side, you’re only seeing half the problem.

Whenever you spot ugliness or evil in The Other (which is easy), look, unflinchingly, for that same stuff within your own tribe, and within yourself (which is hard). Then forgive (which is hardest). That's the only sane strategy for this Earthly game. Every other reaction makes you the problem rather than the solution.

Conciliation Was Just Re-Framed out of Existence

Trump damages the very notion of “unity“ by equating it with submission to an authoritarian leader.

Uncompromising extremists of every stripe associate consensus with docility, and unreasonably so. Fleeting self-awareness of their own unreasonable impulses restrains them to at least some extent. But those moorings are snapping from this Orwellian use of language, which negates the mere possibility of principled conciliation even as it purports to cherish it.Conciliationis being reframed out of existence.


Re: societal/political dynamics, you always need to consider not just the action, but also the reaction.

HappyMerry ChristmasHolidays

Ah, Christmas. Here at the Slog, that means it's time for my trademark Jewy/conciliatory perspective on the holiday. I've been running the same editorial for several years (my popular "Guide To Holiday Greetings For Christians"), but this time I'll share a Facebook conversation instead. It's a bit raw and sharp-edged, but that makes it fitting for 2018:

It's an American holiday as well as a religious one. Unfortunately, people on both sides of the cultural divide are unable to digest that degree of complexity. Something being two things is way more nuance than anyone can handle.

Being no more staunchly Jewish than, say, Irving Berlin, I happily wish a Merry Christmas to one and all.


I invite you to read/reread what I consider the prototypical Slog posting, describing the most foundational insight of my life which happened while I laid on a couch watching a movie one Christmas Eve: "The Deeper Implications of Holiday Blues". I've been writing a lot lately about perceptual framing (see all such postings here - I'd suggest reading from the bottom up - and you can see a definition here), and it all flows from this. In fact, pretty much this entire Slog flows from that one epiphany (here's a rough map of how it's unfolded).

Pittsburgh

Just a quick take on Pittsburgh:

I'm focused on the three police officers who took bullets to try to protect these people. In the long history of anti-semitism, that was not often (ever?) seen.

In 1993, Oskar Schindler, having written some checks and taken some risks, seemed like a hero. In 2018, cops run straight into the violence, and we barely register them. This is not The Age-Old. It's different now. I believe it's a last gasp of an old problem (though last gasps can be horrendous, and represent a long tail as they gradually fade out). Consider the black church bombing in Charleston a few years ago. Horrendous. But clearly a last gasp of an old problem. I'm not building a shelter in my basement to hide black friends, and they're not doing so for Jewish me, either. That may sound flippant, but it's not. It's a sanity check.

Sensitized by our relative safety and comfort, micro evil seems macro. A few pathetic dipshits with tiki torches in Charlottesville feel like a grand resurgence of the Third Reich, just because it's so startling (40 years ago, it wasn't so startling...so it didn't rattle the rest of us all that much. More dismayed eye-rolling than massive outrage).

Yes, a dipshit can run you over with their car or shoot up a church, mosque, or synagogue, and it's awful, but this is not what a civilizational resurgence of violence and hatred looks like. Take comfort in the longer arch, and stay sane in your rebound (some of my best friends are hicks who don't like Jews very much - though they're obviously willing to make exceptions. There's a huge diff between such prefs and shooting up a congregation, and that's not a distinction the Left seems able to make these days).


If suggestions of restraint strike you as irritating, it's time to reevaluate your urges. It is not your best self that compels you to drop values when shocked by others dropping theirs; to ratchet up intolerance in response to intolerance; to ape the monsters and let their example inspire gleeful indulgence of your uglier impulses.

Our current perch as a nation is a perfect in-laboratory case for exploring humanity's worst defect: our incorrigible impulse to respond to extremism with reciprocal extremism. But what if we get it right this time? Pittsburgh aside, what if the true moral test here isn't on the MAGAs to reform themselves, but on the rest of us to avoid the usual trap, and retain our values and our intelligent composure even when we're upset? It's an individual choice, not a group one. Each of us has an opportunity to "be the change".

A Note to Posterity

This is pretty much the antithesis of a posting I made in April titled "The Center is a Super Tribe...but Doesn't Know it Yet!". How did my perspective change so much so quickly? Three factors: 1. Extremism has accelerated in a chain reaction, which found detonation with the Brett Frigging Kavanaugh saga, 2. Less regular meditation, and 3. Ask me tomorrow, I might feel differently!


Dear Posterity,

Hi, people of the future. It's me, random shmuck from the past, just offering a data point - something to bear in mind once things quiet down and the immediate experience of living in this moment seems distant and unrelatable:

To be a centrist in stridently divisive times doesn't provide the expected feeling of affinity for both sides. No conciliatory bridge of potential understanding. Rather, it feels like being locked in an asylum where everyone's ranting and raving 24/7 and there's no one sane to talk to. It's like being a high schooler disgusted with both the jocks and the nerds. Think of a child neutrally viewing her fighting parents in a state of dismayed isolation.

I'm not saying centrists in times like these don't transcend the apparent polarity to view a unified impression of humanity. Oh, we do! However that impression is of a humanity unified by reciprocal self-delusion and smug certainty; by seething intolerance and juvenile emotional indulgence. Not a pretty picture. (The answer, as always, is to do this.)

From my perch here in ugly 2018, I send forward a suggestion: don't be a centrist. Choose a side (flip a coin!) and enjoy screaming your head off at the Bad Guys. Catalog their brutal stupidity and bad faith as proof of your side's superiority, which you must never closely examine. Do like the Israelis and Palestinians - always a fine model! - and commit to your marrow the atrocities of the Other, which shall justify your own righteous atrocities.

Facing a bogeyman, there's no call for self doubt. That's why most people love a nice big fat bogeyman. There is no moral clarity clearer than the moral clarity of one's marrow. It practically sparkles.


I once described a conversation with a Catalan friend about the visceral urgings of the marrow:

Him: I'm not a totally crazed nationalist, like some Catalans I know. Though I have to admit, deep down, I do feel a strong drive of that. I can't explain it rationally, but something about it just feels right to me.

Me: Let me tell you about a deep drive. You see that woman over there? (I gesture across the bar to an attractive female). I'd like to walk over there, throw her to the floor, rip all her clothes off, and fuck her senseless. This is not a drive, however, that I choose to indulge. Responsible people learn to disregard their drives, even if they might "feel right" at some dark, primal level.

A Centrist Appeal for Sanity

Extremists on both the Left and the Right, I make this futile appeal to your perpetually deaf ears:

Criticism of your tactics for solving a problem does not signal approval of the problem, nor alliance with the problem-causers.

If I could break into some central control room somewhere and make one single alteration to the human psyche, I'd rekindle this obvious and mundane logical connection, which seems to have gone completely dead for practically everyone.

To the Left: One can question the tactics of Black Lives Matter without being a racist who wants to see black people terrorized. And one can question the assumptions of #MeToo without excusing violence against women. To the Right: One can support a woman's freedom to choose without deeming embryos worthless, disposable scraps of tissue (more here). And one can support gun control without wanting to deny guns to people for whom hunting and vigorous defense of property and family is culturally important.

To those of you so deep in the Duality of it all that you've lost your minds, try to hang on to the seemingly obvious truth that everyone refusing to adopt your mantle, buy your doctrine and unquestioningly join your team is not a monster, and not your enemy!


Benjamin Witte is a legal commentator and editor of the Lawfare Blog. He's a national treasure who's done as much as any American this side of Robert Mueller to track and thwart the excesses of this administration. A few weeks ago, Witte was mass-harrassed by a furious mob for daring to oppose a line of attack on Brett Kavanaugh that he considered unjust. Intellectual integrity being unfashionable these days, many thousands of his previous allies and supporters decided that this could only mean his mask had fallen, revealing Witte as hellbent on enslaving women's bodies (never mind that the next SCOTUS nominee will be just as opposed to Roe vs Wade, or that Witte's positions have no power to affect the Senate's vote).

If you're not delving into social media and real life conversations, you may have found my last few few political postings overheated. They weren't. Left extremism right now is every bit as deranged and dangerous as right extremism. The true cancer isn't one ideology or the other, but extremism, period. And extremism on one side always begets reciprocal extremism on the other. 

Please at least consider moderation. In times of turmoil, it takes some discipline and contrarianism to favor rationality over emotion, but it's worth it. In the face of awfulness like Trump, we can choose the slightly more disciplined option of pressing for a return to moderation, rather than indulge the compulsion to careen to a reciprocal extreme; to monster-ize ourselves in response to the monster.

Centrism

The Left keeps careening leftward, imagining that this is a golden opportunity for, like, Bernie. Meanwhile, the Right seems determined to keep sticking with Trump, despite his escalating corruption, treason, and authoritarianism.

When there's tumult, when we're angry or scared, we instinctually bifurcate. We tribalize. If you imagine the political divide was ever about ideology, you haven't been paying attention (conservatism recently did a 180 - toward statism - with buttery ease). Really, it's shirts-and-skins. It's us-and-them. This sort of thing explains why history unfolds via a succession of immoderately reactive pendulum swings; why we never learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism.

We feel particular aversion to conciliation when we're riled up. As I once wrote, "'Character' is measured by the rate at which one discards one's values as stakes rise." And we humans don't always have much character. While it gives hope that three of our most adulated figures - Christ, King, and Gandhi - taught a better reaction, it's dismaying how easily we reject their vaunted lessons whenever emotion kindles.

Both ideologically and tribally, I'm centrist. And I believe the majority of the country is, as well. As explained in that link, I think most people are veeeery loosely attached to an identification, mostly out of pure momentum plus asymmetrical awareness of the sins of the other side (which is also how racism happens).

What does Centrisism mean? Easy: "a pox on both their houses." Only a true believer could feel no attraction for such a stance. When I see children playing Color Wars, I don't get drawn in to taking sides, because I'm not a child. I understand the benefits of giving children arbitrary excuses to compete - to flex strategic muscles and develop their sense of teamwork - but, as a grown-up, my perspective is lithe enough to recognize the silly exercise it actually is (I also completely understand how odd and bloodless folks like me appear to those in the throes of it all).

There are, paradoxically, two sides to a reluctance to choose sides:

1. No Thirst for Villainization

With a few exceptions, the Right isn't the Right; it's the anti-Left. And (again, with exceptions) the Left isn't the Left, it's the anti-Right. But my aversion muscles have atrophied, so I can't muster sufficient hatred of The Other to really motivate myself.

As a native New Yorker, liberalism feels like the more familiar tribe even if it's not my ideology. But Texas (mainstream Texas, not just Austin) is one of my favorite places, and I relate easily to people there...as well as to my Trump-supporter friends back home. So I simply can't summon a good strong "Fuck these people!" I grok both perspectives (which is why I can effectively explain conservatives to liberals). I clearly identify the ignorance and anger driving both extremes, and I'm no fan of ignorance or anger.

Being non-tribal, all that's left for me, then, are issues, and my feeling on issue is moderate and conciliatory in the best of times, and utterly beside the point in times like these. I'd be very happy with a president who's honorable, smart and institutionalist in 2020, even if I disagreed on tons of issues (I didn't love Gerald Ford's policies, but he sure was a relief after Nixon!). For instance, I'd vote blindly for Sally Yates (and who knows what she believes?).

Trump has shown us the damage a loose-canon demagogue can do. Give me a low-key mensch for a leader, period. In 2024 maybe I'll go back to thinking about issues! That's the centrist position (and, once again, it's potentially the majoritarian position; for one thing, bear in mind that Trump approval among Republicans doesn't count those who've stopped identifying as Republican!).

2. No Flocking Instinct

I don't flock. I don't seek the refuge of safe space, of tribal familiarity, of haven. I don't watch a Michael Moore and think "sure, he's an asshole, and he's over the top and sanctimonious, but, hey, he's fighting the good fight," and the same goes for a Rush Limbaugh. I can't get over the assholery and sanctimony. In-tribe gestures - the amplifications of my visceral predilections - don't help me forgive it. It sends me the other way, refusing to embrace divisive indulgent buffoonery from figureheads. Many people enjoy watching the performance of someone roughly like them only comically exaggerated as a guilty pleasure. It strokes their confirmation bias. In fact, there's the Fox audience, right there! But I don't chuckle forgivingly at the seething dimness of a Maxine Waters because she and I happen to agree on this administration's venality.

The Republican party will incinerate along with Trump (people who Know Stuff - hardened NatSec folks - say the truth that will eventually emerge is eyeball-searing and much worse than we imagine; the fever will be broken, and the end game began in Helsinki). I'd love to see it replaced with old-time conservatism. Not social conservatism, telling me how to live. And not libertarianism, a radical and nonviable utopia for sheltered eggheads. And not Koch-ism, deferentially trusting unconstrained elites and corps to act in society's best interest. Rather, I mean an emphasis on honor, moderation, small government, rule of law, and institutionalism. And I'd love to see the Democratic Party return to its traditional role as mild irritant to Conservative complacency, stoking a moderately heated grind between idealistic new initiatives and leery skepticism of change. I'd contribute and vote across party lines in such a scenario.


Of course, that's what America traditionally was like. To be sure, it never felt idyllic in the least. The moderately heated grind often felt like siege warfare - much as long TSA lines before we're whisked around the world in hours for the cost of a couple day's work feel to us like a form of torture. It's all how you frame things. The problem is we ratchet our framing in order to ballast our happiness.

The World Isn't Ending

If you're a liberal, it takes forbearance to consider a Centrist's view right now. I post this not to provoke, but in the hope it might calm some people down from the roiling, cataclysmic Sturm und Drang. In complacent times, we need to hear edgy alarms, but amid melodrama it helps to listen to moderation.

First: a reminder that while Donald Trump is an authoritarian, vulgarian, thief, and traitor, he's also an incompetent clown who's his own worst enemy, and those are not the ones who destroy societies.

They can, however, enact the agenda of the party that elected them. And implementing conservative policies and appointing conservative judges is not tantamount to societal destruction, though you'd never know it from the lamentations of the Left as a Republican president prepares to flip the Supreme Court for a couple decades, after a half-century run of surprisingly liberal decisions remade America into something half the country absolutely hates.

I happen to support a number of those progressive decisions. But I also like to see people who don't think like me in this diverse society have a turn at the wheel. Remember how painful the Obama administration was for so many? They weren't all racists. Most were decent people with different values and inclinations, and the neighborly thing to do is to give them their time at the reins, feel happy for them while holding our noses, and plot strategy for the next election (opposing the worst until then). That's how democracy works.

Liberals love pluralism, tolerance, democracy, and encouraging all voices to contribute - just as long as those awful fucking people never get their way with their awful fucking policies. There's their progressive agenda - which is all that is Right and Just - and then there's the beyond-the-pale shit pile of doom. Democracy's when we all join hands in diverse and tolerant harmony to choose the Right and Just. See? Isn't that nice? And best for everyone? And completely reasonable? Why should we even entertain other views?

One of the problems right now is that two things are conflating. Trump's outrageous inclinations and utterances, which most often have all the real-world power of firecrackers and roman candles (before you start hollering at me, know that Obama deported tons), arrive in tandem with the enactment of policies, and appointment of judges, that half the country favors. One's mostly fizz, and the second is simply democracy - i.e. sharing power. The two together do not constitute the end of civilization as we know it.

I watched a lot of MSNBC yesterday, and hosts were railing about how abortion will most likely become more difficult to obtain. Consider my case for why abortion - like gun sales - maybe ought not to be as convenient as buying canned pineapple. It's a viewpoint (if you'll actually read the article) I suspect the vast majority of the population might agree with, even if it's not a stance they'd ever publicly express. And this, as of now, anyway, seems to be the primary screeching peril: something a reasonable, non-spittle-ejecting guy like me could get behind and you could probably live with (unfortunately, the inconvenience would disproportionally affect lower-income women, and that's a genuine problem, but not remotely in the same league with something I saw an otherwise hinged person screaming on Twitter yesterday about how our daughters and granddaughters will never know what it means to have control of their own bodies).

Finally, the so-called McConnell Rule about not appointing SCOTUS judges in election years - which was a cynical abomination and no kind of genuine point of civics - obviously referred to presidential election years, duh. The Democratic leaders hollering about how this, too, is an election year - like that's just the cleverest and most persuasive tack - are demonstrating more of the feeble lameness that lost Hillary the presidency. Er, guys, every year has elections. So why don't we forget the so-called McConnell Rule, which was never anything beyond transparently expedient pretext, and just go ahead and do like McConnell himself, and find smart ways to battle a foundational move from the Other Side. Maybe even try to intelligently strategize the process, rather than mouthily and ineffectively flail and rage (Jesus; a pox on both these parties!).

One last note. Per my frequent predictions, radical left-wing politicians are being embraced by the Left at a time when we really need to be reasserting norms and solidity. Consider Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the charismatic Democratic Socialist bartender who won a congressional primary in the Bronx: