On a lighter note, while thinking of examples of rightwingers only showing compassion to suffering encountered in their own circles (remembering that Dick Cheney's support for gay marriage was undoubtedly to do with having a lesbian daughter), I was reading various pieces about DC and smiled to see this:
Former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who has died, had intimidating power. For instance, when Cheney shot a friend while hunting, an apology was made by the friend to Cheney. His fearful aura made it all the more amusing when CNN accidentally published an obituary of Cheney in 2003, but it was unfinished and had been based on a template used for the Queen Mother. Cheney was described as “the UK’s favourite grandmother”.
The following is according to exit polling for the NJ gubernatorial election. In parentheses are the percentages of the overall votes for each group, followed by the percent of the group that voted for Sherrill, followed by the percent for Ciattarelli.
White (70%) 47% 52%
Black (10%) 94% 5%
Hispanic/Latino (10%) 68% 31%
Asian (5%) 82% 17%
Other (4%) 54% 43%
As mentioned at GftNC's NYT link, groups who shifted right in the last presidential election have moved back left after seeing what they really voted for. I'm curious how age groups voted we well and will probably dig something up later.
The election I was watching was the Public Services Commission elections in Georgia. No Democrat has won a PSC election since 2020. The two Dems both won yesterday, by a bit better than 60/40 margins. What I don't know is whether this was a local kitchen table issue (six Georgia Power rate hikes approved in the last two years), a broader direction issue (the Commission has been pro nuclear and fossil fuels, anti renewables), or a continued red-to-blue shift in Georgia generally (like some western states, Georgia has a lot of younger educated adults moving in, which eventually matters).
I have speculated before that what seems to me obvious from personal observation, i.e. rightwing inability to appreciate injustice and suffering unless in their own immediate family, circle etc, may be a missing or limited capacity of something analogous to imagination. From having to sit numerous IQ tests in my childhood, it was clear to me that the thing I was uniformly worst at was spatial conceptionalisation/manipulation, and although results seemed to support that it wasn't bad enough to materially alter the results, nonetheless I was perfectly conscious of finding it much more difficult than any other category. It's hard to know whether to blame people for possessing less of a desirable talent.
I myself am far too nervous to take this as anything too hopeful, encouraging though it is to read about. This, from Jamelle Bouie in today's NYT, muses on the result.
What really perplexes me about the current situation here in these United States is how people can ignore the inhumanity of the execution of immigration policy. Even if you think someone doesn't belong in the country, does that mean you have to think it's okay to essentially terrorize and kidnap them - children included? It's a completely disproportionate response to the simple violation of immigration law.
How do people accept this administration's insistence that they're almost exclusively detaining rapists, murders, drug dealers, gang members, and other violent criminals who are here illegally in the face of all the evidence to the contrary?
How do they ignore the detention of US citizens? "Oh, but they let them go after they found out" seems to be the excuse. But US citizens have still been put in terrible situations, sometimes lasting days at a time, with no recourse. We're not even talking about "those people" in these situations.
It's a lot to ignore, regardless of your policy preferences.
How can a person show compassion and empathy to strangers while supporting politics that denies it to undeserving Others?
I'm not entirely sure How. But it's hardly unusual for people to hold different views regarding the abstract and the particular. Regarding "those people" and "this person."
Currently, a lot of people here have problems in the abstract with immigration. But they don't make the connection between the immigration issue in the abstract and that nice young lady who helps grandma with her housekeeping and her shopping. Said nice young lady being an obvious immigrant, complete with accented English and occasional issues with words that any middle school kid would know.
At most, they manage a rationalization of "but she's different." Even though she isn't, except to the extent that every person is different from every other. I'm not sure it is even possible to bring someone to realize that the abstract, the general case, is more like the specific individuals he knows.
Perhaps someone with a stronger grounding in psychology than I can say how many specific cases someone needs personal knowledge of before their view of the abstract will change. I am sure that it needs personal knowledge. Just being told that immigrantion impacts food prices, because much everybody who works in agriculture, whether picking vegetables or butchering beef? Only works if you know some of those folks, your children (or grandchildren) attend school with their kids, etc.
russell's uncle Charlie doesn't sound the least bit superficial to me. He sounds like someone formed (as most of us are) by his life experiences, for better and worse. We don't know too much about how his particular combination of beliefs came about, which would certainly be interesting and useful in trying to make sense of the world, but the upside of that is that he and his nephew/godson continued to have an affectionate and joyful time with each other for many decades. And, at least in my opinion, affection and joy between good people weigh heavily on the desirable side of the balance in a dark and worrying world.
How can a person show compassion and empathy to strangers while supporting politics that denies it to undeserving Others? Its the "undeserving" part, if they actually think it through. Most people choose their political affiliation for non-rational reasons, they like the way a politician's persona or speech makes them feel. So you can feel compassion for orphans or Aids patients or kids on reservations because you see them suffer and don't think they deserve to suffer, but still support a politician promoting Aids as God's punishment for sin because those are other people you don't see, and you like the idea of people paying for their sins in the abstract. Besides, you met that politician once and he was funny and charming. Superficial, but good and moral people can be superficial.
Both Democrats won, which is noteworthy in itself because no Democrat has won a non-Federal statewide election in 20 years or so, but more noteworthy are the margins, which are currently 62-38.
With Governor Kemp being term-limited, 2026 could be exciting in Georgia. And that's before figuring in the impact of whatever wave might manifest nationwide.
I couldn’t help wondering whether, at some stage of your young to later manhood, you ever tried to find out how such an otherwise lovely person conceptualised his political opinions
Never had that conversation. We talked about family stuff, or the heirloom fruit trees he had planted in his yard, or odd old songs he had discovered somewhere. And we played games.
No election results thread yet, so here's some (unexpected, to me) good news from here in Georgia. Two seats on the five member Georgia Public Service Commission were on the ballot (elections for this body have been delayed by lawsuits since 2020, it's a mess), statewide elections. Both Democrats won, which is noteworthy in itself because no Democrat has won a non-Federal statewide election in 20 years or so, but more noteworthy are the margins, which are currently 62-38.
Have just started to shift to teaching my students about speculative journalism (reporting of things like climate change that frame parts of the story using the tools [extrapolation, cognitive estrangement] of science fiction). I have them read a few Spec J pieces from High Country News based on the Fourth National Climate Assessment from 2018 with the stories set in 2068. In past quarters I have pulled up a copy of the Assessment to show the what and the how of the extrapolation.
All of the governmental links to the study are broken. The Ancient Orange One and his gibbering minions have taken down those sites. This despite the fact that it was his previous administration that published them in the first place.
And now I am torn as to whether the university will have my back if I simply point this out to my students. We've all been warned not to engage in anything that could be taken as political activism, and they are drawing a very risk-averse line in the sand for what counts as activism.
russell, I've been thinking about this post all day. Given that Charlie died at 90, and you are almost 70, I couldn't help wondering whether, at some stage of your young to later manhood, you ever tried to find out how such an otherwise lovely person conceptualised his political opinions, and expressed what was important to him. Obviously, you wouldn't have wanted to fight with him, or make him (or yourself) feel bad, and maybe you never went there. And maybe you wouldn't want to go into it now either, in which case fair enough. But if you ever did discuss it, delicately or not (in my family we never argued delicately, but argumentation was considered an unavoidable part of life and we never questioned our love for each other), and if you felt like giving an idea of the discussions, that would be very interesting indeed.
In 2011, 30 percent of white evangelicals said that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” Now, 72 percent say so
Kind of a necessity for them. If they still held to expecting morality of elected officials, there's no way they could vote for Trump.
There are others who opposed him, not because they necessarily disliked his platform, but because they believed that character matters in elected officials and found his objectionable.
it's 9 years old now, but it's still remarkable:
In 2011, 30 percent of white evangelicals said that "an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life." Now, 72 percent say so — a far bigger swing than other religious groups the poll studied.
It's just one poll, but it does suggest a sizable shift in how Americans of several religious stripes think about the connection between morality and politics. White evangelicals also are less likely than they used to be to say that "strong religious beliefs" are "very important" in a presidential candidate. That share fell from 64 percent in 2011 to 49 percent this year.
White mainline Protestants and Catholics also grew more accepting of a candidate who has committed "immoral acts," while religiously unaffiliated people barely changed. Those "unaffiliated" people in 2011 had been much more willing than the broader population to believe candidates who had committed "immoral acts" could do their jobs. Now, they are in line with Americans as a whole.
in the archive.org copy of this article (linked), there's a nice graph that illustrates what happened more clearly than text can (NPR's current version has lost the graph image).
sometime between Obama and Trump, huge numbers of people in the religious groups surveyed changed their minds about how much personal morality mattered for Presidents.
which, IMO, is all you need to know about how highly those religious groups people actually valued that particular morality.
if one can abandon a principle that quickly, there's a good chance that principle was never very strongly-held.
The people who advocate private charity replacing government payments usually have no real idea of the relative scales of what the government does, and what private charity could do. Ignore Social Security on the (incorrect) theory that it's a mandated savings program. Medicare and Medicaid combined are more than four times the size of all charitable giving each year. Private charity could cover income support spending in normal years, but would be bankrupted trying to cover the surge that happens during a recession.
I think Wonkie is correct about religion as the locus for right wing charity. I remember seeing claims a decade or so ago that conservatives gave more to charity than did liberals, but the details of that showed that part of what counted as conservative charity was church offerings and tithing, which may be charity or it may be paying the pastor/priest/rabbi/imam and covering the overhead/improvement of the communal place of worship. And unlike Charity Navigator, there really isn't any way to track the efficiency with which those religious donations are turned into support for charitable causes.
My conservative family members and friends can be quite generous. I do think, however, that liberal charitable giving tends to go to causes a bit farther from home and immediate community, where conservative giving tends to have fewer degrees of separation from the giver.
I've been seeing a lot of this "Government shouldn't do charity because charity should be voluntary through churches." Back in the days of Dickens, that is how charity was done. The 1800's were a transition period in Europe and the US when the medieval attitude that the poor deserved to be poor was gradually replaced by the common good and the social contract (and I'd say, basic human decency.). Quite often the people who make the argument that the government shouldn't do charity are themselves living off taxpayers and feel entitled to what they get. It isn't an argument that has any validity, in my view.
My observation is that charitable giving and good works are at least as common on the right as on the left. The R's are predominantly in favour of helping the unfortunate, so long as the get to do it of their own free will.
Their perspective is it's wrong for the government to take their money to give it to possibly undeserving poor people they've never met.
It's a different thing to support unpleasant politicians who share, or pretend to share, parts of one's world view. I thought it couldn't possible extend to someone as unremittingly vile as Trump: I was wrong.
I don't want to be the old geezer who blames everything on the internet, but it seems to me that all the touted ability to hook people up with like minded individuals has a lot of people missing the diversity in their own backyard. That diversity used to keep these sorts of opinions in check, even though they were held by people, by isolating people, it allows them to flower. Not a new idea, but one I think holds.
I've been reading Jeffrey Hall's Japan's nationalist right in the internet age: Online media and grassroots conservative activism, and he has this
In his book, Yasuda portrays Zaitokukai [an ultra-nationalist and far-right extremist political organization] as a product of feelings of economic uncertainty among the working classes of Japanese society. In other words, they feel socially and economically isolated, and can experience positive emotions by channeling their ill feelings into hatred of Koreans.
Sociologist Higuchi Naoto conducted interviews with Zaitokukai participants and came to very different conclusions. Instead of finding social or economic anxiety as infuences on joining the movement, Higuchi found that many of his interviewees had been raised in politically conservative households or had been involved in conservative political activities for the year.90 The idea that they are just “ordinary” people who, due to anxiety, join nativist groups was misleading. Most of Higuchi’s interviewees were already ideologically on the right:
"There are, in this sense, specific problems with Yasuda’s opinion that Zaitokukai is made up of “your neighbors.” There are certainly many activists in the nativist movement who are “ordinary people” with jobs, but ideologically they are not “neutral or apolitical”; they are conservative."
People who are already subscribed to a conservative worldview are more receptive to how nativist groups frame and introduce information. Higuchi sees these nativists as an outgrowth of the existing nationalist and revisionist movement of the 1990s and a conservative establishment that already encouraged hostility toward Korea and China. He also argued that the geopolitical situation in Asia has aided in their rise. Issues such as war responsibility, the abduction of Japanese citizens by North Korea, and ongoing territorial disputes fueled hatred toward people from Korea and China. Higuchi found that the attitudes of Zaitokukai members toward immigrants from countries such as the Philippines and Brazil, who tend to have a lower socioeconomic status than Korean and Chinese immigrants, were not particularly negative. This is very different from the observations of scholars of the far-right in Europe and the United States, for whom the perceived economic or cultural threats from immigrant laborers, or demographic replacement, are central ideas.
That last point is interesting, as it suggests that there is a stronger class element involved in this for the West than it is for Japan.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “People and poliltics”
On a lighter note, while thinking of examples of rightwingers only showing compassion to suffering encountered in their own circles (remembering that Dick Cheney's support for gay marriage was undoubtedly to do with having a lesbian daughter), I was reading various pieces about DC and smiled to see this:
Former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who has died, had intimidating power. For instance, when Cheney shot a friend while hunting, an apology was made by the friend to Cheney. His fearful aura made it all the more amusing when CNN accidentally published an obituary of Cheney in 2003, but it was unfinished and had been based on a template used for the Queen Mother. Cheney was described as “the UK’s favourite grandmother”.
On “Still I Rise”
The following is according to exit polling for the NJ gubernatorial election. In parentheses are the percentages of the overall votes for each group, followed by the percent of the group that voted for Sherrill, followed by the percent for Ciattarelli.
White (70%) 47% 52%
Black (10%) 94% 5%
Hispanic/Latino (10%) 68% 31%
Asian (5%) 82% 17%
Other (4%) 54% 43%
As mentioned at GftNC's NYT link, groups who shifted right in the last presidential election have moved back left after seeing what they really voted for. I'm curious how age groups voted we well and will probably dig something up later.
I mean, 94% of the Black vote. Wow!
"
The election I was watching was the Public Services Commission elections in Georgia. No Democrat has won a PSC election since 2020. The two Dems both won yesterday, by a bit better than 60/40 margins. What I don't know is whether this was a local kitchen table issue (six Georgia Power rate hikes approved in the last two years), a broader direction issue (the Commission has been pro nuclear and fossil fuels, anti renewables), or a continued red-to-blue shift in Georgia generally (like some western states, Georgia has a lot of younger educated adults moving in, which eventually matters).
On “People and poliltics”
I have speculated before that what seems to me obvious from personal observation, i.e. rightwing inability to appreciate injustice and suffering unless in their own immediate family, circle etc, may be a missing or limited capacity of something analogous to imagination. From having to sit numerous IQ tests in my childhood, it was clear to me that the thing I was uniformly worst at was spatial conceptionalisation/manipulation, and although results seemed to support that it wasn't bad enough to materially alter the results, nonetheless I was perfectly conscious of finding it much more difficult than any other category. It's hard to know whether to blame people for possessing less of a desirable talent.
On “Still I Rise”
I myself am far too nervous to take this as anything too hopeful, encouraging though it is to read about. This, from Jamelle Bouie in today's NYT, muses on the result.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/opinion/trump-mamdani-spanberger-sherrill-democrats.html?unlocked_article_code=1.y08.9mv4.Mfkw0tFLN_aL&smid=url-share
On “People and poliltics”
What really perplexes me about the current situation here in these United States is how people can ignore the inhumanity of the execution of immigration policy. Even if you think someone doesn't belong in the country, does that mean you have to think it's okay to essentially terrorize and kidnap them - children included? It's a completely disproportionate response to the simple violation of immigration law.
How do people accept this administration's insistence that they're almost exclusively detaining rapists, murders, drug dealers, gang members, and other violent criminals who are here illegally in the face of all the evidence to the contrary?
How do they ignore the detention of US citizens? "Oh, but they let them go after they found out" seems to be the excuse. But US citizens have still been put in terrible situations, sometimes lasting days at a time, with no recourse. We're not even talking about "those people" in these situations.
It's a lot to ignore, regardless of your policy preferences.
"
How can a person show compassion and empathy to strangers while supporting politics that denies it to undeserving Others?
I'm not entirely sure How. But it's hardly unusual for people to hold different views regarding the abstract and the particular. Regarding "those people" and "this person."
Currently, a lot of people here have problems in the abstract with immigration. But they don't make the connection between the immigration issue in the abstract and that nice young lady who helps grandma with her housekeeping and her shopping. Said nice young lady being an obvious immigrant, complete with accented English and occasional issues with words that any middle school kid would know.
At most, they manage a rationalization of "but she's different." Even though she isn't, except to the extent that every person is different from every other. I'm not sure it is even possible to bring someone to realize that the abstract, the general case, is more like the specific individuals he knows.
Perhaps someone with a stronger grounding in psychology than I can say how many specific cases someone needs personal knowledge of before their view of the abstract will change. I am sure that it needs personal knowledge. Just being told that immigrantion impacts food prices, because much everybody who works in agriculture, whether picking vegetables or butchering beef? Only works if you know some of those folks, your children (or grandchildren) attend school with their kids, etc.
"
russell's uncle Charlie doesn't sound the least bit superficial to me. He sounds like someone formed (as most of us are) by his life experiences, for better and worse. We don't know too much about how his particular combination of beliefs came about, which would certainly be interesting and useful in trying to make sense of the world, but the upside of that is that he and his nephew/godson continued to have an affectionate and joyful time with each other for many decades. And, at least in my opinion, affection and joy between good people weigh heavily on the desirable side of the balance in a dark and worrying world.
"
How can a person show compassion and empathy to strangers while supporting politics that denies it to undeserving Others? Its the "undeserving" part, if they actually think it through. Most people choose their political affiliation for non-rational reasons, they like the way a politician's persona or speech makes them feel. So you can feel compassion for orphans or Aids patients or kids on reservations because you see them suffer and don't think they deserve to suffer, but still support a politician promoting Aids as God's punishment for sin because those are other people you don't see, and you like the idea of people paying for their sins in the abstract. Besides, you met that politician once and he was funny and charming. Superficial, but good and moral people can be superficial.
"
Both Democrats won, which is noteworthy in itself because no Democrat has won a non-Federal statewide election in 20 years or so, but more noteworthy are the margins, which are currently 62-38.
With Governor Kemp being term-limited, 2026 could be exciting in Georgia. And that's before figuring in the impact of whatever wave might manifest nationwide.
"
I was expecting a blue wave but it exceeded my hopes.
"
I couldn’t help wondering whether, at some stage of your young to later manhood, you ever tried to find out how such an otherwise lovely person conceptualised his political opinions
Never had that conversation. We talked about family stuff, or the heirloom fruit trees he had planted in his yard, or odd old songs he had discovered somewhere. And we played games.
"
No election results thread yet, so here's some (unexpected, to me) good news from here in Georgia. Two seats on the five member Georgia Public Service Commission were on the ballot (elections for this body have been delayed by lawsuits since 2020, it's a mess), statewide elections. Both Democrats won, which is noteworthy in itself because no Democrat has won a non-Federal statewide election in 20 years or so, but more noteworthy are the margins, which are currently 62-38.
"
People and politics in NJ are looking okay tonight.
On “Another variety in the diversity of greasy”
Have just started to shift to teaching my students about speculative journalism (reporting of things like climate change that frame parts of the story using the tools [extrapolation, cognitive estrangement] of science fiction). I have them read a few Spec J pieces from High Country News based on the Fourth National Climate Assessment from 2018 with the stories set in 2068. In past quarters I have pulled up a copy of the Assessment to show the what and the how of the extrapolation.
All of the governmental links to the study are broken. The Ancient Orange One and his gibbering minions have taken down those sites. This despite the fact that it was his previous administration that published them in the first place.
And now I am torn as to whether the university will have my back if I simply point this out to my students. We've all been warned not to engage in anything that could be taken as political activism, and they are drawing a very risk-averse line in the sand for what counts as activism.
This is not sustainable.
On “People and poliltics”
russell, I've been thinking about this post all day. Given that Charlie died at 90, and you are almost 70, I couldn't help wondering whether, at some stage of your young to later manhood, you ever tried to find out how such an otherwise lovely person conceptualised his political opinions, and expressed what was important to him. Obviously, you wouldn't have wanted to fight with him, or make him (or yourself) feel bad, and maybe you never went there. And maybe you wouldn't want to go into it now either, in which case fair enough. But if you ever did discuss it, delicately or not (in my family we never argued delicately, but argumentation was considered an unavoidable part of life and we never questioned our love for each other), and if you felt like giving an idea of the discussions, that would be very interesting indeed.
"
Hating on gays and controlling women are paramount.
On “Weekend music thread #03 Rhumba and the clave”
Russell: Loved this. And so fun "meeting" you in your element. Music really is the universal language.
But now I'm seeing your hands every time I read one of your comments, lol.
On “People and poliltics”
In 2011, 30 percent of white evangelicals said that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” Now, 72 percent say so
Kind of a necessity for them. If they still held to expecting morality of elected officials, there's no way they could vote for Trump.
Does clarify what their priorities are.
"
There are others who opposed him, not because they necessarily disliked his platform, but because they believed that character matters in elected officials and found his objectionable.
it's 9 years old now, but it's still remarkable:
in the archive.org copy of this article (linked), there's a nice graph that illustrates what happened more clearly than text can (NPR's current version has lost the graph image).
sometime between Obama and Trump, huge numbers of people in the religious groups surveyed changed their minds about how much personal morality mattered for Presidents.
which, IMO, is all you need to know about how highly those religious groups people actually valued that particular morality.
if one can abandon a principle that quickly, there's a good chance that principle was never very strongly-held.
"
The people who advocate private charity replacing government payments usually have no real idea of the relative scales of what the government does, and what private charity could do. Ignore Social Security on the (incorrect) theory that it's a mandated savings program. Medicare and Medicaid combined are more than four times the size of all charitable giving each year. Private charity could cover income support spending in normal years, but would be bankrupted trying to cover the surge that happens during a recession.
"
I think Wonkie is correct about religion as the locus for right wing charity. I remember seeing claims a decade or so ago that conservatives gave more to charity than did liberals, but the details of that showed that part of what counted as conservative charity was church offerings and tithing, which may be charity or it may be paying the pastor/priest/rabbi/imam and covering the overhead/improvement of the communal place of worship. And unlike Charity Navigator, there really isn't any way to track the efficiency with which those religious donations are turned into support for charitable causes.
My conservative family members and friends can be quite generous. I do think, however, that liberal charitable giving tends to go to causes a bit farther from home and immediate community, where conservative giving tends to have fewer degrees of separation from the giver.
I think that is a fair assessment.
"
I've been seeing a lot of this "Government shouldn't do charity because charity should be voluntary through churches." Back in the days of Dickens, that is how charity was done. The 1800's were a transition period in Europe and the US when the medieval attitude that the poor deserved to be poor was gradually replaced by the common good and the social contract (and I'd say, basic human decency.). Quite often the people who make the argument that the government shouldn't do charity are themselves living off taxpayers and feel entitled to what they get. It isn't an argument that has any validity, in my view.
"
My observation is that charitable giving and good works are at least as common on the right as on the left. The R's are predominantly in favour of helping the unfortunate, so long as the get to do it of their own free will.
Their perspective is it's wrong for the government to take their money to give it to possibly undeserving poor people they've never met.
It's a different thing to support unpleasant politicians who share, or pretend to share, parts of one's world view. I thought it couldn't possible extend to someone as unremittingly vile as Trump: I was wrong.
"
I don't want to be the old geezer who blames everything on the internet, but it seems to me that all the touted ability to hook people up with like minded individuals has a lot of people missing the diversity in their own backyard. That diversity used to keep these sorts of opinions in check, even though they were held by people, by isolating people, it allows them to flower. Not a new idea, but one I think holds.
I've been reading Jeffrey Hall's Japan's nationalist right in the internet age: Online media and grassroots conservative activism, and he has this
That last point is interesting, as it suggests that there is a stronger class element involved in this for the West than it is for Japan.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.