State of the Discussion

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.

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.

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.

Are you in contact with your Apache and Hopi cousins? 

I'm in touch with my cousing Peter - the Apache - on Facebook. After Charlie retired from FDNY he painted houses, and Peter basically apprenticed with him and continues to work as a house painter and general handyman. He had some bumpy times, but is all good now. Peter has the best family pictures and has become kind of the family archivist.

My cousin Tara - the Hopi - grew away from the family a bit at some point, although she and her daughter Kateri are still in touch with Charlie's kids.

Charlie and his wife (and the rest of them) sound like wonderful people.

They were a pretty remarkable crew.

FWIW, the younger guy on the left, sitting in front of my grandfather (older Archie Bunker looking guy in the white shirt) was Eddie Gonzales. Not a brother by birth, but basically unofficially adopted into the family.

Eddie's father abandoned him, and his mother was an alcoholic. Eddie himself was gay, which nobody ever talked about but everyone knew, and nobody really cared about one way or the other. He was good friends with the brothers, so he came and lived with them and my grandfolks raised him along with the rest of the gang.

Eddie was at every family gathering and was just part of the family, full stop. Just a part of the larger Richmond Hill crew.

So yes, this weird dilemma of people who are personally beautiful - kind and outgoing and generous - but aligned with social and political movements that are... not.

I think a part of all of this for my mom's folks was coming up through the Depression, and then WWII. The brothers were too young to serve in the war, but my father (guy in front of the Christmas tree holding the baby - you can only see the top of his head) did, and they all dealt with rationing etc.

They were basically poor - not desperately, but poor enough to have to watch every nickel and do without a lot of things. Like everyone around them was. Tucky - the brother in the middle with the big smile - was offered a full basketball scholarship to Columbia, and wasn't able to go, because the family needed him to work and bring money into the house.

My sense is that all of those experiences - the anxiety of having just barely enough, the sacrifices around wartime - gave them an ethic that you pull together and help out whoever needs help.

But lots of folks came through all of that and were not quite as open-hearted.

This crew and their kids were my people, really - my father's family were all in Georgia, and I did not see them as often, many of them I never even met. They were a joy to know, and I miss them.

Are you in contact with your Apache and Hopi cousins? I'm curious about how their lives turned out. My shirt tail relatives of that generation had a native adopted daughter, but their attitude was condescending and eventually she cut off all connection.

As for how good people do bad things. I think partly it's because they are good people that they can do bad things. They know their own lives, their values, their actions and think that people like them aren't doing anything bad. That plus the harm they do is an abstraction to them.

I think you make a good point about people being complex. So the first question that's worth asking about someone whose politics you question is Why are you supporting this horrible person for office. The answer can be surprising.

Take one obvious example that most of us are old enough to remember. There are people who supported Clinton both times that he won, simply because they liked the platform he ran on and despite his character flaws. 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. (Personally, I think him a pretty appalling excuse for a human being, even if I like many of the things he tried to do while in office.)

Things get more complex when you find people that have essentially identical views on the issues. Faced by a candidate whom they agree with on some issues and disagree with on others, they may vote differently based on how they prioritize the various issues.

Certainly there are extreme cases -- Trump, for example, has absolutely nothing that I can see to recommend him. Unless you somehow manage to see politics are merely a show, with zero real world consequences. But in general people, and circumstances, are rarely binary good/bad.

I have a long time friend, Kile Smith, who is actually a living breathing composer. He heard a recording of the Brahms Requiem when he was a teenager and decided, without much other background or context other than playing some bass and singing in his high school chorus, that that was what he wanted to do.

I met Kile when we both attended Bible College in the mid 70's. Long story for another time. Suffice it to say we became good friends, went our separate ways for a while, and then reconnected a few years ago courtesy of Facebook. For which I'm grateful, Kile is a good person to know.

Most serious arts have a sort of "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" aspect to them. They require a lot of time - hours and hours and hours - of hard work, often time spent alone, with no particular guarantee that you are going to get anywhere. Composing has the additional complication that, to actually realize your work, you have to get someone to perform it. Which introduces a kind of chicken-and-egg thing - if you don't really have a reputation yet, how do you persuade someone to invest in performing your stuff? But if nobody ever performs your stuff, how do you build a reputation?

It's a challenge.

Kile is my age - 69 and counting - and his work is now performed and recorded a lot, by ensembles with real national and international reputations. But it took decades of hard lonely work to make that happen. If you ask him, he will tell you that his secret is having an "iron butt" - he made himself sit in a chair for hours, day after day, to do the work. He's an extremely humble guy, makes no great claims about his talents, but he also knows his work is good.

And it is good.

Most of his work is sacred choral stuff. He's also done some orchestral work, and has set texts by folks as various as Seneca, Robert Lax, Tagore, and Stephen Foster.

Here is Kile talking about his process in composing an Agnus Del.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMoL-y_vjIY

One of the movements from his setting of texts by Seneca, "The Waking Sun".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0J1pgCAx3g

"The stars shine", from his "Consolation of Apollo", a setting of a text from Boethius.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZIe8d5StCw

"Three Spirituals for Piano Trio", an instrumental piece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq6cjnOxW00

Kile almost died this year. He had been feeling ill for a while, with weird and non-specific symptoms. Doctors gave him a bewildering variety of diagnoses, none of which led to a useful treatment plan. He finally got an accurate diagnosis of multiple myolema and has spent the last couple of months in the oncology ward at University of Pennsylvania Hospital. He's doing better - still a long road ahead, but improving, with good prospects for managing things and having lots of years to go.

While in isolation, he finished a piece that had been commissioned. I suggested to him (via Facebook IM, it was a no-visitors situation and talking on the phone was too tiring) that he might want to take his condition as an opportunity to rest for a bit, but apparently he wasn't having it.

Let us work while we have the light.

Thank you for this opportunity to share my good friend with you all.

Also, as a comment on the "work ethic" thing:

Is there anyone in the US who has a stronger work ethic than immigrants?

Maybe it's just me, but every time I see someone who looks "immigrant-ish" - which usually means cafe au lait skin tone and an accent - they are working their asses off.

You know those "how many X does it take to do Y" jokes? Here is mine.

How many immigrants does it take to... oh wait, never mind, they're done.

Just saying.

russell - Grok needs to read the Second Treatise on Government. Also the preamble to the Massachusetts Constitution, which preceded and was a model for the US Constitution.

I'm sure that Grok has been fed those things, but what it "thinks" about those things is just a matter of remixing what others have said about those texts.

Oh, I expect that they would be satisfied with establishing whether there had been miscegenation in the last generation or two. The old 1 drop approach having died of all the mixing in the century and a half since owners could, and did, rape their slaves with impunity.

One could try just going by melanin, except that would restrict testing to late winter and early spring. Otherwise summer tans start confusing the issue vs permanent sun tans.

And tends to be an enthusiasm of people whose "understanding" of the American frontier is limited to Hollywood movies and old TV westerns. When the reality was that, in the Old West people cooperated to survive. And those who didn't didn't.

As a plus the new categories would allow the reintroduction of miscegenation laws.

As a small bit of pedantry, what we had were anti-miscegenation laws.

At least this time around it would be possible (maybe not feasible as a general rule, but possible) to use DNA testing to determine if those laws had been violated. Although there might be an issue with the fact that some (whisper it!) expertise is required to run such tests and interpret the results.

What is “American culture”?

Here are some of the basics.

"American culture is diverse, shaped by history, immigration, and regional differences, but several core tenets recur across sources like sociological studies (e.g., Hofstede's cultural dimensions), historical analyses (e.g., Tocqueville's Democracy in America), and contemporary surveys (e.g., Pew Research on American values). These are not universal—exceptions and debates exist—but they form a widely recognized foundation."
Core Tenets of American Culture

I took up teaching maths part-time for the local university some time after I retired from full-time work. Sometimes I feel exploited, because the overseas students pay the universities very well, and the university pays me not much. But it is a joy to work with young people who take pleasure in learning.

No believing Christian fundamentalist accepts that Mormons are real Christians. Farther outside the pale than even Catholics.

Consider that Italians and Irish were considered black around 140 years ago. 60 years ago, people doubted that a president could be Catholic while at the same time not accepting that Martin Luther King represented actual Christian beliefs. Never underestimate the ability of Americans to do backflips on points of cognitive dissonance.

novakant - At least I feel on most days that I’m doing something useful, though I don’t really know what I’m doing yet.

I know a lot of teachers (myself included) with a decade or more of teaching experience that still feel like this - at least part of the time. We feel it less often, but it never quite goes away. We just get better at letting go of our expectations and more adept at flowing around the obstacles.

Every new class is a learning experience.

Since we seem to be in the worst possible timeline, I expect Juicy Divan to convert to Ye Olde Mormonism, and take Erika Kirk as his new 2nd wife.

What's funny (not "ha ha") to me is that the notion of immigration undermining organized labor is based on an unstated assumption that Americans are too racist to join a labor union with "those people." But, at the same time, people who think this way will tell you that racism is no longer a problem worthy of addressing through public policy.

Vance is setting himself up to the next Trump by going all in on the hatemongering for the Other. That's probably why he's publicly distancing himself from his wife's religion, saying he's trying to get her to convert to Christianity. I wonder if she regrets the marriage.

There are two weeks between Andrew's statement, and the Palace's. They must have thought the former would do enough - but subsequent public disquiet about Andrew's lies about the timeline, and (if my reaction is anything to go by) disgust at his sanctimonious claim to be acting as always in the interest of the country, in addition to the release of Giuffre's book, clearly made it necessary to cut him loose.