Jared Kushner, slumlord

Last week, our fool president went on another Twitter rant, in this case blaming Representative Elijah Cummings, who has been a thorn in his side by simply being an upright, moral human being, of being responsible for the “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” that is Baltimore. This is ironic coming from a New Yorker, home of Pizza Rat, but whole new levels of amusement are added when you learn that Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, is a major Baltimore area slumlord.

In 2017, Baltimore County officials revealed that apartments owned by the Kushner firm were responsible for more than 200 code violations, all accrued in the span of the calendar year. Repairs were made only after the county threatened fines, local officials said, and even after warnings, violations on nine properties were not addressed, resulting in monetary sanctions.

In an investigation by the New York Times and Pro Publica published earlier that year, tenants of Kushner properties reported mouse infestations, mold problems and maggots. A private investigator who looked into Kushner’s property management company, Westminster Management, described the managers as “slumlords.”

“Basically, [Kushner] has been creating a race to the bottom in terms of poorly maintained properties,” she said. “He’s been very, very deeply implicated.”

In the past two years, the Kushner firm and its affiliated entities have been sued multiple times by Baltimore-area residents who allege that the company has charged them excessive fees and used the threat of eviction to pressure them into paying.

I’ve been to Baltimore several times. It’s a fine city, with character and a beautiful downtown (I also like visiting New York), and it’s amazing how petty that demagogue Trump can get when he’s lashing out. He fully deserved what the editor of the Baltimore Sun wrote about him.

Finally, while we would not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner — or ruefully point out that he failed to spell the congressman’s name correctly (it’s Cummings, not Cumming) — we would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are “good people” among murderous neo-Nazis that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.

Impeach that monster. I can’t believe the Democrats have been dragging their heels about confronting a man so manifestly unfit for office.

Whoa — those goons buy their popularity?

I’m gobsmacked. Ben Shapiro is spending $20K per week advertising on Facebook? PragerU, $80K? That’s a big chunk of change.

Two things come to mind. These right-wing figures are “fake news”. They’ve bought a claque, and their popularity is partly a sham.

But also…if you’re wondering why social media sites keep avoiding social responsibility, are being so cagey about not antagonizing fascists, all you have to do is ask who is paying them.

You cannot possibly take Quillette seriously

Oh. My. God. They published a piece praising Boris Johnson that, I swear, reads like something from The Onion or McSweeney’s.

With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him. You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill. This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more pronounced in his way of speaking.

It goes on and on interminably, saying nothing. It even quotes some of his more infamous racist lines, like this one, about the Congo:

No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.

That’s satire, don’t you know. They’re never clear about exactly what they’re satirizing, but like a troop of monkeys, they’ve learned that all they have to do is parrot the word “satire” to excuse their grossest impulses.

Which now makes me wonder…is this entire article by Toby Young, with all its hyperbole and bizarre imagery, also intended to be satire? Is it mocking Boris or praising him effusively? It’s impossible to tell. When two buffoons start mugging at each other, does it mean something, or is it meaningless?

What of Quillette itself? An ugly, tasteless joke, like Johnson’s disparagement of the people of the Congo, or an attempt to be serious by a gang of clowns?

I hope we can throw this tweet in his face in 2020

Trump thinks he’s going to win Minnesota.

It could happen — Republicans are good at cheating, and there is an undercurrent of bigotry thriving here. But I think he’s going to lose votes compared to 2016, because his record is terrible and he’s even more openly bigoted than he was then.

Also, he doesn’t get to take credit for the Minnesota economy. The Democrats are responsible for that, while the Republicans have been holding us back.

Please, Democrats, listen to Tim Wise

Wise has an op-ed that spells out what they did to defeat David Duke in Louisiana. Don’t avoid the issue of racism, confront it head on.

In the early 1990s, I worked for the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, an organization founded for the purpose of defeating Duke, a white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader, in his bids for the U.S. Senate and governor’s mansion. During those two campaigns, we learned that if you want to deflate a movement whose yeast is racism, you can’t do it with a raft of policy proposals, because racist movements don’t rise in the first place based on policy ideas. And if a racist’s political opponent avoids the subject of race, and tries instead to appeal to voters with proposals on health coverage and tax reform, that normalizes the racist, whether it’s Duke, Trump or someone else, by treating them like any other candidate, and treating the election at hand as if it’s merely a debate between two legitimate, contrasting public policy visions.

To win an election where the issue of race is front-and-center, antiracists must make it clear to voters that when they cast their ballots, they are making a moral choice about the kind of people they want to be, and the kind of nation in which they want to live.

This is going to be terrifying to craven wonks at the DNC, because Duke got more white votes in that election than in the previous one. But there was a surge in black turnout, and that turned the tide.

Policy is good, especially at sorting out preferences within the Democratic field. Once the noise settles down, though, I think the Democrats have to focus on Trump’s racism and misogyny and make it clear that this next election is about the fate of the country.

It’s what they do, not what they say

I read this article about the results of a national survey, and found myself annoyed by unthinking acceptance of what people say about their views, rather than what they do. That’s an intrinsic problem of polls, though, and it’s bad when it’s not recognized.

It’s arguing that Democrats and Republicans don’t understand each other. First problem: the two parties are a pair of granfalloons, associations that are mostly meaningless. The author is arguing that we ignore the diversity within each group and don’t understand the values of the other, but part of the problem is that the premise asks that we regard these as real divisions, and then chastises the participants for generalizing opinions of Democrats and Republicans.

In a surprising new national survey, members of each major American political party were asked what they imagined to be the beliefs held by members of the other. The survey asked Democrats: “How many Republicans believe that racism is still a problem in America today?” Democrats guessed 50%. It’s actually 79%. The survey asked Republicans how many Democrats believe “most police are bad people”. Republicans estimated half; it’s really 15%.

The survey, published by the thinktank More in Common as part of its Hidden Tribes of America project, was based on a sample of more than 2,000 people. One of the study’s findings: the wilder a person’s guess as to what the other party is thinking, the more likely they are to also personally disparage members of the opposite party as mean, selfish or bad. Not only do the two parties diverge on a great many issues, they also disagree on what they disagree on.

Wait. You’re asking people to “guess as to what the other party is thinking,” and you don’t realize the fundamental flaws in what you’re doing? You’re asking people to read the minds of a diverse organization, and are surprised that they fail at that impossible task? It’s wrong in so many ways.

When a Democrat guesses that 50% of Republicans think racism is a problem, they’re being charitable, because while we can’t read minds, we can see what the Republican party stands for, how their policies affect the country, and what the leadership says, and the Republican party is a flamingly racist organization led by openly racist politicians.

Likewise, when the Republicans say 50% of Democrats don’t trust the police, they’re also being generous, because if you read the news (which is also biased in its reporting), all you see are stories of police murdering people and not being held accountable; you should think the police are bad people, given what evidence we see in the news.

Of course, this problem is compounded by the fact that the survey is asking respondents to treat Republican and Democrat as discrete and uniform organizations. We know that isn’t true.

That’s what drives me crazy about this report. You’re a bad person for not knowing what individuals believe about the country, but you’re asked to categorize a broad group in your answer. The author reports one of her own experiences.

But one man I talked with – someone raised on a sugar plantation, retired from a life-long career in oil, a proud member of the Louisiana Tea Party and a Trump supporter – grinned broadly at the mention of Bernie Sanders. “Free college? Free medical care? How yawl going to pay for that? He’s a pie in the sky guy,” he said. “But he’s a good man, Uncle Bernie.” Although an oil worker, he was a fan of clean energy, and liked the idea of a Manhattan Project to implement it.

Among Republicans, he isn’t alone. Despite the president’s denial of the climate crisis, national polls recently conducted by researchers at Yale, Stanford and Monmouth Universities show that a majority of voters in both parties now agree on many actions to mitigate it.

Aaargh. I’m supposed to know what a retired oil worker in Louisiana thinks, but you’re asking about the Republican party as a whole? What I’ll use to judge the party as a whole is their actions: they elected a climate change denying president, and they’re implementing policies, such as a 30% tariff on solar panels, and then they’re claiming to be a fan of clean energy in their mind. I must be bad at mind-reading.

That this one guy think Bernie Sanders is a “good guy” is somehow supposed to mitigate the actions of the elected officials of the Republican party, and especially Trump, is galling. OK, I’ll appreciate that random individuals in the Republican party are capable of paying lip service to one value while voting against it.

I also have to ask…how y’all going to pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the military?

The Democratic charade

Yesterday, I was trapped in a hotel room, unable to escape, while my wife listened to this joke of a “news” program on CNN in which they semi-randomly assembled the Democratic debate roster. I was ready to scream. They drew it out to a ridiculous degree, selecting candidates one by one live on air, while reading little blurbs about them. With commercial breaks. They, of course, saved the most significant candidates for last — Sanders, Warren, Harris, and Biden — and what killed me was that before they did the final draws they sat there and yammered speculatively about what match-ups they might get in the next few minutes. Shut the fuck up and just do it.

They don’t seem aware that the process of randomizing candidates into two nights is trivial, uninteresting, and not news. It is, however, representative of how our benighted, self-involved news media deals with an election. They have made themselves the center of the process as a group of people who have to babble about the horserace. I hate it.

This was the final outcome of their blithering idiocy, and it’s ridiculous.

I don’t care. Most of the faces up there shouldn’t be there — they are wasting our time. Go run for congress, or governor, or school board and get something done. CNN was aware of that, too, because they arranged the debate specifically to split up the top four equally. If, by chance, Biden, Harris, Sanders, and Warren all ended up together on one night, no one would bother to watch the other debate, and there goes the advertising revenue.

You also cannot have a debate with 20 sides to it. There will be no substantive discussion. This will be a mob of people vying for the 10-second sound bite that will be picked up by the news the next day.

I have to say as well that using money in the form of donations as a criterion for who gets to be in the debate is offensive and puts the whole silly affair on an absurdly capitalist foundation, and clearly fails as a useful criterion for winnowing the field anyway. Bring back the cursus honorum — you don’t get to run for consul until you’ve run a gamut of lower offices in government.

I won’t be watching any part of the second “debate”, by the way.

So that’s what a philosophy degree is good for

You remember creepy ol’ Colin McGinn, the philosopher who wrote icky sexual messages to his students and assistants, fantasizing about them giving him handjobs and suggesting that they have sex precisely 3 times over the summer. He’s sort of in disgrace now, except…

…McGinn has just opened a consultancy firm to give professional ethics advice to businesses. You read that right. One of the skeeviest philosophers around is selling his dubious ethical skills to corporations. Sounds like just the right kind of thing that corporations might want, but isn’t what they need.

He has a stunning rationale.

McGinn is best known for his work in philosophy of mind, but believes he’s well placed to advise on a variety of business issues, including sexual harassment. “I have insider knowledge of that,” he said. “I consider myself an expert in that subject, having gone through a process, and discussing it with lawyers and so forth, and having to learn about it in detail.”

I was blatantly guilty of sexual harassment, therefore I’m exactly the right person to advise you on sexual harassment. Brilliant.