College Community

Colleges have an underlying incentive that they don't tell you about in promoting "community." They want you to keep sending them money after you or your children leave the place. Therefore they promote the idea that you belong to the special ones even before you quite get there, in the acceptance material.

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

It is very pronounced at the Ivies and Seven Sisters, of course, but they also try very hard at Ivy Wannabees like Duke and Bucknell, and state schools use it to promote a sort of loyalty to your region, to the whole interconnected local world even when you move away.  They don't make that much money from shirts and hats. Texas A&M promotes itself as a very tight-knit ongoing group, we have learned now that Ben has been in Texas so many years. Religious colleges do it - I think with more justification.

This is much of what is behind colleges doing all sorts of ridiculous permittings and forbiddings and creating the illusion of campus-wide statements against racism. We know from the occasional polls which filter out that most students don't care much one way or the other about the individual events, which they often support the general idea of but find the specific expressions a bit crazy, and certainly intrusive. The news stories generate outrage from parents and local groups and place the schools in some legal jeopardy. Conservatives usually complete the picture by figuring that what they must be getting back is status from their academic and liberal institutional friends, and work to undermine that. Some. That's some of it.  But when you remember that convincing everyone that they are part of a community, one that can be tapped for resources for years to come, is the value embedded so deeply in their thinking that they don't even notice it most of the time themselves, a lot of these antics are understood. That an individual protest might be patently foolish and indefensible is not the point.  The idea of the college as community must be preserved and expressed at all costs.

Worst of Sinners

 1 Timothy 1:12-20 

I had a realisation while sitting in a parking lot with my trunk open, waiting for someone to put what I had requested into it. It followed the pattern of "I wish I had written...I said it, but should have said it more clearly...But other people were worse...and more annoying...and more unfair and stupid and lockedmoreintothemomentthantolargerperspectiveEVENTHOUGHTHEY... and but I knew...I knew...why was I not clear?..." and through further chains to the quiet thought "I was well-placed, by personality, training, and those around me to bring this lesson forward a year ago.  And I did not for many reasons, none of them particularly admirable."  I did better-than-average and thought that good, and did not do the job I was commissioned for. You Had One Job, as the internet humor often has it. It will take a bit to absorb this.  But I had things I could have told you a year ago but did not because I thought other things more important.  It wouldn't have saved the world, but it would have improved your lives, the only small circle that I have. 

I'll patch things together the best I can. 

Damn.

Note: My intent is not to beat myself up in public, but to provide a record of how such things occur, so that others can follow the trail.

Update

Symptoms worse, which was a surprise, as I thought I was in a recovery trend the last two days. Not a good sign, but not terrible, and I am getting the  monoclonal antibody infusion on Friday. I hadn't realised that it would be hard to arrange, as the availability is unpredictable.

As is often the case with illness, it is will that is sapped more than ability.  I feel I could mentally focus if I had to, but see no point in that. We can respond well at such times when we have to, when there is an external pressure that drives us.  But trying to find that internally is elusive, as if there were no solid ground to stand on.  I suppose I could read something or listen to a podcast, but I keep putting off getting started. This too shall pass.

Multimember Districts

I have not looked at much serious discussion about how to avoid gerrymandering other than "We should stop those other bastards from cheating."  I am sure that this is but one of many out there, but this is the one that hit the ground in NH today and I thought folks might like it. 

How To Make Voting Districts Fair To Voters, Not Parties 

It will be tougher to fix than people think, as people move out of areas where they believe they are not being heard, but want to be, and have been doing this for a while.

Preliminary Information - Persecution

I started this six days ago.  Life changes. 

It is unsurprising that the subject of persecution comes up in a discussion of Jewish genetics.

Distinctions need to be made. Bias against a group can go on at low level for years - maybe centuries - and no one much remarks on it, because everyone just accepts that's the way things are. Some people have this status in society, some have that one, but it's just normal life. All but the smallest societies are stratified, often much more than ours in some ways.  When we think of the archaeology of burials, for example, think how our own will look. The stone markers will be different, but the clothing and burial objects of the rich and all but the very poorest are going to look similar in the US.

Persecution gets noticed when it is intermittent. The tone of outrage is often hugely "We thought we were accepted here.  We thought you were our friends!" Modern girls look on the lives of women in the past and think "I would never put up with that."  Sure you would.  It was normal life. You would have the same focus and concerns as the women around you.* We put up with a lot because we don't really think of it s putting up with anything. 

Permissions also change with class or group.  In many places the elites have to hold to the official religion and keep up observances, but the peasants and poor in general have more minimal requirements.  No one much cares what they do out in the provinces. Show up Christmas and Easter.  Don't harm the sacred groves. Don't do anything obviously undermining the status quo. 

If a population keeps growing in a region, how much are they being persecuted on an ongoing basis? There may indeed be status differences between groups, and they may be entirely unfair. Ingroups tend to set up some privileges for themselves everywhere. If you belong to this religion you can't marry into the nobility. Well, but how many people were marrying into the nobility anyway?  Has there been a run on this? The Jews increased greatly in number once they entered the Rhineland. But we don't know this from historical records all that much.  There is a gap of about a thousand years 500-1500 in historical information about Jews in Europe.  They kept up a lot of writing about religious matters and then held tight to it, so we still have that aspect.  And we are now figuring out from genetics and archaeology a lot of the missing pieces.  So how do we know there were so many in the Rhineland?  Because there were lists of the martyrs from the First Crusade.  They show up in the historical record as persecuted badly. But that is likely because it was an exception, one more example of "But we have lived among you for years! We thought we had a place here!" Does that mean they were fully accepted members of that society?  Not in the least.  But whatever prejudices they had visited on them didn't rise to the level of being mentioned, and their population increased.

* The world where you go back there and refuse to put up with it and set a good example is more fantastical than the time travel itself. Yes, modern fantasy novelists like to set up stories like that, of girls trying to break out(!) of old ways and become a wizard, or a warrior, or a bard or some other previously forbidden role. (Tolkien and Lewis were early examples and did it well.) But that is largely a modern value.

Condescension and Arrogance

These bother other people more than they bother me. They used to affect me so intensely that they shaped my opinions. (Quick! Guess my politics as a 20-year old from that!) We are social creatures and it isn't unusual. There are both Classical Greek and Confucian encouragements that we should worship the local gods and customs in order to live at peace and be part of a good society. I see the point. 

But I also felt pinned to the wall as a young Christian reading Screwtape for the first time and seeing right in the first paragraph 

He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false’, but as ‘academic’ or ‘practical’, ‘outworn’ or ‘contemporary’, ‘conventional’ or ‘ruthless’. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.

Because it WAS the sort of thing I did care about deeply, and saw at a glance how indefensible that was. Condescension worked on me. So I have been on something of a crusade about that ever since, knowing that it was a forest I had gotten lost in and could warn others away from. I now have some immunity.

I also spent my career as the least-credentialed person at every table, which increased my immunity to condescension and arrogance. Part of that may be largeness of character and resting in my status as a Child of God, but not all. Some of that has also been learning to adapt to how one establishes credibility for one's ideas. One learns to be both firm and disarming. It's an interesting enough story in its own way (to me, that's who) but it is not my story today. My two oldest sons learned it, and if someone is in that situation contact me and I will share what worked for me, at least. It's not so bad a life.  And one does develop that immunity. I know arrogant condescending jerks that I was quite good friends with - because they were right a lot of the time. I know winsome, humble, well-meaning people who actively listen, or whatever they call it now, who are wrong about lots of stuff. Sometimes they are...tiresome. I have worked on teams where others in my department have refused to work with that doctor, and worked with supervisors that social workers wouldn't. Only one could I myself not work with, and I hung on for eight years. Because most of that just doesn't matter.

It always comes up in politics, so perhaps it hasn't really come to a head in the last two years. The influence of news sources on what we believe is certainly something I have long been referencing, including in the Great War with the uncle I was named for, and discussions that preceded and largely formed the early years of this blog. Yet news sources are only the visible portion. I have also been concerned with the effects of artists, writers and others connected more subtly to influencing the culture.  I think they are more powerful in the long run and I have described - sometimes at tedious length - the social and emotional biases that masquerade as intellectual ones. The politics of the Arts & Humanities Tribe that I spring from was a primary focus of the site for a few years. The biases bother me. The reliance on cliches of tribe bothers me. 

It really bothers a lot of conservatives that the government and CDC have "squandered trust" the past two years. I kind of get that intellectually, because when you are leading you have a responsibility to make it worth it to people to follow. When you make decisions that affect people you do have heightened responsibility to get it right.  I have said that while the "experts" have indeed gotten things wrong about covid, their challengers and skeptics have been ten times worse. I admit those are not equivalent roles. The people calling the shots should be wrong less often - a lot less often.  But for me, I'm just looking for sources of information.I want to know who is reliable for making my own decisions. The CDC is still way better than the skeptics.  To not credit any of their information because you are angry at them for having been wrong sometimes, and having the nerve to be arrogant and imperious about it makes no sense to me.

Similarly, I have a friend who is currently ripped about Alex Berenson's dishonesty, and secondarily, Tucker Carlson for encouraging this. The specific is the claim that twice as many vaccinated adults as unvaccinated are dying in England now. When you dig down into the data, it turns out that "adults" turn out to be 10-59 year olds.  A lot of the youngest part of that is not allowed to be vaccinated. A lot of the older part of that group are those who know they have compromising conditions and get vaccinated. Because of the age differences, the numbers can't be compared. Okay, so maybe that takes a little skill with statistics to see, and maybe Berenson isn't as good as he should be, but...But wait, it gets worse.  The study itself says, right on the page, that the vaccinated and unvaccinated in that study can't be compared for that very reason. The vaccinated are much older and initially more compromised. So Berenson had to see it and decided not to mention that. To me, that's a permanent write-off.  Do that once in a public forum and I never trust anything you say again. I don't care if you are charming, or have the "courage" to "stand up to" the experts.  You lie.  You are done. It bothers my friend also that he makes lots of money at this, especially as the sales job for this side of the argument is how much Big Pharma and the Medical Establishment are making off you.* So some guy who wants you to get vaccinated is coming off as condescending and arrogant?  So what? Right, he shouldn't do that, but how does that influence your decision.

Eh, that doesn't bother me so much.  People making money for bad reasons is something I made my peace with years ago. I'm more upset about the reasoning. I hammer that point here. Yes, many people will be affected by the personalities of the speakers, but that should not be so among us. We don't have to. I am also not much convinced that any single person is much influencing anyone these days. Do we think that the landscape would be dramatically different now if Dr. Fauci had retired in 2019, or if Alex Berenson got hit by a bus in 2020? I don't. People do not believe things because they follow the mainstream media as much as the go to certain media because they already believe those things. There is much hand-wringing on the left about Fox News, but Fox did not create that audience.  It found that audience. Individuals likely have some effect, and audience/media reciprocal influence is likely real. But I think it flows more from the larger forces to the media than the other way around.

*That is a reliable career path to wealth, telling people that someone else is making so much money off them.  We lap that up.

Mr. Dieingly Sad

One of the YouTube versions was actually a touch racy.  Or maybe just creepy. You'll have to look for that yourself.

Contagious Diseases

Anyone who thinks God would be pro-medical freedom and not in favor of health restrictions hasn't read Leviticus. The safety of the community was considered so overwhelmingly important that individual rights were barely referenced. A quick vaccination is pretty minimal in comparison.

Statistical Truth Vs Real Truth

I have covid, which already seems to be receding. My immediate temptation is to attribute this to having been vaccinated in Feb-March. Of course I have a mild case. That's what happens when you are vaccinated.  Ain't I smart? 

That narrative could in fact be true. It is the most likely true narrative. Yet it is also the narrative that I want to be true, the self-serving one. That doesn't really prove the case though, does it? If I had not been vaccinated, I might have gotten covid at a different time, maybe more severe, maybe less severe. Or the diminution of symptoms from getting vaccinated then might be so minimal as to be worth no more than a shrug. Or I might have done the hokey-pokey in a different order this month and gotten no virus at all. I blame Jane Russell.  Frankly, if one changes any tiny thing, there is no telling what happens.  Asimov wrote "The Ends of Eternity" in the 50s, but Ray Bradbury and others have also had a go at it. 

Even knowing this, it is hard to fight against it.  "But mine is the most likely scenario," I whine. Maybe so, but that's not enough.  It only matters over a thousand repetitions, and even then, it might be only an emerging outline.

Grim mentioned that there are times when a single counter-example can be meaningful against an absolute claim.  I would go even a step further, and note that for highly declarative claims, even a few counter-examples can raise a red flag. "Marines who enlist after age 20 are almost always..." or "Episcopalians secretly don't like black people, whatever they say..." or  "Southerners refuse to answer the question of..." It is not impossible that the person making the claim might have really solid numbers backing that up.  Yet if I know four people in that category, and none of them fit that description, then I don't mind raising an objection.  I might turn out to be wrong, but against a nearly-absolutist claim, I'll take the risk.

Yet we know, from my N=1 post and just having to listen to jibroneys who somehow get paid to assert stupid stuff that people want to hear, that people will keep saying this anyway. You say that fourth-graders don't care much about masks, but my Dylan hates them, or My son-in-law eats nothing but vegan and you never saw anyone in better shape. 

 I have no solution. Just let us not do it, even when a possible PR victory is within our grasp.

Rittenhouse

He was accused of a crime, and I have focused on the crime and whether there was evidence to convict. Whether he showed good judgement or whether he is an exemplar of important virtues is a valuable discussion, perhaps.  But it does not have much to do with whether he committed crimes.  The prosecution did go for something that is first cousin to that, whether he was a provocateur. If they could have shown evidence for that I could be convinced of its legitimacy. The principle that you can't provoke and then claim self-defense certainly seems sound and worth keeping in law. But in the end they had evidence not even that convincing to people who wanted it to be true, and keeping evidence from the defense ticked off a lot of people who would have loved to have found a way to convict him. 

Those who still have this idea about deciding whether he was a good person, or whether the rules of justice should change in response to this Tuesday's political fads, or what would have happened if he had played Scrabble instead * have a very strange view of justice, where we debate who is worthy of life and who is worthy of death, as opposed to looking at specific acts.  Rather chilling. If you imagine the sc-fi short story that would be built off that, you can see it's a world you wouldn't much want to live in.

I don't even think that would be much slope to slip on. You'd already be pretty near the bottom.

*and if everyone had played Scrabble that night instead?

Prediction

You heard it here first:  In ten years, not only will masks be regarded as an intermittent and not even very interesting public health intervention; vaccinations will be regarded as an intermittent and not even very interesting public intervention.  This will not be because our standards of freedom have deteriorated.  It will be because all but the few insane people, similar to the previous anti-vaxxers, subluxation, chelation, Reiki, and vegan Gaian believers will have accepted, whether slowly or only moderately slowly, that all the objections were mostly crap.  There will be a few side effects of the vaccines, even some serious but rare, that will bear out, as is always the case. 

Many folks will deny that they ever had doubts, only "concerns," about timing, or the wisdom of mandates, or whatever.  But I and others will know. 

Once you realise that the mask skeptics were fevered, pretending that "they" had tried to demand masking as anything but an auxiliary, partial strategy, you have stepped back far enough to be able to ask the next question "What if people's objections to vaccines were only the same thing, a nervous, cowardly, slightly paranoid response that they just didn't like because they wished we could go back to 2019, not a reasoned, measure response based on real information?" You have studies showing that masks may not have helped much.  Why in the world would you think that has the least importance?

When you take just one step back, the others become easier. Vaccinations are boring, and you will be seeing more of them.

Update: If this seems harsh, remember that I partially subscribed to it myself not so long ago.

Poor Tom's A-cold

I have been sick the last two days.  Probably not covid, but I got tested anyway. Whatever it is, it's something, so I wear a mask.

Update: Well, it is covid.  My course so far has been cold, sleepy, and achy beginning Wednesday night and lessening every day.  Coughing started last night, but not bad. I am hopeful.

Footnotes

"The explanatory footnote is an excuse to let the law review writer be obscure and befuddled in the body of his article and then say the same thing at the bottom of the page the way he should have said it in the first place... The footnote foible breeds nothing but sloppy thinking, clumsy writing, and bad eyes." Yale Law School professor Frank Rodell "Goodbye to Law Reviews" Virginia Law Review 1936.

It's hard not to admire the man. However, it is worth observing that no one seems to have paid the least attention to him here.

Generational Test

 

Preliminary Information- New Genetic Tools

I promised a post on Jewish Genealogy a couple of weeks ago, but things keep going wrong in getting it written.  Most humorously, voice-to-joke while I was driving in an area where there was poor reception gave me results like "Moroccan who are working for narrow call to flag it, are closer to Connecticut than Ashkenazy," and "they have a band and Mediterranean cruise throughout," which even an hour later when I tried to use it for outline I could not fathom what I had said to produce this.  The power of the word that one sees can easily overwhelm what it must have sounded like. One more bit of evidence that writing is not language.  Speech is language, and writing is only an approximate representation. Yet readers tend to regard the written word, with its stability, as "real" language, and speech as sloppy.  In its extreme, we get foolishness like regarding a particular era of Latin and Greek as better versions of language that English (or French or German) should emulate in order to be proper - creating horrible artificial rules of grammar.

Much of the recent "Cambrian explosion" in knowledge of Jewish (and all) genetics comes from two sources.  The development of techniques of Identity By Descent, and the commercial ancestry groups providing millions of samples to be studied. The wiki link has a nice colored graphic of IBD that you might favor over my explanation, but I am going to give it a try.

Until very recently, when I thought of inheriting genes from your two parents, I though of it as a coin flip proposition at each point. At marker 347 you got Mom's gene, at 348 you got Dad's, then you got two in a row of Mom's at 349 and 350, then one more at Dad's, etc. It's not like that. In recombination, you get whole long strings of Mom's or Dad's genes. They come in big batches. Overall, it works out to fifty-fifty. Actually, it's between 40-60% of each parent, which follows naturally from the genes coming in big chunks like that.  If it were a coin flip at each point, the number would hover very close to 50-50 at the end.  But with long unbroken sequences, one gets more variation.

It helps identify how closely you are related to someone.  There are only a few breaks in the chromosome sequence - where you switch from Mom's genes to Dad's - every generation. So if you you have lots of long sequences that you share identically with someone, it means it has only been a few generations since you shared an ancestor. In a small breeding population of a few hundred two people might share a lot of ancestry.  But looking at the strings you can discern if they are first cousins. You are more closely related to some siblings than others (though still 40-60%).

This gets very interesting when two populations mix.  Take, for example, my son from Romania and his wife from the Philippines. They do not share an ancestor for thousands of years. In their daughters' DNA you will see long strings of Transylvania followed by long strings of Luzon, and if you compared the daughters, there would be enough long sequences of identical material that you would know they are siblings. But when those girls marry and their DNA recombines with some man of other ancestry, the switches will almost certainly not occur at the same places.  Their DNA chain will switch at places that also have long strings, but one string might be 30% Filipino followed by 70% Romaneste, while the next is 80-20 in the other direction. When recombining, their DNA doesn't know where the switches were last time.

You can use this to see how long ago two populations mixed. The y-DNA tells you where the men came from and the mtDNA where the women were from, and the length of the sequences tells you how many times the DNA has recombined. As this occurs at a regular rate, you can set a range.  Thus, in American Blacks, where there is European ancestry it occurs in fairly long sequences, as it came in 15 generations ago, max. There is R1a and R1b yDNA in the Ashkenazi, and with IBD, we can see that it came in early, likely in the Western Mediterranean Jews while Rome was still an empire, not from Germans a thousand years later.

When genetic histories identify that the Ashkenazi formed between 750-1000AD, but that there were male lineages that became part of it that coalesced earlier, say 3rd C, while the female lineages firmed up later, say 600AD, and some slight Slavic admixture came in around 1600 in NE Europe, this is how they can tell.

N=1

The tendency is strong that we consider our own personal experience to be representative of what has happened to everyone else. When we hear an explanation for events, we immediately fit it against our own lives, or children, or jobs. If twenty people hear that teenage converts to Christianity tend to be Evangelical at first and then move to mainline churches, nineteen of them will immediately confirm or deny the truth of the statistic on the basis of what happened to them, or their children, or whoever the nearest teenage convert is. I used to think this was more common among women, but I am now convinced this is not so.  I even begin to suspect the opposite is true.

"My friend's cousin got the vaccine, and two weeks later he got bitten by a moose.  Do the research, people." 

I don't quite know what to say to such folks. If you don't already know that the incident that happened near your granddaughter's soccer game is not necessarily representative of what happens in general, I don't think I have a ready explanation to convince you. I readily see why people start there.  Sometimes one can actually develop a refutation by noticing that one incident, at least, sharply contradicts that.  Whatever else is true about the hairdressers in America, you might be able to assure the assembled crowd "Not always. My hairdresser doesn't own any small dogs at all."

I think we apply this unscientific experiment with N=1 more often when we do not understand the underlying mechanism or have little grasp of the data. It is the opposite of the Bayesian approach, where we first ask how many highschool students there are, then what percentage of highschoool students are basketball players, and what percentage of students in general are taking chemistry this year to begin with before we try and figure out how many basketball players are taking chemistry this year. Looking at whether your kid is a small forward in chem lab is useless. Even estimating from a few years' teams and school enrollments would be more useful.

Chris Arnade on The Unvaccinated

I have not read his book, Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back-Row America.  I read positive reviews including excerpts when it came out, and I know the local library has a copy.  I just haven't gotten around to that one.

He has observations on his blog about what he is seeing among the unvaccinated. It is similar to what I see myself, but not identical. I know unvaccinateds who do have college degrees. These tend to be from chiropractic/natural sectors or from culturally evangelical, even fringe evangelical types. They tend to talk about those issues more than religious ones, but...small sample size.  I also have contact with people who were military and still strongly identify that way, but of a particular personality type that regards life and its risks as some kind of competition. If they are exposed to disease (not only covid) but don't get it they regard that as a feather in their cap, as if they have demonstrated some superiority over the common stock.  In at least two instances, even tragedies involving close family have not dented that. It is somehow part of their identity to be invulnerable.

Come to think of it, that's not only some of the military guys (and one gal) - that belief in invulnerability, that sense of competition with others to defeat the forces of the universe. Their immune system is stronger than yours, dammit. Some of the natural/alternative medicine/specialty exercise people have that as well.  Not all of them, certainly - I don't think a majority of either of those groups in my circle fit that very strongly.  Maybe I just notice the noisier ones.

Looking back to the people I worked with who were anti-flu shot, and very much alternative medicine folks there were also the general back-to-the-landers, the Wiccans, plus one other group I hadn't thought about much:  people who had a chronic and unusual condition, or a child with one, that wasn't helped much by standard medical measures. This, especially if there was chronic pain. Pain can change everything, and I am not minded to criticise someone too strenuously who is enduring things I am not.  I think that's a whole different feeling. They often were on odd diets or took megadoses of supplements, None of this is breaking down cleanly. Some individuals are fitting a couple of categories here, or have family members who fit one category while they fit another, but both ending up anti-vax.

I think Arnade hits something important that is only at the edge of my thinking until recently.  Discussion of vaccination has focused - both sides - on the specific actions of people in the last 20 months. Usually, of coursse, people focus on the terrible things those other guys did, because that is what humans do.  But Arnade relates this to a much longer pattern of people who feel like they are being ordered around pointlessly - and often have good reason to think that. I was just answering someone over at Maggie's who went off on a tirade about whether I believed what "the government" is telling me about climate change, and the elections in various states, and whether CRT is being taught in the schools.I felt obliged to point out that the CDC has nothing to do with elections or schools, and there were dozens of agencies and levels of government involved here.

Yet he has a point in the broad sense even if his individual accusations are confused. There is a class of people who tell other people what to do a lot. They aren't necessarily cooperating with each other or interconnected, but they do tend to be drawn from the same class and have this attitude. So people develop an attitude of their own in response. I try to push people to make stricter distinctions and keep to one topic at a time, but that does cause me to discount the perspective entirely when I should only be objecting to the vagueness.  The thinking is vague, but that doesn't necessarily make it inaccurate. I am not so much missing the forest for the trees as objecting to a painting of the landscape as unreliable. It might be unreliable as a map.  But it might be valuable as an impression.

Update:  It occurs to me that I am trying to be thorough and make a full case, while Arnade is primarily a writer, attempting to capture a single idea and get it across.  I may have been too hard on him.

Going Back Home

Just a Closer Walk With Thee

 

A Tell Within a Tell

I was listening to a podcaster I like interviewing a guest I didn't quite so much.  Not terrible, but just falling into the same, tired, easy cliches. He was talking about the racism of Donald Trump, and that it was not merely disguised, but overt, as if seeking to overturn the basic principles of political discussion in our democracy. 

Well, take a breath, first up. Maybe use your inhaler if you need to.

The examples given were all quite subtle things. Mind you, they weren't necessarily wrong. Trump refers to African-Americans as the blacks, or the African-Americans more often than he uses the definite article with other American groups. He does it about as often as he does when referring to foreign groups, such as the Arabs, or the Chinese. The complaint was that this is a "distancing" technique, a "tell" that he doesn't view them as quite American. Fair enough, but there are qualifiers here.  Donald also used the definite article for groups that he clearly likes, both foreign and domestic. He has not caught on to the idea that politicians, or others who want to be part of the national media conversation aren't supposed to do that. Dividing people into groups can be done in discussion, particularly in terms of figuring out who they are going to vote for. But it must be handled delicately, and using "the" is even more suspect. It may indeed mean that he is "distancing" and does not regard all groups as equally American.

However, there are some qualifiers here.  This is still "Donnie from Queens," and this is how he learned to talk. One can make the argument that most people who learned to talk like that as children are more racist than the faculty at Brown University, yes. But that's pretty indirect. If it's a "tell," you have to make a better case than that. Trump doesn't care about making adjustments that people who aren't going to like him anyway think are polite to make.  You can find that obnoxious, but it's not the same thing. 

The other examples were similar.  They were all "Yep, that could indicate racism.  In fact, I think that's the most likely explanation myself.  But it's mild, and it's not a slam dunk, and hyperventilating about the basic principles of democracy is completely unwarranted." I've got an anecdote, about a Haitian black who used to work construction in NYC and met Trump briefly several times.  Donald liked to come down to the sites and mingle with those guys, usually showing off a young woman on each arm and winking about it. My acquaintance thought he showed off for the black guys more.  So that's the stereotype, then, the bad boys, the ones interested in sex. If you call that racist, I don't have a good counter.  But it is also not what people are implying when they call him racist.  They usually mean "secret white supremacist."

For me the question is "This is Donnie from Queens, who by the standards of his own day is well on the non-racist side of things. He doesn't change his manner just because you interpret it negatively, because frankly, he doesn't care what you think.  How much of your being pissed off at that is behind your accusation?"

You want tells?  I've got one.

Here is a tell I have noticed that goes in the other direction.  Interpreting the actions of Trump and his supporters is always framed in terms of his following Obama. (Two of the guests on that show did exactly that, and one had to go back to tie it to Nixon's Southern Strategy, one of the most enduring myths of our era.) But we were all there at the time, and no one said anything about that then.  The election was framed in terms of running against his Republican opponents and the "GOP elites," and the general election was framed entirely in terms of running against Hillary Clinton. You can make the argument "But it was really the racist electorate being angry at having a black president," but to make the case to me you have to clearly separate what the anti-Hillary, anti-elite part of that was.  And then you need to explain those Rust Belt voters who went for Barack in 2012 and Donald in 2016. I don't think you can put up good numbers.