Month: September 2019

Once again: Is impeaching Trump a bad tactic?

September 29, 2019 • 9:00 am

Amidst the many New York Times editorials calling for impeaching or investigating the “President”, including an editorial-board opinion favoring an impeachment inquiry, we have an outlier: the following article by Christopher Buskirk, a contributing opinion writer identified as “editor and publisher of the journal American Greatness, [and] a co-author of “American Greatness: How Conservatism, Inc. Missed the 2016 Election and What the D.C. Establishment Needs to Learn.”

The thrust of the article is what we hear coming from many centrists and conservatives (including “never-Trump” Republicans), and even a few Leftists. Even those who want Trump gone say that impeachment proceedings by the House of Representatives—proceedings likely to result in a successful impeachment given that only a simple majority is needed—won’t succeed at the next step, a trial in the Senate. For conviction in a Senate trial requires a 2/3 majority of Senators before the President is convicted, and that seems unlikely to occur. (Conviction would result in removal of the Trump from office, making Pence the interim President.) The argument for impeachment is powerful: there is ample evidence that the President has committed “high crimes and misdemeanors”, and beyond that he appears deranged and incompetent, unable to lead the country. Surely at least an investigation is warranted, one that could subpoena documents now off limits.

But if you want Trump gone, the arguments against impeachment proceedings are threefold, all of them tactical:

1.) Impeachment is very unlikely to succeed in the Senate trial, no matter what evidence is brought out in the House investigation and questioning.

2.) Impeachment will arouse sympathy for Trump, turning him into a Republican martyr and making him more likely to be elected next year.

3.) Impeachment will tie up the Democrats in endless and fractious anti-Trump activity when we should be developing a solid platform with which to defeat Trump. This, too, could help Trump’s chances of re-election in 2020, especially if the Democrats come off as angry and hysterical rather than judicious during the impeachment proceedings.

Buskirk raises all three of these arguments in his piece (click on screenshot):

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/27/opinion/impeachment-inquiry-trump.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

This excerpt gives the gist of Buskirk’s argument, drawing on two other impeachment efforts in my lifetime:

The vote in the House to open impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon was 410-4; against Bill Clinton it was 258-176. The actual impeachment votes against Mr. Clinton in 1998 were 228 to 206 on perjury and 221 to 212 on obstruction of justice. He was not convicted of either charge in the Senate trial.

Now, compare the political outcomes. The broad, bipartisan vote against Nixon led over time to a series of events in which conservatives, including the Republican candidate who preceded Nixon, Senator Barry Goldwater, abandoned the president, who ultimately resigned. The narrow, partisan votes against Mr. Clinton led to his acquittal. Al Gore narrowly lost the next presidential election while Democrats picked up a seat in the House. Hillary Clinton went on to become a senator, secretary of State and presidential nominee. In other words, when Republicans allowed their animus against Mr. Clinton to override their political instincts, they were hurt, but the Clintons were not.

Surely Ms. Pelosi must know that there are not 67 votes in the Senate to convict President Trump of anything relating to his phone call with President Zelensky. So it’s just political theater. The problem is that as it plays out over the next year, everyone will get the joke: The House is just going through the motions to stoke its own base before the election, just as Newt Gingrich’s majority did in 1998. That, in turn, will energize Republicans to support the president. But there is another danger for Democrats lurking here: that they will ultimately demoralize their most loyal voters when they realize the joke’s on them. There will be no resignation, there will be no conviction in the Senate.

But there will be an election. And by focusing on their obsession with the person of Donald Trump, Democrats are giving up the opportunity to talk about wages, employment, the shrinking middle class or any of the other things that motivate normal voters. After two and a half years of hearing about Russia, Russia, Russia, there are vanishingly few swing voters who want to spend the next 14 months hearing about Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.

For the Democrats, the political problem is that this is just more Washington psychodrama. And as engaging as that it is for people in politics, for the journalists who cover it and for people who are deeply ideological, it is uncharismatic and irrelevant to many voters who, rightly, just want to know what Washington is going to do for them.

In reality, everyone knows that Ms. Pelosi’s pursuit of impeachment will not result in a conviction in the Senate and the removal of Mr. Trump from office. So it’s hard to see this as anything other than desperation — an acknowledgment that there is no Democratic candidate likely to beat Mr. Trump head-to-head on issues like China’s mercantilist trade policy, stagnating wages, the shrinking middle class and immigration. By choosing impeachment, Democrats are choosing the ground on which they want to fight the election. But the ground they have chosen is shaky. It imperils their current front-runner, and it avoids the very issues that motivate voters in must-win states.

That doesn’t sound like winning to me.

Such an argument puts us in a conundrum: if we do what we think is right, and try to get rid of Trump via impeachment—a tactic that will almost surely fail—then we may actually help him gain another term, which would prove a disaster for America. Not only would we have a deranged and dangerous President, but he would be even more vindictive and angry at the Democrats having tried to depose him. The only “out” here is that the evidence against Trump might be so strong that it would change the minds of many Republicans, so that a 2/3 vote to convict would be likely. But that seems nearly impossible: 20 of the 53 Republican senators would have to change their minds, and all of the 45 Democrats and 2 Independents would have to vote to convict.

Now I’m not as convinced as is Buskirk that House impeachment proceedings would help Trump by turning him into a martyr. Nor do I think that, given Trump’s behavior, he stands a big chance of re-election even now. And I’m also a fan of doing what is right, which, in this case, is to at least try to remove a dangerous and incompetent leader. The only thing that worries me is that impeachment will distract the country and the Democrats, hurting a solid drive to get a Democratic President elected next year.

Reading Buskirk’s argument, although I don’t agree with him, did make me nervous. The way ahead, if we try to impeach, is not as clear as I’d like it to be. The evidence against Trump is nowhere near as strong as what they had on Nixon, and the Mueller report and even the phone call to the Ukraine have been sloughed off by Republicans. There is no way the Senate will vote to convict unless there are documents with even more damning evidence. Should we then hold off doing the right thing for a greater good: the removal of Trump via a vigorous Democratic campaign?

I still feel that impeachment is the right thing to do, but my feeling about this is not strong because of the possible backlash.

What say you? I won’t run a poll this time (the question would have been “Should we impeach Trump taking these counterarguments into consideration?”), but will ask for your opinion rather than a simple “yes” or “no”.

__________

Update: Reader Pliny the in Between gives his vote on the site The Far Corner Cafe:

Spot the leopard!

September 29, 2019 • 7:45 am

I’m conserving my readers’ wildlife photos because few are coming in. (Send me some, please!)

Today we shall have a “spot the. . . ” post, one found on Twitter by gravelinspector. It’s a hidden leopard (Panthera pardus), and the title of this post is thus a triple entendre. I’ve enlarged the photo below the tweet (I can’t find the original by the photographer, Hemant Dabi, but he’s an Indian photographer from Jaipur who has a National Geographic photo page). Can you spot the leopard? I’d call this one “fairly hard.”

Click on the second photo to enlarge it; reveal at 11 a.m. Chicago time. PLEASE DO NOT REVEAL THE LOCATION IN THE COMMENTS, but you’re welcome to say whether you saw it.

x

Sunday: Hili dialogue

September 29, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s a soggy Sunday, September 29, 2019, and we’ve had two straight days of heavy rain. Even the ducks have fled the pond during the storms, and we haven’t seen them for over two days. I hope they return to say farewell, but I never know when it’s a final goodbye for the year.

It’s National Coffee Day, but isn’t every day National Coffee Day? (I’m drinking a homemade latte as I type this.) It’s also Goose Day (when is Duck Day??), National Biscotti Day (cultural appropriation), and World Heart Day.  And, if you’re religious, it’s Michaelmas (aka National Poisoned Blackberries Day; while if you’re spiritual and philosophical, it’s Confucius Day (in Hong Kong).

Stuff that happened on September 29 includes:

  • 1789 – The 1st United States Congress adjourns.
  • 1918 – Germany’s Supreme Army Command tells the Kaiser and the Chancellor to open negotiations for an armistice.
  • 1923 – The British Mandate for Palestine takes effect, creating Mandatory Palestine.
  • 2004 – Burt Rutan’s Ansari SpaceShipOne performs a successful spaceflight, the first of two required to win the Ansari X Prize.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 106 BC – Pompey, Roman general and politician (d. 48 BC)
  • 1758 – Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, English admiral (d. 1805)
  • 1895 – Joseph Banks Rhine, American botanist and parapsychologist (d. 1980)
  • 1898 – Trofim Lysenko, Ukrainian-Russian biologist and agronomist (d. 1976)

Lysenko, of course, was the Russian charlatan to whom Stalin gave immense power over Russian agriculture and genetics. Lysenko expelled real geneticists from their positions (some were killed or put in camps) and foisted his “acquired inheritance” theory of genetics on the Soviet Union, to both its agricultural and scientific detriment. Here’s John Maynard Smith 1920-2004), whom I knew, discussing the cognitive dissonance of his own mentor, the famous J. B. S. Haldane, one of the founders of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis but also a Marxist and admirer of the Soviet Union.  The interviewer sounds like Richard Dawkins.  Maynard Smith was also, for a time, a member of the Community Party.

  • 1907 – Gene Autry, American singer, actor, and businessman (d. 1998)
  • 1934 – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Hungarian-American psychologist and academic
  • 1935 – Jerry Lee Lewis, American singer-songwriter and pianist
  • 1943 – Lech Wałęsa, Polish electrician and politician, 2nd President of Poland, Nobel Prize laureate
  • 1956 – Suzzy Roche, American singer-songwriter and actress.

Here’s The Killer in 1964 singing some of his greatest hits. Still alive at 84, Lewis is one of the few remaining icons from the earliest era of rock and roll (he suffered a stroke earlier this year).

Those who bought the farm on this day include:

  • 1910 – Winslow Homer, American painter, illustrator, and engraver (b. 1836)
  • 1930 – Ilya Repin, Ukrainian-Russian painter and illustrator (b. 1844)

“Barge Haulers on the Volga” (1870-1873). I saw this painting in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and spent a long time standing before it. It is a very great painting. Burlaks: 17th to 20th century.

Most burlaks were landless or poor peasants from Simbirsk, Saratov, Samara, Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Vladimir, Ryazan, Tambov and Penza areas.[citation needed]

Burlaks joined up in an artel (typically from four to six, sometimes ten to forty, and occasionally up 150 people) mainly in winter, despite that at this time clients paid the lowest price, because in winter burlaks were often otherwise unemployed. The final payments were in autumn, after finishing work.

With the coming of the Industrial revolution, the number of burlaks declined: in the beginning of the nineteenth century about 600,000 burlaks worked on the Volga and Oka rivers; in the middle of nineteenth century, 150,000, and by the beginning of the twentieth burlaks had all but disappeared.

The characters are based on actual people Repin came to know while preparing for the work. He had had difficulty finding subjects to pose for him, even for a fee, because of a folklorish belief that a subject’s soul would leave his possession once his image was put down on paper. The subjects include a former soldier, a former priest, and a painter. Although he depicted eleven men, women also performed the work and there were normally many more people in a barge-hauling gang; Repin selected these figures as representative of a broad swathe of the working classes of Russian society.

For two other great paintings by Repin, see here and here.

  • 1967 – Carson McCullers, American novelist, playwright, essayist, and poet (b. 1917)
  • 1970 – Edward Everett Horton, American actor (b. 1886)
  • 1973 – W. H. Auden, English-American poet, playwright, and critic (b. 1907)
  • 1975 – Casey Stengel, American baseball player and manager (b. 1890)
  • 1997 – Roy Lichtenstein, American painter and sculptor (b. 1923)
  • 2010 – Tony Curtis, American actor (b. 1925)
  • 2012 – Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, American publisher (b. 1926)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Sarah, who’s visiting, photographs and chats with Hili:

Hili: I’m afraid I look like an owl.
Sarah: Not at all, you look like a cat that resembles an owl a bit.
Photo: Sarah Lawson

In Polish:

Hili: Obawiam się, że wyglądam jak sowa.
Sarah: Wcale nie, wyglądasz jak kot, który tylko troszkę przypomina sowę.

From Amazing Things: Bonsai Forest by Masahiko Kimura:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Mark:

A tweet found by Simon. This one’s hilarious, but also true.

From Barry, showing the way things should be:

Two tweets from Heather Hastie, the first showing a useful d*g:

The world’s very best snack:

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/1175030430795468801

Tweets from Matthew Cobb. The first one can get me in trouble, but I can always fob it off on Dr. Cobb;

Kishi Station in Japan, where the famous calico cat Tama used to be the official stationmaster and chief operating officer.  After Tama died, she was replaced by Nitama, whom you see below. And look at the station!

Every couple of years I’d find one of these in my fly bottles; it’s due to the loss of an X chromosome from a female embryo in early development, making a fly that’s half XO (male in flies, largely female in humans), and half XX (female). It was always a treat to see these. The male side has a darker abdomen and a sex comb on the front leg.

“Here You Come Again”

September 28, 2019 • 4:25 pm

If you’re not watching Ken Burns’s PBS series, “Country Music,” you’re making a mistake: almost every reader who’s seen it, including those (like me) who aren’t huge fans of country, have found it mesmerizing.  And you can see all the episodes free online.

When I was exercising this afternoon, and listening to my iPod Nano (a great accessory that’s no longer made), this song came on, and I realized how good it is. The words are simple but the tune is terrific, and they meld perfectly.

“Here You Come Again” (recorded by Parton in 1977) is not really a country song, though Parton is a country singer. It’s a pop song, with the only nod to country music being Parton’s voice and the line “Here you come again, lookin’ better than a body has a right to.” (The phrase “a body”, meaning “a person” is definitely Southern country argot.)

When I looked up the song on Wikipedia, I discovered that it was one of the few Dolly Parton hits not written by her: the writers were the famous duo Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, who planned it as a “comeback song” for Brenda Lee.  Lee rejected it, and the rest is history. As Wikipedia reports, “”Here You Come Again’ was the centerpiece of [Parton’s] now famous pop crossover move in the late 1970s.”

Mann and Weil were writers of pop songs, not country songs (see here for an astonishing list of their hits), and so we have violins instead of steel guitars. (Wikipedia says the recording does have steel guitar, inserted to  but I can’t hear it on the original recording.:

[Parton’s] producer, Gary Klein, who had heard the song on B.J. Thomas’s recently released self-titled album, reported that Parton had begged him to add a steel guitar to avoid sounding too pop, and he called in Al Perkins to fill that role. “She wanted people to be able to hear the steel guitar, so if someone said it isn’t country, she could say it and prove it,” Klein told journalist Tom Roland. “She was so relieved. It was like her life sentence was reprieved.”)

Regardless, it’s a great performance, and rose to #3 on the Billboard “Hot 100” chart.  It’s my favorite song by Dolly Parton:

 

Photos of readers

September 28, 2019 • 2:30 pm

Reader Blue Maas sent this photo of her at tortoise feeding time in the Galapágos. Her caption is indented:

Is of the feeding time / The Salad, Saturday, 19 June 2010, for the tortoises upon Floreana Isle, one of the 27 Galápagan Isles.  The salad’s leaves are as gigantic as they themselves are !
Bulkiness upon my chest is because under my clothing is a neck wallet with all of my money and my passport and id.I could not risk leaving it all behind at the hotel upon Puerto Aroyo on Santa Cruz Island … … as Floreana Isle is a two – hour speedboat trek away from that hotel.

IDers resurrect First Cause argument, claim that it’s convincing and that Dawkins and I are too stupid to understand it

September 28, 2019 • 12:00 pm

LOL! Michael Egnor, as we saw yesterday, is a Christian neurosurgeon, while David Klinghoffer is an Orthodox Jew. Both are goddy Intelligent Design (ID) advocates who write for Evolution News, a site that has largely abandoned providing “scientific” evidence for ID to launching attacks on its opponents. I am quite proud that both of these men seem obsessed with me (that means they worry about my influence), and also that they and their colleagues spend oodles of column inches on the site attacking my views on evolution, my philosophy, and, once, even my looks. I’m also pleased that they chose me as 2014’s Censor of the Year, an honor I’d love to win again.

Today Klinghoffer leans on Egnor (the bland leading the blind) to resurrect the First Cause Argument, claiming that Dawkins and I don’t understand it, and that presumably, if we did, we’d be convinced that God exists. Click on screenshot below, which goes to an archived link (I’m not giving these people page clicks):

Today I get extra plaudits from Klinghoffer because he thinks that both Dawkins and I, in our weak and unconvincing attempt to defend evolution, have actually driven people to Intelligent Design:

. . . . in the context of the evolution debate. . .  opponents of intelligent design theory very often refuse to grapple with ID itself, limiting themselves to denouncing a cartoon parody. Plenty of thoughtful people have been persuaded in favor of ID in part by the “weak, vague, and dubious” responses from supposedly top critics (like Jerry Coyne or Richard Dawkins). In still another context, a political one, I was turned off leftism as a youthful leftist, a college freshman, by meeting other campus leftists and listening to what they had to say and how they said it.

I know of no people who I’ve turned to ID, but I am absolutely sure that Dawkins, at least, has made many more converts to evolution than away from evolution (see evidence here, and note that there are 132 pages of testimony). I also suspect that my book Why Evolution is True has also made converts to accepting evolution: I’ve gotten a ton of emails to that effect, but never one from somebody who said: “Dr. Coyne, your criticisms of intelligent design are so lame that they’ve made me embrace that form of creationism.” Given that I get a fair amount of nasty and critical emails, surely I should have gotten at least one like that!

But I digress: Klinghoffer, unable to give a satisfactory answer to his son’s question, “Who made God?”, importuned Egnor to give him an answer to this recurring argument for theism. And here is Egnor’s reply to Klinghoffer, an extra-ridiculous version of the First Cause Argument (also known as the “Cosmological Argument”). Once again, to my pleasure I get lumped in with Dawkins:

My youngest daughter asked “Who made God?” one day when we were driving to 7-Eleven. She was 4.

There are two groups of people for whom the question is excusable: kids and ordinary folks who make no pretense to philosophical insight.

Coyne and Dawkins fall into neither category. They claim insight — arrogantly claim it, in fact. They are highly educated men who have at their disposal books and colleagues who can provide the answer to that question anytime. They proclaim their ignorant atheism to millions of people who (foolishly) take their word for it.

The answer to the question is simple. God is not “made.” He is not a “thing” in the collection of things we call nature. If He were a thing, He wouldn’t be God.

God is the Unmoved Mover, the Uncaused Cause, the Necessary Existence. He is the necessary prerequisite for making, causing, and existing.

How so, one might ask? Succinctly, all change in nature consists of three steps: the existence of potentiality, the process of change, the final actuality. By the law of non-contradiction, a thing may not exist and not exist at the same moment in the same way. Applied to change, this means that a thing may not be potential and actual in the same respect at the same time. That is, a thing may not be the cause of its own change. Everything that is changed is changed by another.

If everything has potentiality (i.e., can be “made”), then the process of change — steps 1, 2, and 3 — could not get started, because if everything is potential, nothing is actual. If nothing is actual, nothing can change or be made or even exist.

To account for change or causation or even existence itself, there must be Someone Who is unchanged, uncaused, and Who necessarily exists. This is the cosmological argument, which is the framework for Aquinas’ first three ways.

This argument, and its consequences, fills books that fill libraries. There are millions of people — theologians, professors, interested laypeople — who can explain it in simple terms to Coyne and Attenborough. Heck, we’ve explained it in simple terms several times on Evolution News. Coyne and company have no excuse.

“Who caused God?” is, as I said, a fair question for a kid or a person who makes no claim to philosophical knowledge. It is culpable error of a very serious degree for people who have a public voice and who claim insight into such matters.

Remember that Egnor is a neurosurgeon, not a philosopher, so it’s bizarre for him to accuse Dawkins and me of lacking sufficient philosophical knowledge to apprehend this simple argument. In fact, I’ve read a ton about this argument and know all the refutations, some of which can be found here, here, and here. In fact, the argument is so threadbare that no philosophers—save religious ones—accept it as convincing. Physicist Sean Carroll has also smacked it down repeatedly (see here for one example), and Sean is not a dumb guy who’s ignorant of philosophy!

I don’t want to waste time repeating the rebuttals of others, but will just say two things. First, yes, something can be the cause of its own change: one example is an atom of radioactive element that decays into a different kind of atom. As far as we know, there are no external “causes” for this phenomenon.

Second, even if Egnor and his superstitious acolytes were right, and there had to be a “first cause” (something I deny is logically true), that doesn’t show that the “cause” was a god, much less the kind of God (or G*d, in Klinghoffer’s case), in which these men believe. As Hitchens used to say, “All their work is still ahead of them.” The rest of the arguments, including the claim that the universe had to have an external cause, or that there had to be a first cause or a beginning of everything, can be found in the links above.

Yes, of course people have Godsplained this argument to me, mostly in the many books and papers I’ve read about it. But I don’t accept that argument as even coming close to proving the existence of a divine being.

I will leave analysis of Egnor’s argument to readers of a philosophical bent.

CNN: Sarah Jeong leaves NYT editorial board under weird circumstances, becomes a stringer

September 28, 2019 • 10:30 am

Brian Stelter at CNN reports that Sarah Jeong, controversial tech writer for the New York Times and member of the paper’s editorial board, has left that board.  Note that although this was reported on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” site, I haven’t been able to confirm it anywhere else, including on Jeong’s Twitter feed (the New York Post did echo CNN’s report). However, as you see below, the paper apparently confirmed it to someone else. (Click on screenshot).

As you may recall (see my posts here), Jeong came under fire for her social-media posts criticizing white people, men, and the police, but apologized—as did her paper—saying that she was merely responding in kind to people harassing her because she was a woman of color. Despite the social media outcry, the Times retained her as a writer and editorial-board member.

What’s strange about this is the circumstances of Jeong’s “resignation”, which are recounted below in Stelter’s report:

Oliver Darcy emails: Sarah Jeong is no longer a member of the NYT editorial board. A spokesperson for NYT told me Jeong is no longer an employee, but has shifted to being a contracted contributor for NYT Opinion. “Sarah decided to leave the editorial board in August,” said Kate Kingsbury, deputy editorial page editor, “but we’re glad to still have her journalism and insights around technology in our pages through her work as a contributor.”

In an emailed statement, Jeong said the change in role will allow her to “go back to reporting and writing long features while still being involved with NYT Opinion section on tech issues.” Jeong added, “The decision was hard because of the many wonderful colleagues I would have to leave behind, but I made the change so I can work on what I want to work on in the immediate moment.”

…says eyebrow-raising tweet wasn’t a call to unsubscribe

Darcy adds: Jeong raised eyebrows on Friday afternoon when she weighed in on calls for people to cancel their NYT subscriptions over the newspaper’s decision to identify the whistleblower as a CIA officer. Guardian columnist Siva Vaidhyanathan had urged people to not cancel, saying it would “hurt many great journalists” who work at NYT like Jeong.

“You’re wrong,” Jeong responded. “NYT does pay attention to subscriber cancellations. It’s one of the metrics for ‘outrage’ that they take to distinguish between ‘real’ outrage and superficial outrage. What subscribers say can back up dissenting views inside the paper about what it should do and be.”

The comment was read by many as a NYT employee urging people to cancel their subscriptions. But Jeong said it was not a “call to unsubscribe.” She told me, “I’m just weary of having my name and my work invoked as a reason to not boycott. A lot of people have done and continue to do great work at the Times. But if a reader has real, good-faith objections to certain editorial decisions, the fact that the paper has done great work doesn’t negate those objections.”

Once again, Jeong opened her mouth when she shouldn’t have. If it wasn’t a “call to unsubscribe,” it was surely unwise to assert that she was tired of having her work invoked as a reason not to boycott her own paper. What kind of an attitude is that?  It doesn’t even make any sense, unless she was tired of being on the editorial board. And that doesn’t make sense, either. Even if she wasn’t fired but did resign, these statements will surely put her in bad odor with the paper.

At any rate, I guess other people are as “frustrated” with the NYT as I am, though perhaps for a variety of reasons.

Here’s the exchange mentioned above:

There is, however, this tweet. It suggests that Jeong was fired, though her tweet from above appeared just yesterday, and the paper says she decided to leave the editorial board in August.

Sarah Jeong (from her Wikipedia bio)

h/t: cesar