Category: civility

Scott Pruitt publicly shamed at a restaurant

July 3, 2018 • 11:30 am

I despise Scott Pruitt, for as the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), he’s enacting odious policies that despoil the environment; he rejects the fact of anthropogenic climate change; and he’s been charged with misspending government money and other dereliction of duty. He’s about the worst possible person to hold his job. Under Pruitt, the agency should be renamed the Environmental Destruction Agency.

Still, doesn’t the man have a right to eat in peace in a restaurant? In this video, a woman confronts Pruitt and his companion and reads out a laundry list of his misdeeds. As Politico reports:

Another member of President Trump’s administration was confronted by a member of the public, this time in a tea shop in Washington, D.C.

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt was having lunch at Teaism on Monday when a woman confronted him and urged him to resign.

In a video posted to Facebook Monday, Kristin Mink is seen introducing her toddler son to Pruitt and telling him to resign. Occasionally appearing to refer to notes and speaking calmly, she cites his actions on water and air quality protection and tells him his policies have benefitted corporations over the environment.

“This is my son. He loves animals, he loves clean air, he loves clean water,” Mink said in the video to Pruitt and his lunch companion.

“We deserve to have somebody at the EPA who actually does protect our environment. Somebody who believes in climate change and takes it seriously for the benefit of all of us, including our children,” she said.

“I would urge you to resign before your scandals push you out,” she says before the video ends.

Although the video does not show it, Mink said in her video that Pruitt quickly left the restaurant after she confronted him.

[JAC: Pruitt’s office says he listens respectfully, which seems to be the case, and that he left because he finished his meal.]

The thing is, I agree completely with her views—just not with her tactics. Again, while this woman has every right to write to Pruitt, engage in demonstrations, make appointments at the EPA, lobby them, and do everything she can to bring Pruitt down—and surely has the legal right to encounter him this way—I don’t think this tactic is useful. It won’t change his mind; it won’t change the mind of centrists, and it makes the Left look petty.  Can we just leave these people to go out in public in peace without harassing them?

Apparently not to some Control-Leftists. P. Z. Myers, for instance, posted that video and gleefully approved of the confrontation:

Polite, honest, and accurate. She didn’t punch him, throw his table over, or kick him in the balls, even though he deserves all of that. It was an effective protest.

If you see one of Trump’s lackeys in public, and you don’t lean over and tell them, “Resign!”, you aren’t as brave as Kristin Mink.

Make ’em cringe a bit when they’re out in public. It’s the least you can do.

Really? Now he deserves to be kicked in the balls, too? (That, of course, is illegal.)

 

Bill Maher has a chat with Ben Shapiro

July 1, 2018 • 12:15 pm

Bill Maher, to his credit, had conservative Ben Shapiro on his show, and here’s a ten-minute discussion between them. Of course I agree with Maher far more than with Shapiro, but this does show that two political opponents can have a civil discussion. I don’t think minds were changed, but they do have points where they agree (Trump has damaged America’s social fabric, Trump should be impeached if he fires Mueller, etc. ). Of course they disagree on many other points, and there is a bit of flaring temper from time to time.

Nobody is pretending that mere civility is going to bring comity to a politically divided nation. But before we can begin to even find common ground (and I’m convinced there is some on issues like immigration), we have to be able to talk to our opponents.

NYT conflates civility with indifference to injustice

June 30, 2018 • 1:30 pm

Yes, folks, the New York Times is suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, at least if they publish op-eds like the one below (click on the screenshot to read it). Sugrue was motivated to write his piece by acts like the expulsion of Sarah Huckabee Sanders from a restaurant and the verbal attack on White House advisor Stephen Miller in a Mexican restaurant. I have decried this incivility and still do, as it accomplishes nothing except make the Left look bad and allow Leftists to parade their virtue. Others disagree with me, and I invite them to pick a number, get in line, and so on. . .

Thomas Sugrue is a professor of history and social and cultural analysis at New York University. And his piece is just a big mess, because his apparent point is to say that we of the Left shouldn’t try to be civil to individual members of the Trump administration in public because nothing socially progressive was ever accomplished by civility. But he mistakes social civility with public “civility” as the ignoring of calls for justice.

Sugrue’s example is the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

He says, correctly, that much of the success of that movement was due to the use of civil disobedience (note the word “civil”): peaceful violation of the law, putting protestors at personal risk for the great good of integration. An important part of that tactic was nonviolent resistance, which King derived, in part, from Gandhi. But to Sugrue, the protests were “violent” in the sense that whites reacted violently; and it was the sight of dogs and fire hoses being turned on peacefully protesting blacks that turned America’s stomach but also turned their hearts towards civil rights.

According to Sugrue, these protests were “disruptive”, and of course they were, though not terribly disruptive. They were disruptive to the social order of the South, where blacks couldn’t eat at lunch counters or ride in the front of buses. And so Sugrue argues that it’s okay for us to now be disruptive because that’s the only way to achieve our aim: getting rid of the Trump administration and making our country more progressive. His form of “disruption” is apparently harassing and embarrassing the Right in restaurants and gas stations.

As he argues, unconvincingly:

But, in fact, civil rights leaders, while they did believe in the power of nonviolence, knew that their success depended on disruption and coercion as much — sometimes more — than on dialogue and persuasion. They knew that the vast majority of whites who were indifferent or openly hostile to the demands of civil rights would not be moved by appeals to the American creed or to bromides about liberty and justice for all. Polite words would not change their behavior.

. . . [Martin Luther] King aimed some of his harshest words toward advocates of civility, whose concerns aligned with the hand-wringing of many of today’s politicians and pundits. From his Birmingham jail cell, King wrote: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” King knew that whites’ insistence on civility usually stymied civil rights. [JAC: note that he conflates public “order” with the “order” of not harassing Republicans in restaurants.]

Those methods of direct action — disruptive and threatening — spurred the Kennedy administration to move decisively.

. . . He tasked his staff with drafting what could eventually become the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Dialogue was necessary but far from sufficient for passage of civil rights laws. Disruption catalyzed change.

That history is a reminder that civility is in the eye of the beholder. And when the beholder wants to maintain an unequal status quo, it’s easy to accuse picketers, protesters and preachers alike of incivility, as much because of their message as their methods. For those upset by disruptive protests, the history of civil rights offers an unsettling reminder that the path to change is seldom polite.

This is about as stupid an argument as I can imagine, but who ever said professors had common sense? There is a difference between disruptive civil disobedience in the cause of justice and insulting Sarah Huckabee Sanders in a restaurant. The former galvanizes America and focuses its attention on great injustice; the latter accomplishes nothing except make centrists dislike the Left and embarrass the rest of us. (Well, many of us.) Dr. King would never have called for, or approved of, insulting members of the administration in public, demonizing them, or making their personal lives miserable. Civil disobedience is a public act: a peaceful defiance of the law to call attention to injustice. (I’ve practiced it myself.)

Insulting Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Stephen Miller in public places is not the same thing as sitting in at lunch counters or marching to Selma. Sugrue should know this, but apparently doesn’t recognize the difference between treating an individual human with civility and ignoring calls for integration because it’s “uncivil” and leads to “disruption.”

In fact, I’ll go so far as to call Sugrue a moron, and to call out the New York Times for publishing lame tripe like his, pretending that it’s a serious and thoughtful piece.  The downgrading of journalistic standards, and of gravitas in thought, is one of the symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The Advice Goddess schools college students in manners

November 13, 2014 • 2:24 pm

One of the few non-science, non-heathen websites that I follow is Amy Alkon’s “The Advice Goddess Blog.” Described as “Miss Manners with fangs,” Amy has a no-nonsense and hardnosed approach to manners. She pulls no punches, as in her relentless campaign to get people to stop talking loudly on their cellphones in public places (a stand with which I happen to agree). She’s also anti-PC in a refreshing way, and funny as hell. Granted, she has a small d*g, but she also has a pink Nash Rambler and is an atheist as well as a strong advocate of free speech.

The other day on her Facebook page, she asked her “friends” to give advice about manners to college students. As a prof, all I could do (along with several other teachers) was to tell her what incivilities among our students irked us the most in the classroom. She decided to turn that into a column, and it just appeared in the New York Observer, “College students must major in manners.”

Professor Ceiling Cat contributed some advice, though not to this bit; but I assent strongly!:

Emailing your professor: Use of “u,” “ur” and “n stuf ” is fine if you are 12 and emailing your BFF. When corresponding with your professor, take that extra millisecond to tap out the “yo” before the “u.” (How much time do you really save by typing “how u bin?”)

Start your email off with a salutation—“Dr.” or “Professor” or whatever professional title they’ve told the class they prefer—as opposed to “Hey.”

If you are asking to meet with them, propose a few times and look up the location of their office in the campus directory instead of asking them to write out directions. Chances are, they didn’t slave away getting a Ph.D. because all the jobs for mall information officers were taken.

These may seem like minor points, but they are not unimportant. It’s through small gestures of consideration like these—taking care not to needlessly suck the professor’s time and energy—that you show respect.

I can’t tell you the number of emails I’ve gotten from students that start with “hey.”  My mesentery always contracts when I get that, but of course I always reply politely. And here’s one bit of manners that I’ve witnessed exactly twice in my thirty years of teaching:

Gratitude is good: “Send a thank you card when you graduate; we really appreciate this and can use it for promotion and tenure,” says Dominican College assistant professor Sarah Strout. Better yet, don’t wait till you graduate to express gratitude. Research by social psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky and others finds that being grateful—taking note of what is good in your day and in your life—is one of the most effective ways to make yourself meaningfully happier, and it has cascading benefits for others in your life.

Granted, a fair few students have come to me or written many years after a course to thank me, but it’s nice to hear a few kind words at the end of a quarter’s class. And that goes for anyone who helps you! I’m told that airline flight attendants, who bust their hump attending to thankless and often rude passengers, rarely receive any gratitude at the end of a flight. Really, it makes peoples’ day to show some appreciation.

At any rate, Amy has a new book that came out June 3, and I’m not at all surprised at the title: (click the image for the Amazon link):

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