Antisemitism hypocrisy

Wow, almost 9 years since my last post, which wasn't long after my last post on Trump and antisemitism,  which was actually prior to his first term!  I think the worries that I expressed there may have been a bit naive, especially with respect to the second Trump administration, which as I write this has only just hit the 90 day mark.  "Naive" meaning I was too timid.

To be fair, I don't think that Trump is consciously antisemitic.  But I can only say "thanks, but no thanks" to his attempts to combat antisemitism (and that's the most polite way I can express it.

Allow me to observe that Trump...

• Welcomed Kanye West and Nick Fuentes to his dining table.
• Declared that there were "very fine people" among white nationalists screaming "Jews will not replace us."
• Regularly treats Jews as single-issue (Israel) voters, going so far to say that Jews who support Democrats "hate everything about Israel" and "hate their religion."
• Regularly equates support for Palestinians or criticism of Israel with antisemitism (and support for terrorism).  While the Venn diagram of the two, sadly, do have more overlap than they should, the overlap is (thankfully) a distinct minority.
• Regularly demonizes and dehumanizes trans people and immigrants (even legal ones).  Bigotry with exceptions for Jews remains bigotry; there are no "degrees" of bigotry.
• Singles out antisemitism as a problematic bigotry while endorsing other forms of it, most recently in February when he supported JD Vance's contention that an outspokenly racist DOGE employee should not have lost his job.  Think about that: the revealed attitude of this administration is that if you say that "everyone is welcome here", that's problematic DEI that can get you fired, but if you post "I was racist before it was cool," you will have the support of the VP and President.
• Hired into his administration a man who said that "competent white men must be in charge" for things to work.  Again, sexism and racism are OK but antisemitism is not?  I'm feeling like a broken record here: bigotry is not OK
• Is picking fights with universities like Harvard that go way beyond the problem at hand of antisemitism.  If a university is not properly dealing with antisemitism, you work with them to develop stronger - and narrowly tailored (after all, antisemitism may be noxious and evil, but as long as it's mere speech and not action, it's generally still protected by the first amendment) - fixes, or if necessary, you bring them to court on (again narrow) issues.  But withholding billions of dollars of medical and scientific research dollars with only a vague idea of what constitutes "compliance" is not rationally connected to the purported problem, nor will it help to do so.  I especially find ironic the fact that he's demanding actions to achieve "viewpoint diversity" (presumably meaning "more conservative voices, less criticism of Israel")...and thereby demanding a form of DEI for conservatives.  The irony is rich here.

In short, the stench of hypocrisy here is high and the evidence that he's using the "fight against antisemitism" as a fig leaf for his broader fight against "liberals" and "elites" is strong.

I have absolutely no gratitude for this charade of bigotry while claiming to fight antisemitism.  It's simply not OK, and it's not honest.

Not that anybody with half a brain has ever accused Trump of being honest...

Another approach to reducing gun violence?

The gun control debate seems to perennially go nowhere, in part because the two sides talk past each other.  Gun control advocates focus entirely on keeping guns out of the hands of bad guys, which is something the the gun rights advocates are incredibly skeptical can be done without overly impeding the legitimate exercise of 2nd amendment rights.  And gun rights advocates talk about their rights as if they are absolute and in a vacuum, failing to address the legitimate safety concerns of gun control advocates.  No surprise, little gets done and compromise is hard to find.

But it seems to me that there are a few things we can all agree on:

• Criminals and irresponsible people shouldn't have guns
• Law-abiding/responsible gun owners (by definition) aren't a problem.
• There's too much violence committed with guns (which is, of course, precisely why many gun owners carry heat), much of which is preventable.  Yes, violence is committed with knives and other weapons, but guns make it much easier to be much more fatal with less personal risk to the shooter than any other weapon, hence the focus on guns.

Since both sides would agree that a responsible gun owner is not a problem, let's focus on that.  I'd start with defining what "responsible" actually means, since it has to mean something.

"Responsible", I think we can all agree, means never allowing a child to have access to a loaded weapon without appropriate supervision (and for very young children, obviously, it means never letting them have access, period.)  This is not a 99% of the time thing - we wouldn't tolerate an airline pilot who avoids a crash 99% of the time, after all.  It means 100% of the time you don't let kids near guns unsupervised.  Take your kid hunting, show them how to safely handle it, go target shooting.  But if your child gets access to your gun to take to school, or finds it and shoots a playmate, then you have to be responsible for that.  If your 4 year old shoots your 6 year old, you are guilty of child endangerment, assault, and possibly murder.  After all, kids can't be responsible, so you need to be.  (Is this even controversial?)  And if you suspect someone of suicidal thoughts, you should ensure they can't get your guns.

It may not be possible to prevent criminals that are determined enough and sophisticated enough from getting guns, but being responsible means not helping them to do so.  This means when you sell a weapon to someone, you are comfortable that they are also responsible.  You want to give a gun to your uncle Joe?  Sure, why not.  Sell a gun at a gun show?  OK.  But here's the thing: you need to be responsible for making sure that the recipient isn't likely to do something stupid.  After all, if it's your responsibility to not help bad guys get weapons, then you need to exercise at least some care in making sure they don't.

I'd propose that if you give/sell a weapon to somebody, and they commit a crime with it, then you should be held responsible as an accessory to the crime.  But I'd pair that with a "get out of jail free" card: if you perform a background check (or have one done on your behalf), then you are presumed to have done your diligence and have no responsibility whatsoever.  You know your Uncle Joe, so you can decide not to do a background check on him, but selling a gun to Wayne who you just met at the gun show is probably a bit more of a risk.  And it seems this should be transitive.  If Alice sells to Bob who gives to Claire who sells to David, who commits armed robbery with it, and Alice was the only one who did a background check, then Bob and Claire should be accountable for allowing David to get the weapon.  In other words, background checks would not be mandatory, but failure to do so has its risks, and you need to weigh them. Doing the background check is generally cheap insurance.

Many criminals also steal weapons, and others are lost.  Arresting a bad guy and sending him to jail for possessing a stolen weapon is heck of a lot better than waiting until he hurts someone before arresting him.  So part of taking responsibility for making it harder for bad guys to get weapons is reporting them as soon as you are aware of a loss or theft (ideally including serial numbers).  Again, rather than making this mandatory, it's your choice.  But if someone does something bad with your weapon, and you knew it was missing/stolen but hadn't reported it, you're effectively an accomplice and should be treated as such.  Reporting it missing would, as with performing a background check, would absolve you of any such liability.  Again, cheap insurance to do so.

Speaking of insurance, responsible people recognize when they have the potential for greater loss than they can afford.  They can't afford if their house burns down, if their car crashes, or if they get cancer, so they carry insurance for all of these risks.  Lawyers carry insurance in case of bad advice, doctors carry insurance in case of bad treatment.  None of these are controversial, they're all common sense responsible things to do.  Weapons - guns in particular - are quite capable of causing losses far beyond what an owner can afford; a responsible gun owner carries insurance.  And like all policies, that insurance should be expensive for risky behavior and cheap for responsible behavior (think gun safes, training certification, etc.).

Finally, the words "law-abiding" in the phrase "law-abiding gun owner" needs to mean something.  Obviously, speeding, cheating on your taxes, and mass murder are not violations of equal magnitude.  But if you commit any crime of violence (or threat thereof), even without a weapon, or break any weapons rules or crimes involving a gun (including poaching or armed robbery), it seems to me that you've demonstrated that you are not a law-abiding gun owner and should forfeit your right to have one.

I don't offer any of the above suggestions as a cure-all for our violent society.  It won't solve most suicides (a large fraction of gun deaths), and it won't prevent terrorists or mass shooters, who generally are sophisticated and plan meticulously.  But it could help reduce the far too common daily killings.

3 reasons why my Jewish background causes Trump's nomination to give me absolute chills.

The "Nazi" comparison gets so overused in today's politics that it has (unfortunately) lost its meaning.  As awful as I think Trump is, I do not think he is a Nazi.  But there are 3 specific parallels to that period in Germany that I think are unavoidable.

The first is his "strongman" tendencies, inciting violence at his rallies.  Any "leader" deserving of that title would be a calming force.  Instead, he tells people how he'd "like to punch him", how people should be "roughed up", and that he'll pay their legal fees.  No surprise, his supporters commit violence against protesters.  This is the behavior of someone who wants to be dictator, not president.  I think it's very telling that the only foreign leader who has expressed support for Trump (and who Trump has openly admired) is Putin.

Trump's call for a ban on Muslims, besides being likely unconstitutional, is exactly the sort of bigoted scapegoating of an entire group of people.  But think about the logic here: if foreign Muslims are a threat, then so are domestic Muslims (look at San Bernadino, for example).  And if they're a threat, why shouldn't we make them identifiable (hmm, perhaps via identity card or symbol sewn onto their clothing?) or rounding them up in internment camps so that they can't harm us?  OK, these are "slippery slope" arguments to be sure, but nevertheless they are directionally consistent with Trump's rhetoric.  And the way he is demonizing entire groups based on religious or national affiliation is indistinguishable in nature from any other anti-semitic or racist regime.

Perhaps most frightening has been the fact that Trump has called for acts that range from being banned by the Geneva conventions (like torture), to other acts that have explicitly called for the commission of war crimes ("taking out" the families of terrorists).  These are war crimes for a reason, and anybody familiar with 20th century history would understand why Jews in particular (though by no means exclusively) think that the "war crime" designation is quite justified.

Trump is known for bluster, our democracy is (I hope) strong enough to provide adequate checks on such tendencies.  But these are attributes that should send warning flags - red flags and sirens - about the potential perils of a Trump administration.  This would be a leader with more in common with Putin than any previous US president.

An open letter to both sides of the gun debate

After the tragic shootings in Newtown CT last month, and with Biden's proposals to be announced this week, there has been a ton of discussion about gun-violence and "gun control" (which I put in quotes because I think it is poorly defined and, as a result, people project their own meanings into the phrase).

I think both sides in the debate miss some key points, so I offer an open letter here to each.

To the folks who favor "gun control":

The 2nd amendment is not only a constitutional right, but the supreme court has determined that it is in fact an individual right.  You may not like this fact, but you can't change it in the short term; people have been trying for 30 years to overturn Roe v Wade without success; if your strategy involves getting around the 2nd amendment or getting a different supreme court decision around it, you have a long, long road ahead of you and you're not likely to succeed.

So forget about stopping law abiding people from having the guns they choose to have.  I don't personally agree with the NRA on much, but they're absolutely right when they say that law-abiding/responsible gun-owners are not the problem.  If your solution involves trampling their rights, then you need another solution.

There are many issues that lead to violent crime and gun-violence in particular.  We should try to address all of them, of course, but when it comes to gun-violence, I think the issue is not guns per-se.  The NRA is right on another count: guns don't kill people, bad people with guns kill people.  Not everyone who drinks alcohol is an alcoholic or a drunk driver; not everyone with a gun is a problem.

So the key thing to focus on in the gun-violence arena is stopping "baddies" from getting guns.  (I'll define a "baddie" here as anyone who should not have a gun: criminals, mentally unstable people, and unsupervised minors.)  And, to the degree that baddies are getting guns from leakage somewhere in the pipeline from gun-manufacturer-to-gun-owner, I'd suggest addressing the key leakage points, and focusing on ensuring that the NRA's lauded "law-abiding and responsible" owners are in fact both, and that the incentives and penalties around both are strong.

To the folks who are gun-rights advocates:

Nobody is coming to take your guns.  There are some people who advocate doing so, but they can't.  You have a constitutional protection, which is about as strong as it gets, and despite the crazy political rhetoric to the contrary, we are a nation of laws.  You just sound ridiculous when you go off about how the first thing that Stalin, Hitler, etc. did was to take the citizens' guns.  We're not anywhere close to that situation: we have a constitutional protection to the right to bear arms that was not present in any of those situations, and we don't live in a dictatorship. Our laws and our constitution actually do get enforced, and our politicians are not above the law.  I don't blame you for being vigilant about potential erosion of your rights, but you're not going to lose your guns.  Nobody takes you seriously (nor should they) when you react to everything as if it were the final step before confiscation.  Join the debate in a sincere manner already, please, and quit with the "they're coming to take our guns" whining.  They're not because they can't.

That said, the 2nd amendment is like every other constitutional right: it is not absolute.  In the same way that there are limits on the 1st amendment, there are legitimate limits on the 2nd amendment as well.  No rational argument has ever been made to the contrary.  One obvious example is that you don't have the right to bear nuclear weapons or surface-to-air missiles; another is that we all agree that felons and mentally unstable people should not have guns.

Wayne LaPierre said a few weeks ago that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."  He may have been right about that, but he leaped over an important piece: how did the bad guy get the gun?  As I said to the "gun control" folks above, we have a problem of too many bad guys getting guns far too easily.  If we all agree that baddies shouldn't get guns, then we should agree that we can do more to make it harder for them to do so.  Nothing is foolproof, nothing will stop all baddies from getting guns all of the time, but I also don't buy for a minute the argument that nothing can be done that is effective, or that any non-zero imposition on "good guys with guns" is too much.  If you choose to exercise your right to bear arms, then you must choose the responsibility that goes with having guns to help keep them out of the hands of bad guys.  That will mean some level of imposition.  Perhaps more than you like, but if it actually works (the key question), and it lets you have your guns, then it's consistent with the 2nd amendment and worth doing.

Oh, and stop with the argument about bats and other weapons.  Baddies with guns are a distinct problem from baddies with bats, for two reasons: (a) when you have a gun, you can kill people much more quickly than with other weapons, and (b) with a gun, you can kill someone without having to get up close to your victim (thus putting yourself at risk), which lowers the threshold to shooting.  I think these two assertions are well borne out by the statistics about the rates of murder with guns vs. other weapons.

So to both sides of the debate, I'll offer this request: we all agree that bad guys with guns are a serious problem, don't we?  So why can't we find effective means for solving that problem?

My rules for this election season

Republicans had their convention last week, Democrats this week, and we have another 8 weeks of this nonsense.

It's incredibly frustrating to me listening to both sides.  Not because of the issues per se (although I obviously have opinions on those), but from the whole way the political "debate" is performed.

So forthwith, here are my "rules" for the political process.  I'm not so naive as to think any of these will be respected by any politician, but I think if more people followed them then our system as a whole would work better.  Anybody who violates a rule should have to put a sock in it until at least after the election.  And these apply to people of ANY political persuasion.

• Don't define the parties by their crazies and extremists; it's easy to find examples of them in any party, and since they're the noisy ones they get lots of attention.  Watch where the decision makers and consensus of the party are.
• The other being wrong does not make them bad people, nor does it mean they have ill motives.
• Political truths that were once valid may no longer be true.
• Political truths applied in one situation may not apply to another.
• The other side being wrong doesn't make you right.
• ALL policies have unintended consequences and tradeoffs.  It is the weight of these - not their existence - that argues against a policy
• Even if the other side is wrong, their points about the downsides of your position are likely valid
• 99% of conspiracies aren't.
• Challenge yourself . If you're liberal, watch Fox news. If conservative, watch MSNBC.  If you respond to an issue and know your position immediately without thinking, stop and think about it.  Could you actually argue the other side's case convincingly in a mock debate?  If not, you probably don't really understand it.
• If you need to make up, distort, or omit facts, your case is weak. 
• People can look at the same facts and have different opinions about their implications.  (This is, IMO, the source of most political disputes)
• Don't forward email or post on Facebook without first checking whether something is true.
• Be skeptical of any data coming from a partisan source; it is selective at best, untrue or misleading at worst.
• Keynes was exactly right 100% of the time, except when he wasn't.  Corollary: Hayek was exactly right 100% of the time, except when he wasn't.

How big is appropriate for government?

The health care ruling a few weeks ago brought up the ages-old debate about what is the right size of government, and where the right balance is between individual liberty/freedom and government regulations/requirements are.  Many of the people arguing for the conservative/libertarian view of minimalist government also adhere to a fairly strict constitutional interpretation and think a lot about what the founders meant.

I don't wish to wade into the merits of the health care decision (much less the law) here, nor do I want to argue whether a constructionist approach is appropriate (especially since the latter is really a subjective call; a matter of one's perspective and political philosophy). 

Rather, I simply wanted to make an observation as to the nature of why government has grown in our daily lives so much more compared to in the days that the constitution was created.

In particular, I think that our society has changed in two key ways that must require at least some more government "intrusion" in our lives than in the colonial days.  (Whether these justify the level of increased intrusion is a question I will leave readers to determine for themselves).

The first key change is that 200+ years ago, the vast bulk of trade was local.  If you had a home, you probably built it yourself.  If you had furniture, you likely built that too.  You probably grew your own food.  Trade certainly existed - people were certainly not entirely self-sufficient - but they were significantly more so than they are today.  And most of what they did in trade they did locally and face to face. 

Libertarians often decry government consumer "protections" as being unnecessary because the market will adjust for charlatans and cheats.  200 years ago, that was likely true: if the general store owner was dishonest in his dealings with people, he'd quickly be out of business because he was very likely to personally know each of his customers. 

It's still true today that the market can self regulate to a degree, but much less so.  If you feel AT&T screwed you on your phone bill, that's generally just tough luck for you.  The sheer degree to which we each rely on trade and the impersonal nature of much of that trade makes establishing a trust relationship with each trading entity prohibitively inefficient.  As a result, having some degree of 3rd-party trust validation provides a grossly disproportionate amount of lubricant to the economy; without it, the economy would grind to a halt.  In today's environment, the government does some of this (FDA ensuring food standards, for example), the private sector/trade groups does other aspects of it (Better Business Bureau, or, as an example of doing this badly, the ratings agencies that failed so badly during the financial crisis). 

I believe that one can legitimately argue whether the balance of government/private 3rd-party trust providers should be tilted more towards government, is about right, or should be tilted towards more private sector.  And I suspect that the reasons much of it that is government done today are primarily financial (there may not be a good private sector model to fund it) and trust (self-policing can sometimes fail due to conflicts of interest).  But the notion of reducing this function to its colonial-era levels is a quaint reminiscing for a simpler time that ultimately leads to economic suicide.

The second key change from the days of the constitutional convention is simple scale.  When we were a few million people scattered across the colonies, the impact one could have on one another and upon the broader environment (economic as well as ecological) was limited.  Our resources, and space simply dwarfed our numbers and our ability to have negative impacts.  With over 300 million people and a vastly higher per-capita income, those days are long gone.  The tragedy of the commons is a very real problem, even if there is controversy about what are the best solutions to it. 

But again, as with having 3rd party trust agencies above, governments tend to step in where markets fail.  Thus it is perfectly reasonable to expect to see a larger role for government in a larger, more crowded, and more resource constrained society.

None of this is intended as an argument in favor of excessive government intrusion in our lives or limits on our freedoms; quite the contrary - I, for one, don't want government involved any more than necessary.   My point here is simply that as society grows in scale and in technological sophistication, the definition of "excessive" will move over time; we shouldn't pretend otherwise.

China and climate change

I was in China recently to learn more about the country's progress in the clean-tech arena.  "Clean-tech" is a vague term, but encompasses almost anything that reduces pollution and/or consumption of non-renewable resources.  China has enormous challenges in this space: energy insecurity from the facts that they (like us) import most of their oil, their air and water pollution are bad enough to be properly labeled "hellish", and extreme water scarcity, just to name a few.  And on top of this, they are now the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, which of course contributes to climate change.

The authoritarian government there is terrified of instability (and being thrown out of power, in particular), and their primary strategy to avoid this has been economic growth.  There has been an implicit (albeit coerced) bargain between the government and the people, in which the Chinese government will help the people to build better lives for themselves economically, and in exchange the people stay out of politics.  I think there is lots one could say about this relationship, and perhaps I'll comment on it another day, but for now I'll leave it at "I don't live there (thankfully), so it's not my decision."  The key thing for my point right now is that China views economic development as priorities number 1, 2, and 3.

Well, actually, number 1 and 2.  In its current 5-year plan, China has elevated sustainability to be one of its top 3 priorities.  There's a lot I can say about that (and will in another column), but I think it highlights a key distinction between how they approach problems like climate change and how we approach it.

In China, there is no debate about whether climate change is real or man-made.  But not because it's a suppressed/censored debate.  It's because people in the government are, by and large, well educated technocrats and they would look at you strangely for suggesting that it's some plot by left-wing scientists who are fudging their data in order to get government grants.  They look at the data, and draw what seems to be the obvious conclusion: it's real, and it's likely to be a huge problem.  There simply hasn't been any credible scientific alternative theories or model (of course, one could show up, but it hasn't) to the idea of man-made climate change.  (Certainly none that actually demonstrate that the models cannot be true).

Yet China is, at the moment, the world's biggest contributor to the problem.  One might ask how this can be if they actually believe that climate change is both real and bad.  The main reason is the bargain I referenced above: economic growth wins, and economic growth right now means carbon emissions.  Here in the US, we struggle with the same tension, of course, between emissions and the economic growth that causes them, yet somehow some of us allow the debate about policy to cloud our ideas about the underlying science.  But denial is a lousy strategy.  If the science is wrong and climate change is not real, then hooray - that's great news.  Unfortunately, there's more and more evidence that the science is wrong and climate change is actually going to be worse than modeled.  I hope that too is wrong, but alas hope is also not a strategy.

The Chinese seem to be able to accept the most likely scenario (climate change is real and bad) and address it within the limitations of their other constraints requiring economic growth.  But they are not ignoring it.  They have some aggressive goals about energy intensity per unit of GDP to build on some pretty impressive reductions in energy intensity over the previous 5-year plan, for example.  I personally don't think that's enough - after all, the climate doesn't care about energy intensity, it cares about absolute emissions level - but it is a necessary first step.  What's really required - and I think China understands this, they just aren't in a position technologically yet to make it happen - is a fundamental shift of the economy to low-carbon energy sources.  I believe that the classic tradeoff between "economic growth" and "clean energy" is ultimately a false choice, a failure to see opportunity in a challenge.  And I think China agrees with me.  They are investing heavily in alternative fuels, efficiency, and figuring out a low-carbon economy, and when they get the costs right, the transition will happen for economic reasons rather than environmental ones.  And China will do very nicely economically as a result.

We in the US, on the other hand, still compare people who think that maybe this climate change thing is real to terrorists and mass murders.  I wouldn't trade our political system for theirs, but I would very much like for us to adopt their dispassionate approaches to these sorts of issues.