Tribalism vs. Truth

Last Friday, August 24th, the editorial board opinion piece in the Houston Chronicle said some things that I would normally just ignore, because I know the editorial board is biased in a way that doesn’t align with my beliefs. But sometimes it’s worth taking a look at how the other side thinks—and try to figure out why they think that way.

Here’s a section of the piece; I’ve highlighted a portion I want to talk about:

Yes, President Obama lied when he continued to say you could keep your health plan. He was wrong, but he did it to help millions of Americans get heath insurance.

But Trumps lies are wrong, the piece goes on to say, because they are for his own purposes. I don’t know if the editorial writer recognizes it, but he/she just said, “Lying is OK if your purpose aligns with what we on our side want. Lying is not OK if your purpose doesn’t align with what we on our side want.”

I would like to note that, while Trump’s lies are supposedly so plentiful, the editorial doesn’t list a single one in the entire piece. I’m sure there are some, especially if you’re someone who reads his every stylistic superlative as a literal lie, and yet the only actual lie listed is Obama’s, for comparison. And the lies the editorial writer is telling. Such as this one:

The presidential candidate who chanted “lock her up!” about an opponent who stored sensitive email on a home server has now been implicated in an actual crime.

In actual truth, Hillary Clinton committed a felony when she purposely put classified material on her private, unsecure server. The basic facts tell us that.[i] Those who have held security clearances all know this. Intent is not required, even though that is what Comey used as the excuse for not indicting her. And even though intent in this case was very likely provable.

But there is no indictment, or pending indictment, of President Trump for campaign fraud. Even if his former lawyer ends up facing charges, the incident is much less egregious than the John Edwards case, which ended in a hung jury. Not everything that tangentially could affect public opinion is necessarily part of a campaign. Nor is there any evidence of colluding with Russia to commit voter fraud, which was supposedly the reason for the special counsel investigation in the first place.

I don’t want to be put in the position of defending a person who is covering up for sex with a porn star so his wife doesn’t find out. Even though she probably knows. And even though the “billionaire playboy” image was well known to voters before the election. That behavior is disgusting and anathema to civilized men. Almost as savage as diddling an intern in the oval office, one might say—although actually doing it while president still strikes me as more egregious.

Further, a campaign finance violation committed by an employee is probably part and parcel of every major political campaign—because the laws are convoluted and unevenly applied. But when they are applied, the usual remedy is a fine, probably taken out of campaign funds, not removal from office. Unlike the usual remedy for leaving classified materials in unsecured locations: “Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”[ii]

So there seems to be a disconnect regarding truth and facts.

The Wednesday, August 22^nd, opinion page of the Houston Chronicle featured a piece by Paul Krugman, who is also worthy of being dismissed, based on his past commentary. But I’ll use this one as a sample today. His piece is titled, “The Orwellification of the GOP didn’t start with Trump.” He’s referring to George Orwell’s book 1984. He does give some examples of Trump lies:

Donald Trump operates on the principle that truth—whether it involves inauguration crowd sizes, immigrant crime or economic performance—is what he says It is. And that truth can change at a moment’s notice.

Again, I don’t want to be put in the position of apologetic for Trump. But I do somewhat understand language and language style. Trump is not the person to go to for details, or data, or exact facts. He uses words for effect, and for big picture messaging. So some translating needs to be done. Like, crowd size. What other president would the news media go to for crowd size measures? But they claimed erroneously that the crowd was very small, not because it was particularly small, but because saying so would denigrate the president. And then other people showed the crowd on social media, revealing that the media had used a particular angle to hide the crowd.

So Trump was responding to a media lie, and, as he does because it’s his personality to do so, he made sure we all knew the crowd was big. Really big. He might have even thrown in a number for effect.

Trump wasn’t lying about the crowd size; the media outlets who tried to denigrate the president by claiming the crowd was less than it was did the lying.

Trump also hasn’t been lying about illegal immigrant crime; but leftist media have made erroneous and now refuted claims that illegals are more law-abiding than other immigrants or other Americans—and they’ve repeated that lie in the very moments following the revelation that Mollie Tibbetts was murdered by an illegal alien.

And the economy? Let’s just say, if you’re an American who lived through the Great Recession that lasted, coincidentally, all eight years of the Obama presidency, and you’re a young person, or a black person, or one of the other demographics now facing the lowest unemployment rates in decades, maybe you know the one not in touch with facts might be so-called economist Paul Krugman.

Krugman asks,

Why did the party’s belief in objective reality collapse so suddenly and completely?

Let me do some more language and style translation: he means, “No one in their right mind could possibly disagree with me, so the whole Republican party is demented.” And there’s no self-reflection, no inkling of recognition that he’s unaware of actual objective reality.

Since I’m a truth seeker, I’m also the kind of person who frequently asks, “Could I be wrong?” So I do the exploration for facts, which is why I can fairly clearly see both good things and bad things Trump has done. (I’m not the only one. Ben Shapiro often has a segment on his show called “Good Trump/Bad Trump,” where he shows evidence in both directions.)

But this particular president seems to bring out irrational hatred toward both Trump and anyone who disagrees with them—along with an absolute certainty of rightness. As Mark Twain put it, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Jane Clark Scharl, in a piece for Intercollegiate Review, asks the question “How Dangerous Is Jordan Peterson?” She concludes that he and his ideas are indeed dangerous, but not at all in the way his detractors believe. He’s dangerous because he’s revealing the lies being inculcated by various interrelated political tribes. As Scharl puts it:

In universities, high schools, and increasingly as early as elementary and preschools, children and young people are being taught not to think critically about topics like gender, sex, race, privilege, culture, liberty, wealth and success, and religion; instead, they are being presented with a series of platitudes and told to accept them or be punished.

Having someone who can get people to question the platitudes is dangerous to the tribes.

Jordan Peterson
image from here

I think there’s at least a partial explanation for the sense of danger Jordan Peterson stirs up, in the introduction to his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. He spent many years looking into the atrocities of the past century, and asking how people could believe what they believed to such an extent:

I couldn’t understand how belief systems could be so important to people that they were willing to risk the destruction of the world to protect them. I came to realize that shared belief systems made people intelligible to one another—and that the systems weren’t just about belief.

People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another. They act in keeping with each other’s expectations and desires. They can cooperate. They can even compete peacefully, because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else. A shared belief system, partly psychological, partly acted out, simplifies everyone—in their own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Shared beliefs simplify the world, as well, because people who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world. There is perhaps nothing more important than the maintenance of this organization—the simplification. If it’s threatened, the great ship of state rocks.

It isn’t precisely that people will fight for what they believe. They will fight, instead, to maintain the match between what they believe, what they expect, and what they desire. They will fight to maintain the match between what they expect and how everyone is acting. It is precisely the maintenance of that match that enables everyone to live together peacefully, predictably and productively. It reduces uncertainty and the chaotic mix of intolerable emotions that uncertainty inevitably produces [p. xxx].

So, people tribalize to fend off chaos. They have a vested interest in maintaining the tribe—along with its beliefs, values, and traditions—regardless of whether the beliefs are accurate or not. But disagreeing tribes clash.

That’s a problem. How do I know I’m the one who’s got the truth, when Krugman and the Chronicle editorial writer are so sure they’re the ones with the facts?

I have a number of clues. One is data from trusted sources, and probably multiple trusted sources. I would say the objective measures provided by nonpartisan government sources, at least for economic data, are probably accurate. And there are a few other sources I think have held up reliably well. Then it’s a matter of interpreting the data, to make sure you draw accurate conclusions. You need some tried and true principles for that.

Those of us on the conservative side—or, as we would put it in Spherical Model language, those of us in the northern hemisphere, where we find freedom, prosperity, and civilization—have an advantage over those in the southern hemisphere, who seize or cling to statist tyranny in order to fend off the tyranny of chaos. Up here, we encounter opposing viewpoints every day, from nearly any mainstream news source. So we question everything. If it doesn’t coincide with our experience and those around us, maybe there’s more to the story, so we start seeking it.

Those in a southern hemisphere bubble, those who admit to never encountering an actual conservative in their day-to-day lives, might not have a very clear or complete picture.

The Daily Wire did an interview with Brandon Straka, the guy who started the #WalkAway movement a few months ago. He talked about the bubble he used to be in. He would hang out with Ivy League educated smart people, who all saw things the same way. At first, when he thought what they said didn't make sense, he assumed he must be wrong, because they were so smart.

Brandon Straka
image from The Daily Wire

But then, when he started speaking up and voicing his questions, friends either abandoned or persecuted him for not staying on script. When he left that side, because they were, in his words, "intolerant, inflexible, illogical, hateful, misguided, ill-informed, un-American, hypocritical, menacing, callous, narrow-minded, and even blatantly fascistic," he still didn’t consider becoming a Republican. He told himself, "Well, I’m not a liberal, but I’m sure as hell not going to become a Republican because those people are crazy and racist, etc." Because that’s what he’d always been told to believe.

At first he didn’t really listen to the other side—our side. But after being abandoned by so many now hostile friends, he started really listening to Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Ann Coulter, and Michelle Malkin. Now he gladly calls himself a conservative and is a registered Republican.

There’s this interesting part of the interview:

DW: Do you see any of the behavior that you witnessed on the Left mirrored in the Republican Party? For example—the identity politics, the pitting of groups against one another, the tribalism, the cruel rhetoric or violence.

STRAKA: No, I’m not seeing or experiencing anything like that, which is why I think I’ve come to embrace the conservative philosophy as much as I have. It’s all about the individual, personal empowerment, encouraging people to try hard, and work hard. You can have the life you want if you’re willing to work for it, be a decent person, and contribute to society.

One thing that opened him up to new information was a personal change, from alcoholic drug addict. As he says,

My life was all about self-pity and what the world owed me. After I got sober, I really started to learn about accountability, taking responsibility for your actions, and making amends to people when you've made mistakes. I started seeing the rewards of that.

So what he saw as true, when he was in that downward spiral, wasn’t true at all. Once he got free of the brain fog of addiction, he also got free of some untrue beliefs and found some better-serving true beliefs.

There’s an interview with Jordan Peterson—and I’ve heard him say this in several interviews—about learning to tell the truth. It relates to Rule 10 in his book: “Be precise in your speech.” He tries to never say anything that makes him feel weak. The interviewer thought that was an odd thing to base something on, just whether he personally felt more powerful or not. But he didn’t say more powerful over others; he said less weak personally. It’s a signal. You can pay attention and feel it, and that’s a way to find truth.

I would word it differently, based on my religious understanding. But there is a feeling you can have associated with finding truth. It’s a still, small voice, but if you practice and pay attention, you can use it as a built-in truth detector.

I tend to be overly trusting, and assume others tell the truth, because I do. And sometimes that ends up kicking me where it hurts. But many times, an uneasiness, something confusing or unsettling, or physically weakening is what I feel around untruth. I don’t like that feeling. I feel a wholeness, and a wholesomeness, around truth, even unpleasant truth when it needs to be faced.

If you want truth, you have to ask for it. Question tribalism. Question pitting one group of people against another. Question your prejudices. And learn what truth looks like and feels like. Civilization depends upon each of us doing just that.

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[i] 18 U.S. Code § 798 - Disclosure of classified information,  https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798 . And 46 CFR 503.59 - Safeguarding classified information, https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/46/503.59

[ii] 18 U.S. Code § 798 - Disclosure of classified information (see link above).

Houston Strong

We interrupt our usually scheduled political philosophy blog for this special announcement:

The Houston Astros won the World Series

It’s worth celebrating. It’s hard to gauge from here at the current center of the universe, but my guess is that Houston was a sentimental favorite everywhere this year, because of Hurricane Harvey.

Storm on the left, 'Stros on the right
from a friend's Facebook

One Houston Chronicle headline I read this morning said, “Harvey dropped 51 inches so the Houston Astros dropped the Los Angeles Dodgers 5-1.” It may not be a cause-effect relationship, but it’s important. Several of the players had photos in their lockers of Houston homes underwater. They said that when they had a tough day and felt like slamming their glove into the locker, they’d see that photo and remember it was their fellow Houstonians who really had it rough. And they’d resolve to win this for them.

As the Chronicle story says,

The team wore "Houston Strong" patches on their jerseys, even when some of us felt less than mighty sifting through wet, damaged memories. The team visited flood victims in shelters, bringing a bit of blue and orange light where darkness was the norm.

It has been two months now, plus a week, since Harvey hit. Most of the damage near my neighborhood is no longer visible from the outside. But friends are still out of their homes—maybe for another 4-6 months—while inside repairs are underway.

As the team said last night, if they could just bring four hours of joy on a game night—a little bit of happiness—that’s what they wanted to do.

from a friend's Facebook*

There was a lot of love coming from the team. And it showed in their playing. And there was a lot of love back at them. My Facebook feed is very orange today, with Astros banners. The whole city—and everyone who ever lived here—is celebrating. The way we felt unified in the face of Harvey’s tragedy, we feel unified now celebrating with our team.

I’ve never lived in a championship city before. Maybe other places feel this way with their celebrations too. But, because of what we’ve been through here, it feels especially good.

2017 has been one for the history books.

No place like home.

I almost never wear graphic Ts,
but I want this one.

Springer, who gave us 5 home runs this series,
won MVP. And he gave us the term "Springer Dinger,"
which was yet another of his hits right when it mattered.

Governor Abbott declared Friday Houston Astros Day.
Houston schools are closed.
There will be a parade.

__________________________________________

*The Houston Astros Day image is from Governor Abbott's Facebook page. The T-shirt is a screen shot. All the others came from Facebook posts, and I do not know the origins, but I don't take photo credit for them.

Admitting Bias

Earlier this week a couple of stories appeared concerning abortion—specifically concerning whether abortion clinics can be required to meet the standards required of other ambulatory surgical centers. One story is that Texas’s law is having another day in court. The other is that a judge blocked such a law in Alabama.

Tuesday's Houston Chronicle front page

I’m dealing with the news section of August 5^th Houston Chronicle, front page above the fold, and A-7, where theoretically you get news instead of opinion. But what we get here is the news from the point of view of the “abortion-rights” side.

The Texas story’s first paragraph is:

Abortion providers returned to court Monday seeking to block a provision of Texas’ stringent new law that would require abortion facilities to comply with the standards of ambulatory surgical centers, a restriction opponents said would force more clinics out of business and leave hundreds of thousands of women without easy access to the procedure.

Stringent is a subjective term, not news. What the law actually did—in the wake of the Gosnell horrors—was cause abortion clinics to meet the standards expected already of other surgical centers. Why that is considered “stringent” is not mentioned. It should be noted that just days after the Gosnell verdict, Texas employees at an abortion clinic came forward with evidence of similar situations in Houston, with babies being killed.

US Rep. John Culberson gave this reaction to the story:

On the heels of Kermit Gosnell’s conviction, I am deeply saddened to learn about more atrocities committed against precious unborn babies, this time in our own backyard. Douglas Karpen of Houston, TX, has been accused of brutally murdering babies born after twenty weeks. He is innocent until proven guilty, but the descriptions from his former employees are gut wrenching and absolutely heartbreaking. Taking a baby from its mother’s womb and terminating its life is murder. Throughout my years in public service I have been committed to protecting the lives of the innocent, and as a Member of Congress, I will work with my colleagues to ensure that we put an immediate end to this practice in every corner of this nation. I will never stop fighting to protect the lives of the most vulnerable.

So the Texas legislature’s law had two missions: prevent abortions after 20 weeks, when it is now known the fetus feels pain (which also prevents the botched abortion-live birth killings that have been reported); and bring the clinics up to normally accepted health codes for the sake of women’s health.

This is the law, you may recall, that won Wendy Davis (now candidate for Texas governor) notoriety for filibustering, forcing a second special session to get a vote; it passed easily once a vote was taken. Afterward Davis seemed unaware of the actual provisions in the law, and seemed to think it was to outlaw all abortions. Maybe she just seemed confused while revealing she simply can’t bear the thought of any abortion ever being thwarted. Claiming that prevention of any abortion under any circumstances is a "war on women" is hardly a basis for leading the strongest state in the nation.

The providers testifying against the law weren’t led by people actually affected by the Texas law, but the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights. Their lawyers spoke in front of US District Judge Lee Yeakel, asking him to block implementation of the law’s provision, scheduled for September 1^st. Judge Yeakel ruled House Bill 2 unconstitutional last year—his decision was overruled by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. So going before this judge again is likely to go as before.

The pro-abortionists' main argument is that requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles means that the clinics have to close. They also claim that these regulatory burdens are “not imposed on any other health care providers in Texas,” which is false on its face. There are various simple procedures, like dental extraction, that are done in doctor’s offices, but if they are procedures in which there’s a risk of bleeding to death or other serious complications, they are already done in surgical centers meeting the requirements, or in hospitals.

Let’s take a close look at the admitting privileges question. When this came up last year, my question was, “Why don’t the doctors just go get admitting privileges?” They were given ample additional time to do so. And everything I read made it sound pretty standard. But here are the abortionists still complaining that they can’t qualify.

So I looked it up. The main thing is providing credentials. There’s some paperwork involved, but any practicing physician probably has his/her diploma and licenses available. There are two levels of admitting privileges. There are courtesy privileges, which are simply that the doctor is allowed to occasionally use the hospital, to perform rounds with patients and do procedures within his/her specialty on an as needed basis—just in case a need ever arises. This level is relatively simple to get, and would meet the law’s requirements.

The second type is full admitting privileges. This may require that the doctor become a part of the hospital staff, attend staff meetings, and provide a certain number of patients to the hospital per year. Sometimes the doctor must belong to the same insurance group as the hospital. This is admittedly harder to get, and might not be possible for an abortionist to meet.

Here’s where I have a problem with the story—and with the abortionists’ argument: the story says, quoting a coalition attorney: “Almost half of the roughly 40 abortion facilities operating in Texas before the passage of House Bill 2 already have closed because of doctors’ inability to obtain admitting privileges.”

It is not necessarily that doctors couldn’t obtain admitting privileges; it is that they didn’t. An online story I found, describing what it takes to get admitting privileges, quotes the CEO of the untruthfully named abortion provider Whole Woman’s Health, talking about the process: "We’ve worked with at least 25 hospitals around the state in the last six months trying to get privileges on behalf of our physicians."

I see a couple of problems here. First, 25 hospitals isn’t that many. As of 2012 there were 630 hospitals in the state. There are 80 just in Harris County, where Houston is located. Why work with only 25 hospitals? Why not apply with all of them, or at least all that are within 30 miles of an abortion clinic? And how do we know whether these 25 hospitals were the least likely to accept the requests? Catholic hospitals, or other Christian supported hospitals, or possibly hospitals related to specific insurance groups? After all, these are people trying to provide evidence that the law is too restrictive, not people actually trying to meet the requirements. It also appears, from the descriptions, that only full admitting privileges were sought—possibly so that they would be turned down, and then they could claim they couldn’t meet the requirements of the law, giving them "evidence" for appeal.

Second, why is the abortion provider clinic organization, rather than the physician, doing the applying? At some point the doctor has to apply. And generally applications are available for download from a hospital website, so the intermediary isn’t really necessary. Apparently we’re just supposed to take it as fact that they’ve exerted every effort and failed, because the law is too stringent?

On that note, if requiring that a doctor be credentialed and not barred because of various malpractice complaints is too stringent, aren’t we really undervaluing women’s health?

Another problem with the story is the numbers. The pro-abortion coalition claims that there’s a particular shortage of clinics in El Paso and generally in the southwestern portion of the state: “That would leave some 900,000 women of reproductive age in the Rio Grande Valley and West Texas living at least 150 miles from a Texas abortion facility.”

They are counting all women, not just the relative few who choose abortion as their birth control method. Let me proclaim, loudly, that abortion clinics do not serve me. Nor any woman in my family. Nor any woman I know at church. Possibly not any woman in my circle of friends and acquaintances. They are vastly overestimating the number of women they “serve” by killing their babies.

And they’re assuming the state should go to great lengths—even to the point of dumbing down safety requirements that can affect women’s health—just to encourage more clinics where there hasn’t been enough of a market thus far.

This is similar to the argument in the Alabama story (Houston Chronicle p. A7, Tuesday, August 5): “Judge blocks Alabama’s Abortion Law.” In that state, with a law similar to Texas’s, the claim is that, because the abortion doctors live outside the state, they wouldn’t be able to get admitting privileges. The state has just five abortion clinics, and three have this challenge. The claim is, “it’s unlikely that local doctors would begin performing abortions because of a history of violence across the South that includes bombings, shootings, and arsons against clinics, the judge said.”

First, as if I need to say it, violence is not the right approach to persuading people not to commit abortions. And any such violence should be prosecuted according to the law—as it has been; most perpetrators are on death row, have been executed, or are serving life sentences. That said, I haven’t heard of abortion clinic violence in a long time. So I did a Wikipedia search. I found one case listed for Alabama, in 1998. The story says “the South,” so I broadened the search. There are two Florida cases, one in 1993, and one in 1994—with a follow-up bombing in 2012 at the same clinic. One in Kansas in 2009.

There are some additional incidents of attempted murder, death threats, and criminal mischief. I found one case of criminal mischief (breaking in, threatening, damaging equipment) in Alabama, in 1984.

So, my question is, why, if the damage is aimed at the clinics, does a doctor feel safe performing abortions in Alabama clinics, but not living there? And since Alabama is only part of the South, why do those doctors feel safe living across state lines but still nearby? The argument doesn’t hold water. What abortion clinics are saying is that, in some places they find it difficult to find doctors willing to enter into that profession—so they want government to lower standards for women’s health to make it easier for them to ply their grisly trade.

A similar problem is happening in Mississippi, where the single abortion clinic might close, and abortionists are asserting that each state should be required to make sure it has at least one abortion clinic, regardless of nearby access across state lines. They don't say why.

The subheading reveals bias

One more complaint about the Chronicle piece on the Texas law: One of the subheads is “Other Victories.” The paper is telling the story of the struggle of abortion providers; it is on their side. You can get facts about the issue from the story, but know that you might not be getting them all, because the reporter has revealed a pro-abortion bias.

If you think there’s reasonableness on that side, you need to read their protest signs: “Abortion on Demand & without Apology” and the absurdly irrelevant “Forced motherhood is female enslavement.” That is not exactly “safe, legal, and rare” message most pro-choice people would say they support. These religiously pro-abortion activists are perfectly willing to risk women’s health, as long as they press for what they want: to kill any baby up to birth, and even beyond. It’s an ugly business.

On the other hand, the signs at the anti-abortion prayer rally read, “Abortion harms women,” which it does. Not to mention women's babies. 

People need to rethink that whole “war on women” claim. Abortionists aren’t for women; they’re for profit. And they really resent being held to responsible standards if it could cost them money.