Turbulent Seas

There's never a shortage of contemporary Cassandras who forecast America's doom based on a collection of trends and statistical indicators.  I'm sure every powerful nation-state going back to ancient Babylon has had its share of them.  But sooner or later, one of them ends up getting something right.  Like this one.  Here's an excerpt from Ed Luce's 2012 book, Time to Start Thinking:

Fast-forward six years, and Luce's analysis turned out to be dead-on.  It's not difficult to understand why voters feel disconnected from the two major parties. Consider the major events and trends of the past ten to fifteen years.  The 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent Wall Street bailout. Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.  The outsourcing/automation of manufacturing jobs and stagnant wages.  Government shut-downs and political brinkmanship.  The "Retail Apocalypse." Two quagmire wars.  It doesn't take an expert social scientist to understand that a whole lot of people are increasingly uncertain about their futures, and that they view Washington and Wall Street elites as unhelpful and indifferent.  It's a simple equation: economic distress + frustration with current system = openness to demagoguery.  Just to make things interesting, add a healthy amount of simmering racial resentment.

And so, enter Donald Trump.  If you wonder why I rail against him so vocally, it's because he ascended to the presidency at a really bad time.  And I'm not just talking about the portion of the population worried about their futures. The day he took office, the NSA was engaging in bulk data collection of Americans' communications, dozens of police forces across the country were utilizing military-grade equipment, the precedent of launching drone strikes against American citizens without due process had been established, and our civil liberties were being eroded in the name of fighting terrorism.   It was a farfetched, extreme worst-case scenario, but taken together those things would provide an aspiring autocrat all the tools they needed.  So when Trump said things like he'd only acknowledge the election results "if he won," I got a bit nervous. 

I'm sure there are many, many servicemembers, police officers, intelligence analysts, and other government workers who refuse to carry out unconstitutional, and potentially, authoritarian-type orders - like spying on citizens because of their political views or anti-Trump activism.  There are many public servants who understand the Constitution, who know their history, and who recognize the potential of these programs being used toward undemocratic ends.  However, there would still be a significant number who would carry out those orders, and one only needs to look at the past fifty or so years of US history to find examples.  Look at Abu Ghraib, COINTELPRO, Operation Northwoods, the Chicago PD "black sites," and several other incidents, to see how easy it is for things to go off the rails.

Meanwhile, nothing is being done to fix any of this.  Now maybe there's no easy solution for the economic anxiety stuff, but I'm sure there are ways to alleviate the distress: job retraining programs, government investment in developing industries like nanotechnology and solar energy, etc. But the government could be doing a much better job of cleaning its own house: terminating the bulk collection program, making police forces get rid of the military hardware, strengthening Constitutional protections and curbing Executive power.  Yet to nobody's surprise, it's not. 

I'm a natural pessimist, but I don't see this ending well unless the political and business classes start acting to make Americans' lives better.  The path is wide open for a genuine autocrat to show up, and that person probably won't be as incompetent as Trump has been.

New Developments (Maybe) in Afghanistan

Some interesting news coming out of Afghanistan. It looks like US troops are pulling back from the countryside and focusing on the cities. Additionally, the mission seems to be shifting to a defensive one: pulling security and protecting the troops vs clearing/holding territory and expanding outward. Meanwhile, our government has reportedly negotiated directly with the Taliban in Qatar.
I'm no Clausewitz, but it looks to me like the US is starting to wind down, and may be in the early stages of withdrawing from Afghanistan.
I'm not a fan of leaving the Afghan government out of the negotiations. It's their country, after all. But somehow, I think it'll be okay. I'm betting that a lot of Afghan gov't officials and military personnel will strike deals with the Taliban the day after we leave. Hell, I bet a lot of them are closet members of the Taliban, or some other militia, already.
Or maybe I'm just telling myself that to rationalize the US leaving a weak & fragile frenemy government in the lurch.
I'm not a fan of cutting the Afghan government out of the negotiations. Some of them genuinely put their faith in us, have worked with us toward building a stable & safe Afghanistan, and a few have even fought, bled, and died to make that vision a reality. Excluding them is a slap in the face, and is a cowardly move.
However, so is leaving. Don't get me wrong, I am fully aware of that. But here's the thing. The way we were going, we are not any closer to success now than we were in 2002. We have troops controlling every piece of the country, from one end to the other. We have the most technologically-advanced military on the planet, with some of the most fearsome weaponry invented. But none of that matters, because Afghanistan is about as unconquerable as it gets. The last person who came close was Alexander the Great. Just about every nation since then has eventually been chased out in defeat.

The US will likely be no different. No matter if we stay another year, another five years, or another fifty years. Now, maybe if we had gone about it differently - maybe if we had established an overwhelming humanitarian presence in 2001/02, instead of letting combat ops largely drive the mission - we could have succeeded. Maybe if we had brought in State and USAID, had invested billions in rebuilding the country's infrastructure, had put locals to work demining, planting crops, building roads, a power grid, water treatment facilities, and schools. Maybe that would have transformed Afghanistan into a success story. 
Maybe.
But that's a lot of water under the bridge, and we'll never know how it turned out. 2001/02 was arguably our one shot at that, because with everything that happened afterward - Iraq, the financial crisis, the ACA - we never had the money or manpower or political will to try again.
And some seventeen years later, it's long past time to cut our losses. All the money we've spent on Afghanistan, in one form or another, might as well have been put in a pile and set on fire, for all the return on investment that the US got. To say nothing of the thousands of dead and crippled Americans and Afghans the war has produced. 
I would hate it if Afghanistan became another example of blowback - if our ostensible allies today become our enemies in a decade or two. It wouldn't be the first time that's happened, not even the first time in Afghanistan. 
So while I am really, really dismayed and disgusted that we're leaving the Afghan government twisting in the wind, I support the decision to wind things down and leave - if that indeed turns out to be the case.

PS: Before someone asks, I realize that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, if it happens, will likely be on Trump's watch. Meaning that I have to give him credit for something. I'm okay with that. Now, it remains to be seen whether he screws it up somehow, like he has just about everything else. It's also worth asking whether he's doing this on Russia's behalf, for some reason we're not yet aware of. (Paranoid? Sure. But given his past actions, it's a question worth raising.) But ultimately, I agree with what he's doing here. It doesn't even come close to cancelling out all the disastrous decisions he's made, but it is a pretty big item on the plus side of the ledger.

Fabricated Memos and Credibility Problems

The much-hyped Nunes memo became public a few days ago, and I've been noticing a very interesting reaction to it in various corners of the internet; specifically, a lot of people are buying into it, lock, stock, and barrel.  Now, the memo is obviously a steaming poo pile, but here's the thing: there are a lot of people who believe the memo to be true have a plausible argument for that belief.  I don't mean the hardcore Trump supporters; at this point Trump could tell them he can walk through walls and they'd believe him.  The people I'm thinking of are the ones who have been holding a long-standing suspicion of the government.  All the government.  Because the truth is, there is plenty of good cause for suspicion.

The assorted government agencies tasked with protecting America and its citizens - from TSA to the FBI to the DEA to NSA to CIA - have a credibility problem of their own making.  It's not enough to say they all dropped the ball at one time or another, because "dropping the ball" implies that they failed because of something like bad luck or an innocent mistake.  That's not the case at all.  The credibility problem stems from the fact that these agencies misused their authority in a variety of unsavory ways.  Two successive presidents and countless members of Congress told us we had to accept infringements to our Constitutional rights to combat an amorphous terrorist threat.  The Director of National Intelligence perjured himself.  Police forces began to resemble military units and no-knock SWAT raids became more common.  An intelligence failure allowed an al-Qaida bomber onto a US-bound flight from Ghana through the Netherlands.  And those are only a handful of post-9/11 examples.  Do some digging, and there are many other historical ones: COINTELPRO, Watergate, the McCarthy hearings, the Pentagon Papers, the Tonkin Gulf Incident, and countless coups and covert wars. And all the documentation gets hidden behind a "TOP SECRET/NOFORN" label, nobody gets punished, and nothing changes.  Given these organizations' history of past transgressions, it's natural to be skeptical of the FBI.

So does that mean the Nunes memo is correct? No, absolutely not.  First, consider the source: Nunes, Trump, the GOP leadership.  They've all discredited themselves long before this memo became public.  Nunes was already caught trying to cheat on Trump's behalf once; and Trump's accusations fall short when you factor in that two individuals have already pleaded guilty for crimes pertaining to the Russia investigation, that there is a documented paper trail between Trump campaign officials and representatives of the Russian government, and, of course, there was a meeting at Trump Tower in June of 2016.  And those are just the things we all know about.  Add to that Trump and many of his cronies are well-known serial liars and conspiracy-theory peddlers.  Finally, remember that as president, Trump has the authority and the resources to expose any illegal spying if he chooses.  He can declassify NSA intercepts that targeted him, if they exist; he can order the Department of Justice to review the FISA warrants for impropriety.  Occam's Razor says the simplest explanation is more likely to be true.  Ask yourself: is it more likely that the investigation is legitimate and substantive or that the FBI is playing a central role in a broad "deep state" conspiracy against the small group of people in Trump's orbit?

Because that's what this is being packaged as: a deep, sinister conspiracy.  The people pushing this idea performed a very subtle sleight-of-hand, one that's easy to overlook if you're not paying attention.  They shifted the narrative from a claim that the government (in particular, the NSA) is collecting all Americans' communications (true) to an accusation that the government mobilized the resources of the entire intelligence/law enforcement community against the Trump clan in an unlawful attempt to neutralize it (horseshit.)  We're witnessing the birth of a conspiracy theory on par with "9/11 was an inside job" right before our eyes.  This "echo chamber" groupthink would normally be an object of ridicule, except that similar conspiracy theories have already driven people on the extreme fringes to violence not long ago.  That's not something to take lightly.

If we could trust our institutions, there wouldn't be an issue; but our politicians and political appointees have squandered that trust for decades.  Now we're reaping the bitter fruits of that wastefulness.  The agencies, and their civilian overseers, have misused and abused their authority so badly, that now many people reflexively think they're lying and choose to believe con artists like Nunes and Trump instead.  They're the spies who cried wolf, and just like the old fable goes, we're ignoring them at the very time when we should be believing them.

There needs to be serious reform once Trump is no longer president.  He's only the byproduct of some deeper issues, and we need system-wide reform.  He's a complete shit-show, so maybe he'll be the impetus that motivates the people in Washington to finally implement some long-overdue reforms.

DACA, Congress, and Separation of Powers

I knew I'd eventually write something that would infuriate my (very small) audience, and based on the posts I'm seeing in my Facebook feed, this post could very well be the one that does it.  Don't worry, I've picked a last meal and I've got a cigarette and a blindfold - just in case.

Okay, so DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals).  That's the current Divisive Issue of the Week.  I'll start with a little quick-and-dirty history on DACA before I discuss the recent developments.  DACA was President Obama's 2012 executive action on immigration, which partly resulted from repeated Congressional failures to pass its own piece of immigration reform, known as the DREAM Act.  Remember, executive action.  That will become important later.  I'm not sure how DACA meshes with the proposed DREAM Act, or with Congress' 2013 immigration reform act (S.744), and that's further down the rabbit hole than I plan to go.

That's DACA in a nutshell.  Now, as anyone who has followed the news recently knows, President Trump announced that he plans to roll back DACA, along with a complementary program called DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans).  His reversal will be delayed for six months, to give Congress time to act (presumably to craft its own legislation).  Okay, unpopular opinion time. . . Constitutionally, Trump is doing the right thing here.  Congress is the lawmaking branch of government, and it has the duty to come up with immigration laws.  Yes, Obama faced an extremely stubborn and unruly Congress (it absolutely lived up to it's nickname of "The Party of No"), but that's how the framework of government is structured.  The Founders assigned lawmaking authority to Congress; that duty was never granted to the President/Executive Branch.  I can understand Obama's frustration and desire to get something done - Congress was doing its best to block him at every turn, and nobody would stand for that.  It's human nature to push back against another person or group of people preventing you from accomplishing anything.  Maybe one person in 1,000 could resist that urge.  But the president was (is) supposed to resist that urge.  It's one of the core principles of the federal government - the president does not craft legislation.  There's no "except if Congress won't cooperate" loophole.

Not that Congress is blameless.  I'm not giving Obama a pass, but I understand why he acted the way he did.  He stepped in to fill a vacuum that Congress created, and he saw the obstructionist Congress as an obstacle to overcome.  It had six years and change to craft decent legislation, but instead it grandstanded with stunts like trying to repeal the ACA over fifty times - a task Congressional Republicans knew they couldn't achieve, but did anyway to keep their voters energized - and when the GOP gained a unified government in the 2016 elections, it had nothing prepared.  The GOP railed against the ACA for six years, and evidently put zero effort into writing a better piece of legislation.  Congress didn't govern, it obstructed and it abandoned its responsibility.

Now, the immigration issue is back in Congress' court, where it should be according to the legislative process.  Well, the CATO Institute predicts that rolling back DACA & DAPA will have a high economic cost:

"We estimate that the fiscal cost of immediately deporting the approximately 750,000 people currently in the DACA program would be over $60 billion to the federal government along with a $280 billion reduction in economic growth over the next decade."

Those are massive economic consequences, and if Congress was smart, it would vote to keep DACA in place, or at least craft some nearly-identical legislation.  This should be an easy decision.  However, Trump is still popular with the GOP base, and they want to see DACA repealed, in addition to being anti-immigrant.  One of Trump's key campaign promises was stricter immigration reform; and while he's a terrible statesman, he knows how to court public opinion.  Basically, Congressional Republicans are in a bind: rescind DACA and take a huge economic hit or preserve it somehow and enrage their base.  I predict Congress will let DACA lapse, because the Trump cabinet confirmation hearings and the ACA/BCRA fiasco showed that many Congressional Republicans will still vote along party lines, even if that vote carries serious economic consequences.  I do not trust Congress to make the smart decision here.

Even though I think Congress would be making a huge mistake by reversing DACA, it is Congress' mistake to make.  Trump is actually doing the right thing by rolling back an executive order and putting the responsibility on Congress.  Is repealing DACA cruel, foolish, and petty? Absolutely.  But we have to see beyond the immediate policy outcome we want and look at the long game.  No single official or branch of government should have too much power, and there is a convincing argument that the Executive has concentrated too much power over the past few decades.  Curbing that power will cause pain sooner or later - if not DACA, it will be something else.  But it needs to be done.

A few additional links:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/16/us/us-to-stop-deporting-some-illegal-immigrants.html?pagewanted=all
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/349148-daca-debate-turns-toward-congress
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/03/trump-dreamers-immigration-daca-immigrants-242301

Trump's Half-Baked Strategy for Afghanistan

On Monday evening, August 21st, President Trump gave a speech laying out his plan for addressing the war in Afghanistan, a place where the US has occupied since 2001.  Given Afghanistan's track record of resisting and outlasting invading armies, I'd be pessimistic about the plan's odds of success even if an exceptionally brilliant general or statesman like Clausewitz or Metternich had drawn it up; and Trump is certainly not on the same level as them.

First, a few things to say about the speech's tone and timing.  The speech itself is far more eloquent and articulate than many of Trump's previous oratories - could this be a sign of a shift in the administration's collective culture now that Bannon has left? Possibly.  It's too early to tell, but there was a distinct change in Monday's speech.  The emphasis on the bonds within the military makes me speculate that McMaster, himself a career soldier, had a major role in writing the speech.  The speech also stresses the importance of national unity, which many pundits attribute to the recent events in Charlottesville, as well as Trump's verbal bungling in the aftermath.  The speech's timing also conveniently benefits Trump: although he couldn't have foreseen the Barcelona terrorist attack, laying out a policy that escalates the war in Afghanistan certainly helps Trump look tough in the face of terrorism.

That covers my thoughts on the speech's timing and tone.  Now for its content - and we've got quite a bit to unpack here.

First, there's the speech overall.  As I already mentioned, Trump signaled his intent to ramp up the war in Afghanistan.  This confirms that Trump plans to keep America's foreign policy on the same military-centric, interventionist foreign policy it has been on since the Truman Administration.  He might make a few changes around the edges, but the core approach remains fixed.   Trump has effectively fallen prey to what retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich disparagingly labeled the "bipartisan military consensus" in his book, The Limits of Power.  This is a significant point in Trump's administration, because it represents an important indication of the path his policy will lead, not only in Afghanistan, but in other fronts in the war on terror.  Expect to see him maintain or increase the op-tempo in Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq eventually.

The policy which he outlined in his speech is also self-contradictory and painfully naive.  Early on, he expresses a distaste for nation-building, stating "I share their [the American people's] frustration over a foreign policy that has spent too much time, energy and most importantly lives trying to rebuild countries in our own image instead of pursuing our security interests above all other considerations." However, later in the speech, he states that the United States will "participate in economic development to help defray the cost of this war to us." I could be wrong, but economic development sounds a lot like nation-building.  In fact, the economic component is a key part of nation-building.  Additionally, leaving a nation in ruins creates the conditions which Trump himself acknowledges exploit to establish a safe haven.  There's not going to be any way around nation-building, and Trump will soon learn this; unfortunately, an understaffed State Department will pose an obstacle.  Trump's strategy also seems determined to avoid making the mistakes of the previous war: leaving a power vacuum in a broken and divided country.  This applies to Afghanistan in the 1990s, but particularly Iraq, which is fresh in many generals' minds.

A dearth of nation-building efforts implies an emphasis on military force, and Trump's strategy reflects this.  He's evidently opting for a Bidenesque emphasis on counter-terrorism over counter-insurgency.  Trump has also wised up to NATO's importance, emphasizing that this will be a multinational effort.  How well that goes over with the other NATO countries is anyone's guess, though.

Trump also indicates that he wants the Afghan military to take the lead.  There's logic in that, but also huge potential for trouble.  A nation's army must maintain a strict monopoly on force; but in Balkanized countries like Afghanistan, there's a lot of overlap among the military and a particular faction.  Trump's approach will only make insurgents target US forces more, because they'll see us as allies of their enemies.  Also, the US has been in Afghanistan for seventeen years, so our adversaries have already formed their own opinions of us, and those opinions likely won't change.  Trump stated he's open to a political settlement with the Taliban; if so, letting the Afghan army take the lead will make any settlement more difficult to achieve.

Trump also shows a serious lack of understanding for how the Afghanistan policy rebounds into other areas.  First, publicly criticizing Pakistan and lauding India probably won't incentivize Pakistan to cooperate; and since one of Pakistan's key allies is China, this could potentially make dealing with North Korea more difficult.  In fact, China has already responded.  Second, eschewing nation-building will create a void that other nations could rush to fill, and Russia has already been expanding its influence in Afghanistan through the use of "soft power."

This might all be cause for concern, but the "bipartisan consensus" hasn't really been bothered by half-baked plans in the past.  Whether that's due to indifference or because nobody wants to tell the emperor that he's naked I can't really say, but my guess is that the US wants to keep a flag planted in Afghanistan as part of some grand geopolitical scheme.  Trump's bungling won't make a difference, but it will throw a bit of sand in the gears.  This is one of Trump's major tests as president, and he failed miserably.  His speech showed how little he understands about Afghanistan, military tactics, geopolitics, and the consequences of his words.

Finally, there were a few parts of the speech that I wanted to mention briefly:

• Trump's comment that "historically I like following my instincts." As professor Michael Horowitz of U-Penn insightfully notes, this is a clever way of preemptively shifting blame to the generals if the strategy goes south.
• In keeping with his fragile ego, there were a handful of times when he seemingly went out of his way to remind people that he's the president.
• He also threw a bit of red meat to his base by reinforcing the perception of Democrat weakness on military matters and talking about terrorists in the language of force.

That was what I took away from Trump's speech.  I have a feeling the next 3 1/2 years are going to be a bumpy ride.  Trump is woefully, hilariously, out of his league.

Charlottesville: Hate, Fear, and Ignorance in America

This is going to be a different blog post than the ones I've done so far.  It doesn't fit into any of the major themes I had intended to write about when I started this blog, but I'm writing it to get a few things off of my chest.  It will also have a different style to it - less like an academic research paper and more like an opinion piece.  So here goes. . .

Everyone knows what happened in Charlottesville on Friday night and yesterday afternoon, so I won't spend much time on those events.  I want to talk about some people's reactions to it and how those reactions pave the way for the Friday/Saturday race riot (I'm calling it a race riot because that's what it was; tough shit if you don't like it).  The reaction in question is a shrug of the shoulders and a casual endorsement for the Nazis and the white supremacists.  The way I remember it - I'm fuzzy on the details, but I recall the gist of it - was an implication that minorities brought this on themselves because of the various protests over the past several years.  Movements like BLM, Gay Pride, Women's Rights, and so on were just "whining" and the minority protesters should just "suck it up and get over it".  It's this attitude I want to talk about.  The way I see it, it develops when someone possesses these three traits: a lack of knowledge, no sense of intellectual curiosity, and an inability to empathize.

Let's use a real-world example to explain my hypothesis.  The Black Lives Matter movement is as good as any.  Someone with the aforementioned attitude probably doesn't know about the racial disparities when it comes to sentencing and incarceration for comparable crimes, or about practices like "DWB", or how the GOP routinely makes it difficult for minorities to participate in the electoral process.  Maybe this person has never heard of Philando Castile or Eric Garner.  That doesn't make someone a bad person in and of itself - maybe this person doesn't watch much news.  That's pretty implausible with the 24-hour news networks and the internet news saturation, but I suppose it's possible.  It's the other two traits that really create this attitude, though.

First, the absence of intellectual curiosity.  A lot of people go through life accepting what they're told without questioning it or applying any critical thought.  That's just human nature.  The vast majority of people don't have the time, the knowledge, the desire, or the mental bandwidth to critically evaluate every piece of knowledge that gets thrown at them.  People are also psychologically predisposed to screen and reject information that doesn't fit with our core beliefs or opinions.  So we're all guilty of intellectual laziness to some degree.  But like any sampling distribution, some data points fall on the high end of the spectrum, meaning that a certain percentage of people are indifferent when it comes to critical thinking.  Here's how this plays out in the real-world example.  Suppose a person got most of their news from the Fox network, which is hardly a friend to minorities.  How would that person view BLM, which has some very real and very serious grievances? They're going to downplay it, of course.  Here's the curious part, though.  This person is almost certainly aware of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.  Maybe they only read about in a history textbook, so they only see it as an abstract concept, devoid of the emotional resonance; but maybe they lived during that time, and saw the real-life images on TV and in the newspapers.  The protesters getting sprayed with fire hoses.  The balcony where MLK was standing when he was assassinated.  The burning crosses and bombed-out churches.  The Civil Rights struggle probably had more of an impression to people who were alive when it happened, but either way, how does someone reconcile that movement with everything that happened since then? With what's going on now? Aren't they able to make the connection?

That last one is the one that drives me bonkers.  They don't have the intellectual capacity to conceive that racism hasn't ended.  To them, the Civil Rights movement ended things, like it was a sporting event where time ran out, the ref blew the whistle, and that was that.  They're surely aware that racists still exist, but the fact that those racists actively seek to undo the Civil Rights era reforms, and that those racists comprise an appallingly influential political bloc, evidently escapes them.  That's the kind of shallow thinking that leads to some deeply contradictory behaviors and beliefs, such as flying an American flag and going to church every week while condoning a movement that represents the opposite of the ideals their religion and their nation embody.  People like this don't realize that the Confederacy's secession was by definition a treasonous act, or that slavery has had a legacy that still resonates today.  "What's the big deal?", they say when someone points these things out.  "That was a long time ago, why does it still matter?" Unbelievable.  This sort of lazy thinking manifests itself in many, many other ways, but those are outside the scope of this post.

Now, let's look at the third and final component: the lack of empathy.  These people can't relate to minorities, because they've never experienced the myriad forms of discrimination.  Nor do they know many people who have.  They'll never have to worry about police assuming they're guilty by default or politicians disenfranchising them.  Their resumes won't go straight into the trash because of their name.  They won't be denied various legal protections and privileges simply because of who they are, so they take those things for granted.  And because they don't have any frame of reference, they dismiss the complaints of people who do experience these problems.  More than that, they make statements that imply minorities don't deserve these things, often without fully understanding what they're saying.  Things like "Why do they have to push their agenda on us?" or "Aren't they happy with what they have now?" There's a sub-context that the victim's grievances are just whiny complaints or overblown exaggerations.

By now, you might have noticed that I'm a bit worked up and angry.  Yep.  This stuff is a "button pusher" topic, and here's why.  I have a low tolerance for people who live in intellectual bubbles.  It's hard to stay informed, I get that.  And it's harder to see past your own mental blind spots.  That's partly human nature, and I'm as guilty as anyone.  When I'm faced with contradictory information, my natural reaction is to dig in my heels.  But at some point, a person crosses over from a normal confirmation bias to burying their head in the sand.  That infuriates me.  The sky isn't neon green no matter how much you believe it is.  On top of that, I have a default tendency to side with the underdog.  Maybe it's because I disagreed with the aforementioned attitude so strongly that I moved pretty far to the opposite end of the spectrum - I dunno, that's a question for the psychoanalysts.  However it came about, I'm kinda like Tyrion Lannister; we both have a soft spot for "cripples, bastards, and broken things." Automatically siding with the marginalized is one of my mental blind spots.  So maybe I'm getting too dramatic about Charlottesville, but I don't think anyone can deny America has a racism problem now.

Typically, the actual racists are only a small portion of any population.  It's the mentally shallow people are the ones who allow racism to flourish.  They are the ones who turn a blind eye to the insidious spread of racist groups/movements or invent rationalizations to dismiss it.  The ones I spent most of this blog post describing.  They are indifferent to the reality of the situation, and indifferent people usually comprise the vast majority of a given population.  They need to be pulled down off the fence and be made to understand the reality of the situation, because staying in their bubble allows the problem to grow.