"Calls for 'civility' in politics are as likely to elicit ridicule as they are plaudits these days..."

Oh, yes, I've been ridiculing what I call "civility bullshit" for years.

... due in large part to their repeated deployment in the face of escalating state violence. 

What?! I'm trying to read "Why ‘Civility’ Protects Dan Crenshaw But Not Ilhan Omar" by Zak Cheney-Rice (NY Magazine), which looked like it was right up my alley but up my alley and off somewhere I wouldn't go.

What "state violence" is Cheney-Rice talking about? His next paragraph is about whether harassing former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is acceptable because the government has been "locking children in cages." He weasels a semi-generalization:

Where one falls on this spectrum in any given instance is often, but not always, a partisan calculation.

My point is that it's always bullshit. "Civility" is not your value. It's a fake value, presented as real when it serves your partisan interests and subordinated whenever it doesn't.

Cheney-Rice has something to say about the Ilhan Omar business, and it's too complicated to attempt to excerpt here. Somehow "civility" is supposed to be in play when people are simply harshly criticizing Omar for sounding insufficiently somber about 9/11. There's a very strained effort to equate vigorous criticism with the incitement of violence, so that saying Omar sounded almost as though she were laughing at 9/11 is the same as saying that Omar ought to suffer physical attacks. We're told that she gets death threats, and that seems to be offered as a reason why she should be spared verbal attacks responding to the public statements that she chooses to make. Her antagonists would be fools to stand down either because of the phony "civility" argument or because her proponents display a willingness to connect public verbal opposition to her to these unsourced death threats.

Congressman Dan Crenshaw criticized Omar, and then Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized Crenshaw. Somebody else pushed Ocasio-Cortez back for incivility to Crenshaw, and Cheney-Rice says, "Bad-faith outcries about civility aimed at deflecting from Republican misdeeds are the order of the day." Yes, and what else is new? Bad-faith outcries about civility are the only kind of outcries about civility we ever get in American politics — this day or any other day, from Republicans or Democrats or anybody.

Cheney-Rice has not explained "Why ‘Civility’ Protects Dan Crenshaw But Not Ilhan Omar." Civility doesn't "protect" anyone. Civility is just a transitory condition that might make some people feel better when it's blowing in their direction, but it's nothing you can rely on, and you ought to assume it's there only because those who are blowing it think it's good for them. The prevailing winds of civility may favor Crenshaw over Omar at the moment, but civility bullshit is subject to constant change. I see that Cheney-Rice would like to force the change, and of course, he's free to bullshit about bullshit.

Is shunning a "lost art"? That is, had we stopped doing it, and is it the sort of thing — an "art" — that we should want to revive?

I'm reading "Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the lost art of shunning" by Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post, which riffs on something that happened on Friday: The owner of a restaurant (Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia), asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders (who'd already been seated and served) to leave. That came on top of 2 other restaurant shunnings last week: Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen left a restaurant when she "was heckled" (it was a Mexican restaurant, news reports stress, as if the type of food served creates a topic that conflicts with the border-control policy Nielsen defends and enforces). And, at another Mexican restaurant, somebody yelled at Stephen Miller ("Hey look guys, whoever thought we’d be in a restaurant with a real-life fascist begging [for] money for new cages?").

Rubin asks whether these are "reassuring and appropriate acts of social ostracism" or "a sign of our descent into incivility." Her answer is: "It depends on how you view the child-separation policy." So... incivility is okay as long as you feel strongly about the policy that's motivating you to engage in shunning?!

This is why I have the tag "civility bullshit." It stand for my hypothesis that people only push the civility issue against their antagonists and that they will put other values above civility when the time comes for anyone to demand that their side practice civility.

If the immigration policy is perceived as "a human rights crime, an inhumane policy for which the public was primed by efforts to dehumanize a group of people," then, Rubin reasons, "it is both natural and appropriate for decent human beings to shame and shun the practitioners of such a policy."

Natural!? How did that get in there with "appropriate"? Is it appropriate because it is natural? Xenophobia and racism are natural. I thought the moral challenge was to overcome natural urges like that. And Rubin is also saying that it's enough that one views the policy as inhumane or "a human rights crime." You don't have to have listened carefully to the evidence and the arguments, you can just close your eyes and intuit, and if your heart says that person is evil, then lean into your natural urges and shun.

Oh, but wait: "This exception to the rule of polite social action should be used sparingly (if for no other reason than we will never get through a restaurant meal without someone hollering at someone else)."

What kind of reason is that? Why should getting through restaurant meals get be placed on a higher level than the practice of the "lost art of shunning"? There's no effort at coherent moral reasoning here. I imagine Rubin eats in restaurants a lot and really did have to stop and think about whether her elite lifestyle is threatened.

She ends by ludicrously quibbling with herself:

Each to his own method of expressing disdain and fury, I suppose. 

You suppose?!

Nevertheless, it is not altogether a bad thing to show those who think they’re exempt from personal responsibility that their actions bring scorn, exclusion and rejection.

Not altogether a bad thing? What a weaselly ending!

I am tricked by a headline one more time. To call something "a lost art" is to say that it is "something usually requiring some skill that not many people do any more." Was shunning something — like letter writing — that through widespread practice, people knew how to do well? Rubin has little to say on the subject other than she understands the outrage Trump-haters feel called to express in public, but please don't let that ruin her nice dinners out. Could the Trump people really just know they are hated and eat at home?

ADDED: This has me thinking about how Meade and I were treated in Madison in 2011:

Get out, and stay out. Far out. Meade - You ain't no man for this city. We're out on the streets every day, all day. The 77 square is not for y'all. You say we're from out of state? Bullshit. You're from fucking out of state. We'll show you just how fucking Madison we are. Althouse, we will ruin your goddamn career, your comfort, your pocketbook, your sense of safety and wellbeing, and your life....

YOU CAN'T BAN MADISON FROM LIVING IN MADISON, BUT WE CAN SURE AS SHIT BAN YOU. WHO ARE YOU GONNA CALL? COPS FOR LABOR? THE CHICKENSHIT TEA ASSWIPES WHO ARE SCARED SHITLESS OF THE TEAMSTERS TRUCKS? THE NATIONAL GUARD? SCOTT WALKER? NO ONE IS GOING TO COME AND CRACK DOWN ON US FOR YOU. THERE IS NO CAVALRY. ITS US VS YOU ON THE STREETS OF THE CITY GOING AS FAR AS IT HAS TO GO UNTIL A) WE WIN OR B) DOOMSDAY.

For background, read "Exclusive Interview With... the Man Behind the Ann Althouse Threat" (Breitbart).

"Trump defiant as crisis grows over family separation at the border."

That's the headline at The Washington Post, with this video of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen vigorously defending Trump's policy:



From the article:

The president on Monday voiced defiance and continued to falsely blame congressional Democrats for what he decried as a “horrible and tough” situation. But Trump is empowered to immediately order border agents to stop separating families as a result of his “zero tolerance” enforcement policy.

The insertion of the word "falsely" is such a distracting signal that WaPo doesn't want to be looked upon as neutrally professional journalism. If what Trump is saying is wrong for some reason, that should be brought out, with factual statements, somewhere else in the story. I also don't like "voiced defiant" (or, from the headline, "Trump defiant"). For one thing, it purports to know his state of mind. For another, it refers to something that he's defying before setting up what that is. We're dropped into the middle of things, and Trump is all emotional and spouting lies. I feel like I'm reading a pulp fiction novel.

The president asserted that the parents illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border with their children “could be murderers and thieves and so much else,” echoing his incendiary remarks about immigrants at his campaign launch in 2015. And in a series of dark tweets, he warned that undocumented immigrants could increase gang crime and usher in cultural changes.

“The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility,” Trump said in a midday speech. “You look at what’s happening in Europe, you look at what’s happening in other places. We can’t allow that to happen to the United States. Not on my watch.”

So he's doing more of the kind of talk that won him the election in 2016. What makes Democrats in politics and the media believe it will work out differently this time? Big bets are being made on which high-emotion scenario will capture the hearts of voting Americans. I wish this were not forefronted as the issue for 2018. Whatever happened to the IG's report or North Korea or — for that matter — Russia collusion and impeachment?

The crisis garnered round-the-clock television news coverage, with journalists reporting about their first glimpses of the ­concrete-floor and metal-cage conditions inside the detention centers.

So no human beings were making the decision to devote round-the-clock coverage of this issue. The "crisis" did the acting. The abstraction — there's that bullshit word — garnered the coverage.

Nielsen acknowledged that she was not keeping pace with coverage of the crisis, including audio of wailing children published a few hours earlier by ProPublica....

As if her job is to monitor the media, and how to enforce the law should be determined by what video has been chosen to run on television. Nielsen should have her own accurate sources and should work on performing her duties, not spend her time consuming journalism/propaganda and continually modify what she is doing in response to the imagined mood of the country. The test will come when the elections arrive, more than 4 months from now. Will crying, "caged" children fill our TV screens that long?

Trump has been closely monitoring the coverage...

Yeah, Trump, who we've been told spends too much time watching television.

... but has been suspicious of it...

LOL. That's what he does.  Watches TV suspiciously. If you're going to watch the news on TV — a horrible practice (I can't stand it) — that's what you should do, watch suspiciously.

... telling associates he believes that the media cherry-picks the most dramatic images and stories to portray his administration in a negative light, according to one senior administration official.

Well, of course. What competent watcher of television would not conclude that the images are cherry-picked for drama? As for negativity to the Trump administration, can you be a competent TV watcher and believe the concern here really is purely for the welfare of children?

Meanwhile, Trump and his advisers were unable to stanch the wellspring of public opposition. 

I'm skeptical of the phrase "wellspring of public opposition." There are surveys — the article refers to a CNN poll and a Quinnipiac poll showing 67/68% of Americans disapprove of separating children from parents — but I suspect that millions of Americans want what they voted for in 2016, which is strong immigration enforcement, and these people may not want to talk about the innocents who get hurt along the way and they may embrace the idea (that Nielsen stated clearly) that the children are being hurt by the adults who are taking them on a dangerous, criminal journey or suspect that many of these children are not so young and are already involved in gang violence and will bring more of that violence into the United States. What about that wellspring of public sentiment?

By the way, "stanch the wellspring" is a mixed metaphor. "To stanch" is to stop the flow of blood or other fluid from a wound in a living body. A "wellspring" is the source of a river emerging from the ground. These are emotive, colorful words, but they have concrete meaning and they're being used in a way that makes no sense.*

Some Republican elected officials joined Democrats in expressing moral outrage and calling for an immediate end to the administration’s family separation policy.

Are these people saying that what they want is that the adults who arrive with children and make a claim for asylum should — as before — gain free access to the United States? Or do they just express their "moral outrage" and leave it there?
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* And — one more time — I've got to remind you of what George Orwell said about dying metaphors:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying.