Racism Rots the Brain, II

I highly suspect that our demographics underpin the current insanity of Trump/Miller.

It's funny. Decades ago I remember articles about "the browning of America", and everything I've seen indicates those trends are reaching a tipping point soon.

Projections predict white people will be less than 50% of the population by 2045.

The younger generation is already there.

I personally don't see this as a problem, but for fearful racists who care about such things it's a pretty big deal.

Given the way the administration is treating Afrikaner immigrants as opposed to the ones from less melanin-challenged populations as well as the way Elon Musk's Twitter has been spreading the term remigration, I think the desired agenda is pretty clear. 

They want to reverse or prevent that demographic trend. So far it's kind of hidden, in so much as they obfuscate it enough that they can deny any accusations. Pretend they're only focusing on deporting illegal immigrants, for example. 

But I think by now it's pretty clear that the only reason they aren't doing the same to legal immigrants is because of the pushback they've been getting. And if they weren't getting such pushback already, I would not find it surprising if they proceeded to try and mass deport US citizens too.

So far it hasn't come to that, and if they continue to face pushback it may never happen. I'm just pretty sure the only thing holding them back has been that resistance.

And since to their racism rotted brains out current demographics are a huge problem, they'll continue to pull out all the stops as they desperately try to reverse it. 

What Makes Me Mad...

 This is going to be a bit convoluted, but bear with me.

A class I had discussed how to build quality healthcare organizations, and the lessons relate to more than just healthcare.

What they noted was that if they focused on punishing people who made mistakes, it led to bad results. Basically things turn into a blame game, there's incentive to try to cover up or hide your mistakes, and it doesn't tend to lead to quality outcomes.

What is better is to focus on identifying mistakes and then looking at how to improve the system in order to prevent them from happening again.

For example, a nurse may give a patient the wrong medicine. A punitive system would fire that nurse, but wouldn't necessarily prevent similar mistakes in the future.

If you look at it systemically, though, you can think of other ways of preventing the mistake. Like making the medicine a different size and/or color, so it's visually distinct.

That is why, in my last job, when a mistake was made and the team started to go down the path of finger pointing and blaming, I interjected and tried shifting the conversation more to a discussion on what we could do to make it harder to make such a mistake in the first place.

Now, here is where things start to get more convoluted.

See, I've talked before about how leaders set the tone and shape the environment. They can help shift discussions (like in my example above) to be more solutions-oriented, and to look at ways of improving the system.

This plays out in more ways than just how we handle mistakes. See, a funny thing happens when people work together. They combine in a way that makes an organization act like a person.

Companies have their own culture, citizens of a particular nation tend to be more open or closed, etc.

It is easier to influence a culture at the start, and hard to shift it once it's already been established a certain way, and they are often influenced significantly by key personalities... though said personalities are not always the head of the organization.

Really, it's kind of like magic.

Anyways, there are certain things that seem to be the key to success and I've mentioned them before.

1) Having a sense of what your desired endstate is

2)  An accurate assessment of where you are

3) Accurate feedback on how your policies and strategies are working

4) Course adjusting as necessary if those policies and strategies aren't leading to the results you want

Seems simple, right?

But... simple isn't easy. And when you dig into these things, they aren't actually all that simple either.

Let's look at 1. Knowing what your desired endstate is. To me, when it comes to a nation, I generally say something like 'be a good shepherd', because generally we want our people to be happy and healthy and able to live a good quality life. But how do you define that? How do you measure it? And I specifically avoided talking about a 'greater good' because people have the ability to justify some pretty horrible things if they think it benefits 'the greater good', so you have to be careful with that.

Then look at 2. How do you get an accurate assessment? How do you make sure people are telling you what's really going on, rather than what you want to hear? In order to get that you have to make sure you reward people for telling you the truth - even, or perhaps especially, when it's a truth you don't want to hear. And you have to mean it. Your people will pick up on your cues, and if you even hint that they'll get in trouble for telling you something you don't like then they just... won't tell you anything they think will get them in trouble.

3 is similar to 2, but it's focused more on checking on what your policies are actually doing. This is hard because people tend to get attached to their ideas and plans and if they're not mature enough they can see a report that something isn't working as intended as an attack on them. It's saying they're wrong, or made a mistake. 

It's like... people have talked before about how we tend to get attached to a specific plan, and fail to recognize when the situation has changed and the plan is no longer going to work as intended. 

Plus, you have to recognize when bad results indicate some sort of flaw in your thinking. Like... people get attached to all these -isms. Capitalism, communism, authoritarianism... most of these are just ways of looking at things. Like a map, they will ignore irrelevant details to help draw attention to key factors. You can have a topology map, a map of political borders, a map of highways or train routes, a hydrology map... they're all useful for the right situation. They help simplify a complex situation.

But the map is not the territory, and if you get too focused on interpreting something through the lens of your particular map you can easily make a mistake. A map focused on political borders may miss important context when you're dealing with hydrology, or vice versa. 

But people get attached to their ideas, get focused more on proving they were right than on getting accurate feedback and assessing the situation, and it turns more into a fight over bruised egos than it is about actually fixing things. (This is why I like evidence-based principles, and think it's important to investigate when the evidence-based principles give you results that don't match your expectations.)

And then we have 4. If what you're doing isn't working, try something different.

Again, simple. Right?

Except doing so may mean admitting you were wrong. Again, egos get involved, people will try to find evidence explaining away why something didn't work without admitting they were wrong, and then it turns into the blame game and finger pointing instead of, again, fixing stuff.

When I evaluate presidents, that's generally what I'm looking for. First - are they a good shepherd? i.e. are they trying to find solutions that are good for all of the nation. All of it. Not just one political party, not just the business leaders, and also not just the average citizen (because a solution that benefits the average citizen in the short run but also makes it difficult to run a business can ultimately hurt those citizens even more. It's a complicated system that you have to handle carefully, while trying to understand the long term consequences of your decisions.)

Then it's all about their decision-making policies. Or rather, it's about how much they encourage a system that emphasizes honest and truthful assessments of a situation, and a willingness to course correct as needed.

Like - if you think privatization will help improve the education system? Go for it. Get the evidence. Show that it works.

And if it doesn't, do a course correction.

The end goal is to ensure a quality education for all our citizens, and we all benefit from having that educated workforce. I don't actually care how you achieve that, so long as it doesn't overly impact some of the other factors that ensure we all have a good quality life.

I'm not too focused on whether it's the federal government, state government, private sector or public. What I care about is the end result - a well-educated population.

You could say the same for other things - a healthy, well-educated population that is able to earn enough money to live a comfortable life where they are free to raise their families, practice their faith (or lack of faith), and speak and think how they will, with a good economy with jobs available and the skills needed for those jobs, and the ability to switch between jobs so that we can adjust as needed for ever-changing needs.

Yeah, okay... those are all complex topics with quite a bit of subjective values thrown in, but you get the idea.

So what bothers me, what makes me mad about the current administration - is not just all the ways they lose sight of our hard-earned lessons and make the quality of life for the average American worse.

It's also just the sheer stupidity. The inefficiency. The waste. 

First, they don't seem to have the goal of being a good shepherd in the first place. Or rather, they only seem focused on taking care of a small segment of our population. And even that isn't the portion they claim they're taking care of. 

They don't care about truth. Don't care about accuracy. Are not evaluating the results of their policies and adjusting if needed. 

More than that, it's the immaturity. All the stuff I described above requires a level of maturity that understands that criticism and negative feedback is not an attack, and does not mean someone is your enemy.

Here's what happens when someone immature is in a role like that -

They hear someone criticize what they have done, and instead of taking it as honest feedback they see it as an attack. Instead of course correcting, they focus on defeating their 'enemies'. Enemies they often created themselves, simply by treating anyone who disagrees with them or says something they don't like as hostile.

They think they'll magically get their desired endstate if they could just...

Get rid of all those pesky obstacles. Get rid of the annoying enemies blocking their way.

And so instead of course correcting, they focus more on gaining power. On getting into a position where they can get rid of those 'obstacles'. Install loyalists that are on board with their plan.

Except that their plan is flawed and they're not willing to accept any feedback that points that out.

They turn it all into a game of control, of who can gain leverage points and put their people in key positions of power, but in the process they lose sight of what they're trying to achieve and how to get there.

The malevolence or incompetence question comes down to two things.

Is their endstate actually a good one? (malevolence implies that their goal is bad. Discouraging vaccine use means more and more people will die when their deaths could have been completely avoided. Is their goal to have a lot of people die? Or are they just so incompetent that they don't realize that's the consequence of what they're doing?)

If their endstate is a good one, if they truly wanted to 'make America great again', then the steps they're taking show a tragic level of incompetence. They're not assessing whether their policies are actually going to achieve their goals, and they aren't course correcting when they're not.

Instead they're wasting time creating unnecessary enemies, trying to consolidate control in a centralized fashion, suppressing dissent as though anyone who disagrees with them are 'enemies', and basically doing a thousand and one little things that will make it impossible to achieve their goals.

Assuming the goal is a good one in the first place.

It's so stupid. Wasteful. Inefficient. Especially since if they bothered to actually learn more about what they're trying to do they could avoid some pretty well-known problems.

Or maybe they just don't care at all about making America great again.

Saying Again, With Emphasis

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_brain_drain_corey_quinn/

Incompetence of Malevolence?

 "Leadership is an art and a science"

That's what they taught us in ROTC. It's true, though. Leaders develop their own style, their own quirks... and they set the tone. They indicate what they expect, what their standards are, and each can have their own unique take on that.

For example, I've said before that "there are no stupid questions" is an important standard to set... not because there truly are no stupid questions. But because the minute you ridicule someone for asking a question, everyone else on your team sees that and thinks 'I don't want that to happen to me', and they decide not to speak up unless their confident they won't be ridiculed for it.

So maybe you don't deal with stupid questions any more, but you also don't deal with important questions that people are worried will seem stupid.

Learning how to understand how your people will respond to you is part of leadership. Which is part of why leaders learn to be more careful with what they say.

For example, I remember a high-ranking individual mentioning how surprised he was when people took a casual statement wishing for something as a command and went above and beyond in trying to get him what he wanted.

Or at least, what he hinted at wanting. They wanted to make a good impression and please the boss, of course. But when it really was a casual desire, it meant they spent way more time than he expected on something that wasn't actually that important to him.

Anyways, I've talked before about how Trump raising unsubstantiated questions about the results of the election undermined the legitimacy of Biden's government. We still, today, have people who trust that Trump was telling the truth and doubt the results... and all because that oathbreaker cared more about his need to deny a loss than he did about the country.

But that wasn't the point of this post. 

The point was this - either Trump is so incompetent that he didn't understand what he was doing, or he knew and did it anyway.

Incompetence or malevolence?

Is he really clueless about the impact of his own words? Or is he deliberately using the trust bestowed on him to lead his followers in this direction?

And now we hear him constantly talking about the 'Radical Left', constantly dividing us against each other, constantly claiming Democrats (and anyone who disagrees with him, really) as the enemy.

He talks about how the left has incited violence with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, but he incites even further violence. Like the judge whose house was set on fire. (And all this was after those Minnesota legislators were murdered, too).

So I ask again - is he incompetent? Or is he one of those 'violence entrepreneurs' deliberately stirring the pot?

Leadership

This fit surprisingly well with my earlier post. 

https://www.bonnycode.com/posts/just-people-in-a-room/

I also have something else I'll probably type up shortly.

'The Warrior Ethos' talk

 My last post reminded me of something I wanted to say about Hegseth's speech. I know I already shared someone else's commentary on it and iirc it covered this, but I wanted to add emphasis to it.

When I was reading up on counterterrorism, I wound up reading a book about the Algerian fight for independence. What I recall, and what I have seen repeatedly when dealing with terrorism in general, is that governments lose when they overreact.

See, when the government decides that the terrorists are so bad that anything is justified - then the abuses they tolerate start to radicalize previously neutral people. If the government arrests everyone near an incident, some of those people are innocent. And as they sit in jail wondering why they're there, they tend to get radicalized...

As does the friends and family around them. (Sort of like we're seeing in Chicago with ICE, from what I hear).

Basically a government fighting a terrorist organization will often stalemate - the terrorists can make citizens feel unsafe, insecure, and unhappy with the government but they can't really force the government to do much of anything. 

It's only when the government overreacts that terrorists really win. Because the government pushes citizens into their arms.

So that whole speech he gave about Rules of Engagement?

It's bullshit. Childish bullshit. I think it came from a common misperception from the Vietnam War, tbh.

There was a genuine feeling in the military that they 'won every battle and lost the war', that our fighters were better, and that if they just didn't have to deal with all the rules of engagement they could have kicked the Viet Cong's asses.

Now, I don't know enough about the reasoning for some of the decisions back then. For why the Air Force was refused permission to bomb certain targets or not...

But blaming the loss on those rules of engagement sounds to me like how baseball fans always blame the refs when their team loses.

It's just something to make you feel better about a loss. 

Some of it may be legitimate, in which case the rules of engagement should be modified. But not having them at all is a very, very, very bad idea.

I want to emphasize that again - it's a very bad idea.

Because here's another little thing you learn about leadership - you set the tone. When you take over a new command and you give your little speech, you tell your people what you care about and what you don't. You tell them where the lines are drawn. You set expectations.

And the thing of it is, although I loved my soldiers and they were all amazing men and women - many of them are also dumbasses. Many joined straight out of high school, have a steady income for the first time ever and a nice little sign-on bonus, and they will do the stupidest things.

Plus, there's always that small fraction of the population that is outright sociopathic and/or sadistic. 

Like - you set expectations and establish boundaries because if you don't, there's always going to be someone who goes too far.

There's a reason so many militaries are known for raping and looting, and it's only good leadership that prevents it.

So when you have a president who pardons someone who went too far, when you have a SecDef who tells his senior leaders that we "don't fight with stupid rules of engagement" - without ever clarifying which of those rules are 'stupid' - what they are doing is giving a green light to any dumbass or sadistic soldier who will totally use that to justify going too far.

The alternative, the brute use of power to stomp out opposition, basically puts you in the position where you have to put the boot on their neck and never let up.

It's the road to tyranny, if you don't provoke a counterreaction that puts you out of power entirely.

Now, perhaps the SecDef only was referring to some of the rules of engagement, but without clarification he just sounds like a childish cartoon villain who doesn't know what he's talking about.

But he sure is giving fan service to the wannabe war criminals.

Bad Feeling

 I am developing a bad feeling about current events - though given it seems like a continuation of what we've already been seeing, I'm not sure why it's happening now.

I figure I'll type this all out to see if I can get some clarity.

First, as usual - fear and hope both make it hard to think clearly. I personally try to set those aside and look for real world indicators. See if they support or refute that intuition.

Second, and I think I've said this before - inertia is a powerful force. If you're going to try to predict the future, more of the same is generally the most likely course of action.

Right up until it isn't. We're pretty bad at figuring out what's actually relevant and what isn't, which is why history is full of surprises. Surprises that, in hindsight, always have clear indicators and could have been predicted if we had known their importance. Examples include the fall of the Soviet Union, 9/11, World War I, the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, and so on and so forth.

So what indicators should we be looking at?

That gets complicated, but I do think this article lays out some of them. The violence entrepreneurs, which I think is a great phrase and probably explains some of what led to the fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The way leadership is escalating rather than toning down the tension. The increasingly bipartisan violence (i.e. we have had right-wing inspired violence for ages now, which people conveniently seem to overlook. Left-wing inspired violence is beginning to grow now. It reminds me a bit about how the Shi'a ignored Sunni provocations right up until the al-Askara mosque was bombed, which is when the Sunni-Shia conflict really took off.) 

And finally, the politicization of law enforcement.

Underlying all of this is a giant blind spot that far too many Americans have. 

I've touched on that blind spot repeatedly, but it was only in response to my uncle's post on Facebook that I really got to thinking about it.

There are times when we collectively just seem to... pretend something isn't happening. Or doesn't exist.

I don't really know how to say it any better than that, and it feels like talking about it doesn't help because the people who overlook the things I mention will overlook my own mentioning of them.

Which is why I sometimes use the term 'cognitive dissonance'. When confronted with something that doesn't match the narrative, that disrupts what's expected... there's dissonance and people get uncomfortable and just... look away.

Sometimes I think how people handle information like that is the true test of character, and integrity. 

Like, is that what happens when someone in the oil industry is confronted with their environmental impact? Cognitive dissonance, discomfort... and rejection. At best it leads to just pretending the evidence doesn't exist. At worst, they will discredit the evidence and try to come up with some justification for continuing on as they have been.

It's so much easier than having to actually deal with it.

I think it also happens with sexual harassment cases. 

Let me explain.

When I have been in leadership positions, there have been times my people have brought to my attention something that I know is going to be a pain to deal with. Accusations from person A regarding person B, though the instance I'm thinking of was more about workplace bullying.

These things are really hard to address as a manager, because I don't actually know who is telling the truth. Addressing it and getting it wrong will make things worse, ignoring it will make things worse, but getting it right? Is almost impossible. I was not actually there when the incident took place. And both parties generally have their own friends who will back each other up, making it impossible to know the truth. And yet I am still supposed to address it in a fair and balanced manner, and I definitely do NOT want to make my employees feel like bullying is acceptable behavior. That would just create a toxic work environment.

And there is this temptation, perhaps for a split second, where I do kind of resent them for bringing this mess to my attention. Where I wish it would just go away.

But see all of my prior statements. Doing so will make things worse, and create a work environment I don't want. Even aside from moral right and wrong, it tends to be bad for business, you know? Leads to turnover and poor performance and all that.

This is what I think happens with sexual harassment accusations sometimes. The person it's reported to is probably like "I just want us to do our regular jobs and why do I have to deal with this mess and why did you have to tell me this?"

Which can lead to covering it up, blaming the victim, and basically making the person who reported it feel like they were retaliated against.

I've learned to pay close attention to moments like that. Moments where something disrupts everything and is going to be a real pain in the ass to deal with.

As an aside, I think that's part of why I liked the Untamed so much. The main character was confronted with a moment where he either had to act and do the right thing at great cost to himself, or just... look away. He chose to act, which ultimately led to his death (he got better! It's kind of what the whole plot is about.)

In his case, many others in the so-called 'righteous' sects looked away instead. Well, righteousness and the hypocrisy of sects that claim to be righteous is a pretty common theme in xianxia novels.

To bring this back on topic - I think the events of Jan 6 trigger that sort of internal conflict. I've talked about it before. About how Trump never had evidence that the election was stolen, how he repeatedly claimed it was for months leading up to Jan 6. How nobody would have even been there on that day if he hadn't used his political power to push that narrative, to the point where many Americans genuinely believe him. (You wouldn't need all those youtube videos and that blasted documentary if there was real evidence. No, 60+ judges weren't in a conspiracy to cover it up. If there was anything solid, it would have been admissible in court and we would have known. But that's not what Trump's supporters want to hear, is it?)

Yeah, Jan 6 happened because of deliberate action on Trump and his supporters parts. The fake elector plot makes it 10000x worse. I know most Americans don't really understand this tedious sort of civics, but the states determine how many electoral votes a president gets. They do this whole certification process that can take weeks, that includes comparing the voter lists to the death list (since deaths can take a while to get updated) which is how they catch the voter fraud cases where someone voted on behalf of someone who died, and all of that stuff is decided ahead of time. 

Then the states determine send the results to Congress and Congress reads the results in. 

There is, apparently, a provision for questioning the legitimacy of a state's results from the Electoral Count Act of 1887 after a disputed election, and that if there was a dispute the two houses of Congress would separate and debate the question for at most two hours. Then vote to accept or reject the objection. And if both houses support the objection?

Then those votes are excluded. Not handed over to the other candidate. They just don't count at all.

Anyways, the news didn't really discuss how Trump and his allies sent fake electors, ones NOT certified by their state to give the results.

The results were not in question, but they sure tried their best to make it look like they were.

But think about what that means. Think about what we would have to do to address it.

We're talking about impeaching and maybe even arresting and putting on trial a very popular political figure. One whose base is known for targeting anyone their leader dislikes.

It would have been a real pain in the ass to deal with, and it really could have led to more political violence.

I personally still think we had to do it, probably for some of the same reasons I felt I had to address some of those workplace issues.

Ignoring it makes everything even worse.

But I watched. Watched how horrified everyone was the day of - and how quickly it dropped off everyone's radar.

How quickly people didn't even say 'move on', but just... didn't really talk about it. 

How quickly the partisan divide cropped up, how easily people convinced themselves that it was just some protest that got out of hand.

Nothing to see here. Nothing we need to actually do something about. 

And oh, by the way, the completely incompetent leader who manufactured the belief that the election was stolen in the first place?

He got re-elected only four years later.

That same dissonance, that same willingness to overlook things, it keeps cropping up again and again.

The lack of outcry over the NSPM-7 stuff? Looking the other way as Trump uses the Charlie Kirk assassination to escalate things even further? ICE detaining US citizens? That horrific speech to all the senior military leaders?

I look around, and this isn't the America I thought I knew.

Though, knowing what I know of history, perhaps I shouldn't be so shocked.

I don't know how this is going to end, but I am pretty sure of one thing - we're not even through Trump's first year.

It's only going to get worse, and it won't stop unless or until we make it stop.

Or maybe Trump's bad health will finally catch up to him. Who knows?

But those violence entrepreneurs? They're really working hard. And far too many Americans don't even seem to realize it.