I think I have done this one before, but I’ve slept since then it probably bears repeating anyway. I found a fascinating book about evil. It is called “The Science of Evil” and it looks at people would label as sociopaths or psychopaths. The entire premise of the book was that “evil” is what I would lovingly call a “variable absolute.”

The concept of evil is culturally based and therefore almost meaningless on its own. Our enemies become evil, but the fact that we look at the world through a prism of allies and enemies might itself be a sign of distress. So, evil has no useful definition that we can use in a clinical sense. There are certainly individual acts we would all recognize as evil, but if you cannot accurately define it then it is impossible to study it in any significant way.

So what Simon Baron-Cohen (the author of the book) does is look at what traits we commonly see in those people that commit acts that we would commonly recognize as evil. It certainly makes sense. How do you know that someone young has the potential to grow up into a monster?

More importantly, can we change this before it happens? What Baron-Cohen noticed is that people we commonly refer to as evil all have one thing in common. They either have little or no empathy. Good and evil is a hit or miss proposition. Empathy is something we can focus on cultivating. It is something we can teach in our schools, our homes, and houses of worship.

Empathy doesn’t require posting something like the ten commandments. It doesn’t require the imposition of values. It simply requires that we teach young people to see a world outside of themselves. It requires taking those painful moments we all experience and using them to understand when someone else might be going through a similar moment.

As hard as we might try, there are some people that are too psychologically damaged to learn empathy. I have a masters degree in counseling, but I haven’t done the research like Baron-Cohen. I couldn’t tell you if that is a failure on our part or if someone is destined never to learn it. I certainly think there are plenty of anecdotal examples on both counts.

What we can do is prioritize empathy in leadership positions. We cannot force everyone to have empathy, but at least we can incentivize it. We can make sure that the leader of the free world, our schools, places of business, and everything in between are caring people. It is a basic test we used to pass with great regularity. It is a basic test we have failed in recent decades.

When we don’t prioritize empathy we hurt ourselves in multiple ways. First and foremost, when we have leaders that lack empathy, they are unable to make decisions that consider the feelings and well-being of those in their organization. Decision are self-serving and therefore only benefit the leader and those that happen to have the same needs.

The secondary consideration might be the more long-term reason. If I want to be a leader I will model myself after the leaders that I know and respect. If the leaders I know have no empathy then I will think it is okay not to have any empathy. I will think that is the proper way to be a leader. In other words, empathy isn’t an added bonus, but a prerequisite.

Empathy keeps us from hurting people physically and psychologically. Some might label that as a conscience or moral compass. In reality it is empathy. We understand it because we can imagine it being done to us. Empathy is basic, but we can’t take it for granted. More and more people lack it and more and more people don’t seem to mind.

One can certainly tend towards the hyperbolic when dealing with the current state of our politics. The opponent in this election (as well as 2016 and 2020) could be described in multiple ways and none of them have any connection to actual reality. Some would describe him as a cartoon villain. Others might describe him as the real life adult Eric Cartman. In the past, I have described him as a Bond villain post-traumatic brain injury. These are all funny in their own way, but for some they don’t carry much weight.

So, let me describe something that is concrete and potentially disastrous for our country. The current iteration of the GOP has no platform and no real ideology. It basically has become “whatever that guy says it is.” Ideology has to govern your party. Right or wrong, your party has to have a common framework and conception of how the world works. The other side might and likely will poke holes in that framework, but it gives you a baseline for decision making and core values.

I am only 50 years old. Many in our audience here have me by a decade or two. So, this seems weird for me to say, but I remember a time when Russia was the enemy. I remember a time when the worst thing the GOP could hang on you was either the communist label or to be painted as a Russian sympathizer. Instead of holding any candidate to that standard, the party has shifted based on a cult of personality and the fact that their standard bearer has a weird dictator fetish.

That is assuming the very best of the situation. The alternative is that their standard bearer is either under control for financial/blackmail reasons or is unwittingly under their control. I’d like to believe that his followers are blindly following him over this cliff, but we can’t rule out the possibility that some or all are paid stooges as well. I could point to numerous examples within the right wing media, but doing so would be giving attention to people that desperately crave it.

One recent example saw Vladimir Putin apparently advertising for disaffected conservatives and mouth breathers to move to Russia to get away from western liberalism. Indeed. We know a few things. We know that Russia interfered with our election in at least 2016 if not 2020 as well. We know they have spied on us. We know that our last president sided with Putin when it came to all of this information over his intelligence agencies and we know he shared confidential and top secret information with their bureaucrats.

We also know that Russia invaded a sovereign country unprovoked. Yet. voices on the right in government and commenting outside of it that have openly asked what is wrong with that. They have questioned whether we should be involved at all with even a few suggesting we should support Russia. Maybe we need a replay of cold war era movies where Russia is cast as the enemy. Maybe millions of Americans need to be reminded that dictators are not our friends. Maybe it just doesn’t matter anymore and we just need this spell to be broken. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills and I know I’m not the only one.

Did you ever not answer a phone call because you didn’t recognize the phone number on your caller ID? Yeah, me too.

It’s a fact in the 21st century that we now screen our calls because of scammers, phishers, telemarketers, bots, and cold call salesmen. We even screen our emails and text messages.

So how in the ever-blazing fires of H-E-double-hockey-sticks do we think we can use the same techniques to conduct public opinion surveys that we used in the pre-internet days? If it makes any sense, it makes no sense at all.

The last time that I answered the phone to a political pollster, it turned out to be a “push poll.” Its purpose was not to gauge public opinion but instead to elicit a reaction for or against a candidate. For example, “Do you favor allowing millions of illegal aliens with fentanyl and COVID into our country, or do you want to elect Joe Blow?”

That was the last time I participated in a telephone poll, and my responses were all as disingenuous as the poll.

This graph from Pew Research underscores the whole issue.
Get it? Over a 25-year period, phone poll response rates have dropped from 36% to 3%, a whopping drop of 1200%!

Pollsters have defended their science by citing a growing reliance upon online surveys. But excuse me if I object: online response is the antithesis of gathering data with any statistical significance at all. There is a high probability that mainly interested parties will be the primary respondents.

A caveat is that polling results always note an error bar or “margin of error”. And probably the only positive thing on that front is that the percent error is about 50% higher than those that I noted in polls a couple of decades ago.

The best thing that I can say about polling these days is that it reveals relative change over time. But the common conclusion that “It’s gonna be tight” is anachronistic in a time when winners’ and losers’ vote totals  always fall within 5% of each other.

I confess that I have never served in the military. Vietnam was the war of my youth and I was against that immoral and illegal war. But in the end, the draft lottery kept me out of it.

Captain Bonespurs had his own way to avoid fighting in that war because the draft lottery wasn’t invented yet. But I don’t know if TFG was opposed to that particular war (like me), war in general, or his fighting in any war.

I suspect the latter because of things we now know about him since he couldn’t stop mentioning how American soldiers buried in a World War 1 battlefield cemetery were chumps and losers.

That explains a lot.

It explains why stolen valor is such a touchstone in this year’s presidential campaign. Belittling Governor Walz’s 24 tears of service in the National Guard has become a something of a contest among MAGA Republicans these days.

But it’s OK. Captain Von Schitzenpantz has given stealing Walz’s valor his seal of approval.

So it should not be any surprise that the man was moved to denigrate the Medal of Honor by claiming that the civilian Medal of Freedom was a superior award because a recipient didn’t have to get shot at or killed in order to earn it: Mrs. Adelson only had to donate many millions of dollars to MAGA causes to get her medal.

Lesson: If you give TFG your money, you’re a hero. If you die for your country, you’re some dumb schmuck.

Besides Captain Ronny Jackson, TFG’s former physician while he was playing at being a president, Congressman Troy Nehls (TX CD-22) has written a couple of books.

Borderless By Design and The Big Fraud. Both Nehls and Jackson are ex-military, both are Texans with their own Texas congressional districts, and both Ronny and Troy even use the same publisher, Post Hill Press which specializes in “conservative political nonfiction works”.

But what sets the two apart is that while Ronny can report no income from his book deal, Troy can report negative income. His publisher has realized more profit from selling his book to Troy than Troy has received from his publisher. That’s what one may conclude from Nehls’s FEC filing.

Look here and scroll about a third of the way down to the line showing disbursement to Post Hill Press: for $5915.02 on February 1st. For “printing”.

For printing?

In one way to look at it, it would appear that Troy Nehls laid out some of his campaign cash to buy some copies of his own book. I assume he hands them out to loyal constituents because that’s what I would do with several hundred copies of my own book.

If it weren’t for the fact that his campaign donors foot the bill for his largesse, that would have made quite a dent in his pin money.