Why I work with a school somewhere the US govt says is one of the most dangerous places on earth

I’m lucky enough to work with a nonprofit that operates a secondary school in Rumbek, South Sudan.

The UN put out an article about one of the clubs they’re involved with at the school, detailing how students in that club are trying to forge peace and ignore ethnic differences and the concomitant allegiances which have so often proved toxic.

Some choice quotes:

“The first time I met him,” says a beaming Laat Luka, looking up at his friend Daniel Deng Joseph, “I did not know him; but we later got to know each other through our school work. I was good in English and he was good in Mathematics, so he would help me with the numbers and I would help him with verbs.”

His friend is just as happy as Laat about their robust partnership.

“I was really surprised that there is someone who is not from my tribe who can bring me up like this,” Daniel Deng Joseph says and adds:

“Now we do not worry about which tribes we are from,” he said. “We are friends, we are brothers, and we are a family.”

Laat, Daniel and the other students have also been encouraged to act as ‘agents of change’ and relay messages of peace to their families and communities.

Though the article is quite old at this point, I thought I’d offer because it touches on one of the reasons I’m so proud to be on the board of Abukloi. And that means something to me, not only because the work we do has a real impact, but because I have to swallow certain things to do that work.

For instance, I’m a secularist and an atheist, and I am suspicious of religion in almost any form. Nonetheless, Abukloi is operated by former ministers out of a Methodist Church and– to my annoyance– offers instruction that is sometimes tinged with religious sentiment (common for the country).

But the aims of that school have been secular and largely positive. It has an unusually high female student population. Of 365 students when I started writing this, 108 were girls (the figure has since gone up, I believe I’m right in saying). More than statistics, though: it is creating a culture where women are valuable for more than the dowry they might fetch or the children they might birth.

It is also an organization which actively pushes self-sufficiency for the South Sudanese. One small example of this is the way in which we have offered micro-loans for small businesses for students in the community. Several of those businesses have done relatively well.

The reputation of the school has continued to increase and it is a very good thing for the community; mostly due to the work of other members of the board and school I must admit, but still. To listen to Abukloi’s founder and a very good friend of mine, Angelo Maker, is to observe how much impact his dream has had on the region. Angelo went to school under trees drawing notes with sticks in the dirt. Thanks to the work of him and the community, some South Sudanese children don’t have to. It is early days, but it is a start.

Debate Recap: Impacts of COVID-19 (April, 2020)

Half the work of any debate is getting the opponent to commit to a position, particularly when that opponent is not particularly practiced at debating.

Often, we want to have things both ways (insert half-sensical cliche about having a cake and eating it). For instance, in one debate I had on immigration my interlocutor wanted to hold to a conservative philosophy about immigration (suggesting that full political rights were hinged on cultural assimilation) without accepting any specific policy implications of that view. Immediately, he would get defensive any time you tried to pin him down to some of those policy implications and simply dodged the question when you asked him to explain where (and why) he disagreed with your policy positions. In a sense, this is understandable. Thinking isn’t easy; debating is less so. And debating can feel unnatural. When someone isn’t versed in the art, you make allowances.

Strangely, this bad habit can prove hard to shake for even practiced debaters. In the case of a debate I did with Libertarian James Chillemi, a personal injury lawyer and author of Leaving the Cave, he simply refused to take a position on the fundamental questions at issue. This disease seems to infect Libertarians at a higher rate than others. In the end, he was in fact not arguing anything at all, except to point out something that wasn’t at issue: shutting down the economy will have some negative impacts. Of course, no-one denies this. The policy question was shutdown or re-open; so he should have either had an argument for that, or else he’s not adding value.

I have debated him before, and he often plays this game. But I was less ready than I should have been and came off, as one viewer told me, as confrontational (The presumably silent qualifier in that sentence was “overly”, as in I came off “overly confrontational”). I haven’t checked the tapes, but I doubt he’s wrong.

Future strategy: commit to either forcing the person to accept implications or blow past it almost entirely and just make the larger points. In other words, either double down on the confrontational aspect or redirect.

• The debate was filmed for Danielle Solinski’s Citizen Jane’s live debate series. Low budget; audio isn’t great.

Debate recap: ‘Who owns information?’

Connecting lobsters and monopoly and altruism and robots can be less whimsical than you might think. I did it in this debate for the Citizen Jane Blog.

Strategy aside, the debate was entertaining, as far as it went. Below is a clip from the second round. Worth reading, I’d say!

After circling each other like sniffling wolves for one round, this was part of the debate ending reply:

Obviously, what we’re talking about is a vicious cycle: as big corporations take ownership of personal data, a scarce resource, they are able to improve methods and technologies which allow them to accrue more of that resource. It’s approaching a monopoly in effect, if not in semantic detail. Given the amount that small governments have become reliant on the largess of these corporations–take the city where Apple recently planted a shiny new building on that gilded hill, for example. And that the tentacles of these industries have wrapped around the culture, reinforced by lobbying, and socially justified by the amount of “altruism” they engage in. (Let’s be clear: private corporations exist for private profit.) Then we might see this as a corporatization of the market space, and indeed our entire society. Indeed, there were bills recently introduced in Congress to privatize public lands, a further step in privatizing the public sphere. The rot is everywhere, and the private-public distinction hasn’t faded, rather the public good has been consumed by private interests.

The question of this debate— who owns information?— is not a technical one, one that a lawyer might answer; that is not within our expertise and we would add nothing of value to that conversation. But it is a procedural question, a political one. Who should own information? For that, “Is tech an existential threat,” which was the name of a recent speech on a similar topic, might be a better fit. Your statements, both of them actually, presume the answer to that question is the consumer. Technically debatable. But fine. For the purposes of debate, I’ll grant that. What I want to hear is how you propose to transition to an incentive structure whereby consumers can retain “ownership” of personal data within the market structure which we have, which has led to the creation of this problem in the first place. Or what elements of that market structure you propose to reform. This is the tension I was trying to get at in my last statement.

So I reiterate my earlier point: your call to “rethink” these things is vague to the point of meaninglessness.

The difference between us is very small. If I understand your position correctly, then the difference between us primarily rests in your claim (implicit in the first statement; semi-voiced in the second) that the market is easily capable of containing these mounting contradictions. I suggest that it might not be. Or at least it would require a transformation of the structure around the market akin to the anti-monopolization programs of yore.

I think the rougher and tougher questions at play will have to do with biological information. The case of Henrietta Lacks is a good example of how this conversation has become relevant already, and why this is as much a political question as anything else, and it suggests the stakes at play here. With tech like Crispr, or the coding of the human genome generally, the very essence of our beings has been reduced to data. We are, in a very real manner of speaking, just data in physical form. What’s the difference between me and a lobster? Just a few lines of code, so to speak.

But this puts the question in a personal vein. Is some data not salable (is some data “inalienable”, in other words)? I put the question to you. Presumably, there is no market-driven reason for this view. So the question is twofold: what’s your answer and from where do you derive your answer to this question?

In my view, the answer will likely end up being a resounding “no”. Whether or not this is a moral answer, I’m not so sure. But for the advancement of disease-fighting, for the slow-down of the aging process, for the continued eradication of suffering caused by a lack of efficiency, it’s necessary. But, a rather large hindrance, this will require systematized barbarity. It will weaponize systematic thinking and ethics-related thought experiments. A recent example posed to me: a turn on the trolly problem. Should automated, driverless cars sacrifice their passenger by swerving off the road, say, to save another passenger(s)? On what basis should the determination be made? Germany (I think it was Germany) has recently attempted to set a priori limits to the basis on which these kinds of decision can be made. It remains to be seen whether or not this is viable. But calling for a rethink doesn’t quite cut the mustard.

There are still other problems we might not be able to address, too. Like the absorption of other industries by the big behemoths. Amazon buying Whole Foods is a prime example of this. Ultimately, this kind of thing threatens to automate jobs and establish mass and sustained unemployment. We also won’t be able to address the now unstable definitions of consciousness or personhood which have far-reaching implications. Though, I will take the opportunity to point out that Saudi Arabia (of all places!) granted citizenship to a robot recently, the first country to do so. Because that should be more well known. But that’s perhaps enough of a data dump for one response.

• Note: Featured image found through “labeled for reuse” Google search.

I Dreamed of Donnie

In which a friend confides his erotic dream starring me and (*gasp) Donald Trump!

(Medium repost)

Pulled from WikiMedia Commons. From the page:“This image was originally posted to Flickr by DonkeyHotey at https://flickr.com/photos/47422005@N04/35629664822.”

Who says dreams don’t come true?

A close friend confided to me, around November of last year, a dream he’d had. We were boozy and chatty, at our favorite bar/coffeehouse in Arlington, Virginia. Over a steaming cup of coffee, he leaned in and offered a comment with a droll smile: “I had a dream about you,” he half whispered.

“Erotic?… Coming out?,” I asked.

“Very erotic,” he blankly replied, “it starred you and Donald Trump!”

If I had been quicker, I might have said: “sweet dreams are made of these, and who am I to disagree?”

In that dream, he’d go on to explain, I was hunched over in a barrel, naked, in the middle of the road in Downtown DC.

President Trump with his chest puffed out was plopping along astride a shinning white horse. He was heading a parade of tanks through the city, which he’d thrown in his own honor.

Pence, Ryan and Kushner were arrayed behind him like the other horseman of the incompetence apocalypse.

As Trump approached me, he slowed his horse to a trot and said, “I like your style. I’ll give you anything you want.”

“You’re in my sun,” I replied, looking bored.

“Sad!,” he sad, looking hurt. He typed something furiously into his phone, and his horse trotted off.

I forgot to ask whether any of the tanks were Russian. Call me a “Cynic”.

Now as it appears Trump may be throwing an old-fashioned military parade in his honor, a perfect imitation of an African dictator or of the old-school Soviets, it looks as though half of this preternatural scene is coming true.

I’m shopping for vintage barrels now.

California Dreaming

(Repost from Medium. Originally published: Feb 9, 2017)

I’m sitting in an airport, disoriented and a little sick, upset that I’m headed to California and not back to South Sudan. I grew up in California, and for a long time, I thought I would die there without having seen much of the world. Were it not for some family tragedy, I might have.

My life was set on a certain, immovable path. At least it felt that way. There was agency in that path, to the extent that there’s any agency in any path, but it felt almost like a birthright. It was as if my genetics were helping choose my life, guiding my hand. In some sense, of course, they were (and still are). But the feeling is numbed. Life feels unmoored.

A group of high-school-aged Jewish students are dancing and clapping and singing in a circle nearby, interrupting my train of thought. It’s pleasant to listen to, though. Some culture in an otherwise drab airport.

A lot is going on in California. Little of it has much personal meaning, but it does cast a dark shade on this nostalgia. It makes it seem narcissistic, especially since I’ve gone out of my way to avoid this kind of writing, which is based more on feeling and perceptions and intuitions than historically or culturally significant events.

The headlines tell me that the state is struggling with the daunting task of creating a single-payer health system, that an assemblywoman is taking an LOA amid sexual misconduct allegations, and, because there’s always some drivel, that people are freaking out over some “invasive giant swamp rodent.” Cue the Michael Bay footage.

Meanwhile, about 60 students are preparing to graduate in Rumbek, South Sudan. Abukloi, the little secondary school where I had planned to be right now, is elated. They walk tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, I caught what I think was pneumonia a little while back and was too sick to catch the flight. Like I said, sick and disoriented. Some of the other board members keep sending me pictures.

In Juba, people are protesting the announcement of the US arms embargo, according to emails I’m getting from the US embassy there.

Shakespeare made a successful bid for a family coat of arms in his middle age, something his father tried and failed to do. It was a mark of social ascendency then, something which is a little hard to translate now. Shakespeare chose as his motto something a little defensive: “Non sanz adroit.” Not without right. Another possible translation for someone accustomed to speaking English might be: Not without skill. That’s how I feel. I can feel myself drifting. But not without skill; not without right.

My brother, James, and I. I must be about 16, which would make James about 10 or so.

I wonder what that more provincial self would be doing right now. Probably not sitting in an airport. Probably not dreaming of South Sudan. But maybe he would still be feeling nostalgic.

It’s official: I’m a ‘media attache’

It’s official! I’m the “media attache consultant” for Bella & Associates Consulting LTD.

It’s a firm made up almost exclusively of African expats with PhDs. (except me on both counts!). It focuses on Africa and the now contentiously titled field of “development”.

From the site:

Country of Birth: United States of America (USA)

Education: College of William & Mary , Williamsburg, VA-USA

Freelance Journalist

                       

Daniel Thomas Mollenkamp is an American journalist, who has filed reportage from three continents. He is also on the board of Abukloi, which is a secondary school in Rumbek, South Sudan. After studying political economy and governance at the College and William and Mary in Virginia, Mr. Mollenkamp did an internship at the Department of Homeland Security, in the Office of Policy, working on foreign fighters and accountability for border patrol enforcement, as well as the “faith-based initiative”.

Mr. Mollenkamp would later work a winding series of jobs, functioning mostly as a reporter and organizer. He is currently an independent writer covering American and global politics, as well as economics reporting. In 2016, Mr. Mollenkamp was an outside observer to a diaspora-led peace and disarmament process in the Western Lakes region of South Sudan.

This gig came through a South Sudanese expat connection of mine, who I’ve been helping put in applications for jobs.

Check out the page!

 

Notes on my Stanford Speech

In November, I headed a roundtable at Stanford University at the invitation of student groups, the European Association at Stanford and the European Security Undergraduate Network.

That speech was a culmination of some coverage I had done on the Catalan referendum. See: “Europe’s Death Dance” and “Ghost of General Franco”.

That speech went well. I have already been invited back! You can find a recording of the roundtable on Youtube.

Below are some of the notes I used in the speech, as well as a correction.

• Correction: Sometime during the long roundtable, I say I was in Barcelona for a little more than a week. That should have been a little less than a week. My apologies.

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Speech notes:

• Potential opening remarks:

• I think it might be refreshing to hear a speech on the relatively kosher topic of nationalism and police violence, rather than the rising volcanic topics of rape and sexual assault and fascism. And so I’d like to offer you that assurance from the beginning. But, actually, I’m not sure I can, since this talk will veer into the question of ethnic nationalism and corruption and fascism.

  OUTLINE:

  • The referendum:
    • Oct. 1: referendum vote:
      • Declared illegal by Spanish Constitutional Court; La Guardia Civil sent to stop referendum; 43% voter turnout with 90% “yes” vote”; similar to pro-independence vote for Kurds a week earlier;
      • 1968 DNC protests, Richard Daley: “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”
    • Oct, 3rd: strikes & protests permeate the city.
    • Madrid threatens to rescind Catalonia’s self-rule unless they disavow the referendum.
    • Oct. 27— negotiations fail: Catalonia votes to uphold referendum and declare independence, but Puigdemont suspends the declaration; the Spanish senate approves the imposition of direct rule; Prez. Charles Puigdemont and his cabinet are fired, and the Catalan parliament dissolved; Spain says it will implement new elections on Dec. 21.
    • Puigdemont and a few members of the Catalan parliament flee to Brussels. (Puigdemont turned himself over to a court in Belgium which was studying the European arrest warrant for him; he has declared himself the frontrunner for the upcoming election while simultaneously disputing the legality of the manner in which they were called).
    • Diposed Catalan Vice President Oriol Junqueras (and some members of parliament) are jailed on charges of rebellion, sedition and embezzlement by Spanish National Criminal Court, similar charges were drawn up in the Supreme Court for other members of parliament; (two Catalan society members were jailed earlier in Oct on similar charges).
    • Election is framed as a “reset”. But projections seem to show it will give a similar result to the 2015 elections which handed pro-independence movements a parliamentary majority even though they narrowly lost the popular vote.
    • Though: no broad independence coalition (unlike 2015); But pro-independence parties, which in addition to Puigdemont’s center-right party (PDeCAT) include the Left Republicans (ERC) and the radical Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP)
  • Summary of my article: and my time there: “Europe’s Death Dance”.
  • Impact on Catalonia?:
    • No clear settlement of the dispute. May occur again.
    • Bad for business, and thus the economy of the region.
    • Exposed a divided Catalonian populace.
    • Self-governance in region suspended by Madrid (ended 40 years of self-governance; also independence which stretches back at which predates Spain. least as far as Ferdinand and Isabella)
    • My takeaways:
      • Catalonia had no plan for independence in place and would have had no idea what to do if they’d received it.
      • This was opportunism.
        • They hoped to get votes, increase regional autonomy, and rebrand Puigdemont’s party, which has rebranded itself as the Catalan European Democratic Party.
        • Vote was nonbonding to proclaim republic (never did).
        • Madrid’s suspension of the parliament (done by invoking Article 155 of Spanish constitution) conveniently strips them of the hope of greater fiscal autonomy. It also seems premised on the idea that they actually declared independence, which they did not.
        • Madrid’s (P.M. Rajoy’s) takeover of local government functions (including police, edu, public tv and radio, ): can’t find a precedent for this. Essentially, this gave rulership of region to the elements that were pro-Spain (the ones who were trounced in the elections, which doesn’t restore “normalcy” as the Rajoy faction claims, but nullifies democratic rule)
        • From the Nation’s coverage:
        • “Despite the PP’s stark zero-tolerance approach, its endgame, too, is far from clear. Driving Rajoy’s actions, it seems, is a thirst for punishment driven by short-term electoral interests, a deep-seated ideological investment in the unity of Spain, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to thwart constitutional and political change. The prime minister’s decision to call for elections early, setting a clear and short-term endpoint to the revocation of Catalan self-government, was widely praised as an exercise of restraint. Behind it, however, was a threat of further intervention from both the executive and the judicial branches. In an October 29 interview with the national newspaper El Mundo, PP parliamentary spokesman Pablo Casado warned that the actions of the Catalan leadership “will not remain unpunished.” He also put the rest of Spain’s 17 autonomous communities on notice. “Article 155 is a warning. Any secessionist challenge, whatever the majority it may have, is not going to succeed.” Talking about Catalonia, he stated categorically that the region “has never been independent, and never will be.”
        • “…“The conflict with Madrid has helped improve the image of the Catalan right,” the journalist Emilio Silva told us. “In the speech he gave after Rajoy fired him as president, Puigdemont spoke of a Catalan Republic whose citizens would live in equality, liberty, and fraternity. Well, that’s the same Puigdemont who, as mayor of the city of Girona, put padlocks on supermarket dumpsters to prevent those who had no other resources from taking food from them.”
    • Is Francisco Franco dead?: (he died in 1975; launching the Spanish constitution; Catalan has its own language and culture and a history of autonomy). 2006 referendum called for moves towards independence. Catalans account for 1/5 of Spain’s economic output and I think over 20% of its tax base). Gap between taxes and services is 10b euros per year, Economist).
      • “The name of General Franco has been accusingly invoked by both sides.”
      • Pro-Spanish sentiment is that those criticizing how Spain handled the Catalonian referendum as shrill and comical.
        • Former P.M. of Belgium Elio Di Rupo called Spanish P.M. Rajoy a “authoritarian Francoist” on Twitter, which has been elevated to an international posting board for political statements; El País, pro-Spain newspaper, called this the equivalent to calling Angela Merkel a totalitarian Nazi (which, I’ll point out, is redundant whether or not it’s “offensive” and “intolerable”);
        • Rajoy’s comment: “España es una gran nación.”; Spain is a mature democracy.
        • The claim by the Nation coverage: “The government’s approach has also undermined judicial independence, eroded civil liberties, and reversed decades’ worth of decentralization… The Catalan right has borrowed from Rajoy’s playbook, also using the escalation of tensions to whitewash its own history of corruption and enthusiasm for austerity.”
        • Is Spain wagging the dog? Are they escaping revelations of mass corruption through the controversy over the Catalonian referendum?
          • This argument, based largely on the Gürtel case, seems like something of a false start, and my local contacts say they don’t see a meaningful connection.
        • Is this part of a larger swing against self-determination & free speech?
          • I think very possibly: use of ley mordaza, or “gag law” has been seemingly unrestrained. charges of “extolling terrorism” or “offending religious sentiments,” have been levied against commentators, and journalists have been charged with “disobeying authority”;
            • “[journalists have been] slapped with hefty fines for such actions as stepping from the sidewalk into the street during a demonstration in defense of press freedom. On November 17, Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that the crime of extolling terrorism can even apply to a retweet.”
        • The jailed Catalonian parliament members have been called “political prisoners” by Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau and Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias.
          • “Casado, the PP spokesperson, has approvingly recalled the prohibition, in the 1990s, of Herri Batasuna, the Basque party linked with ETA, the terrorist pro-independence group, suggesting, in so many words, that political parties in favor of Catalan independence should therefore be illegal. Ironically, Spain has a legal fascist party, whose vocal members have, in recent weeks, been seen brandishing Francoist flags, making fascist salutes, singing fascist hymns, and violently attacking anti-fascist protesters.”
          • Partido Popular (PP) has been sluggish to condemn the actual fascists in Spain who proudly and actually wave Franco’s damn flag.
        • I’ve even heard Puigdemont compared unfavorably to George Wallace, the man so pro-segregation that he shamed the American South— for violating procedural rules.
        • Nostalgia for Franco? Unsettled question for me. But worth asking. Devaluation of twentieth-century history and associated slur words: Francoism, Communism and Stalinism, Maoist example. Hitlerism and Fascism and Nazism.
    • Nationalism with an economic bent
      • Bannon and Breitbart:
        • Bannon: CPAC; American Prospect; NYT
        • Breitbart: sets opposition between globalists and nationalists, with globalists being the enemy within; “…nation with an economy…not an economy just in some global marketplace with open borders… a nation with a culture and a reason for being.”
        • This echoes the logic of even more fringe and cringe elements like Alex Jones, who bears multiple ties to the president and those responsible for his election, let’s not forget, and who is always on about “globalists” and globalist conspiracies.
        • And the alt-right and white nationalist movements, since it echoes the ontology of people like Richard Spencer who shares the same belief structure and only really changes it by focusing on the “culture” and “reason for being” bits (by adding ethnic an angle). Men like Gavin McInnes, whose “Proud Boys” group once claimed the organizer of the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” as a rank and file member.
      • Really a wish for imperialism and chauvinism
      • Accused of being “phobic” or fearful. Partly true. More aggressive, though.
      • The election of Trump was spurred by a series of cataclysms involving refugees and migrants, and economic busts and a general feeling of rotting from the inside out.
    • Crisis of globalism
      • The middle will not hold, sorry Fukuyama!
      • No persuasive counter-narrative to ethnic-nationalism currently being offered.
      • UN and EU failures
      • The failure to offer a viable metanarrative
        • The crack-up into regionalism; EU’s call for an army; the funding of increasingly regional players, and the rise of places like the African Union and the G-20 and G-8 and development banks and IGAD, etc.
      • Systemic rot
      • No legit arg against crackups
        • Smaller countries have been allowed admittance to the UN, for example.
      • Recent historical precedents: Brexit; Trump; Scottish referendum; Kurdish referendum
      • Implications for the Scottish Nationals, and elsewhere in Europe.
        • Italy: Lombardy and Veneto.
        • US: Calexit (left), State of Jefferson (right); Texas successionism
        • Hungary and Poland must be questioning whether to remain locked into the EU, or to un-attach.
    • Nationalism and the “vanished” ethnic core of the nation-state
      • “The I is another.” And, in the minds of the regulated, self-governance is really the regulation of our extended bodies, of our state’s borders.
      • So, the question I’m here to address isn’t a technical one— one which any of your professors would be better suited to address. It’s a projectionist one. It’s also a journalistic one. How do people view these extended bodies in relation to each other.
      • Nietzsche and the problem of ideological culture:
        • The celebrity of Richard Spencer; rise of Trump and Bannon; reemergence of Christianity as a social glue (Jordan Peterson and the Christian-atheists phenom (even the desire for atheist churches; Richard Dawkin’s “Christian atheist” comment)) the conflation between development and democracy and liberalism with “the west” (and the prevalence of western chauvinism, which is the correct word for it, and the actual word used by people like Gavin McInnis)
        • Peter Beinart argued in the Atlantic that the primary thing to determine whether or not a country is considered “western” is whether it is white or Christian.
        • This may augur the resurgence of fractional movements, including old-school nationalism, both ethnic and not, as well as regionalism and other provincialisms.
        • Al Jazeera interview in April, Puigdemont claimed Catalonians were tired of having to trade their Catalan identity to be Spanish, and tired of Spain ignoring that they were a nation.

Who the hell are you?!

In an effort to let the gown slip a little, I am taking to the interwebs. In addition to an intimate revelation, it’s a public resurrection! Though I was (and remain) unknown, at the request of some friends, I will impose myself on that vast void as if the world were clamoring for me. So: I am posting more on a wider range of platforms. Some of these require a personalized introduction. Reproduced below is one I jotted down on a site called Steemit.

– DTM

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Who the hell are you?!

The question I always ask when presented with another blog demanding attention, another voice from the void, is simply: “Just who the hell are you?”

So, just who the hell am I?

I could try to answer this by giving a personalized version of my resume:

I have spent as much time accumulating as much experience as possible, on as meager a budget as possible. I have traveled and worked what I think is a pretty wide range of gigs. I have been a box slinger for twelve-hour shifts in a warehouse, a reporter in Iowa, an organizer in Louisiana, a bum and a music teacher/ luthier in California. I am currently a journalist, traveling all over– in Barcelona, in Virginia, in DC, in South Sudan, in NY. I’m also the media attache for a consulting firm focused on Africa, and a board member of a secondary school operating in Rumbek, South Sudan.

But that’s a little dry, no?

Alternatively, I could answer by telling you who I imagine myself to be. For instance, I imagine that much of that travel comes down to an insatiable desire to Don Draper my life. Every time I settle for a bit I can feel the creeping dissatisfaction and I desire to pick up and leave. My heart beats a gypsy rhythm.

But more than that, I think I have begun to pull myself together. Though the process has felt like being drawn and quartered, its effect has been the opposite. I have investigated my own mind, and find that some of it is monstrous and some of it is angelheaded. (Apropos: sunt lacrimea rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt)

I have also traded a lot of my life to sit in libraries and dimly lit rooms to investigate culture. And I think the thing I am most obsessed with, aside from a well-turned phrase, is projecting a nuanced (and true) understanding of the world as it is. That requires, to borrow George Orwell’s fantastic phrase, a power of facing unpleasant things.

Still, that doesn’t feel satisfactory. Does describing a few desires I have sum my parts? There are other, less destructive tendencies. Would it be better to tell you that I was born in raised in a religious atmosphere and that I have become acclimated to the religious air of my youth, though I am not religious at all? I could tell you about the rugged and poor California that I grew up in.

Perhaps I could give you a sense of my influences or beliefs, hoping that’ll suggest an answer.

Or, I suppose I could answer by demurring to a better writer. Let’s try that.

Vladimir Nabokov writes about viewing a homemade movie, made in the weeks before his birth, of his mother, smiling and waving, contentedly, from a house that looked unchanged from when he would later live in it. He did not exist and nobody mourned his absence. The familiar gestures gave off a strangely menacing feeling. Most frighteningly, on the porch of that same house he’d known with those same people, was a brand-new baby carriage with all “the smug, encroaching air of a coffin.” The cradle rocks above an abyss…

I have my own picture. I’m young: unruly dark curls and what appears to be a permanent smile plastered on my face. It looks and feels like a poor imitation. I look and feel like a cheap knockoff. The name is the same. But I can’t quite read all the future thoughts or see the future faces in that younger self. He doesn’t really exist anymore. But not even I mourn his absence.

In the vastness of the internet, I am an ant among spiders. Among the writers to clog up and litter the interwebs with excogitated verbal vomit, I am just another voice. So, read or don’t!

Despite all this verbal vomit, I’m not sure I can give you a glimpse of the whole. And this will have to sustain you for awhile because I detest memoirs from anyone relatively young (with precious few exceptions). So, most of the stuff here won’t be as self-revealing as this (and certainly not as narcissistic). Sorry. But perhaps this will offer some insight on what is to follow.

To see some of what I’ve done in the past, look here: www.danielmollenkamp.com

Blog Resurrected!

Since its inception, posts on this blog have been sporadic at best. At the request of some friends, I will remedy that in the coming weeks. Think of this as a resurrection, of sorts. Stronger and more entertaining, my words are back!

Fair warning: though the majority of the content will be political, I may let the towel slip a little and give some personal things as well. Hopefully, someone will find value in the intimate as well as the political.

Happy reading!

– DTM

P.S. To see what I’ve been up to in the meantime look here.

Why the electoral college is actually democratic

Is the election of Donald Trump really an argument for the removal of the electoral college? Not even close.

Noticing that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and objecting to Donald Trump’s election, many people (recently former Governor of Massachusetts and presidential nominee Michael Dukakis) have renewed calls for an end to the electoral college.

The electoral college is “anachronistic” and “anti-democratic,” the argument goes. Indeed, Donald Trump made a similar argument in a tweet from 2012, when Romney had seemingly won the popular vote, calling the electoral college a “disaster for democracy”.

In reality, the electoral college safeguards several of the most desirable aspects of democracy, focusing on preserving the diversity of minority opinions and preventing majority overreach. Viewed critically, both of the objections found in these arguments, which often arise after heated elections, fail.

Whether or not the electoral college is anachronistic– this argument’s first objection– is a matter of interpretation. (It is nearly as old as the government, certainly, first appearing around 1845 in Title 3 of the United States Code, though it had been practiced before then.) However, except in rare instances, age alone is not a sufficient reason to do away with something. After all, who would argue that the Establishment Clause should be done away with merely because it is old? Would you take that argument seriously?

Actually, what Dukakis and Trump were arguing for was not so much democracy as party-run elections and majority rule.

Think about this carefully: we now know that geography shapes political and economic values.

The lifestyles, customs, priorities, tastes and political allegiances of the middle of the country (like, say, Iowa, whose 6 electoral votes went to Trump) differ radically from those on the coasts (like California or New York, whose combined 84 electoral votes went to Clinton).

This difference will likely be reflected in who each group wants to elect. Accordingly, any system that privileges one geographic area over the other– in this case because the states on the coasts are more populous– also privileges the political tastes of that area.

In other words, if the US were to switch to a system that merely tallied popular vote, it would increase the power of already important and populous states like California and New York, allowing them to dictate terms to the middle states.

While this may seem great right now to elite liberals, who wouldn’t mind dictating terms if it means a Democratic victory in elections like this, one could hardly say this is an argument for a more “democratic” electoral system. Unless, of course, diversity is not your metric for democracy (I am assuming here that the argument for democracy, as opposed to, say, the argument for limited monarchy or constitutional dictatorship, rests both on popular rule and the preservation of diverse voices in government, which could always be denied). But this logic cuts both ways. If you give up the mechanisms for preserving diversity (a favorite word of leftists like me), you give up insurances against majority overreach, the very spirit of our democratic system.

Dispassionately considered, then, the electoral college is not some discarnate and elitist institution. Nor is it a method of subverting democracy. It is a method of ensuring people-based rule in state-ruled politics. In fact, those are the grounds James Madison offered in Federalist No. 39 for the college’s existence in the first place. (In Federalist No. 68, Hamilton puts this case rather too flatteringly, describing the system as “excellent.”)

But, counter-intuitive as this may seem, the electoral college system does preserve an amount of diversity in electoral politics that would not otherwise be protected.

However, objections may still be given, and an argument for separating electoral votes within a state, similar to what Maine and Nebraska already do, may be worthwhile. (And, I suspect this objection will be relevant for California’s secessionists.)

If you are unsettled by the unpredictable nature of American elections, you are unsettled by the nature of American democracy.

Since this is a defense of the principles of Hamilton and Madison, I will sign off in the same anti-authoritarian way they did: “PUBLIUS.”