Don't Call Roy Moore a Pedophile (Better: Colloquial "Child Molester")

Except for the useful abbreviations i. e., e. g. and etc., 

there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases

now current in the English language. Bad writers,

and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers,

are nearly always haunted by the notion that

Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones […].

— George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (1946)

Don't call Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for US Senate from Alabama — by the time you read this, probably elected senator from Alabama — a pedophile; consider instead calling him a "plausibly-accused sexual predator and child molester."

            One reason for this choice of words would be the, ahem, dictum of George Orwell to avoid the pretentiousness of using Greek or Latin when English will serve. Pedophile is "From pedo- +‎ -phile, after Ancient Greek παιδοφῐ́λης (paidophílēs) (from παῖς [paîs, “boy, child”] and φιλέω [philéō, 'I love'])," and my giving the etymology by itself nicely demonstrates such pretentiousness.

            More important, pedophilia is a technical term in psychology, with a specific technical definition.

Pedophilia or paedophilia is a psychiatric disorder in which an adult or older adolescent experiences a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children.^[1][2] Although girls typically begin the process of puberty at age 10 or 11, and boys at age 11 or 12,^[3] criteria for pedophilia extend the cut-off point for prepubescence to age 13.^[1] A person who is diagnosed with pedophilia must be at least 16 years old, and at least five years older than the prepubescent child, for the attraction to be diagnosed as pedophilia.^[1][2] 

Pedophilia is termed pedophilic disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), and the manual defines it as a paraphilia involving intense and recurrent sexual urges towards and fantasies about prepubescent children that have either been acted upon or which cause the person with the attraction distress or interpersonal difficulty.^[1] The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) defines it as a sexual preference for children of prepubertal or early pubertal age.^[4] 

In popular usage, the word pedophilia is often applied to any sexual interest in children or the act of child sexual abuse.^[5][6] This use conflates the sexual attraction to prepubescent children with the act of child sexual abuse, and fails to distinguish between attraction to prepubescent and pubescent or post-pubescent minors.^[7][8] Researchers recommend that these imprecise uses be avoided because although people who commit child sexual abuse are sometimes pedophiles,^[6][9] child sexual abuse offenders are not pedophiles unless they have a primary or exclusive sexual interest in prepubescent children,^[7][10][11] and some pedophiles do not molest children.^[12]

Like, a pedophile has a mental disease, and if he — usually he — seeks treatment and successfully resists his urges, he is to be pitied and perhaps even admired. Pedophilia is something one suffers, and pedophile is, in a sense, something one is, and what we are is far more problematic and far less anyone else's business than what we do.

            Roy Moore has been plausibly accused of actions that are unethical and illegal and have the more colloquial English label of "child (sexual) molesting" (although "molesting" has its French and Latin background — so does "chair"!). Aspects of his character relevant to service in the United States Senate are most immediately the concern of the voters of Alabama. The rest of us can talk about what he has done, or is accused of having done — and we can do it in plain, or plainer, English.

"Our Democracy" and the Electoral College

Once again it looks like the popular vote for President of the United States is going to go to a Democrat (Hillary R. Clinton) and the vote in the Electoral College to the Republican (Donald J. Trump). Okay; possibly the worst results of these results will be environmental degradation and violent weather, but, fortunately, I'm old and will be dead before the worst hits or will get enough sympathy to be evacuated out when the Pacific overwhelms my neighborhood.

Two things here.

First, don't get your hopes up for reform of the Electoral College, not until a fire-breathing Republican wins the popular vote and loses in the Electoral College. Second, don't talk about "Our democracy" in the same paragraph in writing or within five minutes in talking about the Electoral College.

The US of A is not a democracy. We're a federal republic with occasional democratic aspirations and a history of increasing democracy — but we were designed as a "mixt constitution," with democracy only a part. Over simplifying a lot (and to hell with it; I'm a retired English teacher, not a historian), to oversimplify a lot, the grand design has the House of Representatives for representative democracy; the original Senate, with senators selected by state legislatures as federalist and aristocratic — way more aristocratic nowadays, as in rich, than even some of the planter elite could've dreamed — and the Presidency as mildly, constitutionally, monarchical. 

And the goddamn White trash rabble were to be kept away from selecting the president (to say nothing of those even lower than poor White men in the divinely-ordered Great Chain of Being and the really-convenient-for-the-well-born, food chain of politics). 

Against some pretty tough competition — I'm looking at you, original-version of the Senate — the Electoral College may be the most openly un- or even antidemocratic part of the Constitution. (The parts on slavery and women work more indirectly [the "s-words" slave or slavery don't appear in the original Constitution] or through silence.)

As it evolved, and since 1913 and the 17th Amendment and the popular election of senators, the Electoral College has been pretty much undemocratic in the same way the Senate is undemocratic and gerrymandering — not explicitly mandated by the Constitution but traditional — like gerrymandering is undemocratic. The rule can be "One person, one vote," but that doesn't means that everyone's vote counts the same.

E.g., my vote hasn't been as important as some except for the time I was in Ohio when it first became "a swing state" and we got what we'd grumbled we hadn't gotten: respect and the attention of candidates. Place here your favorite version of the advice to be careful what you wish for. 

I live in ungerrymandered California, and in an area where we have some hotly contested state and local races. Ventura County, though, went for Hillary Clinton 54.01% to Donald Trump's 38.25%, which came out to 143,095 votes to 101,351. We're both urban and rural in Ventura County, and I live in a port town of 22,399, but the county churned out 264,965 votes in the 2016 presidential election, against, say, the 255,791 votes I add up for the three electoral votes from the State of Wyoming. 

You see where this analysis is going, and I will "leave as an exercise for the student" to work out what part of 55 electoral votes for Hillary Clinton we got in California for the 5,481,885 people who voted for her, as opposed to the 3 electoral votes representing the 174,248 people in Wyoming who voted for Donald Trump. (Use a calculator and, if you know how to do it, scientific notation.) 

Nowadays, we have pledged electors who almost never vote other than they've been instructed to by the laws of their states, so the undemocratic part here is in the numbers and the feeling that having some votes are worth more than others — way more between Wyoming and California — is undemocratic. It doesn't prove the Electoral College system is a bad idea.

Arguably, the system ensures that Wyoming will get some attention, and candidates won't spend all their time in large centers of population. And anything that gets candidates out of the NYC-DC axis and into small towns and rural areas is good. Indeed, it would be a contribution by the Trump campaign to America if it demonstrated that the Electoral College can be gamed against the popular vote precisely by getting out into the rural counties and getting enough "more-equal-than-thou" votes to outweigh New York and California and Illinois.

Except there will still be too much concentration on the "swing areas" and gaming the system, and too little serious discussion spread over way, way too much time.

Arguments can be made for the Elector College, but in updated forms of defense of the College as it was intended to be: a check on democracy, at least "democracy" as defined as "one person, one (equal) vote." Just please spare us the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian B.S. of the purity of solid yeoman farmers and the wisdom of simple country folk. People are people. All of us act dumb some of the time, and some of us are just stupid most of the time. So it's arguable that democracy needs its limits, and liberal democracy demands limits to prevent "the tyranny of the majority." Those limits on democracy, though, are part of "Our republic"; don't get ingenious and insist on limits on democracy "central to our democracy." 

Donald Trump, NATO, ISIS, and the Russians

His smarmier comments are bad enough, but Trump's suggesting the US might renege on our NATO commitments is both an immediate and long-term problem.

I'm one of those people who doesn't see ISIS as an existential threat to the USA and world stability but the harbinger of successor groups that could get widespread support, find a charismatic leader or two, and get us back to the days of warring mass movements. Christian Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries showed what could be done with wars of religion in a time of a revolution in communication (cheap printing) and others in military affairs. A Sunni/Shia civil war combined with an incipient Caliphate taking on a crusading Christendom in the midst of climate change — would not be good. So "ISIS must be destroyed" before it evolves and further metastasizes — and nuclear proliferation needs to be stopped and the number of warheads further reduced: and that means US cooperation with the Russians and the Iranians, including some accommodations with Russian concerns about its "Near Abroad," which is much of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states.

So only recently freed members of "the prison-house of nations" of the Russian Empire (and the Israelis) are going to be very, very nervous and need to be confident that a US/Russia "reset" doesn't include throwing them off the troika to the Russian wolves and bear. And handling *that* problem makes it absolutely essential that Estonia, Latvia, Poland, and the rest are totally confident that there is a US guarantee of their sovereignty that is non-negotiable, and the principle of "An attack on one is an attack on all" is crucial to that confidence.

"The Art of the Deal" with the Russians can't include a US President who has already given their fondest desires on NATO to Russian expansionist jingoes, nostalgic for the glory-days of Stalin and the Empire, and the fight for Mother Russia and the Orthodox Church against the Infidels. Trump, Clinton, and indeed the Democrats and the rest of the political class need to get serious about dealing with Russia as a vast country with whom we will compete and must cooperate.

US Presidential Elections 2016 (and True Believers Forming Up to March)

      If I had to justify the oxygen and other resources I've used the last 73-and-a-bit years on Earth, I suspect my best argument would be that I worked as a teacher for forty years and pretty regularly during those forty years taught Eric Hoffer's 1951 book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.

      Now, in one of the more twisted ironies of US politics, Hoffer in the 1960s went on to become, possibly, something of a True Believer on his own, and certainly the in-house intellectual and lapdog for Lyndon Johnson for Johnson's part of US warfare in Vietnam — which is unfortunate primarily because too many Americans turn against literary and artistic works when it turns out that their creators are or have become bad (or horrible) people.

      Hoffer died in 1983, so you can be sure he's not getting any royalties on The True Believer, and it's often available on line as pdf's where it's fairly safe that his estate isn't making money either. So if you haven't read the book and have the skills and time to read blogs, stop reading my stuff and order it now (or download it at no financial cost). The True Believer offers a history and analysis of fanaticism, including a kind of checklist for how in many places on Earth we've been setting up the conditions for the sort of mass-movement fanaticism that resulted in the horrors Europe saw in the 16th- and 17th-century Wars of Religion, including the disastrous Thirty Years War of the 17th century (1618-1648) and larger portions of the planet saw in the 20th century from the followers of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and, a bit later, Mao.

      We have the potential for another round of violent conflicts among various Parties of God and/or truly exceptional nations, but this time in a world a-brimming with nukes.

      As of the end of February 2016, we have in the United States of America a candidate for President calling upon America to wake up and see how we've degenerated and follow him to a renewal of our greatness. For readers of my age and background, think of that as "Amerika Erwache!" Elect Donald John Trump as President and he will "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN".

      How? Wrong question. With the right leader, a leader who embodies the will of the nation, that leader will lead us to triumph over those keeping the nation down and lead us on to the greatness we had and will have again. Or lead some of us anyway: the true, natural-born Americans.

     We've seen this movie before in the Trump Leader-Principle version and in the religious versions of his main opponents. For a program of the show, so to speak, see Hoffer, The True Believer (1951), and don't say you weren't warned.