Dan Erwin

Functional Vs. Dysfunctional Anger

Over the years I’ve met with clients and business people who were resistant to working with a colleague because he or she was an “angry asshole.” But when I analyzed their statement by talking to other colleagues, I found that so-called “angry” people were a very mixed bag. Their anger differed significantly. It took me awhile to figure out that some anger served a useful purpose and some did not. But that the differences are rarely clear to most people. What I learned was that it was often helpful and enlightening to push back on “useful” anger, but that I was liable to get burned by another person’s anger.

Intuitively, I could usually figure out the anger that was being displayed, knowing whether to charge ahead or back off. Furthermore, in my seminary studies (1960) I had stumbled across a very insightful statement by St. Thomas Aquinas: “Without anger, teaching will be useless, judgments unstable and crimes unchecked.” That single statement had caused me to rethink..

The Impeachment Process Is Worthwhile--Even If the Senate Refuses to Impeach

Though this historical review of the impeachment process won’t be published until the March edition of the Atlantic, all of its subscribers received a copy of Yoni Applebaum’s intriguing study a full month early. Applebaum, the senior editor for politics at the Atlantic, has all the right credentials—if that matters to you--including Columbia, a Brandeis PhD and teaching at Harvard. Obviously, an attempt to get the public thinking, I noticed a number of reviews of the study just a day after its publishing.

Because of the fiasco with Clinton, many legislators are wary of moving to impeachment. But the real worth of Applebaum’s review is to limit Trump’s power. From the initial pages of the review, Applebaum argues that the most serious charge is the attack upon the “bedrock of American democracy.”

Here then, are the five arguments Applebaum lays out in support of impeachment...

So the President is a MotherF**ker??

On several occasions I've written about swearing and rhetoric as well as about expletive naming. In a recent article, Emma Byrne adds to my ideas by writing about the "scientific case for calling the president a motherf*cker."   Byrne especially likes the Rep. Rashida Tlaib's remark, noting that she used the swear word in rhetorically correct fashion.  As Byrne writes, rhetoric reveals that this kind of language signals trust and a sense of belonging--and it also "fosters closeness and suggests a greater degree of authenticity."

Tlaib's swearing differs significantly from Trump's graphic description of sexual advances and his assault of women. While Trump's language intensifies feelings of disgust and revulsion, Tlaib's language has an instinct for the power of words and and the feelings of her colleagues and constituency. There's a sense of comeuppance in her language. It just feels good to say what she's saying about him.

One of the more intriguing insights that Byrne brings to her book on swearing is the distinction, the shit-fuck ratio, of these two swear words. "Shit" is inevitably negative, and  I'm aware of only one positive use of the term, a use that I've never heard except from my Methodist Grandmother Butterworth. She was born and raised in Arkansas and settled in Western Kentucky, spending most of her life as the widowed owner of a tobacco farm. Her world was late 19th and first half of the twentieth century. She used it to refer to me when I said or did something that was "smart alecky." In a positive, and humorous comment--and with a smile--she'd call me "a little shit." I understood it as a high compliment.

2018 Was a Banner Year for Algorithmic Prediction

Harvard’s Jill Lepore, one of the most fascinating and actually humorous historical writers, has superb explanatory insight on algorithmic prediction. That’s not a surprise. She approaches history from perspectives that have never crossed this historian’s mind--and does it with a lot of verve. She’s one of the few with a steady hand when the rest of us are lurching around with churning stomachs about artificial intelligence and moronic politicians.

With two algorithmic geniuses in my own family, a son-in-law and a recently minted CMU data-scientist grandson, with whom I spent an hour listening and trying to make sense of their conversation over Christmas, Lepore is an absolute delight at algorithmic explanation. 

She regularly seems to have the ability to...