Still Not How That Works

     While I have been trying to avoid politics, politics is like an obtuse, friendly salesman with halitosis: it keeps showing up, all smiles and awfulness.

     The latest?  This morning, Tam observed that certain corners of the Internet are running rife with anti-Hawaiian sentiment after a 9th Circuit judge in that state put a temporary block on President Trump's travel restrictions until the courts could have a look at it.  Calls for boycotts (of pineapple, mahi-mahi and leis?) were not long in showing up, along with various flavors of negative commentary -- directed at the state, its history and its people.

     The problem with that, of course, is while Federal judges may indeed be soaking in the culture of wherever it is they're serving, the people, history, etc. of that region don't get a vote in the judge's decisions: those are based on his reading of the applicable law and judicial precedent (and, occasionally, whim).  --Which will be tested, probably most severely, as this case makes its way through the Federal court system.  That testing will be by people who do that sort of thing for a living, not by Japanese tourists, a consortium from Dole or even that nice young taxicab driver you remember from the time you vacationed there.  The White House is suggesting this Executive order may be fought all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court if necessary, a process which will quite rapidly stop having anything to do with a U. S. state on a remote Pacific island -- an island, by the way, which not only suffered the sneak attack of 7 December 1941, but which knows a little about informal immigrants and unvettable visitors making trouble, from at least the 18th Century through the 20th.

     It's a big, complicated world and very little of it actually runs on the politics of identity and grievance.  Nor on whining and ranting on the Internets.