A genuine worry

It's really quite painful watching passionate, intelligent liberals on American TV, such as Stephen Colbert, trying to process how such an offensive man as Trump could win enough support to get over the line.  (Although remember, he did not win the popular vote: especially if you take the third party vote into account, a substantial majority of those who did vote were against Trump:

Nationally, third-party candidates did relatively well in this election. With most of the ballots now counted, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson gained over 3% of the popular vote, and the Green party’s Jill Stein got 1%. Altogether, candidates who did not represent either of the two main parties got around 4.9% of the popular vote (in 2012, third-party candidates only managed 1.7%, and in 2008, 1.4%).

It’s easy to see why people point the finger at third-party votes. In Michigan, where the election was so close that the Associated Press still hasn’t called the result, Trump is ahead by about 12,000 votes. That’s significantly less than the 242,867 votes that went to third-party candidates in Michigan. It’s a similar story elsewhere: third-party candidates won more total votes than the Trump’s margin of victory in Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida. Without those states, Trump would not have won the presidency.)

Anyway, I was watching this lengthy clip from Colbert's first post election show, and its clear he is emotionally upset about it all.  While there are many laughs to be had (I particularly like God's cameo near the end), watching it made me feel more anxious and depressed in sympathy with Colbert, even if, by confirming that the whole of the country hasn't gone nuts, it shouldn't:

I'm not the only one who blames Fox News

Simon Wren-Lewis writes:

mainly macro: Trump: Misleading the People: 

The story is in fact told better than I ever could by Bruce Bartlett, who worked in the Reagan White House and for George HW Bush, so I’ll just summarise it here. The story starts under Reagan, who provided pressure to withdraw the Fairness Doctrine, which was similar to what keeps UK broadcasters from being partisan. Initially that allowed the rise of talk radio, and then Fox News. Gradually being partisan at Fox meant misinforming its viewers, such that Fox viewers are clearly less well informed than viewers of other news providers. One analysis suggested over half of the facts stated on Fox are untrue: UK readers may well remember them reporting that Birmingham was a no-go area for non-Muslims.

But why is this causal, rather than simply being a mirror on the rightward drift of the Republican base? The first point is that there is clear evidence that watching Fox news is more likely to make you vote Republican. The second is that, like the tabloids in the UK, this propaganda machine can turn on party leaders and keep them from moving left. The third is that it is also a machine for keeping the base angry and fired up and believing that nothing could be worse than voting for a Democrat. It is Fox News that stops Republican voters seeing that they are voting for a demagogue, conceals that he lies openly all the time, incites hatred against other religions and ethnic groups, and makes its viewers believe that Clinton deserves to be locked up. Just as UKIP (and perhaps now the Conservative party) is the political wing of the tabloids, so Trump is a creature of Fox news.

Also worth remembering...

....don't bother, they're heeeeere

I knew a columnist would soon enough write along the lines of "if, like an arrogant teenager, the American GOP voting public thinks they know what's best, sometimes it's better to let them learn for themselves that they don't."  And here is that column from the Washington Post.

Of course, the thing that freaks out parents, half of Americans, and about 80% of the rest of the globe, is how much grief said teenager will cause everyone  in the process.

For a solid dose of pessimism, of course we can drop in on Andrew Sullivan, whose column "The Republic Repeals Itself" is as depressed as you would expect, but even he points out the obvious:

The only sliver of hope is that his promises cannot be kept. He cannot bring millions of jobs back if he triggers a trade war. He cannot build a massive new wall across the entire southern border and get Mexico to pay for it. He cannot deport millions of illegal immigrants, without massive new funding from Congress and major civil unrest. He cannot “destroy ISIS”; his very election will empower it in ways its leaders could not possibly have hoped for. He cannot both cut taxes on the rich, fund a massive new infrastructure program, boost military spending, protect entitlements, and not tip the U.S. into levels of debt even Paul Krugman might blanch at. At some point, a few timid souls in the GOP may mention the concepts of individual liberty or due process or small government or balanced budgets. At some point even his supporters may worry or balk, and his support may fade.

Actually, given that you can never tell what a bullshit artist like Trump is really thinking, and that the reality of the difficulty of governing is about to hit him like a bus (I thought he even had a look of worry on his face in his victory speech - his Ritchie Rich son* looked definitely regretful), I fully expect disappointment amongst his supporters to start building very quickly.   This is usually the case with politicians who are light on policy, but big on "hope and change".  (Yes, OK, Obama pretty much fitted that category, but did manage to be a competent and a good president.  But he was, at least, a politician who knew the ropes.   There is obviously no real reason to expect that the Hollywood scenario of an accidental president turning out to be great in the role and beloved of the people could happen with this buffoon.)

Perhaps the biggest worry, apart from Generals having to wrestle the nuclear codes out of his tiny fingers when an Islamic President mean-tweets him, is the likely clownish quality of the advisers and administrators he surrounds himself with.   But, I guess, as with Boris Johnson in the UK, give clowns actual responsibility and at least some of them have to change their rhetoric fast.  

And at the end of the day (gee, how am I managing to be quasi optimistic?) what everyone has to keep reminding themselves - both the doomsayers and the gloaters - is that in terms of popular vote, pretty much exactly half of the country rejected Trump.    Which doesn't seem to me to say much for fool Scott Adams - if being a "master persuader" means just influencing the small percent of the voting public that ever moves from one side to the other, it doesn't seem to be such an awe inspiring thing at all.  (Oh, and Scott, your young girlfriend is going to dump you soon enough, and you can go back to the comfort of your money and 4chan pals.)

* Didn't Trump indicate he would be in charge of cyber-security in his administration?
 

Sounds about right

There’s no way around it: Donald Trump is going to be a disaster for the planet - Vox

The article does, in fact, contain a note of (highly qualified) optimism at the end.

The truth is, Democrats have absolutely no reason for holding back on calling out all politicians (and their followers) who deny AGW as absolute gullible fools being led up the path to destruction by a mere handful of contrarians.  I mean, Clinton tried the tactic this election of "not scaring the horses" by not mentioning it, and look how that panned out.  

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft...

I'm too scared to look over at the threads at Catallaxy - they'll be so high on the red cordial they won't come down for a month.   Of course, they'll own whatever the hell happens under what (I presume) is going to be a Trump presidency.  (You would have thought the dire Prime Ministership of Tony Abbott would have taught them a lesson in being careful what you wish for - and Trump is a bull in a china shop several orders of magnitude larger than Tone.)

Anyhow, there is still the possibility that Trump will not make it to the Presidency.  First, the count is not finished, but hardly anyone is expecting the rest to go well for Hillary.  If he does win, Mexico may invade Washington successfully just to replace him, and all other nations would cheer them on.  Or perhaps Trump will announce he will not take up the job if he'll just get an Emmy for The Apprentice.   The Academy would give him a whole two hour show if he was serious.

And any aliens watching the planet for the last 50 years will no doubt feel this is the right time to intervene.  I would welcome our new overlords as being more predictable than Trump and his nutty, dangerous advisers.

Will they ever learn?

Some good advice to Republicans in Congress from Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post:

Tuesday evening (we hope) we will have a definitive president-elect, most likely Hillary Clinton. Republicans, especially members of Congress, should take a deep breath. Their Clinton derangement syndrome, only partially justified by her ethical malfeasance, has gotten out of control, blinding even the most thoughtful Republicans. Republican activists and party leaders will have plenty to answer for after the Donald Trump campaign ends. So, if I may suggest, Republicans should zip it for a while.

If Clinton wins Tuesday, the GOP would have lost a third presidential election in a row, this one in large part because of their hate-filled, irrational and extreme rhetoric and aversion to reality. They may well lose the Senate majority as well. Frankly, millions of Americans, including frustrated Republicans (whether they grudgingly voted for Trump or abandoned the GOP to vote for Clinton or a third party), don’t really want to hear Republican blather on about impeachment. They don’t want lectures from nativists and fabulists such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity about, well, anything. They don’t want to hear that the GOP is now on a search-and-destroy mission to make certain we have a failed president.

Here’s a novel approach: Root for the president’s success, even if it is Hillary Clinton. We are a country at war and with deep problems; wishing her failure means wishing our country and free people misfortune. Extend her the benefit of the doubt. Look for areas of agreement. Don’t dictate the terms of debate. Keep a civil tongue. Tell their own rabble-rousers to pipe down for just a few months.

Yes, when you think back over it, did they learn nothing from the failure of their pursuit of Bill Clinton over his (rather sordid) sex life?   Or from watching the Obama birthers fail?   Both of these targets are now in overall good standing with the American public (if you ignore conspiracy nutters, at least), yet you get the feeling many Republicans will happily try to pursue Hillary Clinton over matters which are, again, essentially nothing to do with good governance.  

Election prediction

I've been playing with the Washington Post electoral college "do it yourself" map, and my guess on the election outcome would be either 308 or 323 to Clinton, depending on North Carolina.  As Monty seems to be predicting 307 to Clinton, I'll take the high road and go for 323.

Update:   Well, I got the last election right!

America - where witchcraft still matters to politics

If ever there was a "jumps the shark" moment in this election campaign, it was last weekend when the Washington Post felt it had to address the absurdity of Right wing culture warrior hero Drudge promoting the idea that Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman goes to occult dinners to drink blood and other unmentionables.    Tweets from concerned Americans (concerned about "spirit cooking") remain a sight to behold:

Yes, America - the nation that put men on the Moon - still has a significant block of people worried that witches could take over the White House.   Is there any Western nation with that level of contradiction? 

As it happens, I had been going to post about witches and politics for another reason.   Before Halloween, I was reading this good article from last year about two books looking again at the Salem witch hunt, and it put me in mind of Trump's campaign against Hillary because of one of the theories about how Salem could have happened:

In Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (1974)—now considered a classic of interpretive social history—Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum uncovered a long-standing fissure inside the Salem community that closely aligned with opposing sides in the trials. The accused came largely from the families of well-off, market-minded, centrally positioned farmers and merchants, their accusers from poorer, tradition-bound folk living in the town’s interior. The trials, then, can be seen as a backlash phenomenon, a struggle to ward off deep-rooted social change—nothing less, in fact, than the onset of modern capitalism and the values it advanced.

Substitute "globalisation" for "modern capitalism", and you have a strong parallel to why the simple minded, "blue collar billionaire's" followers are prepared to treat Hillary like a witch, with many of them now also believing it of her literally. 

The best of anti-Trump

Over the last week, before the Clinton polling losses appeared to stabilise, there was a lot of passionate, if not panicky, anti-Trump writing to be found.  Here are three pieces I liked:

*  Andrew Sullivan (not my favourite writer, generally speaking) did do a good job at calling Trump out as an awful and dangerous proto-fascist, as I think more in the media should be prepared to say.  Have a read of this:

This is what we now know. Donald Trump is the first candidate for president who seems to have little understanding of or reverence for constitutional democracy and presents himself as a future strongman. This begins with his character — if that word could possibly be ascribed to his disturbed, unstable, and uncontrollable psyche. He has revealed himself incapable of treating other people as anything but instruments to his will. He seems to have no close friends, because he can tolerate no equals. He never appears to laugh, because that would cede a recognition to another’s fleeting power over him. He treats his wives and his children as mere extensions of his power, and those who have resisted the patriarch have been exiled, humiliated, or bought off.

His relationship to men — from his school days to the primary campaign — is rooted entirely in dominance and mastery, through bullying, intimidation, and, if necessary, humiliation. His relationship to women is entirely a function of his relationship to men: Women are solely a means to demonstrate his superiority in the alpha-male struggle. Women are to be pursued, captured, used, assaulted, or merely displayed to other men as an indication of his superiority. His response to any difficult relationship is to end it, usually by firing or humiliating or ruining someone. His core, motivating idea is the punishment or mockery of the weak and reverence for the strong. He cannot apologize or accept responsibility for failure. He has long treated the truth as entirely instrumental to his momentary personal interests. Setbacks of any kind can only be assuaged by vindictive, manic revenge.

He has no concept of a non-zero-sum engagement, in which a deal can be beneficial for both sides. A win-win scenario is intolerable to him, because mastery of others is the only moment when he is psychically at peace. (This is one reason why he cannot understand the entire idea of free trade or, indeed, NATO, or the separation of powers.) In any conflict, he cannot ever back down; he must continue to up the ante until the danger to everyone around him is so great as to demand their surrender. From his feckless business deals and billion-dollar debts to his utter indifference to the damage he has done to those institutions unfortunate enough to engage him, he has shown no concern for the interests of other human beings. Just ask the countless people he has casually fired, or the political party he has effectively destroyed. He has violated and eroded the core norms that make liberal democracy possible — because such norms were designed precisely to guard against the kind of tyrannical impulses and pathological narcissism he personifies.

Wow, hey?   Vicious but, I think, very accurate.

*  Adam Gopnik:  always a great writer, follows a very similar path:

The truth is that Trump’s “positions” on specific issues are more or less a matter of chance and whim and impulse (Of course women should be punished for having abortions! Ten minutes later: no, they shouldn’t) while his actual ideology, the song he sings every day, the one those listeners and followers gleefully vibrate to, is one anthem, and it is the sound of the authoritarian and anti-democratic impulses Americans have rejected since the founding of this country. Call them what you will—populist authoritarianism or extreme-right-wing ethno-nationalism—the active agents within a Trump speech and energizing a Trump rally are always the same: the worship of power in its most brutal and authoritarian forms (thus his admiration for Vladimir Putin and for the Chinese Communists who assaulted the protesters at Tiananmen Square); the reduction of all relations to dominance contests; the contempt for rational argument; the perpetual unashamed storm of lies; the appeal to hysterically exaggerated fears of outsiders; and, above all, the relentless sense of ethnic grievance that can be remedied only by acts of annihilating revenge. His is the ideology not of democratic patriotism but of a narrow nationalism alone—the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. He will “level the playing field” with the terrorist spectre of ISIS by forcing soldiers to commit war crimes; he will not merely kill our enemies but annihilate their families. His platform is resentment and his program is revenge, and that is an ideology with many faces and one name. This is fascism with an American face.

*   And, at a more technical level, the detailed explanation by Matthew Yglesais of the Clinton email issue, the low level security risk of which the media has never really tried to properly explain, is really good.  It starts:

Because Clinton herself apologized for it and because it does not appear to be in any way important, Clinton allies, surrogates, and co-partisans have largely not familiarized themselves with the details of the matter, instead saying vaguely that it was an error of judgment and she apologized and America has bigger fish to fry.

This has had the effect of further inscribing and reinscribing the notion that Clinton did something wrong, meaning that every bit of micro-news that puts the scandal back on cable amounts to reminding people of something bad that Clinton did. In total, network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.

This is unfortunate because emailgate, like so many Clinton pseudo-scandals before it, is bullshit. The real scandal here is the way a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US presidential election — overwhelming stories of much more importance, giving the American people a completely skewed impression of one of the two nominees, and creating space for the FBI to intervene in the election in favor of its apparently preferred candidate in a dangerous way.

Yes, this is the .....

Or, for the non English reader:

I think this justifies a little introspective.

Why do I do this?  Obviously, back when I started this in 2005, it seemed that blogging could be an important and entertaining aspect of the internet landscape, but that hope has all but gone, with most people moving into the short sugar hit of Twitter to get an opinion out with minimal effort or analysis, or diverting into Facebook if they want to spend all day talking about themselves.   All a bit of a pity, I reckon.

I've long since moved into treating the blog as a sort of open diary of thoughts and events, but one that avoids oversharing with respect to my own family and circumstances - I don't see great dignity in that.   If anyone out there wants to follow what I'm interested in, that's fine;  but it's not as if I'm really trying to satisfy anyone but myself.    (And a good thing too, given my very modest long term hit-rate!)

It also serves a useful function as a list of handy bookmarks that is always accessible; and for noting things I may want to find again in future, such as the odd recipe I like.   

And here's the thing - I never know whether I should say this here, but I can pick any old archive page on this blog, and nearly always be pleased with what I find.   The range of topics covered; reviewing the ways in which my opinion has subtly changed over the years; predictions that turned out very accurate (see Rudd, K, amongst others); reminders of trips taken; the odd good photo; and finding links to stories and articles that I still find interesting, esoteric and/or well written -  I think (he says immodestly) this is a great little corner of the internet.  And I find I want to keep recording opinions and material on it, in the way I have for 11 years now.

As for its utility, apart from pleasing its author, I do have vague hopes that sometimes I may link to something hard to find that some Googling reader finds very useful and important.  I also wonder whether my kids (and wife) will find it interesting to read in future, either in my declining years or after I'm gone.  At the moment, they know about it, but rarely care to read it.  (Do writers' families ever spend much time reading the writer's work?)  While I will always want to avoid Facebook style disclosure, I hope they find some of my personality, and love for them, to be discernable in a future reading.

And so, onwards with the blog.   I saw both Interstellar and Dr Strange on the weekend - I really want to write about them! 

Friday American follies

I'm pretty busy, but a few things to observe:

*  The Christian Science Monitor notes that not only Kansas has been playing with Laffer-ite tax cutting experiments, but so have Wisconsin and North Carolina:

But with a deadlocked Congress barely able to pass a budget, let alone rewrite the tax code, Republican-led states such as Wisconsin, Kansas, and North Carolina have taken the lead – all sharply reducing taxes on individuals and businesses in pursuit of growth and jobs.
The results have ranged from poor to middling, suggesting that the most oft-cited success story – Texas – is more the result of the state’s energy economy than its fiscal policy.

As I have repeatedly noted, the Kansas experiment has had terrible outcomes,  but even in Wisconsin the policy has been at the cost of the education sector.   Seems a long term losing proposition to me...

*  The Guardian ran an article about concerns in America that cannabis legalisation is leading to corporate "Big Marijuana" that will push use just as recklessly as Big Tobacco.   My position - yes, it's hard to see how the American system of light regulation of this product will not lead to an unwanted increase in use by younger people, with long term detrimental consequences for educational outcomes and the economy.  Americans have this way of swinging from one extreme to another - the overly punitive drug laws were bad in their own way, too, for people simply using and not trading.  But legalisation with limited input into what's sold is an unnecessary extreme in the other direction. 

*  Just how depressed should one be at the state of America when Trump can even stand a chance of being elected?   One is tempted to despair at the gullibility of humans, but I guess the modern atheist would say it has always been thus.   Given the long history of bad ideas that people have proved capable of believing, I'm not sure that you can argue that they are dumber than they used to be, despite how obvious a conclusion that sometimes appears.   I still think the current blame ultimately has to come down to the awful, propaganda enabling effect of Right wing media and the information bubble it creates; and to a large extent, you have to blame Rupert Murdoch for his morally bankrupt willingnessly to make money this way.   People may not be fools, but their gullibility at the hands of information manipulators can certainly make them act very foolishly indeed.

 

Epidemics where you don't expect them

Official: Fourth-largest city in Russia has HIV epidemic

This Russian city has a population of 1.5 million (which means, I guess, that Russian cities must be pretty small on average, if it's the fourth largest) and has 1.8% of its population with HIV.  It's to do with drugs and (heterosexual) sex:

While the majority of new infections are acquired through intravenous
drug use, heterosexual sex is rising as a source of transmission and
accounts for just over 40 percent of new cases.

HIV infections in Russia are concentrated in large manufacturing
cities in southern Siberia and along drug trafficking routes that begin
in Central Asia and extend to Europe. Russia's Sverdlovsk Region, of
which Yekaterinburg is the capital, is the region most heavily infected
with HIV in Russia, according to Savinova.

Cease all time travelling now!

The US election has been reminding me lately about the classic Ray Bradbury time travel short story "A Sound of Thunder," wherein a time traveller inadvertently (by treading on a butterfly while dinosaur hunting) causes the world's time line to swap to a tyrant being elected.

I think this is a semi-plausible explanation of how a dangerously ignorant, conspiracy mongering doofus with the worst child-like personality traits can be edging close to becoming President.*

I'm not sure which organisation may be conducting time travel experiments at the moment (I wouldn't put it past CERN at the LHC, though), but they have to call a halt till after the election.



* I still don't believe he will win, though.  I would still put that at "high confidence," too.

PS:  I did Google to see if anyone else has been drawing a connection between this short story and this election - surprisingly, there seems to not be many, but there was one link to a person who wrote about this in August.   It's really hard these days to be the first with an idea!

Questioning "broken windows" policing

How A Theory Of Crime And Policing Was Born, And Went Terribly Wrong : NPR

The consensus seems to be that it probably did contribute somewhat to less crime, but not as much as early proponents claimed it did.   I hadn't heard of this research before

In Chicago, the researchers Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush analyzed what makes people perceive social disorder. They found that if two neighborhoods had exactly the same amount of graffiti and litter and loitering, people saw more disorder, more broken windows, in neighborhoods with more African-Americans.

Hardly surprising

Hostility toward women is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support - Vox

You see in the Australian blogosphere, too.

Fair warning

There will soon be reason to dance in the streets, and/or shower me with money and thanks.  {Pay attention to the money part, in particular, kind readers.*}

I've noticed that I am getting very close to making my 10,000th published post....

*  I would like to think that a bit of information, from somewhere on this blog, that someone has been led to by Google has, for some reason, proved to be very useful and important to that person, somehow.  No one has ever left a comment to that effect, but who knows.  Of course, it might also take another 10,000 years for that to happen, too....

A click too far

It's remarkable how making just one extra click can dissuade me from checking in on the details of what Andrew Bolt, or Tim Blair, are complaining or writing about.

Since News Ltd (or News Corp, or whatever - I keep forgetting what it exactly is now) changed their blogs so that you just got a headline and one sentence, I find I just usually can't be bothered clicking further to read more.   I mean, I've disagreed with them about 8 times out of 10 (9.8 times out of 10 if we're talking Bolt alone) on most issues over many years now, and particularly dislike the puffed up, multi-media, Fox News lite act that Andrew Bolt has become, but at least I used to be able to get annoyed with them with just one click from my blog.  Now I can't, and I can't be bothered with the further click to confirm my annoyance.

I would be very surprised if their click rate hasn't tanked, as I've noticed some at Catallaxy saying a similar thing. 

This'll set off the Latin mass Catholics

In Show Of Unity, Pope Francis Marks 500th Anniversary Of Protestant Reformation : The Two-Way : NPR

Sargent gets it

Greg Sargent, in the Washington Post, ends a post about the ridiculous and offensive (to reasonable people) way Trump is trying to play the latest email news with this:

...it’s remarkable that at this point, the political world just shrugs when one of the two major party nominees suggests that there is no legitimate way that our institutions can clear his political opponent of criminality. Either she is a criminal, or the FBI is corrupt to its core. That’s Trump’s actual argument, and it sometimes seems as if barely anyone raises an eyebrow anymore when he makes it.

As many have observed, Trump has broken the media's outrage meter by the relentless weight of outrageous statements.