Three good backgrounders on Brexit

Haven't figured out yet that (as well as being a technical disaster of referendum-holding and writing) Brexit distills all sorts of British national character flaws? Then these articles will get you up to speed:

1. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/09/britain-end-delusion-leader-brexit
2. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/16/a-short-history-of-brexit-by-kevin-orourke-review
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/sunday/brexit-ireland-empire.html

Donald Trump's Next Big Blunder

Trump's bigoted, collectivizing thought about Muslims, Hispanics, African-Americans, immigrants, etc. didn't hurt him at all in the Republican primaries but, as expected, it's dooming him in the general election. Arguably, as of June 15, he's quite close to becoming a zombie candidate. Still, he's not quite dead yet, so it's worth asking: What would complete the job? How could Trump be lured into finally, completely destroying his own candidacy?

The thing to keep in mind is that collectivizing modes of thought (and see this article by Saletan for lots of Trumpian examples) don't stop where Trump currently has them stopping, e.g., at a ban on all Muslim immigration and even visitation to the US. Since the San Bernardino and Orlando Muslim villains were natural-born US citizens, Trump's real target if he wants to 'keep America safe' has to be Muslim-Americans (or perhaps 'Americans from areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States or its allies'). If the existence of radical Muslim-Americans (or radical Americans from areas of the world where there is a proven history of...) makes all Muslim-Americans (or all Americans from areas of the world where there is a proven history of...) suspect as Trump believes then what, apart possibly from Political Correctness, is stopping him from supporting internment of all Muslim-Americans (or all Americans from areas of the world where there is a proven history of...) in camps if necessary or at least 'until we know what the hell is going on'? FDR interned Japanese-Americans in camps for the duration of WW2 (building on decades of discrimination against Asians etc. in immigration during the early 20C). This is the logical end-point of  Trump's favored, collectivized, safety-first-minded thinking too.

Somebody, maybe someone posing as a highly sympathetic, radical right-winger, should be able to bid Trump up in toughness, and get Trump to follow through his own lines of thought. Or maybe that won't be required: Trump's ('punish the women') stumble over abortion earlier in the year suggests that if people keep pressing him on the logical consequences of his positions then Trump's pride and self-certitude will eventually draw him on to the shocking conclusions in the cases of Muslims et al.. At a minimum, interviewers should immediately start asking Trump about internment camps. If he wouldn't go there then why not? What does Trump think about FDR's actions? Does he think that Korematsu v. US was rightly decided?

American Democracy in Action

Pennylvania’s awful gerrymandering of congressional districts (since the post 2010 census redistricting) has ensured that it grossly over-represents Republicans and under-represents Democrats at the Federal level. So this year (2012) Repubs won 13/18 PA congressional districts = 72% of the available representation despite winning only 49% of the vote! (See all data here - you have to add things up yourself at this point):

Total/popular votes for Dem House candidates in PA = 2,702,901
Total/popular votes for Rep House candidates in PA = 2,627,031

PA is truly a travesty of democracy with a downright evil Republican establishment (much anti-Clinton nonsense during the '90s sprang from Western PA) that should shame any principled conservative.

Sadly it’s the same story nationally (modulo recounts and provisionals still to be counted), although corresponding Democratic hackery elsewhere evens things up considerably:

total/popular votes for Democrat House candidates ~ 54 million
total/popular votes for Republicans House candidates ~ 53.5 million

Less than 50% vote share gets the Repubs at least 233 reps, i.e., at least 53% of the House.

The US has much to be proud of politically speaking, but also much that's patently disastrous, completely avoidable, and finally just shameful.

Gail Collins on Men Who Yell

.....in the end, the whole election came down to the time Mitt Romney put Big Bird in a binder on the car roof.

Full Collins here.

All You Need To Know About Debate #2

And go here for much, much more.

The best/scariest thing ever?

Kinsley on Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand

All anyone really needs to read about this election.

Update, October 1: OMFG.

Superb

Plurality Rule and the US Presidency

The first, short appendix to my book on mixed electoral systems shows how the US Constitution confuses majority with plurality rule, and thereby fails to ensure an orderly transition of power in an entirely feasible sort of situation.
Here's that two page appendix excerpted (i.e., the book opened to p. 183):

Is any of this a real problem? I think so. Americans seem to me to be characteristically bewitched by the idea that their Constitution is like a self-contained, logical machine/precision clock (designed by geniuses, possibly with God's help), and that this leads them to regard collegiality, background conventions and understandings, etc. as fungible, and as fair-game to being lawyered away in the name of partisan success. (Other jurisdictions' citizens seem to me to be less enamored with their respective constitutional instruments, and commensurately more aware of their constitutions' ultimate dependence on lots of must-not-be-lawyered-away background good will and shared conventional understandings.) Americans therefore seem to me to be uniquely likely to eventually drive their in-fact-not-at-all-precise Constitution off the rails wherever that's logical permitted. Look out.

The Madness of Speaker Newt: Best TNR Cover of the '90s

Chris Christie is right (at least about what once was).

Update March 16, 2012: After failing to win two crucial southern primaries he'd banked on this week, Newt said the following:

The thing I find most disheartening of this campaign is the difficulty of talking about large ideas on a large scale, because the news media can’t cover it and candidly, my opponents can’t comprehend it…Let me talk for a second about technology and grand opportunities. Other than Ronald Reagan, I know of no Republican in my lifetime who’s been able to talk about this. That’s why I’m still running.

Keep talkin' Newt. The men in white coats are on their way...

Sideshow Bob has a point?

A Great Day: F*** Yeah

I believe in 'Ding dong, the witch is dead!' moments.

Congrats to all the obvious people: the special forces troops involved, the intelligence folks, to Obama, Clinton, Panetta, and so on.

Our thoughts and thanks should at this time also go out to all the nameless people who'll be pulling long hours right now rather than celebrating. OBL's death will have shaken many trees, signals will be flashing, networks will be lighting up. Lots of brave, smart people will have to be watching and listening, working towards the next great day rather than enjoying this one. Thank you.

Update May 4, 2011: There's been a lot of hand-wringing from certain quarters about OBL's death. Much of that relies on the idea that the only satisfactory end-game should have been a criminal trial of some kind. But, rightly or wrongly, the US and OBL alike conceived of their struggle as a war. The goal of war is to defeat/destroy the opposition/enemy. The enemy can surrender at any time, and POW and legal provisions then kick in immediately. But until that happens, the primary goal is to make the other guy die for his country or cause. That doesn't mean that 'anything goes' or that war crimes can't be committed etc.. But it does mean that identifying and killing your enemies - killing them so efficiently in fact that they start to surrender to you preemptively rather than keep up the fight - is the business you are in when you are fighting a war. Not ascertaining guilt but eliminating threats is the name of the game. Apparently, Obama seriously considered both drones-strikes and massive, B-52-delivered bombardment (20+ 2000-pound bombs) as alternatives to sending in special forces to get OBL. Those are the kinds of options that are characteristic of war, and only in the latter case is surrender-at-the-last-minute an option. Of course, 'long wars' conducted by irregular troops hiding among civilian populations pose many problems that make military action complicated and fraught in various respects. But, ha ha, it's probably much harder for irregulars living among civilians to last-minute-surrender than it is for regular military. OBL's style of war may in this way have come back to bite him.

And, yes, it's perfectly decent and reasonable to celebrate a victory in a struggle/war: someone who would eliminate you in a second if they could and who would not, did not ever surrender is gone. Ding dong. [It's probably better, however, to refrain from saying that successful military operations, even triumphs, do or reflect justice. You may hope that your win would be endorsed by some hypothetical, impartial adjudictor - God say - as an appropriate outcome, but you don't know that it would be. More importantly, you certainly aren't currently engaged in anything like impartial administration of sanctions etc..]

Update May 6, 2011: And, yes, there are many senses in which Bin Laden 'won' and got what he wanted. The most important thing for Bin Laden was to get US forces out of the Muslim Holy Land (Saudi Arabia), and he got that pretty smartly by late 2003. Go here for the basic Wiki treatment of the point, but, briefly: the US couldn't leave Saudi if Saddam was still in power in Iraq. Allowing the US to get out of Saudi, thereby stopping ticking off the likes of Bin Laden (and more generally putting some distance between itself and the problematic Saudi regime and getting more plausibly onside with both actual and possible modernizing/liberal democratizing forces in the Middle East) was therefore a major motivation for the US to invade Iraq. Insofar as Bin Laden had a more general goal of weakening the great Satan/far enemy, well, the multi-trillion dollar war on terror has been a huge hit hasn't it? and the damage done to the US's standing in the world (and history more generally) by its descent into legalized torture is enormous (trillions off Brand 'USA' I'd guess, if one tried to do a rough analysis of that sort). All of that's compatible with fast-growing economic inequality at home and financial crises being still more damaging (contracting HIV or hep C or becoming schizophrenic or getting Lou Gehrig's or... is still a horror even if cancer is your worst problem). But those are all sunk costs at this point, and can neither justify nor discredit taking actions against OBL in the present. And OBL's various 'wins' may evanesce. The US's standard of living and reputation will presumably eventually repair themselves. And, essentially the US calculated that 'giving OBL what he said he wanted over Saudi' (at least if Iraq didn't turn out to be a complete disaster) would over time unleash genuine modernizing forces in Saudi and elsewhere rather more than it would spur OBL's favored creeping Talibanization and theocracy. It's still too early to tell yet ('nothing ever ends'), whether the US calculation (prayer?) was correct (has been answered). Let's hope it was (has been).

At least it wasn't The Omen

Act MP David Garrett says that he took the idea of stealing the identity of a long dead baby to procure a fraudulent passport for himself from Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal (filmed by Fred Zinneman of High Noon fame in 1973). Another '70s pop-culture phenomenon that prominently featured shenanigans about dead babies was The Omen. Wiki summarizes the beginning of its plot as follows:

The infant son of Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) and his wife, Katherine (Lee Remick), dies shortly after birth in Rome. Out of concern for his wife's mental well-being, Robert is coerced into substituting the dead child for an orphan whose mother died at the same moment by Father Spiletto (Martin Benson), without telling her the truth. Katherine and Robert name the child Damien (Harvey Stephens). Shortly afterwards, Robert is named U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain.

It later emerges that Damien is the anti-Christ, and that the Thorns' dead infant son was in fact murdered (by, as it were, anti-Nuns). The plan is for the anti-Christ to be raised as a child into the friends-of-a-US-President family then, once grown, for him to use those connections to become US President, or Helen Clark, or some such thing. That plan comes to something like fruition in Omen 3: The Final Conflict, the first and only Hollywood film to have two Kiwi leads (Sam Neill and Lisa Harrow).

Coincidence? I think not. Dream bigger darling Mr Garrett: Roger Douglas stabbing someone in a cathedral, Rodney Hide drowning under ice, fending off Sensible Sentencing Trust wolves, the permutations are endless. Photoshoppers and youtube parodists, start your engines.

Update Sept 24, 2010: Garrett has resigned from Parliament and, according to the NZ Herald, claims that dark forces are at work within the ACT party. The Herald also reports that ACT MP Heather Roy, denies being behind the leaks that doomed Garrett:

'She laughed off the comments about dark forces, saying, "I think everybody might have been reading too much Star Wars."'

Wrong answer. Not dark enough. Try harder. Oh, alright....

Political Compass

I'm somewhat surprised by my social result since I went out of my way to concede grains of salt to various putatively reactionary views, e.g., I agreed (though not strongly) with 'Eye for an eye', with 'Sometimes death penalty is OK', and with 'Military action unauthorized by international law may sometimes nonetheless be OK':

This definitely makes me wonder what sort of lunatic you have to be for the test to count you as an authoritarian.

My 'center left' econ score seems OK (it's an American test - and I always count as center left (= Hillary Clinton) there whereas that computes to center right in NZ. Take the test yourself here.

The (non-FIFA) World Cup

This appeared in Spy Magazine in 1989 (click on image to see full-size and zoom-in-able):

Afghanistan currently looking good for 2010, with home advantage again proving decisive. (Vietnam was always only a pretender.)

Sanctimony about Taxes and Deficits

One of the most irritating political poses is the 'anti-tax' or 'low tax' pose. If you genuinely want government/state to be small then fair enough. But then you must also indicate which government/state activities you want to see ended or substantially shrunk. In the US, substantial Federal tax reductions are achievable in the long run only by shrinking either entitlements (to social security, medicare, medicaid, veterans benefits, etc.) or defense. If you aren't prepared to do one or more of those things then regardless of what you say, you actually aren't in favor of a much smaller government, with its attendant lower tax burdens. Rather, your railing about low taxes etc. is just very familiar, childish whining for a free lunch. (You're in favor of low taxes the way someone who orders lots of food at the restaurant is in favor of a low bill. Wah wah wah.) Go here for a useful discussion of the tendency of the American people to be big babies about this. Here's the crucial graph [hat tip: Andrew Sullivan]:

In the relatively short run, of course, one can square the babies' circle by just piling up debt. That's the Reagan/Bush strategy: cut taxes while expanding government, run huge deficits, and watch the debt pile up. That strategy can't work forever. Eventually things have to be brought back into balance, and some mixture of shrinking the core/popular state (i.e., entitlements+defense) and raising taxes must occur. Whining about debt/deficits can be useful insofar as it calls attention to this necessary end-game. But most deficit whining (shading into sanctimony) is more ambitious: (i) it claims to be in favor of low taxes but without saying in any level of detail how core/popular govt functions are to be seriously shrunk to make that possible; (ii) it claims to be opposed to any additional/emergency government debt even when private aggregate demand in the economy has collapsed (perhaps with a 'balanced budget amendment' to cement the point). Point (i) reprises 'free lunch' childishness, and point (ii) is the sort of lunacy that turns recessions into great depressions.

Let's expand on point (ii). It's one thing to be a deficit hawk over the whole business cycle, it's quite another to be a year-by-year deficit hawk. A 'whole cycler' gathers more taxes than she needs/runs surpluses/reduces debt during the good times (thereby reducing aggregate demand at peaks and helping to deflate economic bubbles), and has the option of using (a mixture of) deficit-creating public spending and deficit-creating tax cuts to boost aggregate demand in the economy during bad times. A year-by-year (YbY) deficit hawk, by way of contrast foregoes all automatic, public sector stabilization (whether through spending or tax cuts) of the private sector's flux, thereby increasing the risks of bubble booms and depression busts like those that plagued the US economy from the Civil War until WW2. YbY deficit hawks - true 'know nothings' really, who are prepared to endorse society-shredding, revolution-promoting capitalist phenomena that would warm the hearts of Marx and Lenin as 'the system working' - are, of course, completely ascendant in current US debates. And that's to say, in the real world, sanctimony about deficits tends to be a continuation of rather than an antidote to ultra-irritating 'anti-tax' or 'low tax' posturing and remonstrance.

And see this story for a reminder of how internally divided and difficult to govern the US really is: Republicans captured both the Federal House and Senate in 1994, in part because of backlash in rural and southern areas against a ban on assault weapons (which Bill Clinton had campaigned on, with the vigorous support of police associations across the US) that was part of a big 'new cops on the street' Crime Bill that Democrats passed that year. One might have thought that conservatives would have found plenty to cheer in that Bill even if they themselves didn't see much of an issue with assault weapons. This was a centrist, right-ish, 'law and order' Bill both in spirit and in many, though not all of its details. But no: God forbid that you do exactly what you said you were going to do, and end private ownership of machine-guns. For that, it's 'throw the bums out'/'now you've gone too far'/'final straw that broke the camel's back' time. Of course, lots else was going on in 1994, including a general 'time for a change' pall over Congress, and Gingrich's well-played nationalization of (traditionally highly local) House and Senate races, i.e., under the 'Contract for America' banner. But the story I just sketched is an essential and depressing part of what transpired.