Tyranny, Theory and Practice

Donald Trump gave a press conference yesterday in which he aggressively challenged the press, even calling one journalist a "sleaze." I'm not sure if the charge is accurate.

Meanwhile, in the Philippines:

"Just because you're a journalist you are not exempted from assassination if you're a son of a bitch."

"Most of those killed, to be frank, have done something," [President] Duterte said, according to AFP. "You won't be killed if you don't do anything wrong."

He also said journalists who defamed others weren't necessarily protected from violent attacks.

"That can't be just freedom of speech. The constitution can no longer help you if you disrespect a person."

Meanwhile, in Bangladesh:

“No one in this country has the right to speak in a way that hurts religious sentiment,” she said while exchanging greetings with Hindu leaders on Thursday.

“You won’t practise religion – no problem. But you can’t attack someone else’s religion. You’ll have to stop doing this.

“It won’t be tolerated if someone else’s religious sentiment is hurt,” the prime minister said.

After the murder of secular blogger Niladri Chatterjee Niloy at his house in Dhaka on Aug 7, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal and police chief AKM Shahidul Haque issued similar warnings.

What we need to decide, and it's a decision to be taken seriously, is whether Trump is of the same kind and merely different in degree, or if he is of a different kind. There are arguments to be made in both directions. One could argue that the media has really deserved harsh criticism, and that bringing such criticism is fair play. One could argue that verbal criticism is only part of the free exchange of ideas, and that being subject to criticism makes the press more likely to do a better, more thorough job in proving their case.

On the other hand, one could argue that such language from a man seeking a position of great power is suggestive that he would suppress criticism forcefully once he had power. One could suggest that his restriction to verbal criticism is temporary, and that once he has the power of the presidency he will not feel so restricted.

Certainly the power of the presidency is great. Especially under Obama the ability to avoid the law, by using Presidential power to refuse to enforce it on one's self or one's operatives, has grown vast. Still, my sense is that Trump would have a lot less power as President than Obama has had, or than Clinton would have, because he will be subject to impeachment and removal. His lack of backing within the deep establishment of his own party means that he would be easy to constrain. The party seems to be lining up behind him for the duration of the election, as he has won the nomination fair and square. I don't think that their willingness to accept the will of the voters in terms of their nominee means that they have abandoned their objections to Trump in general.

That could be wrong, though. A lot depends on whether Trump is just a big talker, or whether he's the kind of man who would be turned by power into a tyrant. Is he challenging the free press in a way that will force it to do its job better -- recognizing that it has, in fact, done a pretty poor job lately? Or is he laying the ground for suppressing the free press after his election? It's an important question.

Sanity on Weapons -- in the New York Times!

No less than the Times editorial board has penned an essay calling for a loosening of New York's "outdated" knife control laws.

I'm not sure the law they endorse is strongly enough worded to attain their outcome. It would be better to repeal the provisions against "gravity knives" altogether. Still, sanity on weapons from this podium does not come all that often. Let us celebrate it while it's here.

Poll on Clinton and Indictment

So, the red-line Drudge headline calls this a "shock poll" because 71% of Democrats think that Clinton should keep running even if indicted. Here's the part that I think is more troubling:

Sixty-five percent (65%) consider it likely that Clinton broke the law by sending and receiving e-mails containing classified information through a private e-mail server while serving as secretary of State. This includes 47% who say it’s Very Likely....

But just 25% think it is even somewhat likely that Clinton will be indicted.

There's your measure of effectiveness for our legal institutions. Two-thirds of voters think she broke the law (which, of course, she did). Only one in four think there's any real chance the law will be applied to her.

The party of more government has an interest in maintaining faith in the government. They're sacrificing more than they know on the altar of Hillary Clinton.

NPR: White Bloc Voting is a Problem

I've been arguing for a while now that Donald Trump is effectively building a white voting bloc, but that this is a response to the success of Democrats in building a black voting bloc, a Latino voting bloc, and an Asian voting bloc.

In other words, Trump's success is predicated on finishing a project that was 90% complete when he got here:  racializing American politics.  It's a terrible idea, but one that has a high probability of success.  It's already the case in other American democracies such as Brazil's, where parties allegedly have principles but are really mostly about tribal identities.  The Democrats have succeeded in convincing large swathes of America that 'our kind of people' just don't vote for Republicans.  It was only to be expected that someone would eventually come along and make the same sort of appeal to whites -- especially as whites are actually the majority, and could dominate in such a racialized environment.

So into this comes NPR's Gene Demby, who writes that "whiteness" is shaping the election.

It's telling that Chait finds it easier to imagine that huge swaths of Republican primary voters are childlike and naive, rather than folks who quite rationally dig Trump's direct appeals to their interests — their racial interests. Among Trump's most notorious policy proposals is a moratorium on Muslims entering the country. He has called Mexican immigrants "rapists." Maybe we should concede that these declarations are not incidental to his appeal among his supporters, but central to them. Calling them "idiots" posits that they've been duped, when perhaps Trump is saying precisely what they want to hear.

What is missing is a criticism of racialized bloc voting in general. What Trump is doing is bad for America. At the same time, he's just completing the work that the Democrats began a long time ago. What we need is not a criticism of white people for giving in to a racialized appeal. What we need is a criticism of politicians who make racialized appeals. We need to break up all of these racial voting blocs, somehow, if we're going to get to a politics that is principled instead of tribal.

Now, I don't have any idea how you do that. Part of the reason this mode is so successful is that is a kind of software that works well with the hardware: human beings readily break out into identity groups. It's hard to break up those groups once people identify with them. And it's hard to get them to prefer rational principles to group interests.

But let's at least be clear about what the problem is. It's not "whiteness." It's racial politics per se.

Scenes from the Memorial Day Weekend

Blackfive always used to say that Memorial Day should include a good barbecue, because it's what the dead would have wanted for us.  A day of carefree pleasure with family and friends is just the kind of freedom they dedicated their lives to providing.  It's a somber holiday, but it's important to take some time to honor that aspect of the holiday.

Wife's bike near the firepit.

Charcoal getting ready for the Applewood smoke chips.

A celebratory ale.

Memorial Day

Perhaps This Won't Be Their Year After All

Libertarian Party chair strips naked at national convention.

Eye bleach warning.

Bikers for Trump

In keeping with his very strong support among the military and veteran communities, Donald Trump finds himself the only remaining Presidential candidate welcome at Rolling Thunder.

Mr. Trump was addressing a gathering at the 29th annual Rolling Thunder motorcycle run, a vast event over Memorial Day weekend that is dedicated to accounting for military members taken as prisoners of war or listed as missing in action. Bikers assembled at the Pentagon before riding en masse into the nation’s capital, with many dressed in leather vests covered in patches, their bikes rumbling throughout the afternoon....

Nancy Regg, a spokeswoman for Rolling Thunder, said the group had invited Mr. Trump to appear. The group did not extend an invitation to Hillary Clinton or Senator Bernie Sanders, she said.

Richard McFadden, 58, an annual Rolling Thunder attendee from North Carolina, said Mrs. Clinton would not have been welcome.

“Just like asking Jane Fonda to show up, it’d be a very, very bad thing,” said Mr. McFadden, who works in computer support and wore a button that read, “Hillary for Prison 2016.”

Mr. Trump’s supporters include a group called “Bikers for Trump,” which has more than 46,000 “likes” on Facebook. Speaking on Sunday, Mr. Trump told the crowd of seeing large numbers of bikers at his campaign events.

“I said, ‘What are they all doing here?’ and my people would say, ‘They’re here to protect you, Mr. Trump,’” he said. “It’s an amazing thing. And I want to tell you, some of these people are tough.”

But when he shakes their hands, “there is love, and it’s an incredible feeling, and that’s why I wanted to be with you today,” he said.

The article notes how odd it is that Trump is so welcome there given his remarks about Senator McCain's days as a POW. Even when reminded of the comments, people at the rally shrugged them off.

Possibly this is because Trump -- in spite of his many flaws -- shows evidence of a patriotism that looks like what Chesterton called a "primal loyalty." Chesterton wanted you to be a patriot of the world, in the sense of being loyal to and loving of the Creation made by God. There is a general point about what it is to really be loyal to something, though, whether God or Country or family. Chesterton asks if this should be a natural or a supernatural loyalty, which he suggests is equivalent to asking if it should be a reasonable or an unreasonable loyalty.

This same paradox may be at work with Trump, and the love he draws from people who are united by this kind of supernatural loyalty to America. To America, I say, rather than to the Federal Government of the United States: to the Constitution, but the Constitution as they understand the Constitution rather than as the Supreme Court interprets it. That's the kind of patriotism I feel deep in my heart, and it may be that Trump feels it in his own weird way also. That recognition allows these veterans to forgive him all his other flaws, all his very many flaws, because they see that he shares in this primal loyalty.

I won't follow him for very many reasons -- for reasons, to return to Chesterton's commentary. Maybe he's right that an unreasonable loyalty is stronger than a reasonable one. Certainly it seems to explain why Trump is running so strong with veterans in spite of things like his remarks about John McCain.

The Issue is Ossification

Lawrence Summers has a straightforward account of why people don't trust government. What he would like is a similarly straightforward account of how to fix it.

...what should have been a routine maintenance project on the Anderson Memorial Bridge over the Charles River next to my office in Cambridge. Though the bridge took only 11 months to build in 1912, it will take close to five years to repair today at a huge cost in dollars and mass delays.

Investigating the reasons behind the bridge blunders have helped to illuminate an aspect of American sclerosis — a gaggle of regulators and veto players, each with the power to block or to delay, and each with their own parochial concerns. All the actors — the historical commission, the contractor, the environmental agencies, the advocacy groups, the state transportation department — are reasonable in their own terms, but the final result is wildly unreasonable.

...

More than questions of personality or even those of high policy, the question of how to escape this trap should be a central issue in this election year.

The person who can help you answer this question is Joseph Schumpeter. His insights on economics are relevant to government, too.

Our institutions are so large and so intricate in their approval chains that [our enemies have] a huge advantage in terms of how fast a decision can be made and acted upon for streamlined organizations. Putin just issues orders, after all. ISIS isn't very big. USEUCOM or USCENTCOM has to socialize a plan among all their staff sections, who reach down to subordinate commands for input and then hash out a plan among themselves before they present it to their general. Most likely, he will need to push that plan up to the Pentagon if it represents a radical change to existing strategy. They have their own process before an answer comes back down, and the easiest answer is to push the suspense for the decision to the right while we ask a few more people. If the change requires a change from an interagency partner, their bureaucracies have to get involved too.

Even if the President were replaced with someone with new-blood ideas and the will to enact them, the bureaucracy would still have to go through at least a basic staffing process to ensure that it carried out the decisions in an orderly fashion. Because the bureaucrats are part of the existing order, there will be many who drag their feet or otherwise resist firm leadership (remember the CIA's campaign of leaks to the press about Bush's programs?).

That's just what Summers is describing. Each process is fine on its own: the problem is that there are dozens of them. These dozens of bureaucracies are each interest groups, which makes them hard to eliminate. There are whole buildings, and large buildings, full of people whose living depends on things not being streamlined.

Ultimately, in economics, what happens when a corporation becomes this ossified is that new, smaller, leaner competitors eat it alive. They may not be able to do everything that the big monopoly does, and they lack its economies of scale, but they still outperform the giants because they can make decisions and act upon them quickly and cheaply. The giants may not die -- IBM's $8 billion loss from the 1990s didn't kill it, and it's still a major world corporation though it has shed a lot of the functions it performed in the 1980s. Still, IBM and similar tech giants now don't even try to compete with startups -- they just find the ones they want and fund them.

There is no similar governmental process. You aren't allowed to compete with the EPA, nor take over parts of its functions if you do a better job for less. That isn't to say that the private sector doesn't try: Delta just invented a better way of doing airport security because its business is being harmed by TSA incompetence. However, all Delta can do is try to help streamline the steps before the TSA bottleneck. They can't replace the TSA. They can't even compete with it, or offer an alternative to it.

In economics, the ossified bureaucracy full of rent-seekers is self-correcting because of competition. In government, the problem is much harder. We have to find the political will to disband much of the government in spite of entrenched interests with their hands on the levers of power. If we can't do that, government will just get more and more incompetent the older and more ossified it becomes.

Ballad of Ricky Washington

I have a certain fondness for this new RangerUp shirt.

'Shut Up, Kristof'

Conservatives have been talking about the lack of ideological diversity on campus for years -- maybe decades, at this point -- but the riotous shutting down of right-leaning voices has grown loud enough to have reached the ears of a major writer from the New York Times. Nicholas Kristof wrote about it, and now has penned a second column about the response to his first column.

In a column a few weeks ago, I offered “a confession of liberal intolerance,” criticizing my fellow progressives for promoting all kinds of diversity on campuses — except ideological. I argued that universities risk becoming liberal echo chambers and hostile environments for conservatives, and especially for evangelical Christians.

As I see it, we are hypocritical: We welcome people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

It’s rare for a column to inspire widespread agreement, but that one led to a consensus: Almost every liberal agreed that I was dead wrong.

“You don’t diversify with idiots,” asserted the reader comment on The Times’s website that was most recommended by readers (1,099 of them). Another: Conservatives “are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers.”

Finally, this one recommended by readers: “I am grossly disappointed in you for this essay, Mr. Kristof. You have spent so much time in troubled places seemingly calling out misogyny and bigotry. And yet here you are, scolding and shaming progressives for not mindlessly accepting patriarchy, misogyny, complementarianism, and hateful, hateful bigotry against the LGBTQ community into the academy.”

The price paid by liberals for this is that they are indeed blind to many things. Maybe twenty years ago, I was involved in a debate about the right response to gun violence. Now gun violence was very much worse twenty years ago, about twice as bad as it is now -- which is to say that it has been halved since then, during a period when the legal right to carry arms has vastly expanded and the number of firearms in private hands has increased sharply.

Listening to liberals talk about gun violence today, however, I can see that they're totally blind to the correlation. Indeed, mostly they're blind to the tremendous success we've had in reducing gun violence. About two-thirds of gun deaths now are suicides, and a right to suicide is generally supported by liberals as long as it's "doctor assisted." Almost all of those facts are opaque to liberals, on campus or in politics, who are discussing the issue today. Hillary Clinton talks as if there were an epidemic of gun violence in immediate need of addressing, for example, and none of these academics seem to correct her assumptions.

So in this debate twenty years ago, I was arguing the position that a plausible way to cut down on gun deaths was to educate people about how to use guns safely and accurately. We could have courses in riflemanship in the public schools, teaching along the way the overlapping, mutually-reinforcing "four rules" of gun safety. At least in that way we could plausibly eliminate most of the accidental deaths, and enable people who wanted to be part of the solution to crime by carrying guns to do so in a better way.

"No, no," the moderator said. "We're not even going to consider that."

A liberal friend of mine jumped in, though, and pointed out that the argument I was raising was exactly similar to the liberal argument for sex education in schools. Yes, it's risky to teach kids about sex. Yes, it violates a number of commonly-held sexual taboos (more so in those days -- American society has abandoned most of its sexual taboos since then). But it's also risky not to teach kids about a danger they are very likely to encounter. Empowering them with knowledge about how to protect themselves while engaging in the dangerous practice would cut down on negative results. Further, an empowered citizenry such as our form of government imagines ought to be educated, not 'kept away' from dangerous knowledge.

It was an insightful moment, but the moderator still shut down the discussion. He did acknowledge the parallel, however uncomfortably, but still ruled that guns were a bridge too far for education. It's an idea that simply could not be considered, not even though the parallel argument was a major platform piece for liberals in those days.

New Texts by Yahya ibn Adi Discovered

Yahya ibn Adi was, in his day, among the foremost philosophers in Medieval Baghdad. He was particularly renowned in Aristotelian circles. He wrote in Arabic.

Nevertheless, he was a Christian. At this period, which was the intellectual height of Islamic civilization, having a leading thinker in the heart of the Islamic world who was not Muslim was in no way threatening to the rulers. Ibn Adi engaged in an extended philosophical defense of the Trinity, and engaged both prominent Muslim and Jewish thinkers on philosophical and theological topics. No one thought to cut off his head. Rather, he both studied under and was allowed to teach Muslims as well as Christians.

Medieval Baghdad wasn't perfect, but it was better than Modern Baghdad. Oh, it didn't have electricity or access to the many scientific advances we have today. Yet it was a better place to live, to think, and to be a part of the community.

Start Even

Never dabbled in 'high society,'
Don't reckon I would if I could.
I'm a little too good for the bad folks,
And way too bad for the good.

Sing it, Tex.

'Child Care' is Bad for Your Children

Well, according to this study, at least.

We first confirm earlier findings showing reduced contemporaneous non-cognitive development following the program introduction in Quebec, with little impact on cognitive test scores,” reads the abstract for the study.

“We then show these non-cognitive deficits persisted to school ages, and also that cohorts with increased child care access subsequently had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life. The impacts on criminal activity are concentrated in boys.”

I can remember discussing this at the phase in my life when questions of child care were relevant. We thought, in those days, that it was good to send a child to child care for at least a few hours a week. The idea was that it would give them a chance to socialize, to get used to not being the most important person in the world and to taking turns with other children.

That's all quite intuitive, but maybe it's wrong. Intuitions often are. Maybe it's really good to your development to have that time of your life spent in safety and assurance. Maybe that's the ground for developing the kind of personality that can then learn to extend kindness to others -- not because you're made to do so, but because you're confident enough to do so freely.

Another View on the Hiroshima Speech

Richard Fernandez analyzes the speech in a different way from others, but one that I think is insightful.

In his view war is old. It was the Atomic Bomb which was new and therefore destabilizing. Those who brought this unregulated thing into the world thus assumed a huge responsibility. It's an interesting formulation, for at a stroke the great moral issues of World War 2 are reduced to a narrative in which everyone -- including militaristic Japan, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Soviet Russia -- were alike victims of age old human passions enabled by revolutionary weaponry. No one is guilty. We are all just victims. But facts have to be faced Obama argued that since a "moral revolution" cannot be effected the great religions which falsely promise a pathway to love while offering only a license to kill then man is irredeemable without government.

Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill. ... But those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.

Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos, but those same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines.

The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.

So more government we will have up to any extent necessary to make safety mandatory. The moral drama of WW2 vanishes, leaving the Hiroshima speech as an unvarnished plea for an arms-control bureaucracy; the demand for a global safe space; a call for gun control on a planet-wide scale.

It's worth reading in full.

DB: Army Disastrously Tries To Copy "Fleet Week"

An Army attempt to copy the success of the Navy’s Fleet Week has resulted in seven casualties, $82 million in lost business revenue, and a near war with Canada, sources report. The senior service’s first attempt to demonstrate the finest land warfare traditions through patriotic demonstrations such as foot patrols, L-shaped ambushes and artillery barrages, created riots, widespread panic and a short-lived gang coalition.

That reminds me of the time that Irish-American veterans of the US Army invaded Canada.

Someday I May Ask You For A Favor

A small favor, such as good friends might ask of each other. Like maybe millions of dollars.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.” ...

Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they report. “The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”

NPR Talks Range 15

You know you want to hear it.

Friday Night AMV

World turned upside down.

Gamblers Fallacy

If you'd asked me last summer, I'd have said that it was at least even money that Trump was a stalking horse for Clinton. Clearly that gamble would not have paid out:

What, Mr. Green asked, would the party look like in five years? “Love the question,” Mr. Trump replied. “Five, 10 years from now—different party. You’re going to have a worker’s party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years.”

My impression on reading this was that Mr. Trump is seeing it as a party of regular people, as the Democratic Party was when I was a child and the Republican Party when I was a young woman.

This is the first thing I’ve seen that suggests Mr. Trump is ideologically conscious of what he’s doing. It’s not just ego and orange hair, he suggests, it’s politically intentional.