NNT on "Fake News"

The piece is over a year old, but it just came across my desk this morning. Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues from his own experience that "The Facts are True, the News is Fake."

In the summer of 2009, I partook of a an hour long discussion with David Cameron, who was in the running for, and later became, the U.K. Prime Minister. The discussion was about how to make society robust, even immune to Black Swans, what structure was needed for both decentralization and accountability, and how the system should be built, that sort of thing. It was an interesting fifty-nine minutes around the topics of the Incerto and I felt great communicating all the points in bulk for the first time. The room in the elegant Royal Society for the Arts was full of journalists. I subsequently went to a Chinese restaurant in (London’s) Soho to celebrate with a few people when I received a phone call by a horrified friend. All London newspapers were calling me a “climate denier”, portraying me as someone part of a large anti-environment conspiracy.

The entire fifty-nine minutes were summarized by the press and reported from a tangential comment that lasted twenty seconds taken in reverse. Someone who didn’t attend the conference would have been under the impression that that was the whole conversation.

It turns out the reporter's understanding of the comment he did make was exactly backwards, but the only thing he heard during the whole hour that grabbed his interest. The news suggested both that Taleb was hotly advancing an agenda he wasn't, and that advancing this agenda was crucial to his argument.

Taleb goes on to make recommendations about how to handle this. Aquinas is involved.

George Washington's Rules for Civility

Washington wasn't so civil that he wouldn't fight a war over a political point -- aye, and win one. But he was a man who aspired to gentility, and he set out to make himself a man of manners as a result. Given the current talk about civility, it might be worth looking over his rules.

The collector notes:

Many of these “rules” are outmoded etiquette, many are baroque in their level of detail, some should never go out of style, and many would be mocked and derided today as “political correctness.” Brookhiser “warns against dismissing the maxims” as mere politeness, noting that they “address moral issues, but they address them indirectly.

The first rule, for example: "Every action done in company ought to be with some sign of respect to those that are present." That's an issue of honor, but honor has significant moral consequences.

Street Brawl in Portland

Looks like a fun weekend on the Left Coast. Communists describing themselves as anarchists attacked a march called the Patriot's Prayer march, which is the one carrying all the flags. (What a collection of flags, too: US and UK and Polish flags, plus a host of historic ones including a black-and-white rather than white-and-black variation of the Culpeper rattlesnake flag). As you can see from the progression of the flags once the explosions start going off, the communists were not prepared.



Not that they didn't bring weapons. Here a masked Communist loses his metal baton to one of the guys he wanted to beat up. I note that the masks seem to be worn only by one side here, which might indicate something about which side intended to lawfully protest, and which side came to do unlawful things to the other.



CBS news (top link, above) quotes a radio station interview with the leader of the Patriot's Prayer march, where he claims that -- as has happened in several other marchers in liberal cities -- the police stood down and allowed the attacks to go on unmolested.

Patroit Prayer organizer Joey Gibson told KOIN the clashes "good in terms that we showed that there's a political move right now to have the police stand down in order to impact free speech in some of these big cities."

"Portland's the last city on the West Coast that's doing that, so we just have to keep hitting it -- I don't see what else to do other than that," Gibson said. "We'll make Portland so ugly in terms of how they allow these protesters to charge us when we have a permit. The police stood down, we were told they would not stand down, so we have to challenge it."

It does seem like this is a recipe for disaster. I think that local governments that order their police to allow protesters to be beaten and attacked are asking for a mess of trouble, and they're likely to get it.

Stop Hyperventilating

Worries in the New Yorker about what a "brazen conservative majority" on SCOTUS would produce.

I for one doubt that Donald J. Trump, of all people, is hot to use this opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade. Donald Trump has affairs with porn stars. If the Left had succeeded in impeaching and removing him from office, and Mike Pence was picking the next Justice, then I'd think that overturning Roe was a priority. But c'mon. Donald Trump is not the guy who is going to impose a chaste sexual morality on the United States.

Trump, also, was openly pro-gay-marriage well before Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton were. Like 2005 earlier -- ask the NYT.

Conservatives of all stripes are glad to have Trump rather than Clinton picking the next SCOTUS justice, but not because we expect an activist. I don't even want an activist. I want an originalist, textualist Justice who will attempt to understand what the ratifiers of the Constitution or its amendments intended to enact, rather than attempting to impose a meaning that the Justice might prefer. I want someone who will be very disciplined about that, even though that means there are cases -- 16th Amendment cases, for example -- where the Constitution does not say what I would wish it might say.

The reason I want that is the same reason I always wanted it. We can change the Constitution through Article V processes, but those require a large degree of consensus. Attaining that degree of consensus before altering the basic law of the nation means that the result is stable. Imposing rapid, radical changes on society without that degree of consensus results in the instability and anger that we see in our politics today.

That is not to say that strictly interpreting the Constitution might not produce radical changes in and of itself, especially where the 10th Amendment is concerned. Those changes will push power down to the people in the States, though. That means that liberals will be able to live as they wish in many states, especially the highly populous ones they tend to dominate. It will protect their interests where they tend to live; and those who do not live there now are free to move.

Be at ease, liberals. It won't be that bad.

Stop Feeling Guilty

In point of fact, it would be healthier for our politics if people would stop "feeling" their way to answers all together. I should make bumperstickers: "Stop Feeling, Start Thinking!"

"Disproportionate!"

From the NYT: "Some liberals now say that free speech disproportionately protects the powerful and the status quo."

What do you think regulated speech will do? Who regulates things? The powerful, right? Those in charge right now? Thus, the 'status quo'?

I know these people are not idiots, but they sometimes seem dead set on convincing me otherwise.

Enemies of the people

I yield to no one in my contempt for much of the press, though of course I hesitate slightly in emphasizing it this week, for sadness about the Maryland shootings.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed this National Review piece:  The First Amendment is not the "Be Nice to Journalists Act of 1791":

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; nor shall any president troll Jim Acosta or describe Katy Tur as “little”; nor shall any president draw undue attention to honest errors committed by the press in their noble pursuit of speaking truth to power; nor shall any president say the New York Times or Washington Post are failing when they totally aren’t; nor shall any president fail to ensure White House briefings are televised to maximize exposure of journalists who have put a lot of work into their hair and makeup; nor shall any mouthpiece of any such president bestow undue prominence in said briefings to reporters from Newsmax or the Daily Caller; nor shall any president be unduly mean to the press in general.

Should we fear Amazon?

The Financial Times straddles the fence:

So: Amazon competes hard and invests heavily, just the things that make capitalism work as it should. Worries that Amazon is a threat to competition — and many people do worry about this — may therefore seem quixotic. The concern is that when the Amazon steamroller has flattened the industrial landscape, it will be free to raise prices and, more importantly, either crush or buy out any innovative rival to its established franchises.

To waive this away on the grounds that one day a new competitor will unseat Amazon, just as Amazon unseated Walmart, seems naive. Amazon has not only a huge edge in physical infrastructure, as Walmart once did. It also enjoys technological network effects to rival Microsoft’s and a trove of consumer data that would make Mark Zuckerberg blush.

Resurrecting other great ideas from the 1930s

Remember the "switch in time that saved nine"?  Why not trot it out again?  It's the Gandhi gambit:  it works only when you're up against an opponent whose principles can be turned against him.  Not, in other words, against the Second Coming of Hitler.

As a corrective, an example of more grown-up ways to resolve disputes:



My Facebook feed (now consisting largely of residents of my county who are involved with me only because of the recent election) is full of zhizzhing and dripping over who started all the incivility, and whether civility has a place in a world where whatever.  Lot's of talk about how we can't win ("any more") by being nice.  One neighbor even complained that people seem to think snowflakes just sit around singing "kum-bah-yah."  I don't think that's anyone's idea of a snowflake:  it's not their niceness that they're famous for but their thin skin, and there aren't many illusions about what's under the thin skin.  What is ever under thin skin but Old Adam?

Everything is Hitler-Eleventy

Feedback mechanisms: some tactics contain the seeds of their own destruction:

Rage is hard enough to direct, rage against everything is impossible to control.

And here's Trump-as-Hitler-Eleventissimo. Any minute now, he'll start murdering political rivals. He's already got ICE, which is just like a fascist militia, right?

Stuff that just has to be true

A blogger called "The Money Illusion" examines five widely held assumptions about important economic events of the last few years, and concludes that we too seldom re-evaluate our assumptions in the light of what later events should be teaching us:

Let’s consider 5 popular hypotheses:

1. The mortgage interest deduction has a major impact on the housing market.

2. The NASDAQ was obviously wildly overvalued in 2000.

3. Switzerland was forced to revalue its currency in January 2015.

4. The US housing market was obviously wildly overvalued in 2006.

5. Brexit would cause a recession in the UK economy.

Powerline week in pix

Fake news

As Mollie Hemingway says, if a poll shows that 53% of D's, 79% of I's, and 92% of R's believe the press lies to us on purpose, and then the press reports only that 92% of Rs don't trust them, that's an example of fake news right there.

The figure works out to 72% of everyone put together.  The press couldn't even get the support of a majority of Democrats, for Pete's sake.  CNN's ratings have dropped below those of the Food Channel.  Yet somehow commentators don't conclude that Trump gets support from people disgusted with the press, they conclude people are disgusted with the press because Trump undermined their sterling reputation.

Update:  Sheryl Attkisson's 52 times the press misrepresented the news about President Trump.

Be careful whom you sue

Mueller's PR stunt of filing charges against Russian companies unexpectedly pitted him against flesh-eating lawyers for a client with nothing to lose.  The prosecution is horrified by the prospect of having to turn over Brady material to the defendants.

Candlemakers vs. the Sun

Basquiat poked fun at protectionist trade policies by pretending to petition on behalf of French candlemakers for an end to the importation of below-cost sunlight.  The only flaw I can find in his argument is that we can't see any plausible way one of our trade competitors can cut off our sunlight after we come to depend on it.

Lately, if I understand the President properly, he's taken to saying he'd actually prefer zero tariffs, and is imposing tariffs only to show other countries the cost of the ones they impose on us.  Is this really like saying we should shut out the sun because other countries are doing the same to themselves?

Whether this really is a flaw in the President's economic theory or not, however, it does seem as though the strategy can work.  Trading partners do respond to the threat of tariffs, sometimes, by agreeing to moderate their own.

The Flight 93 Campaign

I missed this Michael Anton essay from shortly before the 2016 election:

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic. The stakes can’t be that high because they are never that high—except perhaps in the pages of Gibbon.

The story has a happy ending:

Michael Anton ... was a senior contributing editor of American Greatness from July 2016 until January 2017. He currently serves as deputy assistant to the president for strategic communications on the National Security Council.

Wild Irish Rose

Some of you might be celebrating a bit this weekend. Here's a faithful companion for you... well, a companion, in any case.







There's too many of these songs to include them all. Some are old, and some are very sad, but it's a well-known theme.

Another narrative buster

The man early reports were itching to identify as some kind of alt-right NRA nut shooting up the liberal press turns out to be a shotgun-toting guy with a Hispanic surname, no obvious political connection, basically a disturbed young man with a history of scary obsessions.  Here's the lawsuit that started his vendetta against the Annapolis newspaper in 2011.  He believed the newspaper painted him in an unfair light after his guilty plea on an internet harassment charge.  His terrified harassment target has long since moved out of state and sleeps with a gun by her bed.  It's a shame no one at the newspaper office was similarly armed.

As ithers see us

HotAir looks at a poll on how Rs and Ds misperceive each other:

If you replace "Agnositcs or atheists" with "unaffiliated," the Rs are a little less off:  the portion of Ds would be 26%.

Might Be Fun

An alternative reality fiction called Vikingverse. I don’t know anything about it beyond what’s at that page, but it could be of interest to some.