Is the "Socialist" tag unfair?
I didn't follow the Florida races closely, so I have no idea whether the press or the Republicans callously misrepresented Donna Shalala, as Bill Scher asserts.
Shalala made an unforced error when she called herself in an October TV interview a “pragmatic socialist,” which her opponent gleefully used in a late attack ad. Shalala clearly misspoke; in the same interview she said, “I’m as far from being a socialist as anyone that you’ll ever meet. I’m a capitalist.” But while it was disingenuous for her opponent to use the truncated clip, if Shalala had a deeper connection with her district, the attack wouldn’t have stuck so easily.Still, if I'd heard Shalala make both those statements, it would take more than the press or her opponent being fair to her to make me think she could be trusted in office. One or the other, if not both, has to be a lie or pandering, if not both.
It's a Mystery
Gun control support drops sharply to 4 year low, Gallup finds. "Whyever would that be?" asks Hot Air.
Source on Differential Cities
I've seen this claim on social media that Biden underperformed Clinton's 2016 numbers everywhere but a few swing state cities, but here's an actual source for it. The source is Richard Baris of Big Data Poll. He's cited by another writer cited by this writer. It's hard to track things back given all the noise around this stuff.
It's not that nice kind of socialism
I picked this up from HotAir, but as far as I can tell it's a snippet from the New York Times, which I won't link to. Still, if it is the NYT, someone's hearing something he'd rather not hear:
The “average white person,” Mr. Gonzalez added, may associate socialism with Nordic countries, but to Asian and Hispanic migrants it recalls despotic “left-wing regimes.”…To make matters worse, that Nordic "socialism" took a hard U-turn on the socialism thing some time back, which is why they still have an economy.
The Fury of the Fatherless
From First Things:
Like Edmund in King Lear, who despised his half-brother Edgar, these disinherited young are beyond furious. Like Edmund, too, they resent and envy their fellows born to an ordered paternity, those with secure attachments to family and faith and country.
That last point is critical. Their resentment is why the triply dispossessed tear down statues not only of Confederates, but of Founding Fathers and town fathers and city fathers and anything else that looks like a father, period. It is why we see generational vituperation toward the Baby Boomers, like the diss of “OK, Boomer” and the epithet “Karen.” It is why bands of what might be called “chosen protest families” disrupt actual family meals. It is why BLM disrupts bedroom communities late at night, where real, non-chosen families are otherwise at peace.
The stink of fear
It's not exactly Atticus Finch, is it?
Why go all-out, launching a boycott campaign targeting Jones Day, and doxxing lawyers, if the whole thing is futile? If Trump can't win, then conservatives are just wasting money that won't be spent on protecting the Senate majority in Georgia?
Winning over the unindoctrinated
David Shor draws lessons from the 2020 election results and concludes that it doesn't look good for credentialed progressives for the next 10 years:
But if we can’t reduce the structural biases that have appeared in the last ten years by changing the rules of the game, we will have to make the hard choice of changing our party so that we can appeal to these non-college-educated voters who are turning against us.
. . .
Turnout was up, but it was up for both parties. According to Nate Cohn’s estimates, Black turnout was probably up by around 8 percent, but non-Black turnout was up by something like 15 to 20 percent. So we had the highest-turnout election in a century, and despite that, we still only won because a bunch of people switched their votes in our direction.Well, a bunch of people switched a bunch of people's votes in his direction, but the question is, were they the same people?
So the median voter in the presidential election is about 50 years old, watches about six hours of TV a day, and mostly gets their news from mainstream sources. And that means that, if you want to influence what this person believes, you’re probably not going to get them at the door or even through a paid message. They’re going to form their opinions based on how the media reports on and characterizes the parties.Luckily, that generally works like a charm for the Party of Highly Intelligent College Types, but there is a dark undercurrent of doubt:
I think the reality now is that whenever any elected Democrat goes out and says something that’s unpopular, unless the rest of the party very forcefully pushes back — in a way that I think is actually very rare within the Democratic Party currently — every Democrat will face an electoral penalty. And that’s awkward. . . . I think that the only option that we have is to move toward the median voter. And I think that really comes down to embracing the popular parts of our agenda and making sure that no one in our party is vocally embracing unpopular things. I know that sounds reactionary.The upshot:
And we also still have a chance to limit how much we need to compromise by winning in Georgia and then passing sweeping structural reforms. But if we don’t, then the reality is that the median voter who gets to determine Senate control is going to remain a non-college-educated 55-year-old in a pretty Republican state who voted for Donald Trump. Probably twice. That’s who we’ll need to win over in order to govern.Good luck with that, unless you start lying a lot more effectively. And sure enough:
When you think through the optimization problem of, “How do we enact the most left-wing legislation possible without running over these trip wires that will make the public turn against us,” one part of it is that there are things that poll badly but are low salience. . . . And then there are also a lot of accounting gimmicks that are very promising. I will point out that we actually did finance a very large section of the ACA by nationalizing the entire student-loan industry.Apparently these lies have been successfully market-tested on the Smart Credentialed demographic.
I always thought I got a decent education--but my alma mater wasn't like this when I was there.
When does it start to be a person, again?
Disney's Star-Wars-universe show "The Mandalorian" is enjoyable science fiction, but it ain't very woke. A recent storyline involved adorable Baby Yoda, who is always hungry, filching and devouring some of the incubated eggs of a minor character who's trying to reunite with her husband and prevent the extinction of her species. Twitter took to its fainting couch.
I don't get the outrage. He wasn't selling them for parts, was he?
Different aims, same tools
From "The Woke Supremacy" by Evan Sayet:
The Russian Socialists chose gulags and work camps, permanent confinement to mental institutions, and exile to frozen tundra. The German socialists opted for the more efficient and effective gas chambers and ovens, while the Chinese socialists, seeking to save on infrastructure and material costs, went with mass starvation and other low-tech means.
While these kinds of atrocities are typically blamed on the ideologies of these various Socialist entities--giving comfort to some that "this time," with today's Socialists embracing a different ideology, things will somehow be different--the fact is that gulags, death camps, and killing fields are not ideologically driven. Who is sent to them is.
We were blind, how can we contrive to stay blind?
I find articles like this hilarious. This one at least tries to figure out what it means to have been so completely wrong about what so many voters think. The author even proposes to view some of President Trump's achievements honestly, painful as that is. In the end, though, he just moans about how wrong all those bad voters are, especially when there are so many of them.
Some of these numbers seem a little fishy
Powerline has a good statistical analysis up.
And again, red flags are not proof of fraud, but they're a sure sign that some serious investigation is in order. Listen to the experts on this.
Trust the experts, or else
I've been deluged with arguments this week from people who blame practically everything that has gone wrong in the U.S. in 2020 on President Trump's crime of not taking COVID seriously enough. It's impossible to engage them in a discussion of any action he took that supposedly stemmed from this improper attitude, or of a result that credibly followed from the action. Instead I hear claims that, if the President had made people understand how seriously they must take the danger, we would somehow have handled better the convulsive rush to universal mail-in voting. If I object that the big problems were not just the difficulty of imposing enough antifraud measure but the concerted opposition to antifraud measures as a cruel and unconstitutional burden on the franchise, I get back an argument that somehow this would have resolved itself reasonably if Orange Man hadn't poisoned the well of public discussion.
Similarly, all the jobs lost? Somehow his fault for not talking the virus seriously. The 200K-plus deaths? Somehow there would have been fewer. Not up for discussion, it's intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. Riots? Arson? Murder? Catch-and-release perpetrators of same? Major problem: his attitude:
(1) Doubt in the public mind.
(2) . . . ?
(3) Bad result.
My own view, of course, is that's it's a lot easier to make the case that, if COVID-restraining measures really aren't working as well as they might in a perfect world, a large part of the explanation is that people are going through the motions on measures they don't believe in, at least in part because reminds them of hearing that eggs are good, then bad, then good for your health. It doesn't help when the most prominent and powerful voices for the most personally costly containment measures treat them with contempt in their own lives whenever they're inconvenient.
At least when President Trump sheds doubt on the effectiveness of a measure, he's acting consistently with his stated beliefs. What I hear him saying is, sure the virus can be dangerous, but some dangers have to be faced. We don't necessarily have a choice of a world in which we can eliminate the danger without bringing on consequences that are even more damaging. We wish we had that option, but acknowledging that we may not is not the same as wanting to kill Grandma. Nor am I entitled to believe that half the country is guilty of attempted murder because they're not as convinced as their not-very-trustworthy betters wish they were.
There Are No General Laws of History
AVI had a post the other day citing an article from the Economist about this same guy; I find this version from the Atlantic more interesting. I disagree sharply with his basic approach, although his five year estimate sounds plausible. Joseph Schumpeter made the same argument in the latter part of his life -- I had thought it was earlier, but the discussion is from 1975.
Marx, of course, thought so too -- for different reasons, he regarded the socialist revolution as inevitable.
Really, though, Nietzsche pegged this mechanism in his lifetime too. Absent God to admire, and absent divine assurance of one's dignity and ultimate ascension, human beings resent each other for their own failures. An elite that has nowhere to go be elite (and large student loans they can't pay back) is likely to resent everything and everyone they see as keeping themselves out of power. It's the way they keep from having to blame themselves.
Come to think of it, Aristotle has a bit to say about this in his Politics, too.
Yet even though this issue recurs throughout our history, and has occurred to great thinkers in several ages, I still reject the notion that Peter Turchin is putting forward. There are no general laws to history.
The basic idea Marx adopted from Hegel was that reality evolves along a set path, which is pre-determined because its evolution is logical. In other words, since each step follows logically, each step has to happen and will happen in a certain way. Thus, Marx believed he could predict the future (at least a few steps out) by understanding the logic at work. He also believed that he and his followers could bring about this future by understanding the process and working towards making the next step come true.There are no laws binding us to this future. We may get there; we may certainly get to a war over the issue of whether we get there. It is not ordained, however. We can pick a different road.That is the basic connection with revolutionary politics. Later Communists were trying to bring about revolution because they believed that capitalism (the ‘thesis’) would fall into revolutionary conflict as it impoverished most people to enrich only some (the ‘antithesis’). The synthesis position, which they called ‘Socialism,’ was something they were working to bring about. Since the violent revolution was a necessary logical step between capitalism and socialism, it was to be pursued ardently. (The Nazis, of course, are “National Socialists,” different from Communists but possessed of the same basic idea about how to proceed).
Now, the important thing is that Marx was wrong (and Hegel probably was too). It turns out that history and economics don’t follow pre-set, logically-determined paths. Countries like the UK and the US adopted different approaches to synthesizing the goods of capitalism with the harms that can follow from it. Other countries found other ways still. It turns out that it is not true that very smart people can ‘see’ the future, and thus it is unlikely that rushing into revolutionary wars is wise because you can’t really be sure of how well they will turn out.
However, you can see how attractive is the idea that smart people could ‘see’ the future and bring about wonderful changes through their brilliance and courage. For more than a century now, people who thought themselves smarter than most others around them have been enamored of the idea.
Since when did disagreement become "disrespectful"?
I was recently in a disagreement with a friend of mine (friend of a friend, more accurately) on social media (he posted something I disagreed with on his wall). Nothing acrimonious, just we see things differently on that particular topic. This friend happens to be black. Another friend of mine who also knows the one I'm disagreeing with came into the conversation with "Mike, sometimes we as white people need to just listen to people of color and not speak."
By Foreign Standards
The NYT sends out a morning email, which this morning is trying to browbeat Trump into conceding the election. (Gore, of course, didn't concede in 2000 until mid-December, which they fail to mention.) "A president is trying to undo an election result: How would you describe that situation in another country?"
Well, if a President in a foreign country were asking for recounts and audits of suspicious votes, I don't think I'd call it anything except the election process playing out. Those are ordinary enough things in close races or races with questions about their conduct.
Fair enough, though: what would we say about an election like this if it happened in a foreign country? It happens that the State Department had a report on an election in Ukraine that it called "rigged." Streiff at RedState, a fellow I've met once and know to be a veteran of unimpeachable taste in Scotch, reports.
You can read the State Department report in their official archives here. Among the reasons they thought the vote was rigged were "Illegal Use of Absentee Ballots (massive electoral fraud was committed through the illegal use of absentee voter certificates).... Opposition Observers Ejected.... North Korean-Style Turnout in the East: (Turnout in the pro-Yanukovych eastern oblasts was unnaturally high)... Mobile Ballot Box Fraud.... Computer Data Allegedly Altered To Favor Yanukovych..."
So basically everything that Trump's lawyers have sworn affidavits for in their appeals to the courts, in other words.
Apparently we call that "rigged." Well, G. W. Bush's State Department did, anyway.
A Small Matter of Formalities
What's the difference anyway? It's all rhetoric, these days, a few old-fashioned folks aside.
Gatlinburg
Rode to Gatlinburg this weekend through the Newfound Gap.
I think this haunted house has been there since I was a boy. If it’s the same one, it has a balcony that is hinged to “fall” an inch or so when you walk out on it. Gives kids quite a jump.
The great thing about Gatlinburg is that it presses right up to the border of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. You can ride down into town, eat at the Mellow Mushroom, get back on your bike, and be in the woods again in less than two minutes.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)