Sometimes, a week really is a short time in politics.
Democracy dies in complacency
One of the things I remember about 2016 was the misplaced complacency of so many liberals about the absurdity of (a) the prospect of a Trump presidency and (b) the fact that he would pose any serious danger to the republic even if he were elected. I’m having the same feelings about the complacency surrounding the apparent absurdity of Trump’s railings against the rigged and fraudulent election that is supposedly denying him a second term.
The establishment view is that Biden’s succession is secure. All that remains is some tidying up, certification of votes by states, etc. And the then the Electoral College meets and Biden’s election is formally confirmed.
On the other hand…
Why is the Republican establishment apparently supporting Trump’s nonsense and funding legal challenges to the electoral results in several states?
It seems unlikely that there’s something really sinister going on — if there were it would surely have been picked up. Or is there some stunt that’s being planned to delay the final results of the counts to the point where the decision on a state’s delegates to the electoral college is left to Republican governors of those states?
Long read of the Day
Kurt Vonnegut: the Paris Review interview
Unforgettable interview. He was a prisoner of war in Dresden the night the city was firebombed — which was the origin of his Slaughterhouse Five.
Vaccine hysteria: the stock market is crazy — as usual
A quote I picked up from a newsletter today — and I can’t remember which!
For the first time in forever, investors snapped up beaten down “value” stocks including airlines like American along with travel and leisure companies. The Covid-induced collapse in travel and non-homebound entertainment crushed these stocks the last nine months.
At the same time, investors dumped high-flying tech companies like Netflix, Zoom and Amazon on the theory that we will all soon evacuate our work-from-home caves and trudge to our offices, see movies in theatres and shop in real life stores.
Wait, really? Hang on. This all seems pretty nuts.
One in five Covid-19 patients are diagnosed with a mental illness within three months. Which is why being blasé about younger people catching it is foolish. Link.
Matt Drudge abandons Trump.. Seems there’s no honour among sleazebags. Link
This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!
A succession of studies during the pandemic have described the scale of the anti-vax movement and the strength of its online presence (see also posts on July 7, July 15, August 11). Politico reports a Eurobarometer survey stating that nearly half of Europeans believe that vaccines are a danger to health. Last month The Lancet carried a story based on a study made by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. It found that one in six British people were unlikely to agree to being vaccinated, and a similar proportion were undecided. Traffic on social media was growing. Globally, 31 million people followed anti-vaccine groups on Facebook and 17 million were subscribing to similar accounts on YouTube. A more parochial investigation of Totness published this week in the Guardian, found a thriving Facebook community opposed to face masks, lockdown, and vaccination.
It might be argued that such surveys do not matter. Despite the Pfizer breakthrough, there is no vaccine available today, no real-life decision to make. Opinion is bound to change once there is a call from the GP surgery. The question is what the take-up will then be, given that the online anti-vax movement is evidently capable to responding negatively to any claimed medical advance. It needs to be somewhere near 95% fully to eradicate the virus.
The issue constitutes an interesting case history for the capacity of digital communication to shape private behaviour. There is a tendency in the critical literature to assume that networked messages have a direct effect on the actions of those who receive them. That is what power means. The fertility of the conspiracies, the scale of the readership and of the investment in them by advertisers, lead to the expectation that consumers will do things they otherwise would not do if they relied solely on more traditional forms of communication.
In this instance the online-messaging will compete with conventional newspaper, radio and television outlets which at least in Britain are united in their support of the scientific breakthrough, even though some opponents are finding their way onto chat shows. For all the damage caused to the standing of politicians and administrators during the pandemic, medical researchers retain authority. The roll-out of the vaccine will start with care-home residents, who are unlikely to be spending their enclosed days following Facebook conspiracy theories, and with eighty-year-olds in the community who will not share the online-habits of eighteen year-olds. Then there are the opinions of close friends and relatives whose views you respect and whose respect you do not want to lose.
I dare not contemplate the response were I to tell my children that I have decided to let nature take its course.
Typically astute post. I agree with him that the vaccine will be an interesting test case. People say all kinds of misleading and/or daft things to the poor wretches who work for polling companies. But I’m willing to bet that if proof of vaccination becomes the criterion deciding whether you can legally resume some semblance of ‘normal’ life, then there will be few refuseniks.
See also David’s elegant riposte to Milord Sumption who, in his Cambridge Freshfields Lecture of October 27, denounced the political response to the pandemic as “the most significant interference with personal freedom in the history of our country.”
For some reason, I always think of Lord Sumption as Lord Sumptuous. He reminds me of a cat which has not only swallowed the cream, but has also obtained a controlling interest in United Dairies. As David observes, he is “a wearer of power braces, a man with a high regard for both his principles and his intellect.”
Controlling advanced chip manufacturing in the 21st century may well prove to be like controlling the oil supply in the 20th. The country that controls this manufacturing can throttle the military and economic power of others. The United States recently did this to China by limiting Huawei’s ability to outsource its in-house chip designs for manufacture by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), a Taiwanese chip foundry. China may respond and escalate via one of its many agile strategic options short of war, perhaps succeeding in coercing the foundry to stop making chips for American companies. If negotiations fail, China might take drastic measures, turning the tables on the United States. On the more modest end of the spectrum, China might start some type of trade war with Taiwan to ensure access, following the playbook Beijing used to coerce Korea over Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) or Australia over its recent decision to lead a call for investigating the origins of the novel coronavirus. On the more extreme end, these Taiwanese chip foundries might be subject to an aggressive campaign of sabotage. And even though observers of the region might downplay the risk, it is not impossible that this could be used as a part of a casus belli for China’s long-held desire to reunify by force. Such is the importance of chips in this era.
Either way, Washington should be worried. If the United States were to be deprived of access to these foundries, the U.S. defense and consumer electronics industries would be set back for at least five years. Moreover, because China is investing in its own chip foundries, it could become the world leader in technology for the next decade or more. That’s why it was encouraging to see Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate propose $25 billion to help America’s semiconductor industry. But this should only be the start…
Interesting essay. It would have been even more worrying if Trump had won. The big question is whether US pressure on the Chinese tech companies could eventually lead China to move on Taiwan. Unlikely, still, but…
This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better then why not subscribe? It’s free. One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. And there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is already crowded enough!
Yesterday’s post about the fact that Joe Biden’s ancestors came from Ballina, the town where I was born, prompted a flow of satirical comments in the WhatsApp channel of my extended family across the Irish Sea. The one I enjoyed most was this:
Trump may be leaving the White House, but he will always be with us. Alas.
While you watch Donald Trump’s presidency stagger to its ugly end, always keep in mind how it began: Trump entered the political world on the back of the “birther” conspiracy theory, a movement whose importance was massively underestimated at the time. Aside from its racist undertones, think about what a belief in birtherism really implied. If you doubted that Barack Obama was born in the United States—and about a third of Americans did, including 72 percent of registered Republicans—then that meant you also believed that Obama was an illegitimate president. That meant, in other words, you believed that everyone—the entire American political, judicial, and media establishment, including the White House and Congress, the federal courts and the FBI, all of them—was complicit in a gigantic plot to swindle the public into accepting this false commander in chief. A third of Americans had so little faith in American democracy, broadly defined, they were willing to think that Obama’s entire presidency was a fraud.
That third of Americans went on to become Trump’s base. Over four years, they continued to applaud him, no matter what he did, not because they necessarily believed everything he said, but often because they didn’t believe anything at all. If everything is a scam, who cares if the president is a serial liar? If all American politicians are corrupt, then so what if the president is too? If everyone has always broken the rules, then why can’t he do that too?
Applebaum’s argument is that while Trump’s current behaviour may seem pathetic or oathologically erratic, it is in fact part of a longer-term strategy:
Even if Trump is forced to make a grudging concession speech, even if Biden is sworn in as president on January 20, even if the Trump family is forced to pack its Louis Vuitton suitcases and flee to Mar-a-Lago, it is in Trump’s interest, and a part of the Republican Party’s interest, to maintain the fiction that the election was stolen. That’s because the same base, the base that distrusts American democracy, could still be extremely useful to Trump, as well as to the Republican Party, in years to come.
Certainly these voters can be used to discredit and demean Biden’s presidency. Just as Trump once helped convince millions of Americans that Obama was illegitimate, so he will now seek to convince Americans that Biden is illegitimate…
Sorry to make you choke on your muesli, but there might be something in this.
On the first news of a possible vaccine, what happens?
Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says. Democrats blast FTC/Zoom settlement because users won’t get compensation.Link
Biden has a plan for tackling Covid-19.Link. Trouble is, he doesn’t yet have any authority to act.
Danny Kuo’s Staircase. How to build storage vertically. Clever and functional. Link
This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!
Nobody who’s been to a Sharon Shannon concert will ever make the mistake of thinking that an accordion is merely a squeeze-box.
The sweet-bitter moment
Don’t get me wrong: I’m delighted — and relieved — that Joe Biden won. But I’m also afraid that his Presidency might be just a brief interlude in an inexorable downhill slide towards autocracy because he’ll be governing a polity that is fundamentally broken, and he will lack the levers needed to reverse the slide. It’s the sheer narrowness of his win that’s so alarming. 48m Americans voted for Trump. And this time they did not have the excuse that they didn’t know what he was like, or what he stood for.
1 But first, the sweet side of all this. Joe Biden and I have two things in common. The first is that we both hail from the same town in Ireland — Ballina in Co Mayo although his connections go back some distance in time — to the Great Famine of the 1850s in fact. His great-great-great grandfather, Edward Blewitt, had been a surveyor who had worked on the Ordnance Survey and, during the extremes of the famine, was employed to run schemes for alleviating the plight of the poor in the district. But eventually, dismayed by the futility of the exercise, he emigrated to the US and set himself up as a land-surveyor in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He died there, 20 years after he had left Ballina. The rest is now history. (Biden was born in Scranton.)
I was born in Ballina in 1946, and lots of my extended family still live there and thereabouts. Rightly, this momentous event is largely unrecorded — unlike the birth, two years earlier, of Mary Bourke who — as Mary Robinson — became Ireland’s first woman President (and who I met when Cambridge was the first university to give her an honorary degree after she became President. She and I had a very funny conversation about Ballina at a tea-party after the degree ceremony, but that’s a story for another time.) So I look forward to the moment when those two Presidents — one former, the other new, finally get to meet.
The other thing we have in common is that we both love the poetry of Seamus Heaney. During the campaign, Biden remembered the appositeness of Heaney’s great poem, The Cure at Troy. Here’s a snatch of him reading from it:
2 Now the bitter side. Unless something unexpected happens — for example, the Democrats managing to scrape a majority together in the Senate — Biden will be completely hamstrung by Mitch McConnell. Not a single piece of significant legislation will make it onto the Statute Book. It will be like Obama all over again — although the mood music will be very different.
But the most worrying thing is the number of people who voted for Trump, and what they might represent for the future.
One hot evening in late June 1996, the telephone on my desk in Beirut rang with one of the more extraordinary messages I was to receive as a foreign correspondent. “Mr Robert, a friend you met in Sudan wants to see you,” said a voice in English but with an Arabic accent. At first I thought he meant another man, whose name I suggested. “No, no, Mr Robert, I mean the man you interviewed. Do you understand?” Yes, I understood. And where could I meet this man? “The place where he is now,” came the reply. I knew that Bin Laden was rumoured to have returned to Afghanistan but there was no confirmation of this. So how do I reach him? I asked. “Go to Jalalabad – you will be contacted.”
A month later. “CLACK-CLACK-CLACK.” It was as if someone was attacking my head with an ice-pick. “CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK.” I sat up. Someone was banging a set of car keys against the window of my room in the Spinghar Hotel. “Misssster Robert,” a voice whispered urgently. “Misssster Robert.” He hissed the word “Mister.” Yes, yes, I’m here. “Please come downstairs, there is someone to see you.” It registered only slowly that the man must have climbed the ancient fire escape to reach the window of my room. I dressed, grabbed a coat – I had a feeling we might travel in the night – and almost forgot my old Nikon. I walked as calmly as I could past the reception desk and out into the early afternoon heat…
The fractures were there from the start. Trump insisted on wearing the pants in the family, and when supplication didn’t flow from Fox News Channel he would make eyes at OAN and Newsmax, which rankled Murdoch. Trump also demands loyalty for the pleasure of his intimacies, and Murdoch couldn’t abide. He has famously called Trump a “phony“ and “fucking idiot,” and as early as the summer of 2017 was not deterring his many journalistic outlets from sniping at Trump and his family. One of the biggest anti-Trump stories, about the president’s mistresses, was broken by Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, and Fox’s Chris Wallace bedeviled the president during the reelection campaign with a slashing interview.
The final cause for separation, if you want to call it that, came on Election Night, when Fox became the first to call Arizona for Joe Biden, the New York Times reported, prompting Jared Kushner to contact Rupert Murdoch and a Trump aide to demand a retraction. For the Trump team, this had to be a bigger betrayal than finding Rupert in bed with Bernie Sanders. As liberals blinked hard in astonishment and began discovering a sudden, unfamiliar respect for Fox over its projection, there wasn’t much marriage left to save. Trump and Fox had only the details of the split to resolve.
Trump was useful to Murdoch and Fox for a while. Now he isn’t.
The ‘Crown Consultancy’ idea: stop outsourcing thinking
From the FT…
Boris Johnson’s government is quietly working on creating its own in-house consultancy arm — dubbed “Crown Consultancy” — to cut its dependence on high-charging private sector firms.
The idea, driven by efficiency minister Theodore Agnew and championed by Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings, would bring bright civil servants and graduates together in a new division to improve delivering policies across Whitehall.
There’s a lot of reliance on consultancies,” said one official close to the project. “It would be sensible to look at what we can do internally, rather than externally.”
There have long been concerns over the spiralling costs spent on consultants by the government. According to the research firm Tussell the UK government spent £2.6bn on just eight consultancies between 2016 and 2020. These were: the UK firms PwC, KPMG, Deloitte, EY and PA Consulting; the US firms McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group. Once, when I was working on a small consultancy gig in Whitehall, I was in the same office as a group of ‘consultants’ from one of the big firms. They had been drafted in at short notice because one of the Department’s junior ministers was pathologically unable to sign off any proposal unless he could cover his ass by having it vetted beforehand by one of the big consulting firms. They sent in a bunch of fresh-faced graduates who seemed to know very little about government. These kids beavered away for a week, mostly just interviewing the civil servants involved in the decision, and then wrote up the interviews into a ‘report’ (no doubt accompanied by a slide deck). They were billed at £2,500 per day, which in those days was real money. The whole thing was clearly an established kind of racket: the firms were security blankets for ministers — and, sometimes, for civil servants. For the firms, the government was the gift that kept on giving.
The FT piece has a nice quote, which rings true to me:
Lord Agnew, a former businessman now based in the Cabinet Office, last month claimed in a leaked letter that Whitehall had been “infantilised” by “an unacceptable” reliance on expensive consultants.
Precisely. This is just about the only thing on which Dominic Cummings and I agree.
The gig economy is here to stay. Now let’s humanise it
the gig economy might provide a useful case study. At the moment, most of the challenges to platform-based enterprises such as Uber and Deliveroo have involved trying to shoehorn them into legal frameworks that were designed for a pre-platform age. This is a piecemeal approach that has so far produced erratic results. In February, for example, a French court ruled that a Deliveroo courier should be treated as an employee rather than a contractor. In September, Spain’s supreme court made a similar ruling about another delivery startup, Glovo, after lower courts had made a series of contradictory rulings.
We can’t go on like this. A better way of thinking about it would be to recognise that we’re in a position analogous to that of Britain in the 1830s and 1840s when parliament passed the Factory Acts to regulate the conditions of novel kinds of employment as the Industrial Revolution roared ahead. The Factories Act of 1847, for example, colloquially known as the 10 Hours Act, met a long-standing demand by mill workers for a 10-hour day. Other legislation regulated the use of child labour and other practices.
We need that kind of comprehensive approach to the gig economy because, as other kinds of employment get automated away, it will be what provides employment for an increasing number of people (just as the factories of industrialising Britain provided jobs for people coming off the land)…
Other, possibly interesting, links
Books to read in lockdown. From the Irish TimesLink
QAnon Followers Frustrated After Q Calls For Respecting Election Results, Uniting Behind Biden. Yes, you read that correctly. But remember, it’s from The Onion. Link.
This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!
America’s Next Authoritarian Will Be Much More Competent
Sobering and insightful essay by Zeynep Tufecki, who is one of the sharpest minds writing about our current catastrophes.
TL;DR summary: Trump was ineffective and easily beaten. A future strongman won’t be.
Trump is just one more example of the many populists on the right who have risen to power around the world: Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, my home country. These people win elections but subvert democratic norms: by criminalizing dissent, suppressing or demonizing the media, harassing the opposition, and deploying extra-legal mechanisms whenever possible (Putin’s opponents have a penchant for meeting tragic accidents). Orbán proudly uses the phrase illiberal democracy to describe the populism practiced by these men; Trump has many similarities to them, both rhetorically and policy-wise.
But there’s one key difference between Trump and everyone else on that list. The others are all talented politicians who win elections again and again.
In contrast, Trump is a reality-TV star who stumbled his way into an ongoing realignment in American politics, aided by a series of events peculiar to 2016 that were fortunate for him: The Democrats chose a polarizing nominee who didn’t have the requisite political touch that can come from surviving tough elections; social media was, by that point, deeply entrenched in the country’s politics, but its corrosive effects were largely unchecked; multiple players—such as then–FBI Director James Comey—took consequential actions fueled by their misplaced confidence in Hillary Clinton’s win; and Trump’s rivals in the Republican primaries underestimated him. He drew a royal flush.
But ‘Trumpism’ is now a powerful force in American democracy — a contemporary kind of Peronism. And soon or later a really astute demagogue in the Orban/Erdogan league will spot its potential.
Interesting also to see the signs that the Republicans are done with Trump. When Fox called Arizona for Biden and Trump phoned Rupert Murdoch to demand a retraction, Murdoch curtly refused. For him and Mitch McConnell and the others Trump has been a useful idiot. He delivered what they wanted — tax cuts, umpteen Conservative senior judges and a stacked Supreme Court. So he’s now surplus to requirements — and becoming a real embarrassment, even to them. So he’s toast. He just doesn’t know it yet.
Lockdown sceptics vs zero-Covid: who’s got it right?
Tim Harford has a really good post on his blog, bringing his customary tone of good sense and rationality to a debate that has become vicious (especially in the Tory party):
Some lockdown sceptics have advanced a variety of dishonest or deluded views over the course of the pandemic. Months ago, one correspondent wrote to assure me that the infection fatality rate was just one in 2,000. This implies 33,500 deaths if the whole UK population was infected. We have suffered 67,500 excess deaths; am I to conclude that we have all had the virus twice? Then, in what now looks like a line from a Shakespearean tragedy, there is Donald Trump’s early declaration: “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
But there is an honest argument against lockdowns — namely that while the disease is dangerous, the lockdown cure is worse. The virus has the power to kill many more people than died in the first wave. Yet in England and Wales, the vast majority of those who have died were 65 or over, with two-thirds of them aged 75 or over. The honest lockdown sceptic asks, is it wise or fair to impose radical limits on the freedom of all with no apparent end in sight? Thousands of lives are being saved — but millions of young people are seeing their prospects sacrificed. Is their sacrifice worthwhile?
The zero-Covid position reaches the opposite conclusion from the same starting point: since there will be no end to the suffering as long as the virus is circulating, the answer is to eliminate the virus in the UK and Ireland. We are island nations, like New Zealand. If community transmission can be stopped, then border controls — plus contact tracing for the occasional outbreak — can keep the virus out.
The most prominent British advocates of the zero-Covid approach are the scientists calling themselves “Independent Sage”. In July, they explained that the first step would be to apply lockdowns until we reached “control”, defined as one new case per million people per day. Thereafter, a contact- tracing system, plus support for people in isolation, would eliminate the virus on these shores.
Both sides of this debate hold out tempting rewards if only we are willing to suffer now. But both are mistaken. Zero-Covid looks prohibitively costly for European countries. A relentless lockdown would be needed even to reach the “control” step, with no guarantee against backsliding.
And his conclusion. There’s no magic bullet, just hard slog and competence, bot alien concepts to the Johnson administration.
Germany has learnt to live with the virus as a constant yet contained threat. The secret is no secret: lockdown suppressed the virus enough to allow contact tracing, mask-wearing and general vigilance to take over. In July, at a time when the British were still emerging from their homes, blinking in the sunlight, I visited Bavaria. Masks and sanitisers were everywhere, but it was thriving.
The UK had the same opportunity but we are squandering it. Our contact-tracing system was slow to grind into action, our testing capacity was overwhelmed by the predictable surge in demand as schools reopened and, most recently, a technical error led to many thousands of positive test results not entering the contact tracing system promptly.
Forget the clash of grand ideas, of Sweden versus New Zealand. Just stop bungling the basics. It is not much of a slogan. But it might just be a solution.
Great post.
How introducing friction into a communications system improves things
The holy grail of geeks is to make things “frictionless” — to do away with all the cumbersome blockages and delays of analog life. And, to a great extent, they have achieved their goal — to make everything just a click away — in the process achieving what the economist Ronald Coase envisaged in his great 1937 article, “The Nature of the Firm”. In that, he explained why it is that people choose to form partnerships, companies and other business entities rather than trading bilaterally through contracts on a market. (It was all about whether the ‘transaction costs’ of contracting out were higher than the costs of doing it inside the organisation: that’s why the great US automobile firms wound up running rubber plantations in tropical countries.) One of the most important affordances of the Internet was that it often dramatically reduced transaction costs, and therefore changed the shape of corporations.
As the so-called “marketplace of ideas” was inexorably sucked into social media, the same affordance was deployed. The transaction cost of having to copy and paste a piece of information before passing it on to someone else was retuced to zero with a simple ‘Like’, ‘Share’ or re-tweet button. Which meant that ideas, lies, information (and disinformation) started to circulate with the speed of light. When feedback loops operate at that speed, any control engineer can tell you what happens to systems whose behaviour is determined by that feedback.
All of which is by way of background to an interesting piece by Kevin Roose in today’s New York Times. The TL;DR summary is “On Election Day, Facebook and Twitter Did Better by Making Their Products Worse”. What happened is that the social media platforms effectively introduced some friction into the feedback loops.
For months, nearly every step these companies have taken to safeguard the election has involved slowing down, shutting off or otherwise hampering core parts of their products — in effect, defending democracy by making their apps worse.
They added friction to processes, like political ad-buying, that had previously been smooth and seamless. They brought in human experts to root out extremist groups and manually intervened to slow the spread of sketchy stories. They overrode their own algorithms to insert information from trusted experts into users’ feeds. And as results came in, they relied on the calls made by news organizations like The Associated Press, rather than trusting that their systems would naturally bring the truth to the surface. ImageAn alert on the Facebook newsfeed notifying users that votes are still being counted. An alert on the Facebook newsfeed notifying users that votes are still being counted.
Nowhere was this shift more apparent than at Facebook, which for years envisioned itself as a kind of post-human communication platform. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, often spoke about his philosophy of “frictionless” design — making things as easy as possible for users. Other executives I talked to seemed to believe that ultimately, Facebook would become a kind of self-policing machine, with artificial intelligence doing most of the dirty work and humans intervening as little as possible.
But in the lead-up to the 2020 election, Facebook went in the opposite direction. It put in place a new, cumbersome approval process for political advertisers, and blocked new political ads in the period after Election Day. It throttled false claims, and put in place a “virality circuit-breaker” to give fact-checkers time to evaluate suspicious stories. And it temporarily shut off its recommendation algorithm for certain types of private groups, to lessen the possibility of violent unrest. (On Thursday, The New York Times reported that the company was taking other temporary measures to tamp down election-related misinformation, including adding more friction to the process of sharing posts.)
I don’t like the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor but it does provide a way of thinking about how a market operates. We saw what happened when stock markets were effectively automated — when trading is mostly done by machines. And then we saw how that led to the epidemic of so-called High Speed Trading described by Michael Lewis in his book, Flash Boys — and the instabilities that introduced into what was once a marketplace for investors valuing companies on the basis of long-term prospects as well as short-term gains. Similarly, our marketplace of ideas has become a space also distorted by high-speed ‘trading’ in every kind of information, good, bad and indifferent. So we shouldn’t be surprised at where we’ve got to. Going frictionless is great — until it isn’t.
Other, possibly interesting, links
FDR’s 1994 State of the Union address. This is what politicians used to be like. Link
Bentley will ditch internal combustion engines by 2030. Don’t all rush to buy a collector’s item. Link.
This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!
“Really I suppose what I hate myself most on is showing other people where to dig, not having time to do intensive and exclusive digging myself. I am a dowser and not a navvy.”
Queenie Leavis
A bit like a blogger, really.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
I struggled with this today, given the thoughts below.
What I kept thinking of was the famous reply that Ben Franklin gave to the woman who accosted him as he emerged from the final day of deliberation of 1787 with the question,”Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
Franklin answered, “A republic… if you can keep it.”
In the end, I came up with this:
Joan Baez singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic in 1963.
The inescapable reality of the election results is that Trumpism remains a powerful current in American politics. It’s akin to political tendencies in other parts of the world where strongmen have co-opted democracies. The president’s brand of demagogic nationalism, his ceaseless campaigning through every year of his term and his unrepentant embrace of divisive messaging and tactics have clearly mobilized tremendous support.
“Trump over-performed in myriad polling measures. There would be no landslides, only squeakers and clenched jaws — and, possibly, court fights,” wrote my colleague Monica Hesse. “Win or lose, Trumpism will not have been swept into the dustbin of history; it will remain all over the furniture. It’s part of the furniture.”
Indeed, it may wholly define right-wing politics in the United States for years to come. “Trumpism might be becoming America’s version of Peronism,” tweeted Dan Slater, director at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan, referring to Argentina’s own legacy of populist nationalism. “Highly mobilizing, highly polarizing, not always in power, but never going away.”
And this from Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times…
Naturally, a Biden win, even a slight one, is a better outcome for liberalism than Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016. But the absence of a landslide and a strongly Democratic Senate will sting. Four years ago, the party could cite excuses and circumstances: an unpopular candidate, an opponent with no political history to attack.
This time, they have no such solace. Democrats nominated a seasoned and unobjectionable moderate. They ran on the fundamentals of public health and prosperity. They amassed a Fort Knox of campaign money. They had the encouraging precedent of the 2018 midterm elections. Above all, they had Mr Trump’s ethical and administrative record to go after. All the raw materials were there for a crushing victory that would double as a purgative moment for the republic: a clean-up of sorts.
Yes, a Californian running mate was never ideal — the election hinges on the Midwest and the south-east — but there was no clear alternative to Kamala Harris. As for his avoidance of mass political rallies, Mr Biden could hardly run as a slayer of the coronavirus pandemic while holding them.
At this point in the search for unforced errors, the trail runs cold. Liberals are left to accept a deeper fact about the US. Far more than when the phrase started doing the rounds a generation ago, this is a 50-50 nation, or thereabouts.
And so the question is: how did that come to pass? That’s a long story, and some of it is peculiarly American (particularly the racism that runs through that society like the message in a stick of Blackpool rock). But not all of it; there’s an element of it also that other Western democracies share, namely that this pathological polarisation has been a long time building — by my reckoning since the collapse of the post-war Keynesian order from 1971 onwards, and the subsequent ideological infection of ruling elites in most democracies by neoliberalism. We are now reaping the whirlwind of what we sowed in those decades.
And Trumpism isn’t going away. It’s the new Peronism. Time to brush up on Argentinian history.
Other, possibly interesting, links
How Stanford voted. Interesting (and, to me, surprising). Very few Republicans there, it seems. Link
First words spoken or sent on various communication systems. Link
So who emptied that Bitcoin wallet of nearly a billion dollars? Now we know — or at any rate Uncle Sam does: the hacker who did it (“Individual X”, if you please) panicked after being threatened by the original owner of the wallet (now behind bars) and handed the loot over to the Department of Justice. Link.
This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!
About last night… After what felt like a few hundred hours of watching election results trickle in, I assumed the fetal position on my couch and moan-cried for about thirty minutes. It was a combination of things. Part of it was personal: I just spend so much time thinking, writing, tweeting, and distracting myself with this all-encompassing political story that I may have been momentarily overwhelmed. Maybe I was just considering how much dough I spent on various races around the country (I don’t want to overstate how invested I am in this election, but I think ActBlue just repossessed my car). The bigger part was less personal: Trump has been basically the same guy since he’s been president, and knowing this, tens of millions of Americans still voted for him. On some level, we are broken. I get the national divide and I frankly agree with many of the complaints coming from rural America. I understand some of the anger, but I’ve never understood expressing that anger through Trump. And watching him go full authoritarian as the votes were still being counted made me especially sad for my parents who had to watch the rise of a strongman during the buildup to WWII in Poland and Germany when they were kids, and who now have to watch half of America embrace a guy who deploys the same political tactics. But then I stopped crying. Partly because no one owns this lib! Partly because I realized that among the challenges my parents have faced, nothing about this election ranks in the top thousand. And partly because, regardless of the premature self-coronation of the mad king, in America, no election is over until every last Retweet is counted. And while there are very fine people on both sides, I have a feeling Biden’s side is going to have enough electoral votes to win. But it’s gonna be damn close. If my math is right, Biden got more votes than any candidate in history and Trump got more votes than he did in 2016. Stress and confusion in 2020. Who saw that coming? And one can safely assume, there’s much more to come between now and the end of this election season. (One irony of presidential elections is that each one takes four years off my life.)
That resonates with me, and I’m sure with may other people. It’s the size of Trump’s vote, after four years of his criminality, that’s the most depressing part of it all.
Long read of the day
Code, on wheels. Software will play a central role in the automobiles of the future by Frederic Filloux.
If Biden ultimately wins, pollsters and the data journalists who rely on them will claim some vindication. To be fair, FiveThirtyEight’s final projections gave Biden less than a 1-in-3 chance of a landslide. The popular vote projections are likely to be pretty accurate. Yet, frustratingly, pollsters can also marshal a defense of their methods if Trump manages a surprise win. After the polling misfires of 2016, Silver and other data journalists went to great lengths to remind readers that no matter how promising the polls looked, a Trump victory could not be ruled out. “A 10 percent chance of winning is not a zero percent chance. In fact, that is roughly the same odds that it’s raining in downtown Los Angeles. And it does rain there,” noted FiveThirtyEight’s final projection.
It’s not all that comforting to Democrats today to know that 9 out of 10 times this election happens in the greater multiverse, Biden will win it. As former FiveThirtyEight writer Mona Chalabi put it, assuming the voice of FiveThirtyEight’s much-derided Fivey Fox mascot, “No matter what happens, I will find a way to say ‘I told you so! That’s how probabilities work!’ ”
It’s not that we should stop trusting polls entirely. They are a flawed but vital tool for campaigns to know where to devote resources, and for campaign journalists to use in reporting. But an entire industry of pundits and soothsayers have turned polling analysis into something more like a religion while proclaiming it a science. Meanwhile, it is increasingly unclear why these projections are useful at all.
Other, possibly interesting, links
How the F@!# Did This Giant Whale Tail Save a Derailed Train?. A rail investigator explains how the Dutch train was saved by a sculpture. Is it any wonder I love Popular Mechanics? Link.
Someone Just Emptied Out a Bitcoin Wallet With $964,000,000 In It. It’s not yet clear if a hacker made off with a gigantic payday, or if the wallet’s long-dormant owner just came out of retirement. Link.
This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!
This week’s Economist cover (with my annotation). Neat graphic.
Quote of the Day
Once, censorship worked by blocking crucial pieces of information. In this era of information overload, censorship works by drowning us in too much undifferentiated information, crippling our ability to focus. These dumps, combined with the news media’s obsession with campaign trivia and gossip, have resulted in whistle-drowning, rather than whistle-blowing: In a sea of so many whistles blowing so loud, we cannot hear a single one.
The researchers had built a plug-in extension for the Google Chrome browser that, they explained, “copies the ads you see on Facebook, so anyone, on any part of the political spectrum, can see them in our public database. If you want, you can enter basic demographic information about yourself in the tool to help improve our understanding of why advertisers targeted you. However, we’ll never ask for information that could identify you. It doesn’t collect your personal information. We take your privacy very seriously.”
So what was the problem? Basically this: the extension has access to not simply public posts on Facebook but also to whatever content the user accessed while logged in. This would include their personal data, of course, but, as is likely in the case on many Facebook pages, also some data from the user’s friends.
A lot of commentary has followed the launch of the iPhone 12, some of it praising Apple for going back to the old design and some complaining about Apple’s inability to do something different from a design perspective. Both sides miss the point: Enduring design doesn’t need constant reinterpretation. It needs tweaking, polishing, and subtle improvement. I think of the iPhone and its design language very similar to Porsche’s design language. Or, for that matter of a classic Leica camera…”.
A win for Joe Biden would only scratch the surface of America’s afflictions
Sobering piece by John Mulholland, the Guardian‘s US Editor.
If the president loses, there will be much talk of a new normality and the need for a democratic reset. Hopes will be voiced for a return to constitutional norms. There will be calls for a return of civility in public discourse and a healing of the partisan divide that scars America. All of that is as it should be. But it ought to come with a recognition that America was broken long before it elected Trump and his departure would be no guarantee that the country will be mended. Many of the systemic issues that afflict the US predate Trump.
His ugly and dysfunctional presidency has distracted from many of the fundamentals that have beset America for decades, even centuries. But they remain stubbornly in place. If he does lose, America will no longer have Trump to blame. Two two-term Democratic presidents over the past 30 years have not significantly affected the structural issues that corrode US democracy and society, and race is always at their heart. The past few months have drawn further attention to the systemic racism and brutality that characterise much policing. But racism in the States is not confined to the police. In fact, it is not confined at all.
When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, there was talk about a post-racial America. But in 2016, at the end of Obama’s eight-year term, the non-partisan thinktank the Pew Research Center estimated that the median wealth of white households in the US was $171,000 (£132,000). This was 10 times the median wealth of black households ($17,100). This was a larger gap than in 2007, the year before Obama was elected.
Trump can be blamed for exacerbating racial tensions and giving succour to white supremacists but the racial wealth gap runs deeper than his term of office. As the non-aligned Brookings Institution said this year: “Gaps in wealth between black and white households reveal the effects of accumulated inequality and discrimination, as well as differences in power and opportunity that can be traced back to this nation’s inception.”
There’s also the matter of what happened to Native Americans.
We’re all prisoners of our histories. Back to my General Theory of Incompetent Systems.
Keys to the White House…
… is the name of a forecasting system, developed by political scientist Allan Lichtman for predicting the winner of American presidential elections, based upon the theory of pragmatic voting. (America’s electorate, according to this theory, chooses a president, not according to events of the campaign, but according to how well the party in control of the White House has governed the country.) It’s claimed that the system has correctly forecast the winner of all eight presidential elections from 1984 to 2016, usually months or even years prior to Election Day.
At the moment it’s predicting a Biden victory of 52.2% over 47.8% in the popular vote and 336 to 202 in the Electoral College.
Other, possibly interesting, links
25 Feel-Good Films You’ll Want to Watch Again—and Again. Might be useful for lockdown. Link
Ireland Mourns for Missing Dolphin Fungie – The New York Times. Link Might seem daft, but accurate. Dingle is one of my favourite places in all the world, and this Dolphin was one of its many delights. I still remember the joy on my daughter’s face one day in 1995 when, aged 4, she was able to reach out of the boat and stroke his dorsal fin.
Taiwan marks 200 days without domestic Covid-19 infection. It can be done. You just need a government that knows what it’s doing. Link
This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!
This is one of my favourite pictures. Absolutely no post-production artifice. This is exactly what I photographed early one morning on Nordeinde in The Hague.
Quote of the Day
“When I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?”
Lovely interview by Tim Adams in yesterday’s Observer. It was triggered by publication of Gray’s new book, Cats and the Meaning of Life, which I’ve just ordered on the strength of this conversation.
The most optimistic among us see the Trump era as some sort of momentary insanity, half of the nation under the spell of a conjurer. They believe that the country can be reunited and this period forgotten.
I am not one of those people. I believe what political scientist Thomas Schaller told Bloomberg columnist Francis Wilkinson in 2018: “I think we’re at the beginning of a soft civil war.” If 2018 was the beginning of it, it is now well underway.
Trump is building an army of the aggrieved in plain sight.
It is an army with its own mercenaries, people Trump doesn’t have to personally direct, but ones he has absolutely refused to condemn.
Which is why his defeat in the election is likely to provoke serious disturbances in some places.
Some of these Lincoln Project ads are really powerful. Thanks to CD for pointing me at it.
Why is everyone building an electric pickup truck?
This is a follow-up the the link I posted the other day about the Hummer electric SUV. It seems that lots of auto manufacturers are launching SUV EVs. Why? I thought the whole thing about SUVs is that people bought them because they were bad for the environment? So here’s an explanation from Ars Technica…
Here’s the problem: no one knows who that American electric pickup buyer is. “It’s not like people have been asking for this,” says Jessica Caldwell, the executive director of insights at Edmunds. “I don’t think people have been sitting around and thinking, ‘You now what I need? A pickup with an electric motor.’”
But…
The Hummer, which hasn’t been produced since 2010, has gained a cult status among a certain kind of driver. General Motors wants the car aficionados and gearheads to pay attention: convince them to go electric, and the whole world might follow. To wit, GM has stuffed plenty of nerdery into the electric pickup. It comes with a crab walk feature that lets the truck drive diagonally and in-vehicle graphics developed by video game maker Epic Games. The truck, the first to use GM’s new Ultium batteries, has a 350-mile range. It can do 0 to 60 in three seconds.
Economics for the people
A remarkable essay in. Aeon by Dirk Philipsen of Duke University.
A basic truth is once again trying to break through the agony of worldwide pandemic and the enduring inhumanity of racist oppression. Healthcare workers risking their lives for others, mutual aid networks empowering neighbourhoods, farmers delivering food to quarantined customers, mothers forming lines to protect youth from police violence: we’re in this life together. We – young and old, citizen and immigrant – do best when we collaborate. Indeed, our only way to survive is to have each other’s back while safeguarding the resilience and diversity of this planet we call home.
As an insight, it’s not new, or surprising. Anthropologists have long told us that, as a species neither particularly strong nor fast, humans survived because of our unique ability to create and cooperate. ‘All our thriving is mutual’ is how the Indigenous scholar Edgar Villanueva captured the age-old wisdom in his book Decolonizing Wealth (2018). What is new is the extent to which so many civic and corporate leaders – sometimes entire cultures – have lost sight of our most precious collective quality.
This loss is rooted, in large part, in the tragedy of the private – this notion that moved, in short order, from curious idea to ideology to global economic system. It claimed selfishness, greed and private property as the real seeds of progress. Indeed, the mistaken concept many readers have likely heard under the name ‘the tragedy of the commons’ has its origins in the sophomoric assumption that private interest is the naturally predominant guide for human action. The real tragedy, however, lies not in the commons, but in the private. It is the private that produces violence, destruction and exclusion. Standing on its head thousands of years of cultural wisdom, the idea of the private variously separates, exploits and exhausts those living under its cold operating logic.
Worth reading in full.
Other, perhaps interesting, links
The magic of the tilt-and-turn window. Made in Germany, naturally. Link
I’m a Principled Republican Senator and I’m Suddenly Troubled By the Current State of Politics. Link
Chile restores democratic rule: Neoliberal’s first gunshot has stopped echoing. Link
This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!
Characteristically lucid and informative essay by Francis Fukuyama on the historical background to some of our current problems.
The “democracy” under attack today is a shorthand for liberal democracy, and what is really under greatest threat is the liberal component of this pair. The democracy part refers to the accountability of those who hold political power through mechanisms like free and fair multiparty elections under universal adult franchise. The liberal part, by contrast, refers primarily to a rule of law that constrains the power of government and requires that even the most powerful actors in the system operate under the same general rules as ordinary citizens. Liberal democracies, in other words, have a constitutional system of checks and balances that limits the power of elected leaders.
Democracy itself is being challenged by authoritarian states like Russia and China that manipulate or dispense with free and fair elections. But the more insidious threat arises from populists within existing liberal democracies who are using the legitimacy they gain through their electoral mandates to challenge or undermine liberal institutions…
He goes on to argue that the contemporary attack on liberalism goes much deeper than the ambitions of a handful of populist politicians, and that they would not be as successful as they have been were they not riding a wave of discontent with some of the underlying characteristics of liberal societies.
To understand this, he says, we need to look at the historical origins of liberalism, its evolution over the decades, and its limitations as a governing doctrine.
And therein lies a master-class… Worth reading all the way through.
I’ve always admired Fukuyama’s writing. I was a bit puzzled by his book on Identity which came out a couple of years ago. But in this essay he seems back on form.
When the Worst Man in the World Writes a Masterpiece
This is an enjoyable essay by Alvaro de Menard about an enduring puzzle: how did a vain, shallow, lecherous nobody called James Boswell come to write the greatest biography in the English language?
de Menard begins by painting a succinct pen-portrait of the biographer:
He was a perpetual drunk, a degenerate gambler, a sex addict, whoremonger, exhibitionist, and rapist. He gave his wife an STD he caught from a prostitute.
Selfish, servile and self-indulgent, lazy and lecherous, vain, proud, obsessed with his aristocratic status, yet with no sense of propriety whatsoever, he frequently fantasized about the feudal affection of serfs for their lords. He loved to watch executions and was a proud supporter of slavery.
Boswell combined his terrible behavior with a complete lack of shame, faithfully reporting every transgression, every moronic ejaculation, every faux pas. The first time he visited London he went to see a play and, as he happily tells us himself, he “entertained the audience prodigiously by imitating the lowing of a cow.”
By all accounts, including his own, he was an idiot. On a tour of Europe, his tutor said to him: “of young men who have studied I have never found one who had so few ideas as you.”
As a lawyer he was a perpetual failure, especially when he couldn’t get Johnson to write his arguments for him. As a politician he didn’t even get the chance to be a failure despite decades of trying.
His correspondence with Johnson mostly consists of Boswell whining pathetically and Johnson telling him to get his shit together.
He commissioned a portrait from his friend Joshua Reynolds and stiffed him on the payment. His descendants hid the portrait in the attic because they were ashamed of being related to him.
Having read the first volume of Boswell’s own diary, which covers his arrival in London and his first years in the capital, that seems plausible. And yet, such an undoubted creep produces this single great work.
de Menard quotes the opinions of Macaulay — who thought that the ‘Life’ succeeded because of Boswell’s vices (he never hears a confidence that he would not betray) — and Thomas Carlyle (who thought the biography the greatest work of the 18th century) en route to an interesting conclusion. “The story of Boswell,” he writes,
is basically the plot of Amadeus, with the role of Salieri being played by Macaulay, by Carlyle, by me, and—perhaps even by yourself, dear reader. The line between admiration, envy, and resentment is thin, and crossing it is easier when the subject is a scoundrel. But if Bozzy could set aside resentment for genuine reverence, perhaps there is hope for us all. And yet…it would be an error to see in Boswell the Platonic Form of Mankind.
Shaffer and Forman’s film portrays Mozart as vulgar, arrogant, a womanizer, bad with money—but, like Bozzy, still somehow quite likable. In one of the best scenes of the film, we see Mozart transform the screeches of his mother-in-law into the Queen of the Night Aria; thus Boswell transformed his embarrassments into literary gold. He may be vulgar, but his productions are not. He may be vulgar, but he is not ordinary.
Lovely stuff.
Other, possibly interesting, links
Obituary of publisher Tom Maschler “No stranger to self-doubt,” but a great publisher also. Maybe the two were connected. Link
Facebook Seeks Shutdown of NYU Research Project Into Political Ad Targeting Apparently research into what they’re doing violates their terms and conditions. Link
Why this presidential election is special — democracy is on the ballot — not just Trump and Biden – Vox Link
Mask-wearing and ‘freedom’ (contd.) Paul Krugman weighs in: “Liberty doesn’t mean freedom to infect other people.”
This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!
