“There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
John von Neumann
Brexit and Trump victories are not just about economics
From Project Syndicate
According to exit polls, Trump won 53% of white male college graduates, and 52% of white women (only 43% of the latter group supported Clinton); he won 47% of white Americans between the ages of 18 and 29, compared to 43% for Clinton; and he beat Clinton by 48% to 45% among white college graduates overall. These Trump supporters do not fit the stereotype at the center of the economic narrative.
Meanwhile, more than half of the 36% of Americans who earn less than $50,000 annually voted for Clinton, and of the remaining 64% of voters, 49% and 47% chose Trump and Clinton, respectively. Thus, the poor were more favorable toward Clinton, and the rich toward Trump. Contrary to the popular narrative, Trump does not owe his victory to people who are most anxious about falling off the economic ladder.
A similar story unfolded in the UK’s Brexit vote, where the “Leave” campaign asserted that the EU’s supposedly burdensome regulations and exorbitant membership fees are holding back the British economy. This hardly amounts to an agenda to fight economic inequality and exclusion, and it is revealing that rich businessmen wrote the largest checks to support Leave.
(Emphasis added). There’s no one single explanation for the two upheavals.
Will climate change data be safe under Trumplethinskin?
This is interesting — and scary:
Alarmed that decades of crucial climate measurements could vanish under a hostile Trump administration, scientists have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent servers in hopes of safeguarding it from any political interference.
The efforts include a “guerrilla archiving” event in Toronto, where experts will copy irreplaceable public data, meetings at the University of Pennsylvania focused on how to download as much federal data as possible in the coming weeks, and a collaboration of scientists and database experts who are compiling an online site to harbor scientific information.
“Something that seemed a little paranoid to me before all of a sudden seems potentially realistic, or at least something you’d want to hedge against,” said Nick Santos, an environmental researcher at the University of California at Davis, who over the weekend began copying government climate data onto a nongovernment server, where it will remain available to the public. “Doing this can only be a good thing. Hopefully they leave everything in place. But if not, we’re planning for that.”
As the old joke goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. If I were a climate scientist I would share these concerns. After all, Trumplethinskin has appointed a climate-change denier as head of the EPA.
Hacking, disinformation and democracy
My take (in Prospect magazine) on Russian interference in the US election.
The CIA has concluded that Russia intervened in this year’s presidential election to help Donald Trump win. Speaking on Fox News the beneficiary of these alleged subterranean efforts retorted, “I think it’s ridiculous. I think it’s just another excuse. I don’t believe it.” And his transition team issued a dismissive statement. “These are the same people,” it stated, “that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’”
Ponder this for a moment. American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Trump’s. They based that conclusion, in part, on finding that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems as well as the Democratic National Committee’s network, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.
That, of course, doesn’t prove that the Russian intervention was decisive in enabling Trump’s victory (though, in the end, the verdict of the Electoral College depended on 80,000 votes). But in a way it doesn’t matter. What matters is that a foreign adversary intervened covertly but adroitly in an American presidential election; that the outcome was the victory of a candidate who seems less belligerent towards Russia than his predecessor; and that the new president is contemptuously dismissive of the analysis of the intelligence services that he is soon to lead…
Quote of the Day
“To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.”
Raymond Williams
Quote of the Day
“Islamophobia is the new anti-Semitism.”
BBC Newsnight journalist who did a report last night on the emergence of far-Right “Identarians’ in Europe.
Peter Thiel’s latest bet
Peter Thiel is the only prominent Silicon Valley figure to publicly support Trump during the election campaign. He famously spoke at the Republican Convention. This is what he said:
Good evening. I’m Peter Thiel. I build companies and I’m supporting people who are building new things, from social networks to rocket ships. I’m not a politician. But neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it’s time to rebuild America.
Where I work in Silicon Valley, it’s hard to see where America has gone wrong. My industry has made a lot of progress in computers and in software, and, of course, it’s made a lot of money. But Silicon Valley is a small place. Drive out to Sacramento, or even just across the bridge to Oakland, and you won’t see the same prosperity. That’s just how small it is.
Across the country, wages are flat. Americans get paid less today than ten years ago. But healthcare and college tuition cost more every year. Meanwhile Wall Street bankers inflate bubbles in everything from government bonds to Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees. Our economy is broken. If you’re watching me right now, you understand this better than any politician in Washington D.C.
And you know this isn’t the dream we looked forward to. Back when my parents came to America looking for that dream, they found it right here in Cleveland. They brought me here as a one-year-old and this is where I became an American. Opportunity was everywhere. My dad studied engineering at Case Western Reserve University, just down the road from where we are now. Because in 1968, the world’s high tech capital wasn’t just one city: all of America was high tech.
It’s hard to remember this, but our government was once high tech, too. When I moved to Cleveland, defense research was laying the foundations for the internet. The Apollo program was just about to put a man on the moon–and it was Neil Armstrong, from right here in Ohio. The future felt limitless.
But today our government is broken. Our nuclear bases still use floppy disks. Our newest fighter jets can’t even fly in the rain. And it would be kind to say the government’s software works poorly, because much of the time it doesn’t even work at all. That is a staggering decline for the country that completed the Manhattan project. We don’t accept such incompetence in Silicon Valley, and we must not accept it from our government.
Instead of going to Mars, we have invaded the Middle East. We don’t need to see Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails: her incompetence is in plain sight. She pushed for a war in Libya, and today it’s a training ground for ISIS. On this most important issue Donald Trump is right. It’s time to end the era of stupid wars and rebuild our country. When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?
Of course, every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I am proud to be an American. I don’t pretend to agree with every plank in our party’s platform; but fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline, and nobody in this race is being honest about it except Donald Trump.
While it is fitting to talk about who we are, today it’s even more important to remember where we came from. For me that is Cleveland, and the bright future it promised. When Donald Trump asks us to Make America Great Again, he’s not suggesting a return to the past. He’s running to lead us back to that bright future.
Tonight I urge all of my fellow Americans to stand up and vote for Donald Trump.
What’s intriguing about that speech is that — except for its endorsement of Trump — it could have been written by thousands of other critics of the neoliberal elites who have misgoverned the US (and other countries) since the 1980s. I agree with most of it — as did Larry Lessig.
“What’s striking about this speech”, Lessig writes, “is, except for its references to Trump”,
how obviously true it is. Something has gone wrong in America. Growth is not spread broadly. Technical innovation is not spread broadly. We were a nation that tackled real and important problems. We have become a nation where — at least among politicians — too much time is spent arguing over the petty. “Who cares?” about which bathroom someone uses — which coming from a gay libertarian must mean, “it’s none of your business.” The wars of the last generation were stupid. We need to focus on building a “bright future” that all of America can share in.
What’s puzzling about this speech is how this brilliant innovator could predicate these words of a Donald Trump presidency. Maybe the excuse is that they were written before the true insanity of that man became unavoidably obvious. Who knows?
Thiel is a really interesting and complicated guy. He’s a born contrarian, but with a genius for making good bets. (The first was PayPal, of which he was a co-founder; another was Facebook, in which he was the first major investor). His book, Zero to One is simultaneously a fascinating and irritating read. He infuriates — and terrifies — journalists because of the way he used his wealth to pursue, and eventually destroy, Gawker. In achieving that he demonstrated that anyone who is sufficiently rich and sufficiently vengeful can render toothless the First Amendment.
As I said, Thiel has a talent for making big, contrarian bets. With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, it looks as though his gamble on Trump has paid off. At any rate, the New York Times now reports that he has become a key player in Trump’s transition team. So he is probably the person behind Trump’s decision to ‘summon’ the leaders of the big tech companies to a meeting at Trump Tower. “The agenda”, says the Times,
is undisclosed and perhaps still under consideration, but it is unlikely to produce the sort of love fest that existed between President Obama and Silicon Valley. Tech culture celebrates disruption as the tool that produces a better future for all. Many of Donald J. Trump’s supporters, on the other hand, see it as pushing them down.
How to reconcile these views is the task of Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and Facebook board member whose role is to formulate a tech policy for the new administration. Mr. Thiel secured this position by making a contrarian bet on Mr. Trump’s candidacy, which paid off. The round-table invitations are from Mr. Thiel; Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law; and Reince Priebus, the incoming chief of staff.
It’s not clear at the time of writing how many of the Valley’s billionaire geeks will roll up. My hunch — knowing the aphrodisiac effect of power — is that most of them will, though some will sneak in via the service entrance.
UPDATES * Kara Swisher is claiming that Tim Cook (Apple), Larry Page (Google), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook) and perhaps Jeff Bezos (Amazon) are planning to obey the call. * Scott Rosenberg has some stirring advice on what they should tell the Troll-in-Chief.
We’re in a new era, folks. And not just because of Trump.
From the New York Times of December 9:
WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.
They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.
In the months before the election, it was largely documents from Democratic Party systems that were leaked to the public. Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks.
The Republicans, naturally, deny that their networks were hacked. To which the answer is: how would they know?
This story merely confirms what we have intuited for ages, namely that Russian investment in the disruptive potential of the Internet (as part of the ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’) is now beginning to pay off.
Trump: the security risk
Glenn Carle, a retired CIA officer and interrogator, believes that Trump’s temperament had played into Russia’s hands and put the president-elect on a collision course with the CIA. Here’s what he said in the context of Trump’s annoyance at official reports that his campaign had been helped by Russian hacking of the Democrats.
“Look, in my professional assessment as an intelligence officer, Trump has a reflexive, defensive, monumentally narcissistic personality, for whom the facts and national interest are irrelevant, and the only thing that counts is whatever gives personal advantage and directs attention to himself.
“He is about the juiciest intelligence target an intelligence office could imagine. He groans with vulnerabilities. He will only work with individuals or entities that agree with him and build him up, and he is a shockingly easy intelligence ‘target’ to manipulate.”
“Were Trump an intelligence officer himself, he would be removed and possibly charged with having accepted the clandestine support of a hostile power to the harm of the United States”.
With every day that passes, we move further into uncharted territory. All politicians dislike officials who tell them uncomfortable truths. But with Trump this might reach psychotic levels.
Sad but true: ‘Digital natives’ can be, er, naive
This morning’s Observer column:
If Facebook thinks it can outsource the detection of fake news to its users (and thereby avoid accepting editorial responsibility) then Stanford University has some bad news for it. Over the past 18 months the university’s history education group has been testing the ability of 7,800 “digital natives” (ie at middle school, high school and college students) in 12 states to judge the credibility of online information…