Like other Americans, however, many libertarians think of political parties like sports teams. They want their own team to root for and cannot root for the other teams. Voting Libertarian gives them psychological satisfaction, while in the aggregate diminishing their political impact.
Libertarians should stop thinking of parties as teams and think of them instead as the playoffs. In NFL football terms, The Democrats are the AFC and the Republicans the NFC. To get into the Superbowl, you have to survive the season and the playoffs in your respective conference. In effect, Libertarians want to form their own league which no one but themselves is interested in watching. And they assure themselves of never making the playoffs much less the Superbowl.
Randy Barnett, “Parties Are Not Sports Teams — Parties are the Playoffs”, The Volokh Conspiracy, 2005-02-24
December 7, 2020
QotD: American politics as “the playoffs”
December 4, 2020
Canada used to have a “none of the above” option in federal elections … let’s bring it back
David Warren describes how the “returned ballot” functioned as a “none of the above” vote in Canadian federal elections:
“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Back to the polling station, where the electoral officer is now passing me a ballot, with a hint on how to make an X on it. I am directed to a voting stall.
But I refuse to go there. Instead, I turn earnestly to the officer and say: “I am returning this ballot.”
Chances were, even decades ago, he would be thrown into confusion. So one would explain his job to him. He was supposed to have a book, entitled “Returned Ballots.” Into this he was supposed to transcribe one’s name and address. Getting into the book was one’s only way to avoid the secret ballot. But it was important to get in, to be recorded correctly, rather than as a “spoilt ballot,” as one is counted now if one’s ballot has no X.
After voting, I would check the result, and if not even one returned ballot had been recorded, I could doubt it was legitimate.
Now comes the good part. For returned ballots were supposed to be a separate category in the election tally. It was competing with all the other candidates. If it won a plurality — more returned ballots than the leading candidate — the election was to be formally thrown out, and a by-election called, in which none of the candidates for the thrown out one were allowed to run again. Too, voters could “theoretically” do this over and over, until at least one Party chose a candidate we could stomach.In theory, this was an excellent way for voters to “drain the swamp,” directly, by eliminating the political sleaze in successive groups. In practice — aheu — it was never used. The political sleaze nevertheless spotted the possibility, and had it taken off the books, at both Dominion and Provincial levels. What can I say? They are sleaze.
So the first thing we must do is campaign for the return of the returned ballot, up here; and for its institution in all the other Western nations. Then the second is to impartially, but massively, campaign for its use. It could be the greatest thing since the ancient Athenian ostracon.
November 26, 2020
Fixing the US federal election mechanism to prevent errors or fraud from distorting the results
Down south, our American neighbours held a federal election at the beginning of November. Ignoring the Associated Press trying to annoint the winner, we still don’t legally know who won and the tallies in several states are still being challenged. This is an embarassing situation for the “leaders of the free world” and common sense changes to the way the vote is conducted seem to be the best way to ensure that the results are known quickly and that the results will fairly represent the way the voters chose to exercise their franchise. At Steyn Online, Tal Bachman has a fairly concrete set of suggestions that would be a significant improvement over the system in place today:
“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
First, it’s run by a single-purpose, rigorously impartial, devoutly transparent federal entity overseeing federal elections (about which more below).
Yes, I know we’re all sick of the federal Leviathan. I know it already has far too much power. It’s just that in this case, we don’t have much choice, do we? We’re going on well over a century of chronic Democrat Party presidential vote-rigging; and it appears they just ran one of their classic tricks again just a few weeks ago. At some point, pro-America voters have to stop making excuses for why they shouldn’t try solutions to these nation-destroying problems, and just try them.
Yes, I know this would require a constitutional amendment. But let’s assume for now we could get one of those passed.
Second: The new federal entity — let’s call it Elections USA — would then divide the nation into voting districts of equal size for purposes of federal election (that could occur within pre-existing congressional districts). Elections USA would then further subdivide the voting districts into smaller units. Working with the postal service, Elections USA would then draw up a list of voters in each unit, and designate a voting station for residents of that particular unit.
Third: In preparation for election day, Elections USA would send out flyers informing households of where to vote. The information would also be made available on the Elections USA website.
Fourth: On election day, voters travel to their designated voting stations: an elementary or high school, a union hall, a community center, whatever.
Each voting station is watched over by police or other security guards.
As voters approach, they join a quick-moving line. At the front, they present two pieces of government issued ID, at least one with a photo. A volunteer finds the voter on her list of voters for that unit. (If they’ve come to the wrong polling station, they are redirected to the right polling station).
The voter then approaches the voting station in a large, open room, where another volunteer hands him a paper ballot. Picking up the provided pencil, he marks the ballot behind a screen, folds the ballot, and drops into the voting box in full view of the poll clerk and attendant witnesses sitting a few feet away—typically, a few volunteers from political parties who act as “scrutineers”, or official observers and verifiers. The voter then leaves. The entire process never takes more than fifteen minutes.
Once polls close, no one is allowed to enter or leave the premises until the vote count is completed.
The poll clerk — still in full view of the scrutineers — dumps the ballots on to a table and sorts them into piles according to the candidate/party voted for. She then counts the votes for each, showing them to the scrutineers as she goes. Once the votes are counted, a supervisor is called over to the table. After verifying that the scrutineers are satisfied with the counting, and resolving any lingering concerns, the supervisor signs off on the count, and the ballots are immediately placed in a special, sealed envelope. The sealed envelope is then stamped, and cannot be opened without subsequent detection.
The ballot count numbers are then phoned into Elections USA, right then and there, again in view of the scrutineers, who verify that the numbers called in match the numbers they witnessed during the count.
Once all the numbers are called in to Elections USA — a process which never takes more than two hours — the supervisor then physically transports the sealed envelopes (each marked with information like Voting Desk #4 at Poll Station #15) to the Elections USA depot, where she hands them over.
“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
The sealed envelopes are then transported to Elections USA employees, who will then verify, and eventually formally certify, that all the numbers called in from each desk of each polling station of each voting district in the country matches the number of actual ballots. In the unlikely event any question arises about accuracy, the ballots can be accessed and counted again.
In a simple process like this, the media will have accurate election results within two hours of the polls closing, and there is virtually no opportunity for fraud. I can attest to that, because I myself have witnessed this exact process in real life quite a few times, and am friendly with several people who volunteer as election workers on election days. What I described is how elections are conducted in Canada, but not only in Canada: an identical or similar process is used in most other English-speaking countries. A few simple security protocols — not least of which is, no computerized voting machines — and your election is as fraud-proof as this mortal realm would ever allow.
When you compare this typical voting procedure to the morass of conflicting voting regulations representing fifty states, many of which — incredibly — do not even require that the voter present identification before voting, and which are being manipulated by the very state party hacks tasked with preventing fraud, you begin to see just how desperately America needs electoral reform. Credible stories of poll watchers being denied access, for example, in any normal country, would be regarded as completely unacceptable, to the point where the votes in that area would be likely thrown out as a matter of course. And yet, that type of chicanery is now so common in the United States, most people take for granted it goes on. That’s how far the window of acceptable behavior has moved.
November 17, 2020
Cancel culture comes for Donald Trump’s lawyers
Mark Steyn reported yesterday that the Lincoln Project’s latest doxxing has been successful and that a law firm representing President Trump in one of his Pennsylvania suits has been intimidated into withdrawing from the case:
Donald Trump addresses a rally in Nashville, TN in March 2017.
Photo released by the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.
Back in the summer I mentioned on The Mark Steyn Show that “cancel culture” was increasingly literal: It used to mean you got kicked off Twitter or Facebook; then it progressed to losing your job or television show or book contract. By 2020 it had advanced to being denied domain registration on the Internet, credit-card services, bank accounts and other basic necessities of modern life. Now, in a country with more lawyers than the rest of the planet combined, the supposedly “most powerful man on earth” wakes up and finds his counsel just canceled:
Lawyers with Porter Wright Morris & Arthur LLP submitted a filing late Thursday stating they were withdrawing as counsel in a federal suit seeking to block Pennsylvania from certifying its vote. No reason was given. In a statement issued Friday, the firm confirmed the filing but did not say why it was exiting the case.
Powerline‘s John Hinderaker reckons the reason is pretty obvious:
Porter Wright is a mid-sized law firm with offices in eight cities across the country. But apparently it lacked the courage to stand up against the Twitter mob. The “Lincoln Project” doxxed the two Porter Wright lawyers who signed the Pennsylvania complaint, tweeting their pictures, addresses and telephone numbers, and encouraging leftists to harass them. Reportedly there also were employees at the law firm who objected to representing President Trump. Porter Wright’s abandonment of its client is shameful conduct for which I suspect it will receive little but praise.
[UPDATE: A Powerline reader with knowledge of the situation says that Porter Wright has withdrawn from only one of five suits.]
As John points out, in America everybody from 9/11 plotters to celebrity pedophiles, Boston bombers to Oscar-winning serial rapists gets hotshot law firms and nobody bats an eyelid. But not Donald J Trump, who is apparently unfit for legal representation.
If you like the sound of all that “unity” and “healing”, this is what it boils down to — unity in the sense the Soviets meant it: the absence of opposition. And, when they’re done with Trump, they’re serious about that “Truth & Reconciliation” enemies list. To reiterate a point I’ve made for months: on free speech and related issues, things are going to head south very fast. I carelessly assumed they’d wait till the inauguration, but it seems “the Office of the President-Elect” is already on the case.
November 15, 2020
Mark Steyn is looking for an argument
I somehow missed this when it went up on Mark’s website:
“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
One of Mrs Thatcher’s great insights was: First you win the argument; then you win the election.
To win the argument, you have to make it. In the Westminster system, you make the argument for three or four years, then you have a six-week election campaign. That’s when the system’s functioning, which it certainly wasn’t under, say, Andrew Scheer’s Tory leadership in Ottawa.
But, even when it’s not functioning, somebody’s making an argument. Thus the fatal miscalculation of David Cameron when he decided that the Brexit referendum would be the best way to put the EU issue to bed once and for all. By then every electorally viable political party — from the Tories to Sinn Féin — was “pro-Europe”. Nigel Farage had been making the argument for twenty years, but, because he had no real political party to advance it, it didn’t get him anywhere at UK general elections. So, the minute Cameron called a referendum on Nigel’s issue in splendid isolation, it gave Farage a shot at the second half of Maggie’s great formulation: He’d won the argument; and Cameron delivered up a mechanism that allowed him to win the vote.
In the American system, it is, as the Brits say, arse over tit: As Monty Python once asked, where’s the room for an argument? There are no parliamentary debates, so you never see a Dem senator going at it with a GOP senator. Even more strikingly, there are a bazillion political talk shows, none of which ever features a Dem senator going at it with a GOP senator — the way that even the most despised BBC, CBC, ABC yakfests routinely feature opposing legislators debating health care or the Irish backstop or Covid response.
Instead, there is a multi-billion-dollar two-year campaign, which is all polls, fundraising, horse race piffle, telly ads for the halfwitted, plot twists of no interest to anybody normal (ooh, look, Cory Booker is up from point-three to point-four in Iowa!), all culminating in a stilted pseudo-debate tediously moderated by a pompous mediocrity asking questions all framed from the left’s point of view. You’d almost get the idea that the entire racket was designed to eliminate the very possibility that someone might make an argument.
November 12, 2020
The party of the Lucky Winners
Brian Micklethwait sends some thoughts from his sick-bed on the (still in question) outcome of the US election:
“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Democrat electoral cheating is not a new story. I’ve been reading stuff about America and American politics all my life, off and on and mostly off, and like a thread through it all is the fact that in big cities that they run and are determined to go on running, Democrats cheat in elections. So Democrats cheating in elections this time around is not the big change.
The big change is a Republican refusing to retreat in the face of it. Why? Why is Trump being so unpresidential, so undignified, so … just so ghastly? The answer is that the big political picture has been transformed, partly by him, but partly by him responding to the fact that it has already changed so much.
Time was when Republicans were the party of the Lucky Winners. Country clubbers, corporate executives, yacht owners, owners of houses with several garages, presided over by perfectly manicured wives, in charge of several well behaved children and subservient servants. The Democrats, meanwhile, were the party of the workers, of people struggling to do work or even to get work. Any plutocrats who were attached to the Democrats, like the Kennedys or (FD) Roosevelt, were numerically insignificant oddities. (Whether that was true, I don’t know. But this was the dominant narrative, as people say now.)
But that’s all changed. The Democrats are now the party of the Lucky Winners, and also of the unlucky losers at the very bottom of the heap who can only now depend on the crumbs of comfort bestowed upon them by the Lucky Winner class. The Republicans have become the party of the workers in the middle, the middle class, as Americans accurately describe them. The Republicans are the party of the people who still struggle to work and to stay working, and who hate the whole idea of giving up and becoming dependant upon the Lucky Winners.
Not all “workers” voted for Trump. A lot of workers, especially in things like IT, are still solidly Democrat. But the heart of the Trump vote was workers of a certain sort. The heart of the Trump vote was no longer the Lucky Winners class. They have migrated over to the Democrats.
Okay, now for the key bit of what I’m saying.
In olden times, if you were a member of the Lucky Winners class, and your guy lost an election, complaining about cheating was frankly a bit, well, undignified. You and your pals controlled almost all the levers of power in society. You owned the big corporations. Your children were creaming off most of the expensive education. The world was yours. Were you going to bitch about electoral corner-cutting by a few machine politician Democrats in big cities who had enough clout to say boo to you, every once in a while? This was not a good look. And on the whole, Republicans took their defeats, and if Democrat cheating cost them a win or two, well, that was how it crumbled, cookie-wise. Legally, that may not have been the rule, but actually, that was the rule. Noblesse oblige. Let the people picked by the struggling class have their turn. Suck it up. Go play golf.
But now? Now, what is happening is that the Lucky Winners class is telling the class definitely below it in the pecking order that this subordinate class now has to just lie back and let it happen, when the electoral cheating happens all over them.
This is not a good look either, but it’s what the Lucky Winner class now think they can do, and get away with. Maybe they can, in the sense that they may well get their guy over the line this time around. But if they do, but if it then becomes clear that they did this by cheating on a large scale in this election, then the words “reap” and “whirlwind” spring to mind.
November 7, 2020
Trump-supporting ethnic minorities were “enacting a form of white mimicry, or ‘white adjacency'”
In The Line, Kaveh Shahrooz looks at the accusations among the ultra-woke that members of ethnic minorities in the United States who voted for Trump can no longer be considered ethnic minorities and are guilty of variant forms of white supremacy:
Did self-hating racist Hispanic and Black people help Donald Trump? Did sexist women stop the promised Democratic blue wave?
Those may seem like bizarre questions, but according to the woke left, the answer is: yes.
A new narrative began to emerge on election night, after it became clear that Miami-Dade County — a heavily populated area in southern Florida — would go to Trump, thus preventing an early Joe Biden blowout. To the woke left’s chagrin, it was Trump’s significant support among Miami-Dade’s Hispanic voters, namely those in the Cuban-American and Venezuelan-American communities, that kept the state in the Republican column.
In a direct challenge to the widely held belief that Trump’s presidency is the result of a simple racist white patriarchal backlash, the incumbent president actually increased his support among Latinos, black males, Muslims, and Native Americans on election night. He also appears to have maintained much of his support among women.
To compensate for this cognitive dissonance, standard bearers of the woke left explained this phenomenon by implying that these ethnic minorities were enacting a form of white mimicry, or “white adjacency.” First out of the gate was the New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, fresh off the controversy surrounding her 1619 Project, who tweeted that “white Cubans” should not be lumped in with “Black Puerto Ricans and Indigenous Guatemalans.”
Insofar as ethnic communities should not be assumed to share political interests simply because they speak the same language and come from roughly the same broad geographic region, it is hard to disagree with her. But her point was not anything nearly so straightforward. As she made clear in subsequent tweets, she believes that the Miami Cubans should more accurately be viewed as white because they sit atop “racial hierarchies based on whiteness.”
November 6, 2020
“[T]he inability of election authorities to do something as simple as gather and count votes is undermining Americans’ faith in the constitutional system”
There have been many accusations of ballot fraud since the polls closed in the recent US federal election — not helped by Joe Biden’s Kinsley gaffe about creating the “most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics” — but that’s not the only thing holding up the process of determining who won say Jon Miltimore and Dan Sanchez:
“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Elections are a nasty business, but sometimes they can be clarifying.
We don’t yet know who won the US presidential election, and we may not for days or weeks to come. This stems largely from the ineptitude Americans witnessed on Election Tuesday.
It wasn’t just the fact that pollsters once again failed disastrously, or that networks fumbled their election coverage.
The bigger issue is that America’s governing bodies look incapable of managing something as simple as a vote, something Americans have managed to do efficiently for centuries without the benefit of computers, digital communication, and mass transportation.
As an American, I find this a tad embarrassing. As the journalist Glenn Greenwald observed Wednesday, countries with far fewer resources and less advanced technology regularly manage to hold speedy, efficient elections. This is something the US failed to do on Tuesday, Greenwald noted.
[…]
The most prosperous country in the world cannot manage to do something as simple as collect and count ballots. Think about that for just a moment.
Unfortunately, this incompetence carries consequences that are quite real. Americans are beginning to lose faith in the integrity of elections. I’m not just talking about voters in the fever swamps of Twitter.
Many impressive journalists, thinkers, and students of various political stripes have expressed alarm at what they witnessed in the last 24 hours.
November 3, 2020
How They DId It – Elections in Ancient Rome
Invicta
Published 14 Oct 2018We step back in time to join the Romans as they head to the polls! In this episode on ancient elections we look at the offices, the voters, and the process of the mid-Republic.
Bibliography:
— Yakobson, Alexander. “Secret Ballot and Its Effects in the Late Roman Republic.” Hermes, Vol. 123, No. 4 (1995) pp. 426-442.
— “Traditional Political Culture and the People’s Role in the Roman Republic.” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 59, H. 3 (2010) pp. 282-302.
— Elections and Electioneering in Rome: A Study in the Political System of the Late Republic. Franz Steiner Verlag Stuttgart, 1999.
— Lintott, Andrew. The Constitution of the Roman Republic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
— Phillips, Daryll. “Voter Turnout in Consular Elections”, Ancient History Bulletin 18 (2004), 48–60.
— Morstein-Marx, Robert. Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
— Taylor, Lily Ross. Jerszy Linderski, ed. The Voting Districts of the Roman Republic. University of Michigan Press, 2013.
— Roman voting assemblies from the Hannibalic War to the dictatorship of Caesar. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990.
— “The Centuriate Assembly Before and After the Reform.” The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 78, No. 4 (1957), pp. 337-354.
Hall, Ursula. “Voting Procedure in Roman Assemblies.” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 13, H3 (1964), pp. 267-306.
— “‘Species Libertatis‘ Voting Procedure in the Late Roman Republic.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Supplement No. 71 (1998), pp. 15-30.Research: James Conrad
Artwork: Anders Végh Blidlöv (https://www.behance.net/andersvb)Music:
“Strings and Drums Comedy” by 8th Mode Music#RomanHistory
#HowTheyDidIt
October 19, 2020
Sarah Hoyt – “… I’ve been feeling like I’m at the end of a Bond movie, and the villain is telling me his big master plan and how Western Civilization is tied to the train tracks and can’t escape”
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt explains why she’s not expecting the US federal election next month to resolve anything, at least not in a positive way:
At this point I hold about a 10% chance the Democrats/Socialists/Communists (interchangeable now that the masks are off) don’t fraud their way into full power, pack the court and rip our system apart, to install (yet again) a form of communism. This is complicated by the fact that a lot of them are in China’s pockets. Or rather, China has been filling their pockets for a long while. We might find ourselves working for racist, hegemonic overlords, besides suffering all the ills of a descent into communism. (By the way, they’ve already been doing this to some extent to the less fortunate countries, including most African countries. The left in the US and Europe believes this is benevolence. And that Chinese aren’t racist. I wouldn’t believe it, if it hadn’t been said to me over and over.)
There is maybe another 25% of chance we’ll find ourselves in CW II, now with even more foreign interference. What comes out of that, G-d only knows, and I’m not Him. Which is good, because I have trouble enough being me.
And there is a very strong chance that even if Trump wins the White House, besides continuing to have to drive a car where the wheel is disconnected (the extent of which I wasn’t even fully sure of until this month) he won’t do more than delay the crash.
Sometimes here, and particularly at insty, because I tend to do that really late at night when I’m exhausted and less able to control my moods, you’ll catch a hint of how hopeless I feel our situation to be.
In fact since the lockdown, I’ve been feeling we were screwed. That the lockdown was imposed all over the world on such flimsy evidence, that countries and churches, and every cultural institution not only submitted to it but kept telling the people how much it was needed sent me into a deep depression from which I haven’t fully recovered. (Again, the evidence that this virus was MAYBE as bad as the flu has been before our eyes since the beginning. You don’t need special equipment to see it. The homeless were congregating and not dying in droves. The people in slums in the third world weren’t dying at a higher rate than usual. And there were the numbers from the Diamond Princess. Which some idiot here tried to justify with “but they got the best treatment.” In a floating petri dish. With no special equipment. May G-d have mercy on the soul of every idiot who bought that bullshit.).
This last week, on the other hand, I’ve been feeling like I’m at the end of a Bond movie, and the villain is telling me his big master plan and how Western Civilization is tied to the train tracks and can’t escape.
Oh, not the massive corruption of the Biden crime family. I mean seriously. Any of you who didn’t know already that Crackhead McStripperbang wasn’t being paid for foreign countries for his services must have been living under a rock.
Not even the ridiculous, immediate coordination with which our tech overlords moved to clamp down on that information and preventing it from reaching the virgin ears of most of our willfully and willingly ignorant countrymen.
No, what discouraged me most was the “sexual preference” suddenly becoming a slur and Webster dictionary falling in line. (Seriously, guys, sexual preference goes way beyond orientation. For instance, my sexual preference is monogamous and with someone I love. If you think that there’s no preference involved, you must think people have absolutely no control over their impulses.) Because that bullshit couldn’t happen, even in the most totalitarian of conspiracies.
And that’s the terrifying thought. These people are no more conspiring than your breaklines being cut are a conspiracy not to stop the car.
They are a result of deep inlaid propaganda and misseducation which cause a lot of people to try to fall into line with the “word from above” and be “right” with those they view as the smart people and the masters of society.
October 17, 2020
Actually, his photo has that effect on me too …
… except that I still keep the beard. David Warren, on the other hand, is clean shaven:
“Jack Dorsey, Twitter and Square founder, in a London cafe in November 2014.” by cellanr is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Every time I see a photograph of Jack Dorsey, I want to wash and shave. It is seldom that another human being has such an hygienic effect on me; especially one I have never personally met. Thanks to him, I may report to gentle reader that, up here in the privacy of the High Doganate (surrounded by jackhammers), I am quite clean-shaven this morning. I was able to resist the temptation to bathe in Dettol, but my shower was the next best thing.
I’m going out on a limb here. I am assuming my reader knows who Jack Dorsey is. (It’s not hard to find his picture.)
The boss of Twitter is among the “deep tech” executives who have, in a less ambiguous way than ever before, shut the accounts of the Trump campaign, within three weeks of a national election, and are blocking those (rather numerous) subscribers who are trying to forward the meaty revelations appearing in the New York Post. Those, incidentally, unambiguously show that one of the presidential candidates (Biden, of all people) is seriously fraudulent and corrupt. Who’d have guessed it? (Well, I did.)Now, when I write “deep tech,” some reader will accuse me of touting a conspiracy theory. I use this expression on the analogy of “deep state.” Curiously, I don’t think this is a conspiracy at all. In the District of Columbia, where the bureaucratic institutions of the Merican Nanny State are chiefly located, Democrats routinely take well over 90 percent of the vote. Republicans do not necessarily finish second, however. That the labour pool for these institutions is overwhelmingly “progressive,” is something I infer.
Ditto for Silicon Valley. The residents do not need to conspire, although the speed at which identical editorial decisions are reached, is amazing. This I attribute to their electronic hardware.
Some seven years ago, under the influence of well-intended friends, I did a three-month experiment of “being on Twitter.” They said it would immensely increase my “hits,” and it did — while dramatically decreasing attention to them. I was flattered by all the fan-mail I received, because I am a shallow person, but when the three months were up I got off. For I do not covet a mass audience, or that kind of fame. Engaging in live-time battles of wits with other Twitterers is fun for a while, but sooner or later one recovers one’s self-respect. Or at least some people do.
September 20, 2020
Andrew Sullivan on the politically deranging effects of social media addiction
In his latest Weekly Dish installment, Andrew Sullivan decries the extreme polarization of the US electorate and points an accusing finger at social media for making things much worse:
An Electoral College victory for Trump, if he loses the popular vote again, would, in this new elite consensus, prove beyond doubt the centuries’ long grip of “white supremacy”. Some are already calling such a victory illegitimate, even though it would be completely constitutional, under the rules everyone has agreed to. The sickening street violence that the far left has downplayed, and permitted to run riot in major cities could be a mere taste of what is to come — along with ever-stronger white nationalist gangs instigating or responding in kind. (Trump’s toleration of this dangerous right-extremism in the past four years is as unforgivable as the left’s excuses for murderous violence.) But the upshot is the same: we will be lucky if the country doesn’t erupt in large-scale civil violence by the end of all this.
And the reason this dystopian scenario is so credible is not just the fault of these political actors. It’s ours too — thanks to the impact of social media. I think we’ve under-estimated just how deep the psychological damage has been in the Trump era — rewiring the minds of everyone, including your faithful correspondent, in ways that make democratic discourse harder and harder and harder to model. The new Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, is, for that reason, a true must-watch. It doesn’t say anything shockingly new, but it persuasively weaves together a whole bunch of points to reveal just how deeply and thoroughly fucked we are. Seriously, take a look.
The doc effectively shows how the information system necessary for democratic deliberation has, in effect, been jerry-rigged in the last decade to prevent any reasoning at all. It’s all about the feels, and the irrationality, and the moment, which is why Trump is so perfectly attuned to his time. And what’s smart about the documentary is that it shows no evil genius behind this unspooling, no sinister plot deliberately to destroy our system of government. One of the more basic motives in American life — making money — is all you now need, the documentary shows, to detonate American democracy at its foundation.
For Facebook and Google and Instagram and Twitter, the business goal quickly became maximizing and monetizing human attention via addictive dopamine hits. Attention, they meticulously found, is correlated with emotional intensity, outrage, shock and provocation. Give artificial intelligence this simple knowledge about what distracts and compels humans, let the algorithms do their work, and the profits snowball. The cumulative effect — and it’s always in the same incendiary direction — is mass detachment from reality, and immersion in tribal fever.
With each passing second online, news stories, graphic videos, incendiary quotes, and outrages demonstrate their stunning utility to advertisers as attention seizers, are endlessly tweaked and finessed by AI to be even more effective, and thereby prime our brains for more of the same. They literally restructure our minds. They pickle us in propaganda. They use sophisticated psychological models to trap, beguile, outrage, and prompt us to seek more of the same.
[…]
And online is increasingly where people live. My average screen time this past week was close to ten hours a day. Yes, a lot of that is work-related. But the idea that I have any real conscious life outside this virtual portal is delusional. And if you live in such a madhouse all the time, you will become mad. You don’t go down a rabbit-hole; your mind increasingly is the rabbit hole — rewired that way by algorithmic practice. And you cannot get out, unless you fight the algorithms to a draw, or manage to exert superhuman discipline and end social media use altogether.
But the thing about algorithms and artificial intelligence is that they don’t rest, they have no human flaws, they exploit every weakness we have, and have already taken over. This is not a future dystopia in which some kind of AI robot takes power and kills us all. It is a dystopia already here — burrowed into our minds, literally disabling the basic mental tools required for democracy to work at all.
If you watch video after video of excessive police force against suspects, for example, and your viewing habits are then reinforced by algorithms so you see no countervailing examples, your view about the prevalence of such excessive force will change, regardless of objective reality. A new study shows how this happens. Watching the videos, even more than reading text about them, raises the percentage of white liberals who believe the cops frequently or always use excessive force by around 20 percentage points. The actual data are irrelevant. The BLM movement this summer was less a racial reckoning, as we’re constantly lectured, than a moment of web-induced mass hysteria.
September 19, 2020
September 10, 2020
QotD: The power and wisdom of the voters
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956.
August 30, 2020
Andrew Sullivan – “… let’s be frank about this and call this by its name: this is very Weimar. The center has collapsed.”
In the latest Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan finds himself in agreement with Marcus Aurelius: “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.
I don’t think I’m the only one, as even the Democrats seem now to realize. And this massive blindspot is not hard to understand. When a political party finds itself so wedded to a new and potent ideology it cannot call out violence when it sees it, then it is walking straight into a trap. When the discourse on the left has become one in which scholars and editors and Tweeters vie with one another to up the ante on how inherently evil America has always been, redescribe it as a slaveocracy, and endorse racist books that foment the most egregious stereotypes about “whiteness”, most ordinary people, who love their country and are mostly proud of its past, will rightly balk. One of the most devastating lines in president Trump’s convention speech last night was this: “Tonight, I ask you a very simple question: How can the Democrat Party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?” A cheap shot, yes. But in the current context, a political bullseye.
The key theme of the RNC was reminding people of the American narrative that once was. Yes, it was unbelievably vulgar. Yes, it looked like a cross between a sophisticated CGI video-game and a crude car dealer ad with a dollop of Leni Riefenstahl. But it was extremely effective. To see that, you have to remove your frontal cortex and put it in a jar, accept that it’s all going to be a series of lies so massive they stupefy us into stutters, and then cop the feels. Pence gave us a vision of America that was a souped up Disney special from the early 1960s — from Fort McHenry no less. And look at the icons Trump invoked: Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley, Davy Crockett, and Buffalo Bill. You can mock. But in the midst of a culture being redescribed by the left as a form of foul and relentless “white supremacy”, and in a moment of arson and rioting, it felt like a kind of balm.
All this reassurance played out against a backdrop of Kenosha, which was burning, and Minneapolis, where a suicide led to a bout of opportunistic looting, and Washington DC, where mobs of wokesters went through the city chanting obscenities, invading others’ spaces, demanding bystanders raise fists in solidarity, with occasional spasms of violence. These despicable fanatics, like it or not, are now in part the face of the Democrats: a snarling bunch of self-righteous, entitled bigots, chanting slogans rooted in pseudo-Marxist claptrap, erecting guillotines — guillotines! — in the streets as emblems of their agenda. They are not arguing; they are attempting to coerce. And liberals, from the Biden campaign to the New York Times, are too cowardly and intimidated to call out these bullies and expel them from the ranks.
[…]
And let’s be frank about this and call this by its name: this is very Weimar. The center has collapsed. Armed street gangs of far right and far left are at war on the streets. Tribalism is intensifying in every nook and cranny of the culture. The establishment right and mainstream left tolerate their respective extremes because they hate each other so much.
The pattern is textbook, if you learn anything from history: an economic crisis resulting in mass unemployment; the pent-up psychological disorders a long period of lockdown can and will unleash; a failure of nerve on the part of liberals to defend the values and institutions of liberal democracy, and of conservatives to keep their own ranks free of raw demagogues and bigots. But critically: a growing sense of disorder and violence and rioting as simply the background noise; and a sense that authorities do not have the strength or the stomach to restore order. What most people want in that kind of nerve-wracking instability is a figure who will come in and stamp it out. In Trump, we have someone who would happily trample any liberal democratic norm to do it. And the left seems to be all but begging him to do it — if only to prove them right.
A long time ago, I was mocked for saying that I believed that the election of Donald Trump was an extinction-level event for liberal democracy. But this is where we are. There is no place for liberal debate or dissent, just competing mobs deploying propaganda, intimidation and mutual racial hatred. Norms are trashed, from the shameful cooptation of national monuments for partisan purposes, to violating the privacy and peace of ordinary citizens because they are not in the ranks of agitators. Liberals are now illiberal; conservatives are revolutionaries. The Republican convention we are witnessing makes no pretense of even publishing a platform — all to demonstrate total and unfailing fealty to the leader whose own family is now assumed to succeed him. What about this pattern of events do we not already understand?
