tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22909405583221771762024-03-13T23:31:16.181-04:00Sun Tzu SaysSun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.comBlogger1808125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-82471329742021343472019-03-17T20:40:00.001-04:002019-03-17T20:44:27.750-04:00Final NCAA RanksRecords are top 100 games only, with any losses outside top 100 after.<br />
Italicized names did not make the tournament.<br />
<br />
1) Duke 18-5 (most top 25 wins, 9)<br />
2) Gonzaga 12-3 (rates as best offense in country, by a large margin)<br />
3) Virginia 19-3 (plays slowest tempo in country, again)<br />
4) Michigan St 21-6 (most top 50 wins, 17)<br />
5) North Carolina 17-6 (8 top 25 wins)<br />
6) Michigan 21-6 (tied with Michigan St for most top 100 wins)<br />
7) Tennessee 17-5<br />
8) Kentucky 17-6 (8 top 25 wins)<br />
9) Texas Tech 16-5-1 (rates as best defense in country)<br />
10) Purdue 18-9<br />
11) Auburn 17-9<br />
12) Virginia Tech 12-8<br />
13) Wisconsin 18-10<br />
14) Iowa St 14-10-1<br />
15) Florida St 15-6-1<br />
16) Houston 12-3<br />
17) Kansas 19-8-1 (16 top 50 wins, toughest schedule overall)<br />
18) Louisville 12-12-1<br />
19) Buffalo 4-1-2<br />
20) LSU 17-6 (lowest rated top 3 seed)<br />
21) Mississippi St 14-10<br />
22) Nevada 6-1-3<br />
23) Villanova 17-8-1<br />
24) Kansas St 14-7-1 (lowest top 4 seed)<br />
25) Marquette 15-9<br />
26) Maryland 14-10<br />
27) Wofford 9-4 (0 top 50 wins)<br />
28) Florida 9-14-1<br />
29) <i>North Carolina St</i> (first team out) 9-9-2<br />
30) Cincinnati 11-5-1<br />
31) <i>Clemson</i> 7-13<br />
32) <i>Texas</i> 9-14-2 (lost three in a row at end of season)<br />
(There is a rather steep drop here between Cincinnati and Syracuse)<br />
33) Syracuse 12-11-2<br />
34) Utah St 5-4-2<br />
35) Oregon 9-9-3<br />
36) St Marys 6-8-3<br />
37) Oklahoma 14-11-2<br />
38) Iowa 14-11<br />
39) <i>Indiana</i> 11-15<br />
40) VCU 7-4-3<br />
41) <i>Nebraska</i> 12-16<br />
42) Ohio St 11-14<br />
43) Ole Miss 9-12<br />
44) Baylor 11-11-2<br />
45) <i>Penn St</i> 9-16-2 (18 losses, still rates as a top 50 team)<br />
46) <i>TCU</i> 10-12-1<br />
47) Washington 12-7-1<br />
48) Central Florida 7-7-1<br />
49) Minnesota 14-12-1<br />
50) New Mexico St 0-2-2 (no top 100 wins)<br />
51) <i>Creighton</i> 9-14<br />
52) Seton Hall 15-11-2<br />
53) Belmont 4-2-3<br />
54) Murray St 1-3-1 (only win is the win that got them in)<br />
55) <i>Arkansas</i> 6-14-1<br />
56) <i>Lipscomb</i> 3-6-1<br />
57) Arizona St 10-5-5 (5 non top 100 losses)<br />
58) <i>Memphis</i> 6-10-3<br />
72) St John's 10-10-2<br />
75) Temple 6-7-2 (these two should be considered the last two in the field)<br />
76) Irvine 2-3-3 (18 road/neutral wins, most in country)<br />
78) Vermont 1-3-3<br />
79) Liberty 2-3-3<br />
81) Northeastern 3-6-4<br />
94) Yale 1-3-4<br />
95) St Louis 6-6-6<br />
97) N Kentucky 0-2-6<br />
104) Old Dominion 5-1-7<br />
109) Georgia St 0-1-8<br />
<br />
(nearly every team after this has no top 100 wins, and few such games played)<br />
121) Colgate<br />
127) Montana 1-3-5 (beat South Dakota St)<br />
157) Abilene Christian<br />
158) Bradley 1-0-14 (only win was over Penn St)<br />
170) Gardner-Webb<br />
192) Iona<br />
200) North Dakota St<br />
203) Prairie View<br />
208) Fairleigh Dickinson<br />
292) NC Central<br />
<br />
Seeding overall looks a lot smoother now that they're not using the RPI system. A few teams were higher or lower than expected (Wisconsin, perennially), but there are not any embarrassing 5-12 or 6-11 games where the 12 or 11 is obviously better. There was a clear consensus who the top 8-10 teams were, with Houston being the only one much higher in the NET rating system than elsewhere, so there was nothing like "Xavier or Oregon gets a 1 seed as the 12th best team in the country"Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-69014321986281498742018-09-29T07:14:00.002-04:002018-09-29T07:36:03.750-04:00Ghost livesI've been kicking around trying to condense some thoughts on this for a few weeks after a few "debates" went... poorly, sometimes with a certain breed of human male (the types I usually try to avoid). The most frustrating of which have been with more sexist versions of people like myself though, who think they're being rational and skeptical. So I've kept unwinding my thoughts and winding it all back up not thinking there's much that can be said by me. There's a bunch of disclaimers I feel like I needed to make that I mostly won't make here.<br />
<br />
Because I think it has become clarified in the last week that it suffices to focus in on one thing that keeps coming up in almost every forum this is discussed.<br />
<br />
Male obliviousness of how women are living, and the ability not to have to worry about that ignorance or its consequences.<br />
<br />
Where that intersects here lately.
I don't walk into a room outnumbered by women, or simply alone with a single woman, with one or both/all of us perhaps in some degree of inebriated state and suddenly start to worry about my physical safety. Or being molested. I don't have to. I have been groped or grabbed or simply stared at by a relative stranger with some level of sexual interest before. But I am a rather large human male. I'm not sure I'd have to worry about this as a real threat in almost any room under any scenario, and I can't think of an occasion that I have done so (I experience other anxieties being in a room with a lot of people, but none involve my actual safety). I am not sure very many men if asked on the spot could come up with a concept of what kinds of defenses would be necessary to reduce or prevent this from happening, what kinds of precautions to take, and finally have any understanding that there probably is still a last line of thought for "this could go sideways anyway, no matter what I do, what would I do then?". Because it's not something we've ever had to consider.<br />
<br />
There's a general concept for men of "this isn't a friendly neighborhood, I will walk with my guard up a bit to discourage a fight and make sure my car doors are locked up when I park/leave". But that's very different than "I'm in a room with 4 other men, I need to make sure I know where the exits are, be careful where I put a drink, try to decide which of them I can trust not to be a dick", and on down the line of precautionary elements. It's a different level of specificity and passive/active mental practices to inhabit. This is a serious cost to pay for what often amounts to, for men, normal social interaction. The relative freedom to engage with other human beings without worrying about security or physical abuse is something I can take for granted. And that's all being imposed as a mental and physical tax upon women for safety and security in ways that will probably always exist (it'd be nice if rape or sexual abuse could be abolished... but that's not the point here). It's why some women probably won't go in that room with 4 men. It's also why it can be convenient to play a "boyfriend/husband on TV", as it were. To discourage some other asshole from bothering a friend. The larger point though is there's a bunch of places and situations I can walk into and never have to think twice or think about how to structure the experience to make sure I come away safely at all that almost every woman I know does to some degree consider this.<br />
<br />
A related but far less pressing problem here is that it deprives men of the company and input of women in certain situations at work or in some social setting. And that's unpleasant for us too. That's a cost we're all paying for because some of us are dicks. This is low hanging fruit as a space for room of improvement is to get men to behave a little bit better and be aware of this as a cost imposed on the women around them when they do not. There are ghosts around us where there should be a person, or these are people who have to deal with some very angry and ugly ghosts just to get through the day. That's not unusual, but the particular flavor and its widespread nature should be concerning.<br />
<br />
Especially if we are to come to consider how common it is that virtually every woman a man knows; his wife or girlfriend, his daughter, his friend from work or school, his mother and grandmother, has had a small to large mountain of sexist bullshit to wade through, daily, for most of her life (at least teen on, if not prior). From more innocent seeming comments than intended to overlong glances and stares assessing her entirely as a physical sexual specimen on the lowest end of the scale (what might be called the pornification of women) to creepy guys exposing themselves or randomly asking for photos of her breasts, to a boss or coach molesting them. Some women will manage or avoid portions of that ugly continuum far better than others. But it's a universal experience. At some point, possibly daily, hopefully rarely, she will feel like she is an object. No longer a person. The person is a ghost, dismissed from the scene. Most men have little feeling or consideration of this as it relates to themselves I expect. I do not think other people are assessing me as an object. I am not certain any people are assessing me much at all frankly, but certainly it does not cross my mind to contemplate being seen as an object of fantastic desires, nor am I made to feel that bad about it if I am not fulfilling any social demands and expectations that I should be so considered.<br />
<br />
One of the things that's come up often after the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings, such as they were, is the volume of men talking to and hearing from women around them who have similar stories and the overwhelming reaction of these men has been along the lines of "I had no idea". The point here isn't "all men are creeps". That's not the issue. The issue is that most men are unaware of how widespread this is that women have had to figure out how to deal with this wide variety of creepy and sexist behavior, up to and sometimes including physical or sexual violence against her personally. Firsthand, not simply through some talk their parents gave them as a child. And then probably never told any of the men around them about it after it happened. We don't know about the catcalling because it never happens when we're standing right there. We don't know about getting random dick pics because they get deleted (and it's not like we'd want to see them either). We do not know who was beaten by an ex. We don't know which of our friends were raped or had some guy in college or at a party force himself on her that she fought off and escaped.<br />
<br />
I do not think all of these stories and events are equally terrible. Nor is the point that women are equally as innocent as men are in some manner guilty. I do not think all of these events will be handled in some way that every woman involved in it won't respond by handling it herself and not needing any man to fight any part of the battle for her. The point here isn't that women can't do some things to improve. That however isn't a very interesting question for me, a human male, to try to understand is what is it that women can do to improve the behavior of men, much less what we could do to improve the behavior of women.<br />
<br />
The question that has nagged at me for months, years now, is what is it that men should do. Not just to improve behavior toward women, but amongst ourselves.<br />
<br />
I'm not always sure what it is that we are going to do next to deal with these as societal concerns. Shame and shunning does not seem to have any prominent effect anymore. The assholes among us keep coming on anyway now, without apology or recognition. Indeed, they are sometimes clustering together in damaging, sometimes violent ways. Due process doesn't always apply in some formal legal sense, leaving informal and inconsistent quality measures instead to evaluate claims and defenses. Which is all very messy and probably less effective at providing some context of what someone did that was wrong and what they need to learn not to do in the future. The methods and tools at hand for social and cultural change are, thus far applied, weak, inconsistent, and probably not favored to be used by many still yet anyway. What has become clear is this is not something that men can pretend doesn't happen anymore; to claim that sexual harassment and gender inequality was resolved decades ago and now a gender peace in the workplace reigns. Or claim that because he didn't touch you or didn't penetrate you, or if he did that he didn't use his penis to do it or didn't "finish", it doesn't really matter. Or make broad claims that women are making up rapes, or idiotic claims about how female physiology works. Or to claim that "boys will be boys" and find that a compelling defense.<br />
<br />
There's been a wide variety of responses to this sudden sunshine over blissful ignorance by men. Some of which are outright sickening or pathetic. "We can't flirt or tell a dirty joke anymore", said by idiots, up to "I need to record all my sexual encounters to make sure she can't accuse me of rape", said by monsters. We are not monsters, or at least, I'd like to set the bar at least that high for most of us as human beings. That leaves doing something else besides complaining about the behavior of half the population in order to improve these circumstances. Nominally it is not the half of the population actually committing these sexual assaults and misconducts and disrespectful attitudes and speech coming up for introspective analysis at that. Introspectively trying to understand "what is the problem", "is there something I can do about it", and then where possible go do that is a big start. Being aware of these issues and listening to women, compassionately as people, not because they're "my wife/girlfriend/daughter", which is merely an object state in relation to ourselves, happens to go over really well. At least according to some women around me. Men are capable of exercising this faculty. Maybe not very well, but it's a possibility. I would recommend we improve upon that.<br />
<br />
I think the value of feminism ultimately comes down to helping men (and sometimes women too) behave a little bit better toward each other, across and within genders, by being slightly more aware of the lived experiences of other people, and thus offering a marginal space to improve how they relate to women around them, and sometimes to other men around them. People they purport to care about might be better treated and respected. But more importantly, people they don't know and don't care about at all might be accorded a level of respect. If we are having issues with teenagers and college students trying to navigate sexuality and consent, and I think there's broad agreement that this has been a problem for decades, if not centuries, maybe we should be doing a better job allocating our social and political capital and trying to figure out what to do with it instead. How can we prepare each other to try to make difficult decisions and take any actions required gracefully, and behave responsibly and compassionately. We will not abolish the worst aspects of human behavior. That's not the point. It's how can we help each other avoid and manage those horrible things as best we can. That cannot happen if there is a veil of ignorance pulled over it by half the population. This is also not a simple problem with a simple solution. There's probably 50-100 major factors filtering into all of this sludge of toxic masculinity and sexism, and some of the results of that will never really wash away no matter how diligently we try. That does not absolve us the responsibility of looking at it and trying to improve. If not for ourselves, for children or their children. Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-41723758687755784032018-07-17T15:37:00.000-04:002018-07-17T16:20:58.605-04:00Russia talks, Trumps lips move<a href="http://suntzusaid.blogspot.com/2018/06/dprk-talks.html">As with DPRK</a>, the point of objections isn't (or shouldn't be) to the existence of talking to the Russians. We have substantive diplomatic issues with which we should be talking to them, leaving aside the questions of hacking and election and news meddling. The people making this argument, "that why are they mad that we're talking" typically suggest no similar argument is valid for Iran, which makes it hypocritically stupid. It is possible to set aside difficult and intractable policy goals and rivalries with other nations to make agreements on specific issues (like nuclear weapons policy, or Syria).<br />
<br />
It's also not an objection to say well even if Russia meddled in our elections and democratic processes, we did that too in other countries. This has rarely redounded to American interests to have done so. It was not a good thing that we did it, and most of the countries that were meddled in have had very mixed and poor results in their stability or even their allegiance to American hegemony (Iran most prominently figures against this idea being a good one, South Vietnam would be another good example, or most of Central America).<br />
<br />
Russia or Putin may have reasons to think this was a good idea. We do not have to.<br />
<br />
The point of the objections is largely in three areas:<br />
<br />
- That it was far from clear Trump was capable of addressing these substantive topics on his own, and in a way that would result in any deal, much less a deal favorable to US policy goals. He rarely credibly talks about anything in a way that suggests he has reached a well formed opinion or an informed position. This is fine if the deals and their details are to be worked out by others. He believes they are being worked out by himself alone.<br />
<br />
- That Trump is himself heavily compromised via the continued Russia/Mueller investigations, and that any agreements or attempts at agreements would be labored by this weight and unlikely to hold up. Indeed, it was extremely likely they would backfire with Congress (again) attempting to pass sanctions and other restrictions on Russia. These passed easily before, and aren't some liberal plot. Russia's actively doing stuff we don't and shouldn't like or tolerate.<br />
<br />
Trump seems at best purposefully oblivious to this, and more likely purposefully obstructionist over the whole issue. <span style="font-family: inherit;">The better phrasing of objection here is less that he will appease Putin, but that he's a Manchurian Candidate. A Putin puppet. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> - That Trump would obsequiously and favorably address yet another murderous dictator with a fawning admiration. Stylistically and diplomatically, this is wholly unnecessary. It is possible to conduct talks without telling horrible people they are awesome, and possible to tell relatively decent people that we share their major values even as we disagree about some particular issue. It all presents the position to other nations that our disagreements with our actual allies (EU, Canada, Mexico, South Korea, etc) are with rivalrous foes while our disagreements with our actual rivals (DPRK, Russia, China) are more cordial affairs. This makes little sense even from a game theory perspective. Theoretically it is about unpredictability. Unpredictability is potentially useful for a game of chicken type approach to foreign affairs. But this is repetitively predictable and unsurprising. Trump pisses off a bunch of American allies, and makes nice with some really terrible people. It is not unpredictable. It's boringly obvious. He has a long standing history of thinking some really awful and horrible regimes or the people running them were "tough" and "strong". This is not news. And it should surprise no one that he behaves more favorably toward such regimes now. </span>Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-29284867389060182322018-06-17T14:53:00.001-04:002018-06-17T15:03:54.066-04:00DPRK talks<a href="https://niskanencenter.org/blog/after-singapore/">“I think he will do these things. I may be wrong. I may stand before you in six months and say, hey, I was wrong. I don’t know I’ll ever admit that. I’ll find some excuse.” If Narang and Panda are right, and Kim Jong-un proves as unwilling to follow through on his vague promises as his predecessors given the credibility and legitimacy they now provide him, the president finding some excuse to cover up what will then be a failed summit will likely be the best case scenario.</a><br />
<br />
I've been trying to figure out what to make of all of this for a few weeks now.<br />
<br />
I find the idea that no talks should occur, ever, a bit strange. It's very clear there are reasons to engage with DPRK along with South Korea and probably China to resolve the issues involved non-militarily if possible. The danger to US allies is substantial, as is the probability of the regime collapsing and a massive humanitarian and economic crisis emerging in a very rich corner of the world, a corner which would be largely demolished. The bar should be set pretty low that anything could happen for such talks. But talking is preferable to threatening words being exchanged or destructive warfare.<br />
<br />
I do think the idea that any talks involving Trump would be productive, particularly for the US and our allies, is correct to bring up as a serious problem. This was never very likely. Trump is a terrible negotiator as but one obvious problem. And there did not even appear to be agreement over what the terms of the deal could even be. Spiking the football when you're at the two yard line is an interesting game plan for conducting diplomacy. I would not call it a winning one.<br />
<br />
It's really strange to think talks will be productive after nuclear deals to prevent proliferation with Iran are being scrapped. This should put a very low ceiling on the prospect of what "denuclearization" actually means to the North's regime. Many Trump decisions on foreign policy have this quality of own-goals being scored rather than forward progress being made toward these goals. (This is before considering if those goals are worthwhile, which they are often not).<br />
<br />
The most self-aware admission is the quote above. This is correct he will find someone else to blame rather than admit fault if these talks go nowhere or produce no tangible result. As we should expect for the time being.<br />
<br />
The amount of praise heaped upon Kim is disgusting and unnecessary. This is not the only authoritarian regime Trump has obsequiously complimented and admired for little or no diplomatic benefit, effectively unprompted gushing and fawning swoons over some of the most terrible people on the planet. This is probably the most disturbing trend that continued.<br />
<br />
The most optimistic reading is that talks and relations between North and South Korea improve or are able to have productive outcomes without the added attention of the US nuclear demands for a time. Presumably those US centered talks will continue, but without Trump's attention, they are less likely to be important to anyone in the region, allowing for attention to be spent on more productive things. This would be a net boon. The nuclear deal itself is unlikely to materialize in any practical sense, but relative peace in Korea and the possibility of trade or economic freedoms offered through reform of the North's authoritarian system of repression and starvation would be welcome (basically a smaller version of what happened in China in the 1980s and 90s).<br />
<br />
This is to keep in mind, again, that Trump's Iran policy purportedly offered as a framework here is not helpful. That policy will ultimately destabilize the region and made it more likely Iran, and Saudi Arabia if not others, would become a nuclear power, all while achieving no humanitarian aims or diplomatic advantages and weakening relations with the US's European allies necessary to achieve any harsher goals on nuclear powers (including North Korea).Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-28209068237088613852018-06-16T23:55:00.001-04:002018-06-16T23:56:53.049-04:00Not so Open BordersObserving immigration debates, particularly with the border issues over asylees currently. Something that occurs to me is there's a very poor public understanding of what "open borders" actually means and the propensity of any Americans to think it to be a good idea or ideal (there are few who do).<br />
<br />
This is a typical canard faced by people who oppose nativist restrictionist policies intended to reduce legal immigration from current low levels, not just illegal immigration is this claim they favor an open borders policy. Sanders complained about this too, so it's not just Trump types that do it. The actual debate is something more like the following: We don't have open borders, or very open borders, and what we are mostly arguing about as a country is the level of how closed we wish them to be, whether it is closed or open enough and how or whether to adjust that. Not whether it should be thrown open entirely to allow for the most possible free movement of people.<br />
<br />
The US has fairly restrictive immigration policies by comparison to the rest of the globe and has had them in place for a long time, going back at least a century, which make it difficult to move here and become a legal citizen or worker/resident, particularly from non-favored places on the globe. This restrictive approach didn't start with Trump or Obama, and wasn't undone by Reagan (or Obama). It started during the Arthur administration (if we don't want to go back further to restrictions on the Transatlantic slave trade as a means of reducing "immigrants" from certain places on the globe). Anti-immigrant fervor was for a time a major political movement of its own during the antebellum period, and existed throughout the early days of the American republic, but did not succeed in surging into broad and major legislative restrictions until the early 20th century.<br />
<br />
We were explicit back in the Wilson administration when some of the first major and broad immigration restrictions were instituted that a significant goal was to severely reduce and strictly control immigration from, say, Poland or Russia or Japan, just as it is now sought to reduce and control it from Honduras or Nigeria or Syria. There is and was little reason to do any of this for the benefit of our residents and citizens, to keep people out from any particular nations or regions. It solely benefits nativist demands to reduce the need for their own assimilation to a more dynamic culture. Immigrants themselves tend to assimilate fine to the American system and ways of life; it's the nativists who don't keep up. This is evident by examining places with more dynamic economic growth (mostly places with more immigrants living there), or places that more strongly oppose immigration (mostly places with very few immigrants).<br />
<br />
There are advantages to the overall US system, such as jus soli, that make it easier in certain ways for immigrants to get and stay here legally. But we actually receive fewer families as immigrants than even the supposed high-skilled worker-based immigration systems of Canada and Australia that (some) Trump type conservatives seem to want to emulate (other than Trump himself or Stephen Miller types). Those supposed advantages are being washed out by all the difficulties and impediments we throw up instead.<br />
<br />
What seems needed to reform the situation in a more constructive manner, as a non-expert observing the issue.<br />
<br />
- Understanding that the "illegal" immigration issue, such as this even matters, largely is one of people overstaying legally issued visas or coming in from Asia or Africa or Eastern Europe, and not anymore from Central America. Many people coming in from Central America at present getting much of the news attention are attempting to apply for asylum status. Almost none of this is anything like someone storming across the border with malevolent intent that it should require a harsh legal or military response as is being demanded.<br />
<br />
- Walls are pointless to deal with those problems even if they are considered as seriously as issues related to these problems. Walls are a poor symbolism for a free democratic nation to use to boot as an additional reason to avoid them.<br />
<br />
- Policies adopted by less democratic or less free nations with the intention of reducing the cultural, intellectual, ideological, and ethnic diversity of that nation are not to be emulated or considered a valid comparison as something we should wish to do. The very idea any number of Americans think it is a good idea to see what North Korea or Afghanistan or China does with people trying to cross their borders illegally and copy any elements of that, or to take a more representative example of actual policy, to look at what we did with Japanese Americans during WW2 and see that as an instructive and successful policy, is horrifying from a civic perspective.<br />
<br />
- There should be a massive expansion of work visas in amounts and availability. These visas should be controlled by the workers themselves as much as possible so that companies can decide whether or not to employ someone without worrying about national origins or needing to apply and somehow justify that they need to hire someone from another country, and so workers can go from job to job relatively easily or start a company of their own if they wish/are able. Companies could sponsor specially talented workers as a means of generating loyalty among highly skilled employees, but otherwise should have to pay normal wages to everyone.<br />
<br />
- Significant expansion of refugee/asylum programs should be undertaken. The global refugee population is at an all time high in the last decade. This is in part because of American policies; such as in Yemen or parts of Central America. Regardless of the blame we may ascribe to our policies abroad or domestically as they negatively impact other nations and people, we have a moral obligation as a rich country and people to help those in dire need. And we tend as a nation to benefit considerably by taking in refugees historically as a selfish reason to do this. There are no significant downsides to doing this. Other than that it annoys nativists who may elect more immigrant-restrictive public officials.<br />
<br />
- Significantly easier citizenship applications and processes should be created. The cost and time involved is a significant impediment to making it easier for people to immigrate legally and become a permanent resident, if they wish. If it is easier to immigrate legally via citizenship or work status, it would be much easier to concentrate enforcement resources on those who continue to come with more dangerous and thereby illegal purposes than finding work or being with family and friends.<br />
<br />
- As such, we should see reduced deportations of non-criminal immigrants, whether or "illegal" or not. If someone is not a terrorist, spy, or murderer/rapist, I'm not sure why it would be a useful exercise of the federal government's priorities or resources to deport them. Concurrent with that, abolishing checkpoints for immigration within a border zone, not at the border would be useful for US residents. Immigrants are not required to live in and are not necessarily concentrated in these zones anyway that monitoring visa status would be useful to do in this way. Such checkpoints appear to be mostly used for other dubiously legal purposes, such as checks on narcotics smuggling rather than arresting or detaining immigrants with dubious residential statusSun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-64992996911733625402017-12-19T02:24:00.000-05:002017-12-19T02:32:25.651-05:00On offensive analogiesI make a lot of analogies when talking to people lately. Some of them don't work as well as I would hope, and others work fine. Because this particular subject keeps coming up in some form over the last few years, I'm going to make one as a thought experiment which might be offensive. You have been warned. It's also not originally mine.<br />
<br />
Something which occurs often in atheist and secular circles is the question of how to deal with often zealously religious people, and some not so zealous. I find I probably have fewer problems than most other atheists. Mainly because I wasn't brought up with some strange beliefs and did not lose many friends or associates as a result of abandoning them either. I was raised on cultural things like Star Trek and its humanism and the writings and philosophies from Aristotle, Mill, and Adam Smith, and later the Stoics. Maybe those are strange to others, but they're fairly normal within American and Western culture. I was also brought up around a rather more tolerant friend group, and family members that did not tend to push religious beliefs. There were occasional arguments over evolutionary theory or points of ethics, but it wasn't by and large causing major social rifts. The fact that I didn't and don't like most people did that, or vice versa.<br />
<br />
What I intend to do is explain how it is I try to get along with religious people, and why it is that breaks down sometimes. There's a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot">famous formulation</a> of analogy for belief in god to wonder whether there is a tiny teapot floating between Earth and Mars. While there are some logical philosophical problems with it, it should suffice to examine this question for my purposes.<br />
<br />
The primary disagreement atheists and theists have is whether or not there is a teapot there in the first place (and indeed this is the primary logical problem with the argument is that this materialist framing bogs it down in the face of faith-based reasoning in teapots). This is a rather trivial disagreement in my view. I do not care if people want to believe in very silly things to extract comfort and meaning from life or on how to practice and put forward their ethical values. Only whether or not these are sensible ethical values or lead to contented and fulfilling lives for as many people as possible seems a pertinent question to me. The metaphysics of teapots isn't a very interesting debate for me. Ethics are.<br />
<br />
The relevant disagreement atheists and theists that I see as having is to suppose that this difficult to find teapot has also been broadcasting instructions and teachings on the ethics and meaning of existence to human beings for centuries, and that human beings should act accordingly and follow this as a doctrine or dogma about what appropriate human behaviors and social arrangements are.<br />
<br />
This poses (at least) four separate scenarios for how human beings will act. (Note that none of this requires that the teapot actually exist, merely that some people believe this is an origin point and act upon that).<br />
<br />
-1- That the teapot sends beneficent messages about compassion, kindness, generosity, charity, hope, tolerance, or love, and people who follow its teachings mostly try to follow these examples and virtues in their actions. In so far as being kind or compassionate is difficult to do sometimes, they won't do it perfectly, more something to aspire toward as a set of values and virtues.<br />
<br />
-2- That the teapot sends beneficent messages about compassion, kindness, etc, etc, and teapot followers do not mostly try to follow these teachings, but instead expend a lot of energy about which version of the teapot's teachings they should listen to, or whether or not other people believe in the teapot in the first place. Or if they do believe in the teapot if they do not follow it perfectly or in the way they believe is perfect. Rather than whether or not other people tend to ascribe to some significant elements of those teachings in their own independent behaviors and judgments of ethics and decency and tend and intend to behave as such.<br />
<br />
-3- That the teapot sends mixed messages, with some benevolent and some intolerant or cruel, and people have to decide for themselves which are beneficial and wise and which are not, or determine when they apply and when, or if, they do not from context and structure of words and accompanying doctrines. Sometimes people will succeed at this challenging task, and sometimes they will fail.<br />
<br />
-4- That the teapot sends cruel or intolerant messages and people decide (or not) to follow these, and act accordingly. (Trump and some of his more rabid religious Christian followers, ISIS types, etc). This is one possible solution to the theodicy problem, to suggest that the teapot has a message, or at least some parts of messages, that would be favored by some sick fucks in the first place and at least some people are acting in accordance with that.<br />
<br />
In the first and perhaps third versions, if the net result of people's belief in teapots net results in acts of mercy, kindness, charity, and love and compassion for other people (and sometimes even other living things), I see little reason to complain about this. I can think it's silly, but they're unlikely to bother me much about it or be bothered that I think it is silly in the societies that result. In general, many religious people I have encountered try to work within that framework, trying to be decent human beings toward one another, and not all that bothered that I am not of their religious tribe if I likewise act with decency or kindness and respect toward them. I might have some significant quibbles with what things are found to be ethically questionable at times by their teapot related messages, or what things are deemed intolerant or cruel by teapot followers. But these are not generally because they believe in wise and virtuous space teapots or not in the first place. More because ethics are really hard as a subject for people to reason through, and they mostly do not bother to try (teapots or not). And because these are not always simple and non-contradictory commands that are being followed. Interpretation is involved, and wisdom or folly will proceed from there.<br />
<br />
People will learn, hopefully, from their errors, and the correcting instruction of others, how to behave sensibly and appropriately, and generally this could result in a more just and fair society. I see little basis for judgment or derision of the silly beliefs in teapots somehow being reliant in forming these habits of justice in others, so long as they are aspiring to form these habits and mostly successful at doing so. Many religious people I encounter act more in this world according to the wishes or teachings of a benevolent teapot and ignoring other considerations or scenarios. This does not make them always good people, but it can make them more sensitive to arguments about compassion even for people who might violate some of the more strange ethical commands made by the benevolent teapot. And the net result is a society that could kind of slide by those more strange and perhaps harmful conceptions of goodness in favor of the more beneficial ones.<br />
<br />
Not all people however hew to this arrangement. It is the second and fourth versions I find really challenging to deal with, and also perplexing as common in public perceptions of teapot followers and common behaviors by some. And indeed, perhaps increasing in the commonness of public perceptions that these are the more likely ways for teapot followers to behave.<br />
<br />
The second option devolves into a lot of arguing over theology and doctrine and ingroup-outgroup tribalism dynamics. It is responsible for a lot of bloody wars and genocides over the last several centuries. This is hardly an ideal way to follow this teapot with its supposedly benevolent messaging. It remains active as an artifact of skepticism of the Christian bonafides of Catholics by other Christians for example, and generally leads to a wide array of religious people fighting with each other. As an atheist, this scenario has the most impact upon the quality of arguments and salience of religious orders, simply because it acts to weaken them and cause disarray and distrust of them internally within religious organisations that are no longer as unified by their common belief in the great teapot. If it were thus limited to that arena of humanity, people willing to fight and die over such disagreements, this would be deeply disturbing but not something I would actively work to stop either. This group of people will expend a lot of time harming people that don't really care that much about these arguments, and mostly just wanted to follow the general messages of good teapots everywhere (or those who don't care about teapots in the first place and want some coffee or beer instead, say). Either by making such people look bad by acting like fools and defaming the good name and example of decent people, or by acting with intolerant cruelty and hypocrisy toward people of the "other" groups.<br />
<br />
It nevertheless makes dealing with such people incredibly frustrating. The quality of theological debate is typically poor and poorly informed, the quality of philosophy poor, and the embrace of any positive social messages and changes they might otherwise have used as poorly convincing but at least beneficial evidence of their beliefs gets bogged down in these tedious spaces. Society does not progress toward a more beneficent set of arrangements for its people and risks or inflames many pointless conflicts along the way.<br />
<br />
The fourth scenario has its obvious drawbacks. The first being that convincing people that their teapot is in fact a vile asshole is really hard. Trump, as a practical example, is really, really popular among very religious (white Christian) Americans, particularly with a lower standard of education, and not so popular at all with anyone else. Or at least many people who claim to those beliefs. This suggests these are people don't see his actions and behavior as a problem, and further suggesting their beliefs and teapot based communities are more about intolerance and cruelty he displays toward unfavored others in the first place than about any beneficial messages from their teapot.<br />
<br />
The second and most pertinent problem is that it would lead to a lot of unethical and inappropriate behavior harming other human beings. Cruelty and suffering being things that should be avoided where possible to foster a peaceful and prosperous world for people, following such a teapot's messages or the people who think they would prosper by them, is something that should be avoided. Getting people to stop doing so is going to be really hard, and probably not usually worth the effort. But that still leaves cleaning up the messes they're making on the way, which is not absolved by ignoring vile and unpleasant people either.<br />
<br />
<br />Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-43107749349701006162017-03-12T22:41:00.002-04:002017-03-13T00:45:08.202-04:00Final Rankings NCAA 2017Seem to be the best two teams now.<br />
1) Gonzaga 10-1 - 6 top 25 wins, but 3 are against St Mary's<br />
2) Villanova 19-3<br />
<br />
Other likely title contenders.<br />
3) North Carolina 17-7 - top rebounding team, 6 top 25 wins<br />
4) West Virginia 17-7-1 - forces tons of turnovers<br />
5) Kentucky 20-5<br />
<br />
Mixed bag, mostly teams to avoid taking too far.<br />
6) Louisville 14-8 - only 8-7 in Road/Neutral games<br />
6) Kansas 20-4 - lowest 1 seed, 6 top 25 wins, 14 top 50<br />
8) Wichita St 4-4 - 10 seed, 0 top 50 wins<br />
9) Virginia 14-10 - 5 seed, #1 defense<br />
10) Duke 18-7-1 - most top 25 wins, 8, 15 top 50 wins, also most<br />
11) Florida 17-8<br />
<br />
Sleepers<br />
12) SMU 10-3-1 - 6 seed, but rates higher than 3 seed Baylor<br />
13) Purdue 15-6-1<br />
14) Oregon 14-5 -only 2-3 vs top 50<br />
15) UCLA 11-4<br />
16) Baylor 19-7 - 13 top 50 wins<br />
17) Iowa St 16-10 - 13 top 50 wins<br />
<br />
Upset potential teams (in either direction)<br />
18) Florida St 15-7-1 - 13 top 50 wins, losing record in road/neutral games<br />
19) Michigan 15-11 - 10 top 50 wins<br />
20) Arizona 12-4<br />
21) Cincinnati 10-5<br />
22) Wisconsin 16-9 - 10 top 50 wins, but 8 seed...for some reason? (RPI has them at 32, I'm not sure how)<br />
23) St Mary's 5-4<br />
24) Notre Dame 14-9<br />
25) Oklahoma St 13-12 - 10 seed, #1 offense, bad defence<br />
26) Butler 17-6-2 - 11 top 50 wins<br />
27) Creighton 11-9 - started year 18-1 overall, but slumped since starting PG was injured (was leading nation in assists)<br />
<br />
Most teams from here will have middling records against competitive teams.<br />
Non-NCAA bid teams will appear in italics<br />
28) Marquette 9-11-1 - top 3 point shooting team, but awful defense<br />
29) Kansas St 10-13<br />
30) Wake Forest 8-13 - 3-13 vs top 50, worst defense among at-large teams<br />
31) South Carolina 15-9-1 -only 3-5 vs top 50, worst offense among at-large teams to make the field, plays de facto home games in first and second round (7 seed)<br />
32) Miami 8-11<br />
33) Minnesota 13-9<br />
34) Vanderbilt 12-14-1 - 4 top 25 wins got them in<br />
<i>35) Indiana 9-13-2 - first team out</i><br />
36) Xavier 10-13- only one good win post-injury (Butler)<br />
37) Northwestern 10-11 1st NCAA bid in school history<br />
38) Arkansas 14-8-1 - 3-7 vs 50<br />
<i>39) Clemson 9-15 </i><br />
40) Rhode Island 8-7-2<br />
41) Michigan St 11-13-1<br />
42) Dayton 10-4-3<br />
<i>43) TCU 9-15 - 2-8 in last 10 games</i><br />
<i>44) Syracuse 9-12-2 - 2-11 in Road/Neutral games</i><br />
<i>45) Texas Tech 7-14 </i><i>- 2-11 in Road/Neutral games</i><br />
46) Virginia Tech 11-9-1 - 8 top 50 wins<br />
47) Maryland 14-7-1<br />
48) VCU 8-7-1 - 1-3 vs 50<br />
49) Middle Tennessee 4-1-3<br />
<br />
Last "out" at larges and mixed upset mid-majors/low rated at-larges<br />
<i>50) Utah 4-8-3 - 0-6 vs 50</i><br />
<i>51) Houston 5-7-3 - 1-5 vs 50</i><br />
52) Nevada 5-3-3<br />
53) Seton Hall 11-9-2<br />
<i>54) Alabama 8-14 </i><br />
<i>55) Georgia 11-14 - 1-11 vs 50!</i><br />
<i>56) Illinois St 1-3-3 </i><br />
57) Providence 10-9-3<br />
58) UNC-Wilmington 4-3-2 - 0-2 vs 50<br />
<i>59) California 6-11 - 0-7 vs 50</i><br />
60) USC 5-8-1 - lowest rated at-large team, 2-6 vs 50, got in because of RPI rating (41)<br />
65) Vermont 0-4-1<br />
66) ETSU 2-4-3 - 0-1 vs 50<br />
70) Princeton 1-5-1<br />
<br />
Rest of Field<br />
77) Bucknell 3-5-3 - 1-2 vs 50<br />
93) New Mexico St 0-1-4<br />
105) Florida-Gulf Coast<br />
110) Winthrop<br />
112) Iona<br />
132) Kent St<br />
134) Troy<br />
144) N.Kentucky<br />
155) UNC-Central<br />
166) Jacksonville St<br />
178) North Dakota<br />
179) South Dakota St<br />
186) Texas Southern<br />
194) Mount St Mary's (only team in field with negative scoring margin, also gets clobbered on the boards)<br />
202) New Orleans<br />
205) UC-Davis<br />
<br />
<br />
Critical injuries<br />
Xavier- Sumner (6-7 since, but 3 of those wins are against DePaul)<br />
Creighton - Watson PG (6-6 since)<br />
Oregon- Boucher (injured in conference tournament)<br />
<br />Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-83228764427113943032017-03-03T04:00:00.004-05:002017-03-03T15:33:15.681-05:00Cultural critique<span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;">I've been off to the side watching a lot of film and TV, during what appears to be a golden era of TV and TV writing, and cultural nerd/geek ascendancy in film. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #494949;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #494949; font-family: "slab" serif , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc;">There are two major issues I keep seeing repeated. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #494949; font-family: "slab" serif , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #494949; font-family: "slab" serif , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc;">1- It's a visual medium, use "show, not tell." This fails the viewer on many levels. Showing us acts of heroism/villainy or romance or cleverness establishes clearly these features as a reason to care about or relate to the character. Telling us someone is clever or a hero is the same function as a person assuring us "I am smart". In that it generally tells us "you are an idiot." Dialogue can be used to establish any of these things instead of action, but there is a less is more style approach to this that is frequently abandoned, as though the expectation is the viewer won't understand what is going on without being spoon-fed lines of exposition constantly. Dialogue of this sort should be more about establishing the character, by making them seem more real or relatable. For example, to tell a joke or a moving back story to another character, having them gossip or engaged in some act of chicanery and mischief, rather than about spoonfeeding us details about them. With a more complicated show with many moving parts and characters (the Wire, or Game of Thrones say) this might be true that the viewer needs a little bit of explanation to follow it. Game of Thrones essentially invented the concept of "sexposition" as a method of having complicated pieces of information conveyed while someone, or several someones, is nude and engaged in various salacious actions on screen. By contrast. The Wire has a sequence, a entire brilliantly written and shot sequence, where the two characters communicate entirely by variations of phrases including "fuck" key within them, with no dialogue exposition whatsoever. It's all shown through reenactment and body language what they are thinking and doing and the viewer is simply expected to apply what exposition they've had before and know what's going on. And it isn't hard to follow in spite of this limitation of words and precision. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #494949; font-family: "slab" serif , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #494949; font-family: "slab" serif , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc;">The most dramatic cultural difference I've noticed is between Marvel's films and DC's in the last few years. We are constantly told Superman is a hero, and then rarely see much heroism and instead watch a city getting destroyed through collateral damage in his own fight with the main villain. This doesn't really convey much of a reason to care much about this apparently indifferent and possibly sociopathic superhero because the depiction we are seeing is at odds with the depiction we are told we are seeing. Guardians has a bunch of anti-heroes, or at least very unlikely heroes and their tree creature companion, running around eventually working together to save a planet that probably hates or fears them just as much as we are told Superman is hated or feared by humanity. It's acted out and it fits more or less what we are told needs to be done in those moments of exposition between explosions. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #494949; font-family: "slab" serif , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #494949; font-family: "slab" serif , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc;">Romance plot lines in most films follow a similar problem, where the chemistry and interplay and dialogue between the main love interests is usually an unconvincing dud that is neither escapist entertainment nor realistic depiction of human pair bonding and attraction. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #494949; font-family: "slab" serif , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #494949; font-family: "slab" serif , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc;">Even with Game of Thrones, which is one of the better shows on TV for avoiding the show not tell problem (although it often dwells too heavily on the showing of barbarism), spends most of the last couple of seasons telling us that Tyrion is clever and wise, and then watching most of his plots and clever schemes blow up in his face. We are buoyed along by the fact that he has done clever and wise things in the past, but no longer seeing the more convincing evidence of this fact. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #494949;"><br /></span>
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;">2- "it’s more interesting in theory than in practice." This is a frustrating component of a ton of film and TV. Rogue One could have been a very interesting and compelling work of fiction set in the Star Wars universe to tell us a story most people could conclude was not going to work out that well. The way it could have done this was to have interesting characters who will all, eventually, be sacrificed for a good cause. We should care more who these people are, why they are fighting, and that they are dying. Dirty Dozen managed to carry this off in a war-themed film, where most everyone dies (spoiler alert if you haven't been alive since 1967). Instead the characters are fairly disposable means of creating action sequences. Some of them may as well have been named "plot device", for all I know they were. This is frustrating because there's an angle where the context and content that's available should have been really interesting and engaging, but nobody bothered to use it. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #494949;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #494949;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc;">The most common example of this is sci-fi themed. Westworld and the Expanse are both shows that hit some interesting questions of psychology, neuroscience, or philosophy. What would a world with AI be like, what is consciousness, what would the discovery of alien life do to a primitive space-faring human society and its messy politics? But they fall short by being a tangled mess of story that rarely allows people to care about dynamic characters doing something interesting on its own. There is a huge gap between Omar in the Wire, a guy who runs around robbing drug dealers who should not at all be a popular and well-regarded character (and is), and whoever the hell these people are in the Expanse (I have a vague idea of names other than one of them does the voice for a Quarian admiral in Mass Effect). Or William in Westworld. One of these is a well-developed character who doesn't even appear until the 3rd or 4th episode of the series. And the others, I've been following these people around for an entire season of a show and still don't really feel like they are anything other than ciphers and plot devices around which things are supposed to happen to make me feel like there's something interesting happening. I don't relate to them. They don't seem to have complicated motivations, or even get along all that well to where I'd understand why they back each other up. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #494949;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #494949;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc;">Where I think this is falling flat mostly is that stories are about the people in them and how we feel about them. And it feels like writers or show runners have forgotten that. Sometimes in favor of flashy action sequences. Not always. A writer can and should expose people to interesting concepts or ideas, but stories they tell are primarily about people (actually primarily about themselves or the people they know well, which is why so many films or shows are about people trying to act or write or succeed in some creative endeavour). The ideas are smuggled in alongside that. </span></span><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc;"><span style="color: #494949;">I thought that having everyone important in the story die (spoiler alert from 1977) in Rogue One should have been a really interesting risk to take with a film, especially when it seems to be a war film. This would confront us with the horrific cost of war and violent resistance and that even if there seems to be a valorous sacrifice in the works, a victory will feel hollow and painful for the losses we accrue to get there. But then I didn't care about any of these people and they barely seemed to care about each other. So. It didn't work very well as a story about people. It traffics, as Force Awakens did before it, but in a less reliant way, on a cultural memory that we have seen from characters before (Han Solo or Darth Vader), rather than giving us much new about these characters now. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc;"><span style="color: #494949;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: #fcfcfc;"><span style="color: #494949;">There are films and shows that get around these problems. I may be expecting a bit much for a big blockbuster production to have ideas and complex characters in it for example. Still. It isn't that much of an ask to have the main character not be "the explosion in scene 24" either. </span></span></span>Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-79534143170688908712017-03-03T02:31:00.000-05:002017-03-03T02:58:15.589-05:00March NCAA RanksAll records are top 100 records only (with any losses to non-tournament quality teams designated).<br />
<br />
1) Gonzaga 9-1<br />
2) West Virginia 14-7<br />
<br />
I still don't feel like these are the two best teams. Gonzaga has only played one meaningful game since last month. The gap has also closed. The next two teams are right behind them now<br />
3) Villanova 19-3<br />
3) North Carolina 15-6<br />
<br />
5) Kentucky 15-5<br />
6) Florida 16-6<br />
7) Kansas 21-3<br />
8) Louisville 13-7<br />
9) Virginia 12-9<br />
<br />
10) Wichita St 2-4<br />
11) UCLA 11-3<br />
12) Purdue 14-6<br />
13) Duke 14-6-1<br />
13) Baylor 17-6<br />
<br />
15) Oregon 13-4<br />
16) Florida St 12-7<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
17) Oklahoma St 13-10</div>
<div>
18) SMU 11-3-1<br />
19) Butler 18-5-1</div>
<div>
20) Iowa St 13-9<br />
21) St Marys 4-3<br />
22) Wisconsin 14-7<br />
23) Cincinnati 10-4<br />
24) Arizona 9-4<br />
25) Creighton 12-7<br />
26) Notre Dame 13-7<br />
<br />
Bubble thoughts going into the tournament weeks<br />
Teams I have "in". These are not all teams I would put in, in fact none of them are). These are teams ranked high enough to sneak in basically.<br />
31) Wake Forest 7-12 - All of Wake's losses are in the top 50. <br />
34) Texas Tech 7-12<br />
36) Kansas St 7-12 (yes all three of these teams have 7-12 top 100 records)<br />
38) Indiana 7-13-1<br />
39) Clemson 10-14<br />
40) Vanderbilt 9-13-1<br />
46) Houston 7-6-2<br />
<br />
Of these, Wake, Kansas St, Vandy, and Houston are the only ones even getting bubble chatter. The fact that any of these teams are seems like a problem. The bubble looks incredibly soft this year.<br />
<br />
Teams I have "out" that will almost certainly get in<br />
47) Michigan St 12-11-1 (injuries and actually a decent record against top-100 teams and a tough schedule)<br />
56) Providence 11-9-2<br />
58) Seton Hall 10-9-1<br />
67) USC 5-7-1<br />
<br />
Actual bubble right now<br />
42) Xavier 11-12, fallen about 15 spots in the ranks in the two weeks. Probably safe, but fading badly<br />
44) Syracuse 8-12-1<br />
49) Rhode Island 5-7-2<br />
50) California 4-8-1<br />
51) Illinois St 1-2-3 (not much of a schedule)<br />
All of these teams are in right now, probably. If there's a couple of at-larges because of upsets in conference tournaments, these are the teams getting axed. Syracuse appears to have a terrible RPI, but will probably be getting in anyway (again). Which is a good sign the RPI is useless and starting to be ignored/replaced.<br />
<br /></div>
Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-56522821680136168702017-02-08T17:08:00.000-05:002017-02-08T17:08:23.466-05:00Early NCAA ranksAll records are top 100 records only (with any losses to non-tournament quality teams designated).<br />
<br />
1) Gonzaga 9-0<br />
2) West Virginia 9-5<br />
<br />
I don't have much faith these are the best two teams, mostly because they both have lower quality schedules, so far. Partly this is because nobody seems that far ahead of the rest of the pack this year.<br />
<br />
3) Virginia 11-5<br />
4) Louisville 10-5<br />
5) Villanova 15-2<br />
<br />
6) Kentucky 10-5 (seems to be in a funk, they were ranked #1 two weeks ago)<br />
7) North Carolina 13-4<br />
8) Kansas 13-3<br />
9) Florida 11-5<br />
<br />
10) Purdue 10-5<br />
11) Wisconsin 12-3<br />
12) Baylor 13-3<br />
13) Duke 9-5<br />
13) Florida St 11-4<br />
15) Wichita St 2-4<br />
16) UCLA 8-3<br />
<br />
17) Cincinnati 7-2<br />
18) Oregon 7-3<br />
19) SMU 6-3-1<br />
<br />
20) Arizona 7-3 (currently projected as a #2 seed on bracketmatrix)<br />
21) Oklahoma St 7-8 (toughest schedule in the country)<br />
22) Creighton 11-4<br />
23) St Marys 5-2<br />
24) Butler 14-4-1<br />
25) Notre Dame 9-7<br />
<br />
Non-top 25 notes<br />
Michigan and Indiana are the first teams which I have ranked that are considered bubble teams (and probably out), at 31 and 32. Followed by Wake Forest and Miami. And Syracuse, as the ACC has a string of middling teams. None of these teams looks that distinguished. Syracuse has only one road/neutral win so far all year, for example. This is typical as bubble teams are usually mediocre.<br />
<br />
ACC vs Big 12 as the "power conference" for the year<br />
ACC has 11 potential teams up for bids (more like 10, Clemson hasn't beaten anyone, neither has Wake Forest), and the #3 and #4 and #7 teams.<br />
<br />
Big 12 has 8 teams most likely all getting in, with #2 and #8 also in the conference. Additionally, even the weakest two teams that won't get in (Texas and Oklahoma) are in the top 100.<br />
<br />
In general, the Pac-12 looks overrated by tournament prospects. Arizona's very high on the projected seed line, and Utah is projected as a bubble team, with a 2-7-1 record, and USC has a very low computer ranking (I have them at #59), mainly because they don't appear to have played anyone (5-4 record). California also has some bubble potential and a poor ranking (I have them at #55). I'd say there are probably some of the usual RPI shenanigans, but I don't look at RPI. These things could improve, but don't count on it.<br />
<br />
UCLA rates as the best offense in college basketball.. but their defense is outside of the top 100.<br />
<br />
Best non-major conference teams as upset spoilers should they get in:<br />
#54 Middle Tennessee 5-1-3<br />
#57 UNC Wilmington 3-3-1Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-55726398786499389102017-01-28T11:56:00.001-05:002017-01-28T11:56:13.429-05:00In which I am a hypocrite?In the wake of this election and the early days of the new administration, there are two core themes I'm picking up on as problems<br />
<br />
1- How do we find and evaluate reliable news and information. Particularly news that Trump fans/conservatives in general will find reliable? (to the extent that is possible). There are extended and competing narratives about the nature of various problems (crime, immigration, climate change, racism), which sometimes rest upon factual assessments.<br />
<br />
I am often asked this, or somehow regarded as a broker of information. Even if people disagree with me about what I conclude should be done about it as a matter of public policy (often: nothing). And to be honest, I'm not sure that I have a good answer. I trust sources that tend to be more grounded in what evidence is available on a subject, make sound and robust interpretations of that evidence, or include and attempt to evaluate contrary evidence/studies. I try to avoid too many obvious partisan sources (so no Fox News, no HuffPo, MSNBC, Breitbart, Catholics4Trump, etc). Not that these are equally bad, just that they tend to be less useful than some other source that will require less filtering. Then avoid subjects on which the writer/journals in question might exercise a great deal of bias without grounding that bias in attempting to convey a relevant expertise in the subject at hand. That is: if they're studying the subject with a particular eye on what policies or ideas it should favor, chances are conclusions and methodology will be sloppy or unserious, and if they're not studying the subject at all, chances are they don't know what they are talking about (so an example here would be "don't read David Barton or David Wolfe", and probably don't talk to people who have taken him seriously either).<br />
<br />
This is not a snappy answer directing people to a single source ultimately. So it isn't a very good one. People don't like it.<br />
<br />
2- How do we resist effectively objectively bad policies from being enacted?<br />
<br />
The second question, as someone who thinks there are always bad policies being enacted, is hard. But one core insight someone familiar with the division of powers and activities of government has is to suggest that local and state politics are much easier to influence, and still likely to have direct influence upon your own life. Local politics and events can be ignored to a point, but the things that happen there tend to be more noticeable immediately. Opposing or supporting changes at this level, or even introducing such changes, would have an immediate impact as a result upon the lived experiences of your neighbours. People you see or interact with every day at work or school, or church should that be your thing. It feels good to (potentially) affect change like this because people who might be helped are evident and visible to us. And the people who might be harmed are likewise, suggesting we could take more caution in adopting harmful policies (not that we do). Large scale policies like federal income taxes, trade policy, international relations, and Supreme Court rulings can impact large numbers of people at once significantly, but often the impact is modest, if still attributed to government actions at all by the time it reaches the public (there can be individual actors that benefit mightily of course, by distributing the costs across hundreds of millions of people). It also involves many, many activists and actors clamoring for attention at that level that it can be difficult to get attention or affect any changes. It magnifies and intensifies these political and cultural chess matches such that they can take years, decades even, to shift noticeably.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile. Voters, in their infinite wisdom, have essentially acted to punish the President or the President's party for increases in their local property taxes. Rather than looking to punish them solely on the basis of these large scale shifts in policy at the top. This is not a new problem to this election; it's been on-going. One reason for that is a lack of involvement or rigorous coverage of local and state politics. This is something I routinely encourage people to seek out and engage with. Voter participation in local or state elections is often abysmally low. Some, like school board votes, are deliberately scheduled in off years, sometimes even off months, such that interested parties might influence the results, on this basis that there simply won't be enough voter turnout to overcome such effects. This is clearly something we could attend to with more interest as a public. But accepting that turnout is low, that also means there is more opportunity to overwhelm popular attention quickly, or to be well known by political officials within that community and have concerns or demands engaged with seriously (it could also mean such notoriety is punished of course, so be careful what you wish for).<br />
<br />
There are obvious limitations to this as a strategy, for instance if you favor XYZ policies and live in an area dominated by other people that find XYZ policy to be abhorrent or a terrible idea, advocating for it is likely to be unpopular, and getting a movement of people started to potentially alter public views is likely to take quite a while. Most people would find it more convenient to move to somewhere that does want to do those things, as sometimes that doesn't even require uprooting to a new area, just another civic jurisdiction nearby. So paying attention in a sustained way to the local policies and politics and views of the local populace is not something most people do beyond this first pass screening to look for cultural cues and heuristics suggesting they are moving somewhere which modestly favors their outlook and views. And will tend to vote accordingly.<br />
<br />
But there's one bigger problem with attending to local political action and activism, and it ties into the first issue that's afflicted people in the wake of the last few years: in most cities there isn't as good of a pipeline of routine and reliable information about local and state politics. So knowing what is going on, what might be changing, and why, is hard to discern. Local TV news is usually a useless stream of stories about how everything in your home and outside the door is trying to kill you (spoiler alert, they're not out to get you), in a vicious cycle of bleeds and leads coverage. I would even suggest that people watching it are less informed than people that do nothing at all, because they will routinely be misinformed rather than properly contextualizing new information about potential hazards, criminal activity, and so on (this is a common issue with Breitbart or Fox and various other national news outlets as well but its much worse locally because there is less competition). Local papers might still have some coverage of local politics, but it can be hit or miss on how focused this is, and space in newspapers is limited. National news coverage soaks up a lot of attention because it's usually easy to find a bigger story somewhere else than what is happening to be announced by a town crier, and for which another paper or news organisation has produced news in a format that can be readily published more cheaply than paying reporters to go sit in on city council meetings. To an extent, it should absorb considerable coverage, because the policies enacted can have weighty consequences. But such coverage devoted to political infighting and horse trading as often occurs can be readily looked up later by interested parties (at election time for instance), and is often of little significance to the average voter. The ugly sausage making of writing laws and regulations meanwhile, is. At least some of this oxygen could be devoted to supporting lower levels of journalistic activity in states and cities.<br />
<br />
I myself probably should consume much more local news and events (or produce more of it) in order to have some occasion to do productive, or at least productive seeming, political and cultural effects upon the land. At a national level, I find sources that I can deem somewhat reliable at producing information I can then use to make decisions. Flawed sometimes. But reliable. Locally. Not so much. Lacking good reliable sources of information, it will be difficult to determine what might need to be done in a local community, or what needs to be blocked and protested at the statehouse.<br />
<br />
That leaves things like political activist and advocacy groups, who will have biased messaging or political and local facebook groups/friends, again, with a self-selected bias problem endemic to all social networks. The amount of filtering, expertise shortages, and biases involved in sorting these sources could be immense. I would not look forward to that starting from scratch in a way that filtering national news sources takes ample time already. Instead, there are institutions within a community, such as churches and some non-profits, which do interact and engage, and may possess valuable information that could be directly used (even if it is sometimes amounting to town gossip). If turning this into clear policy initiatives seems less likely, at least initially, it at least provides the probability of direct action helping some small number of people.<br />
<br />
I've been thinking about this problem as a consequence of being mildly associated with a local group of atheists and contemplating how to organise that typical band of misfits to do productive social and civic things (besides hang out and tell other atheists how ridiculous some theological point is). There are opportunities to do this and they have been pursued in the past, but sporadically at times. That is ultimately a concern that there are fewer institutional ties to the community which can be easily pulled to produce a thread of something to go do in that community, and often stubborn resistance to using some of the existing ties (such as those conceived of by churches and other religious entities) and precious little group cohesion to build some infrastructure of our own. Drawing upon local knowledge of events, where possible, at least offers the prospect of civic engagement to such a group. Whether or not it chooses to take up arms.<br />
<br />
There are two other important consequences to local activity and activism I could conceive of.<br />
<br />
- More people could be exposed to the idea that other people hold some really strange ideas to be true. That would include some of the people they consider friends or respected co-workers or public figures, or people who might otherwise be fellow ideological travelers (on one issue or another). Or concurrently be aware some of their own ideas are thought of in strange terms by others.<br />
<br />
- More people could be engaging in semi-productive, possibly respectful dialogue over said strange ideas.<br />
<br />
Or possibly more shouting matches and protest fighting would occur and I would be people watching such events.Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-34680473597369932272016-12-19T19:39:00.001-05:002016-12-19T20:23:32.390-05:00Rogue One and ArrivalThis isn't a contest to see which is better. Arrival is clearly a superior film. People should not be confused or considering it another way. I could conceive of having non sci-fi fans watch Arrival and get something out of it anyway. It's that good, and that understated as to the science fiction elements.<br />
<br />
<b>Rogue One</b>.<br />
<br />
<b>Good</b><br />
<br />
Action sequences are generally well laid out and create a strong sense of running battles and impending destruction.<br />
<br />
Vader finally plays a badass again (hasn't really happened since Empire and New Hope). Good villains help these stories. There weren't quite any in this. But at least Vader showed up as Vader. I was fine with that.<br />
<br />
There are some very gorgeous cinematographic sequences. They did really well picking up fun locations to shoot (Maldives, Jordan, Iceland, etc). They took full advantage of what they had to work with to make it crisp and chewy as scenery goes. And to blow it up.<br />
<br />
This was generally better than Force Awakens. It also seems to have a point or a story to tell of its own. That being "war sucks, people will die". This feels more like a WWII movie with blasters and space combat than a "Star Wars" movie at points. That's a good thing. There are little moments like listening to a turncoat spy or a stormtrooper chattering about something just before they are attacked and killed to drive home even the enemies of the rebellion are people of some sort. This works better than Finn as a defector in Force Awakens to humanize the enemy as probably a lot of people who haven't had much choice in occupation.<br />
<br />
This is also a key point sorely lacking in the Star Wars prequels, which do try (and mostly failed) to explore the politics of a gigantic bureaucratic nightmare with a veneer of democracy. There isn't really a sense that wars are bad and have terrible costs. What costs are involved are paid for reasons totally divorced from the wars themselves, and mostly involved lightsaber mishaps and insane rants about the "high ground". So from the perspective of trying to set an action movie with a lot of desperate and bad things happening within the contextual structure of the Star Wars universe and its rebellions and galactic conflicts, I was happy with that attempt. This was the biggest problem with Force Awakens was it took no risk to tell a new and engaging story, or even to spin that story that much that it wasn't obviously a mishmash of the original trilogy with some of the same key players. It was further plagued that most of its universe based elements made little or no sense even in the context of that universe (why is there even a "resistance" if there's a Republic again?), or were annoying (Finn, Kylo Ren).<br />
<br />
The droid is funny. Probably taking up all of the film's humor, but still. Probably funnier than C3-PO. Sarcastic droid wins over whiny droid.<br />
<br />
<b>Mixed</b><br />
While I think they did a good CGI job on Tarkin (and one other at the end of the movie), it is a little strange seeing an actor who has been dead for 20 years in a movie. This is not a trend I would look forward to.<br />
<br />
There are a lot of Star Wars Easter eggs. Some of them are annoying. Others are fun reminders of the original films. This was a mixed bag issue with Force Awakens also. Telling a different and new story in Star Wars can be done, and can be done to use these little touches to remind us what universe we are in (like the Stan Lee cameos in Marvel films). I feel like this did a little to push the envelope, much more than Force Awakens/Abrams, but not enough. It could have been a spy thriller for example but with Jedis and a space battle, or battles and devastation happening in the background. I had thought that was kind of what it was going to be from the trailers. There are nods like that's what they will be doing when they recruit a team of saboteurs and assassins to come help them, and they start sneaking around the base. Then a lot of the stuff from the trailers don't make any appearances in the film, and a lot of things start blowing up, and a fleet shows up to attack. People can make a war-spy movie drama/thriller, something that would resemble Dirty Dozen maybe. But the film has to commit to the spy or sneaky part to pull it off. This never really does.<br />
<br />
There are no extraneous "cute" characters to be marketed to children. This is a harsher world than Ewoks and Jawas and whatever Jar Jar was supposed to be, and as a result, no cuddly creatures appear. I would consider this a good thing, if they had taken the added time not doing this form of marketing and expended it on making the actual people in the story a little more compelling.<br />
<br />
<b>Bad</b><br />
Jyn isn't terribly well written. She spends a lot of time giving muddled speeches about hope, making bold decisions, and not doing much action herself (a little at the end). But because she keeps taking these bold choices, it feels like an interesting character was in there that other characters had decided to follow and listen to. That isn't always a compelling view of good leadership. But it works okay here because we know what she's doing. She is going to end up going off script, so to speak, and do something very dangerous or radical within the Star Wars universe. Other than Han, nobody else has that kind of pull to play by their own rules. Jyn doesn't quite rise to that level. We're sort of supposed to assume she can be in the "tell not show" problem endemic to many films these days. This is also one of the key downgrades from Force Awakens. Rey, despite being super-capable very fast in a sometimes annoying way, is at least acted and written as an interesting or mysterious character and as a leading character. There's a brief but engaging backstory and personal charisma, and her competence and rising confidence is an infectious element of the story (and there isn't anything else in the story that is). Jyn has basically none of those things going for her. She's not shown as a great resistance fighter (one scene maybe). Or spy. Or leader. Or pilot. Or warrior. Her backstory, what we know of it, is mainly why she is picked to be on the mission in the first place; because of her connections to other key characters. As a plot device. Later on she does some fun, bold, and determined things, and a few of her speeches lines are not terrible to rile up the troops as it were (they're mostly corny and lame). But that's really late in the film to care that much about what's going on anymore.<br />
<br />
There's very little chemistry between the various cast members. They're pretty much interchangeable and expendable characters that we aren't that attached to as they are inevitably killed off. There's a little between the quasi-Jedi and the hired gun friend he has. And that's it. Oh. Spoiler: anybody who isn't in New Hope that we meet here should be assumed to be killed off during the course of this movie. Further more obvious spoiler, go read the crawl before New Hope and you know exactly what must happen in this film. This kind of death and sacrifice, meaningful or not, should have more emotional weight. We should care that these people are dying, because each death has some resonance on the other characters. Force Awakens got a lot of cheap but effective emotional mileage out of having Han die. Because people were attached to him as a strong and interesting character (and because Harrison Ford actually bothered to do some acting). Both Jyn's mentor and her father die and we shrug and move on, because they basically shrug and move on and because neither seems that compelling. They each die because they're no longer integral to the plot and are expediently removed from it.<br />
<br />
The overall writing struggles. I'm not sure why Forest Whitaker's character was even in the film other than a plot point to get Jyn in the movie. We spend many tedious minutes early on wandering around several planets without much happening on them to remind us I guess that Star Wars has a lot of planets with cool volcano bases and evil installations in tropic locales (I'd think Scariff would be a plum assignment for an Imperial officer?). Introductions of characters, other than Donnie Yen's blind quasi Jedi with a staff beating people up, are often weak and forgettable. I can barely remember anyone's names other than Jyn (Cassio? Che Guevara? Droid? Chinese film market tie-in? General Director British Villain/Tarkin knock-off?). Compare this to Jabba in RotJ, as a giant gangster slug who has a pretty short character arc in film time but a rather large footprint on the film and series by being a memorable character (Lucas later would destroy this by having him appear in New Hope when it was re-released later). Even the Pit of Carkoon has more of a memorable feel than these poor saps.<br />
<br />
Note the pilot, the actual defector in Rogue, is equally badly written as Finn was, if not quite as annoying or central to the movie. The method of humanizing some of these characters being chosen by directors and writers seems to be to pick the most social inane and awkward people alive and write them into the film.<br />
<br />
Because these characters are expendable and uninteresting, the plot is very slowly paced early on.<br />
<br />
I'd say RotJ is around a 7 out of 10, basically like a C+ movie. Force Awakens is maybe a 6, a solid C or maybe C-, though still much better than the prequels. This is maybe a 7 at best as well, possibly lower (a C+/C movie). It's fine. But not that interesting.<br />
<br />
<b>Arrival</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Good</b><br />
<br />
There's a lot of scene economy in how this is shot. It's minimalist in the way it uses disorienting elements to build the overall story of trying to communicate and interact with aliens, and to build around the function of circles as a shape in scenes. It's subtle sometimes about when or how they've made one. And the use of shapes to frame sequences is a fun little way to design a more interesting scene, and how to draw our attention toward or away from other things. The circles the aliens draw take our attention away from the creepy looking squid things in the background for instance.<br />
<br />
The concept is intriguing. It doesn't limit to simply using language to alter a brain either. Most of us have a propensity to alter ourselves according to roles we seek and take on. Parent. Spouse. Lover. Single parent. Divorced. Grieving. Sick. Recovering. Addict. Activist. Child. Adult. Even the jobs we do (or the fact that we have them) can define us in a new way to others. And so on. These things change our decisions, our thinking, our identity, and our comfort with the past, present, and future in a number of ways. Language does this too. But it isn't even the only thing happening within the film on this form, just the most explicit. Her transformation as a person and the roles she has is implicit. There are even little moments about this where she is resisting other transformations (the non-zero sum game conversation).<br />
<br />
I found that overall a fascinating concept. It works more easily within science fiction structures of "hey we are aliens and we'd like to talk to you". But it is an element of distinction between different languages here on Earth. Chinese seems to be advantaged for how math is thought about for instance (where there is no "eleven" but instead "ten and one", a more direct elaboration). German was the favored language for a long time of philosophy and engineering for its vibrant economy of complex terms. And so on. There are also broader discussions about the effects of mind altering substances on the sort of identity and interactions with others we have that can tie into this. The idea that "how we think about ourselves" as the main "gift" brought by benevolent but bizarre aliens is an implied effect that creates the Star Trek universe, and it is here as well.<br />
<br />
Amy Adams is being wasted in the Superman films, even as she's probably the only good character in them (Batfleck being a possibility as well). She's very good in this.<br />
<br />
<b>Mixed</b><br />
Renner's character is kind of meh. Other than as a counterfoil to Adams, it's hard to see what he does. Maybe making a computer do some work toward the end of the film to provide some kind of mathematical analysis to say "see, she is not crazy". He tends to provide "Hawkeye" levels of workable production in films in that he doesn't add or take away much. That's fine if he's a role player, with some occasional elevation as in the Avengers series. Less so if he is supposedly a main character.<br />
<br />
There's a nod to people freaking out about possibly hostile aliens, as there was in Contact (a similar kind of Sci Fi film, but not as good). Perhaps more and less appreciative of how big a problem this would be. I think it plays off reasonably well within the plot, but it doesn't ramp up any tension very much so much as feel forced in by events.<br />
<br />
Overall I'm nitpicking here to find things I did not like. So. That's a good sign.Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-17856590106210331222016-12-02T15:30:00.003-05:002016-12-02T15:30:53.505-05:00WestworldI've been trying to figure out what I think of this show. So here goes<br />
<br />
<b>Good</b><br />
Anthony Hopkins is playing a villain.<br />
Cultural homages to Shakespeare, Frankenstein, and Hannibal Lecter ensue.<br />
<br />
They've done a pretty capable job of examining the concepts of memory and solipsism as they might interact with an AI (or anybody with a really good memory but a traumatic life). This has also been by far the most interesting question marks of the show for me to think about is the intersection of memory and story telling.<br />
Note: Game of Thrones also deals heavily in the question of story telling and history/memory. I might have a thing for shows, books, or films that highlight the difficulty communicating information accurately to other people, or the difficulty of remembering things accurately, or the effect of a narrative or even thinking in narrative arcs to pervert memory and thinking into a rigid space rather than a purposeful and open investigation of the nature of reality.<br />
<br />
The two android characters that have been the most built-up by the show (Dolores and Maeve) are at least the most engaging characters. I suspect one of them does not have an important plot line, which is a problem for the show. The downside of this is that I really don't care about any of the human characters. That includes the feud between Arnold and Ford over the question and importance of the nature of consciousness. Which should be an interesting philosophical digression. But isn't. Partly because Arnold's idea of how to "create" consciousness was... let's say idiotic. This could have been Ford telling a story, which is to say, lying. But after the last episode it doesn't look like that's the direction the show is going.<br />
<br />
There are some nice shot constructions and cinematography to build up the world, and little details within it as a universe building experiment. These aren't always fleshed out, but I'd rather see a pretty well shot show that I am not sure what to make of than a poorly shot show that I'm not sure what to make of (see: all of Game of Thrones' scenes set in Dorn).<br />
<br />
<b>Meh</b><br />
There's a lot going on. There is however<a href="https://youtu.be/y1JJ0AINp-w?t=1m14s"> a maxim for how to treat that</a>. I'm pretty sure this show does not live up to that one. Not all of the sound and fury matters here. There's really only one or maybe two plot lines that matter. The rest is window dressing. Most of it looks like it was hacked into the script later. Very messily at that. Given the frequent Lost comparisons and connections with the production team, this is not at all encouraging. The show is rather uninteresting to me until about the 5th or 6th episode, The fact that at that point it doesn't feel very connected to the first several episodes which were technically fun but uneven plot wise suggests they didn't originally know what they were going to do. It is possible this is suggesting that they may have taken some time to figure out what they wanted to do. Or that they still haven't figured any of that out. But essentially, if Lost comparisons keep appearing, that's not the space they want to be in.<br />
<br />
Note: I never really watched Lost, because it clearly was heading in this direction of plot gaps and sloppy writing but lacked the acting chops or technical effects that this show does have. It was heavy on meaningless detail and symbolism from what I can tell though, which is not how I like my shows.<br />
<br />
Most of the reveals have been boring and predictable rather than interesting plot twists (next week's season finale doesn't look any different on this score). That's fine... if the point is to do something other than tell an interesting story. Like make a show about the process of making stories. And complain about people who want to edit those stories to be less complicated. While also needlessly stuffing the plot with complex details that don't mean much of anything. But it also means you can't really sell the show as being full of mysteries and secrets either if none of them aren't easily solved several weeks before they appear.<br />
<br />
<b>Bad</b><br />
The show doesn't really present a plausible explanation for whatever is going on most of the time. Which is to say, it presents a series of roughly to totally incompetent human characters interfering or attempting to interfere with Ford's little empire in the sun, little to no internal security measures despite the prospect of intellectual property rights theft and sabotage or technical malfunction, elaborate coding requirements that don't get overseen or phased in through testing. And finally all of this advanced technology and huge amounts of land and resources being expended on a weird fantasy world built around what amounts to a MMORPG complete with pathetic little side quests for its players. We can already do that and kill other human beings repeatedly online (usually not literally). But sure. Let's build a giant park to kill the same robots over and over. I usually accept the dramatic universe premise for say, a comic book, fantasy, or sci-fi series. This sort of thing was a huge problem with any of the post-Aliens Alien movies however. Assembling a team of incompetent morons to go investigate a major xenobiological find on another planet? Uh. No.<br />
<br />
This show isn't True Detective season 2 level of gahdawful writing and acting performances (McAdams was fine, everything else about that was absolutely terrible). It isn't Prometheus level of stupid. It isn't yet at Lost levels of useless incoherence. It's probably better than Walking Dead for that matter, with a more invigorating prospect of having both heroes and villains from non-human interactions to spice up the plot (where Walking Dead more or less relies on humans only to provide villainy, and the non-humans are there as atmosphere or background radiation at this point).<br />
<br />
But I also don't think it's the next best thing to Game of Thrones going right now in popular water cooler shows, or whatever that term would be these days.Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-34953351974178309912016-11-14T15:07:00.000-05:002016-11-14T15:26:14.684-05:00Historical guidesHistorical analogies are imperfect. But to get at what I think many people disappointed by last week's results are seeing (people across the ideological spectrum). The closest comparison I keep coming back to, now that George Wallace no longer works, is Andrew Jackson.<br />
<br />
The reason that's bad: Jackson was a terrible President.<br />
<br />
He was racist, even in an era of much higher racism, he stands out (as does his key Supreme Court appointment, Roger Taney). He basically destroyed the US economy of the time, with his second term presiding over one of the worst economic downturns in the country's history (FDR does not get sufficient blame for what happened in his second term either, in my opinion). He completely destroyed the prospect of integrating native tribes like the Cherokee into rather than being excluded from American society (this was, admittedly, a dim prospect). He firmly inaugurated a spoils system in political appointments, a system which would take decades to overcome with civil reforms, and which greatly strengthened the executive branch at the expense of legislators and professionals. Those few who could provide a more balanced or nuanced check on radical reforms sought only by the executive.<br />
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His pre-election history includes a belligerent attempt to start a war over Florida (he invaded on his own to attack the Seminoles), and numerous duels. He was seen as having a lack of respect of common decency or genteel behavior. His election was seen as a changing of the guard in American politics, and a repudiation of elites by the general public. Given the reverence sometimes granted to Tocqueville's work on American democracy by right-wing thinkers, he was not fond of Jackson either, noting his indifferent hostility to Congress and tendency to ignore or subvert legal processes to try to get at his personal rivals or settle his own agenda. As a further parallel, he represented a significant shift within the Democratic party (away from Jeffersonianism, in style more so than substance, but both were shifted), much as Trump appears to have upset most of the previous ideological or intellectual pillars of the current Republican party (such as there were any left).<br />
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I'm not expecting Trump to be a good President. I'm not expecting him to uphold something like the dominant social values of the country. I'm not expecting him to behave personally. It might be because I've seen this play out before. And I didn't like how it went.Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-25928418652181227202016-11-13T00:43:00.000-05:002016-11-13T01:15:51.487-05:00Boiling oil on the gatesI have been trying to reduce down Trump-ism to its essential ingredients. I am not quite sure I have a handle on them yet. But some thoughts anyway.<br />
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<b>Borders matter, damnit! </b><br />
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This is a version of nationalism. I am an anti-nationalist, or a globalist, and a humanist. I don't really care that much about games of nation-states and their claims of awesomeness. I am very much a child of the post-Cold war, where there was no great evil to savage in contests of ideology, war, science, and even athletics, and where the only advantage to be sought out was the betterment of ourselves and the protection of those who were still growing and vulnerable, both in our society and without. I sense in our modern conflicts a demand to feed a more ancient sense of conflict and competition with a dreaded "other", to justify ourselves as a more savage and wild or untamed beast of a nation. There have not been peer great power states with which to compete since the fall of the Soviet Union however. That left only the project of defining what American hegemony was and should be to other nations. To the extent I embrace realist international tendencies and theories, I do like the idea of American hegemonic power, but only so far as it is used successfully to promote the peaceful flourishing and security of all nations and people under its dominion. That it may provide an example of a functioning liberal democratic state, with Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment ideals for other nations to aspire toward (as we ourselves try), and that it maintain peace or order lightly, and without a casual or brutal violence when not necessary. Unlike the nationalist, I want to know that our country actually serves useful ends and is admirable, rather than claim the right to demand admiration through our strength. I prefer American hegemony to Russian or Chinese dominions mostly for the types of countries that are historically aligned within it, and any beneficent effects upon the people within them. And not because it has the word America in it and branded on symbols and hats. I think, as a great power hegemony, this has gone pretty well for America and most Americans for nearly seven decades, and that Americans were a curious and respected people, while their country was a curious and respected experiment long before that. Nationalists should not be so quick to dismiss this history. Neither should globalists.<br />
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I do have some respect for the idea of patriotism. In people wanting to see their country, and their countrymen, prosper, flourish, and improve because we care about the place in which we live. Accordingly, that we care about the ideas or principles we believe that place should strive to exemplify. Policies which promote those ideas and principles, advance them, and defend them, are to be used. Policies which work, from a consequential mindset of actually achieving these high minded and vague sets of things pragmatically, are also to be favored. Policies which do not work, or which advance more dangerous ideas and principles that we should not aspire to, should not.<br />
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I suspect I find Trump-ism abhorrent in part because I recognize nationalism as a dark and very much more difficult way to get people to hope and live up to those ideals, where it is more dangerous and more apt to be weaponized for destructive purposes. It is that place I saw us carrying into during the dark days after 9-11 and the Iraq War, and now again, on 11-9, and whatever sad disaster comes of it. Trump has himself provided some semblance of this already where the idea of the game of nations is a zero sum game, where there are only winners and losers, and destruction and authority are the tools of power. History does not bode well for those varieties of nations and hegemonic powers based upon primarily the application of strength, particularly through violence. This is not a principle I feel has been or should be an exemplary function of the American polity and nation-state, even as our history has many marks of conquest and warfare against other nations. Not simply because it does not align with the values I find most admirable in my country of birth, but because it has had little chance of success historically to apply brute strength and have it be unresisted and unconquered in turn. It does not work. It does not make us stronger. It should not be our path now. I fear it will start swaying back this route under Trump, and there may not be time to arrest our fall.<br />
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Trump-ism applies this brute function through trade, which he tends to oppose, or claims we have "failed" to make work for ourselves, with the intention of extracting clear benefits for Americans at the expense of other nations (which is... not what trade is). And through conflict, through the bluster of threats toward our enemies, and cold and unfriendly or harsh demands made to our allies. And through the strict control of borders, to police what is "American" in ethnic and nationalist terminology. And through bluster and respect for authoritarian strength. These qualities when possessed among American Presidents and political figures in our history (Andrew Jackson or Huey Long in particular, less renowned characters like Millard Fillmore or Father Coughlin could be included as well) have generally been looked upon by myself as disdainful black marks on our history. I cannot find it an admirable theory of what America should look like. Trump pushes it further in foreign policy through a demand for colonialist domination, or tribute through strength. Conquests should not be of high-minded liberation. If that were where his views stopped, that is an argument I might find appealing given that they are fairly unlikely to prevail in that way historically. But instead, his basis for conflict and conquest is for the provision of resources for ourselves at the expense of the weak and vanquished. This was an argument as a vision for the nation-state which ultimately led to two massive and bloody wars in the last century. It did not work out well for any of the nations which held it (Germany, France, UK, Italy, Japan, and eventually, the Soviet Union).<br />
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Trade is a far cheaper way to attain that provision of resources and prosperity than warfare. Gold is always cheaper than blood. Diplomacy and knowledge may be cheaper still. Paper is cheaper than gold. Most of these other great powers from the last century have learned this lesson (Germany and Japan far more successfully than the others, while Russia appears not to have learned it at all). This is a flaw common across Trump-ism, it calls for a universe of ideas that have largely been discredited by history or left behind by progress as functional ways to organise a society. The ideas he sells to absolve people of their fears or anxieties do not and will work, certainly not to help people who are struggling to adapt to a world, an America, that has rapidly changed.<br />
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To combat this method of thought. Patriotic duties should be reclaimed and reforged. Rather than using rank nationalism, a philosophy which if left undiluted which possesses immense dangers in a world with powerful weapons capable of annihilating cities. This still leaves questions of "what does it mean to be an American?". In what can we take pride in? What America will we leave for our children and grandchildren to take pride in and succeed in? High-minded liberal ideals espoused in the Constitution modestly and inconsistently practised domestically and exported around the world peacefully, and being an global economic superpower are all well-and-good, but Trump appears to have tapped into something else that these things do not connect to. A simpler question. Namely: what does any of that mean for normal Americans and their lives. He does not propose a good answer, but we should treat this question seriously.<br />
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<b>The American dream, as a nightmare</b><br />
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"The American dream" has always been a flawed vision, denied to millions of its own citizens. Sometimes deliberately and maliciously. Sometimes with neglect and indifference. For example. It is reasonable to point out that free trade, while enriching most Americans with efficiently produced goods from abroad and increased business opportunities, still provides a massive sense of uncertainty for millions of them. As does relatively free immigration, as was the case throughout the 19th century and which globalists (like myself), favor still.<br />
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Indeed, one of the core problems of Trump-ism is that for over a century, Americans managed to exist with few meaningful obstacles on who could be "American". Without even a clear sense of what our borders were as a nation. We expanded, and grew, often ruthlessly absorbing territory and cultures. Vast numbers of immigrants fled here and eventually became heavily integrated into the story of who and what was America in spite of hostile receptions on arrival. Vast numbers of natives were killed or displaced. Vast numbers of Africans were enslaved, sold, and wars fought to expand the economic opportunities they provided wealthy land owners. (I did not say it was a virginal purity story that makes up the American dream). And for decades in that time, men and their families wished to own property, to farm or ranch upon that land, marry well, and produce and raise children to whom they could pass on what wealth they created through trade and hard work, and who would absorb these lessons and help care for their elders when they could no longer care for themselves. Or at least that is the optimistic narrative thread of what we might presume we wish to be true about ourselves. Adopted to the mid 20th century, the aspirations and the pathways of success were little different. A decent job in an office or a factory and a suburban home instead of a farm.<br />
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These fruits have dispersed erratically. They always have. The process of creative destruction in a free and open economy, intersecting with our abilities, laws, regulations, and competition from abroad or from our friends and neighbours, does not reward all alike. It aspires to be meritocratic, but does not always achieve it. It also firmly rejects the Marxian axioms about each to their need and often leaves some in want or destitution, and provides all with an incentive to better themselves in competition. We have made some progress in assuring no one will fall too far behind, that indigents might find help and the freedom to try again, but the basic elements of a meritocratic society remain the central story of America. Here people come and live to make themselves better, to have better lives and opportunities than they have experienced in some other land.<br />
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In the later 20th century, and today, these fruits have begun to shift to allow women far greater access. To allow ethnic minorities more access. Immigrants have always had access to this, but our laws and regulations have shifted back from a stiffer and less welcoming world, that of the mid-20th century which was often constrained to political dissidents and refugees from favored states, to a more accepting and open one. A world which takes in people from Cambodia and Somalia and Germany alike and gives them each a chance or a stake to compete. Not merely by moving here and adopting the ethos of Americans, but by existing at all. There is far greater competition for success, respect, tolerance, and well-being for someone who came up in a world where being a white male of modest education (completing high school, and maybe eventually college), and merely being born in America, was a recipe for a pretty comfortable life.<br />
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To a globalist this is all well and good. To a meritocratic vision it is also fine. We should expect to have to compete not simply because we were born here be handed a world on a platter. To a normal person, it might seem terrifying. I imagine many people contemplating what impact automation has had on the economy so far, and what impacts it is liable to have moving forward will likewise find much consternation and confusion just as these questions about how a global economy impacts Americans, or Egyptians, or Filipinos appears to do. Globalists and most ethicists will see no problem with mining and manufacturing, historically often dangerous manual labour jobs, being done by disposable machines instead of hordes of disposable people. But as with the agricultural revolution, there is a question of what happens to those people now that the industrial revolution has ended and a knowledge economy has replaced it. What do they do now. It's not like they can suddenly become successful bankers or salesmen on a whim (Iceland attempted to do this, and many of the bankers went back to being fishermen when their financial sector imploded).<br />
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Most of the people for whom Trump-ism has had its greatest appeal appear to be older, over 60, mostly white, more likely to be male, and living in middle-sized cities or smaller towns. Many of their concerns are not limited to economic anxieties about themselves or their futures, or those of their grandchildren. There are sizeable correlations with support for Trump and xenophobic fears of foreigners, or of people coming here with funny religious views. Or of an America that is darker skinned rather than a white majority, or retrograde views about the role of women and the type of treatment men should be allowed to perform. These are cultural fears about what it means to be an American. These fears are mostly not shared by their children and grandchildren. I regard this as a good thing. Perhaps in time some of them will as well. That it is not a big deal to have a Muslim man as a neighbour or friend, or to have a woman as a doctor, or as a boss. This type of fear is a broad cross section of Trump-ism. It intersects with the question of nationalism. What does it mean to be an American. And they don't like what they think it now means on these and other questions. This is a question and a response that dangerously flirts with racism, sexism, and xenophobia, sometimes rushing in to embrace these things fully.<br />
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Liberals and progressives, or even plain people who are mostly tolerant of these changes, find this appalling. I believe we should find it appalling, an instinct that we should resist, and should resist when it attempts to influence and create policy changes. But a huge number of people found it appalling and voted for Trump anyway. I have been trying to explore why that could happen. And what I think I am settling on is they often do not understand how our society will have a place for people like themselves even to compete. Jobs increasingly demand high skilled education and licensure from the state. Simple and menial tasks that were once treated with middle class aplomb are automated or shipped off to foreign countries, or backbreakingly performed by low skilled migrant workers from other countries. The call "we don't make anything in this country" is patently false. We build a ton of stuff. It produces more economic value than ever before. But a lot of it is assembled by robots, purchased on computers, and may soon be delivered by robots. We aren't going back to a world with legions of factory workers who work the same job for 40 years. That world was dead 50 years ago. It will not be resurrected.<br />
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Trump-ism has sold a message that pretends that we will be able to do so as a balm for this anxiety about what happens next. I think a better message would be to offer people an actual hope, something that could actually happen. An economic and social system for people having purposeful jobs that they can perform with minimal levels of training, and have easier access to get, and learn to excel at to move up the economic ladder, or which have basic skills that can be translated to other careers. Late in the Obama years, there were numerous reports, both from government and from economists and think tanks, calling out the problem of extensive and still expanding occupational licensure, frequently now used as a needless barrier to job growth and economic opportunity rather than as a necessary function to protect consumers. One of the flaws with the sales pitch of the ACA was that it was not made clear how to make health care portable, rather than tied to our employers such that we might feel stuck to a job we no longer find fulfillment in, but need so that our children have access to medical care. These are practical steps to give the economy a breathing room space to let people try things and figure out their own path forward, and to show others how it can be done. I did not hear them getting discussed much. Mostly a lot of media coverage about emails and sexism. One can imagine why the public seems to have eventually tuned this out.<br />
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I believe what happened, for many Trump voters, is they saw Clinton selling more of the same. And they did not connect this to see how it would help people like themselves (nor did she help them to do so), only that it would probably help people not like themselves, under their perceptions that that is what has been happening for a long time. Some of them found this offensive for highly offensive reasons. In some cases, a lot of them did so; for instance, on the Syrian or Muslim refugee question. But most people if they don't think a candidate is speaking about them, speaking to them, and listening to them, will find somewhere else to go with their vote. Trump promised them restorative change. Therefore that's where they went. Trump isn't actually offering restorative change, at least not on any of these issues that matter, he merely promised it. He doesn't appear to know how to create such changes, and most of the things he does know how to offer are dangerous, boorish, and downright offensive or stupid. But if that's the only thing people think they have to get, that's what they will take.<br />
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Clinton appears to have run a campaign based on the idea that things are fine, and getting better, which they are in most ways. Violent crime is near historical lows for the last half century. Abortion rates, teen pregnancy, and divorce have been declining. Terrorism is rare and sporadic, and often fomented and conducted by various ideological loners rather than representing a systematic or existential threat to a peaceful or prosperous American life. The US military, while partly bogged down in largely ineffective and pointless conflicts, is still powerful enough to deter any rival power from threatening us and our interests or allies and then some, granting immense safety from armed conflict that American civilians have enjoyed for almost two centuries (with the exception of a couple of prominent attacks rather than sustained, destructive conflict on American territory as is occurring in Ukraine or Syria, and has ravaged all of Europe and Asia in the recent past). The economy and wages are finally growing, albeit haltingly and slowly. Inflation is low. Corporate profits are high. American scientists and researchers and inventors are exploring the universe and the world, and making advances in technology and leisure with benefits that can be quickly dispersed to people all over the world. These are promising messages. Most people are unaware of them, or find them highly dubious because they are told something else is happening without verification of facts. Voter ignorance is a crushing problem to effective democracy, but it is not overcome by ignoring it and not bothering to confront it. And recognizing that the world is not on fire, and seems to be getting better in many ways, even if those ways do not always benefit ourselves, is a good start to acknowledging and defending progress and opportunities created and capitalised on as a consequence of our values and institutions as a nation.<br />
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What appears to have happened instead of offering these features and finding ways to expand them as opportunities to people who were afraid was a campaign that hammers on the fact that Trump was an unacceptable demagogue, peddling lies and false narratives, offensive speech and nonsense. This is all well and good, because it has the virtue of being true. Most people agreed with this message. That he was openly sexist or misogynistic in the things he said or did. That he was being racist in how he spoke about immigrants or minorities. That he was selling fear or xenophobia on the question of terrorism or crime. And even that he wasn't trustworthy and was running a con to enrich himself at the expense of voters. And still some of them voted for him anyway. It is not that they did not care. They simply evaluated these faults as less important than some other consideration. Some of them voted on the basis of amplified fear over abortion, or gun rights, or Obamacare, or immigrants, or terrorists. The campaign should have been doing what is possible to reduce those fears, because they have become unhinged from what is possible, or what is actually happening. As fear is often capable of doing. Fear, as a national emotion, is something to be avoided also. It paralyzes us, and prevents useful action and trust. It burns and destroys bridges and builds walls in the rubble. The world Trump-ism describes is a world with barbarians at the gates, and calls for reactionary politicians to man the walls ready with boiling oil to save us from this new and twisted evil. This is not the world in which we live in. But nobody seems to have bothered to explain this.<br />
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I would have some sympathy for Bernie Sanders fans running around complaining that if only Democrats had nominated him, this national nightmare would not have happened. Some of them are doing so in some really bizarre ways, such as complaining about the DNC "rigging" the primary process, and in so doing, annoying me when they pop up in threads discussing what to do about the attitudes and issues unfurled by a Trump/Republican victory to defend civil rights, or to protect women or minorities. I'm still not sure Sanders would have won, as there are some structural weaknesses to his campaign, and on a few points, not enough difference between himself, and his fans, and those of Trump. What this rests upon is the idea that the appropriate response to a right-wing populist/nationalist demagogue is left-wing populism, which in turn rests upon an idea that the appropriate way to turn out votes is to focus on being as distinctive as possible from your rivals to encourage your supporters with a clear vision. I agree a clearer and coherent vision would have helped the Clinton team. I do not think it is clear a farther left vision would have. Large numbers of voters were not happy with Clinton as the perception was she was too liberal. I think on the merits it was accurate she was liberal, more so than Obama. This does not point to an idea that Sanders would have benefited. Where he benefits is on the message of requiring some form of radical/restorative change. This seemed to be the broad segment of Trump's base and their demand was for someone to promise them change and the impression that they could deliver it.<br />
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I think Clinton's supporters were able to rest upon the idea that she cared about them. Her opponents did not think this was the case at all, because she offered little succor and clarity about how she would fight for their interests. Her record in office suggests she very much does fight for people's interests and liberal causes. Perhaps not always the most vibrant and important ones on the front lines (gay marriage most prominently), but in ways that would benefit the people she served in office. I regarded much of the opposition to her candidacy as grounded in some very strange, often conspiratorial ideas about how she practiced the use of power for domestic goals. Where I think this missed is that some of the opposition was that she wasn't ambitious enough about offering a robust agenda that people could get behind. There was no clear and cohesive view that was apparent to her observers of how and for what purpose she would exercise power. Trump-ism offered pretty clear ideas about what that would be, if offensive and self-destructive. So did Sanders. Reams of policy proposals and white papers suggested mainly that Clinton's agenda was "government for government's sake", if there was anything at all to it. Sanders or Trump at least suggested there would be a purpose of their own massive expansionary positions.<br />
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Much of my skepticism of Sanders' chances I think rests on the idea that he, like Trump, was mostly selling a lot of ideas that I do not see how they will be all that helpful. If anything, I regard significant minimum wage increases and "free college", key pillars of his agenda (and later Clinton's), as liable to increase and accelerate the problems posed by income and economic inequalities, along with his reflexive opposition to trade and sketchy positions on immigration. I felt that among these three candidates, Clinton on policy grounds probably offered the least harmful set of ideas and policy proposals (at least until she moved farther left on economic policies during the primaries), and that Sanders was only less harmful than Trump by dint of not being as belligerent and clumsy with American diplomacy, something he seemed to care little about, and less hostile to the idea that Americans have Constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties and should have those rights protected by government, not infringed. Overall, he offered an agenda I saw as dangerous by being largely economically illiterate and harmful. I do not want candidates who put forward ideas in the lineage of "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vidzkYnaf6Y">we need to do something, this is something, let's do it</a>". If we must have bold transformative ideas, I would like to see some idea that we might come away afterward with a better world. Sanders did not offer that. Trump certainly does not. Clinton's problem in this space was she lacked an idea, a justification around which to rally. A dream to sell other people on walking in. Trump literally promised people all of their dreams would come true. All the time. Even if some of those dreams are nightmares for others.<br />
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But Sanders and Trump suggested they would man the gates and pour the oil on someone, anyone. Maybe even lighting it on fire after. And that seemed to be something a big chunk of voters want. They don't know what the American dream is, or is going to be. So they'll settle for a nightmarish version of it. Trump supporters will have to contend not only that they picked a strange and probably counterproductive message around which to resonate, but that they picked a horrible messenger. Someone who was crude and offensive to most Americans and whose effects or policies may be dangerous to the security or safety of many. This too is a feature of Trump-ism.<br />
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<b>Tell it like it is!</b><br />
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Which is to say, it is not a particularly appealing feature of Trump. Telling large portions of Trump's voters that they are racist, sexist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, or whatever, has little or no effect. I'm not sure it is a useful exercise. Some of them pride themselves on this, on being offensive for the purpose of being offensive. Most however do not understand how their views have become interpreted this way, or do not understand that the things that may have outraged them are not considered that outrageous by others (or even as existing as real in the first place). Or that they are in fact considered reprehensible. There are not clear norms for interpreting and applying liberal or progressive values if one is conservative. Partly because these are still shifting, sometimes dramatically in the last decade. The cultural norms on speech and behavior relating to women alone have shifted radically in the last 50 years, and in even the last 15-20 years. These are voters who often grew up before that time, and whose children and even grandchildren may have internalized certain habits of how men talk that it should be "excused". For the most part, this view was not held by most voters in the country. It wasn't even held by most Trump voters. But things like "grab em by the pussy" were regarded as "just locker room talk" by a large number of people. Including women.<br />
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The difficulty many liberals have with interpreting this is that it comes from a political party and movement which has claimed for itself a mantle of "the moral majority". And then appears to have given a huge pass to someone who has crudely violated most of the norms and values they claimed to stand for. These are the same people who are often quite disturbed by the shifts in values or norms regarding language, sexuality, or violence in media and society. While some of them are thrown in a panic every December when a clerk says "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas", most are offended at the idea of publicly objectifying women on at least some level.<br />
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This is a dimension of Trump's appeal that I have the least comfort with and least understanding of. But what I think, partly, is going on is anecdotes about college speech codes and media flirtations with "hate speech" as though it should be a legal concept, combined with perceptions that traditional symbols and institutions are not respected by liberals (like religion or the flag or the military or the police), has created a sense that these values are under threat and that people won't be allowed to voice their opinions in the future. I don't much care for some opinions. I don't think most people express themselves very well (Trump included, he does not have the "best words"). But I do think people can and should be allowed to try. Where I have difficulty is in understanding how "but people don't like my opinions!" is treated as an issue of free speech. The chilling effect of having bad opinions called out by others, or poorly expressing them, is not the same as being legally prevented from speaking. The use of others right to protest and assemble having the impact of denying speech or assembly by others I believe is unwise as a use of those rights, but it does not seem to be something we should trouble ourselves over as a legal function either. Where the use or threat of violence exists, we should intercede. Where people are merely very annoying and disruptive, we should counsel against it. Where people are lying or dissembling extraordinary events into existence, we should demand better evidence.<br />
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The basic problem with this is that I don't have a good sense of whether this is a new or extreme threat to the institutional value of free speech. Or if it's just some wacky professors and college kids and a few people who manage to get editorials written. There isn't very much public engagement with the civic value of speech as a right, and its legal implications, versus the social norms about how people should use speech in public and what they can or cannot say in polite company. Assessing the actual damage done to the concepts like freedom of speech is also difficult. I do worry about how people choose to use the rights they have. There are not laws, or should not be laws, against being an asshole. But it shouldn't be our first choice in most circumstances either.<br />
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Running alongside these narratives about speech codes, these seem to be some number of people who are much offended by the use of the word "pussy" or "vagina", but not much offended by crude stereotypes and antiquated traditions about women and men's opinions of women. I don't know how to square that circle. I also see no reason to extend much respect to bad or bigoted ideas that are being held and espoused, or that egregious threats and strength through bullying to quiet others should be tolerated. Or to pretend that these methods of opposition to the polite discourse of ideas are hardly limited to a handful of wacky leftists, and are quite common and endorsed by Trump himself, and some of his most ardent fans. Unlike leftist professors, Trump is also in a position of legal authority to strip others of their basic civil rights. This is a serious threat to American civil liberties and the public exercise of them by its citizens. Not merely of the freedom of speech or freedom of religion. I do not think this is a serious danger that the majority of white Christian males are about to lose the privilege of talking and saying any ridiculous or offensive thing that comes into mind, or that Trump needed to be elected in order to restore that to being the case. As I and others have pointed out, a lot of whining about PC speech codes comes down to not being able to be a dick without having that pointed out (in making the mistake of reading internet comments, I saw this very much on evidence over the last few days. It was not wholly limited to right-wing nutters complaining they were being called homophobic for thinking gay men are gross and therefore that they shouldn't be allowed to get married to each other or have binding contracts enforced by the state. But there was a lot of that going on too).<br />
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Where I do find some more comfort in understanding this perspective is on another front. These are people who are mostly, if not overwhelmingly, white, and white Christians at that. And to be sure they will often have some antiquated views about women, race, and other subjects. This bothers me such that I don't plan on inviting very many people to BBQs or out for beers for sure (not that I do this with very many people anyway). What they also have is a vague sense that "they" are being somehow excluded by the political functions of identity politics. So some poor white kid in Arkansas trying to get a college degree and become a chemical engineer, say, does not get the same kind of assistance as some poor black kid in Chicago, or a Mexican immigrant's daughter (legally a citizen), to do the same thing. I'm not sure this happens that often, but I don't doubt that many families have internalized a sense that it does. Where it does occur, this violates a basic moral sense of fairness or equity. There are some good historical reasons why Americans should seek to provide aid to historically oppressed ethnic minorities (and also women) to a modest degree to help attend to the questions of economic mobility, and college admissions is an easier equalizer than shuffling large sums of money around through tax policy. Still. I would agree our sense of fairness, for something like college admissions, should focus mostly on the question of poverty first, and identity politics second as a result. I don't have strong feelings about it either way as long as it isn't used to exclude and discriminate against others.<br />
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One reason for this would be that poverty as a foremost concern would still mostly focus on the problems of ethnic minorities and class mobility. So we'd still be able to address this as a societal concern. But the other is that better educating a bunch of ultra religious rural/red state poorer kids in science or philosophy seems like a necessity anyway in order to shift the American polity in a somewhat more helpful direction politically on a few important issues. It should not be that the US is the only industrialized country with a major political party which takes so many basic anti-science stances. Such as global warming denialism. Or has so many people who are not sufficiently understanding of science and its methods and operations that they will deny the merits of evolutionary theory. These have rather negative impacts upon our policies in scientifically informed issues (carbon taxes, vaccines, antibiotic resistance, among others). To put it mildly we cannot afford to leave behind that half of the country. We can't easily fix rural or red state public schools at the K-12 level to spread empirical reasoning and critical thinking far and wide. One of the easiest ways to fix that is to make sure to admit some smart, poorer white folks from Arkansas and Louisiana and Montana into a pretty good university once in a while. I wouldn't suggest doing it at the exclusion of other smart and poor non-white kids from Chicago or Las Vegas or Los Angeles. But if the system is supposed to look like a meritocracy, giving people the same kind of shot based on some objective criteria (like wealth or income inequality) isn't a terrible idea.<br />
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All that said. There are talking points going past each other. To presume that a white population, with a declining life expectancy and troubles with alcoholism, opiate addiction and abuse, and mental health and suicide, and comprising a large body of undereducated people living in smaller cities and towns who may not be finding easy employment in future economic states as automation and globalisation increases and thus is in need of some kind of societal attention is not the same as concluding that our conflicts over the inequalities caused by race or gender or sexuality should be set aside, abandoned, or neglected either. We can do both. We also don't have to put up with intolerance and bigotry along the way simply because some people haven't figured out how to be kind to one another.<br />
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<b>So...what now?</b><br />
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As for how to combat this. Americans in the 40s and 50s and even into the 60s appeared in the rose-coloured glasses of history to have had a sense of common purpose as a people and nation. Rhetoric defending and exemplifying civil rights and civil liberties as anchors of individual and social freedom used to be common, even as the country often failed to live up to those high-minded ideals. Investment in science and science education, and celebrating the achievements of those who took to it and made advances and discoveries and inventions, was seen as a patriotic necessity. I do not think it so that this era was populated by people any more noble or any wiser or better educated than ours today that they better understood these values, or struggled less with how to uphold them. The distinction seems to be that we do not have some idea that these things, these inalienable rights, are a part of what it means to be American and are worth celebrating in our civic life, and worth trying to uphold and live up to. We have just elected someone who openly proclaimed an intention to ignore most of these values, and appears to have little interest in examining the things he does not understand, and has no history of exhorting others to live up to these values privately or publicly to this date, nor of surrounding himself with capable people who know things that he needs to know. This is a serious problem. It appears in part to have happened because elites took some things for granted. But also because people really hated elites, and didn't care what we get instead of the status quo. We are divided by ideology, or political party, just as we are along religion (or its absence), and by race. To the point that we no longer argue over principles and ideals, but over fealty to this identity and damn anyone who belongs to the other side. And that toxic mixture of fear, hate, and ignorance has boiled over.<br />
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This has happened before. The antebellum period leading up to the Civil war was filled with incidents of division and strife, eventually culminating in a bloody and disastrous war between brothers and states. The 1960s and early 70s unleashed a long saga of civil rights struggles and chaos here and abroad which even engulfed the President and other instruments of governance in a corruption that was exposed and took down an entire administration. We recovered. We can recover this as well. But we have to have something else to replace it with, something to shoot for, instead of each other. More or less together, setting aside the differences and fear across the partisan din. Before violence and mayhem sets in and the truncheon or the Molotov or the bullet replaces a conversation.<br />
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There was a dream that was America. Make us believe in it again. As the line goes.<br />
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<br />Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-24345089178101335342016-11-11T14:31:00.000-05:002016-11-11T14:39:38.480-05:00Fear and respectTwo other points in all of this. There's a fair amount of talking past each other going on. I'm trying to interpret it. Because something just happened that I genuinely did not understand, or did not expect this country to be capable of. So I'm doing some listening.<br />
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In looking at Trump supporters. I'm seeing a lot of talk and discussion about a demand for respect. There is sometimes a genuine disdain evident from "elites" toward white working class people living in rural Wisconsin, say. I don't think Trump was paying them better respect (because he's a con man). Still. I understand the demand for it, if not where that lead them politically. There is a manner in which discussing his voters as ignorant, racist and anti-feminist country bumpkins dismisses this need, which is justified, and provides more incentive to lift a middle finger in response and go do something kind of dumb to get back at people who don't respect you and your interests. In the way that people become spiteful in order to try to harm others who do not grant them the respect and common decency that is required in societal norms. For one thing. Most of them are not like this depiction. Social and polling evidence is strong that many are, depending on the subject (particularly exhibiting xenophobia toward Muslims and immigrants), and that some number of Clinton supporters were also, depending on the subject. That still leaves a big chunk of people who voted Republican the other day for all sorts of complicated reasons that were not sexist, racist, or idiotic. That is difficult to explain on the merits. But it isn't difficult to explain that they have complex motives and self-interests that are not the same as "what I think they should be", the position of "people voting against their self-interest" which is far too commonly taken up by liberals and progressives in examining right-leaning constituents. Dismissing other people's interests is not a sensible way to govern versus seriously arguing with them.<br />
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The issue for me is more that most of them deliberately overlooked what Trump was (an ignorant, racist, and anti-feminist bumpkin in a suit). I had thought at multiple opportunities we were better than that to see this as a problem as a country, as something beneath us to represent us to each other and to the world. Respect is something earned by being a decent person, someone who is tolerant, patient, and kind to others. Most of us try to do that privately and publicly where possible. Most of us I thought wanted the country to reflect that even as we disagree vehemently over how. If we are in need of respect as a nation, we should find a better exemplar who earns and commands respect even from his or her rivals. Reagan was great at this, even as I would have to find many of his policies ridiculous. Do not go run with a belligerent jackass. That is not the route to the respect you demanded. You will get a lot of people pissed off. "They" of the infamous "they" will respect you even less for exercising such poor judgment. Not elites, whose respect people do not seem to even want anymore. Other regular people who happen to be more liberal than you, because of a position on guns or abortion, say, and are otherwise trying to lead normal, happy lives. Or people of a different ethnicity than you. Or who live in another country. Or who wanted to come to this country and build a life. And it is these people who may suffer most from what happened Tuesday, not the elites who look down upon you. This is what has happened. In the quest to punish elites for a lack of respect, it is normal people will suffer and no respect will be earned or given. Only more division. It is hurtful and often disrespectful or dismissive to be called a racist or a sexist, particularly when you do not feel those terms should apply to you. It is much less so than suffering the consequences of someone who is racist or sexist in their actions and words.<br />
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In looking at Clinton supporters. This is something that I think many people are far too quick to dismiss among the right. There is a genuine fear based upon the things Trump and his surrogates have said they intend to do. Significant and sometimes terrifyingly large portions of his supporters have expressed a demand for particular changes in policy that are genuinely harmful to some number of "other people", people unlike themselves that they hate and fear. Minorities. The LGBT community. Foreigners. Immigrants. These are groups of people who have been given every reason to be concerned right now. This is a fact.<br />
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It is wishful thinking to push it away and claim Trump is the most LGBT friendly Republican nominee they've had (I am extremely dubious, as Goldwater comes to mind immediately as having been pretty pro-LGBT as a Senator, especially later in his career). When they also have Mike Pence on the ticket and the most explicitly anti-LGBT party platform they have ever had. Trump has said explicitly he wants to overturn the Supreme Court ruling granting marriage as an equal right and is in a position to appoint people who could do so. Pence has taken much more harsh stances. This is not imaginary. This is not merely about people getting pissed off because some bigoted baker wouldn't make them a cake for their wedding.<br />
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Changes to abortion restrictions and access to birth control should alarm many women. Changes to police militarization and justice department restraints of abuse by police of civil liberties should alarm anyone and everyone, but will fall most harshly on ethnic minorities. Changes to immigration policy should alarm migrants and people who look like they could be immigrants. Changes to the way we surveil and treat Muslims and their religious liberties should alarm the Islamic community. Changes to the way we accept refugees should alarm people fleeing from authoritarian governments and active war zones. Changes to environmental policy should alarm environmentalists (and everyone else). These are innocents. Not people who wish us harm, merely sometimes people with which we disagree. People can claim these are deserved and necessary changes (I disagree, for the most part), or be unconcerned, even gleeful, that these other Americans or other people are now afraid or potentially will suffer. But they don't get to claim that fear doesn't or should not exist and that everyone should pipe down and get on with it.<br />
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These fears are grounded in what has happened in the campaign, what has happened when Republicans have had control over the levers of government, and what is most likely to happen now as a matter of American policy. It is not made up. It is entirely reasonable to wonder why large numbers of voters went to the polls, and seeing these same elements, and decided "yeah, that's a good choice for President". If the fears people have are from experiencing sexism, and racism, and ultra-nationalistic chest bumping on the receiving end, it will not be appropriate for such people to declare and decide that their white (mostly male) countrymen are all sexist, racist bastards who just want to burn everything down and make other people suffer. But it isn't an entirely unreasonable conclusion given that this will be the effects they experience.Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-40613791906948428802016-11-10T18:18:00.000-05:002016-11-10T22:46:29.520-05:00Many words, here instead of elsewhereMost of my annoyance in the last week or two has gotten filtered into facebook posts among friends. But I'm also encountering now some of their own forms of annoyance. I have some thoughts.<br />
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Blaming third party voters is a waste of time. This was bad political strategy during the campaign for Clinton and her surrogates to go after Jill Stein or Gary Johnson supporters. It isn't any smarter now after the fact. What appears to have happened in the narrative of the campaign's history is she used those initial attacks, and the debates, and the grab 'em by the pussy statements to consolidate her more liberal support among third party voters (this is suggested by polling at any rate) back in early October which allowed her to get out to a significant polling lead. That left a solid cohort of "true believers", people who almost always vote third party and probably would not vote at all if they were forced to vote for Clinton or Trump, and whatever portion of that vote may have preferred Trump to her but were uneasy about actually voting for him, plus some portion of people who lived in non-competitive states and wished to voice an opinion.<br />
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Voters do appear to have engaged in some strategic voting, to reduce the chances of a swing state being carried by Trump as third party vote totals in close states like Florida are extremely low, while states like New Mexico or Utah were not. But what appears to have happened is not that this third party vote preferred Clinton uniformly and thus that the millions of Stein and Johnson voters could have swung the election to her, but that those votes went to Trump instead at the moment of truth in the ballot box. There is some math involved, which I will spare people, but so far it appears Johnson's presence on the ballot, and Evan McMullin's occasional presence, may have flipped Minnesota and New Hampshire to Clinton based on who showed up to vote and who Johnson's support was drawn from. Colorado is a possibility as well. This is in spite of Stein and Johnson possibly flipping Wisconsin and, especially, Michigan to Trump. What does this mean? Well it does not mean Clinton would have won. That would require a very different universe of voters turning out than who did.<br />
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There are two major flaws with this argument that the problem for Clinton was third party voters. First that the major party vote is deserved by even this small sliver of protesting voters who may have quixotic political views that are better reflected by minor parties. The best response to that is to make a pitch to appeal to those odd views in some way. Based on what I see Stein putting forward as her views on many issues, that was not very likely to be very similar to Hillary Clinton. In some cases, that's a good thing. She's weird, and her views are weird on a number of issues. Appealing to some of them as a mainstream Democrat, even a farther leftist one, would be weird and probably not ultimately helpful for winning an election. This is also true of Johnson voters and libertarians, except there the typical appeal is from mainstream Republicans. Like many third party candidates, Gary Johnson appears to have been a very awkward and bumbling representative for his overlying philosophy for governance: a bleeding-heart-libertarianism, which has some appeal to younger voters, and younger Republicans or conservatives especially. Still, expecting conservatives to decide Hillary Clinton is a good choice to vote for again suggests a very strange correlation based on the history of conservative media and its coverage of the Clinton family. Based on my understanding of conservative views, there were a great many who did not favor Trump's agenda. But they were not fond of Clinton's either. They may have presumed or calculated that it would be easier to manipulate Trump's than Clinton's into something they would find livable. You can disagree with that calculation, or point out that it does not account for a bunch of other things that you think are important, or point out that Clinton might actually be better for their preferred agenda, but that appeal has to be made. I do not think it was. It was instead assumed that third party votes should just not exist, and that all voters must obviously favor one candidate over the other and should vote accordingly. That this is the prevailing attitude both during the campaign and persisting afterward is not encouraging that Democrats and liberals have learned anything by this experience.<br />
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Second, the bigger flaw is to assume that these votes substantially preferred the candidate you did. They do not. "Libertarian" votes historically go to Republican candidates, not Democratic ones. Johnson tried to make a pitch to more socially tolerant or socially liberal voters, Bernie Bros for example, as well as civil libertarians of all political stripes. And maybe that's a chunk of the support he had left. But he also had a chunk of support from anti-Trump voters that didn't like Clinton either. And some who genuinely liked neither. It is not as simple as to look at his vote total and assume it would all go in the Clinton column, or the Trump column.The math from late polls suggests he was no longer drawing evenly, and the math from the disparity of polls and state election results suggests a bunch of his residual anti-Trump voters decided to give in and vote for Trump. What this means, in mathematical terms, is he was suppressing Trump's vote more than he was Clinton's by being on the ballot and attracting votes. It is wishful thinking to assume otherwise.<br />
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The appropriate response to all of this was not "third party voters are evil and stupid", and it certainly does not appear to be "third party voters have just created a fascist dictatorship because they're stupid", but rather "my candidate better reflects your agenda than this other person, and here is why". Or perhaps listen a little to why they do not think so. Many of these voters are otherwise normal people with weird habits and views. Some of them have very reasonable disagreements with either of the major political party candidates on issues of substance and significance.<br />
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And well. Some are just assholes. I for one will not miss the influence of alt-right, Ayn Rand fans, and the voters thereof upon the libertarian movement in favor of more classically liberal views. Go home to the Republican party and stay there. Libertarians as a political movement seem to be doing just fine at growing their support base without you anyway. I regard that as a good thing. I do not regard it as a good thing that you were apparently this numerous however.<br />
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There are some problems with the third party vote. Most notably: that a bunch of people who suggested they might vote for Gary Johnson in polls back in the summer mostly broke to vote for Donald Trump at the last minute, and over the last few weeks. Given there are fairly few policy parallels between these two (you almost can't get a more extreme variation on immigration, abortion, gay marriage, and civil liberties, as examples), I have a hard time understanding what that is based upon. I have this problem almost every election cycle, wondering what people with libertarian-ish views or claim to have libertarian-ish views are doing voting for most Republicans (or Democrats). But Trump appeared to be uniquely incompatible with a political ethos based around freedom or individual liberty and rights. He appealed strongly to authoritarian instincts, and toward the restraint of the rights of "others". Neither of which should be appealing to libertarians, or people who might have otherwise found the variety of libertarianism on offer from Gary Johnson that appealing. I seriously doubt his announced intentions to scale back banking regulations, among other regulatory changes, or to punch a huge hole in the deficit by passing a massive tax cut and not reducing spending was getting that big of a draw from Johnson voters.<br />
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What this last part suggests is the real problem for Clinton voters to answer. It is not enough to answer why some small sliver of libertarian-ish voters decide to vote for Trump. Why did people at all want to vote for Trump in the first place? I have not been satisfied so far with many of the answers that are given. Some of them I recognize as likely true, but I find appalling. Vast portions of Trump's agenda should have been regarded as politically disqualifying by a decent society. His avowed, willful, and bombastic ignorance of subjects relevant to governing also should have been regarded as a serious danger. His affinity for attracting support from authoritarians abroad, and from misogynists and racists at home also should have given serious pause (as it did for me with Ron Paul, as an added bonus for finding him too distasteful on a number of policy questions, immigration and abortion key among them).<br />
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There are two scary parts to this.<br />
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1- People who were aware of these as disqualifiers. Most of the public did not approve of his bombastic cruelties toward women or thought he was unsuited for the job of the President. Some number of these people who thought he was an ignorant asshole of some variety voted for him anyway. This is disturbing. There might be other reasons they preferred him to Clinton, some policy issue (for example, Supreme Court nominations). But then the question mark is why prefer and prop up him over some other more amenable source for advancing those policies? Trump actually got fewer votes than John McCain, in a country with more people and voters in it than 8 years ago. What policies are this important to risk a number of other issues, and to risk depressing voter turnout by having a nominee that disgusted large portions of the general public? Clearly there was a high level of disgust with Clinton as well, for sometimes legitimate concerns and sometimes rather tortured reasons. It is likely a generic Democratic candidate clobbers this fool.<br />
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2- People who ignored or embraced these as disqualifiers. Because of the unusual nature of Trump's campaign, lots of studies have already been done examining who his supporters are likely to be. It is not obvious to liberals or the media why he attracted this much support. So studies. There are large sums of people who are racist. Who are sexist and who hold anti-feminist views of a hostile or misogynist nature (rather than benevolent chivalry of a traditionalist view). Who are xenophobic or Islamophobic. Trump did very well with the voters who (still) think Obama wasn't born in the United States, or is secretly Muslim. Trump did very well in counties that George Wallace did well in in the GOP primaries, and often adopted some of the same tones. Democrats were not immune from these issues either. There was considerable racism found among Democratic voters too, just not as pronounced as among Trump's base. His campaign was very much a revanchist and white nationalist view of policy on many issues. It adopted strongly authoritarian tones ("I alone can fix it", among others). Violence was not an uncommon incident from his followers at campaign events, and he did little or nothing to discourage any of these views of himself or his followers, or their behavior. Indeed, his most ardent followers often reveled in being called "deplorable".<br />
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The assumption all along by liberals and polls was that voters, even Republican or conservative voters, would reject these as a stated agenda. They did not. Policy elites did, particularly on the issues of national security, where Trump has taken a very unpredictable and probably dangerous long-term stance on the use, goals, and promotion of the American hegemony (to the point that I think the biggest winners of the election were probably Russia and China, our biggest geopolitical rivals). But as it turned out, conservative voters did not care very much about the conservative agenda served up by standard Republicans. The voices of protest or conservative reason abandoned a ship that was ready to toss them off anyway. This is not what they cared about.<br />
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I have seen two vaguely laid out perspectives of what they did care about.<br />
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1- We want to blow up the system because we think the system sucks (or favors people we do not like/fear.) This is the "economic anxiety" argument for his support. I think most of his policy agenda is apt to foster far more economic anxiety particularly his positions on trade and taxation/spending, with the exception of pretty well off people like himself. But it wasn't like I felt Clinton did a good job messaging how she would do any better. She waffled on trade instead of defending it as something that benefits everyone, or explaining how it could be redistributed to better benefit workers. She waffled on immigration instead of defending it as something that can benefit all Americans by enriching us rather than "taking away jobs". And on and on throughout her agenda. A core problem appeared to be that she was seen as part of the system, someone who wanted to work within its limitations and understood them well, but did not seem able to elaborate what she intended to do. What was she focused on? Who knows? It seemed like anything she could get into and get done. Which is hard to sell in a stump speech, even if there's something in there for almost anyone.<br />
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Trump, for all his lack of policy details, it was pretty clear what he intended to do as a set of visionary goals. Build a stupid fucking wall. Kick out Muslims and Mexicans. Start a trade war with China. Isolate ourselves from our traditional allies. Adopt more authoritarian governing cultural norms. Cut taxes drastically for people like himself. And so on. This was an appalling policy vision to many people, but it serves the purpose of "burn down the system" simply because it was not smelling like rank establishment. That most of his actual policies were composed by or will be composed by the establishment Republican party was a fact missed in all of this and is now being arbitrated by his followers claiming that he won't be trying to go after gay marriage rights. He picked Mike Pence as his VP and the party platform was aggressively anti-LGBT, if you don't think he won't go after that question, among others that were feared by his political opponents, you are fooling yourself. Trump's appeals to LGBT voters and other minority groups all took the form of "I'm not anti-gay but", a problem which leads me to the second reason Trump appears to have gathered support.<br />
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2- "We don't like being looked down on by elites." This is the "he tells it like it is" version of his support. To an extent I understand some maligned feeling regarding PC speech. There are anecdotes of ridiculousness of speech codes and responses to offensive speech, questions which need more examination for me to get an understanding if this is a broad social trend that needs to be combatted or is just a few really wacky folks. I am also uncomfortable with using laws to try to shutter bigoted cake shop owners who refuse to make cakes for weddings they don't approve of (even as I agree they are most likely bigots and can or should be called such). But. Most of the time when I hear a statement complaining about PC culture and speech policing, what it amounts to is whining that you can no longer be a dick without being called out as one. People who are more offended at being called a racist than the fact that they hold racist views, suggesting that the label is accurate. Statements like "I'm not a racist but....." or "I have great respect for women but..." are heard as "I am a huge asshole and you should have to listen to me anyway". This is largely the methods Trump has employed in his lifetime. His "grab em by the pussy" comments suggesting casual sexual assault were often compared to rap lyrics as though these were similar word crimes (a common punching bag for all manner of right wing talking points seems to be Beyonce, I assume it's because she's really popular with liberals and not with conservatives). All while ignoring that it is the context of words that is suggestive of harmful behavior or intention and thus makes them potentially offensive. Not the existence and use of words that are deemed offensive.<br />
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This is not a segment of the population I am all that sympathetic toward as a whole. I think the advance of social norms of tolerance is a good thing in a diverse society. I think it will do so imperfectly, and should be called out when it is acting weird or counterproductively. The use of speech to suppress others speech by coercion is not going to be an easy space to walk in, and will have erstwhile allies on underlying policies, like gay marriage, who wish to go much further than I think is necessary. I do not agree that such norms as politeness or decency toward others should be generally enforced with laws and speech codes, where possible, which is where I often part from more progressive friends. But I do believe they can be beneficial to consider the impact and importance of words and behaviors on others and to treat them with more kindness or tolerance. I do not think that means we should revel in being a racist prick, or a misogynist pig who doesn't believe in rape as a crime. Or that that should be something to aspire to being. There's a middle ground there somewhere that involves the legal functions of using our freedom of speech with the laudable cultural norms of "not being a dick" when we do so, but I don't think we will be seeing it anytime soon. Large segments of Trump's supporters embraced views which are anti-PC. Much of his vote came from voters who have a very serious hatred or fear of Muslims and who somehow believe that calling a war, such as it is one, something different and labeling our opponent as Islam, or at least a portion of it, is somehow a good strategic concept. As but one example. There was a non-trivial sum of his vote that was willing to not only ignore these views and policies, but actively favoured more of them and has been celebratory for the return of a world where such abuses as they wish to hurl at others may do so again. These were abuses they were and still are free to hurl at others generally. The only difference is it is harder to say they are "wrong" when the cultural norm has elected someone who violates the norms (in spite of most voters agreeing this was wrong and unpleasant behavior).<br />
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So. Where do we all go from here? For my part, I will continue to argue against most of Mr Trump's agenda. Vociferously. There are portions which do not animate me with disgust, or fear for my fellow Americans, or which do not seem likely to be odious and harmful to millions of people. But not many. Had Mrs Clinton been elected instead, I would have had many disagreements there as well, particularly where it regarded foreign policy and civil liberties. These were issues I felt both candidates were quite awful, and the precise issues on which I normally vote for Presidential candidates. Neither candidate seemed interested in addressing the deficit or debt. Tax reform policies were scarcely discussed. The things I cared about most did not come up much at all (climate change, BLM, long-term fiscal security of the country, etc), in spite of being obviously high stakes between the two candidates for once. And the ones that did come up at all (trade and the appropriate use of American hegemony) came up in a really, really weird way that left me with no favored candidate.<br />
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I have the fortune of being in a relatively well off position that most of his policies will not impact me directly, or at least not immediately (his protectionist anti-trade and anti-immigrant stances will be a problem for everyone). That does not mean I feel comfortable waiting to see what he will do and how it will impact people who are much more vulnerable than myself for reasons of ethnicity or religion. He has announced what he intends to do. People for whom he has announced policies that will target people like themselves have every reason to be afraid and to take calls for patience and unity as sanctimonious nonsense. Don't come to them telling them to calm down and not be angry.<br />
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In brief discussions so far with friends since election night. Many people are angry, angrier than I am even that the result of this election cycle was this man, in particular, becoming President and the prospect of his agenda being enacted frightens or disgusts them. The thing that occurs to me most is that people should work to defend those causes and issues they care most about. If that is pro-choice abortion rights, find a clinic to volunteer at. If that is Black Lives Matters and general questions of police reform, keep pushing back on police militarization and brutality and violations of civil liberties by police, and assure that the goal is that police can and will do a better job cleaning up crime and violence by citizens rather than rousting and annoying ordinary citizens because they can. If that is gay marriage, work to make sure many people you know who can get married and want to will do so and support those marriages as friends do. If that was immigration or refugees, see what can be done locally to protect people here in this country or seeking to come here. If that was climate change, keep trying to do things that are environmentally friendly personally, or push for local and state action where you can. Broad scale changes in the form of legislation and regulation are coming on these and many other issues. They may not be amenable to your goals as a person for what you want this society to do with its powers and attention. Go forth and defend them on the front lines if you can.<br />
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I had also entered this election cycle wondering what would happen with "reasonable" conservatives (and libertarians). I am now left very confused still about that question, with even less clarity than expected. It would seem to me that both major political parties need to have a serious "what the fuck are we doing" discussion, as the political elites in both parties have been annihilated and overturned for the most part. They will (both) need new agendas for long-term stability moving forward as a younger generation comes of age and starts voting at higher rates. Budget hawks, civil libertarians, anti-drug warriors, and anti-interventionists or IR realists have had no homes right now at all as expressed in the major party Presidential candidates or Congressional politics over the last couple of cycles. Those seem like they could be substantial portions of the American polity to attract votes for a political party in several cases. Why aren't they reflected by one party or the other? What happens to anti-Trump voters that ended up voting for him out of a disdain for Clinton? What happens to weak political parties in an era of intense partisanship?<br />
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Really the question of what happens with the portion of Trump's voters that were not sexist/racist morons (roughly half of his voters don't fall into those categories, most of the rest do so pretty clearly) had interested me the most. Since they "won", in a close and contentious election at that, I'm now intensely curious what they think they won. I don't see that there was some prize in the box that they will come away with better for. In a few cases, I see some policy wins (pro-life voters for example), but those wins are liable to be very hollow rather than long-term advances. I'm not sure what that leaves. I would have had some similar concerns regarding Clinton had she won. Other than the importance of a symbolic win of a woman over a clearly sexist opponent and rival, that wasn't entirely clear what we were getting either as a country that it would be helpful, or would stand a chance of passage. I have a hard time believing that Trump's support was entirely based on denying this from occurring. But. I am not seeing many coherent and sensible ideas on offer instead.<br />
<br />Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-90123906003801642122016-09-18T23:31:00.001-04:002016-09-18T23:34:42.950-04:00Why were we invited to that party again?<br />I'm having trouble understanding why libertarians are still marginally affiliated with Republicans/conservatives. These <a href="http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/wp-content/uploads/toplines_lvc_2016_0815.pdf">questions </a>are not helpful for figuring that out.<br /><br />"Since the 1950s, do you think American culture and way of life has mostly changed for the better, or has it mostly changed for the worse?<br /><br />Conservatives: 23% better, 64% worse<br />Libertarians: 74% better, 12% worse."<br /> <br />There are better ways to tell the difference between these two, but pessimism will do if nothing else will. (These are all among a group of mostly millennials, not overall populations).<br /><br />Immigration had a big split, but mostly because libertarians were 94% in favor of more immigration, and 86% opposed to a stupid wall. Conservatives were divided, nominally opposed to more immigration and in favor of a stupid wall. Another big gap existed over the NSA and defence cuts, and ground troops to fight ISIS.<br /><br />And then there were these questions.<br /><br />"Do you believe that identifying with a gender different from the gender assigned at birth is morally acceptable or morally wrong?<br /><br />Conservatives: 64% wrong, 1% acceptable, 32% not a moral question<br />Libertarians: 13% wrong, 24% acceptable, 62% not a moral question<br /><br />Recent killings of black men, including incidents in Minneapolis and Baton Rouge have sparked national protests of police treatment of black Americans that centered around the slogan #BlackLivesMatter. Do you support or oppose the goals of #BlackLivesMatter?<br /> <br />Conservatives: 21% support, 76% oppose<br />Libertarians: 64% support, 32% oppose<br /> <br />It is important for children to be brought up in a religion so they can learn good values<br /><br />Conservatives: 88% agree, 8% disagree<br />Libertarians: 34% agree, 61% disagree<br /><br />I am willing to give up some personal freedom and privacy for the sake of national security<br /><br />Conservatives: 80% agree, 16% disagree<br />Libertarians: 24% agree, 70% disagree<br /><br />Internet pornography is a public health crisis<br /><br />Conservatives: 53% agree, 44% disagree<br />Libertarians: 10% agree, 84% disagree<br /><br />The government needs to do more to combat the prescription painkiller addiction epidemic<br /><br />Conservatives: 48% agree, 49% disagree<br />Libertarians: 25% agree, 70% disagree"<br /><br />And these<br /><br />"How concerned are you about the following issues?<br /><br />Terrorism/national security<br /><br />Conservatives: 89% very concerned<br />Libertarians: 29% very concerned<br /><br />Abortion<br /><br />Conservatives: 71% very concerned<br />Libertarians: 26% very concerned<br /><br />Morality in society<br /><br />Conservatives: 67% very concerned<br />Libertarians: 50% not concerned at all"<br /><br />"Which of these best describes your religious preference?<br /><br />Catholic<br /> <br />Conservatives 32%<br />Libertarians 8%<br /><br />Evangelical<br /><br />Conservatives: 32%<br />Libertarians: 6%<br /><br />Non-religious<br /><br />Conservatives: 3%<br />Libertarians: 40%"Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-21648192246371729362016-09-08T16:15:00.001-04:002016-09-08T16:15:19.693-04:00Gary Johnson and political ignoranceI take it that an interview this morning did not go well for the upstart third party campaign of Johnson-Weld. I have numerous reservations with Johnson's positions on a number of issues as it is, though I still find him broadly preferable to either Trump (who is just awful) and Clinton (who is merely pretty bad). But this kind of event requires some thinking and examination.<br />
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To recap. Johnson's "problem" is he has gotten a lot of media coverage this campaign cycle, which means he is getting a broader array of questions than a third party candidate normally gets. He has a habit of deflecting questions he does not understand, whether by brain fart or sheer ignorance, by asking what they are talking about and then formulating some kind of answer. This looks really quite bad when the question is asking about what are deemed to be significant policy details. Such as a city in Syria. I was not happy that he didn't know where Aleppo was.<br />
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In voter ignorance terms, most Americans did not know where it was and what significance that question had either. Very few Americans probably knew what that question meant or was in reference to. Had I heard it, as someone who tries to keep abreast of foreign policy and issues in other countries, I would have sought to clarify what they were specifically asking about in regards Aleppo (the fight between Assad's regime and the rebels there? the refugee problem? the general state of affairs in Syria as a whole? the deployment of American special forces there?), suggesting it wasn't a terribly great question anyway. Perhaps the context was helpful and I could have provided a cogent response without seeking clarification, but I am dubious. It is not like "Morning Joe" is likely a space for intelligent commentary and interviews.<br />
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As to what that means in political terms.<br />
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Probably not very much.<br />
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Presidential candidates have gaffes of memory or misspeaking quite often. We have one candidate in particular (Drumpf) who does not seem capable of uttering virtually any factual information correctly whatsoever. I am not happy about it to be sure. Aleppo is, or at least ought to be, pretty well known within discussions about Syria. But it isn't very pertinent to specifically know about it in order to determine overall strategic questions about what should be done in Syria or about Syria by the United States.<br />
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It turns out that the <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/09/08/no_one_knows_what_aleppo_is.html">media doesn't seem to know where Aleppo is or what it is either. </a>Which is not terribly surprising. Most Americans of all lines of work and persuasion are woefully ill-informed about other countries. Even other countries in which we seem to have a considerable interest in intervening in militarily or diplomatically or are actively doing so. (The old line about "war is god's way of teaching Americans geography", which Bierce or Twain did not ever actually say or write). Getting those kinds of details correct is something Presidential candidates should try very hard do in order to sound well-informed to a public that is usually not well informed. But. Secretary Clinton is nothing if not razor sharp at recalling and reciting facts about policies that might be informative at determining what good policies are and have achieved. This has not generally helped her form what seem to be wise and effective policies where international relations are concerned (see: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Rwanda, Kosovo....). Meanwhile, Donald Trump has more or less gone out of his way to sound uninformed and uninterested in becoming informed on pretty much any policy, in particular international affairs. I would imagine this could leave some room for error in the middle in the minds of many undecided voters.<br />
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The current two major party candidates are both pretty unpopular, and American foreign policy is not considered a major issue by many voters. While domestic considerations like terrorism and ISIS are considered important, they're not actually a big deal. I don't think it is automatically disqualifying for how one should vote if one was considering a third party that someone flubs a very specific policy question. Most of his support appears to be from younger voters anyway. Voters who are unlikely to pay much attention to mainstream media coverage and whose main problem would be making sure they might show up to vote in the first place.<br />
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This will probably depress Johnson's vote total somewhat, but probably not below the 5% threshold to secure funding and ballot access for the Libertarian party in the future, which is a useful goal for libertarians or libertarian-ish voters to seek out as a means of demonstrating a potential avenue of reform for either political party. If his vote total is subsequently depressed from the current 8-10% nationally in polls to around 6-7% in votes (something I regarded as likely anyway), that will possibly help Clinton in a couple of close states (perhaps Colorado or North Carolina most noticeably). It will also probably keep him from competing as effectively in Utah to try to win any state, something no third party candidate has done for quite a while. And possibly put a damper on his fundraising efforts to some degree in order to run ads or voter registration campaigns in favorable states. But all of that is also unlikely to impact the result of the election simply because the third party vote, while apparently much higher than normal, was pretty unlikely to impact the result of the election already.<br />
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I would say that this is a common issue with media and establishment types to deem minor party candidates as "disqualified" by dint of rather minor errors, while writing off rather substantial errors made by the major party figures (see, most everything Trump has done for the last year, as well as his entire public life, for example). That will not help Johnson recover from this blunder. The margin for error is really quite low if one is running an insurgent campaign to garner any public respectability. This was something he should have been aware of. And worked harder to avoid.<br />
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For the record: the correct answer on Syria/Aleppo should be something like the following list<br />
1) Take in vastly more than 10000 refugees. Possibly as many as one million. Or basically anyone who wanted to come here. The American refugee system is pretty reliable for both vetting potential refugees to reduce problems of terrorism or criminality or maladjustment, and also for producing high quality immigrants who work hard to assimilate to a new life in a pretty safe and advanced country that took them in from a place of hardship and violent upheaval. Historically it's one of the best weapons we have both against terrorism or violent extremism. And also one of the best faces we can put upon what it means to be "American" is that we will take in people from anywhere and more or less leave them in peace to live their lives once they get here. We should take advantage of that to take in and shelter as many people as we can. This is the most pressing element of the war is the displacement of ordinary people it has created and the vast humanitarian crisis that has unfolded as a result. We should be seeking to do as much as we can to alleviate that by removing people from a position of violence and danger and placing them in the position of trying to build ordinary lives elsewhere.<br />
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2) Use diplomatic pressures to try to end the civil war between the Assad forces and various rebel groups who don't like him. This may mean that Assad must step down, the country could be partitioned into autonomous or semi-autonomous states (like the Kurds in Iraq), Russia or Iran would have more influence on the resolution of the situation than is nominally desirable, and so on. I do not mean to suggest that this path is easy, but it seems more likely to have a productive result in ending fighting and violence in Syria than violent intervention and use of force against Assad to remove him militarily, or that the provision of military assistance to forces we might nominally support is likely to guarantee that weapons we provide won't be used against us later, or won't be used internally or regionally for the purposes of brutal repression (as the Saudis have been doing in Yemen and has been mostly ignored).<br />
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3) Use diplomatic pressures to try to involve all of the relevant regional parties in suppressing ISIS regional state as a thing that exists within Syria and Iraq and might be of some threat to the outside world, most especially the neighbouring countries and the people within the territories it has control or influence over. This would mean Turkey, Syria/Syrian rebels, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and probably Russia as well.<br />
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4) Do not use American foreign policy in the form of bombing campaigns or ground forces to resolve the question of lone wolf style ideologically inspired attacks within the US and the West. That is not how that fight is going to be won. That is a terrible policy formulation. American leaders should take advantage of voter ignorance and indifference on foreign policy to "ignore" problems like that and seek their resolution in other means (intelligence gathering and cooperation with foreign governments, counter-terrorism policies, police investigations, etc).Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-31890855163475169242016-08-31T12:43:00.001-04:002016-08-31T12:43:25.159-04:00Odious speechThere have been two parallel trends of "free speech" discourse over the last several years I have observed with some disdain.<br />
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People who complain when other people who do not like what they have said and say so, or otherwise use their private ability to discriminate who may use a platform of speech they have provided, under a mistaken belief that "PC-policing" of this kind is infringing upon their rights to free speech.<br />
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Groups of people who cite anecdotal experience to suggest that there are broad, sweeping, and new trends which threaten civil discourse norms of engaging with political opponents in a polite disagreement over facts and motives.<br />
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The former is merely stupidity about what the Constitution means; that it restricts the government, but not the people, from imposing restraints upon what someone can say, or what they wish to hear. Which is par for the course, but still really annoying and tedious.<br />
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The latter position if true would be a deeply shared concern, but I have not really seen anyone making an attempt to demonstrate that it is in fact what, say, college campuses and college students on said campuses are doing in a new way that they have never before done. These two trends often intermingle in a way that suggests a major problem is in fact the demand for PC behavior. There are points on which I might agree this is the case. But in general, it is not.<br />
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The former situation operates in something like this manner: If I am attempting to engage with someone I likely may disagree with, it is best to do so in a method that treats them with a degree of respect. One way to do this is to answer questions in a civil manner. Another is to try to understand their perspective. One can still be quite dismissive of the manner they have arrived at an opinion, of the "facts" they have marshaled in support, of the flimsy nature of logic being used to move from one subject to another, and so on. But one should ultimately try to avoid being dismissive of the person with whom a conversation is being engaged with. This is not always easy to do but it is the proper and civil nature of a debate to carry out, and it has some noble aims in principle behind it. It is possible you might persuade them that they are wrong, or that they have considered a perspective that you have not and that you are in fact in the wrong. At "worst", it may persuade people with whom you haven't even engaged that one of you is offering a more sensible option for interpreting events or their proposed solutions. That is the purpose of engaging in civil debate and discourse with people who disagree with you. What I often find instead is that disagreement is then used as a means of divining and imputing all manner of ill-favored motives, character flaws, ethnic or racial origins (where not otherwise obvious), and an increasing slide into personal attack rather than argumentative cases being constructed for the matter at hand. The effect of such action is to persuade neither person of the wrongness or flaw in their argument, and most likely to make both of you look like complete assholes to any innocent bystander who happens by.<br />
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The Internet, for all its flaws in preventing or harnessing the ability of individuals to filter out bullshit from fact, actually does offer some amount of tools for dealing with this as a problem. The ban hammer comes out and away that person goes to cool down for a while, perhaps indefinitely. What it does less well is deal with this when it concerns an entire movement of people condemning an individual or groups of individuals, whereupon they have descended as locusts to feast upon the person, marrow and bone all.<br />
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One of the essential difficulties of this is that the former activities, banning an obnoxious troll from your sight and daily interactions, is a subjective action that protects the time and energy of the individual (and sometimes their viewpoints). I find it useful for abusive persons in social media debates, or for people whose arguments are so tedious and pathetic that I no longer wish to expend the time on them. But the latter action, banning a whole host of persons at once, or restricting one or more person's ability to influence said persons through a social media platform entirely, involves a more rigorous analysis than "this person annoys me". And as such, it often passes well into less decorous behavior before anything is or could be done. Threats (true or otherwise), abusive language, bigotry, and so on. Almost all of which is and probably should remain perfectly legal and free from public sanction by the mechanics of government and law. But a platform provided by a private company has no obligation to allow anyone to use it in that way either. It is perfectly legal behavior to be an asshole, and to carry forth senseless mayhem in argumentation. It is also a perfectly sensible action to point out that someone is acting like one.<br />
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This is the essential component of what gets termed PC. What is "politically correct"? A simple stab at an answer would be "avoiding being an asshole in public". Expressions of bigotry or intolerance do not need to be tolerated. Merely being annoying or offensive might need to be tolerated at some level, but doesn't need to be sought out either.<br />
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This is the part that I am having some difficulty understanding however is how this intersects with college experiences. There are definitely many specific stories indicating that there are some people who have difficulty understanding what to do with academic freedom, or whether academic freedom should exist, and instituting speech codes with fairly arbitrary purposes, and trying to suppress the public speaking appearances of controversial figures. I've encountered some people with a rather poor grasp of freedom of speech in academic settings myself, in debates on public forums, and so on. Getting from there to the supposition that the entire architecture of freedom of inquiry and debate is under assault because "kids today are weak and don't want to engage with tough ideas!" is a very large stretch however.<br />
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I consider these concepts like "trigger warnings" to be reasonably robust in the culture at large. We tend to use mechanics like parental ratings systems to screen out material we may not want to view on TV or in films or hear in music. This is not limited to trying to restrict access for children. But to tell ourselves as adults or parents that this is going to have some graphic material and to decide whether or not we want to deal with a show about rape and sexual abuse, or brutal violence or torture. To be sure, I probably have more tolerance with viewing nudity or sexuality, or violence, and certainly with hearing "strong language" than many other people. Nevertheless, I usually want to know that's what I'm about to be in for, implicitly or explicitly rather than just sit down and all the sudden be in the middle of hearing about a brutal rape case or viewing a fictional torture sequence in a film or TV show. If I were taking or teaching an ethics class, I would not expect to dive right into asking about incest as a moral topic. Or abortion. Or even humans (Westerners at least) eating insects (or other humans) as food. There's a certain amount of mental preparation most people need to make in order to get past shock or disgust and try to dig into the content.<br />
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If and where these concepts like trigger warnings or safe spaces are being used to destroy discussion altogether, or to prevent controversial figures from speaking and learning what, if any, rationale they might have for their views, or otherwise to present only a sanitized and sanctioned understanding of a topic, I would agree they are being misused and applied to an over broad practice of policing thought and expression. This is not generally what people are doing with them in academic settings. It's more like giving people a minute to collect themselves. I would feel it works more like the slow and relaxing climb up a roller coaster ride, before diving and twisting around.<br />
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One of the many beneficial features of free speech and free inquiry is that it allows people to go more or less anywhere with a thought or a hypothesis and to explore many ideas. It also means that when we are treading off into an area of exploration of ideas or the expression of them that is likely to be offensive or troublesome, other people will be free to say so. We can then ignore them. That is likely to make us come off not so well in a social sense, that it will have cultural and social consequences. This should encourage us not to automatically abandon our esoteric and unpopular quest for what seems to be forbidden knowledge. But instead to think harder about its merits and how to express them, or to acknowledge perhaps there are few enough merits to discount the idea more or less entirely and to move on into other inquiries more worth our time. Or at least better forms of expression to get across our ideas. A key value of free inquiry and free speech is the process of ideas having to do some amount of rigorous battle with each other. Rather than simply being able to express something freely without complaint, we should expect that people might marshal their energy to oppose us. And that should lead us to make or seek out the very best and most rigorous arguments for not only what we believe we have learned and discovered to be true about the world around us, but what others believe as well. Such a process should humble us about our own level of certainty. And will also provide some outlets for controversy and debate. Even basic fundamental premises like "major political candidates should not say racist things and be able to get elected" will be tested from time to time, giving us the space to re-evaluate ourselves alongside our fellow citizens, classmates, teachers, friends, family members, and so on. To recognize whether we seem to be progressing or not with difficult ideas like how to deal with issues of racism or sexism. Or crime. Or punishment. Or education.<br />
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Even the premises of speech themselves are challenged from time to time. Very strong advocates for its utility should be willing to re-examine the value of speech and understand how robust it is, or how weak it has become as institutional practice if that is indeed the case. As well as understanding the varieties of expression will include shocking and distasteful methods or topics that can be approached more cautiously and perhaps more productively as a result.Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-38446205791336942892016-08-31T11:38:00.002-04:002016-08-31T11:59:50.944-04:00Random thoughts<br />
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1- Suicide Squad was pretty fucking bad. Like terrible. Possibly one of the dumbest movies I've ever seen. Non-existent plot which basically consisted of "and now things are happening, and here more things are happening that are almost entirely unrelated to the things that just happened, with no explanation". Poor script or dialogue. Mostly bad casting. Robbie and Smith were wasted on this garbage, and Leto sucks. Years of unfortunately having seen Michael Bay films did not prepare me for how stupid a movie could be.<br />
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2- Dick pics. I don't get the premise. Even as a form of sexting, I'm not aware of women who want to receive them. I have a hard time understanding what the basis of thought involved in it is. "Okay. That's my bulge in the groin area. Or the full extent of my erections. Enjoy ladies." This is rather dull as an expression of perspective or understanding what it is that women will tend to enjoy. Almost no woman I can think of is going to be suitably impressed by a photo of a penis on a tiny screen. I'm pretty sure she's going to be a little more impressed if you have any idea what good that penis may be for. Which is not for show and tell. As a hint.<br />
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I don't really understand the concept of flashing either. Male strippers, maybe makes sense (I don't really understand strip clubs either, but to each their own there). The rest does not, even as a form of exhibitionism. It's creepy and strange. And does not work even for the base purpose of attracting or enticing women for sex. It doesn't communicate desire or sensuality. It mostly communicates this is a fairly normal human male who believes women should admire his penis, but probably would not care much about the rest of him.<br />
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So. I'm a little confused as to why, besides an unfortunate last name, Anthony Weiner keeps sending them, many years after he was caught doing so and destroyed his political career by leaving a photographic trail indicating just how often he thinks only with his penis. You would think this would be a learned behavior that could be amended. "Hmm. This got me into trouble before. Perhaps I should try some other means of attracting women, one with less of a photographic trail at least."<br />
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I am really confused as to what possible attraction there is for taking a photo of one's genitals or even a bulge created thereof mostly concealed by clothing, but also having a child in the photo. This does not seem like a reasonable fetish to advertise. Or a legal one. And it should not increase one's sex appeal to have a child prop in a photo intending to demonstrate that you may indeed have a functioning penis.Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-25923694233360973702016-07-29T03:46:00.002-04:002016-07-29T03:46:15.498-04:00An incomplete list of dumb ideas<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.32px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
An incomplete list of political positions Trump has taken that are morally reprehensible or stupid. More importantly, this list all contradicts common public perceptions. For example that he is "isolationist", "non-interventionist", "realist" on foreign policy. Or that the more common perception that he is "softer" on social issues than his Republican counterparts. How this is relevant when he is still far to the right of Democrats or libertarians is not clear. </div>
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<span style="line-height: 19.32px;">One can agree with some or any of these as policy agendas, but one should not be able to examine a list like this and come away with the interpretation that these are positions compatible with the above views. This should not also be taken as a complete list of Trump's dumb ideas (in my view) but rather a list which refutes certain common narratives which I see frequently expressed. His views on immigration more broadly and any number of other issues I take to be quite awful as well, but I would prefer to focus on stuff people haven't paid as much attention to or might take to be false if they have casually involved themselves on the subjects at hand. </span></div>
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1 - Mercantilism motivates most of his trade and foreign policy positions. This was a discredited economic perspective over 200 years ago, involving zero sum competition and tariffs/protectionism rather than mutual cooperation and trade (a position which allows for more economic and social growth). Global trade and competition does involve winners and losers, but the "losers" are easily predictable ahead of time and could be accommodated through domestic policies. </div>
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2- Colonialism motivates the remainder of foreign policy perspectives, the idea of taking over the strategically valuable territory or resources of a country if it is attacked or invaded. This is idiotic. Such resources are used or sold on open markets. So long as the country attacked or invaded is not attempting to impose export tariffs on the goods or resources it is capable of distributing abroad, it's virtually irrelevant to consumers where such things will come from. On economic grounds. People may have moral concerns about the government or non-state actors, but that's different from the economic viability of trade. In either event, naked conquest for the purpose of resource extraction or tribute extraction is an idea which was last common in the 19th century as European powers conquered Africa and SE Asia. </div>
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3 - Opposes 14th amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship. This is not merely a statement about opposing "illegal immigration" but an effort to reduce legal migration and immigration by adding an additional step to provide for the guarantee of citizenship rights. There is a minority legal position that in any way the 14th amendment does not provide for birthright citizenship, but it does not appear to be held in mainstream legal theories or have clear legal precedence that could make this likely to be overturned. In fact most of his legal views are inscrutably bad, suggesting he has little or no familiarity with the legal and judicial system, or otherwise no idea what he is talking about where Constitutional concerns would arise. </div>
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4 - Supported a government shutdown attempt over Planned Parenthood funding (last year). His views on abortion may have "evolved" but the belief that they are more socially liberal is based upon positions he held almost 2 decades ago. I would prefer to evaluate someone on the basis of what they now hold to be the case rather than what they implied when I was still in high school. </div>
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5 - Stated women who receive abortions should have legal penalties. It was his first instinct to respond with the most aggressive possible legal sanctions. <span style="line-height: 19.32px;">This was walked back, slowly. </span></div>
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6 - Stated he would attempt to appoint justices who would overturn Roe v Wade. The list of judges that was leaked was viewed favorably by anti-choice groups for the likelihood of doing so.</div>
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7 - Buys into the "War on Christmas" narrative.</div>
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8 - Wants to abolish IRS rules on religious organisations and political campaigning.</div>
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9 - Supported NC House Bill 2, a bill removing LGBT anti-discrimination protections enacted by local governments. (He did change his mind on this, but he now supports it).</div>
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10 - Expressed same position on same sex marriage for over two decades. Which is that he does not support it. His supreme court short list included a number of anti-LGBT judges and he suggested after Obergefell that he would seek to overturn it.</div>
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11 - Suggests having the DoJ investigate Black Lives Matter protesters and organisations. In addition to other first amendment violations regarding freedom of the press; somehow expanding libel laws, attempting to bar disfavored reporters or media organs from covering his events, etc. </div>
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12 - Mocked a reporter with a visible disability during a speech, suggesting no sympathy for people with physical maladies and disabilities. </div>
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13 - Supports using stop and frisk searches (a highly questionable and probably unconstitutional practice of searching people without a clear Terry basis for a stop).</div>
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14 - Supports torture and capital punishment.</div>
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15 - Opposes legalisation of marijuana, and supports increasing enforcement efforts in the drug war</div>
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16 - Supported Iraq war and Libya, and generally supports the same policies as Clinton for Syria, and her pre-treaty positions for Iran. All of which are quite hawkish positions.</div>
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17 - Long history of deploying racist or fearmongering propaganda where it concerns Native Americans.</div>
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18 - Is fine with nuclear proliferation, which increases risks of very damaging military conflicts, which may or may not involve us, or nuclear terrorism (a fear which I would tend to ignore under ordinary circumstances). This is not a favorable non-interventionist position if it increases the danger or risk coming from foreign powers to an unacceptable degree. The purpose of non-interventionism is to get along with other nations on a neutral but friendly basis and thus reinforce acceptable international norms (things like "you don't need nuclear weapons" being among them). The point is not to increase the mayhem and chaos of the world but to engage with the world in a responsible manner. </div>
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19 - Generally gives favorable approval of "strongman" behavior (Turkey's post-coup behaviors for example). This does not indicate interventionism, but it reinforces the probability that he might wish to govern in an aggressively anti-democratic way. </div>
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20 - Can't make up his mind about Ukraine, but seems to be demanding we become more involved or makes demands that NATO become more involved. </div>
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21 - Wishes to maintain very close ties to Israel, while putting forward positions on NATO/West Pac that are favorably viewed by rivals or hostile states in those regions (Russia/DPRK/China). As a general strategic view of the world, this is very unusual. Israel alone requires military aid without qualifications? Even though it has already a stronger and more advanced military and economy than any of its neighbours/rivals? As a theory of politics it suggests we should only help those who don't need it by being already strong. </div>
Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-87508412725232899392016-07-19T22:47:00.002-04:002016-07-19T22:53:34.168-04:00Stateless actorsOne of the key elements in "fighting terrorism" I have noted is a reliance upon occupation and bombing campaigns of other places in a theory that fighting terrorism abroad means we won't have to deal with it here. This sort of logic lay under a lot of late 20th century foreign policy, through offshoring and other proxy fights with communist rulers across the globe on a theory that preventing the spread of communism to new countries would prevent it from spreading here. A more sensible understanding was that communism was never going to be that fertile in the US anyway, and much of Western Europe and other allies either and that all that was necessary was containment while the ideology destroyed itself. The mythology that Reagan won the Cold War has some pieces of merit, but at no point did he directly confront the USSR militarily in battle either (indirectly in Afghanistan and other places, yes). This should be instructive to understanding the limitations of the fighting abroad logic.<br />
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But what is really demonstrative is comparing the chaos caused by terrorism now to that of the 19th century anarchists (and some communists). This period spawned shootings, bombings, and political assassinations all over the world for several decades. The common cause was ideological, sometimes vaguely, and this inspired individual actors with guns and bombs to mayhem and violence. There was no other country to go invade or bomb to put a stop to it, as there is not really today either. The problem was growing and incubating within each country itself. It came from an idea, not a border. The problem now resembles this far more than the Cold War rubric that seems to dominate strategic action or what passes for strategic thought today. There is a "state" in the form of ISIS, which functions in a bureaucratic sense to administer territory, but the relevant feature of that state is not its ability to threaten us, or even its neighbours, with invasion and devastation in military conflict. It cannot do any such thing. It is the ability of this state's ideology to inspire action abroad to make small scale isolated attacks in an attempt to terrorize or at least annoy their perceived enemies. When or if it is crushed as an illegitimate state force, this result will be largely irrelevant. Other groups carry similar ideological beliefs (al Qaeda, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, etc), and have inspired or carried out large scale attacks of their own. Conflict in military arenas is not the appropriate strategic realm on which to fight this problem in the first place, but appears to be the only dominant method we have considered executing.<br />
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It flows nicely from the "we must do something, this is something, let's do it" logic that I suspect pervades much public action. What we "know how do to do" is bomb locations or targets, and defeat enemies militarily with logistics, stealth, and firepower. Therefore that's what we're going to do by Jove. But almost all of which is useless against ideas. And typically involves a very expensive method of attempting with violence and force, and mostly failing, to stablize regions and governments that might spread and sponsor such ideas. This should be recognized as a dysfunctional method of response. Or at best, only a part of a response. <br />
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It is by now a common set of wisdom however that if they hit us, we hit them back. This is not a solution to most problems at the age of 4 or 5 in observing the play of children. It is hardly a solution to most problems for adults. Much less nation-states. A better analogy might work something like this. It is reasonable to take steps to deter a mosquito bite, to try to prevent mosquitoes from approaching you or an outdoor patio when one is in a summer or spring repose taking in the day. It is even reasonable to slap and kill the mosquito when it should bite you. It is not reasonable to decide after such a bite that you shall endeavour to exterminate any insects of any kind near you, most of which have done and will do nothing so remarkable even as to provide a small itchy patch of skin. This is generally what our responses look more like than the more limited "slap the mosquito" response.<br />
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In a foreign policy or national security explanation, we should be attempting to gather intelligence. On suspected terrorists, not on everyone, with a more strict limitation on what constitutes "terrorism". We should be taking reasonable but not onerous and super-expensive security steps. So some minor security screening to get on airplanes, with those having secured cockpits and alert but not paranoid passengers. And not rigorous and endless lines involving the removal of shoes and belts and toothpaste at great expense of time and energy (and lives) for little or no gain in actual security or deterrence of threats. We should be operating intelligence along the outer rim of groups that are deemed at risk of violent action (white supremacists, Islamic radicals, anti-choice radicals, etc), to try to identify and deter possible violence before it happens. But we should not be treating anyone with a generic Muslim heritage, members of biker gangs, or anyone using vaguely anti-government rhetoric as a potential terrorist either. Same with mental health issues and on down the line as subjects we have highlighted for prejudicial assessment in this way. We should not be deploying weapons of war to our own local and state police forces. These are of little use for most towns and cities in the project of anti-terrorism. They are of great use in the oppression of citizens local rights instead. And we should not be seeking to conduct bombing campaigns aggressively in other countries in the hopes of possibly killing "terrorists". Who are often insurgents, at least in parts of Iraq and Afghanistan, and no thus no threat to us here.<br />
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Violence that we would prefer to avoid is in this sense a disease. It is not solved by spreading it to more people than those who are already afflicted by it. Or afflicting yet more violence upon those already at risk of it.Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-87201837455762760492016-07-05T13:28:00.000-04:002016-07-05T18:30:55.922-04:00Thoughts on the email/Clinton scandalI have generally been meh in reaction to this as a scandal. In so far as I agree it is a scandal, there is that. But it also does not present much useful information for me. There were a number of reasons I was not very moved for or against Clinton.<br />
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It was always to my mind extremely unlikely she would be prosecuted or charged with a crime. High government officials are rarely held legally accountable for their behavior. David Petraeus essentially did the same thing. He in fact deliberately leaked information, something which would be hard to prove in Clinton's case, and only got probation and a fine. There were numerous scandals and public officials under investigation during the Reagan administration. Very few of them went to jail; one was a cabinet official convicted of bribery involving public housing projects and building contractors. Agnew was convicted of tax evasion, but Nixon was pardoned for Watergate. Albert Fall was the first cabinet official ever convicted of a crime while in office and that took until the Harding administration and Teapot Dome. And so on. This makes no statement of whether the legal system should be more involved in the accountability of public officials in the executive branch. It's a statement that they usually aren't charged and convicted when something sketchy legally occurs, and that any expectation that would happen here should be tempered by the knowledge that it hasn't happened very often. As to why it does not happen more often.<br />
a) It can be really hard to prove an actual crime was committed deliberately. Bribery for example has to usually show there was some significant political favor purchased with the bribes. It isn't as simple as showing that money moved from point A to point B. These are rarely cases involving direct physical evidence like a murder or robbery that can be examined separate from the case itself.<br />
b) Justice department officials and public executive officials, like local police and prosecutors, more or less have to work with each other and have strong incentives not to rock the boat too much where it concerns a high official who if they screw up the prosecution and gets off, then is likely to still be The Boss. And probably will not be very happy with whomever tried to grind an axe and failed.<br />
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Without a legal charge, there was little probability that it would have a major impact on the campaign. As a scandal it largely fit the processing of how many people already saw the Clintons (both Bill and Hillary). This is more a statement about us than it is about her. If people already saw her as hypocritical or duplicitous, then behavior which appears hypocritical or duplicitous simply reinforces the existing narrative. Many people already held this view of the Clintons and of Hillary in particular. This was not changed or altered in some fundamental way such that it actually matters in campaign horse race terms. I generally see coverage to the contrary as media attempting to get attention for something rather than reporting on something new and interesting. Such as any policy shifts she has made, and proposed to make, and whether those will be good for the country/world or not.<br />
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As a statement about her judgment it says very little. A more concerning feature of judgment is her assessments of waging war in Libya. Without a probable long-term campaign to re-stabilize the country after deposing a ruler, or risking any long-term diplomatic strategy for getting China and Russia on board if a more significant foreign government/dictator actually needed to be deposed, like, say, Assad in Syria. The Benghazi "scandal" has largely ignored this question during investigation, most likely because many elite Republicans favored intervention in Libya, much as they favored intervention in Iraq (as she did too). The email scandal meanwhile has occasionally been linked into questions over her support for NSA metadata collection, opposition to publicly available encryption, continued processing of far too many government documents as classified or other attempts to keep them from public view, and so on.<br />
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These to me are the far more important questions of her judgment being in error as these potentially negatively impact the civil liberties of millions of American citizens and residents, something a President has enormous power and sway to do. Likewise pushing for an ill-advised bombing campaign for the purpose of regime change in an unstable area without likely stability in the form of new leadership (which is judged in some way morally superior), seems like a poor judgment. The bigger picture seems more important than whether or not some sensitive documents were hacked because they were improperly handled. That's more or less par for the course right now, in my estimation, because that's kind of how the internet works right now. Documents will be hacked if someone wants to hack them. Or leaked if someone wants to leak them.Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2290940558322177176.post-37935397571072768642016-05-08T19:40:00.002-04:002016-05-08T19:40:29.629-04:00Civil WarI had other thoughts on the quality of the film (it was good, but not at the level of Winter Soldier or Avengers). This isn't about that. (spoilers anyway though).<br />
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One thing that has emerged in the aftermath is people seem to have trouble understanding what Captain America/Steve Rogers basis for "rebellion" against the authorities even is. This is much more clearly spelled out in the comic, but the component parts are all present in the film itself. The problem is they aren't very clear; the movie seems very clearly to be hammering upon questions of revenge instead of the geopolitics that underlie the comic that spawned the film in the first place.<br />
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So here's what it breaks into.<br />
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1) Cap does not trust the agendas of potential oversight. He has good reason not to from the events of Winter Soldier, to be suspicious of other people telling him what they are up to and for what purpose. The comic was written at the height of the Iraq War's unpopularity. The gist both there and to an admittedly less clear but still present extent in the film is that people in charge often demand weapons and violence be pointed at the "wrong" targets, and this still results in the terrible results they are seeking to prevent by enacting rules of oversight (such as collateral damage). It is an important distinction that the agendas of "ordinary" men are going to differ, perhaps wildly, from what may be objectively found to be good or best possible alternatives. The results may not always be terribly different, but if we're looking for "extraordinary" people to set these agendas, it's possible they may do so more capably and with less damage by not attacking the wrong places deliberately. Winter Soldier sets this up pretty strongly as a concern within the series of films.<br />
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2) The film portrays the oversight as coming from the UN via a broad international agreement. But anyone familiar with the UN will be aware it is often dysfunctional and will probably prevent many actions for political reasons ("agendas" as Rogers calls them). "Movie UN" is always a really powerful and cohesive group for some reason. I suppose it wouldn't be very amusing in movie terms to see the UN deadlocking on a vote or Russia or China or the US vetoing deployment of the Avengers to go deal with a raging supermonster/supervillain somewhere on the globe. The question of whether they will be sent somewhere they don't want to go (to do something they shouldn't), or won't be allowed to go somewhere they need to, is a viable concern if what they are doing is dealing with potential threats all over the globe which potentially threaten millions of lives. This is also an argument that many neoconservatives make of course. We are seeing that the threats the Avengers deal with are usually "real"; this is not the case of the US or other nation-states and their agendas.<br />
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But. It should be pretty clear that the UN/accords governments ignore the input of the superfriends team of Avengers almost immediately (Ross ignores Stark's file of evidence on Bucky) and that they would end up likely being a huge red tape working on shutting them down rather than using them as a superfriends team to do some good.<br />
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3) He does not generally trust the methods of others; again, seeing WS, he presents a very strong civil libertarian case against what SHIELD/Hydra are up to. "This isn't freedom, this is fear". And of course, this being a movie, his fears of what is going on turned out to be quite justified. He has a good degree of trust in the abilities of people he works and trains with closely, and that they are just as concerned that they work carefully to save lives/protect people. He does not trust others to get the job done as often and as well, that there won't be more lives lost. Or that they won't turn out to be weapons that can be turned against the innocent deliberately (as in WS). There's an argument to be made that a team of superheroes with considerable abilities and being well-equipped and trained to use those abilities together will be able to limit the possibility of damage far more than anyone else. Or may be the only ones who can stop certain plots from occurring at all (say some enormous alien invasion of NYC, or cleaning up Stark's mess from creating a psychotic AI, or unraveling and stopping nefarious plots by international bad guys bent on world domination, or whatever).<br />
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This is not a great argument in real life. But in the context of the Marvel universe, it probably makes more sense not to attach too much red tape to their activities and to give them the tip of the spear/sword/shield and decide how to use it themselves instead of someone else telling them where they can and cannot go. They aren't just a band of superpowered thugs roaming around blowing things up for kicks. They have spies and computer hackers to help them pick the right targets as best as they can.<br />
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The counterargument is strengthened by Stark's screw-ups (with his company selling weapons under the table that he had to clean up, and later himself creating Ultron, but also Vision), which is why that makes a compelling argument to him, but not to Cap. The comic also strengthens this argument in that there are bands of lesser superheroes who cause problems because they are not as skilled or admired or otherwise legitimate, and ultimately this causes more collateral damage.<br />
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4) One of the major points in the comic, and which may be obscured by the more personal nature of the film, is that one of Cap's key concerns is that he will be sent after people who do not sign on the dotted line to agree to the rules. And most likely sent after them to kill them, because these are potentially very dangerous people that inspire fear (whether deserved or not). Or at best these would be people who would be imprisoned indefinitely. This point does get made, but very subtly. In the film, Cap was about to sign the accord, until Tony brought up that Wanda was still effectively imprisoned until he signed (plus obviously Falcon and himself). This does not go over well, predictably. Wanda later makes a key point that people are going to be afraid of her no matter what she does. It doesn't actually mean much that she signs a piece of paper (or that Cap signs it for her, essentially).<br />
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5) I felt the best argument that was made in the political sense was Widow's "we still will have one hand on the wheel and we have to use it earn back their trust". But, because of the plot of the film in hunting down what ultimately ends up being the wrong man, she sees this isn't going to play out in a way they would have control or influence over what they are to be doing either and bails on it.Sun Tzuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03435848395263035323noreply@blogger.com0