Month: November 2016

Trump and the bicycle-riders

We now have Donald Trump’s final argument for his election, which basically amounts to saying that manly man Donald Trump will beat down the foreigners and Jews — George Soros, Janet Yellen, Lloyd Blankenfein — who are secretly pulling the strings behind the political establishment. (Speaking of Janet Yellen, I have to confess that I hadn’t noticed that the Federal Reserve had been led by elders of Zion Jews — three of them Republicans — for all but nine years since 1970.)

I think often of a public lecture that Yale history professor John Boswell gave in the 1980s with the title “Jews and Bicycle-riders”. The title came from a celebrated anti-Nazi joke of the 1930s: A Jew is pushed off his bicycle by a Brownshirt, who looms over him and screams “Who is responsible for Germany’s misfortunes?” “The Jews,” replies the trembling Jew, “and the bicycle riders.” “Why the bicycle riders?” asks the Nazi. And he replies: “Why the Jews?”

Boswell’s lecture was mainly about homosexuality, pointing out that prejudice against gay people had risen and fallen over the past two millennia, and tended to parallel the ups and downs of antisemitism, and to be promoted by the same people. The joke suggests that antisemitism is irrational and arbitrary, and has nothing really to do with the Jews; Boswell extends this to say that antisemitism and homophobia are both targets of convenience for what is really an anti-urban, anti-cosmopolitan agenda.

(The bicycle-riders in the joke are supposed to be an obviously ridiculous target of discrimination. Boswell might have been amused to know that in the febrile politics of the 21st century, bicycle-riders have also become a frequent target of right-wing abuse — for example, Colorado Republican who called Denver cycling initiatives “part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty” and Rob Ford in Toronto: “What I compare bike lanes to is swimming with the sharks. Sooner or later you’re going to get bitten… The cyclists are a pain in the ass to the motorists.”)

Obviously part of the point was that the credibility of antisemitism was at a low point in the mid-1980s, while discrimination against sexual minorities was decidedly respectable. From the perspective of 2016 things look decidedly different. Homophobia us barely tolerated in polite circles, while antisemitism is ascendant. I’m sure I thought in 1985 that the downward trajectory of antisemitism was inevitable — it was so obviously irrational — while the rights of gay and lesbian people seemed to need fighting for. In retrospect, I see that no matter how marginalised they may be, both of them are always capable of recolonising the body politic when the right conditions return. Somehow this seems to me more obvious and intuitive with regard to homosexuality than with regard to Judaism; Boswell’s link helps to clarify the danger.

Making sense of the predictions

I absolutely agree that Sam Wang and the Princeton Election Consortium have a good argument for there being a 99+% chance of Clinton winning. Unfortunately, I think there’s only about a 50% chance of his argument being right. It could also be that Nate Silver is right, that there is a 65% chance. Putting that all together, I come down right about where the NY Times is, at about an 85% chance of escaping apocalypse.

I’ve written a bit more about how I think about the likelihoods here. But a fundamental problem with the PEC estimate is that it clearly puts very little weight on the possibility of model failure. A fundamental problem with the 538 estimates is that they are very clearly not martingales. That is, they are not consistent predictions of the future based on all available information. One way of saying this is to note that a few weeks ago Clinton had close to a 90% estimated victory probability. Now it’s 65%. That seems like a modest change, but if the first estimate was correct, the current estimate reflects an event that had less than a 1 in 3 chance of happening. So we’re more than halfway there. But does anyone really think that the events of the past month have been that unlikely?

The smoking gun

US Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is all in favour of selective leaks from the FBI about ongoing investigations:

HH: It’s just a practical impossibility. But he might find a smoking gun. If he does, do you think he has an obligation to tell the American people about it?

PR: Yeah, look, I understand why he did what he did, because imagine if he didn’t, and we found out after the fact that he was sitting on this before the election. So I clearly understand why he did what he did. Hillary Clinton has no one to blame but herself, and she and Republicans are saying if you’ve got something you’ve got cleared, put it out there. So yeah, I think if he’s gone through the process that he needs to go through to vet evidence, and he’s got it, he should do it. I do agree with that. More disclosure is better, clearly.

Ordinarily, the crime-fiction term “smoking gun” involves investigation into, you know, a murder, there’s a body, there’s a suspect, and there’s a gun in his/her hand that seems to have just been used. In this case we must imagine a scene like the following:

JW: We see here the smoking gun. What do you make of it, Holmes?

SH: Yes, very odd that this gun has been smoking for the past four years. This is proof that Mrs Clinton is a murderer. It remains only for us to determine who has been murdered.

What is the actual crime that the “smoking gun” is supposed to be incontrovertible proof of? What lurid fantasies do the Republicans and the FBI have of the contents of these missing emails? Contacts with Libyan rebels informing them of the weak points in Benghazi consulate security? The communication that lured Vince Foster into the park? Arrangements to pay a dozen different women to falsely accuse Donald Trump of sexual assault?

Waiting for Armageddon

The US presidential election is now just 4 days away. It seems to me that people are not taking the danger seriously. In particular, last week, in the hour after the FBI started its intervention to bring on the apocalypse (more work for them, I suppose), it was reported that the S&P500 stock index fell by about 1%. If we suppose that the FBI’s announcement made a Trump victory 2% more likely, that suggests an expectation that Trump would wipe 50% off the value of the stock market. Yet that doesn’t seem to be incorporated into the current value of the markets. It’s almost as though investors are in denial: When forced to focus on the Trump danger they rate it apocalyptic, but as soon as the news quiets down — within minutes — they go back to treating the probability as 0.

I’d like to believe Sam Wang’s projections, that the election result is all but certain for Clinton. Nothing is all but certain, least of all the future. Nate Silver’s reasoning, leading to about a 2/3 chance for Clinton, seems to me very sound: Trump will win only if he wins about half a dozen states where he has about a 50% chance. That sounds like about a 2% chance, except that they are unlikely to be independent. The reality is likely to be somewhere between 2% and 50%. Where it is, is almost impossible to judge. I’m slightly more hopeful than that because I believe in the power of Clinton’s organisation. But how much more?

But even 2%, for the risk of a crybaby fascist as president, is far too much. It’s not clear to me how the US can come back from this disaster, even if Trump loses.

Moving the goalposts

Reactions to the high court’s ruling that Brexit requires approval of parliament can only be understood in the context of the fundamental unseriousness of British politics. It’s all sport, and they won, so you can’t take away their victory.
But “their victory” involves taking away people’s rights, so there’s a parliamentary procedure. That’s how politics differs from sport. If you win the championship, as the cliché goes, they can never take that away from you. In politics every victory is immediately followed by a struggle over what the victory means.

The Daily Mail calls the judges “Enemies of the People” who “defied 17.4 million Brexit voters.” The Sun’s headline attacked the lead plaintiff for being foreign-born. The Daily Express said that three judges have “blocked Brexit”.

How odd, as many have pointed out, that the Brexit supporters suddenly object to parliamentary sovereignty.
Continue reading “Moving the goalposts”

The Brexit spiral begins

I’ve been warning since the Brexit vote that there could be a xenophobic feedback spiral:

We face years of escalating frustration on both sides of the negotiating table, as the British are confronted with the reality of a Europe that has no interest in making the fantasies of the Conservative Party come true. The British public will become more bloody-minded, unwilling to be dictated to by a bunch of foreigners, leading to a feedback loop of retaliation against the hostages, the EU citizens living in Britain and the British living in the EU. It could get very ugly.

According to the Guardian,

The chairman of JD Wetherspoon has fired a warning shot that the pub chain could stop selling drinks brands from other European countries if senior EU leaders maintain a “bullying” approach to Brexit negotiations.

For Britain to take a decision that harms its neighbours — with rhetoric that positively seems to relish the gratuitous harm to its neighbours — is a matter of high principle. Sovereignty! But when the neighbours respond in kind it is “bullying”.

I never heard of this chain, but then, the negotiations haven’t even started.