At least we don’t get ID cards

… because that would be fascism! Instead, we’re likely to get the NHS checking people’s passports and utility bills (for proof of address) before they can get medical treatment.

As I’ve commented before, the British seem obsessed with not having national ID cards — when they came into power one of the first things the Conservatives did was to cancel a Labour programme that had been in the works for about five years to provide ID cards — because carrying an ID card is inimical to Anglo-Saxon freedom. They don’t object to round-the-clock video surveillance, police stopping foreign-looking people on the Tube to ask for proof of right to be in the country, or now checking nationality documents at the hospital.

They just object to providing people with the documents they need to meet the authorities’ demand (given that one in six Britons has no passport, and they cost about £80). Instead, they leave it up to easily falsifiable electric bills to attest their address.

Is global warming a hoax or not, Mr Sarkozy?

A few weeks ago former and possibly future French president Nicolas Sarkozy proclaimed his allegiance to international right-wing loonidom by ridiculing the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change:

Cela fait 4 milliards d’années que le climat change. Le Sahara est devenu un désert, ce n’est pas à cause de l’industrie. Il faut être arrogant comme l’Homme pour penser que c’est nous qui avons changé le climat…

[The climate has been changing for four billion years. The Sahara turned into a desert, and that wasn’t caused by industry. It takes a uniquely human arrogance to believe that we have changed the climate…]

But now, perhaps because Le Pen seems to have the loony right wing anti-science vote locked up, he is threatening to punish the US if it tries to scuttle the Paris accord:

Donald Trump has said – we’ll see if he keeps this promise – that he won’t respect the conclusions of the Paris climate agreement.

Well, I will demand that Europe put in place a carbon tax at its border, a tax of 1-3 per cent, for all products coming from the United States, if the United States doesn’t apply environmental rules that we are imposing on our companies.

The man who can’t stand to lose anything

After settling his Trump University fraud case for $25 million, the president elect reported on Twitter

I settled the Trump University lawsuit for a small fraction of the potential award because as President I have to focus on our country.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2016

Not to seem ungrateful, but why would he say this? It would have been in keeping with the aggrieved self-sacrificing tone of the rest of the message for him to have written that he had settled the lawsuit for more than what he could have lost at trial, just because he loves America THAT MUCH that he couldn’t bare to be distracted from his transition duties.

Instead, since he can’t stand to suggest that he lost, even for a moment, even in the context of an unimaginably larger victory, he implies that he got off easy, that the real amount of the fraud was much larger than what they got out of him in the settlement.

Are we living in a David Mamet film?

I just had a frightening thought: Has the entire Trump campaign been scripted by conservative neozealot David Mamet? It’s House of Games, with politics and racism.

Before even being sworn in as president, Donald Trump has assured himself a place as probably the greatest con man of all times. And one of the most important skills of the really masterful con man (one learns from Mamet) is to know how to take advantage of people thinking they’ve seen through your con. A double con. There’s no one more gullible than someone who thinks he’s seen through you. Continue reading “Are we living in a David Mamet film?”

Tender-hearted racists

The only place I run into Americans here is in the synagogue. There is one loud-and-proud right-winger who gets treated to a lot of good-humoured deference. This past Sunday, naturally, he was feeling his oats. I mostly stay out of these political discussions, but after listening to him go on and on about the “elitists” in their “bubbles” who had failed to appreciate the world-historical significance of Donald Trump, I remarked that these were very large bubbles that contained more than half of the US population. He suddenly switched gears and accused me of accusing all Trump voters of being racists, a remarkable feat of projection, given that no one up to this point had mentioned race. No, I said, I’m sure some of their best friends are black.

But I was thinking of this when I recently read this passage in John Ferling’s Jefferson and Hamilton: The rivalry that forged a nation. (Overall, a pretty interesting book, if not especially elegantly or engagingly written) about Hamilton’s attacks on Jefferson in the context of the election of 1796:

Hamilton raised questions about Jefferson and race. He drew on passages from Notes on the State of Virginia to demonstrate Jefferson’s racism.

The context is a society that accepts enslavement of African-Americans, Jefferson owned dozens of slaves, yet evidence of “racism” was seen as a black mark on his character. And Hamilton needed to delve into Jefferson’s writings to find “evidence” that the slave-owner Jefferson was racist. For that matter, Hamilton himself had owned slaves in the past, and probably did even as he was polemicising against Jefferson’s racism.

Anti-racism is self-limiting. As soon as we accept that racism is a terrible thing, there is a natural tendency to absolve pretty much anyone with a name and a face of this evil. Racism exists in the past, or on the fringes of society. People like Trump are just clumsily saying some racist things or appealing to non-PC white voters. (And if he’ll just stop saying racist things for a week or two, problem solved!) Similarly, the NY Times has just today seemed to express sympathy for famous racist and likely Trump cabinet pick, Alabama senator Jeff Sessions:

screenshot-2016-11-17-12-01-28

The poor guy is being trailed by those nasty racial comments. Maybe he can get a restraining order against them!

If you’re not actually burning crosses you’re not a real racist, just as anyone who isn’t Hitler can’t really be an antisemite. (And anyone who recalls the fake-Hitler-diary furore may also recall the breathless coverage that noted the absence of any reference to the holocaust, eager to absolve the Führer of the worst crimes.)

I think often of this exchange from the second presidential debate in 2000:

GORE: …The governor opposed a measure put forward by Democrats in the legislature to expand the number of children that would be covered. And instead directed the money toward a tax cut, a significant part of which went to wealthy interests. He declared the need for a new tax cut for the oil companies in Texas an emergency need, and so the money was taken away from the CHIP program… I believe there are 1.4 million children in Texas who do not have health insurance. 600,000 of whom, and maybe some of those have since gotten it, but as of a year ago 600,000 of them were actually eligible for it but they couldn’t sign up for it because of the barriers that they had set up.

MODERATOR: Let’s let the governor respond to that. Are those numbers correct? Are his charges correct?

BUSH: If he’s trying to allege that I’m a hard-hearted person and I don’t care about children, he’s absolutely wrong.

The words don’t adequately communicate the smarmy expression of offence that Bush displayed. Gore accused him of taking insurance away from 600,000 children. Bush didn’t respond or explain, but simply contended that to mention this fact was to insult him, to call him a “hard-hearted person”.

Freeing ourselves from the grim Brussels bureaucrats…

… because London bureaucrats are so much cheerier. According to a recently leaked memo,

The document, compiled by consultancy firm Deloitte and obtained by the Times newspaper, says Whitehall is working on 500 Brexit-related projects and could need 30,000 extra staff.

On the other hand, according to this document there are are fewer than 33,000 staff in total working for the European Commission. Maybe there are some other “EU bureaucrats” who don’t work for the Commission, but pretty much, the total number of Brussels bureaucrats is very nearly matched by the additional bureaucrats in Whitehall. Small-government conservatives rejoice!

I guess this is what the government meant by stopping the hiring of foreigners to do jobs that British workers can do.

Opinion polling can’t stabilise democracy

Something I’ve been thinking about since the Brexit vote: There was a prevailing sentiment at the time that the British people are inherently conservative, and so would never vote to upend the international order. In fact, they did, by a small but decisive margin. But how was this “conservatism” imagined to act? The difference between 52-48 for Leave and 48-52 is happening in the minds of 4% of the population who might have decided the other way. Except that there’s nothing to tell them that they are on the margin. If you are negotiating over a policy, even if you start with some strategically maximum demand, you can look at where you are and step back if it appears you’ve crossed a dangerous line.

A referendum offers two alternatives, and one of them has to win. (Of course, a weird thing about the Brexit vote is that only one side — Remain — had a clear proposal. Every Leave voter was voting for the Leave in his mind. In retrospect, the Leave campaign is trying to stretch the mantle of democratic legitimation over their maximal demands.) There is no feedback mechanism that tells an individual “conservative” voter that the line is being crossed. Continue reading “Opinion polling can’t stabilise democracy”

A year of Trump

I decided to go back over my comments on Trump from the past year, to see if there is any insight I had, or anything I missed. I don’t think there’s anything there that seems embarrassing in retrospect. The few people interested can find all my comments under the tag “Trump”. But here are some highlights:

  • Back in March I noted the sexism of the media coverage that portrayed Clinton as weak and Trump as strong, even in newspapers like the NY Times that would not consider themselves sympathetic to Trump.
  • I compared Newt Gingrich’s Trump apologetics to those of Albert Speer on Hitler.
  • I first got really frightened of Trump’s potential when I read the NY Times reporting on Sanders supporters who mostly want politics to be entertaining: “A dark side of me wants to see what happens if Trump is in. There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change…”
  • In June I commented on the weird contortions of logic that the Republican establishment used to argue that Trump is not a fundamental danger to American democracy, and the widespread conviction that Trump’s problem was unfortunately inflammatory language, that could be resolved if he would just speak differently.
  • In July I wrote that, while I still expected that Trump would lose, the mere fact that he could get so far reflected deep sickness in American democracy.
  • I commented repeatedly on the false persistent assertion in the media that both candidates are inherently unpopular and nothing could change that. In fact, Trump has been persistently unpopular. Clinton only unpopular when she is involved in a presidential campaign.
  • In October I commented on the weird distortions of probabilistic language and reasoning that political pundits were using to convince themselves that a Trump victory was impossible. Shortly before the election I took up this theme again. “The reality is likely to be somewhere between 2% and 50%. Where it is, is almost impossible to judge… 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.” “A fundamental problem with the PEC estimate [99+% chance of Clinton victory] is that it clearly puts very little weight on the possibility of model failure.”
  • Trump’s flirting with antisemitism.
  • Trump’s belief that his prodigious intellect allows him to see simple solutions to problems that the eggheads claim are complicated.
  • I was surprised that Clinton ran a so openly feminist campaign. Trump, locker-room talk, and the pathologies of masculinity.