Published at 10:04 on 6 August 2016
Don’t gloat too much about Trump’s recent free-fall in the polls. While Trump is unlikely to regain the lead, the free-fall (or even the current 15-point spread) is unlikely to persist. The reason for Trump’s free-fall is that Clinton has been mostly keeping her mouth shut while Trump is behaviorally incapable of doing same. Given how both candidates are weak with strong negatives, the best each can do for themself is keep quiet and minimize attention.
But no candidate can keep their mouth shut all the time. In the last few days Clinton opened her mouth and some whoppers about her E-mail server came out. That’s going to have consequences for her.
Plus Trump has really been running his mouth in high gear recently. That’s already wound down a bit. Yes, he’s a gasbag extraordinaire, but even by Trump’s standards the past week has been exceptional (and unlikely to last).
Don’t, however, expect Trump to regain the lead. Clinton actually has a good measure of self-control over what she says. Trump does not. Therefore the overall pattern of Trump doing more to damage his prospects than Clinton does hers will continue.
Published at 08:13 on 4 August 2016
The Guardian is arguing that the GOP leadership might intervene against Donald Trump. Wishful thinking.
First, history argues against it. Trump causes conservatives to be jittery because he’s not a conservative. He’s a fascist. This observation is not my own leftist hyperbole at play; a number of conservatives have observed this. However, that’s happened before. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and so on caused conservatives to be jittery in their respective countries, and some prominent conservatives militantly opposed fascism (Hitler’s attempted assassin was a conservative), but the key word is some. The overall pattern was one of uneasy alliance, under the (inevitably incorrect) assumption that the fascist would be controllable once he got power and thus a useful vehicle for the Right to get power.
Second, everything indicates this is the present pattern. He’s won the primary and been coronated at his party’s convention. Far more Republicans have lined up behind Trump in uneasy support than have come out against him. The number of conservative voices raised against Trump will probably increase as the weeks pass, but a wholesale reversal of the general trend is unlikely.
Trump’s gaffes are irrelevant to his base. In regards to that base, Trump was spot-on when he quipped last January:
I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.
Trump’s base isn’t enough to elect him. Look at the primary results: The number of Republican votes against Trump is greater than the number for him. Trump’s negatives are enormous; he will manage to get the support of his base plus a slowly dwindling number of jittery traditional conservatives, but that’s nowhere near enough to win in November.
These trends all could theoretically reverse themselves, but I doubt it. At this stage, Trump really seems doomed. Michael Moore’s fear probably won’t come to pass.
Published at 08:22 on 3 August 2016
In a recent Guardian article about changing (in the direction of less of it) sexual behavior, we find the following:
“The new sexual revolution has apparently left behind a larger segment of the generation than first thought.”
“Left behind?” Really?
Wasn’t the Sexual Revolution about liberating people from socially repressive restrictions that interfered with them following their desires? Haven’t such restrictions continued to vanish in the past decade or so? Same-sex marriage is now the law of the land. LGBTQ people can now serve openly in the military. And so on.
Just because some individuals choose to abstain from sexual activity is no evidence of their being repressed. Maybe those abstainers simply don’t want to be sexually active? If the Sexual Revolution isn’t about their right to remain celibate by choice, then it’s a revolution I want absolutely no part of. You don’t sexually liberate people by replacing an obligation to not have sex with an obligation to have it.
This cuts close to home for me because I’m less sexually driven than the norm, and the (by my standards) hypersexualized youth culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s and then the (again by my standards) hypersexualized gay male subculture always left me feeling out in the cold.
It took a long time for me to disentangle my internalized homophobia from my desire to not be steamrolled into conforming to a culture of casual sex that is simply not the sort of sex I desire. It’s why I identify as queer but not as a gay man; I fit in with the gay male subculture about as little as I fit in with the straight male one. Neither are geared to who I really am.
I’ve found the Millennials’ attitudes about sexual orientation to be much more in line with what I view as true liberation, in fact. They are much more likely to see sexual orientation as a multi-dimensional thing, not a simplistic one-dimensional gay/straight/bi axis.
So color me skeptical about the premise that less sexual activity automatically implies more sexual repression. It sounds like precisely the sort of thing an aging Baby Boomer who is clueless about what liberation really means would come up with.
Published at 07:59 on 2 August 2016
It first caught my attention when Dan Savage claimed it. It didn’t make much sense: why would the Green Party, which is trying to attract more support, do something as stupid as nominate an anti-vaxxer nut as their leader? (Short answer: they wouldn’t and didn’t. Savage lied.) Now the Guardian is repeating the lie.
It seems that Democrats (and their enablers) are engaging in a Big Lie campaign against Jill Stein. This is a technique first widely popularized by the Nazi Party, who accused others of doing it while engaging in plenty of it themselves:
But it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world war on the shoulders of Ludendorff they took away the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice.
All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X
The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.
— Joseph Goebbels, Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik
Does Stein do some low-grade pandering to anti-vaxxers? Yes. This crowd is present in the Green Party. She’s a politician. All politicians pander. But (this is important) throwing the anti-vaxxer crowd a harmless bone or two while at the same time openly stating the benefits and effectiveness of vaccines is not the same as being an anti-vaxxer oneself.
Claim she panders. Claim the GP has problems because of that crowd. But don’t claim she’s an anti-vaxxer herself. That’s a lie.
When you resort to such rank dishonesty, Democrats, that says far more about you and your party than it does about Ms. Stein and hers.
Published at 07:58 on 1 August 2016
Right on schedule (a bit early in fact), today dawned foggy.
The first summer I lived on Bainbridge Island, when August rolled around I got a surprise: What I had thought of as the autumn fog season was the late summer/autumn fog season in areas closer to the Salish Sea. It’s something I had been unaware of, never having lived on one of the islands before.
That year had an exceptionally foggy fall. I’m wondering if today’s weather is any sort of portent to that happening this year.
