About 4 years ago, I wrote a post trying to outline what I thought were the key questions in understanding why pro-nationalist voters were feeling the economy was bad for them. The thing I come back to more than anything in that post is the issue of geography - the economy can be strong in most of the country, but dying in some regions, and that's going to create a lot of angry people in those regions.
Some of this is worldwide, rural town are dying because the number of resource extraction jobs required is declining, and that's the only kind of job that flourishes in rural areas. But the Rust Belt looks different to me - there are cities that used to thrive and now are moribund, and we need to figure out why that is. Sure, they lost their key industries, but why haven't other industries flocked to the abundance of labour a rustbelt city provides? Cheap real estate an lots of available labour present opportunities for an up-and-coming business.
Understanding that is the key to designing a policy solution will actually help, because increasing trade barriers won't. All it will do is increase the price of goods, thereby making thin pay packets have to stretch even further. In some cases, like rural towns it may be necessary top help people move (this won't be easy, but there may be no alternative), but revitalising the depressed areas that can be revitalised is going to take more careful thinking than the populists can supply.
I don't know if that will be enough to satisfy disaffected workers, but it's the best thing I can think of to actually help things.
Not all constitutional reforms require constitutional amendments. Isolating the Inspectors General and Special Prosecutor from executive meddling, for example, could likely be done by statute.
As for voter ignorance, it's bad enough that people don't know how many senators there are, but to not understand that Trump doing effectively nothing to stop a plague is a bad thing? New Zealanders clearly acknowledged Ardern's performance with COVID and gave her a record-breaking performance. Now, I get that they don't understand that all she really did is get out of the Ministry of Health's way, but people can tell good from bad, right?
Don't get me wrong, I don't think it was especially likely that the Democrats would do what I think they need to do to put the US on a more even keel, but even the option doesn't exist right now.
The end result might not be super close (unless Georgia or Arizona go for Trump), but Trump still gained votes over last election, even if the Democrats gained even more. That means that there are a bunch of people, some of whom had never voted before, who looked at the last four years and said "more, please!". That should horrify you, it certainly horrifies me.
It's also less than ideal that the Republican hold the Senate, for now at least. The US needs a series of constitutional reforms and enacting even the easiest of them will require the legislature to act. That seems unlikely so long as the Republicans hold one house.
You make a good case. The Republican party needs to pay a hefty price for nominating Trump, and then for standing by while he wreaked havoc. Ideally the Republicans will suffer a defeat so severe that 100 years from now the Republicans will refuse to nominate another populist.
For that matter, a big win for Biden would help reinforce the idea that the path to victory is to ignore the pro-Sanders crowd and continue nominating normie centrists, which is also something I'd prefer.
I am indeed a New Zealander, and I simply don't think the natural barriers mean that much. The US got COVID via air travel, not its land borders, and even now the US isn't really importing COVID from Canada or Mexico. And New Zealand had over 4million international visitors a year pre-COVID, many of whom came from China, so it's not like we're really that isolated. We were just willing to shut down harder and faster than other countries.
You're not wrong that 95% of political commentator are rank hypocrites. Affiliates of both parties routinely exchange scripts based on pure expediency. So you're definitely not crazy, most of this discussion is just partisan sniping.
But here's the thing, people can come to the right conclusion using a bad reasoning process. Identifying a logical fallacy in someone's argument doesn't prove they're wrong, you actually need to examine their claim directly.
Your position appears to be that voting for Trump is a necessity because of a handful of nutjobs on the far left want to take over society, like they always do? This is where I think Twitter is leading you astray. And to be clear, that is not a dig at your mental state, the availability heuristic is a normal part of human cognition, but it will mislead you if your attention is focused on a a small number of unusually loud buffoons rather than the average person. And since social media points you at the former over the latter, that is a problem.
The Democratic party base was given the opportunity to vote for some very left wing candidates, but they chose Biden, the normiest of normie candidates. The media went on about how no one was enthusiastic for Biden and yet it turns out a lot of people like Biden, it's just that none of them live on Twitter so the media class missed it. The critical Race Theory / Abolish the Police crowd hate Biden, and yet he easily won anyway. It's fair to conclude from this that the radical left has very little power in the Democratic party.
And what is it about Biden that terrifies you so? That he wants a "strong response" to COVID? When faced with a 100-year emergency a strong response is exactly what is called for. We did it here and it worked out really well. No distancing, everything is one, they ask us to record our movements and wear masks on public transport but it's not mandated. The month and a half of lockdown was hard, but it bought us normality, at least within our borders. When you're driving off a cliff, taking strong action is appropriate, continuing to drive straight is a sign of dysfunction not admirable restraint.
As for Trump, whether you want to call him a fascist or not, he is a serious problem. Over 200,000 Americans are dead from COVID (more like 300,000 if you go by excess deaths), and while some of them would have died regardless, if you had done as well as us proportionately you would have fewer than 2000 deaths. He has responded to political unrest by deploying secret police (law enforcement with no identification or clear lines of accountability are secret police) in cities against the wishes of the State Government. He has tried to manipulate the US's data collection process to undercount constituencies likely to vote against him. He has, without embarrassment, that accepting help to manipulate the election for hostile governments is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. We can argue semantics about fascism, but that's a lot more serious than people demanding apologies.
The office of President has been growing steadily more powerful for over a century, and the reason is that each side keeps excusing the misdeeds of each President because it never seems so bad when "your guy" does it. Both sides are guilty in this, but right now the President is a Republican, so it is incumbent on Republicans to rebuke the latest overreaches. Once the Democrats get the Presidency I'll go back to hassling them.
Your vote won't change the outcome of the election, one vote never does. All you can do is declare what you're willing to support. A vote for Trump is a vote for undermining American democracy, and bringing you ever closer to dictatorship.
Yeah, I agree. It's not that they're aren't nuts on both sides, it's that on the right the nuts are in charge while on the left they are rightly marginalised.
The big problem I see with the current filibuster is that it contributes to the impotence of the legislature. It's bad enough needing a simple majority in each house, but when you need 60% in the Senate, it make it too hard for the legislature to do anything. This means the President tries to legislate by executive order and the Court rules on whether the orders are ultra vires or not.
Letting the legislature legislate would help restore legislative power and improve their ability to check the President.
I bought a multicooker a few weeks ago, I wanted to broaden my recipe base while being able to make things that A) don't require too much work and B) are made in big batches so I can freeze leftovers.
A journalist shouldn't let a subject get away with dodging questions, nor should they allow their subject to lie unchallenged on air. That's the difference between an interview and a puff piece.
That is Jami-Lee Ross being interviewed by Newshub's Tova O'Brien. Now Jami-Lee Ross is not a National MP any more, he was elected as part of National in 2017, but he left the National Party in 2018 after a very public dispute with then-leader Simon Bridges. He remained in Parliament as an Independent.
Earlier this year, presumably in response to his negligible prospects for re-election, he decided to join forces with Advance New Zealand, a lunatic fringe party whose policy platform derives entirely from the floor sweepings of 4Chan conspiracy theories.
To be clear, the mainstream right wants nothing to do with Advance New Zealand - their political positions aren't really coherent enough to fit onto the political description, and National has no love for Jami-Lee Ross. David Seymour, who leads Act called Billy Te-Kahika (Advance New Zealand's leader), in these exact words, "a fucking idiot". Advance New Zealand received less than 1% of the vote on Saturday.
This is not the mainstream right being beaten up on by some radically left-wing journalist. This is a man who lit his own political career on fire, then tried to salvage it by selling some of Parliament's integrity to a bunch of lunatics. And then when that failed utterly O'Brien refused to accept soggy platitudes in place of answers and wouldn't allow him to continue to spew misinformation into the public domain (she only shut him down when he tried to get into nonsense about COVID being no deadlier than influenza).
I'm reminded of the women in the elevator reacting to meeting Joe Biden. I get the feeling lots of people find Biden inspiring, it's just none of them are part of the media class, so the media narrative is "Biden doesn't inspire".
Look past the surface. Imagine a politician with a flair for getting both the media to pay attention to them and disaffected white people to vote for them, like Trump does. Now imagine that person with 40 years of experience in politics, who has a keen understanding of how government works and how to use it for his advantage. Imagine someone as good at cutting deals that benefit his as Trump thinks he is. That's who Winston Peters is, there's a reason why he's been an essential powerbroker in New Zealand politics since 1996 despite his party never getting more than 10% of the vote.
New Zealand First is a good example of how left and right can vary between countries. In the US, New Zealand First would be straightforwardly right wing (Winston Peters is basically a smarter version of Donald Trump). but in New Zealand they are (slightly) left of centre because here it's economics that drives the left-right divide and National haven't been anti-immigration since the late 1980s.
In fact the party New Zealand First has the greatest enmity with is Act, the most right-wing party in our Parliament.
Your police routinely break into people's houses, fire weapons unprovoked and beat people (sometimes to death) where it was definitely unnecessary to do so.
If these were the actions of a dystopian government's stormtroopers the writing would be considered heavy-handed. And while people given power will inevitably misuse it at some rate, the fact those that do are not punished meaningfully will utterly destroy people's faith in the police.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Agilely Sprinting”
Yes, the mass combat system is pretty elegant.
It's a small duchy, and I won't make them conquer all of it, just the bulk of it.
"
They're going to invade a country, it should be fun.
"
I bought an apartment this week, so this weekend will involve planning my move.
Also, Sunday is the end of the RPG campaign I've been running for a year.
Also, Desert Bus for Hope starts tomorrow, so I'll be watching that.
So I'm going to be pretty busy.
On “Attention Must Be Paid: The Electoral Lessons of the Working Class”
About 4 years ago, I wrote a post trying to outline what I thought were the key questions in understanding why pro-nationalist voters were feeling the economy was bad for them. The thing I come back to more than anything in that post is the issue of geography - the economy can be strong in most of the country, but dying in some regions, and that's going to create a lot of angry people in those regions.
Some of this is worldwide, rural town are dying because the number of resource extraction jobs required is declining, and that's the only kind of job that flourishes in rural areas. But the Rust Belt looks different to me - there are cities that used to thrive and now are moribund, and we need to figure out why that is. Sure, they lost their key industries, but why haven't other industries flocked to the abundance of labour a rustbelt city provides? Cheap real estate an lots of available labour present opportunities for an up-and-coming business.
Understanding that is the key to designing a policy solution will actually help, because increasing trade barriers won't. All it will do is increase the price of goods, thereby making thin pay packets have to stretch even further. In some cases, like rural towns it may be necessary top help people move (this won't be easy, but there may be no alternative), but revitalising the depressed areas that can be revitalised is going to take more careful thinking than the populists can supply.
I don't know if that will be enough to satisfy disaffected workers, but it's the best thing I can think of to actually help things.
On “The Election Wasn’t Stolen”
Yes, a lot of Democrats talked about how Russia "hacked the election", but Russia didn't hack the votes, it hacked the voters.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Replaying Dead Space”
Of course, for some rolls failure isn't always failure as such, especially for red checks.
On “Reflections on Biden’s Victory”
Not all constitutional reforms require constitutional amendments. Isolating the Inspectors General and Special Prosecutor from executive meddling, for example, could likely be done by statute.
As for voter ignorance, it's bad enough that people don't know how many senators there are, but to not understand that Trump doing effectively nothing to stop a plague is a bad thing? New Zealanders clearly acknowledged Ardern's performance with COVID and gave her a record-breaking performance. Now, I get that they don't understand that all she really did is get out of the Ministry of Health's way, but people can tell good from bad, right?
"
Don't get me wrong, I don't think it was especially likely that the Democrats would do what I think they need to do to put the US on a more even keel, but even the option doesn't exist right now.
"
The end result might not be super close (unless Georgia or Arizona go for Trump), but Trump still gained votes over last election, even if the Democrats gained even more. That means that there are a bunch of people, some of whom had never voted before, who looked at the last four years and said "more, please!". That should horrify you, it certainly horrifies me.
It's also less than ideal that the Republican hold the Senate, for now at least. The US needs a series of constitutional reforms and enacting even the easiest of them will require the legislature to act. That seems unlikely so long as the Republicans hold one house.
On “Best Meal Ever Week: Lamb Vindaloo in Middle Earth”
A lot of hotels and restaurants closed in 2012 due tot he earthquake, so it may no longer be in business.
On “A Non-Partisan’s Case For Straight-Ticket Voting”
You make a good case. The Republican party needs to pay a hefty price for nominating Trump, and then for standing by while he wreaked havoc. Ideally the Republicans will suffer a defeat so severe that 100 years from now the Republicans will refuse to nominate another populist.
For that matter, a big win for Biden would help reinforce the idea that the path to victory is to ignore the pro-Sanders crowd and continue nominating normie centrists, which is also something I'd prefer.
On “The Antifa Case for Voting Trump”
I am indeed a New Zealander, and I simply don't think the natural barriers mean that much. The US got COVID via air travel, not its land borders, and even now the US isn't really importing COVID from Canada or Mexico. And New Zealand had over 4million international visitors a year pre-COVID, many of whom came from China, so it's not like we're really that isolated. We were just willing to shut down harder and faster than other countries.
"
You're not wrong that 95% of political commentator are rank hypocrites. Affiliates of both parties routinely exchange scripts based on pure expediency. So you're definitely not crazy, most of this discussion is just partisan sniping.
But here's the thing, people can come to the right conclusion using a bad reasoning process. Identifying a logical fallacy in someone's argument doesn't prove they're wrong, you actually need to examine their claim directly.
Your position appears to be that voting for Trump is a necessity because of a handful of nutjobs on the far left want to take over society, like they always do? This is where I think Twitter is leading you astray. And to be clear, that is not a dig at your mental state, the availability heuristic is a normal part of human cognition, but it will mislead you if your attention is focused on a a small number of unusually loud buffoons rather than the average person. And since social media points you at the former over the latter, that is a problem.
The Democratic party base was given the opportunity to vote for some very left wing candidates, but they chose Biden, the normiest of normie candidates. The media went on about how no one was enthusiastic for Biden and yet it turns out a lot of people like Biden, it's just that none of them live on Twitter so the media class missed it. The critical Race Theory / Abolish the Police crowd hate Biden, and yet he easily won anyway. It's fair to conclude from this that the radical left has very little power in the Democratic party.
And what is it about Biden that terrifies you so? That he wants a "strong response" to COVID? When faced with a 100-year emergency a strong response is exactly what is called for. We did it here and it worked out really well. No distancing, everything is one, they ask us to record our movements and wear masks on public transport but it's not mandated. The month and a half of lockdown was hard, but it bought us normality, at least within our borders. When you're driving off a cliff, taking strong action is appropriate, continuing to drive straight is a sign of dysfunction not admirable restraint.
As for Trump, whether you want to call him a fascist or not, he is a serious problem. Over 200,000 Americans are dead from COVID (more like 300,000 if you go by excess deaths), and while some of them would have died regardless, if you had done as well as us proportionately you would have fewer than 2000 deaths. He has responded to political unrest by deploying secret police (law enforcement with no identification or clear lines of accountability are secret police) in cities against the wishes of the State Government. He has tried to manipulate the US's data collection process to undercount constituencies likely to vote against him. He has, without embarrassment, that accepting help to manipulate the election for hostile governments is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. We can argue semantics about fascism, but that's a lot more serious than people demanding apologies.
The office of President has been growing steadily more powerful for over a century, and the reason is that each side keeps excusing the misdeeds of each President because it never seems so bad when "your guy" does it. Both sides are guilty in this, but right now the President is a Republican, so it is incumbent on Republicans to rebuke the latest overreaches. Once the Democrats get the Presidency I'll go back to hassling them.
Your vote won't change the outcome of the election, one vote never does. All you can do is declare what you're willing to support. A vote for Trump is a vote for undermining American democracy, and bringing you ever closer to dictatorship.
"
Yeah, I agree. It's not that they're aren't nuts on both sides, it's that on the right the nuts are in charge while on the left they are rightly marginalised.
On “Joe Biden Won’t Restore America’s Norms”
The big problem I see with the current filibuster is that it contributes to the impotence of the legislature. It's bad enough needing a simple majority in each house, but when you need 60% in the Senate, it make it too hard for the legislature to do anything. This means the President tries to legislate by executive order and the Court rules on whether the orders are ultra vires or not.
Letting the legislature legislate would help restore legislative power and improve their ability to check the President.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Specialized Kitchen Tools”
I bought a multicooker a few weeks ago, I wanted to broaden my recipe base while being able to make things that A) don't require too much work and B) are made in big batches so I can freeze leftovers.
On “New Zealand Election Results 2020”
A journalist shouldn't let a subject get away with dodging questions, nor should they allow their subject to lie unchallenged on air. That's the difference between an interview and a puff piece.
"
OK, so a little context there.
That is Jami-Lee Ross being interviewed by Newshub's Tova O'Brien. Now Jami-Lee Ross is not a National MP any more, he was elected as part of National in 2017, but he left the National Party in 2018 after a very public dispute with then-leader Simon Bridges. He remained in Parliament as an Independent.
Earlier this year, presumably in response to his negligible prospects for re-election, he decided to join forces with Advance New Zealand, a lunatic fringe party whose policy platform derives entirely from the floor sweepings of 4Chan conspiracy theories.
To be clear, the mainstream right wants nothing to do with Advance New Zealand - their political positions aren't really coherent enough to fit onto the political description, and National has no love for Jami-Lee Ross. David Seymour, who leads Act called Billy Te-Kahika (Advance New Zealand's leader), in these exact words, "a fucking idiot". Advance New Zealand received less than 1% of the vote on Saturday.
This is not the mainstream right being beaten up on by some radically left-wing journalist. This is a man who lit his own political career on fire, then tried to salvage it by selling some of Parliament's integrity to a bunch of lunatics. And then when that failed utterly O'Brien refused to accept soggy platitudes in place of answers and wouldn't allow him to continue to spew misinformation into the public domain (she only shut him down when he tried to get into nonsense about COVID being no deadlier than influenza).
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Doom 2016”
I'm ploughing into the endgame of Hades, 75 hours in, and all's well.
On “Vote Like Your Life Depends On It, Because It Does”
I'm reminded of the women in the elevator reacting to meeting Joe Biden. I get the feeling lots of people find Biden inspiring, it's just none of them are part of the media class, so the media narrative is "Biden doesn't inspire".
On “Amy, Tell Me What You’re Gonna Do: Part 4”
I really appreciate you writing these Em.
On “President Trump, First Lady Test Positive for Covid-19 (Updated)”
Ah, well that's nice to know. Death is the one thing the US Constitution seems to handle pretty well.
On “Election 2020, No the Other One”
Look past the surface. Imagine a politician with a flair for getting both the media to pay attention to them and disaffected white people to vote for them, like Trump does. Now imagine that person with 40 years of experience in politics, who has a keen understanding of how government works and how to use it for his advantage. Imagine someone as good at cutting deals that benefit his as Trump thinks he is. That's who Winston Peters is, there's a reason why he's been an essential powerbroker in New Zealand politics since 1996 despite his party never getting more than 10% of the vote.
"
New Zealand First is a good example of how left and right can vary between countries. In the US, New Zealand First would be straightforwardly right wing (Winston Peters is basically a smarter version of Donald Trump). but in New Zealand they are (slightly) left of centre because here it's economics that drives the left-right divide and National haven't been anti-immigration since the late 1980s.
In fact the party New Zealand First has the greatest enmity with is Act, the most right-wing party in our Parliament.
On “The Libertarian Case that Riots are Good, Achtually”
Your police routinely break into people's houses, fire weapons unprovoked and beat people (sometimes to death) where it was definitely unnecessary to do so.
If these were the actions of a dystopian government's stormtroopers the writing would be considered heavy-handed. And while people given power will inevitably misuse it at some rate, the fact those that do are not punished meaningfully will utterly destroy people's faith in the police.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.