Definitely not a cult (except for the child sacrifice part) UPDATED

This just in...

“Consumers should never attempt to create their own test scenarios or use real people, and especially children, to test the performance of vehicle technology,” @NHTSAgov says after Tesla owners post videos putting FSD to the test with child pedestrians. https://t.co/z054vjWdqi

— Craig Trudell (@crtrud) August 17, 2022

___________________________________________________

I was just going to throw this in with the rest in a Tuesday Tweets post, but I decided it needed a post of its own.

 

Rob Stumpf writing for the Drive.

Video of the test was released earlier this week and shows a Tesla Model 3 repeatedly striking a small, stationary dummy directly in front of the car while supposedly operating on Tesla's controversially named Full Self-Driving Beta software. However, clips from the video led some online publications to instead call the test a "smear campaign" under the notion that FSD was not actually engaged, and after further evidence emerged that FSD was engaged during the test, Tesla fans and FSD users began filming their own experiments to see what happened—with mixed results. One noted Tesla devotee even staged a public call for people to volunteer their own children to stand in front of his Tesla and prove it'll stop in time.

So will a self-driving Tesla run over a child? Amid the noise, the answer seems to be a resounding "maybe," which is just as bad as "yes" in this case. Here's where things stand.

To understand why this test is so controversial, it's important to start with the funding behind it.

The test, video of which is embedded above, was paid for and performed by The Dawn Project, an organization campaigning to promote "unhackable" software and systems. The Dawn Project is backed by Dan O'Dowd, who is the CEO, president, and founder of Green Hills Software, a competing company in the AV space. In January, O'Dowd took out a full-page ad in the New York Times campaigning to have Tesla's FSD Beta banned from operating on U.S. roads. O'Dowd also ran in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary to represent California earlier this year, though he only garnered 1.1% of the vote. [O'Dowd's "campaign" was strictly about publicizing the flaws in FSD and never pretended to be about anything else. 1.1% was probably more than he expected. -- MP] Tesla CEO Elon Musk publicly slammed Green Hills following the full-page ad, calling it "a pile of trash."

O'Dowd's test clearly shows the Model 3 slamming into the dummy three times, but its stitched-together footage showing the infotainment screen doesn't match up with how the car would actually look when FSD Beta is engaged. There is no Autopilot icon, the prediction line remains gray, and the speed doesn't match up with the reproducibility steps published by The Dawn Project. Electrek took this as evidence that FSD Beta was not engaged and published an article condemning the test.

Tesla fans began to reference this article as proof that the test was flawed. Even Elon Musk joined in on sharing the article, tweeting it at The Guardian while calling the test a "scam video."

Later, raw footage was published that showed the view from inside the cabin, and it appeared to show a UI on the central screen that would indicate FSD was in fact engaged. Furthermore, Art Haynie—the driver who conducted the test on behalf of The Dawn Project—signed an affidavit claiming that FSD Beta was active at the time of the test.

Regardless, this discrepancy then caused some people to go into full-on defense mode and re-enact tests themselves in an attempt to disprove the findings published by The Dawn Project.

Some people began setting up their own stationary mannequins on residential streets. They attempted to recreate the test results and published videos showing the vehicle avoiding the mannequin without hitting it. Others were able to replicate the findings as their own vehicles slammed into their homemade dummies. And yes, there's that guy on Twitter who asked for volunteers to have their children run in front of his own Tesla to prove it'll stop in time.

We've known for a while that FSD would sometimes try to steer into pedestrians, cyclists, pylons and especially stationary vehicles. There are endless videos on YouTube and Twitter (at least until Musk buys it) of test drivers having to disengage the system to prevent disaster, but the footage of Tesla mowing down statues in the shape of small children very much struck a nerve, particularly after the more honest attempts at debunking started producing more videos in the same vein. 

The most popular defense has been that Tesla's AI is smart enough to tell the difference between a small child and a mannequin without any real chance of error. This argument has been made most visibly by the Whole Mars Catalog. More than "that guy on Twitter," the site has an unofficial but very close relationship with Musk and Twitter, which makes these latest threads all the more bizarre.

Just so we all have the full picture here: it's not just that these people want to endanger children for social media stunts posing as "self-driving testing," they will initiate an insurrection against the government if their right to do so is infringed https://t.co/i2LxcsrKxG

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) August 10, 2022

HAHA JUST KIDDING THERE IS NO WAY A CAMERA-ONLY SYSTEM EVER PASSES THIS TEST IN THE DARK

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) August 11, 2022

somewhere a san francisco divorce lawyer is about to have a very exciting day pic.twitter.com/8A8eHdApN0

— Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) August 10, 2022

Five years ago at the blog: there are things I'd change if I were writing this today, but the title wouldn't be one of them

 I'd definitely address gerrymandering if I were writing this today. I don't have a good answer for why I didn't back then.

Of course, the crazies have grown in number and in lunacy and have grown more dangerous. Now a plurality and possibly a plurality of one of the two major parties holds demonstrable delusions among their core political beliefs.

If the crazies leave, the Republicans cease to have a viable party.

 

The GOP needs the crazies more than the crazies need the GOP.

The following is not really a voting paradox, but it is kind of in the neighborhood. You have three stockholders for a company. A holds 48% of the shares, B holds 49%, and C holds 3%. Assuming that any decision needs to be approved by people holding a majority, who has the most power? The slightly counterintuitive answer is no one. Each shareholder is equal since an alliance of any two will produce a majority.

Now let's generalize the idea somewhat. Let's say you have N shareholders whom you have brought together to form a majority. Some of the members of your alliance have a large number of shares, some have very few, but even the one with the smallest stake has enough that if he or she drops out, you will be below 50%. In this scenario, every member of the alliance has equal veto power.

I apologize for the really, really basic fun-with-math explanation, but this principle has become increasingly fundamental in 21st-century politics. At the risk of oversimplifying, elections come down to my number of supporters times my turnout percentage versus your number supporters times your turnout percentage. Arguably the fundamental piece of the conservative movement has been to focus on ways to maximize Republican turnout while suppressing democratic turnout. (Yes, I'm leaving a lot out but bear with me.)

There are at least a couple of obvious inherent dangers in this approach. The first is that there is an upper bound for turnout percentage. This is especially worrisome when the number of your supporters is decreasing. Sen. Lindsey Graham was alluding to this when he observed that they weren't making enough new old white men to keep the GOP strategy going.

There is, however, another danger which can potentially be even worse. When you need nearly 100% of your supporters to show up to the polls in order to win, you create a situation where virtually every faction of your base has veto power. One somewhat perverse advantage of the large base/low turnout model is that groups of supporters can be interchangeable. You have lots of situations where you can alienate a small segment but more than make up for it elsewhere. In and of itself, this allows for a great deal of flexibility, but the really important part is the power dynamic. You have to represent a large constituency in order to wield veto power.

Probably since 2008 and certainly since 2012, pretty much every nontrivial faction of the GOP has held veto power which means the question is no longer who has it, but who is willing to use it. The Tea Party was the first to realize this. Now the alt-right has caught on to the dynamic as well.

Even with increasingly aggressive and shameless voter suppression techniques, Republicans tend to get fewer votes. It is true that they have, through smart strategy and tactics, managed to get an extraordinary number of offices out of those votes, but it is a precarious situation. We can debate how many people really believe in shadowy Jewish banker conspiracies or Martian slave labor camps, but it is almost certainly a large enough group to sway some close elections if the crazies collectively decided to go home or, worse yet, opt for a third party.

Ed Kilgore (whom I follow and generally respect) had a badly ill-informed post, Trump Should Emulate Buckley and Tell Racists: ‘I Don’t Want Your Vote.’ That simply won't work for Trump or the GOP. They need the crazies more than the crazies need them.

 

J.D. Vance: David Brooks doing Hee-Haw cosplay

Before we get to Vance, here's a bit of relevant personal history. My grandparents on my father's side had a family farm in the Rio Grande Valley. On my mother's side, my grandparents started out as sharecroppers until World War II gave my Grandfather the opportunity to find work as a carpenter. 

I was born in Texas, but when I was five, my family moved to a small town in the Ozarks and I stayed in the region until I was in my thirties. I taught high school and college there before making the jump to the corporate world and the East Coast before ending up in California. 

I mention this to give you some idea why the transparent fraud of J.D. Vance pissed me off so much, and why I'm so angry with the national press and particularly (as always) the NYT for their role in the sham.

 

 2022 has been a rough year for conventional wisdom which means a rough year for the NYT and journalists like Weisman. Not only was his framing inappropriate; it was wildly off base. Vance has taken what was supposed to be a safe seat and made it into a tight (an for the GOP, expensive) race.

But it's not just Vance's competence as a candidate that the press got wrong; it was his sham persona, and no publication bought into the lie more than the New York Times.

Take a look at Jennifer Senior's 2016 review of Hillbilly Elegy.

But his profile is misleading. His people — hillbillies, rednecks, white trash, choose your epithet (or term of affection, depending on your point of view)  [These terms are in no way interchangeable -- MP] — didn’t step off the Mayflower and become part of America’s ascendant class. “Poverty is the family tradition,” he writes. His ancestors and kin were sharecroppers, coal miners, machinists, millworkers — all low-paying, body-wearying occupations that over the years have vanished or offered diminished security.

We start hitting likely embellishments right off the bat. The part of Kentucky Vance's grandparents came from does not and probably did not produce the kinds of cash crops associated with sharecropping. It's possible that Vance's family moved there from more productive land, or it might be he was just adding a flourish to his tale of humble origins. 

Mr. Vance was raised in Middletown, Ohio, a now-decaying steel town filled with Kentucky transplants, which at one point included his Mamaw and Papaw — in newscaster English, that’s grandma and grandpa — who moved there shortly after World War II. Though the couple eventually managed to achieve the material comforts of a middle-class life (house, car), they brought their Appalachian values and habits with them. Some were wonderfully positive, like loyalty and love of country. But others, like a tendency toward violence and verbal abuse, were inimical to family life.

Just to emphasize this point, J.D. Vance was born in the suburbs and never lived in rural America (no, summer vacations don't count). His mother was born in those same suburbs. Middletown is a lower middle-class suburb located between Cincinnati and Dayton. While hardly prosperous, it is better off than some of the surrounding area, For instance, the percent of the population below the poverty line in 2020 (back when Vance was living there) was around 9%, roughly half that of nearby Dayton.

As for violence being inimical to family life, Vance is on the record as saying women should stay with abusive husbands for the sake of the children, so maybe that's more his thing.
 

Papaw was forever coming home drunk. Mamaw, “a violent nondrunk,” was forever tormenting him, whether by serving him artfully arranged plates of garbage for dinner or dousing him with gasoline. All this guerrilla warfare affected their children. Mr. Vance’s mother was an empress of instability — violent, feckless, prone to hysteria. A long stint in rehab couldn’t shake her addiction to prescription narcotics (she’d later move on to heroin). She spun through more boyfriends than this reader could count and at least five husbands.

The only reason Mr. Vance made it out in one piece is because his grandparents eventually reconciled, becoming his unofficial guardians. (He also spent a terrifically affirming four years in the Marines.) Mamaw was especially encouraging. She was tough as snakeskin, foul-mouthed as a mobster and filled with love. In a town where many children don’t finish high school, she raised a grandson who managed to graduate from Ohio State University and Yale Law School, defying skyscraping odds.

 

Have to stop for just a minute and  say something about those "skyscraping odds." Besides being purple prose, it was also badly inaccurate.

Ohio State is a good school but it is not (to its credit) particularly exclusive with an acceptance rate of 68%. Furthermore, Vance went to OSU by way of the military, meaning he had a tremendous support network to help him get into college.Vance graduated summa cum laude, so he was clearly hard-working and academically talented, but suburban kid raised by his grandparents graduates high school, joins the Marines, gets into a good university, goes on to get an ivy league law degree is not particularly inspiring. 

I've taught high school in the Delta and in Watts and I can point you to lots of kids who genuinely defied the odds to get where they are. Putting Vance in that group is offensive. 

It's also worth noting that Vance got his opportunities primarily through the GI Bill and the land-grant college system, two landmark progressive programs that Vance's mentor, employer, and political backer Peter Thiel would beat to death with a tire iron given the chance.

“Hillbilly Elegy,” in my mind, divides into two components: the family stories Mr. Vance tells — most of which are no doubt better experienced on the page than they were in real life — and the questions he raises. Chief among them: How much should he hold his hillbilly kin responsible for their own misfortunes? 

...

Time and again, Mr. Vance preaches a message of tough love and personal responsibility. He has no patience with an old acquaintance who told him he quit his job because he hated waking up early, only to take to Facebook to blame the “Obama economy.” Or with a former co-worker at a tile warehouse who missed work once a week though his girlfriend was pregnant.

Just to recap. Vance is a Thiel disciple with a history of romanticizing and possibly embellishing his stories. Perhaps we should take that into account when reading his unlikely sounding anecdotes.

Squint, and you’ll note the incendiary nature of Mr. Vance’s argument. It’s always treacherous business to blame a group for its own misfortunes. Certainly, an outsider cannot say what Mr. Vance is saying to his kin and kind. But he can — just as President Obama can say to fellow African-Americans, “brothers should pull up their pants,” as he did on MTV.

 Except that Obama is an African-American while Vance is a venture capitalist from the suburbs doing hillbilly cosplay.

None of it mattered, not the sham persona, not the embellished bio, not the association with and dependency on a far-right billionaire so extreme he publicly called women's suffrage a bad idea. Journalists across the country immediately fell in love.

David Brooks got where he is by telling often fabricated anecdotes with a veneer of pop sociology that confirmed his target audience's preconceptions about the class system. Vance took the act to the next level, adding "first-hand" observations and substituting tough love for Brook's "more to be pitied than censured" shtick when discussing the lower classes. Vance also seemed to offer special insight into the rise of Trump, something that had caught the pundit class completely off guard.

 The mainstream press swallowed the obvious fraud because they wanted to believe it.

I feel bad about associating Hee Haw with Vance, so I picked out a few clips to balance things out.

 

 

A few late night thoughts on recent events and the state of the Grand Old Party

1. The counter-intuitive take is usually wrong. That's why we have it. If the intuitive was wrong most of the time, natural selection would have removed intuition from the gene pool long ago. 

In 2015 and early 2016, armies of political pundits and data journalists assured us that counter-intuitively being consistently ahead in the polls was bad news for a candidate. In 2022, lots of those same experts are arguing that being raided by the FBI in a corruption case is good news for a politician (or at least bad news for his opposition. 

Counter-intuitive takes can be right. but they make for poor default positions. 

2. At this point, speculating about the nature of the documents or the details behind the raid is one of the least productive ways you can spend your time. The ratio of words to facts is already way to high.

3. All those articles and op-ed pieces about the GOP moving past Trump conveniently assumed he would let them. A large chunk of the party is personally loyal to Trump and at any time, he can turn them against the Republicans. As he has been for almost seven years, Trump remains the man with the grenade.

4. The more frightened Trump becomes, the more he will demand that Republicans and the conservative establishment leap to his defense. Of course, the things that he is currently afraid of have the potential to make him politically toxic in the near future. 

5. The Republican response has basically broken down into two camps: the first goes on Fox and threatens retaliation; the second burrows deep into the ground. No one in the GOP believes it is safe to attack or even distance yourself from Trump. Chaney is a cautionary tale. 

6. Some parallels to the Dobbs decision. The Republicans worked to make that story about the leak not the contents of the decision. In this case to make it about the raid and not the crimes being investigated. In the first case, the strategy initially worked with the press but the public didn't buy it. We'll see how this one plays out.

"That’s not the way any of this works…"

[Meant to post something about this a month ago but things have been hectic]

That’s not the way any of this works… https://t.co/NLihkmb1Lr

— Kai Ryssdal (@kairyssdal) July 5, 2022

 

Ryssdal was referring to the supremely misguided idea of addressing inflation with stimulus checks.

 From the SF Chronicle. [Emphasis added]

It’s official: Most Californians who filed their taxes in 2020 will get one-time payments totaling about $9.5 billion from the state starting in October to help offset rising inflation.

The Franchise Tax Board has set up a web page with some of the details and a calculator where people can estimate their payment.

The Legislature passed an election-year bill, AB192, authorizing the payments with zero votes against it, and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it Thursday as part of his budget package.

The bill called these payments Better for Families Refunds, but the tax board is calling them Middle Class Tax Refunds, even though couples making up to $500,000 in 2020 adjusted gross income and individuals making up to $250,000 are eligible.

  

We shouldn't have to say this but handing out stimulus checks is the worst thing you can do in a period of high inflation. It did, however, make for a nice photo-op.

Tuesday Tweets special edition

Bad night for "Fox is turning on Trump" people. pic.twitter.com/SO5D0cnyOy

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) August 9, 2022

I had planned on doing a post on the hot new genre of "the GOP is abandoning Trump" stories, which long-time readers will recognize as a  reboot of the once popular "Trump will never get the nomination" genre. Today's events somehow manage to both undercut and confirm critique I had in mind. On one hand, this could mark the beginning of the end for DJT's political career. On the other, it reminds us that the GOP is still very much Trump's party.

 Here's a good background piece on the story.

And a couple of threads from some excellent legal experts. 

THREAD: “What’s the difference between this and Watergate?” Donald Trump raged in a statement Monday night after FBI agents.

Well, as a Watergate and FBI historian, four things stand out to me:

— Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) August 8, 2022

1) The idea the FBI launched a raid on a former president would have been approved and monitored at the highest level of the Justice Department; hard to even imagine how high the bar of probable cause must've been for the Bureau to initiate such a politically sensitive search....

— Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) August 8, 2022

2) A search warrant means an independent federal judge ALSO signed off on the probable cause and, independently, believes evidence there was likely a crime committed AND that more evidence would be found at Mar-a-Lago. That's huge too.

— Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) August 8, 2022

3) The fact the search apparently didn't leak until basically when word came from Donald Trump himself shows the FBI and the Justice Department conducted this search by the book and a high degree of integrity. No leaks? Impressive. Surely only a small team knew inside DOJ....

— Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) August 8, 2022

4) Taken together, this is one of the most significant, sensitive, and politically explosive actions the US Justice Department and FBI has ever taken—one of a tiny handful of times it's ever investigated a president.

Bottom line: The FBI & DOJ must've known they had the goods.

— Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) August 8, 2022

Attorney and legal commentator Ken White takes a much deeper dive and comes to the same conclusion.

Okay. Seems solid that the FBI searched Mar-A-Lago, based on multiple sources, including a very angry shouty man who is liveblogging it.

Let's talk about what they had to do to get that search warrant, what it means, and what we'll be able to find out about the investigation. /1

— DarkTimesHat (@Popehat) August 8, 2022

LATimes Legal Affairs Columnist.

per @marceelias HUGE POINTt:the records provision they're investigating carries the penalty that someone convicted "shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States." So this could be the whole enchilada in terms of DOJ resolution.

— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) August 9, 2022

Or maybe not...

Nope, can't impose qualifications on holding the presidency by statute—the qualifications are set out in the Constitution. The search for "one weird trick" to banish Trump from politics will have to continue. https://t.co/w4x0oswjyW

— Jason Willick (@jawillick) August 9, 2022

Sources confirm to @SaraMurray and @KristenhCNN that the FBI search on Mar a Lago was related to the handling of presidential documents, including classified documents, that may have been brought to MAL.

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) August 8, 2022

This will in no way dampen the claims of persecution.

When Trump and his monkeys screech about tonight’s news, somebody should remind them that HE APPOINTED THE FBI DIRECTOR who approved the Mar-a-Lago raid.

— Joe Conason (@JoeConason) August 9, 2022

Yes he was hoodwinked into putting these people into power

— Tishb (@yorkyeddiemom) August 9, 2022

 

"The mind reels with sarcastic replies" -- Snoopy

Attorney General Garland: preserve your documents and clear your calendar. pic.twitter.com/dStAjnwbAT

— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) August 9, 2022

This (below) is an intimidation tactic. They want the name of the person who authorized the FBI raid because they want to send a mob after them as a way of warning other government officials not to go after Trump. pic.twitter.com/ktkFipjPcy

— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) August 9, 2022

 

Imagine being Don Jr.'s brother and still being considered the Fredo.

''How about the Benghazi scandals? ... you want to talk about scandals that were never investigated?" -- Eric Trump pic.twitter.com/5YAAZVduMi

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 9, 2022

 

Kari Lake issues a statement that apparently she will have Arizona secede from the Union if elected Governor. pic.twitter.com/ZYBr6s3UUB

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) August 9, 2022

After todays raid on Mar A Lago what do you think the left plans to use those 87,000 new IRS agents for?

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) August 9, 2022

It’s very easy to avoid breaking the law. pic.twitter.com/CN595ABUiN

— Rachel Vindman 🌻 (@natsechobbyist) August 9, 2022

Miller: This is an abomination pic.twitter.com/LlxKEAHx6f

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 9, 2022

If I'm the regular Fox anchors who are on vacation right now, I'm hiring someone to taste my food as soon as I get back to the office. This young substitute host has a lean and hungry look.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) August 9, 2022

Fox is going full-tilt boogie conspiracy bullshit. And the replacement anchors are grasping for their main chance. Hysteria reigns.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) August 9, 2022

 

Removing fascists always carries the risk of a violent reaction. This is not an argument for not removing them.

Pretty much every Trump/Q forum I'm on is wishcasting Ron DeSantis sending Florida police to somehow intercept federal law enforcement around Mar a Lago.

Others are saying they're waiting for Trump's permission.

"When does the shooting start?" said one TheDonald commenter. pic.twitter.com/aQhn6RYm6X

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) August 8, 2022

And who could have seen this coming?

For anyone wondering. https://t.co/MDiAsjNC3c

— Elad Nehorai (@EladNehorai) August 8, 2022

Trump supporters are REALLY excited about the idea of a civil war. Some of the responses to today’s FBI raid:

“I already bought my ammo”
“Civil war! Pick up arms, people!”
“Civil War 2.0 just kicked off.”
“Let’s do the war.”
“One step closer to a kinetic civil war.”

And more… pic.twitter.com/cG7NvAz9An

— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) August 9, 2022

More on the politics of protecting Social Security -- the Washington Post weighs in

Opinion | Republicans are coming after Social Security. Democrats, take note. - The Washington Post https://t.co/phuujXX4OX

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) August 7, 2022

A couple of weeks ago, I finally ran a post questioning the apparent conventional wisdom among progressive politicians and pundits about not making Republican attacks on Social Security a major campaign issue.

Fast forward to 2022. Republicans are talking about cutting, privatizing, or killing Social Security with an openness they hadn't shown in at least twenty years. Trump himself lost interest in the topic long ago. But among the pundit class and much of the Democratic establishment, a few six-year old statements had permanently inoculated not just Trump, but the entire GOP on this issue.

What's remarkable here is not just the convergence but the certainty. A large part of the Republican Party is pissing on the third rail of American politics and yet no influential Democrats thought it was worth pulling the switch just in case the power was on.

If attacks on Social Security have eroded seniors' support for the GOP, they have done so almost entirely on their own. Progressives seldom mention the issue. AARP has been uncharacteristically quiet on the matter. Talking Points Memo, probably the best progressive political news and analysis site has dropped it entirely as far as I can tell.

...

Even in Florida, which has a lot of seniors, Val Demings is all but silent on the topic, despite the fact that her opponent and his fellow senator are both on the record as wanting to cut or kill the program.

There's no conspiracy here, no hidden agenda. These people simply believe with a great deal of confidence that while pushing back against Republican attacks on Medicare and particularly Social Security might be the right thing to do, it is not a winning political strategy.

If there were any doubt in the Democratic establishment's mind, hedging the bet would be cheap, easy and pretty much risk free. A few campaign ads, some viral videos, a couple of lines in stump speeches, a bullet point in campaign websites,  raising the subject in interviews.

The most bizarre part of this is that for decades, one of the unassailable truths of American politics was that attacking Social Security and Medicare was bad for Republicans and defending them was good for Democrats, and yet, in the space of a few years for no particularly good reason, the political establishment became absolutely certain of the exact opposite.

 Shortly afterwards, David Weakliem dug into the question and backed things up with some actual data.

In most presidential elections starting in 1984, there were questions about which candidate would be better on Social Security.  They were not all by the same organization, so the wording varied.  Most of the variations were minor (e. g.  "handling" vs. "dealing with"), but in 1988 and 1992 they asked about "protecting the Social Security system" and in 2016 they asked about "Social Security and Medicare."   I calculated the difference between the percent naming the Democratic candidate and the percent naming the Republican.  The Democrat was always ahead, which is why I call the figure "Republican disadvantage."

In 2016, Trump trailed Clinton by 50-42%, giving an 8% gap, which was just about average--unfortunately the question wasn't asked in 2020.   Reagan in 1984 stands out as an unusually large gap, which is plausible because in one of his Presidential campaigns (I think it was his first, in 1976) he suggested that maybe Social Security should be privatized and got a lot of negative publicity.     Aside from that, there's no trend, and the ups and downs don't show any obvious pattern and are small enough so that they could be sampling error.  So there's not evidence that Trump changed anything--the Democrats consistently have an advantage on the issue.   This isn't really surprising--even someone who doesn't pay much attention to politics can tell that if forced to make a choice between tax increases and spending cuts, Republicans would be more likely to go for spending cuts and Democrats would be more likely to go for tax increases.

 Now it appears things may be shifting. Outside of the NYT, there is no bastion of conventional wisdom more recognized than the Washington Post, so when columnist Helaine Olen argues that "Republicans ... are  ... handing Democrats an issue almost as politically potent as abortion rights," the establishment is likely to listen.

The most recent to join the fray is Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). He announced earlier this week that he believes Social Security should be up for a congressional reauthorization vote every single year. “If you qualify for an entitlement, you get it no matter what the cost,” he huffed on a podcast.

The nerve of those entitled seniors. They paid faithfully into a program and expect a check. Imagine that!

This ups the ante from Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who opened the Social Security floodgates earlier this year when he proposed putting all government programs — including Social Security and Medicare — up for renewal every five years. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) immediately declared it dead on arrival, but that hasn’t stopped some Republicans such as Johnson from expressing their approval.

...

It’s almost as though these Republicans can’t stop themselves from acting on the hope that when it comes to Social Security, the majority of voters won’t take them seriously, even as the GOP base laps their message up. But, in an age when increasing numbers of Americans are going to need a Social Security check to get by in retirement, that seems like a risky bet.

Ten years ago at the blog -- We've been banging this particular drum for a long time

 

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Megafires, incentives and the inactivity bias

One of the recurring themes of my conversations with Joseph is this country's growing disinterest, bordering on antipathy, in getting things done. (If you think I'm bad, you ought to get him started.) From building a badly needed piece of infrastructure to addressing global warming, we seem to focus most of our energy on finding reasons for inactivity.

NPR's excellent series on wildfires has a good example. If you weigh the costs and risks of prescribed burns against the costs and risks of letting current trends continue, the case for action is overwhelming, but we continued to let the situation get worse.

Add climate change to the mix (another situation we've shown lots of interest in discussing and little in solving), and we may have reached the point where there are no good solutions, only less terrible ones.

I remark just how lush his forest is, how the Ponderosa pines almost reach out and touch one another. He doesn't take it as a compliment. "They're a plague," he says. "On this forest, it's averaging about 900 trees per acre. Historically it was probably about 40. Here in the national forest, what we're facing is a tree epidemic."
Armstrong has rubbed some people the wrong way with talk like that. But he says forest this dense is dangerous. "We're standing here on the edge of what is known as the Santa Fe Municipal Watershed," he explains. "Imagine a huge bathtub" — a natural bathtub sitting in the mountains around Santa Fe. When it rains, the water flows down into reservoirs. That's where the state capital gets most of its water.

Trees help slow down the flow, but big wildfires take out the trees. They even burn the soils. "They convert from something that's like a sponge to Saran Wrap," Armstrong says. "In the aftermath of a wildfire within this watershed, that would flood like the Rio Grande, for heaven's sakes; that would come down a wall of water, and debris and ash and tree trunks, and create devastation in downtown Santa Fe. Suddenly, they find that the entire mountain is in their backyard."

Armstrong supports trimming smaller trees with machines and chain saws. But that costs hundreds of dollars per acre. The service now lets some natural fires — ones started by lightning, for example — burn within prescribed limits. Or they start "prescribed" burns when conditions are safe. These clear out smaller trees and undergrowth to keep them from fueling megafires. Armstrong has done that here.

But people didn't like the smoke, and when an intentional fire gets out of control, people sue. And there's been widespread drought in recent years. These are some of the reasons the Forest Service has reduced the use of prescribed fires.

Thursday Tweets

Today in undeleted texts news.

Some insurrectionist trivia for you: Roger Stone reportedly introduced Alex Jones to Trump and arranged for Jones to interview Trump on Infowars during his 2016 campaign. Stone also once called Jones “the single most important voice in the alternative conservative media”.

— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) August 3, 2022

Wow. Sandy Hook parents' lawyer is revealing that Alex Jones' lawyers sent him the contents of Jones' phone BY MISTAKE.

"12 days ago, your attorneys messed up and sent me a digital copy of every text" Jones has sent for years.

"You know what perjury is?" the lawyer asks.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) August 3, 2022

Privilege is the utter gall of starting a third political party because you personally don't have to worry if the Republicans regain power.

— Lecia Michelle: Author & Anti-Racism Activist 🐝 (@LeciaMichelle11) July 29, 2022

In case you were wondering:

- CNN, assessment of impact of death of al-Zawahri
- MSNBC, same
- CNBC, same until top of past hour

-Fox: first Jesse Watters, then Tucker, on corruption and reckless big-spending of incompetent Biden administration.

— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) August 2, 2022

The USPS is not a corporation. There are no share holders. There is no requirement to turn a profit.

Would you make the Marine Corps turn a profit? How about the Centers For Disease Control?

This makes zero sense unless you are lobbying for one of the private shipping companies https://t.co/xRM5xJpxcR

— Bryan William Jones (@BWJones) July 29, 2022

Six weeks ago, lead on all TV / radio newscasts, and most major news outlets, was "pain at the pump" of gas prices. Was allegedly central economic, political, cultural issue

Symmetrical coverage as prices have gone down?

Not so muchhttps://t.co/t1tsOBY4aC

— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) July 28, 2022

One way to think about gas prices:

10 years ago 10 gallons of gas cost about 1.5 hours' wages for the average worker

3 years ago (pre-pandemic) that was down to only about 1 hour, but that was because of an unsustainable fracking bubble

Today the number is about 1.3

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) August 1, 2022

Fun facts: In the first six months of the 1981-82 recession, we lost 1,046k jobs, in the first six months of the 1990-01 recession we lost 690k jobs, in 2001 we lost 761k jobs, in 2007-09, we lost 705k jobs. In 2022 we gained 2,740k jobs.

— Dean Baker (@DeanBaker13) July 29, 2022

Making liberals angry:
A motivator for Reps, particularly MAGA Reps

Reps say they would be more likely to vote for a candidate to make liberals angry, that rises to 69% among Reps who identify as part of MAGA. https://t.co/frLfYI1BmW pic.twitter.com/AZfz8EAgoZ

— CBS News Poll (@CBSNewsPoll) August 2, 2022

JD Vance thinks people should stay in violent marriages for the kids, but even he knows that's indefensible.

Vance has had every opportunity to explain his dangerous position. Instead, he's hiding from press. What a coward. pic.twitter.com/eyRWq2iAtg

— Tim Ryan (@TimRyan) July 29, 2022

But where would the politics desks of most major newspapers have been through this past year, without this "everyone knows it's happening" organizing concept ?

— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) July 30, 2022

"Told" is an interesting choice for a verb here.

GOP leader Kevin McCarthy told Trump to WAIT until after the midterms to announce if he is running https://t.co/NbrR4w6yI7

— Daily Mail US (@DailyMail) July 27, 2022

The MAGA fixation on Fauci remains one of the most curious aspects of that very curious crowd.

We are a deeply sick country https://t.co/w3T1ZYQrGA

— Jon “Bowzer” Bauman (@JonBowzerBauman) August 2, 2022

idea: a gameshow called Imposter Syndrome where you take 10 senior developers and tell them that one of them is actually just a sales guy who's been taught to say DevOps buzzwords. to win, they have to figure out who the fake dev is. the trick: there is no sales guy

— Cain Maddox (@ctrlshifti) August 1, 2022

I sometimes think about the fact that about 2% of VC funding goes to female founders and about 1.2% goes to Black founders yet some funds have clearly run out of even mediocre ideas to fund let alone good ones.
This is a Money Ball opportunity for some VC fund. I’ll do it someday pic.twitter.com/eufAB9IqOB

— Dare Obasanjo (@Carnage4Life) July 29, 2022

And lo, on Thursday, only three days after they offered up their preferred business model, Instagram pulled the plug on its product reboot.

It was a stunning admission of what has been clear for so long: Zuckerberg basically has no idea what he's doing.https://t.co/335MOHgHSA

— Tech Insider (@TechInsider) July 29, 2022

Meta is doing what I would do if I was trying to destroy a company .i.e go all in on a concept almost nobody wants.

— Concoda (@concodanomics) July 28, 2022

VCs poured $5B into scooter startups over the years but missed one crucial lesson from Uber & Lyft. Ride share companies offload ownership & maintenance of cars to drivers. This boosts their financials.

Owning easily damaged or lost scooters turns out to be a terrible business. pic.twitter.com/sjciMDWa2H

— Dare Obasanjo (@Carnage4Life) July 30, 2022

The one that exists.

— CommonSenseSkeptic (@C_S_Skeptic) July 30, 2022

HBO Max may be the best service but WB is possibly the worst run studio. The business is idiot proof largely because smart people like Ted Turner bought up valuable catalogs. If that IP hadn't been acquired (or had been allowed to go into the public domain)...

HBO Max is widely acknowledged to be the best streaming service. And now the execs who bought it are on the verge of dismantling it, simply because they feel like it. Mergers give just a few wealthy people MASSIVE control over what we watch, with disasterous results.

— Adam Conover (@adamconover) August 4, 2022

“I’m helping. Weeee..” 😂 pic.twitter.com/j9NXQPqYlQ

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) August 1, 2022

Fascinating drone footage looking down into a volcanic eruption from above.

Credit: Bjorn Steinbekkpic.twitter.com/u6MGtONNax

— Wonder of Science (@wonderofscience) August 1, 2022

Wish I could find one of these for LA.

Isochrones 😍 ! This map shows you how far a 5h train ride will take you, departing from any city in Europe.https://t.co/6F4dJ80N87

Inspired by Direkt Bahn Guru by @juliustens. pic.twitter.com/8vY48WiakE

— Benjamin Td (@_benjamintd) July 29, 2022

Remember when we said the data was thin? Well, it's getting a little thicker

Very quick addition to our political implications of Dobbs thread. Just to recap...

In May, we argued that the conventional wisdom was underestimating the disconnect between state level views on abortion in the willingness of Republicans to push the most extreme laws imaginable (the Alaska Paradox)

Last month, we pointed to polling that suggested that even in strongly anti-abortion states, overturning Roe and its aftermath were not popular. (The data are thin but still worth keeping an eye on)

Which brings us to today's news.

Kansas is pro-choice, but just barely. By comparison, Oklahoma is moderately pro-choice and Ohio is solidly pro-choice.

 

In both of those states, the legislatures pushed through extreme anti-abortion laws, recently enough that we don't know how they will play with voters. In Kansas, however...

Kansas voters overwhelmingly shot down an amendment that would have stripped their constitution of its state Supreme Court-interpreted abortion protections Tuesday, a surprising outcome on the heels of a wave of last-minute enthusiasm from those furious at the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

For observers looking to Kansas as a bellwether, the first state to put abortion to a vote since the Dobbs decision, the election may prove a compelling data point given the built-in advantages to the pro-amendment side.

...

More than 60 percent of voters had rejected the amendment when networks, including NBC and CNN, began to call the race shortly before 11 p.m. ET. Roughly 78 percent of the vote had been counted. Preliminary results suggested that Tuesday’s turnout had come close to doubling 2018’s primary turnout.

Slate's Mark Joseph Stern:

Remember that Republicans scheduled the Kansas abortion referendum for the primary rather than the general election because there are many more registered Republicans in the state than Democrats and unaffiliateds can’t vote in primary races. Abortion rights still won handily.

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) August 3, 2022

We have a winner in the 2022 high weirdness category

This one really does have everything...

    Conspiracies

    Reverse-aging technology

    International Qanon

    Trump waiting in the wings

    Hucksters cashing in on the Tesla brand

    “Life force energy”

    Reanimated JFK

    and the rightful “queen” of Canada.

Kelly Weill writing for the Daily Beast.

An increasingly popular conspiracy theory falsely centers around the existence of “med beds,” a fabled medical instrument that does everything from reversing aging to regrowing missing limbs. The theory has grown in popularity among followers of far-right movements like QAnon, some of whom claim to be urgently awaiting a med bed to treat severe health conditions.

...

Some QAnon sects have made med beds central to their conspiratorial claims. A Dallas-based group, which follows the Q influencer Michael “Negative 48” Protzman, has promoted med beds, in part because the devices address a plot hole in another conspiracy theory. The group falsely believes that John F. Kennedy is still alive and youthful, and attributes his remarkable longevity to the curative powers of med beds.

Romana Didulo, a QAnon-adjacent conspiracy leader who claims to be the rightful “queen” of Canada, has also hyped med beds. The devices “will be made available for FREE to all Canadians” following her revolution, she wrote in an August post. Followers of YamatoQ, a Japan-based QAnon movement, have also latched onto med bed theories, even making their own attempted version of the device with copper wires.

Some conspiracy theorists believe Trump is aware of med beds, and can release them to the public. Delays in the prophesied technology (like one frustrated Q fan noted in an open letter to Trump last year) have led some to speculate that Trump is reserving the devices for the most critical cases, and for military members.

Companies selling self-described “med beds” often stop short of conspiracy theorists’ most unlikely claims.

Tesla BioHealing doesn’t claim that its “medbed generators” can regrow missing body parts—and its med beds are not even beds, but metal canisters designed to be placed under a mattress. Nevertheless, the Delaware-based company recommends its products for a spectrum of conditions, ranging from “mild” (including asthma and autism) to “severe” (including “terminal cancers”).

Reached for comment about Tesla BioHealing’s benefits for people with “severe” conditions, CEO James Liu told The Daily Beast that the devices delivered “life force energy” to those patients.

Tale of two fires

This is strange. It's almost as if what scientists and forestry professionals have been telling us for the past 50 years about active stewardship and controlled burns was exactly right.

 Alex Wigglesworth writing for the LA Times

The two fires started just 17 miles apart in the rugged terrain of California’s western Sierra Nevada — but their outcomes couldn’t have been more different.

The Washburn fire, which ignited July 7 along a forested trail in Yosemite National Park, was nearly contained, with no damage to structures or to the famed Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias.

But the Oak fire, which sparked almost two weeks later in the foothills near Midpines, confounded firefighters as it exploded to four times the size of Washburn and forced thousands to flee as it destroyed at least 106 homes. At times, the wildfire’s smoke plume could be seen from space.

Experts attribute the difference to variations in weather, vegetation and topography. The management history of each landscape also played a role: Yosemite boasts decades of active stewardship, including prescribed burns, while areas outside the park bear a legacy of industrial logging and fire suppression.

Six years ago at the blog: We should have paid more attention to the right-wing's reaction to those Planned Parenthood "sting" videos

To be honest, I'd forgotten all about this story until I came across this old post.

Friday, July 22, 2016

When catharsis becomes an end to itself

Ed Kilgore does a good job summarizing an important aspect of the GOP convention.

On Wednesday night, Team Trump deliberately provoked what can only be described as a lose-lose confrontation with Ted Cruz that created a nasty and divisive scene overshadowing the maiden speech of the vice-presidential nominee. With each such decision, you get the impression the people in charge of this convention have forgotten that the real "arena" is the general election, and that their real audience is an electorate far beyond this bowl seething with unaccountably angry delegates.

Otherwise it's hard to credit the constant, interminable, over-the-top feeding of red meat to the crowd, beginning with Willie Robertson's first-night taunting of people who are not "real Americans." It may be understandable that speakers are tempted to interact with the people on the floor howling for Hillary Clinton's incarceration, but the job of convention managers is to remind them that these people are TV props — ignore them and remember the whole world's watching!

It's almost as though the Trump people are treating the convention as the culmination of the mogul's campaign: an opportunity to glory in their extremely unlikely conquest of one of America's two major parties, to gloat over the shattered Establishment that's being forced to accept them, and to shake their fists at the unbelievers who still mock their orange-tinted champion. That there is still a difficult election ahead and that this convention is a priceless earned-media opportunity to reach out beyond their own ranks seems to be lost on this wild show's organizers and participants.

This unwillingness or inability to shift the focus from the base to a broader audience is something we've been discussing for a long time. Here's a representative post from last year.

Planned Parenthood, channeled information and catharsis

This recent TPM post about the looming government shut-down ties in with a couple of ideas we've discussed before. [Emphasis added]

Facing a Sept. 30 deadline to fund the government, GOP leaders in both chambers decided they would fast-track standalone anti-abortion bills in an effort to allow conservative Republicans to express their anger over a series of “sting” videos claiming to show that Planned Parenthood is illegally harvesting the tissue of aborted fetuses. The leadership hoped that with those votes out of the way, the path would be clear for long-delayed bills to fund the government in the new fiscal year, even if those bills contained money for Planned Parenthood.

But anti-abortion groups and conservative House members are not backing down from their hard line. They are reiterating that they will not vote for bills that include Planned Parenthood funding under any circumstances, despite the maneuvering by leaders to vent their outrage over the videos. If anything, anti-abortion groups are amping up the pressure on lawmakers not to back down from the fight.

Here's what we had to say about the GOP reaction to those videos a month ago.

Fetal tissue research will make most people uncomfortable, even those who support it. If you were a Republican marketer, the ideal target for these Planned Parenthood stories would be opponents and persuadables. By contrast, you would want the videos to get as little play as possible among your supporters. With that group, you have already maxed out the potential gains – – both their votes and their money are reliably committed – – and you run a serious risk of pushing them to the level where they start demanding more extreme action.

With all of the normal caveats -- I have no special expertise. I only know what I read in the papers. There's a fundamental silliness comparing a political movement to a business -- it seems to me that in marketing terms, the PP tapes have been badly mistargeted. They have had the biggest viewership and impact in the segment of the voting market where they would do the least good and the most damage (such as pushing for a government shutdown on the eve of a presidential election).

[I really should have said "causing supporters to push," but it's too late to worry about that now.]

I haven't followed the press coverage that closely, but based on what I've come across from NPR and the few political sites I frequent, I get the feeling that the center-left media is more likely to discuss the doctoring of the tapes than to focus on the gory specifics of harvesting fetal tissue. I'd need to check sources like CNN before making a definitive statement, but it appears that the videos are having exceptionally little effect on what should have been their target audience.

Instead, their main impact seems to have been on the far right. The result has been to widen what was already a dangerous rift. The pragmatic wing looks at defunding as a futile gesture with almost no chance of success and large potential costs. The true believers are approaching this on an entirely different level. It has become an article of faith for them that, as we speak, babies are being killed, dismembered and sold for parts. They demand action, even if it's costly and merely symbolic, as long as it's cathartic.

I've been arguing for quite a while now that we need to pay more attention to the catharsis in politics (such as with the reaction to the first Obama/Romney debate), particularly with the Tea Party.  Conservative media has long been focused on feeding the anger and the outrage of the base while promising victory just around the corner. This has produced considerable partisan payoff but at the cost of considerable anxiety and considerable disappointment, both of which produce stress and a need for emotional release.

There's a tendency to think of trading political capital for catharsis as being irrational, but it's not. There is nothing irrational about doing something that makes you feel better. That's the real problem for the GOP leaders: shutting down the government would be cathartic for many members of the base. It would be difficult to get the base to defer their catharsis, even if the base trusted the leaders to make good on their promise that things will get better.

For now, the Tea Party is inclined to do what feels good, whether it's supporting an unelectable candidate or making a grandstanding play. It's not entirely clear what Boehner and McConnell can do about that.

 

Thursday Tweets

Who are the urban planners working on NEOM? How much acid do they take? Maybe a daily microdose situation. Are they having fun or is it a "we fear the wrath of the Czar" type environment?

— Jacob Silverman (@SilvermanJacob) July 27, 2022

I was going to give the abortion thread a rest, but these new twists in the story are worth keeping an eye on.

Faced with a steady stream of horror stories about the impact of abortion bans on patients suffering failed pregnancies, anti-abortion advocates have retreated into a paranoid conspiracy theory that doctors are trying to "create viral stories making abortion bans look culpable." pic.twitter.com/RapvDOqRVg

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) July 26, 2022

Anti-abortion laws are crafted very carefully. The lack of clarity is intentional. They’ve left just enough room to claim that the dr could have performed an abortion but chose not to, while creating enough doubt (and levying such harsh punishment) that few dr’s would risk it.

— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) July 26, 2022

A lot of you have asked so here’s the deal with the bill in NC that would legalize the use of “deadly force” against anyone providing an abortion: pic.twitter.com/ITKhe0ws3z

— Sen. Jeff Jackson (@JeffJacksonNC) July 25, 2022

  

When you read stories about Trump's declining influence in the GOP, remember he can drop below 50%, he can drop below a plurality, but as long as a significant number of people in the party sound like this, he is still the man with the grenade.

Cult https://t.co/TzHeb8yIng

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) July 24, 2022

 

New Georgia voter law creates a system of vote purge privateers in which voters can get fellow voters purged from the voting rolls based on their own DIY internet research. Not surprisingly, conservatives have taken the lead organizing to strike what … https://t.co/orQsVYFUOh

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 27, 2022

I'll admit I winced a bit at "shouldn't correlate," but it's still an interesting finding.

Vaccinated people primarily blame Russia for war in Ukraine, unvaccinated tend to blame US, NATO, Ukraine, EU, poll of Austrians shows.
These shouldn’t correlate. One doesn’t cause the other.
But they share a cause: a transnational identity politics united in rejection of facts. https://t.co/rpIv8Fj14o

— Nicholas Grossman (@NGrossman81) July 25, 2022

Yes, it's a campaign ad and there's no telling what was done in the editing, but having grown up and spent much of my adult life around good ol' boys I can tell you that this is exactly the right approach.

If you want to make Texas great, you need to make it BETO first. ❤️ pic.twitter.com/Wyr37WrlkH

— Zola4Beto 🛹 (@Zola4B) July 24, 2022

It's the "unwisely" that erases the line between the real thing and an New York Times Pitchbot parody.

Beto O'Rourke is raising more money than Greg Abbott in the race for Texas governor, and polls show a single-digit contest between them. Suddenly, improbably, perhaps unwisely, Texas Democrats are again daring to think that maybe this could be the year. https://t.co/qQ9v2KyXhS pic.twitter.com/K90psloYvO

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 24, 2022

The stunning colors of the Anna's hummingbird are iridescence caused by light scattering from nanoscale structures within their feathers.pic.twitter.com/BZzXuFnHag

— Wonder of Science (@wonderofscience) July 21, 2022

BATS CAN SWIM!!!!!!!!!!! https://t.co/9W0Ppf8eEa

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 28, 2022

History of terrible ideas

This is Joseph.

This amazing tweet has been commented on by both Dmitry Grozoubinski and Eschaton. Here is the tweet, which, to be honest is worse than the article (written by different people to be fair-- Arias and Granoff -- who are generally interested in fewer nuclear weapons): 

The article suggests removing the last 150 American nuclear weapons from Europe. Steven Pinker appears to be expanding that to all of NATO. One option is pointless symbolism. The other is really daft. 

France has 280 deployed warheads and the UK has 120 deployed warheads. Removing 150 warheads is not a small change but is hardly an end to the NATO nuclear force. The United states still has 14 submarines that deploy weapons, with 20 weapons per submarine. Like if this caused a very robust settlement with the Ukraine maybe the symbolism would be worth it, but isn't the actual negotiations supposed to be between belligerents? How well has it worked historically to have a different alliance negotiate on behalf of one side of a conflict? Note that Ukraine has nuclear weapons and decided to get rid of them and may have opinions on the wisdom of this decision. 

Now, getting rid of all of the NATO nukes WITHOUT getting rid of the Russian weapons would mean the only nuclear power in Europe was Russia. It's also a bit unclear how you introduce this idea to France. You know, the country with the famously rocky relationship with NATO. Does England count as Europe for this metric, because I can see this debate a mile off. Nor is it clear how NATO can negotiate on behalf of the Ukraine. Or what the terms of "ending the war" are. Does Russia leave the 20% of the country it currently occupies? What about Crimea? What about post-war guarantees as to no future invasions with a military reformed based on the lessons from this war? 

But the idea in the article (unilateral removal of US weapons) is at least possible. It requires on decision maker (the US) and might (or might not) have some positive benefits in having fewer weapons around. But, to be frank, any lasting peace needs to involve Ukraine and Russia as the core parties and it might make a lot of sense to ask what they want. Obviously, they are currently too far apart for a peace talk but here is where the real seeds of a lasting peace might lie. Perhaps we might wait for one or the other party to actually make this suggestion before we just start proposing things as third parties?