Though I have to admit, Alex Jones' chocolate bone broth looks delicious

Paul Krugman's excellent op-ed uses Rick Perlstein's seminal the Long Con as a starting point to discuss the role of Snake Oil in the 21st Century Conservative Movement.

Why should marketing scams be linked to political extremism? It’s all about affinity fraud: once you establish a persona that appeals to angry, aging white guys, you can sell them stuff that will supposedly protect their virility, their waistline, and their wealth.

And at a grander level, isn’t that what Fox News is really about? Consider it not as an ideological organization per se but as a business: it offers cheap programming (because there isn’t much reporting) that appeals to the prejudices of angry old white guys who like to sit on the couch and rant at their TV, and uses its viewership to help advertisers selling weight-loss plans.

Now, normally we think of individuals’ views and interests as the forces driving politics, including the ugly polarization increasingly dominating the scene. The commercial exploitation of that polarization, if we mention it at all, is treated as a sort of surface phenomenon that feeds off the fundamental dynamic.

But are we sure that’s right? The Alex Joneses, Ben Shapiros, and Fox Newses of the world couldn’t profit from extremism unless there were some underlying predisposition of angry old white guys to listen to this stuff. But maybe the commercial exploitation of political anger is what has concentrated and weaponized that anger. In other words, going back to where I started this essay, maybe the reason we’re in a political nightmare is that our political behavior has, in effect, been parasitized by marketing algorithms.

...

Anyway, I think it’s really important to realize the extent to which peddling political snake oil, whether it’s about the economy, race, the effects of immigration, or whatever, is to an important extent a way to peddle actual snake oil: magic pills that will let you lose weight without ever feeling hungry and restore your youthful manhood.

 And if you haven't seen it before, you really need to check this one out.

Repost for the Death of a Dog Whistle

Back during the run-up to the election, we had a long thread on the way that conservative movement media strategy and self-serving, short-sighted journalistic norms had combined to allow Republicans to manipulate the press. One of the recurring points in that thread was that Trump was a stressor and that the system was starting to show the strain.

From Reagan through Ryan, this carefully constructed messaging and spin machine allowed Republican politicians to make dishonest or offensive statements with little or no penalty. Even when a reporter did correct the record, it was done often accompanied with a generous dollop of false balance.

Working in concert with the openly partisan media of Fox News, it was remarkably effective, allowing the GOP to maintain cordial relations with a press corps they claimed was biased against them. It was a robust system as long as there was minimal effort put into keeping the messaging at least marginally defensible. Now we're seeing what happens without that effort.

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

The loss of plausible deniability

One important point to keep in mind while following this year's election is that, of the truly objectionable things about the Trump campaign, very few are actually new. Instead, we have all sorts of practices that have always been unacceptable, but which are now being presented in a way that makes them undeniable.

If you remember the elections of 2000 and 2004, you will probably recall talk of Karl Rove and his mastery of "political jujitsu." It was generally discussed as if it were some sort of mystical Jedi mind trick that allowed Rove to make strengths into weaknesses and weaknesses into strengths. Mainly, it came down to the realization that most reporters would respond to obvious lies with straight faces and no follow-up questions.

In 2004, I remember Republican operatives making the argument that George W. Bush's military record compared favorably with that of John Kerry. Just to review, Kerry was a legitimate war hero in terms of courage, sacrifice, and effectiveness. On the other side of the ledger, even if we push aside all of the accusations and contested points about favoritism and completion of requirements, there is a relatively cushy stint in the National Guard.

These and other clearly untrue statements were usually allowed to stand largely because this was a symbiotic relationship. It was in both the source's and the journalist's interests to keep this relationship going and not to push the boundaries in either direction.

The lies we've been hearing recently are not necessarily that much more blatant, but Trump and associates are no longer observing the social conventions that traditionally went with them. If a reporter asks about your candidate's military service and you reply by saying all sorts of nice things about the National Guard, that reporter can move onto the next question without looking like a complete moron. If you look reporters in the face and tell them that twice cheating on then dumping your wife for a younger, more glamorous woman qualifies as a sacrifice, you leave the reporters looking like asses just for letting you get the words out of your mouth.

Which brings us to (from TPM):

Khizr Khan, the father of the Muslim soldier, said in his speech at the Democratic convention last week that Trump had "sacrificed nothing." And Trump hit back over the weekend, saying that he's "made a lot of sacrifices," like creating jobs.

During a CNN panel discussion Sunday, Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes defended Trump's comments.

"Mr. Trump was responding to the fact of sacrificing. Nowhere ever did he ever say that his sacrifice was equivalent or more or even close to what the Kahn’s had given up," she said.

CNN host Fredricka Whitfield then asked, "Is creating a job considered a sacrifice?"

"You know what, creating jobs caused him to be at work, which cost him two marriages,” Hughes said in response. “Time away from his family to sit there and invest.

Clinton surrogate Bernard Whitman jumped in to say, "infidelity cost him."

"No, actually being away from his family, he’s admitted it,” Hughes insisted. "That is the spin of the media and ongoing bias."

 "Creating jobs" normally implies actually paying the people who do work for you, but we can save that for another day.

Tuesday Tweets

The lesson here is, when you see something obviously stupid on Twitter, go back and reread it carefully before tweeting your dismissive correction.

A maths meme that is actually funny rather than stupid:
Solve carefully!
  230 - 220 x 0.5 =

You probably won’t believe it but the answer is 5!#maths

— KJ Cheetham ❄️ #FBPE 🔶 (@kj_cheetham) July 13, 2019

Someone needs to ask Thomas B. Edsall about this.

The straightness of that 26% over several elections bothers me. Can it really be so consistent? https://t.co/z0cVw6Ibyb

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) July 14, 2019

Another reminder that I need to think more about path dependency.

Reading early access game reviews on Steam ("I played 87 hours straight, but the end was meh, 0 stars!"), I am reminded of a clever paper comparing Best Buy & Amazon ratings to show the 1st online review is HUGE: negative sales effects linger for 3 years! https://t.co/anwgyo2Vi2 pic.twitter.com/XQPjXdHqI1

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) July 14, 2019

Nonetheless, the "Trump is unstoppable unless the Democrats do ______" argument is ubiquitous. It shows up across the political spectrum and yet the people making the claim never notice all of the contradictory ones.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) July 14, 2019

Need to do a post on the implications of this new direction from Netflix.

This is an interesting development.https://t.co/iNcONQLl1E

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) July 14, 2019

This is embarrassing. Every few years, journalists dust off this same story, add a few quotes and statistics and act like it's something new. https://t.co/DiV7S7BlZf

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) July 13, 2019

This seems to be gaining momentum.

It’s not that it was premature to ban nuclear: it’s that the failure to heavily invest in nuclear over the last several decades was by far the biggest failure in climate policy, and nothing else comes close. https://t.co/4siaKOOBZY

— Ben Thompson (@benthompson) July 12, 2019

And finally

The three stages of career development:
1. I can't wait until I'm important enough to be included in meetings.
2. I feel so important being in these meetings!
3. I will do anything legal and several illegal things to avoid these meetings.

— Michael Carusi (@MichaelCarusi) July 11, 2019

Robert Cialdini on the relationship between behavorial economics and social psychology

From a good, high-level (and non-walled) article in Psychology Today, quoting from Cialdini's introduction to The Behavioral Economics Guide 2018:

Behavioral economists ask questions mostly about the way people make economic choices/judgments or the way particular financial systems (retirement plans, tax codes, etc.) affect those responses (Thaler, 2018). Social psychologists are willing to consider other, non-fiscal personal choices as well. For instance, my research teams have investigated why people are motivated to litter a public space, wear a home team sweatshirt, display charity organization posters, reuse hotel guest room towels, and volunteer to give a unit of blood.
...



    Second, behavioral economists still have to fight the rationality-versus-irrationality-of human-behavior battle (Rosalsky, 2018). For example, to ensure that interpretations based in neoclassical economic theory are duly addressed, they are more likely than social psychologists to include in their research designs at least one condition involving a rational actor prediction. For their part, social psychologists have no such need, having long ago come to concur with Rabelais’ six-century-old observation regarding the pervasiveness of human illogic: “If you wish to avoid seeing a fool, you must first break your mirror.” As an aside, I once asked Richard Thaler’s opinion of why proponents of neoclassical economic thinking have been so reluctant to admit to the frequent irrationality of our species. He thought it was partially due to the elevation within economics of mathematical modeling, which works best at incorporating rational rather than irrational elements—and remains the professional standard, conferring status on the modeler.

...

Finally, behavioral economists are more likely to test their hypotheses in large scale field studies of consequential behaviors observed in real world settings—versus in laboratory investigations of relatively inconsequential personal choices made on a keypad. Why social psychologists have tended to stay tenaciously in the laboratory has multiple answers. Convenience, quick and plentiful outcomes to be submitted for publication, and the ability to collect ancillary data for mediational analyses have all played a role. But, much like Thaler’s view of what occurred within economics, a reputational factor may be involved. Academic social psychology evolved from a discipline that many considered insufficiently rigorous (until 1965, its flagship publication was the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology) into one that fought for stature as scientifically-based rather than clinically-based. If it is true that many economists have clung to financial rationality because of the prestigious mathematical trappings of econometric models, perhaps many social psychologists have clung to the laboratory because of its prestigious links to rigorous science.

How to write like Harlan Ellison (literally)

Ellison said he generally wrote with movie soundtracks, especially those of Ennio Morricone, playing in the background. If you want to emulate Ellison, you won't have to worry about running out of music. Morricone currently has 519 IMDB composer credits and he's not dead yet.

Thursday Tweets

The New York Times is incapable of learning from its mistakes.

Indeed. https://t.co/XQ9agI9P5R pic.twitter.com/CqGU2JAGfx

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) July 10, 2019

In 2020, failing to compete anywhere is a huge blunder for the Democrats.

I'm not so sure that Ohio is the entity that is drifting. Failing to contest Ohio is a huge political blunder. pic.twitter.com/QzIP5OV3Ua

— Jason Segedy 🇺🇸 🇭🇺🇮🇹 (@JasonSzegedi) July 9, 2019

Of course, he didn't actually say "telecommuting."

This was about when Arthur C Clarke was predicting that telecommuting would mean the end of cities https://t.co/Wgc2xjkrCc

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) July 10, 2019

On the EV beat.

Your cars, you are breathing them ... https://t.co/szW5JBCCUJ

— David M. Levinson (@trnsprtst) July 9, 2019

And the AV.

"Mr. Musk’s unhappiness with the Autopilot group appears to stem from difficulties it has had in adapting the software, which was designed to automatically steer Tesla vehicles on highways, to work with city driving"

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you! https://t.co/KLHHjIwOSd

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) July 9, 2019

And finally.

This baby elephant playing and chasing birds is exactly what we need this weekend!pic.twitter.com/hSARyPFIDr

— Rev. Travis Akers (@travisakers) July 6, 2019

If not for the development of the caterpillar tread, these would have been big.

Another cool technology with the bad luck to come in second.

From Wikipedia:

 The pedrail wheel was invented in 1903 by the Londoner Bramah Joseph Diplock. It consists in the adjunction of feet (Latin radical "ped") to the rail of a wheel, in order to improve traction and facilitate movement in uneven or muddy terrain. Sophisticated pedrail wheels were designed, with individual suspension for each foot, which would facilitate the contact with uneven terrain.

Scientific American 1903-04-18

Keeping that stock up there – one day at a time

When trying to make sense out of the Netflix story, the first thing you have to remember is that there’s not that much to remember. It’s complicated but it’s not all that complex.

The standard case for Netflix is a long game of dominance through content. It is an argument that has launched countless business articles but when it comes to what are effectively the three questions journalists and investors need answered, there has been relatively little attention paid to the first and vanishingly little to the other two.

1. How many people are watching the service’s original content?

2. Who owns that content?

3. Does it have legs and broad, preferably international appeal?

Just to be clear, I’m skipping a lot here (the corporate finance questions alone would be the stuff of graduate classes), and even these three “simple” questions are extraordinarily difficult to answer definitively, in no small part because Netflix does its best to make them difficult.

But they do provide a framework and a way to keep your bearings when reading stories like this.

As for the portion of the deal giving a CBS a window for reruns, while it wasn’t central to bringing ODAAT to Pop, it certainly helped make the financials of the agreement more logical for CBS Corporation, since the company can spread the show’s cost across multiple networks. None of the parties involved in the deal would talk specifics, but the new season of ODAAT won’t be cheap. “It’s a big swing for Pop,” Schwartz said. “But it’s not like we haven’t reached before with shows like Flack. Having said that, this is a little bit of a farther reach. But Sony really came to the table. Everyone was so passionate about this show, and everybody was willing to make it work.”

Under Sony’s Netflix deal, the streamer — as it does with all of its shows — paid the full cost of production plus a premium fee, essentially giving Sony its backend syndication money upfront. Frost confirmed that the deal with Pop will be a more traditional TV deal, under which Sony will deficit finance a part of the overall cost of production, with Pop making up the rest. “It’s still a healthy license fee,” Frost said. “But we worked with our [syndication and international] division to make sure we could monetize the show in other ways. That includes international distribution of the show and, at some point in the future, selling season-four streaming rights to a subscription video-on-demand service.” Frost confirmed the production budget for season four will be reduced a bit, but “nothing that is going to reduce the quality of the show.”
…

In terms of how long ODAAT will run on Pop, Schwartz made it clear his goal is to keep it on the air for many years to come. “I hope it becomes our huge flagship series that goes on for five, six, seven seasons. That would be the dream,” he said. Kellett concurred, saying she and Royce “have been texting each other” during the past three months trading stories about their own families they’re already envisioning as future plots for the show. “And Rita [Moreno] isn’t going to stop even after seven seasons,” Royce quipped. “She and Norman will be doing this show in season 15.”

First off, I don’t mean to suggest that Sony didn’t care deeply about this show (Studio executives are sincere, caring people – ask anyone), but the company appears to have made out pretty well for itself, as did Norman Lear. Despite its long and successful initial run, the original ODAAT would seem to have been the most moribund of Lear’s hits. It’s hard to imagine Jamie Foxx or Woody Harrelson lining up to play Schneider the handyman.

Netflix took all of the risks, and, as far as we can tell, walked away with nothing more than rights to the shows it actually bankrolled. Furthermore, since the vast majority of shows never make it into syndication, “giving Sony its backend syndication money upfront” is an incredibly sweet deal.

Now that ODAAT has been brought back to life, there’s the potential for a long run and the show developing the kind of legs that allow certain sitcoms to bring in serious cash for decades. I guarantee you that “I Love Lucy” will still be bringing in real money when it turns 75.

It’s possible that the details of the contract benefit Netflix in ways we can’t see from the outside, but I’m inclined to go with my preferred alternative hypothesis. Maybe the company doesn’t care about the long term. Maybe they’re just trying to generate enough buzz to keep the enterprise up in the air until they can manage a soft landing.

I'm not looking for agreement, just a little conversation.

Daniel B. Poneman is clearly an advocate for the industry and, as previously mentioned, I’m inclined to view nuclear energy as a useful and probably necessary tool in turning back climate change, but even if  I were skeptical, I believe I’d find some of these points persuasive.

All of this goes back to the broader issue of the fundamental unseriousness of the way we discuss serious problems such as global warming, income inequality, the resurgence of fascism, racism and sexism, the systematic undermining of democracy, and the general rise of bullshit.

This is not a question of disagreements. If anything it’s the opposite. We treat clowns and charlatans as important thinkers based on their positions, not on the weight of their evidence or the force and logic of their arguments. We’ve lost all respect for the process, the idea that it is more important to contribute to an honest, factually grounded, productive debate than to reach the “right” conclusion.




In a serious discussion of climate change, prematurely shutting down our leading source of carbon-free energy would be a major topic.


From Scientific American:

Nuclear energy is the largest source of carbon-free energy in the U.S. by a huge margin and it has a major role to play in confronting the global climate challenge. But we must also be vigilant about the prospect of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists or rogue regimes.

The threat of nuclear proliferation abroad should not lead us to abandon nuclear energy at home. Indeed, American nuclear leadership has always been critical to guiding the safe, responsible use of civilian nuclear energy around the world.

For example, a number of American companies are developing advanced generation-reactor technologies that offer a host of safety and nonproliferation advantages. These advanced designs would have “walk away” safety, meaning they do not need any backup power or external cooling systems in the event of an accident. And since many of the new reactor designs would rarely if ever need to be refueled, the risk of diversion of fuel from uranium-enrichment or plutonium-reprocessing plants to a bomb program would be greatly diminished.
...

The 98 reactors in our nuclear fleet are the workhorse of the clean-energy sector. They provide one fifth of our electricity. Unfortunately, over the past few years six reactors have been prematurely shut down, and another 12 are set to close in the next seven years.

...

Nuclear plants are not only emissions-free and carbon-free, they are by far the most reliable assets in our power generation mix, operating 93 percent of the time—even during extreme weather events when some fossil fuel plants may be forced to shut down or curtail their operations. Under current rules, electricity markets are not allowed to value these attributes, even though they are clearly valuable.

...

Preserving existing reactors may not sound exciting, but it is a critical first step if we take the climate challenge seriously. Consider that for every reactor that prematurely shuts down, our carbon dioxide emissions rise by about 5.8 million metric tons per year. According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Equivalencies Calculator, that equals the emissions from burning more than 648 million gallons of gasoline—the equivalent of filling up an NFL stadium with gasoline and setting it on fire. To offset those carbon emissions, we would need to plant over 95 million trees. Or we could install solar panels on one million homes and figure out a cost-effective way of storing the electricity so it is available day and night.

We'll come back to Elektro the Moto-Man

The Atlantic has a beautiful photo spread on the 1939 World's Fair. If ever there was a period when pessimism was justified, this was it, which makes the whole thing that much more extraordinary.

From Wikipedia.

The 1939–40 New York World's Fair, which covered the 1,216 acres (492 ha) of Flushing Meadows–Corona Park (also the location of the 1964–1965 New York World's Fair), was the second most expensive American world's fair of all time, exceeded only by St. Louis's Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Many countries around the world participated in it, and over 44 million people attended its exhibits in two seasons.[2] It was the first exposition to be based on the future, with an opening slogan of "Dawn of a New Day", and it allowed all visitors to take a look at "the world of tomorrow". According to the official pamphlet:

    The eyes of the Fair are on the future—not in the sense of peering toward the unknown nor attempting to foretell the events of tomorrow and the shape of things to come, but in the sense of presenting a new and clearer view of today in preparation for tomorrow; a view of the forces and ideas that prevail as well as the machines.

    To its visitors the Fair will say: "Here are the materials, ideas, and forces at work in our world. These are the tools with which the World of Tomorrow must be made. They are all interesting and much effort has been expended to lay them before you in an interesting way. Familiarity with today is the best preparation for the future.

Within six months of the Fair's opening, World War II began, a war that lasted six years and resulted in the deaths of 70–85 million people.

There's Elektro.

And finally, an imagining of the future of 1960.

America versus the rest of the world

This is Joseph.

All of the points in this piece are good.  But I am particularly struck by:

Of course Americans love their own children as much as any parents anywhere. But raising kids is seen as a private decision, freighted with hardship and annoyances that are to be entirely borne by the parents themselves. Enter many places in America with a preschooler and the unspoken message feels more like, "Please move quietly to the suburbs to suffer in silence. Don't bother the rest of us with your uncool offspring."

But the idea of making children an entirely private concern is culturally unusual.  We have a lot of laws and regulations around children, but a fear of having to contribute to making children viable.  Just look at the daycare expenses that some area have. 

I don't think that this attitude is necessarily wrong -- everyone has to make some trade-offs but it is odd to see this in any culture that frames itself as pro-family. 

Happy 4th

Some [reposted] music for the holiday.



































Listening to Cohan, it's easy to forget how controversial going to war in Europe was.

And Josh Marshall wins the award for best use of the word "Timesian"

Josh Marshall puts his finger on one of the issues I've long had with the New York Times. (emphasis added)

The New York Times has a rather lengthy and Timesian piece out this morning on the on-going mystery of Jerry Falwell Jr, his wife and family and this “pool boy” who they befriended and then put into the divey youth hostel business in South Florida. For those who’ve read the earlier reporting by Politico, Buzzfeed and Reuters, there’s no big new bombshell or piece of evidence in the new piece. (If anyone’s read it and thinks otherwise, let me know.) What there is is bits and pieces of more confirmation and nuggets of detail throughout. It’s a classic Timesian piece, the kind fellow journalists often grind their teeth over. The Times comes in late, largely with other people’s reporting and makes the whole thing official with splash of Times holy water. And yet, as usual, they’ve used their name and resources to unearth enough new details and additional confirmations to put the whole edifice on a rather firmer footing.

How much of this is insult and how much is injury? No institution in journalism is as relentlessly smug and as compulsive with its self-congratulation, but just being annoying isn't a crime, so does this go beyond the hurt feelings of a few competitors? I'd say yes for at least a couple of reasons.

I tend to be dismissive of charges of plagiarism partially because I'm far more concerned with crimes of content underneath the byline, but also because we only focus on a form that is minor and relatively rare. There are all sorts of ways of stealing other writers' work, ideas and style, and as long as you don't actually lift specific phrases, it is a crime without consequence. 

Writers for the New York Times routinely arrive late and build on the foundation of other journalists. They may mention the previous work, but it's the NYT story that gets the attention, even if it adds relatively little.

More importantly, the practice of automatically anointing any story from the paper "groundbreaking and definitive" status feds the rot that is already undermining the paper's culture.

In terms of quality, the New York Times is no longer our best paper (the Washington Post has been blowing it away ever since Marty Baron took over and certainly since they lost Margaret Sullivan). It may not break the top five. It is still, however, the paper that matters.

Self-examination has never been a strong suit of the New York Times, but since its disastrous handling of the 2016 election, it has doubled down on the denial and has become openly hostile to its critics. The reception that stories like this get help the paper maintain the fiction that nothing is wrong, and that's the worst possible outcome.

"He changed me"

North Carolina in 2019:

There are quite a few clergy members at the picnic. Another is the Rev. Jerry Miller, whose son came out as gay four decades ago. At first, it wasn't easy for Miller to reconcile his faith with his son's identity.

"My wife and I basically went in the closet because I was a pastor of a Baptist church at that time. And I prayed that God would change my son someday," Miller says. "God didn't change him; he changed me."

Thursday, May 7, 2015

An Arkansas Tea Party group plans an anti-equality rally. Guess what happens next...

There is a big and largely untold story here about cultural and political shifts south of the Mason Dixon Line. They don't get much coverage but I've been noticing items like this.

RUSSELLVILLE, AR -- Hundreds of people marched down Main Street in Russellville for the definition of marriage in Arkansas just three days before the U.S. Supreme Court considers the fundamental question of whether same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.

The rallies were on the same street at the same time, but were on opposite sides of the street because of people's opposing views on same-sex marriage.

The march started off calm. Nearly 80 people walked on Main Street to the Pope County Courthouse holding signs that read, "One man + one woman = marriage and family" and other signs that supported heterosexual marriage and disagreed with homosexual marriage. The group, which included members of the Tri County Tea Party, headed its own march with a separate march trailing behind.

...

All while hundreds of people rallying at the other march chanted "marriage equality" across the street.

...

That was the message speakers at the original rally tried to get out, but struggled because of the loud chants across the street.

Even though March for Marriage was the first march formally announced, supporters were outnumbered by the crowd across the street.

Outnumbered is a bit of an understatement.

Because I've heard conflicting numbers regarding the folks on both sides of the two rallies in Russellville this weekend, I asked Travis Simpson, a reporter at the Russellville Courier, who was there on the scene on Saturday.

He said the crowd supporting marriage equality was the larger of the two, "no contest." Simpson said he estimated there were perhaps 30 rallying against same-sex marriage, but around 200 on the pro-equality side.

Nor was that the end it.

On Saturday, a group called Pope County for Equality organized a rally in Russellville to show support for marriage equality and LGBTQ civil rights in Arkansas. More than 300 people showed up — quite a significant turnout for a community of under 30,000. Klay Rutherford, an organizer of the event and an undergrad at Arkansas Tech University, sent this report to the Arkansas Times. All pictures are courtesy of Pope County for Equality's Facebook page.

Residents of Pope County gathered in Russellville at 3 p.m. on Saturday, May 2 for a march and rally for marriage equality. Over 300 attendees marched through downtown and congregated at a stage near the historic Missouri-Pacific train depot.

The event was sponsored by Pope County for Equality, an online organization that advocates for the equal treatment of all individuals, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. Speakers included Dr. MarTeze Hammonds, Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion at Arkansas Tech University; Jeannie Fowler Stone, a proud Christian and an accepting mother of a transgender son; and, James Bittle, a retired sergeant in the U.S. Army who is gay and recently married. Hammonds, Stone and Bittle are all residents of Russellville.

Event organizers said, “Our goal is to be an overwhelming presence of love and acceptance. We aim to lift people up, start discussions, and show our community that we are more than a stereotype. We simply want to bring our community closer together in a setting of love and peace.”

An impromptu marriage proposal took place on stage as Russellville resident Morgan Walker got down on one knee, surprising the crowd and her new fiancé, Silvia Harper (also of Russellville). The band Sad Magick provided entertainment.

The rally was held in part as a response to an event the previous weekend (Saturday, April 25) organized by an Arkansas River Valley Tea Party group in support of defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Protests that weekend were organized by pro-equality individuals not affiliated with Pope County for Equality. While many media outlets downplayed the presence and role of the protesters at the April 25 event, we estimate that there were at least 250 pro-equality protesters and no more than 50 participants among the the anti-equality crowd.

Pope County for Equality would like to thank the Russellville Police Department for their unbiased approach in handling both marches. Despite the surprising turnout at both events, they occurred without incident or injury.

In the fairly near future, I'm planning a deep dive into how the culture and politics of the South are shifting in ways that our standard metrics tend to miss. For now though, just remember that Russellville is in the most Republican part of the state.

Primary polls, noise and path dependency

As with rational actors and efficient markets, the strong form of the wisdom of crowds theory is too silly to bother with -- a collection of motivated reasoning and epicyles -- but the weak form stands up fairly well and, at the very least, serves as a very useful rule of thumb. Under the right conditions, more heads really are better than one.

When, however, we try to determine how much better, we run into a paradox, or at least a tricky caveat.      We are often most likely to rely on collective opinions when we should trust them the least. This is especially true in cases of limited information.

When reasonable people want to understand something or make a decision, they generally seek out both objective information and informed opinions. Furthermore, being reasonable, they constantly try to gauge the quality of that input and give more weight to the good and reliable. Unfortunately, our ability to judge the information other people are using is less than our ability to judge the information we’re using. This leads to a big problem when everyone is using the same basic set of facts.

If I feel ignorant on a subject, I’m more inclined to rely on your take. If you feel ignorant on a subject, you’re more inclined to rely on mine. Extend this out to a large number of people and limit their ability to share their uncertainty and you can see where this is going.

Which brings us to primary polls, noise and path dependency.

Supporting a candidate partially because other party members support her is not necessarily a bad thing. In a democracy, agreement is a positive and if you believe elections have consequences, it is only ration to consider electability (with the caveat that much of the conventional wisdom about electability is demonstrable bullshit). Six months from now, ignoring the polls when deciding who to support will border on irresponsible.

At the moment, though, the focus on polls and horse race coverage actually damage the democratic process, amplifying noise and creating the illusion of information. With all due respect to Nate Silver and his peers, if they would all just take the next few months off, the country would be better off.