Wednesday, October 11, 2023

"Now the language of this 15-minute conspiracy theory has made its way to some of the highest levels of the British government."

Another dot for you to connect in the feral disinformation thread.

If you are following the housing debate, this NPR segment on 15 minute cities is definitely worth reading for both good and bad reasons. There are a lot of problems with the piece, not the least of which is the choice to bury the most important section in the middle. Having the country's transport secretary spreading wild conspiracy theories should be the lede.

Another important point which should have been emphasized far more is the role of Jordan Peterson and particularly Joe Rogan. Peterson has a very large cult-like following while Rogan is one of the most popular broadcasters in the country. Both are Typhoid Marys of the feral disinformation epidemic. If you want to understand this crisis, you have to understand their place in it.

 One element this story has in common with yesterday's flying syringe is that it started with something real. While conspiracy theorists are certainly capable of inventing fantasies out of whole cloth, there are usually a few grains of truth mixed in.

 Julia Simon reporting for NPR:

At the fall meeting, Enright saw a group of attendees he didn't recognize. One of them stood up and asked about 15-minute cities. "To be honest, first I'd ever heard of that phrase," Enright says.

The group grew so agitated that they stopped the meeting. "They were explaining all about this theory about world government via the World Economic Forum trying to institute this policy everywhere of '15-minute cities,'" Enright recalls, "by which they meant you would only be able to travel 15 minutes from your home."

Enright couldn't understand why the bus priority lanes were getting mixed up with a conspiracy theory about 15-minute cities that restrict people's movements. "My job is to make travel easier so people can go wherever they like to find opportunity: jobs, education," he says. "Not to stop people going more than 15 minutes."

Yet the conspiracy theory that 15-minute cities are a way for the global elite to contain people in open-air prisons took off in the past year, says Jennie King, head of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London, a nonprofit that studies extremism.

"Fifteen-minute cities is the latest victim in a broader trend," King says. "The unifying theme of a lot of these attacks and conspiracies is that climate change is being used as a pretext to strip people of their civil liberties."

Some prominent right-wing podcasters, including Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, have brought up the conspiracy theory on their shows. Last month, Rogan talked about 15-minute cities on his show. "You'll essentially be contained unless you get permission to leave," Rogan said. "That's the idea they're starting to roll out in Europe."

Now the language of this 15-minute conspiracy theory has made its way to some of the highest levels of the British government. Last week at the U.K.'s Conservative Party conference, the country's transport secretary, Mark Harper, said he was "calling time on the misuse of so-called 15-minute cities."

"What is sinister and what we shouldn't tolerate," Harper said, "is the idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops and that they ration who uses the roads and when, and they police it all with CCTV."

...

In February, thousands of protesters gathered in Oxford decrying the proposed bus priority lanes, which they saw as an onramp to draconian societal controls. Enright and his colleagues began receiving strange messages, phone calls and, eventually, death threats.


Tuesday, October 10, 2023

Feral disinformation and "flying syringes"*

Continuing with the week's theme...

Hailey Branson-Potts and Jessica Garrison writing for the LA Times:

As soon as Jon Knight applied for a seat on the Shasta Mosquito and Vector Control District board, the conspiracy theories started flying.

Knight, who owns a hydroponic gardening supply store in Redding, spoke darkly about his suspicion that Bill Gates had helped unleash genetically modified mosquitoes in California. And he warned about “flying syringes that will mass vaccinate the population.”

Knight was considered along with Donnell Ewert, a retired epidemiologist who once was the Northern California county’s public health director.

The Shasta County Board of Supervisors chose Knight — a right-wing political activist who was pictured outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, holding what appeared to be a white power symbol.

 ...

There are parts of California that have doubled down on their political conservatism in the face of the state’s largely Democratic bent — and then there is Shasta County.

Home to 182,000 people, the mostly rural county has long been governed by mainstream Republicans such as Rickert, a cattle rancher.

But there is a bitter divide in Shasta County between traditional conservatives and the far right, akin to Washington, D.C., where ultraconservatives led the revolt that just ousted California Republican Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House.

Hard-right politicians — supported by members of a local militia, State of Jefferson secessionists and residents furious about COVID-19 pandemic restrictions — hold a majority on the powerful Shasta County Board of Supervisors.

Earlier this year, the board voted to dump the county’s Dominion voting machines, citing discredited allegations of voter fraud pushed by President Trump, and moved to hand-count ballots for its more than 110,000 registered voters. The decision prompted new legislation — signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday and set to take effect immediately — that limits the ability of local governments to hand-count ballots.

Last year, the Board of Supervisors fired Karen Ramstrom, the county’s public health officer, for following state laws requiring masks and vaccinations during the pandemic.

The appointment of Knight to the vector control board is just the latest example of what many exasperated residents describe as Shasta County’s descent into a political sideshow.

 ...

Knight said he recently got West Nile virus and was more sick than he ever had been.

 ...

Anita Brady, a retired high-school biology teacher, said Knight’s appointment to the vector control board terrifies her.

“The fact that he’s been swayed by these conspiracy theories, evidently for years, doesn’t give me much hope for what’s going to happen with this board,” she said.

Brady, who lives a few miles east of Redding, said she just wants the mosquito threat to be taken seriously — with a science-based approach.

In August, one of Brady’s neighbors contracted West Nile virus from a mosquito bite and was paralyzed by the disease. After weeks in the hospital, Brady said, he recently returned home in a wheelchair, unable to walk. 

* As with a few of these theories, the idea of using mosquitos for mass vaccination was not invented out of whole cloth, rather it is a highly speculative proposal that has been elevated to the level of a massive secret operation.

 

 

Monday, October 9, 2023

Almost no one in the mainstream press has come to terms with what it means to have one of our two main political parties based on feral disinformation.

Just to get this out of the way, there are certainly false beliefs that are common among democrats/progressives/ liberals. The far left is a whole 'nother story but they don't have that much say in the party despite what Fox News would like you to believe.
 

For example:


The primary cause of Western mega-fires is not climate change. Most coastal cities will not soon be underwater due to rising sea levels. These are not whole cloth falsehoods. Climate change certainly exacerbates my region's forest fires and greatly complicates our ability to tackle them. Rising oceans are likely to submerge a handful of very low lying cities such as Miami Beach and, more importantly, can make storm swells all the more deadly for many coastal cities.

Yes, most Democrats hold these incorrect or at least insufficiently nuanced beliefs, but while it is important that everyone try to do better when it comes to misinformation, the disinformation problem on the right is an entirely different beast in terms of magnitude, type, causes, and potential for damage, and as far as I can tell, few researchers and almost no analyst with any major news organization has fully faced this problem and thought through its implications.

Just to review, what we've been calling feral disinformation started out as propaganda, conspiracy theories, and other false beliefs that were originally promoted or at least tolerated by the conservative movement because it helped advance their objectives, but this disinformation took on a life of its own. To put it bluntly, feral disinformation along with the desire to "own the lib"s define the Republican Party of the 2020s.

Almost all GOP voters base their political positions at least in part on some example of feral disinformation.

Certain false beliefs and conspiracy theories are so widely held in the party that no candidate can hope to be nominated without at the very least turning a blind eye. If you make evidence-based claims about vaccinations, the 2020 elections, or the lack of any support for conspiracy theories about prominent Democrats part of your platform, you are unlikely to have any hope of a career in the Republican Party beyond the district level.



Not only is feral disinformation found among a large majority of Republican voters, completely delusional variants are held by a disturbingly large minority, often including disturbingly highly placed and influential figures. Fantastic theories about vaccines spreading through casual contact or even genetically modified mosquitoes, futuristic life extending technologies keeping long dead politicians secretly alive, satanic cannibal cults of the elite, Protocols of Zion style Jewish conspiracies, rejected X-Files plots about aliens and subterranean lizard people, and of course flat earthers. While the typical Republican probably doesn't believe any of these things, taken together, the believers do represent a large enough group to have real impact in the party.

This is the reality that everyone who works in politics, either directly or as a journalist or as a researcher, has got to face up to. If you're looking at DeSantis's support, you pretty much have to start with anti-vaxxers. If you want to explain the ratcheting of more extreme and unpopular anti-abortion laws, you have to factor in urban myths about infanticide and and other child endangerment fantasies.

2,000 Mules has more to do with Trump's hold on the party than do any variables political scientists would normally put into their models. 

At this point, trying to understand the GOP without considering the role of feral disinformation is like trying to explain the witch mania without considering the belief in the supernatural.



Friday, October 6, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- Dems in Disarray













Imagine the reaction of your past selves when you travel back in time and  tell them how much you like Michael Steele's commentary.





Was this before or after he whined about the Democrats not cleaning up the Republicans' mess?









Quiet parts out loud.



 

We've been talking about the rise of the "Trump > the Pope" Catholics for years, but they still freak me out.







The sad part is that this in no way lowers the average quality of Briahna Joy Gray's commentary. 





Thursday, October 5, 2023

Twelve years ago at the blog -- Even East Coast journalists are starting to catch on to Weigel and over-the-air television

Svengoolie has broken through from cult figure to mainstream appeal with write-ups in places like the WSJ and a full issue team-up with the Justice League. MeTV is a ratings juggernaut, crushing deep-pocketed competitors like Paramount's TV-land in the ratings. And while the streaming industry continues to lose billions of dollars, the over-the-air niche Weigel pioneered might be the most profitable spot on the television landscape.

Pretty good for a technology that people were calling dead on arrival fifteen years ago.

Friday, October 7, 2011

Free TV blogging -- Why Weigel Broadcasting may be the best business story that no one's covering -- part I

[I should start with the disclaimer that all of the information I have about Weigel comes from two sources: Wikipedia and way too many hours of watching television. It's entirely possible that a competent journalist could discover that the truth here is something entirely different, but if competent journalists were paying attention I wouldn't be writing these posts.]

Though the improvement in picture and sound got most of the attention, another aspect of the transition to terrestrial digital was arguably more important, particularly for broadcasters: under the new technology, each station could broadcast multiple subchannels. The situation was analogous to the TV landscape thirty years earlier when cable and satellite stations were exploding on the scene. It's not surprising that someone would try to create the broadcast equivalent of superstations like TBS. What is surprising is who was able to get a channel up and running before any of the competitors were out of the gate.

The name of the channel was ThisTV. It was produced by a regional broadcasting called Weigel, best known for operating the last independent station in Chicago and being the home of the cult favorite Svengoolie -- last of old time horror hosts. Weigel had a content deal with MGM which was not nearly as impressive as it sounds -- Turner had bought out the classic MGM library years earlier -- but MGM still had a lot of films including the catalog of American International, the studio responsible for virtually every drive in movie you can think of from the late Fifties through the early Seventies.

Access to all those AIP films probably had a lot to do with the unique ThisTV brand. Here's how I summed it up earlier:
Weigel are the people behind ThisTV and the exceptionally good retro station MeTV (more on that later). ThisTV is basically a poor man's TCM. It can't compete with Turner's movie channel in terms of library and budget -- no one can (if my cable company hadn't bumped TCM to a more expensive tier I never would have dropped the service), but it manages to do a lot with limited resources using imagination and personality. As a movie channel, it consistently beats the hell out of AMC.

ThisTV has caught on to the fact that the most interesting films are often on the far ends of the spectrum and has responded with a wonderful mixture of art house and grind house. Among the former, you can see films like Persona, the Music Lovers and Paths of Glory. Among the latter you'll find American International quickies and action pictures with titles like Pray for Death. You can even find films that fit into both categories like Corman's Poe films or Milius' Dillinger.

If I ran a TV station, I would definitely combine Bergman and ninjas. I would not, however, run Mario Bava's feature length pulp magazine cover, Planet of the Vampires from twelve till two. Some of us have to get up in the morning.

This mix was in place from the very beginning. The station officially debuted on November 1, 2008 with Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It but many stations started carrying it a day earlier to take advantage of a day of cheesy Halloween horror films. It was a formula that made a virtue out of cheapness (rarely seen auteur films and drive-in movies both have the advantage of not costing much) and it produced a format that's been running smoothly with remarkably few adjustments for almost three years.

For a small player to identify a new market, develop a concept, negotiate the necessary deals with a content provider (MGM), line up affiliates, make the countless other arrangements that accompany a major launch and to be up and running with a quality product when the support technology first comes online is an impressive accomplishment. But it gets better.

So far we have a solid business story -- small yet nimble company with some good ideas beats big, well-established competitors into a new market. Not exactly the most original piece of journalism but certainly good enough for the front page of the business section. However the story doesn't stop there. Weigel didn't just beat its big and well-financed competitors; it lapped them. Before the next entrant, Tribune/WGN, was able to get its station, AntennaTV on the air, Weigel managed to launch a second channel, the ambitious classic television station, METV. If this weren't enough, AntennaTV is the only one of the three to look slapped together despite having taken far longer to make it to the air (of course, we have no way of knowing how long it took Tribune to see the opportunity and how long it took them to act on it but either way Weigel looks good by comparison).

To put this in context, at least half of this story takes place after the collapse of '08, a downturn that hit advertiser-based businesses particularly hard. Furthermore, the story occurs in an industry that a large number of lobbyists and at least a few pundits were literally trying to kill. There had even been a New York Times op-ed calling for the government to eliminate over the air television and sell off the spectrum.

One of the great memes of the Great Recession has been that uncertainty paralyzes businesses. Even the possibility of a tax increase or some additional regulation -- both extremely mild by historical standards -- are enough to bring the economy to a standstill, but here's a market filled with unknowns under a credible threat of annihilation and we can still find a company like Weigel moving aggressively to establish dominance of it.

That's the other side of uncertainty. It allows companies to substitute boldness and decisiveness for money and market position and take advantage of opportunities that would otherwise be out of their reach.

[also posted at MippyvilleTV]

 

Wednesday, October 4, 2023

Housing in Canada: why Mark is clever

This is Joseph.

So we all know that housing in Canada is berserk. Vancouver is less affordable than any city in the United States and Toronto is right next to Los Angeles and San Diego. But this understates the issue, more Canadian live in big cities than Americans and the average home price in Canada is now double that of the United States, a country with higher per capita incomes. But we will use Ontario as the easiest example, as BC is small and Ontario is 40% of the country's population. 

So why is it so over priced?

I have found a number of explanations, but to give the punch line away: everybody focuses on zoning (YIMBY) and not the other (likely more effective levers). Let's talk about a few. 

First, money laundering. It is never a good sign when the market with the greatest price inflation in your country also has a method of money laundering actually named after it. It involves casinos, another Canadian idea that is daft. Raising revenue via casinos became legal in Ontario (for example) in 1985 as a revenue raising method that fed addiction, fueled urban blight, and appears to have opened up doors for corruption. Eventually people will notice and it would be better to get ahead of this one. It definitely beats zoning as an issue. 

Second, property taxes. Property taxes in the small city of Sudbury are 1.59%. In downtown Toronto is is 0.63%. I am not joking.  Here is the map from Twitter:


It's just crazy. Even a mid-size city in Southern Ontario (London) has a rate of 1.42%. Low property taxes drive price appreciation and starve the city of money. The city of Toronto has been asking the Federal and Provincial governments for tax revenues to fund their one billion dollar shortfall. Property tax brings in 3.93 billion and a small increase in it could leave Toronto with atypically low property taxes and no revenue problems. This is a self-inflicted wound.

Third, immigration. Ontario universities are underfunded and they are using the high fees of international students to cover operating expenses. Some colleges are 80% international now, which is fine, except that it aggravates a housing crisis. In 2022, Canada admitted 437,000 immigrants by, by 2019, had 642,480 international students, with news reports suggesting over 800,000 in 2022, meaning Canada is drawing near the to the US total. The number of temporary workers jumped by 50% between 2014 and 2019 to 2.1 million. Between 2022 and 2023, the total was 1,158,705 people (+2.9%). If you want brisk population growth that can be a good thing, but probably best to plan housing at the same time. 

Fourth, development taxes and complex building rules. Ontario is currently increasing development charges by 9.33% in the GTA to cover the cost of growth. The same is happening in Vancouver, with the real issue being that low property taxes mean you need to pass costs on to new construction (Vancouver makes Toronto look like amateurs with a 0.24683% property tax rate). Even when the government tries to improve matters, they do it by increasing micromanagement and red tape -- which is a very optimistic view of government capacity to centrally management so many complex processes. It can't help that Vancouver now has the highest construction costs in Canada despite the lowest property taxes. Add in fast changing rules which make investment annoying) and you have a great way to discourage creating new units:




 Just look at how hard it is to do a bathroom renovation in Vancouver. Not only is it nine steps, the tree inspection for a bathroom was especially exciting:


There is also the sunk cost of the nine steps of paperwork going back and forth:

The whole thread is interesting (and well worth the read) for how many separate reports are needed, how much this all costs, and how often the city time targets are missed. One can imagine how this depresses the housing supply (just time of renovating an apartment). You can claim that safety is important but the $750 for an arborist report for an internal renovation seems like a sub-optimal plan. The energy report also seems like a strange requirement. It just eats up money and time for housing improvements and cannot but increase costs.

Now look at this article here on comparative construction times.  In 2020, Canada ranked 34/35 among countries for permit times, managing to just barely beat Slovakia and tripling US times. Now, the article was from a contractor but the statistics, themselves, just continue to support this narrative. 

Fifth, tech companies. This is AirBnB. I am generally skeptical that these really increase rents (many, many examples of this) but they do seem to have some tax advantages in Canada as compared to hotels. Generally, this looks like a small effect that just barely is not zero. But worth noting in passing.

Finally, zoning. This one gets the most attention. This is the pet example of the YIMBY movement. But it is also the place where massive profits are to be made: just look at the recent greenbelt scandal (with 30-1 returns for investors with political connections via what appears to be bribery or, at the very least, gifts with poor optics). But the problem here is that it is true that new projects really do have externalities on existing homeowners. Maybe, in the United States, there is no dysfunctional administrative processes and it really is all NIMBY-ism? I guess it is possible, This isn't to say that NIMBY-ism isn't a problem in Canada. Here is a parking lot in Toronto that is the "heart of the community" when it is slated to be redeveloped as affordable housing.  Here is an example of a car wash being turned into a apartment requiring $500,000 in studies, for a 10% chance of approval. Here is a four story apartment on an arterial road and 100 m from a subway being anti-neighborhood character. Here is a story in nearby Guelph where neighbors, protesting a 23 story variance for a lot zoned for 18 stories, proposed that the city limit buildings to five stories (because of tornadoes and power outages). Or how the sightlines of million dollar homes next to the University prevent student housing from being built while students start planning to live in vans. I could do this all day. Zoning and resistance to development rises when housing prices become huge but I think that this is as much a symptom as a cause. Once you let housing become expensive then a 5% change in housing price is a lot more money and so you have the implicit leverage of high prices increasing resistance to development. 

So why did I title this "Mark is clever"? Well, I started out focused entirely on zoning and the process of looking for causes has had me thinking that zoning is a weak lever compared to the others and it has the advantage of being an easy way to encourage corruption. But both money laundering and property taxes are easy ways to drive reform. We do not want to become the haven for illegally earned income and it would be a net benefit to the economy if we could have less of it. Corruption hurts productivity as it makes it easy to earn money by other means than investing in value production (similar to how the resource curse works). Canada is down with Italy and Japan for productivity in the last 20 years. And the financial crisis in big cities would be greatly helped by an increase in taxes to just lower than everybody else in the province, instead of ridiculously lower (it would also increase the carrying cost of property making the money laundering less profitable). 

Immigration is also good. But so is housing. A sane policy might pair increases in international students with new student residences. These would make it easier for these students to integrate into Canada and improve student support. But right now international students from India pay more into the higher education sector in Ontario than the provincial government does. A more thoughtful strategy (and much fairer to the students) would do a lot to both improve housing issues and make the educational system more robust to shocks. I mean it would be a very bad time to have an international row with India, wouldn't it? 

So I think I am still a YIMBY, but I think it as representing a less obvious line of attack.

Tuesday, October 3, 2023

Five years ago at the blog -- When you're always a skeptic. there's always a risk that something you mock will live up to the hype. (Hasn't happen to us personally, but you hear about cases.)

This isn't to say that every business or innovation we've criticized have crashed and burned. Netflix is nowhere near the profitability bulls were promising, but it does make money and it's still the number one streamer unless you let Disney count all the subscribers from Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN, and I 'm sure there are other examples, but when it comes to ideas that we called out as stupid and completely unworkable -- hyperloops, Quibi, "Netflix but for Legos," and countless others -- all attracted millions and in some cases billions in funding only to crash and burn. 

Elon Musk's proposal for a high-speed train to travel a route of just over three and a half miles never even got to the funding stage. It has been replaced by a controversial, but less silly plan for a gondola to carry people to the stadium. More on that later. 

 


 

 

Wednesday, October 3, 2018

Fixed costs, marginal costs, and the Zeno project management rule of thumb.

Having spent a long time now chronicling bad journalism, one of the conclusions that keeps coming up again and again is that 21st-century journalists have a serious problem dealing with the obvious, particularly when it goes against the story being told by the subject of a piece. This inability to address these naked emperor situations shows up in every area of news coverage – – political examples alone would fill volumes – – but let's focus on one egregious example, high-speed intra-city rail, best illustrated by a recent proposal from, to no one's great surprise, Elon Musk.

There's a very good rule of thumb when you're trying to devise complex solutions to get you as close as possible to some upper bound: if you think of your progress in terms of a succession of steps that take you halfway from where you are to where you want to be, you should assume that each step will cost more than the previous step. In other words, getting halfway to your goal will be cheaper than going from half to one fourth and going from half to one fourth will be cheaper than going from 1/4 to 1/8, and so on. (I'd probably start using the word "asymptote" here if this were the kind of post where I was going to use words like "asymptote.")

Clearly, this is closely related to the concept of diminishing returns and it immediately suggests that plans which promise complete solutions to thorny problems should be viewed with great skepticism. Recent case in point, the vague pitch for a vague proposal for a vague plan for getting pedestrian deaths in Los Angeles down to zero. With a well-functioning press corps, offers of perfection should be a hard sell.

Unfortunately, this takes us into the bullshit territory of aspirational language and various other magical heuristics. The willingness to commit to the impossible has increasingly come to be seen as a sign of seriousness and visionary thinking. Playing by these rules, the very fact that a claim is unbelievable actually makes it more credible.

While it is possible to come up with exceptions to the Zeno rule, it holds for an exceptionally large number of cases, particularly when you take into account fixed and marginal costs. Let's get back to the subject of transportation.

Consider two flights, one from Los Angeles to San Francisco, the other to some city east of the Mississippi. LA has a fair number of major airports, but they all tend to be understandably on the outskirts so that, if you are starting from a fairly central location, it is easy to find yourself a considerable distance away from the closest option. Between driving, parking, and getting through security, let's call it two hours from stepping out your front door to stepping on the plane (to simplify things, we'll treat the other airport as your final destination).

We'll round up the flying time from Los Angeles to San Francisco to an hour and call the flying time to our unnamed East Coast city eight hours, giving us a total of three hours and ten hours respectively. In terms of travel time and airspeed, those two hours are fixed cost while the rest are marginal. Increasing airspeed would decrease the second but leave the first unchanged, thus paying extra for a much faster airplane would make a great deal of sense for the long flight but almost none for the short one.

Once again, apologies for spending this much time making obvious points, but it's good to have these things in mind when we consider the following:

Elon Musk's company proposes 3.6-mile tunnel to Dodger Stadium
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s tunneling company on Wednesday announced a proposal to build another tunnel in Los Angeles, a 3.6-mile underground route that would carry fans between Dodger Stadium and a nearby Metro subway station.

The Boring Co. said the Dugout Loop would be a “zero-emissions, high-speed” transportation system that could carry fans in about four minutes between Elysian Park and a Metro station along Vermont Avenue, at Beverly Boulevard, Santa Monica Boulevard or Sunset Boulevard.

Pods carrying passengers would whiz through the tunnel at speeds of up to 150 mph, resting on self-driving platforms called “skates,” the Boring Co. said. The trip would cost about $1, and riders would purchase tickets in advance through a mobile app.

 

Monday, October 2, 2023

Every day the New York Times' editors check out the latest from NYT Pitchbot and say "hold my beer."

 There is possibly no writer who is more representative of the NYT than Frank Bruni, and I don't mean that in a good way. There are others who are better known and more strongly associated with the paper, but they bring something of themselves to the job. Even the execrable Dowd at least has a distinct voice. Bruni doesn't, which makes him especially useful when you want to get a read on what the people above him are thinking.

Trump has a mammoth lead over all of them, and there’s no sign that it’s shrinking. He’s skating to the party’s presidential nomination. Along the way, he’s doing quadruple axels of madness, triple toe loops of provocation. He’s fantasizing about executing a respected general, and he’s fetishizing firearms, his words coming close to incitements of violence. He’s not sorry for the Jan. 6 riots. To my ears, he’d like more of where that came from.

...

And perhaps the only shot that any of those seven candidates have to stop him and prevent the irreversible damage he’d do to the United States with four more years is to call a tyrant a tyrant, a liar a liar, an arsonist an arsonist. None of them did.

They’re too frightened of his and his followers’ wrath. So forgive me if I chortled every time they talked about leadership, which they talked about often on Wednesday night. They’re not leaders. They’re opportunists who are letting an opportunity slip away from them.

I don't want to spend too much time on the tactical wisdom of attacking the most popular Republican leader since Reagan (at least within the party). Barring some disruption that completely resets the table (like a health crisis or someone fleeing the country to avoid imprisonment), Trump will be the GOP nominee and even if there is a massive disruption, telling the majority they've been supporting a tyrant is probably not the best way to weather it.

But while Bruni's argument flies in the face of evidence and common sense, it aligns perfectly with the narrative the paper has pushing more and more desperately for well over a year now, the latest iteration of one the paper (and much of the rest of the press) has been telling itself for at least a quarter century now about how both parties are basically the same and it's just a few unrepresentative extremists in both parties who cause all the trouble.

The two-part fantasy of the moment is that Trump is an anomaly and that all that is needed is the right candidate with the right approach and the former president won't make it past the primaries. It has been an increasingly difficult delusion delusion to maintain, and the press's efforts to keep it alive are sound like a Pitchbot thread, particularly the evergreen "Experts/researchers/polls say [obvious conclusion], but we talked to [tiny unrepresentative sample] who aren't so sure."

Recent and humiliating case in point.

If opinion polls are to be believed, Donald Trump has the 2024 Republican presidential nomination in the bag. But in a recent Times Opinion focus group with 13 Republican voters who are looking at candidates other than Mr. Trump, the idea that the race was all but over sounded off base, either because they don’t know any other Republicans who want Mr. Trump back in office or because he seems beatable for the nomination.

The press and particularly the NYT has been playing variations on "if the polls are to be believed" for over eight years now, briefly acknowledging Trump's numbers then trying to wave them away with wishful analytics. The hard inescapable death and taxes truth is that Trump's standing at this point is something unprecedented in recent memory (including 2016).

 

Barring extraordinary events, if Trump is capable of running (and remains in the country), he will be the GOP nominee. Any other outcome is so unlikely that to treat it as possible is irresponsible.

The NYT (I'm going to skip the clumsy phrasing "The press and particularly..." and just cut to the chase from here on) appear to have abandoned their quixotic efforts to argue that Trump's polls were worse worse than they looked, and have doubled down on on op-eds and not just focus groups but "where the hell did you get these people?" focus groups. Parties and publications have a long history of stuffing these groups with unrepresentative samples, but I've never seen the thumb applied to the scale with quite this much force.

Beyond the absurdity of not knowing any other Republicans line (shades of the Pauline Kael Nixon quote without the self-aware preface), every response is at odds with what what we know about GOP primary voters. Despite vaccines being Trump's greatest area of vulnerability on the right, there's not an anti-vaxxer in the bunch. No conspiracy theorists either. Almost no mention of abortion and none of it heated. "Few of these voters cared about immigration or wokeism." The only mention of Ukraine was a positive nod to the hawkish Nikki Haley. The only comment about Russia outside of the one involving Haley was one praising... wait for it... Joe Biden.

Every one of the focus group members was a NYT editor's fantasy figure of a typical Republican voter. Remember that scene in Being John Malkovich where everyone looked like Malkovich's? It was like that only with David Brooks' face.


Friday, September 29, 2023

Deferred Thursday Tweets -- as always, Dems in disarray

All you need to know about the GOP primary in just twenty seconds. You don't need to see any other clips or read any analyses. Just watch this.
  






Growing up in rural Arkansas, I remember my heart going out to those the subsistence truffle farmers.


Another good ad, and one that makes a point we've been hammering.





On Trump, Drudge > NYT







SROs would seem to be the simplest conversions and it would answer a burning need for low income housing, but I never hear those proposed.

 

A note to those who get all worked up about polls more that a year before the election:


And a reminder that, as good as he is with polling data, Nate Silver's track record as a political analyst is decidedly mixed.

(There is an extremely overrated politician from California, but his name isn't Harris.)


Today, Florida...


Tomorrow, the world.

Naomi Klein and Matt ("not Gatez") Gertz need to form a support group.



Untroubled by any hobgoblins of consistency.


Getting serious for a moment, this is an important issue.




The funniest part is that rather than ignore this, Fields waded into the replies under the impression that the details would help.


Big week for Elon.



From Forbes:
Potentially, it could cut carbon emissions by about 50% over a lifetime of use, assuming a buyer replaces a similarly sized gasoline truck, said Nick Molden, CEO and founder of Emissions Analytics, an independent automotive research firm based in the U.K. But if an owner uses it less frequently than the gasoline truck, “that would undermine the climate benefit because the manufacturing emissions to make a Cybertruck would be amortized over too few miles,” he said.
In other words, you could get a much safer appropriate-for-your-needs hybrid with the same carbon footprint, you'd save a ton of money, and you wouldn't look like a complete dick driving around town.




As we were saying twelve years ago.

Tech notes


Before they "fixed" it, the math reasoning section of the SATs relied heavily on rewriting problems with new notation so that students who hadn't had much math wouldn't be at a disadvantage. Similar principles should apply to tests for LLMs.


And misc.


You never know where you'll fidn a history nerd.



Not actually a mole, but I still love this clip.