.@StephenKing defends @bobdylan winning the Nobel Prize for literature: https://t.co/n4IO4z1qRI
— Scott Bauer (@sbauerAP) December 8, 2016
City, Local Government, Politics
The Simplest Explanation for Whitewater, Wisconsin’s Politics
by JOHN ADAMS •
In my last post, I mentioned Noah Rothman’s perceptive post on the failings – and they are many – of a non-ideological politics, a politics without principle.
Whitewater’s politics, unlike that which Rothman describes, certainly isn’t a politics of radical populism; there’s no radicalism in Whitewater whatever. (Those who see radicalism here likely see unicorns and pink elephants, too.)
Whitewater’s politics is, however, non-ideological (with a few exceptions). So-called stakeholder politics here is primarily an identity politics, of some cohorts over others, where the town is imagined in terms of identity: students, non-student whites, non-student Hispanics, elderly whites, etc. Old Whitewater – a state of mind, not a person or chronological age – very much sees the city this way.
In fact, Old Whitewater mostly sees one group (non-student whites). Others, by this narrow way of thinking, aren’t really here, or should think about moving away, etc. Occasionally newcomers who want to advance quickly will parrot the worst of this thinking, to ingratiate themselves as truer than true, so to speak. Reminding that a majority of the city’s residents are students, and that many others are Hispanic, for example, only rankles those who think the town belongs to one ‘true’ cohort. (There are some who find a Census table too much to bear.)
When Old Whitewater looks for influential stakeholders, it’s really looking for familiar, leading members of particular identity groups.
That’s why Whitewater has had, for well over a generation, a paradoxical big-government conservatism: precisely because ideological and principled views matter less than what particular identity groups insist that they want and need. Millions for this, millions for that, without an ideological framework to any of it.
The irony is that this spending is not championed by the poorest residents of the city, but by a parochial, mostly-mediocre (but well-fed) clique aching for The Big Thing. (No matter how few the Next Big Thing helps, any more than the Last Big Thing helped, this small faction must have as an ornament to its pride yet one more project.)
They are sure they are owed these things, as self-appointed guardians of a particular identity group, as the real residents within a city of many kinds of residents.
Arguments for multiculturalism and diversity are arguments, in this context, of a city without a fixed identity politics, where many groups will combine in ideological & principled ways, without barriers to participation based on identity, but instead based on clear views.
Look around, and one sees the rack and ruin from an identity politics, as the city stagnates, and thus declines relatively. See The Local Economic Context of It All, Offer, Cooperation, Gentrification, and Stability and Stagnation, Differently Experienced.
This sort of politics cannot succeed, and so descriptions of it will, at bottom, be descriptions of error and loss.
Far-Right Populism, Law, Liberty
Republicanism Without Principle
by JOHN ADAMS •
Writing at Commentary, Noah Rothman has a short, but powerfully insightful, post entitled Republicanism without Principle. The essay is, immediately, about Trump and the Republican party, but it applies as nicely to republicanism as a form of government under the pressure of radical populism. (It’s worth noting that Commentary is a conservative publication; one finds some of the strongest critiques of Trump from steadfast, free-market conservatives.)
Rothman observes the absence of ideology in Trump:
The fatal conceit of any populist movement is that it is non-ideological. It is entirely practical, its advocates insist. It has no use for theoreticians and philosophers. After all, what have they ever produced? The urgency of the present crisis demands of us the resolve to use every tool in the toolbox. What crisis, you ask? And what tools? The questions alone betray a suspicious lack of revolutionary consciousness. They mark the incredulous inquisitor as unfit to share the fruits of the new enlightenment….
Rothman rightly sees the danger – to liberty, to safety, to well-being – in such movements:
A nihilistic detachment from ideology is also the abandonment of principle, and that is a dangerous condition in leaders vested with the kind of awesome power that American presidents enjoy. The ideology that informs principle serves as a check on that power. Pragmatism is its own philosophy, one which justifies every manner of behavior with little regard for its morality or long-term consequences….
If principle grounded in an intellectual framework comes to be seen as an impediment to progress, any manner of remedy to that condition is soon justified in the populist mind. And pragmatism necessitates the kind of ugly remedies that principle often proscribes….
Here we now are, in America. There’s more to Rothman’s essay that I’d easily recommend, about the views of the clique surrounding Trump. (They are, to be sure, men who would set aside concern for any particular meal or view for the sake of a place at the table and a window seat.)
Rothman’s success, here, however, is more universal: a concise description of government without ideologically principled limitations.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 12.8.16
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Whitewater’s Thursday will be cloudy with a high of twenty-six. Sunrise is 7:13 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 06m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 62.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1941, the United States declares war on Japan. On this day in 1864, the Wisconsin 2nd Cavalry receives an assignment for a scouting mission in Memphis, Tennessee.
Worth reading in full —
Trump’s been supportive of Philippine Pres. Duterte (a man who is accused of a murderous campaign in his own country, see ‘They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals’). Duterte, as it turns out, is grateful for Trump’s support, so much so that Philippine President Duterte unveils his Trump impression, complete with profanities:
Alex Kotlowitz describes The Limits of Sanctuary Cities: “At a news conference last week, Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, tried to reassure undocumented immigrants living in the city. “To all those who are, after Tuesday’s election, very nervous and filled with anxiety, you are safe in Chicago,” he said. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump had consistently promised to deport immigrants living in this country illegally, but Emanuel, along with other big-city mayors, including Bill de Blasio, in New York, asserted that their cities—so-called sanctuary cities—would remain safe havens against federal deportation actions. As Emanuel went on to declare, “Chicago has in the past been a sanctuary city. . . . It always will be a sanctuary city.” What these mayors didn’t say, however, was how their municipalities would be able to prevent the federal government from exerting its authority—and what they mean by the term “sanctuary city.”
In Milwaukee, Bruce Vielmeti reports that a Jury awards $1.99 million in [illegal] strip search: “The City of Milwaukee has racked up another significant courtroom loss in the continuing wake of the illegal strip search and cavity search practices of former police officers. Late last month, a federal jury awarded $1,995,000 in actual and punitive damages to Willie Newman after a two-day trial. The jury found that former officer Michael Vagnini had violated Newman’s civil rights during a 2010 arrest and that fellow officers Jeffrey Cline and Paul Martinez failed to intervene, despite knowledge of his improper actions and opportunity to stop Vagnini. The jury awarded Newman, 39, actual damages of $150,000 against Vagnini, and $60,000 each against Cline and Martinez, plus punitive damages of $1,125,000 against Vagnini, $400,000 against Martinez and $200,000 against Cline.”
NASA’s released new (and impressive) photos of Saturn from the Cassini probe:
City, Indolence, Local Government
Indolence Over Something as Simple as a Parking Lot Repair
by JOHN ADAMS •
Here’s a simple observation: if full-time department managers in a small town’s government can’t develop and execute repairs to the city’s parking lots without repeated prodding from the town’s part-time council members, then there’s not much that city government can do.
Full-time, publicly-paid leaders should have enough pride in their town to act quickly without repeated prompting, excuse-making, hemming and hawing, etc. (Then again, those same full-time leaders should be able to see that oil’s leaking into a downtown city lake without learning of the fact from city residents, and taking two days’ time to act on the problem. See Pavement Project Causes Lake Contamination in Whitewater.)
There are many people in the Whitewater area who get up every morning, to work long hours in factories, dairies, and egg farms who do so with fewer excuses than the average city department leader. The people who work those long hours also do so without taxpayer-supported salaries.
The malaise or indolence that grips those leaders degrades the quality of life for residents and makes the city unattractive to visitors and newcomers.
Libertarians, Politics, Trump
Jennifer Rubin on ‘Four ideas for surviving in the Trump era’
by JOHN ADAMS •
Jennifer Rubin’s a principled conservative, and her writing is both insightful and clear. Rubin’s blog and Twitter feed have been must reading for years (including her posts when she was blogging at Commentary; she’s now at the Washington Post). In a time when it would be easy to speak lies to power, she’s remained honest.
The title of Rubin’s post is Four ideas for surviving in the Trump era (emphasis mine), but she’s writing not merely about surviving, but about prevailing.
She offers four points:
1.Right and left must end their sworn allegiance to economic determinism…We can reject Trump’s message of xenophobia, sexism and racism and the urge from populists to infantilize white, working-class voters as helpless victims. We are left, however, with an acute need to cultivate a sense of belonging — to nation, community and shared values….
2. Government likely won’t get better, so look elsewhere…. [Trump] presents us with the opportunity not only to rebalance power between the executive and legislative branches and between the federal and state governments, but between the public and private sector. The latter includes philanthropy, civil society and business. We all have looked too frequently to the government for fixes and mandates; now is the time to look to voluntary efforts, persuasion and advocacy aimed directly at business. (One silver lining to Trump’s election: An outpouring of donations and volunteer offers to charitable and public advocacy groups.)….
3. We need massive civic education. If we learned anything in the 2016 election, it is that a slick charismatic figure can trash the First Amendment, threaten all sorts of unconstitutional actions, incite violence and appeal to naked prejudice with nary a peep from the majority of voters. In fact, the more disrespectful of our democratic institutions and civil liberties Trump became, the louder they cheered….
4. The sane center has to be supported. If the left goes the way of democratic socialists and the right in the direction of European national front parties, we are going to need a coalition from center-left to center-right to support democratic norms and reasoned proposals for education, criminal justice and immigration reform….
There’s need for a grand coalition of which libertarians will be one part, and along the way we will have use of inspirational suggestions for opposition, tactical steps one can take (such as Rubin’s), a brief reference guide of renowned writings to which we can refer, and particular techniques to combat Trump’s ceaseless lying and his surrogates’ ceaseless sophistry.
Our success is not in doubt, and we have reason to agree with Rubin that “[w]ould it have been better to elect a prepared, stable and intellectually coherent president? Sure, but in the meantime, there is plenty of good work to be done.”
Culture, Politics
Anecdotes About Politics in a Small Town
by JOHN ADAMS •
I posted last week about how it’s mistaken to think that most leaders in a small town are direct, forthright (see Plain-Spoken in a Small Town? Not Most Leaders).
Here are two stories about how politics sometimes works in a small town.
At a candidates’ forum last year, I had the pleasure of seeing a few residents speaking about their candidacies for a local office. One of the questions for each candidate was what he or she thought of Act 10. (For new readers visiting from out-of state, first a welcome, and second an explanation that Act 10 is the provision of Wisconsin law by which, among other provisions, Wisconsin restricts the collective bargaining rights of most public workers.)
Act 10 has been controversial, and so there’s really no one in the state who doesn’t have an opinion, one way or the other. Among candidates for office – those who are actually thinking about politics – anyone should have a clear opinion, whether favorable or unfavorable. (I opposed Act 10 as I doubted it would save money, and more fundamentally because I believe that anyone, in any vocation, should be able to organize vigorously against government for any lawful reason. That, by the way, would be the traditional libertarian view. My opposition has been clear.)
As it turns out, the oldest of the three candidates, having been in local politics for decades, couldn’t give a straight answer. Instead, he ventured that he once supported Act 10, before the felt that perhaps it might have gone a bit too far, before his voice trailed off and he had nothing more to say on the matter.
All those decades in office, so eager to be a town notable, and on one of the biggest political topics of state politics – affecting every community in Wisconsin – nothing but an ambiguous, let’s-not-make-waves answer.
That’s a scene from small-town politics.
(An aside: After the forum, this same candidate saw me in the audience, noticed that I had a notebook, and walked over to speak to me. He didn’t bother to introduce himself, but he did point to the notebook and ask, “where are you from?” One could guess his meaning, but I decided to give an unexpected answer, so I told him the name of the street on which I live, to see how he would react. He showed no sign that I was teasing him, not the slightest sense of humor or irony, and instead replied, “No, I mean what paper are you from?”
I smiled, and told him that I wasn’t from a newspaper, but was merely taking notes. He politely reassured me that it was okay to take notes during a public candidates forum. For a moment I thought that I would thank him for his gracious reassurance, but I decided against it, as he might have taken that, too, as a literal reply.)
Here’s my second anecdote, from public ceremony, a few years ago. While introducing a guest speaker, a local politician stopped to ask how long that speaker had lived in the community, and the speaker replied that he had been in Whitewater for (if I recall) about thirty years or so. On hearing this, the politician approvingly replied that he guessed the townies (a term I don’t use) must have thought that after so much time he was one of their own.
Now I’ve lived in Whitewater for many years, have been an American all my life, from a family that was American before there was an America (so to speak), but it would never have occur to me to think what others thought on the matter should ever matter to me.
To think otherwise is to be mired in an identity politics. Identity politics is strong in a place like Whitewater, but such strength as that only leads to a weak economy of empty streets, empty stores, low-wage jobs, and deteriorating buildings.
If someone came here a lifetime, a year, or a day ago, my first thought would be the same: what does one believe, and how will one carry on in advancement of those beliefs? What does one think, and what will one do?
The proper question isn’t where or when, but what. Where should be about what, about those principles that uplift and improve.
The gap between successful and unsuccessful towns is measured in the distance between where and what, each additional inch of separation being a community loss.
Libertarians, Trump
That’s Not What Libertarian Means
by JOHN ADAMS •
Over at the Washington Post, one reads that In West Virginia coal country, voters are ‘thrilled’ about Donald Trump. The mayor of Buckhannon (a Republican who voted for Clinton) describes Trump’s appeal:
Trump’s appeal here is stylistic as well as policy-driven, said David McCauley, the mayor of Buckhannon, the county seat, a pretty and bustling town of 5,700. It’s about coal, but also about being ornery and oppositional.
“Trump was just what people here have always been — skeptical of government, almost libertarian,” McCauley said. “He’s a West Virginia pipe dream: He’s going to undo the damage to the coal industry and bring back the jobs, and all of our kids down there in North Carolina are going to come home.”
McCauley is also a professor at a nearby university, and he doubtless knows that Trump’s not ‘almost libertarian’ – McCauley’s describing how people in that town see Trump.
I don’t doubt that there are people, ill-informed or desperate (or both) who think that Trump’s skeptical of government, but such people are as far off the mark as they could be. Trump’s disposition and political views are closer to authoritarian than libertarian.
It’s a compliment that people see libertarianism as a good, hopeful politics, because of course it is. But it’s a good, hopeful politics not for its stylistic elements but for its fundamental principles:
FREE MARKETS in CAPITAL, LABOR, & GOODS, INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY, LIMITED & OPEN GOVERNMENT, and PEACE
A state-loving, market-meddling, press-hating, expression-restricting, minority-demonizing, foreign autocrat-loving mendacious mediocrity isn’t a libertarian, an almost-libertarian, or anyone libertarians would ever support.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 12.7.16
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Midweek in this small city will be mostly cloudy with a high of twenty-seven. Sunrise is 7:13 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 07m 45s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 51.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM.
It’s the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. On this day in 1954, U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy receives widespread criticism for the baseless charge that Pres. Eisenhower was “weak on Chinese communists.”
Worth reading in full —
In 75 years later, USS Arizona band remembered, Meg Jones writes about members of a a U.S. Navy band on the deck of the U.S.S. Arizona at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor: “My grandparents as well as a lot of others didn’t know if their sons were alive or dead. I think the shock of it was so bad they never really talked about it,” said Nielsen, a retired optometrist who lives in Michigan. “Looking back now I think that it was such a significant thing that happened that it kind of derailed a lot of things in their lives. I just don’t think they had as much happiness in their life.” All Nielsen has is a few photos of his uncle, a newspaper clipping of his obituary and his Purple Heart. “I often think what it would have been like had he survived and had a nice career in music. I can just see him surviving the ’40s and being involved in music in some way. Who knows? Jazz or Nashville or something like that,” Nielsen said.”
Jason Stein writes that a Walker official predicts worsening roads, rising debt: “Madison — The share of Wisconsin highways in poor condition is on track to double over a decade, debt payments are set to rise for the next several years and state costs are poised to outpace new money for road and highway projects, Gov. Scott Walker’s transportation secretary told lawmakers Tuesday. There are 12,000 miles of Interstate, state and U.S. highways in Wisconsin and by 2027 42% of them will be in poor condition if the state doesn’t find new revenue or other solutions, state Transportation Secretary Mark Gottlieb testified Tuesday. In the coming years, the state is expected to end up using up to a quarter of every dollar in its road fund for debt payments under Gov. Scott Walker’s two-year plan to borrow a half billion dollars for highway and bridge projects, Gottlieb said in more than three hours of painstaking testimony.”
Predictably, Time magazine has selected its person of the year.
The AP reports on a supposed sale of Trump’s assets in Aide says Donald Trump sold stocks in June but offers no proof: “WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump sold all of his stocks in June as he plunged into the costly general election campaign, his transition team abruptly announced Tuesday. His advisers provided no proof of the transactions and would not explain the apparent sell-off.”
Even disposable materials may form realistic sculptures —
Economy, Employment
Trump’s Carrier Deal: Fewer Saved Jobs With Each Passing Day
by JOHN ADAMS •
Desperate but hopeful people wanted to keep their jobs with Carrier in Indiana. As it turns out, the promises of over a thousand jobs retained (albeit at a cost to other taxpayers) were exaggerated, whether by carelessness or manipulation:
INDIANAPOLIS (WTHR) – The Carrier deal, brokered by President-elect Donald Trump, may not have saved as many factory jobs as was presented at the plant last week in Indianapolis.
Carrier workers received a flyer from the United Steelworkers, Local Union 1999. It details which jobs are staying here in Indy and which are going to Mexico. The numbers are a bit different from last week’s big announcement.
Last Thursday, amid much fanfare, President-elect Trump spent time on the factory floor and talked with union workers at the westside Indianapolis Carrier plant.
“We’re keeping a little over 1,100 jobs it turns out,” he told them.
He also made a big announcement about a big deal reached with United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, to save 1,100 American jobs that were going to be moved to Mexico….
But [T.J.] Bray and other union workers just learned some new numbers about the actual number of production jobs saved by the Trump-Pence deal….
“We found out today that more jobs are leaving than what we originally thought,” Bray said. “It seemed like since Thursday, it was 1,100 then it was maybe 900 and then now we’re at 700. So I’m hoping it doesn’t go any lower than that.”
Union workers got a letter at the plant saying Trump’s deal with Carrier will save only 730 factory jobs in Indianapolis, plus 70 salaried positions – 553 jobs in the plant’s fan coil lines are still moving to Monterrey, Mexico.
All 700 workers at Carrier’s Huntington plant will also lose their jobs.
Via USW: 730 union jobs saved in Carrier deal – not 1,100 @ WTHR.
Berlusconi, Far-Right Populism, Politics, Trump
Berlusconi’s Political Career as a Partial Analog for Trump’s
by JOHN ADAMS •
One reads much these days about how similar Trump and Silvio Berlusconi supposedly are. There’s something tempting about comparing Trump’s political situation to Silvio Berlusconi’s: both are businessmen, held no earlier office before winning a national election, are admirers of Putin, crude, anti-intellectual, and lecherous.
There’s reason to look at parallels between the two; one needn’t look at those parallels exclusively, or with high confidence.
In The Dangers of Anti-Trumpism, Cinzia Arruzza argues that “Silvio Berlusconi’s tenure as Italian prime minister shows how not to resist an authoritarian demagogue.” She’s careful, however, about the strength and weakness of comparing the two:
Trump’s very resistible rise to power is, to a certain extent, more astonishing than Berlusconi’s more predictable first electoral victory. While Trump hijacked the Republican Party, running up against opposition from a large part of the Republican establishment and from the media, Berlusconi used his media empire to both control information and create a new political party, accordingly reshaping the political spectrum….
Moreover, Berlusconi did not agitate for isolationism and protectionism, did not challenge international market agreements, and did not question Italy’s participation in the creation of the European Union and the eurozone — at least not until 2011. Finally, Italy does not play any hegemonic geopolitical role comparable to that of the United States.
These differences are significant enough to caution against facile predictions about the course of Trump’s presidency based on Italian vicissitudes. They do not, however, mean that nothing can be learned from the Italian experience….
That seems right: that there is something to learn, but that something offers a limited, partial understanding.
(In any event, I’ve no confidence whatever that a move toward Arruzza’s suggestion of a “radical and credible alternative” [emphasis added] would be a sound alternative to Trump. Arruzza contends that “it was thanks to the neoliberal and austerity policies carried out by the center-left in the subsequent six years [after Berlusconi was first ousted] that Berlusconi’s power was consolidated [in his return to office].
I’ll not question her sense of the Italian scene, and how a traditional approach only allowed Berlusconi to return to office. It’s enough to observe that Trump is, simply put, a radical populist, and Americans will find nothing but hardship in replacing one radicalism with another. Running away from constitutional and political norms in a different direction won’t make us stronger.)
So for us, of Berlusconi’s example, one can say that there are lessons, but only partial ones.
Local Government, Politics
Stakeholder’s Just Another Word for Special Interest
by JOHN ADAMS •
In a small town like Whitewater, there’s much emphasis on finding and listening to stakeholders. In fact, local policymaking is mostly stakeholder policymaking.
As stakeholders aren’t merely and exclusively residents, but are more often influential residents and local special interests (business groups, business people, etc.) there’s a double-counting of connected residents, as though one gets a vote as a resident and again as a resident business person, for example. Stakeholders are mostly longstanding incumbents. A stakeholder politics is like nepotism, with longstanding, cozy connections instead of blood ties.
Officials in Whitewater will complain about a same-ten-people problem, but stakeholder politics rests on the same ten people, not as problem, but as a cardinal feature.
The benefit to officials is that the same ten people are well-known, and unlikely to present surprises. The disadvantage is that the same ten people exercise authority under conditions of dirigisme and so of stagnation. Familiarity brings a price tag of insularity, stagnation, and relative decline. See, along these lines, The People in the Room.
To get a sense of how addled stakeholder politics is, consider an account of a meeting two years ago to find a new chancellor for UW-Whitewater. (See, from a local newspaper, UW-Whitewater chancellor session held.) The story – written not by a reporter but a ‘correspondent’ with university ties – describes a search consultant’s question to the assembled town notables:
[Search Consultant] Kozloff stated, “We really want to get a sense from all the various stakeholders of what you’re looking for in this new leader.”“Many of you have known Dick Telfer for a number of years,” Bellman said. “We’re also interested in characteristics, attributes, strengths and skills that Dick has displayed over the years … things that you felt were particularly positive in integrating and understanding what is important in the community.”
….Much of the discussion focused on characteristics of Telfer that the group believes would be essential in a new chancellor, including high energy, being approachable and a good listener, understanding that the university is one of the major economic anchors in the community, and being a visible and active member of community life.
[Whitewater City Manager] Clapper said he hoped that the new chancellor would, like Telfer, “think about not just what’s going on in the office — not just what’s going on on campus — but how those those are going to impact the community that surrounds it.”
If one read only the story, and believed it as written, one wouldn’t guess that Telfer was passed over as chancellor more than once, pushed state capitalist schemes in opposition to any evident understanding of economics or entrepreneurship, presided over a campus with a large number of sexual assaults, two of which led to federal complaints against the university, and would later find himself a defendant in a federal lawsuit from a coach who would claim defamation and that the coach’s firing was the result of reporting a sexual assault to the police. (I’ve a link to a long list of posts describing Telfer’s disappointing career.)
It’s wholly possible that every stakeholder in the room that day believed everything that he or she said. Meaning, of course, that it’s wholly possible that every stakeholder in the room that day lacked the discernment and judgment expected of an ordinary person.
The truth of stakeholder politics is special interest politics, and the result of special interest politics is weak judgment that produces inferior results. more >>
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 12.6.16
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Here in Whitewater, we’ll have a partly sunny Tuesday with a high of thirty-five. Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset is 4:20 PM, for 9h 08m 42s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 40.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s city government will hold a public meeting on street reconstruction from 4:30 – 6 PM, and the city’s common council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1923, Pres. Coolidge delivers the first formal presidential address over the radio. On this day in 1821, Wisconsin’s first post office is established.
Worth reading in full —
Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward report on how the Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste:
Patrick Marley writes that Wisconsin’s Republicans crank up highway dispute: “Madison– Wisconsin Republicans amped up the debate over road funding Monday, with one side releasing a video to highlight the poor condition of highways and the other warning that drivers could be hit with a big tax increase. Monday’s positioning underscored the deep divisions among Republicans who control Wisconsin’s government when it comes to spending on highways. The state faces a road funding gap of about $1 billion over the next two years. Gov. Scott Walker says he won’t raise gas taxes or vehicle fees unless an equivalent cut is made in other taxes. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) argues a tax or fee hike may be necessary.”
Alissa Rubin reports that A New Wave of Popular Fury Could Hit Europe in 2017: “PARIS — For Europe, 2016 has brought a series of political shocks: near-record numbers of immigrants arriving from the Middle East and Africa; a vote by Britain to leave the European Union and renewed threats by Russia to meddle on the continent. But 2017 could be even bumpier. There will be at least three elections in Europe next year: in Germany, France and the Netherlands for sure, and now perhaps in Italy, too. Just about everywhere, political establishments are being blamed for tepid growth, for too few jobs and for favoring global financial markets over the common citizen. The latest indicator of popular discontent was Italy’s referendum on Sunday, when voters rejected constitutional changes proposed by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. That result was a stinging blow to Mr. Renzi, who said he would resign.”
Lawrence Freedman (@LawDavF), now emeritus professor of War Studies at King’s College London, finds himself (as do so many others) needing to defend the nature of historical fact (in response to the claim that “history is a matter of opinion and every player writes his own version):
History is NOT a matter of opinion. Fine to be a revisionist but only on the basis of evidence and analysis – not whose side you are on. https://t.co/LGotqsWfPO
— Lawrence Freedman (@LawDavF) December 6, 2016
One reads that “deep in the forest of Overland Park, Kan., little gnomes made a home. But how did they get there? This is the story of paying it forward, one little house at a time….”
The Gnomist: A Great Big Beautiful Act Of Kindness from Great Big Story on Vimeo.
Mendacity, Politics, Reasoning, Twitter
The Post-Truth Crowd
by JOHN ADAMS •
Scottie Nell Hughes, a CNN political commentator and the political editor of Right Alerts, blithely declares that we’re in a post-truth era, where facts don’t exist apart from opinion:
“It is an idea of an opinion. On one hand I hear half the media saying that these are lies but on the other half there are many people who say, no, it’s true….
One thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch, is that people that say facts are facts – they’re not really facts….
Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true. There are no such things, unfortunately, as facts.
So Mr Trump’s tweets, amongst a certain crowd, a large part of the population, are truth.”
One encounters this on Twitter frequently. Consider the following exchange I had there recently:
Adams: Inner monologue replaces epistemology: #Trump Claims, With No Evidence, That ‘Millions of People’ Voted Illegally http://nyti.ms/2gvxNOi
Chutzpah (Deplorable) [his handle, not my description]: Quoting NYT defeats your purpose and makes it fiction. Journalists should prove #trump wrong not just yell falsehoods.
One sees three things here: (1) Chutzpah (Deplorable) believes that although Trump can assert what he wants, it’s not Trump’s burden of proof to confirm Trump’s own statements, (2) nothing in the New York Times can be right, and (3) it’s supposedly clever to defend Trump (whose most rabid Twitter followers include a cadre of anti-Semites) while using a Yiddish term and describing oneself as deplorable.
The big issue is that ‘Chutzpah (Deplorable)’ and his ilk (Russian trolls, nativists, etc.) think that those who assert have no obligation to prove their own contentions – it’s others who have to disprove them. This is convenient, because by that standard if they spew twenty baseless claims per hour, they’ll tie up the discourse with no greater effort than the time it takes to make up stories.
This is an attempt to overturn millennia of reasoning by shifting the philosophical burden of proof.
Likewise, although the frequency of baseless claims during the national campaign seems new (and cumulatively vast), it’s not new at the local level, where many communities have listened to glad-handing excuse-makers for years, even as conditions decline. See Fake News Was a Local Problem Before It Was a National One.
Locally, it’s often a choice between whether one believes small-town officials & their sycophantic defenders or one’s own lying eyes.
A fact-free perspective is now a national problem, one that its defenders present as fact that there are no facts, the truth that there is no truth.
We’ll be years fighting this, but better to fight now for a few hard years, rather than many lost decades.