All Hail Stupid, Long Live The Reign Of King Stupid

The Media Bubble

Michael Moore observed early on that Trump was on a wining track. He did that by simply traveling around the Mid-West of the USA, and found that many people were simply disillusioned with both parties, but also if the Democratic Party could think of no better than to put up Hillary Clinton as their candidate, they had no choice but to vote for the other guy, warts and all. Somehow it got discounted in the mix of things because polls said Hillary was winning.

Well, polls have had their comeuppance. Just as the pollsters completely missed Brexit in the UK, their US counterparts completely missed Trump's support on pretty much the same methodology. Dare I say the pollsters in Australia missed the support for Tony Abbott, both in 2010 AND 2013; and if you look at a number of other elections, it's been clear for about a decade that polls have been far less reliable. Had they been reliable, Nate Silver would not have shot to fame in 2008.

What's surprising and interesting to dissect in the aftermath of Trump's win is just how much the media convinced itself that Clinton would win, and just how much America's heartland disagreed. It is in stark contrast to how they actually voted. White people voted for Trump and there were enough of them spread out through the country to swing the Electoral Colleges. Hillary Clinton may have won the popular vote, but she won them predominantly in urban areas. She won big with the base and utterly failed to persuade Michael Moore country.

Now, it could be argued that these people are racists for voting for Trump who was endorsed by the KKK and various other neo-Nazi groups and white supremacists and 'Deplorables', but it actually flies in the face of the two terms won by Barack Obama. The demographic narrative that came out of the Obama victories was how the demographic was changing in such a way that a coalition could be built around various groups to beat the white majority vote. The fact that the Mid-West support Obama could count on, collapsed for Clinton has to be sheeted home to the candidate, and not the white people in the Mid-West who decided to vote against her.

Perhaps it's no coincidence - no make that, perhaps it was bloody pertinent - that the Sanders campaign offered more to those people than Hillary Clinton did, and the fact that she was carrying the baggage of Bill Clinton's presidency which effectively sold them down the river made it nigh impossible to win over those people. Thus combined, we have a situation where a bad candidate was sent out to win seats she wasn't going to win while the pollsters failed to understand this fundamental dynamic as they gathered numbers that obscured this fundamental problem, and the media reported those poll figures as if it paints the entire picture because it had a big investment in ignoring the underlying conflict, and they felt comfortable in doing this because the DNC assured them this was okay. This kind of circularity essentially led to the Media Bubble that formed around the narrative that Clinton was going to win, and this same Media Bubble got exported to the world.

No wonder the world is in shock.

"President Pussygrabber"

I know this sounds terrible, but if it does sound terrible, today is the day you should check your privileges in being able to think it's terrible - everybody has been way too keen to label Donald Trump with the expletives of the Post-Modern era. He's a sexist, misogynist, racist, entitled white male oligarch. And while all of that is true, it simply didn't matter to the wider electorate. And - again this is probably hard to bear but - those things not mattering is the normal condition of humanity and history. Also, there's a lot more to politics than identity politics, and so we ought not be jumping up an down over whether Donald Trump identifies himself as a sexist misogynist racist entitled white male oligarch - or not.

It's really easy to denigrate Donald Trump. He's been on the media as a caricature of himself for a very long time, so much so we don't even know how serious he is when he says the stuff that he says. And while it's most likely true that he sexually assaulted all those women who have come out to sue him, that's still not the entirety of the man. It might behoove us to keep in mind that the parts of the man that isn't the Pussygrabber is going be making decisions about who to drone-strike or not as the case mat be.

I know that sounds awful, but you have to get this into some kind of historic perspective. I remember when Ronald Reagan won. It was meant to be a disaster, but Reagan, combined with Bush Snr. (and a dose of Alzheimer) didn't exactly destroy the world through nuclear war. Equally, John F. Kennedy who is held in high esteem by the Democrats was a philandering sex-addict on the prowl for pussy. Nobody's seriously judging his presidency on the back of Kennedy's sexual adventurism.

While I wouldn't forgive Trump his peccadillos and sexual transgressions, the office of the President of the United States of America is going to demand much more of the man; and as long as the office is what it is, he's going to have to live up to it. He's most likely not going to be grabbing pussy. This kind of name calling isn't going to help us one bit, going forwards if we are to fight what is coming down the pike. The stupids have won, they are going to have their day. All Hail Stupid, Long Live the Reign of King Stupid.

The Gap Between What Is And What Ought To Be

Naturally, the media want to disown any claim that maybe they were part of the problem in how they couched the Trump candidacy. Politico had this editorial piece.

All that digging by the press corps meant a lot, and its message hit home. As the Cook Report notes today, newspaper investigations cemented into the public mind the preexisting image of Donald Trump as a bad person, as exit polls showed that 60 percent of voters viewed him unfavorably. But that didn’t keep 15 percent of those who thought he was deplorable from voting for him. Likewise, 63 percent of voters believe Trump lacked the right “temperament” to be president. But of those respondents, 20 percent said what the hell and voted for him anyway. And 60 percent of voters said he wasn’t qualified to be president—and you can guess the rest: 18 percent of them voted for him.

The election of Trump, then, can’t be reduced to a “failure” of the “broken” press—to lean on two worn-out descriptions of the craft. Nobody would ever say the American electorate “failed” or proved itself “broken” because it voted in numbers large enough to place a political monster in the White House. So the election of Trump doesn’t render the many journalistic findings published during the campaign worthless. Journalism at its best can only provide a set of traffic advisories. It is not and it can’t be an autopilot for life’s trip. Voters are free to read or ignore the press corps’ findings and even, as the Cook Report points out, absorb and agree with those reports and then cast ballots that contradict what’s been reported and what they believe. Being stupid is an inalienable right in a representative democracy.

There you have it. The media did a fine job in exposing what a terrible human being Donald Trump was; it's just that people were stupid in not taking the media's heed. It seems a little self-congratulatory as well as self-serving. It is easy to argue what people ought to have done so given the plethora of information uncovered by the media. It overlooks the fundamental problem that what *is* does not give rise to an *ought*. To that extent the Trump candidacy is incredibly instructive in that the terrible phenomena of who and what Donald Trump is, did not necessarily dictate to people they ought to vote against him. It didn't happen because on some basic level, the Trump candidacy was not based on some points system of ticking off correct answers to questions posed by the media, rather, it was made up of a stronger desire to tell the media to go fuck itself for asking such questions. The Deplorables know they are some kind of something that the elite in the media do not like; some might have even looked up the word deplorable; but ultimately they would have worn the term as a badge of honour as they voted for Trump. In that process, the media did an adverse job, simply because it allowed itself to be the insulters in chief.

There's a line in the Batman movie where Alfred offers to Bruce Wayne that some men do despicable things, because they just want to watch the world burn. What this election shows is that it's not just some men, it's roughly about half the American population.

Good God, Mark Latham

Take A Chill Pill And Come Back Wittier Please

It's been a weird - mostly losing - month for Mark Latham. He was supposedly penning nasty remarks from a fake/anonymous cyber-identity. In common parlance, he was indulging in some sock-puppetry. When he was found out, he had to part ways with the AFR where he was a columnist. A lot of people are down on Mark Latham for all sorts of reasons so he is not a popular cause to back. You could easily argue (maybe not even argue, rather, simply state) that he was not a great cause even when he was going up against John Howard in 2004. Not only did he lose big in that election, he lost his footing in the world of Federal politics and scurried home to be a stay-at-home dad.

Since then, he's been the go to guy for acerbic take downs of politics-of-the-day. On any given day he would be dishing out commentary on just how awful these people were, regardless of party affiliation. Then he ran into some trouble dealing with feminists and couldn't quite contain himself.

It's quite strange just how much his own side of politics reviles him so much. It's almost unfair. There was time in the late 1990s when John Howard was trouncing both Kim Beasley and Simon Crean that  it was clear that the ALP needed new policy ideas beyond the old protectionist, Union-driven rhetoric. He even fit a kind of ALP identikit. He was university educated, but from the Western Suburbs. He was seamlessly the product of Gough Whitlam's many reforms, and came to Parliament with a lot of ideas. He was part policy wonk and ideological warrior. Long before he became the Go-to-Guy for acerbic take down commentaries, he was the Go-to-Guy for intelligent progressive policy alternatives to the Thatcherism-Lite of John Howard's rule.

That's just a long caveat to say, yes I voted for him, and the ALP in 2004, and I have few regrets for doing so. If anything I'd castigate the electorate who chose to stick with Howard out of fear of the future. It can be a very stupid country with a stupid electorate at some times. Just look at 2013 that gave us the Abbott Government. The point being, there was a time the ALP needed this man. Now that things have gone horribly wrong, they may yet need this man; but he keeps disqualifying himself in the public view, from being that man.

Mr Latham told the audience he had taken pride in researching everything he wrote in the now-defunct column and no error had ever been found. 

"None of these left feminist activists went to the Press Council to complain and seek any correction for anything I said that was inaccurate," he said. 

He said there was now no outer suburban columnists in the Australian media with the last one - himself - now gone. But he said he would continue to express his opinions, but now unfiltered of the niceties of the Financial Review.

He said class politics was alive in Australia and while people had been happy with his past criticism of Labor power brokers, action to kick him off the paper started when he began "rousing the rich girls". 

Mr Latham went on to say the problem with the "left feminist elite" was that criticism was seen as being derogatory. 

"I am such a big misogynist that I decided I am out of politics, I'd stay at home to look after the children and support my wife's law career," Mr Latham said.
Mr Latham's address at the festival was supposed to have been on whether former politicians could write objectively on politics. Later in the talk, as the temperature in the room cooled a little, he spoke more clearly about being a stay at home dad, Tony Abbott and politics more broadly. 

At one point he revealed he had lunch in Liverpool, Sydney with Opposition Leader Bill Shorten in early last year to discuss a range of policy issues. He added he helped write some of Mr Shorten's budget reply that year, but there had been no more contact from mid-2014. 

After the event the official Twitter account of the Melbourne Writers Festival said: "We're disappointed in Mark Latham's #MWF15 appearance today. Not the respectful conversation we value."

And more's the shame really. He has a point to make but it is so nuanced it's not getting past the static of the knee-jerk press. The hard left feminists detest Mark Latham for being so blokey, they suspect he is centre-right in political alignment, disguising himself as a leftist. A lot of people are projecting negative notions at Mark Latham and quite honestly, I think they're more revealing of the accusers than the accused.

One imagines that at this point in his life where he's no longer running for office, Mark Latham would rather serve up his contempt unvarnished.  And so it's become a weird media spectacle where people are ganging up on Mark Latham for what he is not - a contrite sensitive new age feminist - instead of the proud bloke with progressive politics from the western suburbs of Sydney. And Mark Latham to his discredit, fires back. His critics decry him for not being smooth like Kevin Rudd or not being a woman like Julia Gillard, or a winner like Paul Keating or political dynast like Kim Beazley. They accuse him of being crass and a misogynist as if these things are defining characteristic of the man. And that's from his own side of politics! 

It's sad that the caricature of Mark Latham has reduced him to some kind of boofhead-of-politics. I'm sure the right in this country take great delight in his fall, because it validates their victory in 2004. A decade on, all it does it prove just how negative is the politics in this country. Put simply, we are far worse off. 

Mark Latham for his part, really needs to go quiet for a while and sort out his PR. This brawling commentary persona simply makes him look worse than he ever needs to. 

Reading Doxa, Seeking Episteme

Grist For The Mill From Burqua-Lurkastan

During the last week I made reference to the growing Burqua debate in Australia and pointed how disturbed I was how vehemently self-declared Feminists were coming out infavor of banning them in the name of ... oh, I don't know, let's be old-fashioned and call it "women's lib". Even somebody with a high profile as Elizabeth Farrelly had this hostile article denouncing the Burqua in Australia.

Who knows the difference between ethics and morality? Belgium does, for one. Technically, there's not a lot in it. The dictionary makes ethics and morality synonyms, each relating to our cumulative attempts to tell right from wrong and act accordingly.

Aristotle's Ethics examines what it means to be good; for him, and many thinkers since, ethics and moral philosophy are one.

In everyday life, though, we tend to distinguish on a public-private basis. ''Morality'' tends to imply a code that is personal, often sexual and, just as often, religious in origin. ''Ethics'' meanwhile, denotes a public and generally secular amalgam of these values. The baked crust, if you will, atop the pie. Hence talk of professional and corporate ethics, ethical investing and, of course, ethics taught in religion's place in schools.

The St James Ethics Centre's chief, Simon Longstaff, argues similarly, defining ethics as ''a conversation . . . [on] the question, 'what ought one to do'?'' Moralities, he says - and he stresses the plural - are the voices in that conversation; one Jewish, one Christian, one Hindu, one Muslim and so on.

Ethics, in this sense, come into play where there is conflict between moralities, or between rules within a morality - as when the truth imperative cuts across kindness.

I present that bit because it had me gagging on my morning coffee this week. The fact that Aristotle thought ethics and moral philosophy are the same, does not necessarily make it so. Now, I like Aristotle (in comparison to the political Fascist Plato), but that is simply as fallacious a position on ethics as the geocentric model of the Universe. The fact that other thinkers after him followed in his tracks, doesn't make it necessarily so.

Be that as it may, she then stumbles to where most contemporary people agree about ethics, where she says "ethics comes into play where there is conflict between moralities or between rules within a morality (sic)".Her precarious conclusion is thus "as when the truth imperative cuts across kindness." What the hell exactly does she mean by that?  One assumes she is arguing that kindness shouldn't count when we're looking for the truth. Philosophically, that would be true, but it seems to me if she's ultimately talking about the burqua, I don't see how she can sustain any conlusion on her part is acting in the interests of truth and the truth imperative while the burqua supporter is not.

It's a relatively simple logical point. Either she is going to make an investigation of truth in something which is falsifiable - thus achieving epsiteme (knowledge) or she is going to arrive at an doxa (opinion) based on some largely personal observations. I don't want to bore the reader with epistemology 101, but what I am gagging on Elizabeth Farrelly is trying to set up an argument where her conclusion is going to be true, while the burqua defenders are  going to be *wrong* for not having her version of the truth.I might add, that she is not talking about a black or white issue like say, science. She's talking about a cultural practice of people she does not have full knowledge thereof.

The startling three paragraphs thus ends with this:

Democracy pivots on the universal franchise; the presumption for each individual of a public identity, as well as a private one. To cover someone's face in public, to reduce them to a walking tent, is to declare them lacking such identity, destroying any possibility of their meaningful public existence. It is, literally, to efface them.

To hide the face is to hide the person. As Shada Islam, Europe correspondent for the Pakistan paper Dawn, wrote last week, most European Muslim women have little patience with the burqa or its wearers, seeing it as ''a sad process of self-isolation and self-imposed exile''.

And while you could see even exile as a personal right, it does directly contradict a public duty, the duty of public presence. The morality of identity-erasure may be (barely) acceptable, but the ethics are not. Brave little Belgium.

And I am left shaking my head. Farrelly believes that Democracy is being undermined by people who choose to cover their faces because the effacement contradicts the public duty of presence. If ever there was tortured logic, I can't readily recall one ad tortured as this. There is nowhere in the notion of Democracy that everybody must maintain a public face as well as a private one. Let's be frank, she invented it for the purposes of her sophistry. Such a notion actually robs the legitimacy from people who are advocates for privacy.

It might be a surprise to Ms. Farrelly, but Democracy also covers the notion that should a person choose to remain intensely private, that person would and should have the right to do so. That person does not owe their neighbour or a stranger or Ms Farrelly their face. They simply do not.

Then it gets worse. In what follows this section - the Shada Islam quote - is mere opinion (doxa) as well. It's one person's stinking opinion, based on hearsay, without any statistical or empirical substantiation. It would hardly count as something in the service of the "truth imperative" as Elizabeth Farrelly claims.

The logical contortion Ms Farrelly applies to get there - even in an Op Ed kind of column is fundamentally dodgy. In fact, it borders on a non sequitur when she goes from that notion then to morality versus ethics, and then praises Belgium.

I'm sorry, but it doesn't make any bloody sense, and pretending that it does is a lie - an out and out untruth! One suspects Farrelly knew, which is why she wrote the first bit above to bolster her own claims to being able to come at an ethical decision (as opposed to a moral one),  and then punch out a conclusion that says it would be unethical to let muslim women wear burquas in public.

Only in the twisted-logic world Elizabeth Farrelly lives in.

The Punch Says Back Off

Just in case you're wondering, I'm neither female, or muslim. but I totally, totally agree with this article here. It's really well written, I recommend it thoroughly, but I'm going to cheat and cut to the chase:

By denying Muslim women agency, we miss out on seeing their resilience, strength and passion.  When I tell people that I’m an Iranian Feminist most people assume that my fervent passion for defending women’s rights came from witnessing the way the government oppresses women in Iran.  That’s not the case.

I’m not a feminist because I witnessed first hand how bad things could be for women.  I’m a feminist because I had the privilege of watching women fight for their rights without compromise.

Seeing photos from the Green Movement to reform Iran shows this – at the forefront of most protests are women, donned in hijab, fighting not to have it obliterated but for their right to choose whether to wear it.  If the hijab isn’t a hindrance in fighting for democracy, freedom and basic human rights then its certainly not a barrier against playing sport.

In the end I want the sisterhood to acknowledge that I can control my destiny, not despite my religion, family or place of birth but because of them.

I want them to celebrate my achievements not tokenise them.  I won’t accept anything less than a unqualified acknowledgement of my agency, power and ability to make decisions in regard to my body and my life.

I know it strikes a lot of people as weird, but I totally get this argument. I have no issues with this line of thinking. I'm not a feminist, I'm just some un-reconstructed male-chauvinist-pig passing by the topic each day, but I have to say I find the feminist support to ban the burqua to be a kind of cultural imperialism and a very patronising position at the expense of people who should at least be given the benefit of the doubt, and those people really should be shown the same kind of tolerance and acceptance these very same feminists demand on behalf of asylum seekers on boats.

News That's Fit To Punt - 08/02/10

SMH's Most Commented

Here's the top-most-commented page wherein it is argued, the MacBank employee got off too lightly.

No one with a heart can help feeling sorry for David Kiely, the hapless Macquarie stockbroker caught viewing near-naked images of Miranda Kerr on his work computer. Needless to say, it would be grossly unfair for Kiely to be disciplined more severely than normal by his employer simply because he was unlucky enough to be caught doing so live on Seven News, in a clip that has now amused millions of viewers around the globe.

What's more, these kinds of sexually provocative images of women are so ubiquitous that it's completely understandable that many are left thinking, "What's the big deal?" With rather more sexually explicit images regularly confronting us all on billboards and the magazine stands in convenience stores and petrol stations, it might be hard to work up too much outrage over a picture of Kerr directing a gentle come-hither look over her modestly shielded naked breasts.

But that doesn't mean that Kiely's behaviour should be dismissed as the harmless manifestation of red-blooded maleness, or that objections to it should be decried as ''wowserism'' or over-the-top political correctness. At a time when business leaders are wringing their hands over the dearth of women in finance and executive management roles, it's worth considering how sexually explicit images of women affect us, and what kind of message they send in the workplace.

Got that? The semi-nude picture on Kiely's personal monitor at work  - which just happened to go out to the public by his own stupidity - is a symbol for the unreconstructed sexism everywhere. What does this Cordelia Fine woman want? She's not a wowser but she presumably wants more public humiliation for David Kiely. Like, yeah, that'll be politically correct.

Personally, I find the Feminist wowserism to be just another kind of wowserism, probably because it always seems to emanate from White women with status and money.

If the Obama election told us anything, it's that when both gender and race are talking points, gender issues get overstated in order to push race issues to the back and the people who argue this most vehemently are white women. Make of that what you will, but the SMH sort of misses it by lining it up with this one:

The second top-most-commented page is this one:

There are two pragmatic tests to ascertain the real level of racism in a country. Namely, the level of ethnic-motivated crime and the amount of inter-marriage between ethnic groups. Australia has a low level of ethnic crime and a high level of inter-marriages between all races, including indigenous people.

There is racism in every country. But Australia is not a racist nation. Certainly not when compared with societies where racism is, or has been, rife. The myth of Australia as racist has been promulgated by alienated leftist academics in Australia, who just happen to be employed in universities that are examples of tolerant multiculturalism at work.

From time to time a litany of journalists, actors, directors and the like join in the Australia-is-racist chorus. There is invariably a spike in such collective apologia around Australia Day. Among the voices heard this year was Warwick Thornton, the director of the widely acclaimed film Samson & Delilah.

Thornton told ABC TV News on January 24 that the Eureka flag will be like the swastika in 20 years' time. In other words, according to Thornton, Australia is so racist it is just two decades away from Nazism, or at least fascism. Yet Thornton, who has an indigenous background, is a successful Australian whose work has been supported by the taxpayer through Screen Australia. His brilliant career, so far, suggests that Australia is anything but in pre-fascist mode.

So Gerard Henderson, a well-to-do middle-aged white guy with money and status is telling us that Warwick Thornton is wrong when he says Australian society is racist.

Again, I think Warwick Thornton not being the white suburban guy with all the social perks  that go with it, gets to make the call; not you, Mr. Henderson. The rest of the article is just you saying stuff that you find ideal. The real world is far from your ideal.

The utter lack of humility by both Cordelia Fine and Gerard Henderson makes me gag. Maybe it's just the way columns have to be - stupidly single-minded and oblivious to the nuances of what is being argued.

I just thought I'd point that out before people sort of got the impression from the SMH that Australian society isn't racist at all but were decidedly sexist to the point of no redemption.

Malcolm Turnbull Fighting On

This is tragic.

Giving his first parliamentary speech since losing the Liberal leadership in December, Mr Turnbull indicated he would cross the floor to vote with Labor when a vote was taken on the carbon pollution reduction scheme.

Mr Turnbull was scathing of the Coalition's new direct-action policy, which aims to provide financial incentives to industry for reducing carbon emissions.

"We all know ... that industry and businesses attended by an army of lobbyists are particularly persuasive and all too effective at getting their sticky fingers into the taxpayer's pocket," he told Parliament today.

"Having the government pick projects for subsidy is a recipe for fiscal recklessness on a grand scale.

"And there will always be a temptation for projects to be selected for their political appeal."

A handful of Liberal MPs, including treasury spokesman Joe Hockey, were present in the chamber during Mr Turnbull's speech.

The government allowed Mr Turnbull an additional 10 minutes to complete his speech as other MPs, including climate change sceptic Wilson Tuckey, wandered into the lower house ahead of a maiden speech by first-time MP Kelly O'Dwyer.

Mr Turnbull said his strong and long-standing personal commitment to an emissions trading scheme prevented him from voting against the government legislation.

(edit)

"Prudence demands that we act to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and do so in a way that is consistent with, and promotes global action to do the same," he said.

"All of us here are accountable, not just to our constituents, but to the generations that will come after them and after us," he said, adding it was Parliament's job to legislate for the nation's long-term future.

It was positive that both sides of Parliament had agreed to at least a 5 per cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, he said.

"But it is not enough to say that you support these cuts, you must also deliver a strong, credible policy framework that will deliver them."

Without a strong climate change policy, Australia could not expect other countries, such as China and India, to heed the call to tackle global warming, he said.

Mr Turnbull said his arguments in favour of the ETS now were "no different to those I have made and stood for, for the last three years".

Schemes, like that proposed by Mr Abbott, which would give millions of taxpayers' dollars to selected new technologies, were "neither economically efficient nor environmentally effective" compared with a market-based approach.

It's really weird it's come to this, but weirder still, Tony Abbott is getting a lot of loony support for his Claytons Climate policy. There are a lot of wishful people out there, trying to wish away the cumulative consequences of humanity's actions.