View From The Couch - 10/Feb/2017

When Satire Lands A Punch

Donald Trump has rightfully earned himself a lot of satirical blows. What's funny about President Trump is that he's no different to the Donald Trump on 'the Apprentice', which is to say he's just carried his reality TV persona into the White House, and leaks suggest he is fuming that people are able tome fun of him so mercilessly. His hapless advisor Kellyanne Conway has been a faux-pas machine blessing the world with such notions as 'alternative facts' and a totally imaginary 'Bowling Green Massacre'. Then there is his Press Secretary Sean Spicer who just can't land on the truth.

The novelty news of he week has been just how good Melissa McCarthy's take down of Spicer has been (and it really was spot on as well as hilarious) and Spicer meekly offered that perhaps the Saturday night Live crew were being mean. This is was sort of funny coming form the administration that went out of its way to be mean to women and muslims in the first ten days, so it was a bit rich.

All of this got me thinking a bit because I've been watching 'Designated Survivor' on Netflix and truth be told, they who plays the Press Secretary in that show looks ten times more competent than Sean Spicer. Actually, Kiefer Sutherland's accidental President looks to be ten times more competent than the Donald, and both men are having problems filling positions in their administration, even if it is for totally different reasons (I won't spoil it).

What's interesting about the real life chaos in the White House is that after watching 'West Wing', 'House of Cards' and 'Designated Survivor', most people would have a better idea of how to go about presenting for an administration. Clearly that's not the case with these people, Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway. To the extent that politics is a kind of theatre, then what we are seeing is a long-running Broadway show in the Obama Administration giving way to an underground variety theatre troupe, sort of trying things out as they go along. As State Actors go, they're terrible talent. Even with Donald Trump's experience with all the camera hogging he's done in all his life, he's actually not really anywhere near a good a talent as Alec Baldwin who is crucifying him. Melissa McCarthy is far more talented than Sean Spicer, and as for Conway, well...

A picture tells a thousand words. She shot her own credibility and all she has as comparison is Beavis.

The last time the SNL crew got it so well was when Tina Fey did her Sarah Palin back in 2008, and again, what was at play was just what an amateur talent Palin was, next to a consummate professional camera talent as Fey. This doesn't mean politicians ought to go to acting school or that - god forbid - more actors should be drafted into politics. It's just that the capacity for well-executed satire to demolish the pretensions of a politician resides in the gap of camera talent. It also explains the fact that the reason Reagan can be revered by so many Republicans is that at the end of the day, Reagan too was a great camera talent despite his track record as a B-Movie actor. The phrase 'B-Movie Actor' probably disparaged and undersold his genuine strengths as camera talent.

It's a peculiar problem of American Democracy because Americans value public speaking so much and so many of their good orators put across dodgy arguments with great presence and presentation. The very nature of charismatic leadership lends it self to image-over-substance and so it is understandable that a reality TV star beats out a field of bad camera talent, as Donald Trump did. It also means the whole system is susceptible to a talent like Donald Trump to short circuit proper discourse and shoehorn himself in to the White House - which is the big irony in all of this stuff. Therefore, as hard as it is to believe, Trump's still okay talent, but he needs to straighten out his act a lot if he wants be taken seriously.

If one casts one's mind back to recent Australian politics, we can see a parallel in the rise of Kevin Rudd, who basically built a demographic support out of a TV audience which over-rode the political considerations. The fact that he was reasonably equipped to tackle the job of leader and then Prime Minister might have been a tangential aspect to his leadership. What really fuelled his rise to theta was in fact his stint as pundit on a morning breakfast show. Similarly, the rise of WTE Joe Hockey to Worst Treasure EVER was facilitated by the very same show appearing opposite Rudd.

That being said, the leader Trump resembles most in the Australian landscape is of course Tony Abbott. Both men stand firm on the side of denying climate change is real, and both men entered their office as the most unpopular incoming leader. It took two years before the Liberal Party felt compelled to remove their leader in TonyAbbott, so we'll see just how long the US Republicans can tolerate the irrational, temperamental, unstable leadership style of Donald Trump.

All this is to say, it's really interesting to find out what an Administration is made of when a satirical punch lands as hard as Melissa McCarthy's turn as Sean Spicer.

Quick Shots - 27/Nov/2016

Fidel Castro Passes Away

Fidel Castro is dead.

Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary leader who built a communist state on the doorstep of the United States and for five decades defied U.S. efforts to topple him, died on Friday, his younger brother announced to the nation. 

He was 90. 

A towering figure of the second half of the 20th Century,
Castro stayed true to his ideology beyond the collapse of Soviet communism, and retained an aura in parts of the world that had struggled against colonial rule and exploitation.

He had been in poor health since an intestinal ailment nearly killed him in 2006. He formally ceded power to his younger brother two years later. 

Wearing a green military uniform, Cuba's President Raul Castro appeared on state television to announce his brother's death. 

"At 10.29 at night, the chief commander of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz, died," he said, without giving a cause of death. 

"Ever onward, to victory," he said, using the slogan of the Cuban revolution.

Tributes poured in from world leaders including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Venezuela's socialist President Nicolas Maduro, who said "revolutionaries of the world must follow his legacy."

It wasn't exactly unexpected, the man was 90.

Somewhat In Defence Of Populism

The whole Trump winning the election situation has the world-knickers in a giant knot. It is as if the western world's left-leaning thinkers have been given a gigantic wedgie by the Bully-in-Chief. As a consequence, there's really not a whole lot of rational coherence going around, but it has to be said the charges that Trump is a populist and this is bad flies in the face of democracy.

Populism, by its very nature only works if the population get up behind the said candidate. A quick Google gives you this definition on 'popuist':

populistˈpɒpjʊlɪst/
nounnoun: populist; plural noun: populists1.
a member or adherent of a political party seeking to represent the interests of ordinary people.
a person who supports or seeks to appeal to the concerns of ordinary people.
"she is something of a populist—her views on immigration resemble those of the right-wing tabloid press"
adjectiveadjective: populist1.
relating to or characteristic of a populist or populists.
"populist tabloid newspapers"

First off, if you're in a democracy, it's really hard to mount an argument that says it is good for the democracy for the polity to represent the interests of ordinary people. Think about that for a moment. If you want to run a policy counter to the interests of the ordinary people, you are likely an elitist or a revolutionary. Either way, those impulses are anti-democratic.

There seems to be a double-think going on whereby democracy, which is rule by people of the polity is good, but populism which is representing the very same ordinary people is somehow bad. It seems to be an oddity of etymology. Democracy comes from Ancient Greece and especially Athens where they fought to end tyranny. The word Populism derives from Latin, that is to say ancient Rome where the Roman Senate sought to rule over the masses until the Triumvirate came along and neutered the Senate. Julius Caesar, Pompeii and Crassus were all populists - and so in the context of Roman history, populism led to the Imperium, and carries the historic connotation of being against the interests of a proper democracy because it overrode the Senate.

If we do carry with us the Roman legacy of the word populism, then we're effectively standing with the elite who deem themselves to know better than the ordinary man what is good for the state and polity. That is to say, us charging the other as populist underscores their argument that there is a "liberal elite". In a sense our use of the word 'populist' to describe the leader of the 'Deplorables' is the very essence of what gives strength to their accusations of elitism; that somehow we think we know better than they do, and so we look down upon them when they are not just the people, they are the demos that forms the democracy.

It's a bit like saying "we are the courageous, but they are the foolhardy" or "we are flexible, they are without moral fortitude". What is good in our modus operandi shouldn't really be painted as bad in the opponent. It's a bit tricky, but this tension between the words democracy and populism sums up the problematic of a Trump Presidency whereby a silver-spooned rich guy played up to the crowd of 'Deplorables' and won an election. We as the pinko liberals need to get a grip on this lurking vocabulary problem whereby one person's democracy (good) is another persons populism (bad).

Winning The Votes, Losing The Election

The last time this happened was bacon 2000 when Al Gore failed to beat George W. Bush. It was - as it turned out - a crucial election to have lost for the Democrats and by extension, pinko liberals and environmentalists and technocrats everywhere; this was because 'Dubya' led the  world into a series of wars with no discernible goalposts for victory. When you combine that event with Hillary Clinton losing this election even though she has 2 million more popular votes, you can understand why some people want to dismantle the electoral college system.

What's striking about the model of having electoral colleges is that it ends up weighing votes from different states differently. If you are from California, Texas, Florida or New York, your vote is vastly underweight next to a vote from North or South Dakota or for that matter Kentucky or Mississippi. One wonders if this is actually constitutional. This is partly how Hillary Clinton ends up with more votes and still fewer electoral colleges, but also discourages people from actually voting. There probably should be a class action to sue the United Staes of America for not allocating enough weight to votes in those four states.

The degree to which people opted not to vote is quite staggering. 46.9% of the electorate did not vote. This number dwarfs the 25% and 26% respectively of the sport Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton garnered.

For Australia, the other relevant problem is that the Australian Republican Movement wanted to go with this model of Republicanism to select a President. Back when John Howard allowed a referendum took take place, he successfully split the vote of the Republicans between the ARM's position and those who wanted a direct vote, thus stopping the move to a republic dead in its track. It was classic obfuscation whereby people not only had to vote for Republic, but had to overwhelmingly vote for one of two models, and so the entire republican cause suffered. You could say John Howard was  a wiley bastard, but equally it could be said the ARM were indeed the elitists of the variety that had anti-democratic notions which contributed to the ad result. At the time, they blamed the people who wanted a direct election, but really, they only had themselves to blame for being so inflexible.

All of that, is also on Malcolm Turnbull's head.

Quick Shots - 14/Nov/2016

Don't Blame The People Who Voted, Ethan

Ethan Coen of the Coen brothers fame penned a letter lambasting the people who voted for third party candidates.

1. Jill Stein voters: You helped elect a man who pledges that he will, in his first hundred days, cancel contributions to United Nations programs to fight climate change. If your vote for Ms. Stein did not end up advancing your green agenda, it did allow you to feel morally superior to all the compromising schmoes who voted for Hillary Clinton. And your feelings about your vote are more important than the consequences of your vote. So — thank you! 

2. Gary Johnson voters: Thank you, for similar reasons. You, too, may now reward yourselves with feelings of warm self-approval, and your libertarian agenda will now be advanced (or not) by someone who admires the governance of Vladimir Putin. And to Mr. Johnson himself: Not only can no one blame you for this outcome — we’re all free agents, man! — but you can stop looking for Aleppo.

Democracy's a funny thing. You can't really be getting angry at the people who voted for somebody else when they're actually participating in democracy just like you. The people who didn't bother are the people you ought to be angry at.

I know this whole Trump thing sucks, but only a tiny portion of people voted for these candidates. The problem is 46.9% of the registered electorate didn't bother to turn up. Really, if you're going to lambast anybody, they're the people who deserve a swift pen to the eyeball.

'The Expanse' - Season 1

I guess this is as hard a Science FictionTV series you could make without it costing the earth. It's a pretty cool series set in the near future where humanity is colonising the solar system and planetary governments are somewhat in conflict. None of it is unimaginable, and in most part things look nice and gritty,ratherthan white, plastic and NASA. It's long way from '2001: A Space Odyssey' or its stunted cousin 'Space: 1999'.

Without spoiling anything, it's kind of interesting how the interplanetary trips are portrayed, as well as what a space battle might look like. I'm inclined to think they set up a lot here that could be interesting to explore but it never even gets through half of its problem. I'm kind of glad there's another season coming, because Season 1 really only scratches the surface of the problem.

'Ascension'

This mini-series goes 6 episodes and literally goes nowhere. And then some important characters die and there isn't a cathartic moment. It ends like it's meant to continue on, but apparently this one didn't get renewed, so there will be no more.

The idea of a generation ship as a setting is good; combining it with the irony that they never left and they're sitting in a huge silo on earth is better. Yet, it never reaches the cathartic moment when the crew find out they've been living in this phoney environment for 50years.
It'a bit of  shame it won't continue to that logical conclusion. As it is leaves way too many loose ends which were obviously set up for a longer run.

Also, I know this came earlier than 'Stranger Things', but this business of an esper girl feels really tired. Right down to the bit where the supernatural powers are unleashed when she gets angry.

'ARQ'

Surprising cool little 'Groundhog Day' ripoff. Very suspenseful and well contained in a very small location. Very tight writing, except they wrote themselves into a corner. Some will enjoy, some will complain, that's the nature with these kinds stories. '22.11.63' comets mind as the more recent iteration apart from this one. Considering '22.11.63' was such an elaborate, grand 'Groundhog Day' derived concept, this one looks positively punchy by comparison.

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.

Trump Wins! (The World Loses!)

If The Cubs Can Win, Anybody Can Win This Year

And by anybody we mean even the much reviled Donald Trump.

Where do you start? I guess we start by the inordinate amount of uncertainty that went into the election day itself this year. Contrary to the two previous elections, FiveThirtyEight led by Nate Silver was incredibly mealymouthed with his prognostication. He cited just how many people were 'undecided', and that the distribution of Hillary Clinton's votes were too concentrated in urban areas, leaving the rural electorates wide open for speculation. This view stood in stark contrast to the definitive pronouncement he was able to make going into the two Obama elections, and so therein we could see ample ground for the kind of seismic shift we saw.

The way things turned out, all those 'undecided' people were in fact Trump supporters. They were just too embarrassed to tell the pollsters they were actually going to vote for Trump, and therein lies the clue to understanding what the hell just happened. The media collectively created an environment where it was shameful to support Donald Trump by stigmatising him with everything from racism through to sexual assaults (hey, count me in on the guilty side there), and they did such a good job of it, the people who agreed with key planks of his platform felt ashamed to say they supported a man who was allegedly all these terrible things.

Now, let's not get too carried away. There is nothing sensible about most of Trump's policy platform. But it was very direct and very simple; clearly simple enough that the lefthand side of Bell curve could understand. And just as it happened with the Brexit vote in the UK, all it took was enough from the right hand side of the Bell curve to defect to the stupid side for catastrophic electoral consequences to unfold. In that light, it's amazing how the media convinced itself Hillary Clinton was actually a good candidate.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, A Candidate From Hell

I was a Hillary Clinton backer back in 2008. Obama blew her away in June that year and the rest is history. One of the frustrating things about Hillary in that campaign was how she couldn't articulate a position that transcended bits of policy positions cobbled together. She might have been great with details, but she had no way to present the big picture. It stood in stark contrast, not only with Obama who came in with a big picture vision of hope, but also her husband an ex-President Bill who was marvellous at presenting a picture of where he wanted to go.

After that election, I browned off from the idea of Hillary Clinton as presidential candidate. This year's run was always on the cards since that defeat in July, but you never really saw that she became a better candidate in the intervening 8years. The public office record of Hillary Clinton is actually much shorter than her public profile. In 2002 she became a Senator for New York state, and ran for POTUS in 2008, after which she managed to get a seat at the cabinet table for four years. During which time she presided over rather hawkish events in Libya as well as Syria with a dose of shooting Osama bin Laden. So, really she had 10years as a public official, added on to which she was First lady for 8years, but that's really not a political office so much as a ceremonial seat. She was short on experience, on top of being a not very good salesperson for her policy position.

And yet, this is the person the Democratic National Committee chose to line up behind, and to the extent that they gerrymandered their own system so well (i.e. by hobbling Bernie Sanders' legitimate campaign), the DNC in fact set the whole world up for this marvellous bit of political failure we see today.

The DNC has a lot to answer for. Yet, it's clear Hillary was the Regressive Left's candidate from day one, and here we are, watching that project burned down to the ground. I'm just wondering if any of these Regressive Left types are going to take note, let alone understand the significance.

Because Bernie Would've Beaten Trump

This was one of the crucial things about the Bernie Sanders candidacy - as an outsider, he was in position to take a sledgehammer to the machine that made so many voters unhappy and outside. Of course, that would have meant the DNC would lose out on its vested interests as well, so they decided the safer candidate was Hillary Clinton. It overlooked the fact that the electorate was looking for a big change. Theft that the electorate was looking for a big change probably goes to the heart of what's wrong with the DNC. If you ask the DNC, they would tell you that the 8 years of Obama's presidency were an outright success. If Obama's presidency were such a success, why are there so many people unhappy and on the outside?

Obama's presidency was a massive attempt to shore up the status quo in the wake of the GFC. If you lost your life savings the GFC, and then never recovered it during the anaemic growth of the last8 years, then you might not be so positively disposed towards President Obama. Combine that with being called a racist any time you object to any of his policies, and maybe you start getting a picture of how vast swathes of white flyover-land might have decided they wanted a big change. As an encore to the Obama administration, the DNC managed to pick the candidate who promised in no uncertain terms that she was for more of the same.

As for Bernie, he was addressing the grassroots and they were responding. It is not hard to believe that those same people might have voted Trump to punish the DNC, or simply stayed home. The DNC will want to blame them, but they would be wrong. They had a candidate who could make inroads into the real plight of the American people, and they decided they wanted the pre-fab apparatchik. They've only got themselves to blame.

End Of The Clinton Dynastic Politics

I write the subheading, mostly in hope. Just as we don't need more Bushes, we don't need more Clintons running for high office. Age would suggest it would be unlikely that Hillary would run for office again. I guess Bill would want Chelsea to run for President one day, but that's exactly the problem, the dynastic politics begets the kind of corruption that hobbled Bernie Sanders' campaign, which in turn hobbled the Democratic Party. You don't get something for nothing in the world of politics.

The election machine of the Clintons would likely stay in place, and maybe somebody can ride upon it to challenge Trump next time; that's entirely conceivable, for it's hard to imagine the Clintons bowing out of politics completely, or for them to abandon the apparatus that so efficiently delivered Hillary to the doorstop o theWhite House this time. Yet in all honesty, we're sick of the dynastic politics and the American electorate is showing signs it wants to move on.

It's Not One Thing

There's this vein of critique doing the rounds that the Trump victory proves that America is one racist nation, or that it is one sexist nation. I would warn people from trying to compress the entire meaning of the Trump victory into a trite one-liner.

I confess I do find it a little amusing that the women who are shocked by this are saying this like this:

Many women in the empty Javits Center concluded that the country was sexist and rejected Clinton in a large part because she was a woman -- and was now headed backwards when it came to women’s rights.

“If Hillary Clinton were a man, tonight would be a much different night,” said Dana Nicolette, who manages a wellness center on Martha’s Vineyard. “Do people not know what autonomy over our own body means? They haven’t read history books? I have no words. I have no idea. I don’t know how as a woman, you could vote for that person who I don’t even want to say their name right now.”

Maybe the electorate simply don't buy any of your discourse? I know, it's hard to believe, but maybe the brand of academic feminism that places such an importance on Hillary being a woman is exactly the wrong kind of intellectual tool to understand what people didn't vote for her. My two cents would be to suggest that it's not that these people don't value these things, it's that they value other things more - and a vote for one or the other candidate is an incredibly un-nuanced tool to dissect thought.

Not even the KKK are voting Trump on just the race issue alone. They are likely voting on a whole range of issues. Similarly, there are non-racists voting for Trump and for that matter non-sexists, non-misogynists and non-capitalists even. The above kind of academic feminist discourse attempts to label-and-shame these people when it is exactly what foments their resentment towards the 'elite' who push Hillary Clinton their way.

Indeed, the label-them-and shame-them routine that has become the staple of the internet era radical feminism is in essence driving more people away from their candidate than it attracts them. The reductio ad absurdum of such electorate support is 100% of the women vote, but 0% of men vote. You'd still only get to a split result with 50% of the population; and frankly presidential politics has to be much bigger than that.

Equally it can be observed that if Trump's support truly were white, male, and old, he shouldn't have enough of a constituency to get to 25%. The fact that he got over 50% in enough electorates clearly demonstrates he wasn't a candidate that could be boxed into this kind of discourse. It's not like Trump is some Mens' Rights Activist either.

Making Trains Run On Time

Before Mussolini tagged up with Hitler, he had along run presiding over a growing Italian economy. The fascist playbook of state and corporate interests looking for synergies while marching a lot of people around actually did okay. Could have done better? Possibly - but there were real reasons why Fascism found adherents around the globe, as a competing ideology to communism. Of course, Mussolini's better moments have been summarised as "he made the trained run on time," so we should all take it with a grain of salt.

Now, I'm NOT a fan of fascism, but in President Donald Trump, we have to understand that his policies are fascist, and so we have to parse how this might play out. If we're lucky, he won't appoint himself dictator, and when he does leave office, he just might have presided over some economic growth. That wouldn't be something to sniff at; but to get to that point, he's going have to break some eggs in the classic fascist playbook. One imagines Wall Street is in for a surprise.

I'm also not being hopeful; instead I'm offering up the tiny possibility that Trump's time in power is not going to be a total and utter loss.

Having to go through Mussolini's track record to find some hope is a tough call, I admit.

Not A Circus, A Dumpster Fire

Can It End Now Please?

Well, the second debate came and went and it was divisive and crazy. I can't believe that there are people who thought Trump was a good idea when he was labelling Mexicans rapists, denigrating the disabled, accepting support from Ku Klux Klan members, and all the other crazy antics like the 3am tweets, abusing a Miss Universe contestant (a woman he once defended no less) - and then turning around to abandon Trump because he talks incredibly disrespectful-dirty shit when he thinks nobody's recording. It's actually hard to tell if that's worse than continuing to support the man in spite of all the crazy plus the leaked audio. At least sticking with the man shows loyalty. If they're abandoning him now after this recent scandal, then it's really hard to understand what exactly they stand for but that they draw the line at white women. Which is fine, but it's no endorsement of these people's character, because if one was willing to line up with the lunatic extremist and populist that is Trump while ignoring all the signs that he was a contemptuous human being full of bile, resentment, class entitlement, race entitlement and gender entitlement, it doesn't say much for one's judgement or character, does it?

That's all on the one side which is hellaciously awful.

But giving the Clintons a pass because Hillary isn't Bill is disingenuous; the Clinton Foundation and its inner workings would be problematic tif Bill and Chelsea were to remain part of it, and you'd think the American public would wonder out loud if having Bill back in the White House as a househusband on the loose was really what America wants. Is Bill a reformed philanderer or a better philanderer at covering his tracks? Not that it really matters where he sticks his genitals but last time he was in the White House he made a spectacular job of making it the world's business. If Hillary is in the White House, it stands to reason she brings with her the baggage of the first Clinton presidency.   Will the more serious questions like the dismantling of the Glass-Steagle Act be revisited? Can Hillary reinstate it without damaging Bill's legacy? Highly unlikely; and if not, then is this a decent candidate to be having? What about all those leaked memos over at Wikileaks confirming she' a hawk and wants to go boots and all into war over Syria? Is that even safe?

The only reason she looks reasonable is because her opponent is Donald Trump, Man of Abject Intellectual Misery. A pile of hot steaming shit on a plate next to a poisoned pizza can make the poisoned pizza look like the palatable option.

It is an utter failure on the part of the Republicans that they couldn't come up with single credible candidate to face Clinton this year. The irony is that her toughest opponent was Bernie Sanders in the primaries. All this speaks volumes to the credibility loss trickle-down economics and globalisation and all these other Reaganomic claptrap economics has suffered. It also underlines the intellectual failure of the neo-con framework for government and the fact that the Republicans could not repel the insurrection from the right bodes ill for its future. I guess the problem now is what is going to replace it. If the Tea Party was an early harbinger of the shitstorm to come, then maybe we shouldn't be hoping for the demise of the Republican Party.

I do pity the American electorate. Neither candidate is exactly enticing. One is a disaster, while the other proves the failure of American politics through her victory - which is pyrrhic to say the least. Yet by extension of her powers, American politics affects us all, and so it is that this tragedy belongs to us all.

'Snowden'

The Secret History Of Today

The Guardian had an advance screening of Oliver Stone's new film 'Snowden' so I got to tag along. I was hoping for somebody from the Production to turn up and talk about the film but the Q&A apparently turned out to be about whistleblowing and journalism. I didn't stay for it as I headed to a pub for a feed.

Of course protecting whistleblowers is important, but nobody really steps up to protect those people because they are in a sense, enemy of the state when they do that. The state, has long arms, even longer than the ones it's supposed to have by its own laws. And that's enough of a topic for Oliver Stone to be making this film.

As Oliver Stone films go, it's not as didactic as his other historically inspired films. It feels much like a docudrama, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance is a standout. Rhys Ifans turn as "O'Brien" was brought with accent issues. Nicolas Cage has an odd cameo-like role trying to restrain his Nicolas-Cage-Acting, and Zachary Quinto too is understated even by his standard of understated-ness.



What's Good About It

The film lays out who the guy was in the context of the US Security apparatus. We've been told by Barrack Obama he was a hacker. The Stone film begs to differ - and even subtracting from the myth-making for which Oliver Stone has a propensity - the man is not some low level hacker that glommed on to state secrets and absconded. No, he was implicitly and explicitly a careerist in the institutions of surveillance and espionage.

The film goes to great lengths to explain just how intrusive the government had gone through the use of its technology, and how enmeshed the military industrial complex has become in being able to prosecute a data wagon every individual on the planet. As an Oliver Stone film, it's relatively short on bombast and discursiveness, but the cerebral nature of the concern is undeniably Stone's work.

What's Bad About It

It's rather unclear about Snowden's own moral conversion to seeing the point of view where this kind of government surveillance was actually a public problem that had to be dealt with in the public sphere and debated. The motivation is weak - as far as cinematic and dramatic depictions are concerned. That being said, he might indeed have just had a eureka moment that made him do the whistle-blowing.

There's also a lot more to Ed Snowden getting to Russia on his way to Ecuador, which is glossed over with a montage towards the end. The film sort of starts telling that story but curtails that venture quickly and finishes off with a scene to do with Ed Snowden presenting his case in a public forum. The film was already long, but it could have done with the escape from Hong Kong.

What's Interesting About It

The rampant growth of the US Security apparatus came about in the wake of 9/11. It is often argued that the intelligence failure in preventing 9/11 led to this rampant growth, but the film argues that the terror threat is small potatoes next to the big issue of fighting a cyberspace war with China and Russia. Neither of those two states have any democratic shackles to put on their surveillance and espionage in cyberspace while American democracy affords itself restrictions, and thus you have agencies who lie to governments about what they do and how.

If this film were made prior to 9/11 describing an imaginary 2013, it would have been a science fiction-tinged action movie directed by the late great Tony Scott - probably starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman. Yeah Tony Scott sure had this story down even before 9/11. As things stand, Stone's film is a very sombre film after the fact, about just how much the US surveillance system has grown and how paranoia may indeed be the most appropriate response to the increased surveillance. Essentially it confirms all of the paranoia from 'Enemy the State'. The sombreness is to be expected given that when you find out all the fantastically wild paranoia is legitimate, your world grows that much colder.

It's Not A Conspiracy Theory If They're Really Watching You

Just how invasive is the surveillance? We've been told by Edward Snowden, just how much infiltration and malware distribution and cyberspace intrusion goes on with not only other nations' leaders but also just about any person on the planet with an internet connection. It's a strange feeling to come to the realisation that these organs have been listening in all the time to everything and have everything indexed ("Hey, including this blog! Somebody's reading this site! Hooray!") and the notion that the world is totally transparent to those who watch creeps you out.

This stuff used to be the provenance of conspiracy theorists. If you talked about stuff like this, people would joke and tell you to go get your tin foil hat. Well, let's look at that "tin foil hat" for a moment.

The reason "tin foil hats" is a thing is because the tin foil hat represents an attempt to place a Faraday cage around one's head to stop electromagnetic scanning of the brains and thus block agencies from scanning one's thoughts. This far fetched notion that a government might be interested in one's private thoughts is pretty much the crux of the issue, and there are no tin foil hats to help us from the prying government. The government, it turns out need not scan the inner workings of your brain, they merely need to parse the output of your mind - all of it - in order to figure out what you are thinking.

At this point in history, we had better accept that the surveillance state is fully in motion, fully in operation and minimally supervised with negligible oversight. It goes so deep and wide, a faraday cage won't protect you.

Oliver Stone's Getting Sad

There used to be an animal gusto to Stone's films. Whether it was the bombast of 'Platoon' and the slow motion as Sgt. Elias buys it in a hail of bullets, or Al Pacino's marvellous speech about life being about "a game of inches" in 'Any Given Sunday', which crescendoes like an emotional volcano. The best bits of Oliver Stone's films had a stink, a skunk musk of animal spirits. This film was surprisingly short of that kind of blood-guts-and-glory. It's probably a better film for not going to the emotional bombast but at the same time I just want to note just how conspicuous by its absence of bombast this film is, in the annals of Oliver Stone movies.

Maybe Oliver Stone was feeling very dry about the topic because the film has an emotional dry quality to it, even when it touches upon the passion Snowden has for his girlfriend, and the emotional turmoil that is central to Snowden's decision to go public with the secret. I don't know if a dried up desiccated Oliver Stone is all that fun in the movie house. I kind of missed the swagger and full-throated declarations. Maybe he's getting more circumspect. He may even be getting sad. It was weird because I felt sad for him, and he's a very successful film maker. He shouldn't need my sympathy, but watching it, I felt sympathetic for him.

News That's Fit To Punt - 05/Aug/2016

BOE Set Interest Rates At Lowest Rates Ever

We live in interesting times. If you see things that are once in a generation, then live long enough you might see it twice. There are people who presumably experienced the Great Depression firsthand, and are now experiencing the GFC audits aftermath. Yet, even they would never have witnessed the Bank of England settler interest rates this low.  That would be because it's the lowest 322 years.

The central bank's Monetary Policy Committee voted unanimously to lower its benchmark interest rate to 0.25 per cent, the lowest level in the bank's 322 years. The rate had been at 0.5 per cent since March 2009.

further this year, but he ruled out the possibility of negative interest rates. The committee's next meeting is set for November.

The bank also said that it would introduce a series of additional measures to support the economy, predicting that there would be little growth in the second half of this year and that economic growth would decline sharply next year compared with its earlier forecast for 2017.

What we're seeing, is the Bank of England moving to the point where it no longer has any means of adding stimulus to a moribund economy.  

The Bank of Japan has been doing this for over 20years. There's a whole generation of people in Japan who grew up under low interest rates and low inflation that they cannot imagine a world with 6%-8% interest rates and 5-9% inflation. You wouldn't be saying it too loud, but it appears the British economy has entered a similar twilight zone where no amount of interest rate cutting and stimulus spending can reflate the economy. 

It's a strange state of affairs, when you think about it. The central banks are virtually giving money away to banks so they can lend into capital investment. The place where most of the money ends up is in fixed assets, namely housing, and businesses just hoard cash instead. The consumer expects prices to drop in the future so they too hold on to cash; and together they form an environment where demand is low. The rest of the heartache and sorrow, about which you know, so I won't go into it today. I just thought it was worth noting that if you see an institution doing something it hasn't in 322years, you're seeing something very extraordinary; something they'll be talking about in a thousand years' time.

The question I want answered is how do we get to the other side of this malaise without wars and revolutions and killing each other? Because that's what usually happened in the past. 

About Those Jobs In America That Were Lost To Free Trade

I caught this during the week and it's an interesting little article because it shows we might be overstating the extent to which globalisation is eating up manufacturing jobs. If you go through to the Op Ed it is citing, you get this:

The number of manufacturing jobs in the United States has indeed been in a long decline since the late 1970s, but that disguises the true story of American manufacturing. Nostalgia for a bygone era blinds politicians and voters alike to the reality of a revitalized sector of the American economy that is thriving in a global market.

American factories and American workers are making a greater volume of stuff than ever — high-tech, high-value products that are competitive in markets around the world. In the last 20 years, which include enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, real, inflation-adjusted U.S. manufacturing output has increased by almost 40%. Annual value added by U.S. factories has reached a record $2.4 trillion.

What has changed in recent decades is what our factories produce. Americans today make fewer shirts, shoes, toys and tables than we did 30 years ago. Instead, America’s 21stcentury manufacturing sector is dominated by petroleum refining, pharmaceuticals, plastics, fabricated metals, machinery, computers and other electronics, motor vehicles and other transportation equipment, and aircraft and aerospace equipment. 

We produce more manufacturing value with fewer employees than in years past because today’s workers are so much more productive. They are better educated, equipped with more sophisticated capital machinery and turn out more valuable products than their parents’ generation. And as a result they are better paid, with total manufacturing payrolls rising during the last decade even as the number of workers declined.

The article in a nutshell says it's technological progress that has eaten the jobs, not trade. I'd imagine that this is true in Australia as well. There are good trade deals and bad ones (like theTPP they keep trying to pass), but in most part the economy has had rational players when it comes to manufacturing goods. 

I've had a number of discussions with people about this very phenomenon. It has been argued by empirical economists in the past that technological development does not kill jobs, it more than creates more jobs. That when the car came about, the horse-drawn buggy makers went out of business but lots of people found employment making cars; and so when the Australian automotive industry closes, those people will inevitably find employment in areas of higher technology. It makes sense that this has happened, but it seems unlikely that re-training auto-manufacturing workers into high tech workers of unspecified industries is the same as retraining buggy makers into auto-manufacturing workers. 

Similarly, the past performance is no predictor of future performance, and so we cannot simply subscribe to the view that it will happen again because it happened before. The implication being derived out of the empirical numbers, seem to be technological progress is happening in such as way as to cut the rate at which future jobs are created. We're now on the incline where each new development will likely destroy more job than they create, which is a new phenomenon.

The Rudd Revenge Is Just Beginning

Here we go!

"What I don't respect is, having pursued this campaign for United Nations secretary-general for such a long period of time in abso­lute good faith, to then see that good faith dishonoured and trust broken,"Mr Rudd told The Australian.

Arguing he had no interest in pursuing a "quixotic venture", Mr Rudd claimed his continued campaign to be the next secretary-general was based on assurances and underlying assumptions of support from both the Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop.

For his part, Mr Turnbull has again insisted that he told his predecessor that it was a decision for cabinet and warned him in May that the chances of his nomination going ahead were not good.

Oh, I dunno what to say. This Parliament hasn't even sat yet and they've managed to make a problem out of a trifle.

Being Where?

Maybe We Need To Talk About The Donald (Some More)

One of the more interesting narratives developing is the notion that Donald Trump isn't all there. It's hard to pick up all the strands of this story because a lot of people are now discussing it in earnest, but the best strand might be Martin Amis' take in Harper's.

Our psychological exam cries out for hard evidence. Now, the written word is always hard evidence; and I have before me “two books by Donald Trump.” That phrase is offered advisedly, particularly the preposition “by.” But we can be confident that Trump had something to do with their compilation: it very quickly emerges that he is one of nature’s “reluctant” micromanagers, having discovered (oh, long, long ago) that every single decision will hugely benefit from his omnicompetence. “By” is tentative, and even the epithet “books” is open to question, because Trump always calls his books his “bestsellers.” Anyway, almost three decades separate The Art of the Deal (1987) and Crippled America (2015). I suppose a careful study of the intervening bestsellers — among them Surviving at the Top (1990), How to Get Rich (2004), Think Like a Billionaire (2004), The Best Golf Advice I Ever Received (2005), and Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life (2007) — might have softened the blow. As it is, I can report that in the past thirty years Trump, both cognitively and humanly, has undergone an atrocious decline.

It's a delightful skewering of a pompous ass. A tremendous read, really, written by a man who knows how to demolish any character worth calling a character, and by Amis' estimation there's really not that much character to demolish.

Harper’s readers will now have to adjust themselves to a peculiar experiment with the declarative English sentence. Trump’s written sentences are not like his spoken sentences, nearly all of which have eight or nine things wrong with them. His written, or dictated, sentences, while grammatically stolid enough, attempt something cannier: very often indeed, they lack the ingredient known as content. In this company, “I am what I am” and “What I say is what I say” seem relatively rich. At first, you marvel at the people who think it worth saying — that what they say is what they say. But at least an attitude is being communicated, a subtext that reads, Take me for all in all. Incidentally, this attitude is exclusively male. You have heard Chris Christie say it; but can you hear a woman say, in confident self-extenuation, that she is what she is? 

Fascinating. And maybe there’s some legible sedimentary interest in “Donald Trump is for real.” Or maybe not. As well as being “for real,” Trump has “no problem telling it like it is.” To put it slightly differently, “I don’t think many people would disagree that I tell it like it is.” He has already claimed that he looks like a very nice guy, on page ix, but on page xiv he elaborates with “I’m a really nice guy,” and on page 89 he doubles down with “I’m a nice guy. I really am.” “I’m not afraid to say exactly what I believe.” “The fact is I give people what they need and deserve to hear . . . and that is The Truth.” See if you can find anything other than baseless assertion in this extract from the chapter “Our Infrastructure Is Crumbling”:

In Washington, D.C., I’m converting the Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue into one of the world’s greatest hotels. I got the building from the General Services Administration (GSA). Many people wanted to buy it, but the GSA wanted to make sure whoever they sold it to had the ability to turn it into something special, so they sold it to me. I got it for four reasons. Number one — we’re really good. Number two — we had a really great plan. Number three — we had a great financial statement. Number four — we’re EXCELLENT, not just very good, at fulfilling or even exceeding our agreements. The GSA, who are true professionals, saw that from the beginning. 

That’s the way the country should be run. 

Before we turn to the naked manifestations of advanced paranoia, we had better tick off the ascertainable planks in Trump’s national platform; they are not policies, quite, more a jumble of positions and intentions. On climate change: he would instantly desist from any preventive action, which is “just an expensive way of making tree-huggers feel good.” On immigration: he tries to soften the edges, but the nativist battle cry is intact and entire (“Construction of the wall needs to start as soon as possible. And Mexico has to pay for it”). On health care: he would stoke up interstate competition among insurers, and let the market sort it all out. On governmental style: he would restore “a sense of dignity to the White House,” bringing back the old “pomp and circumstance.” On religion: “In business, I don’t actively make decisions based on my religious beliefs,” he writes, almost comatose with insincerity, “but those beliefs are there — big-time.” On gun control: here, Trump quotes that famously controversial line about the necessity of “well regulated militias,” and then appends the one-word paragraph, “Period.”

And there in that bit Amis nails down the cognitive degeneration, very apparent in the texts separated by time. If Donald Trump wasn't all too polished as an intellect way back when, he's since degenerated considerably. He is having trouble slinging sentences together in speeches. Amis, as a professional at reading into text, certainly as any capable novelist is, can parse out the degeneration of cognitive function. 

It's an important idea because we tend towards seeing people in continuity and not as changeable personae. We assume that the people we know and meet maintain a consistent personality and persona over the vast time of a lifetime. I assume my friends are consistent with who they were five years ago, ten years ago, maybe even twenty or thirty. We assume that this consistency applies to people all around me. This is why it so hard for relatives to spot the onset of degenerative cognitive diseases like Alzheimers. 

Now, it turns out somebody in Salon floated the observation that the Donald might not be all there, back in April.

We have become so accustomed to these sorts of ramblings that we don’t really register them as anything more than standard nonsensical Trump-speak—a pattern of speech we have seen crop up across the GOP in recent years, most notably in Palin’s gibberish. But I urge you to re-read the exchange above and register the range of nonsense—the lack of basic grammar, the odd syntax, the abrupt shift in topic, the disconnect from reality, the paranoia, and the seeming inability to even grasp the question. 

As we scratch our heads and wonder how someone who says and does such things can still be a frontrunner, I want to throw out a concern. What if Trump isn’t “crazy” but is actually not well instead? To put it differently: what if his campaign isn’t a sign of a savvy politician channeling Tea Party political rhetoric and reality TV sound bites? What if it’s an example of someone who doesn’t have full command of his faculties? 

We’ve watched both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton come under fire for potentially being unfit medically to run, but have we wondered enough about Trump? There is far more media coverage about Clinton’s health at 68 than Trump’s at 69. 

There could be a good reason why. At times it can be very hard to distinguish between extreme right-wing politics and symptoms of dementia. The Alzheimer’s Association tells us that if two of the following core mental functions seem impaired then it is time to seek medical help: Memory, communication and language, ability to focus and pay attention, reasoning and judgment, visual perception. Alzheimer’s carries other symptoms besides memory loss including difficulty remembering newly learned information, disorientation, mood and behavior changes; deepening confusion about events, time and place; unfounded suspicions about family, friends and professional caregivers; more serious memory loss and behavior changes. 

Scholars of the recent trends in GOP politics point to some of the very same tendencies happening across the extreme right-wing faction of the party. (See thisand this for example.) 

Much to the chagrin of the reasonable conservatives who wonder what has happened to their party, it is now often difficult to distinguish Republican rhetoric from the ravings of someone suffering from diminished mental capacity.

She has a point. In Donald Trump, we might be having the closest candidate to Chauncey Gardner.

UPDATE:
Wait, there's more! Moments after I put out the post, this one came in:

Trump’s shortage of empathy can be seen clearly by his stances on topics like immigration. Instead of recognizing that the data shows that most Mexican immigrants are not violent, but instead people simply looking for a place where actual opportunity exists, with a broad brush he claims that they are “criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” In a similar vein, Trump has vowed to ban all Muslims from entering the country should he be elected. It appears that his lack of empathy has distorted his mind’s ability to grasp the fact that the refugees he speaks of are actually seeking safety from the same murderous maniacs that he wants to keep out. Perhaps if Trump had relatives in countries like Syria and Iraq, he might understand the constant fear that most live under, and in turn become more willing to welcome them with open arms rather than leaving them to be slaughtered. 

But a lack of empathy is just one part of narcissistic personality disorder. Just beneath the surface layer of overwhelming arrogance lies a delicate self-esteem that is easily injured by any form of criticism. We have all seen Trump unjustifiably lash out at a number of people with harsh and often extremely odd personal attacks. When he thought he had been treated unfairly by Fox News host and Republican debate moderator Megyn Kelly, he responded by calling her a “bimbo” and later saying that she had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” In response to the strange, misogynistic comments Kelly said that she “may have overestimated his anger management skills.” If the news host would have pegged him as a bona fide narcissist from the beginning she might have expected such shamelessly flagrant behavior.

He's rather unwell. He needs care. Not the president's chair.

Midnight In The Garden of Democracy And Failure

Sign O' The Times

It didn't take long...

Hey, it's a new day. 

The obits are coming in for Bernie Sanders' campaign. This one here is worth the read, even though it hails from Rolling Stone.

Democratic voters tried to express these frustrations through the Sanders campaign, but the party leaders have been and probably will continue to be too dense to listen. Instead, they'll convince themselves that, as Hohmann's Post article put it, Hillary's latest victories mean any "pressure" they might have felt to change has now been "ameliorated." 

The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide. 

This is especially the case now that the Republican Party has collapsed under the weight of its own nativist lunacy. It's exactly the moment when the Democrats should feel free to become a real party of ordinary working people.
But they won't do that, because they don't see what just happened this year as a message rising up from millions of voters. 

Politicians are so used to viewing the electorate as a giant thing to be manipulated that no matter what happens at the ballot, they usually can only focus on the Washington-based characters they perceive to be pulling the strings. Through this lens, the uprising among Democratic voters this year wasn't an organic expression of mass disgust, but wholly the fault of Bernie Sanders, who within the Beltway is viewed as an oddball amateur and radical who jumped the line. 

Nobody saw his campaign as an honest effort to restore power to voters, because nobody in the capital even knows what that is. In the rules of palace intrigue, Sanders only made sense as a kind of self-centered huckster who made a failed play for power. And the narrative will be that with him out of the picture, the crisis is over. No person, no problem.

Yep, it'll go by like it was on skates. The Democrats don't want to deal with this because dealing with it  will turn the party inside out an if you're on the inside, it's always better to stay there. The way it is with most institutions is that the institutional culture is preserved at the expense of the mission statement. The Democratic Party is clearly exhibiting signs of a thoroughly ossified institution. It is going hand in hand with the Republicans who are also ossified to the point of immobility, and so cannot catch out a rogue insurgent candidate like Donald Trump. American democracy is deeply in the poo.

We're not exactly too behind in Australia if this year's Federal election is anything to go by.

Julia, Hillary, And The Things That Maybe Don't Matter Like Legitimacy

I mentioned Hillary's candidacy in relationship to Julia Gillard's prime ministership yesterday and had some more thoughts about all this. I'll be honest, I didn't think Julia Gillard really established her  legitimacy with the electorate as evinced by the hung parliament of 2010- very much like how Malcolm Turnbull has failed to establish legitimacy for his government.

Generally speaking politicians and legitimacy is a funny thing. It's even harder in a democracy where leaders come to power on vote and not by the sword. Consider Machiavelli's take on legitimacy.


So who comes to mind as not having solved the legitimacy problem in a democracy? Kristina Keneally as NSW Premier was a fraught figure because she too always had the problem of legitimacy in the eyes of the public. I've been told by those who worked the Department of the Premier how on top of her brief Keneally was and how sharp she was in negotiations with Kevin Rudd (something which Kevin Rudd himself conceded), and even then I never warmed to the premier who got the nod on the back of failed Premiers and backroom deals. But then again Nathan Rees and Morris Iemma weren't exactly people who sparkled with legitimacy. That entire musical-Premier-chairs phase of the NSW Labor Government was strange and demented, infested as it was with Morbid Obeidity to boot. Yes Eddie Obeid had a marvellous way of subtracting from the sum total of legitimacy right across the board.

In that light, and while we're talking about female politicians  I do want to say I liked Anna Bligh a lot. I wish she'd run for Federal office. I liked Joan Kirner - I think she got a raw deal. And going back a fair way, I liked Janine Haines; I was indifferent to Dr. Carmen Lawrence (I sure didn't dislike her but the Easton Affair was troubling); and well, Cheryl Kernot was great until she jumped ship to the ALP - again legitimacy was an issue there. The Anna Bligh thing was interesting because at the hight of the Brisbane flood waters, Anna Bligh looked so much more the states-person than the visiting PM, Julia Gillard. In fact it made Julia Gillard look so bad, it probably wasn't worth her while standing next to Bligh in the big press conference, which was surprising.

The point is, regardless of gender, it's important to look like you got your office fair and square and in the right way. You could be an utter dickhead like Campbell Newman, but at least you have to hand it to the dickhead that he stormed to office on an agenda that was voted in in a landslide. He was eminently despicable, but while he was in office, legitimacy wasn't an issue. It's deeply ironic, isn't it?

Which brings me back to Hillary Clinton who basically has a legitimacy issue not unlike the one Julia Gillard carried through her tenure as PM. Now that it's out in the open that the DNC manipulated the system to Hillary's advantage and did its best to bury Bernie Sanders, she's never going to escape the lack of legitimacy this 'win' gives her. Now, legitimacy is one of those iffy things where it's hard to pin it to a person or an office, but when the role is head of government, you sort of need that thing to beat over the heads of your opponents both domestic and foreign. Indeed, Barack Obama does an excellent job of wielding his legitimacy to beat up on the GOP.

Things worked out the way they did because clearly the Clintons own the Democratic Party and the party owes the Clintons too much not to give Hillary the nod. To that end it burnt its own constituents as well as the youth vote, condescending and patronising them as they disenfranchised them. Legitimacy is in short supply now. She might be the world's best candidate, but we've seen what happens to a head of government who struggles to establish legitimacy. To that end, it's just like the Rolling Stone article linked above says, the Democrats have poisoned themselves, just to deliver the nomination to Hillary Clinton. We'll see if the poison ends up killing them.

Wall Street And The Dems

Wall Street told Hillary Clinton that she couldn't pick Elizabeth Warren as her running mate.

NEW YORK — Big Wall Street donors have a message for Hillary Clinton: Keep Elizabeth Warren off the ticket or risk losing millions of dollars in contributions.
In a dozen interviews, major Democratic donors in the financial services industry said they saw little chance that Clinton would pick the liberal firebrand as her vice presidential nominee. These donors despise Warren’s attacks on the financial industry. 

But they also think her selection would be damaging to the economy. And they warned that if Clinton surprises them and taps Warren, big donations from the industry could vanish. 

“If Clinton picked Warren, her whole base on Wall Street would leave her,” said one top Democratic donor who has helped raise millions for Clinton. “They would literally just say, ‘We have no qualms with you moving left, we understand all the things you’ve had to do because of Bernie Sanders, but if you are going there with Warren, we just can’t trust you, you’ve killed it.’” 

Most big donors don’t want Warren on the ticket because she is the most accomplished anti-Wall Street populist in the Democratic Party. But many also think her presence would drive a potential Clinton administration too far to the left, poison relations with the private sector from the start and ultimately be damaging to the economy.

And so it came to pass that Elizabeth Warren wasn't the VP nominee and running partner to Hillary Clinton. I'm sure it's some kind of pragmatism but this is the very kind of deal that browns off people  from the Clintons. Then some person tells you it's because you're a misogynist. How can you be a misogynist if you want a woman to be a VP to go with the female POTUS candidate?! 

More importantly, the fact that Hillary couldn't run it past Wall Street tells you just how much Wall Street has it all over the politicians. Wall Street got TARP and the bail out in 2008 because it was Wall Street. Did you get a bail out? No? See what I mean? Jokes aside, all this proves that there's too much money in US politics as well as outline the unlikelihood of Bernie anders getting up as the nominee. If people really want the political revolution, we're all going have to dig in a lot harder to dig out these banksters.

View From The Couch - 28/Jul/2016

What Need For Terror Laws?

Since 9/11, all the western societies have seen a steady erosion of privacy and rights as governments have sought more powers to contain the terror threat. Each time a bill has come up, more rights have been curtailed and more powers given to the security forces of the western world. At this juncture, it is worth asking if these powers are actually helping at all.

Consider Man Monis, our very own terrorist dickhead. The AFP had him on their watchlist and he fell off. Then he acquired a gun and did what he did at the Lindt Cafe in Martin Place, Sydney. The argy-bargy to do with the Lindt Cafe Siege has been going for a number of weeks now, and nobody exactly has explained how Monis slipped off the AFP's watch list and nobody has reported just how Monis got hold of a weapon.

This is notable because since 2007's APEC in Sydney, there have been APEC Anti-Terror laws in place without a sunset clause. We're all still in danger of being arrested without charge on alleged suspicions of terror links and being refused a lawyer - because hey, we don't have Miranda Rights in this country, and that's all okay by our state governments as well as Federal Government.

And yet with all this great power (and as follows Spiderman "comes great responsibility"), the AFP completely missed Monis. The NSW police had no chance as it went around looking for drugs at festivals rather then round up Monis with its great powers.

The same goes for the bastard who shot up the gay bar in Orlando, the truck driving bastard in Nice, the neck-slitting bastard in Normandy, and all the bastards who participate in the big Paris terror attack. Each and every one of them it turned out was on the radar of the authorities and somehow slipped the net togged through and do their dastardly bastardly deeds.

So today, we must ask, what good are these powers given to our police? What good is us citizenry giving up our privacy and rights to these governments whose security apparatuses still fail to stop these bastards anyway? Ed Snowden tells us the governments of the world are listening into everything we say on the phone, everything we write on emails an so on. With all this omniscience, you'd think they'd be doing a better job of stopping these bastards.

There's even a school of thought out there that they want these attacks to happen so they can justify their vast power and surveillance budgets. It's looking more believable by the day as more anymore terror attacks happen, only be revealed the perp was on some watch list but dropped out.

I say, we need a drastic re-think of these terror laws because they seem to be doing sweet fuck all. really. The bastards keep getting through. I am not fearful, I am angry at the rights of mine they are curtailing.

Privatisation Killed The Economic Growth

Pleiades alerted me to this one. The ACCC thinks privatisation kills economic growth.

Selling public assets has created unregulated monopolies that hurt productivity and damage the economy, according to Australia's consumer and competition tsar, who says he is on the verge of becoming a privatisation opponent.  

In a blistering attack on decades of common government practice, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims said the sale of ports and electricity infrastructure and the opening of vocational education to private companies had caused him and the public to lose faith in privatisation and deregulation.

"I've been a very strong advocate of privatisation for probably 30 years; I believe it enhances economic efficiency," Mr Sims told the Melbourne Economic Forum on Tuesday.

"I'm now almost at the point of opposing privatisation because it's been done to boost proceeds, it's been done to boost asset sales and I think it's severely damaging our economy." 

Mr Sims said privatising ports, including Port Botany and Port Kembla in NSW, which were privatised together, and the Port of Melbourne, which came with conditions restricting competition from other ports, were examples where monopolies had been created without suitable regulation to control how much they could then charge users.

"Of course you get these lovely headlines in the Financial Review saying 'Gosh, what a successful sale, look at the multiple they achieved'," Mr Sims said.
"Well of course they bloody well did: the owners factored in very large price rises because there's no regulation on how they set the price of a monopoly. How dopey is that?"

Nice to see it told straight out for once. The question is will anybody listen? Or is the greed factor just too good to let go?

No Country For Old Warhorses

Here's something on Kim Carr.

In 2006 Carr cultivated an alliance between Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, convincing them they should join forces to depose Beazley. 

In government he supported Gillard's leadership challenge before later becoming a leading agitator for Rudd. 

"Shorten is the first leader he hasn't ratted on," a colleague says.
Gillard dumped Carr from cabinet after many colleagues concluded he had been leaking damaging stories to the media. Carr, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has denied this charge. 

Carr's rivalry with Albanese deepened during his leadership battle with Shorten in 2013. After winning the vote among Labor members, Albanese would have become leader if left-wing MPs locked in behind him. 

A furious Albanese has told colleagues Carr promised him his support only to vote for Shorten and encourage his allies to do the same. Carr denies reneging on any deal.
Laurie Ferguson, a left-wing Labor MP who retired at at this election, says the move against Carr was clear "payback" from Albanese and his allies.

It's probably not right to say this from a clinical perspective because I'm not qualified (educated yes, but not qualified) and Kim Carr is not my patient but I'll say it anyway. That prone-to-dramas thing is a dead giveaway for a personality disorder. It is conceivable that the schizo-genic nature of the ALP in the past two decades could be a function of this guy being an influence broker.

Speaking of this kind of thing...

No Country For Old Female Politicians

Okay, a bit distasteful, but only because it's in reference to the sexism referred to here.

At the Republican Convention last week, attendees had the chance to wear their sexist derision for Hillary Clinton with pride. Just outside, hawkers sold T-shirts emblazoned with "Trump vs Tramp", bumper stickers proclaiming "Life's a bitch, don't vote for one," and the badges printed with "KFC Hillary Special: 2 fat thighs, 2 small breasts, one left wing". 

If that last one sounds familiar, it should. Almost exactly the same "joke" was made at the expense of Australia's first female prime minister in a menu at a fundraiser for Liberal MP Mal Brough: "Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail - Small Breasts, Huge Thighs & A Big Red Box".

That 'menu incident' was about as low as 'politics' in this country got. It's one thing to dislike the Prime Minster because you disagreed with her position on policy. It's another thing to go ad hominem and liken people to poultry as a sex joke - that's all kinds of wrong and it was about as much disrespect as one could take.  And let's not forget, the Opposition that presided over that kind of sexism is now our government to this day.

Anyway, Julia Gillard is backing Hillary Clinton. No surprises there. To give Ms Gillard her due, I should quote this bit, which is important and something I agree with greatly. More people should have called out the rank sexism for what it was. Not doing so robbed the moral authority from the genuine criticism of her office.

No one called for my execution by firing squad, as a supporter of Donald Trump did for Mrs. Clinton, but a radio talk-show host did say I should be put in a bag and dropped in the sea. Witches can’t be drowned, I cynically joked. 

I have often reflected how powerful it would have been if, at that moment, a male business leader, especially one who opposed my policies, said, “I may not support the prime minister politically, but Australia must not conduct its democratic debates this way.” 

Unfortunately, that never happened. 

To my dismay, some of the young women who chat with me are not asking for political insights. Instead, they tell me that, having seen how I was treated, they have decided politics is too punishing for them. I always try to talk them out of this position. Sometimes I succeed. 

In 2016, I hope there are many brave voices naming and shaming any sexism in the presidential contest. The next generation of potential female leaders is watching.

I guess in Hillary's case, she didn't exactly knife Obama to get into her current spot, but she did do her damnedest to hobble Bernie Sanders' campaign, and with it shred the credibility of the Democratic Party. That would definitely get Hillary Clinton into the same hot-seat as Julia Gillard's time in office, which is kind of where she is in Philly right now. They have more than one thing in common.

No Country For Old Perverts

Cardinal George Pell is getting investigated after all.

The ABC's 7.30 program has revealed that Taskforce Sano has been examining allegations from complainants in Ballarat, Torquay and Melbourne for more than a year, and is looking into incidents that allegedly happened during Cardinal Pell's time as Archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s. 

The program has obtained eight police statements from complainants, witnesses and family members who are helping the taskforce with its investigation. The allegations were repeated on 7.30 on Wednesday night, and include: 

• that Cardinal Pell would touch the genitals of children while swimming in a public pool in Ballarat in the late '70s
• that he was naked in the change rooms on a regular basis in front of children
• that he exposed himself to three young children in another change room, at the Torquay Surf Club in 1986 or 1987.

Cardinal Pell vehemently denied the allegations, with his office saying he "emphatically and unequivocally rejects any allegations of sexual abuse against him".

This is going to get good.

View From The Couch - 28/Jul/2016

What Need For Terror Laws?

Since 9/11, all the western societies have seen a steady erosion of privacy and rights as governments have sought more powers to contain the terror threat. Each time a bill has come up, more rights have been curtailed and more powers given to the security forces of the western world. At this juncture, it is worth asking if these powers are actually helping at all.

Consider Man Monis, our very own terrorist dickhead. The AFP had him on their watchlist and he fell off. Then he acquired a gun and did what he did at the Lindt Cafe in Martin Place, Sydney. The argy-bargy to do with the Lindt Cafe Siege has been going for a number of weeks now, and nobody exactly has explained how Monis slipped off the AFP's watch list and nobody has reported just how Monis got hold of a weapon.

This is notable because since 2007's APEC in Sydney, there have been APEC Anti-Terror laws in place without a sunset clause. We're all still in danger of being arrested without charge on alleged suspicions of terror links and being refused a lawyer - because hey, we don't have Miranda Rights in this country, and that's all okay by our state governments as well as Federal Government.

And yet with all this great power (and as follows Spiderman "comes great responsibility"), the AFP completely missed Monis. The NSW police had no chance as it went around looking for drugs at festivals rather then round up Monis with its great powers.

The same goes for the bastard who shot up the gay bar in Orlando, the truck driving bastard in Nice, the neck-slitting bastard in Normandy, and all the bastards who participate in the big Paris terror attack. Each and every one of them it turned out was on the radar of the authorities and somehow slipped the net togged through and do their dastardly bastardly deeds.

So today, we must ask, what good are these powers given to our police? What good is us citizenry giving up our privacy and rights to these governments whose security apparatuses still fail to stop these bastards anyway? Ed Snowden tells us the governments of the world are listening into everything we say on the phone, everything we write on emails an so on. With all this omniscience, you'd think they'd be doing a better job of stopping these bastards.

There's even a school of thought out there that they want these attacks to happen so they can justify their vast power and surveillance budgets. It's looking more believable by the day as more anymore terror attacks happen, only be revealed the perp was on some watch list but dropped out.

I say, we need a drastic re-think of these terror laws because they seem to be doing sweet fuck all. really. The bastards keep getting through. I am not fearful, I am angry at the rights of mine they are curtailing.

Privatisation Killed The Economic Growth

Pleiades alerted me to this one. The ACCC thinks privatisation kills economic growth.

Selling public assets has created unregulated monopolies that hurt productivity and damage the economy, according to Australia's consumer and competition tsar, who says he is on the verge of becoming a privatisation opponent.  

In a blistering attack on decades of common government practice, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims said the sale of ports and electricity infrastructure and the opening of vocational education to private companies had caused him and the public to lose faith in privatisation and deregulation.

"I've been a very strong advocate of privatisation for probably 30 years; I believe it enhances economic efficiency," Mr Sims told the Melbourne Economic Forum on Tuesday.

"I'm now almost at the point of opposing privatisation because it's been done to boost proceeds, it's been done to boost asset sales and I think it's severely damaging our economy." 

Mr Sims said privatising ports, including Port Botany and Port Kembla in NSW, which were privatised together, and the Port of Melbourne, which came with conditions restricting competition from other ports, were examples where monopolies had been created without suitable regulation to control how much they could then charge users.

"Of course you get these lovely headlines in the Financial Review saying 'Gosh, what a successful sale, look at the multiple they achieved'," Mr Sims said.
"Well of course they bloody well did: the owners factored in very large price rises because there's no regulation on how they set the price of a monopoly. How dopey is that?"

Nice to see it told straight out for once. The question is will anybody listen? Or is the greed factor just too good to let go?

No Country For Old Warhorses

Here's something on Kim Carr.

In 2006 Carr cultivated an alliance between Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, convincing them they should join forces to depose Beazley. 

In government he supported Gillard's leadership challenge before later becoming a leading agitator for Rudd. 

"Shorten is the first leader he hasn't ratted on," a colleague says.
Gillard dumped Carr from cabinet after many colleagues concluded he had been leaking damaging stories to the media. Carr, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has denied this charge. 

Carr's rivalry with Albanese deepened during his leadership battle with Shorten in 2013. After winning the vote among Labor members, Albanese would have become leader if left-wing MPs locked in behind him. 

A furious Albanese has told colleagues Carr promised him his support only to vote for Shorten and encourage his allies to do the same. Carr denies reneging on any deal.
Laurie Ferguson, a left-wing Labor MP who retired at at this election, says the move against Carr was clear "payback" from Albanese and his allies.

It's probably not right to say this from a clinical perspective because I'm not qualified (educated yes, but not qualified) and Kim Carr is not my patient but I'll say it anyway. That prone-to-dramas thing is a dead giveaway for a personality disorder. It is conceivable that the schizo-genic nature of the ALP in the past two decades could be a function of this guy being an influence broker.

Speaking of this kind of thing...

No Country For Old Female Politicians

Okay, a bit distasteful, but only because it's in reference to the sexism referred to here.

At the Republican Convention last week, attendees had the chance to wear their sexist derision for Hillary Clinton with pride. Just outside, hawkers sold T-shirts emblazoned with "Trump vs Tramp", bumper stickers proclaiming "Life's a bitch, don't vote for one," and the badges printed with "KFC Hillary Special: 2 fat thighs, 2 small breasts, one left wing". 

If that last one sounds familiar, it should. Almost exactly the same "joke" was made at the expense of Australia's first female prime minister in a menu at a fundraiser for Liberal MP Mal Brough: "Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail - Small Breasts, Huge Thighs & A Big Red Box".

That 'menu incident' was about as low as 'politics' in this country got. It's one thing to dislike the Prime Minster because you disagreed with her position on policy. It's another thing to go ad hominem and liken people to poultry as a sex joke - that's all kinds of wrong and it was about as much disrespect as one could take.  And let's not forget, the Opposition that presided over that kind of sexism is now our government to this day.

Anyway, Julia Gillard is backing Hillary Clinton. No surprises there. To give Ms Gillard her due, I should quote this bit, which is important and something I agree with greatly. More people should have called out the rank sexism for what it was. Not doing so robbed the moral authority from the genuine criticism of her office.

No one called for my execution by firing squad, as a supporter of Donald Trump did for Mrs. Clinton, but a radio talk-show host did say I should be put in a bag and dropped in the sea. Witches can’t be drowned, I cynically joked. 

I have often reflected how powerful it would have been if, at that moment, a male business leader, especially one who opposed my policies, said, “I may not support the prime minister politically, but Australia must not conduct its democratic debates this way.” 

Unfortunately, that never happened. 

To my dismay, some of the young women who chat with me are not asking for political insights. Instead, they tell me that, having seen how I was treated, they have decided politics is too punishing for them. I always try to talk them out of this position. Sometimes I succeed. 

In 2016, I hope there are many brave voices naming and shaming any sexism in the presidential contest. The next generation of potential female leaders is watching.

I guess in Hillary's case, she didn't exactly knife Obama to get into her current spot, but she did do her damnedest to hobble Bernie Sanders' campaign, and with it shred the credibility of the Democratic Party. That would definitely get Hillary Clinton into the same hot-seat as Julia Gillard's time in office, which is kind of where she is in Philly right now. They have more than one thing in common.

No Country For Old Perverts

Cardinal George Pell is getting investigated after all.

The ABC's 7.30 program has revealed that Taskforce Sano has been examining allegations from complainants in Ballarat, Torquay and Melbourne for more than a year, and is looking into incidents that allegedly happened during Cardinal Pell's time as Archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s. 

The program has obtained eight police statements from complainants, witnesses and family members who are helping the taskforce with its investigation. The allegations were repeated on 7.30 on Wednesday night, and include: 

• that Cardinal Pell would touch the genitals of children while swimming in a public pool in Ballarat in the late '70s
• that he was naked in the change rooms on a regular basis in front of children
• that he exposed himself to three young children in another change room, at the Torquay Surf Club in 1986 or 1987.

Cardinal Pell vehemently denied the allegations, with his office saying he "emphatically and unequivocally rejects any allegations of sexual abuse against him".

This is going to get good.