People who wonder about the contents of the defunct website Vote.net may never be able to see any of it. Except for the three items I highlighted last week.
Why those three? There was a stochastic element to the rescue operation, I grant you. But the three I selected might well go into a time capsule entitled "things politically conscious people were talking about in the spring of 2022." Let us go over why.
My "Science" item was not about science, in any purist sense. Nor was it about technology news, because the tech developments that provide some grounding for it are old "news" indeed. It was about the global competitive structure for one particular well-established technology. Greater China (a phrase one uses to combine Taiwan with the PRC) dominates the world of semiconductor manufacture.
Taiwan alone, a smallish island, manufactured 22.4% of chips created anywhere in 2020. The People's Republic, that huge dragon with a curved belly near Taiwan, accounts for another 20%.
The United States has a vital interest here. Our most important industries are completely dependent on the continued flow of semiconductors, and it would not be wise to allow too much power over that flow to fall into the hands of Beijing. Naturally, then, the U.S. has an interest in Taiwan's continued de facto independence.
My Taiwan piece for Vote.net back in April may be said to have foreshadowed the determined decision of the Speaker of the House to visit that country, of more recent vintage.
Also in April I wrote a Health piece on Australia and its national commitment to universal access to health care. There is a political party in Australia that echoes in some ways the views we know of in the U.S. as distinctively Trump's. They can't really say "build a wall," because they have no land borders. But they do have an intense "stop the boats" sentiment.
Yet even THAT party must affirm that it has been defamed unjustly by anyone who even hints that they want to dial back on the universal coverage commitment. The lesson (unexpressed): once a nation makes such a commitment, it is very difficult to reverse it. That should be a reason for caution about embracing it.
The third item that I saved last week from the wreck of Vote.net was the expressly political one on Macron's re-election as President of France. In my mind that event was and still is intimately connected with the role of the Republic of France in holding together a broad global alliance against Russia in Ukraine.
I would have assumed, until last week, that if Donald Trump in his exile in Mar-a-Lago were closely following Franch political matters, his interest would have been focused on that point, too, although in his case I would presume sympathy for Putin, one of those "strong men" for whom his knees go weak, would have him routing for LePen.
But no ... last week we discovered the real reason he closely followed material about the President of France. Our intelligence agencies apparently have information on Macron's sex life, and Trump is nothing if not prurient.
At any rate, you may now have a better idea why I think each of those three items is a point for a pointillist painting of our time.
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