This looks like a mess. Peruvian police raids property of former electoral chief amid irregularities in elections So ... Peru has a two-tiered system of electing a President. In the first round, there is a free-for-all, with dozens of candidates. If no one gets 50% + 1, the two top vote getters from that round run against each other in the second. Much like California's Governor's race. The first round took place on April 12th. Various snafus delayed some of the voting until the next day and snafus in the counting since then have been legion. It is clear as I wrote this that the largest vote total was the one that went to the daughter of a former President, that is to Alberto Fujimori's girl, Keiko Fujimori. It is not at all clear who will be running against her. But the cliffhanger or "who came in second" isn't what is generating the headlines in Peru right now. Nor are they generated by the complicated nature of the Fujimori family's political lega...
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In 2020, JD Vance appeared on a podcast hosted by Eric Weinstein. Here Vance uttered the "yes" heard round the political world. The two were discussing grandparents. (And yes, we can all agree that the relationship between grandparents and their offspring's offspring can be a wonderful one.) But Weinstein wasn't going to let the matter rest there. He said that raising grandchildren is "the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female." Vance's response to THAT? A single word. "Yes." Indeed (for context), the whole Weinstein sentence, is "That [child rearing assistance] is the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female in theory." One thing I find fascinating about that wording is that Vance actually interrupted the sentence, to say "yes," BEFORE the host got out the phrase "in theory". Thus he suggests that for him anyway what he is agreeing with is not just a theory but a settled fact. Hmmmm. So for those p...
Brotherhood is a Showtime series about life in Providence, Rhode Island. It turns out to be somewhere between The Sopranos and The Wire, with perhaps a little bit of Breaking Bad thrown in. If you enjoyed any or all of those three series, you might also like this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotherhood_(American_TV_series) By the way, for those of you who make have notices that I didn't have a blog post on the Super Bowl this year: you're right. I decided there is no way I can add value to any casual TV viewer's existing understanding of the event this year. Glad you got by without me.
The graves are now full of the coffins of campaigns for the Democratic nomintion for POTUS in 2020 that have bitten the dust for a number of reasons. One of the most fascinating of the departed is the campaign of Marianne Williamson, a New Agey spiritualist writer and lecturer whose interest in electoral politics took everyone by surprise when she announced it, almost a year ago now. On January 28, 2019 she walked onto a stage in Beverly Hills, California to announce her candidacy and its goal, to: "engage voters in a more meaningful conversation about America, about our history, about how each of us fit into it, and how to create sustainable future." You might fairly judge from that language that it was never entirely clear that the office of the President was part of her goal. Williamson enlivened the first couple of debates, and her presence has been missed from the subsequent ones. She was the very rare intersection of two Venn diagram circles -- one might ...
Just to practice concision. 1) In anthropology, Spinoza emphasized what we are not. We are not a "kingdom within the kingdom." We are a subject of nature, which is the only kingdom. 2) In metaphysics, Spinoza is remembered for his naturalized God, or for his deification of nature. They work out to be the same thing, which is the point. This has the odd-seeming but predictable consequence that he has been called an atheist by some commentators and a "God-intoxicated man" by others. 3. In epistemology, Spinoza believed in "geometrical order." The best way to approach truth was to start with a small number of premises that are recommended by their clarity and the difficulty of seeing how things could be otherwise, and to spin out their logical consequences. 4. In ethics, Spinoza believed that the real problem was the confusion and frustration that comes our way when we think we ARE a kingdom with the kingdom, and the solution is just to learn better...
Not long ago, the President of the United States, talking to a scrum of reporters, defending his (insane) policy with regard to US/China trade relations, and in that context said "I am the chosen one," and looked briefly to the sky before resuming his discourse. It was an intense moment. It is worth marking the intensity as the world skids out of control and even crazier news pushes that bit aside. I'm doing the POTUS an undeserved favor in the paragraph above by using all lower case letters for the phrase "chosen one," although he said it as if he mean, "the Chosen One." In a country where a majority of the citizens are Christians the phrase has a pretty specific meaning, and the look at the skies rather confirms it. This remark makes Donald Trump our first President of whom we can say that his self-image isn't just dynastic. It is metaphysical. After a bit of blowback, a couple of days later, Trump was asked to expand on what he meant by ...
I'd like to present today, without further ado, something David Hume wrote about the Tories and the Whigs of his day. As no party, in the present age can well support itself without a philosophical or speculative system of principles annexed to its political or practical one; we accordingly find that each of the factions into which this nation is divided has reared up a fabric of the former kind, in order to protect and cover that scheme of actions which it pursues. ... The one party [defenders of the absolute and divine right of kings, or Tories], by tracing up government to the DEITY, endeavor to render it so sacred and inviolate that it must be little less than sacrilege, however tyrannical it may become, to touch or invade it in the smallest article. The other party [the Whigs, or believers in constitutional monarchy], by founding government altogether on the consent of the PEOPLE suppose that there is a kind of original contract by which the subjects have tacitly reserv...
People talk commonly and, as it were, naturally about "social issues" as constituting a nest of issues distinct from the "economic" ones. It is not self evident what this means. After all, economics and sociology don't differ in their subject matter. They differ in their methods. If an economic issue is one an economist might discuss using the tools of his science, then everything human is an economic issue, for nothing is alien to supply and demand. And in that case, the separate nest of "social issues," the other half of the customary dichotomy, dissolves. Yet since it hasn't in fact dissolved, let's try to answer the question in the heading above. What counts as a “social” issue, as distinct from an issue within any other classifications, is largely a subjective matter. Broadly speaking, though, “social issues” are efforts to answer the question “what kind of a person do I think I am?” in the first instance and, collectively...
The news from Germany I discussed yesterday is fairly typical of developments around the globe. The Paris Agreement allowed nation-states to adopt their own targets. One might naively have expected that they would adopt easy-to-meet targets, i.e. "we will emit no more than twice as much carbon into the atmosphere next year than we did last year." But no, the politics hasn't worked that way. As a matter of what one might fairly call virtue signalling, governments have set difficult targets, such as cutting emissions by 40% as of 2020 and 50% as of 2030. They can't and won't meet these targets. Then the different political parties can flagellate each other over whose fault it is that they didn't. Meanwhile, of course, the sort of tough medicine that might make such targets in principle reachable will be blocked by the political pull of the affected interests, because the virtue signalling can't stop the politics of ass protection. All in all, I hav...
Max Weber famously defined the State as the institution of a human community "that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical violence within a given territory." That definition had been very useful to anarchists, including anarcho-caps, as it has given us a nice definition of what we are saying we are against when we say we are against the State. The definition raises certain immediate questions. For Americans, accustomed to arguments over the "state" (in the historically specific sense) and the federal government, the question naturally arises whether a state can agree to share its 'monopoly.' Should we define terms so that both Virginia and the USA have some say in deciding what is a legitimate use of violence in downtown Richmond? Is that a duopoly in one sense but still a monopoly in another? Then there is the word "legitimate." The context indicates that Weber sees that state as self-defining in this ...
The Justice Department's bill of indictment against various Russians who are alleged to have worked to influence the 2016 election includes some of the posts they supposedly made on social media outlets. Today, I'd like to talk a bit about one of them, an Instagram post. It reads in relevant part, "[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary." The use of "Killary" was the result of accurate research. Trump's hardcore supporters used it often to suggest that Hillary Clinton was a killer -- a charge going back at least to the discovery of Vince Foster's body in July of 1993. The phrase "particular hype and hatred" seems odd, though. The intended meaning presumably is "certain lies by hateful people directed at Trump are misleading the people" etc. But it takes some time to figure that out. After all, in English "hype" does not necessarily refer to l...
Wildfires in California. I've been surprised by how 'wacky' (for lack of a better word) have been some of the responses thereto. Of course I shouldn't be surprised. This is the country that elected Donald Trump president. I guess the notion of applying our usual political insanity to wildfires slipped under my radar and came up on me as a surprise. But one finds on twitter without much effort earnest attempts to explain that brush and tress aren't burning, that only houses are burning, because the fires are the consequence of a government plot. Also, one finds efforts to use the fires to make one of the key political points of the Trump coalition: beware illegal immigrants. There is no evidence any illegal immigrant had anything to do with any fire in California, or that there was arson involved with the largest of the fires in the state now, involving an arsonist of any nationality or legal status whatsoever. Regardless, on twitter denizen “Cali-Conser...
It has 8 months left to run, but here are some retrospective thoughts on almost-the-whole of it. 1. Gitmo's infamous detention camp remains open. This wouldn't necessarily stick in one's craw except that Obama issued an executive order as early as January 22, 2009, with the confetti from the inaugural parties still incompletely cleared away, that said it would be closed within one year. 2. Another one that goes back a ways. Obama early on pressed for a cash-for-clunkers bill, which he signed on June 26th of that first year, supposedly to revive the auto industry. It was a cheap gimmick that had no good effect at all. 3 . The whole rebellion in Libya thing was horrendously mismanaged. Absurdly, the administration seems to have thought it was exercising what it called "smart power" in this connection., Nothing smart about it. Ended with the need to use a random video as a cover for whatever the heck actually happened in Benghazi. 4. Waffling o...
Someone on Yahoo!Answers recently asked with which US political party would Niccolo Machiavelli associate himself if he were alive today. It actually isn't a bad question. I offered this answer. Machiavelli was an Italian nationalist. He was enthusiastic about an unscrupulous Prince because he believed only such a Prince could free Italy from the clutches of foreign powers. I suspect he would be a Trump supporter if he were a US nationalist with a similar orientation today. So, at least for the purposes of supporting Trump (not more widely) he would affiliate with the Republican Party.