Why the right splintered but the left united

The New Neo Posted on by

I was very much looking forward to reading this article with that title. It’s an issue I’ve written about myself, and one that interests me greatly.

But alas, the article disappointed me. The author’s main thesis seems to be:

Legutko’s brilliant book suggests that progressives and left-liberals unite more effectively because they are in harmony with contemporary liberal democracy’s liberationist and egalitarian drift””in other words, its tendency to dismantle inherited authorities and pursue equality of result. By contrast, conservatives find much of what they cherish under assault by government’s relentless expansion into areas””such as family, faith, and speech””that were once commonly held to be largely beyond state supervision. Scrambling to resist the ambitious efforts of partisan politicians, government bureaucrats, and courts to entrench progressive norms as default positions, conservatives increasingly lock horns over where to draw lines and what is most urgently in need of preserving…

Progressives””especially progressive elites””can come together in support of Hillary Clinton because of their confidence that for all her baggage she shares their liberationist and egalitarian understanding of liberal democracy and will fortify their grip on the commanding heights of politics and culture. Donald Trump is not the cause but a symptom of division and disarray among conservatives, who have been rattled and thrown on the defensive by a culture and governing institutions that have taken the other side in a partisan battle over the future of freedom.

Although I suppose that’s true, it’s not the main reason (or reasons) for the differences, IMHO. I do agree that Trump is not the cause of the dissension—there’s a long history of it going back to the Rockefeller days and even earlier, although the dissension has been exacerbated greatly during the frustrating Obama years—and I also agree that Trump is at least partly a symptom of problems already present.

However, Trump is not a conservative, while Hillary is a liberal. In some ways, Trump is actually anti-conservative. That’s a problem for a lot of conservatives and makes it hard to unite behind him and easier for liberals to unite behind her.

Trump is also a person with no history of political office at all, whereas Hillary is a seasoned political person with a long track record of devotion to liberal causes. That’s a problem for a lot of conservatives and makes it hard to unite behind him and easier for liberals to unite behind her.

Trump is an offensive personality on the personal level of ordinary decorum. That’s a problem for a lot of conservatives and makes it hard to unite behind him.

Trump is an impulsive personality and is seen as a loose cannon who might actually be dangerous in the presidency, whereas Hillary’s corruption is something liberals are used to and that hasn’t especially harmed them (at least, in their opinion it hasn’t). That’s a problem for a lot of conservatives and makes it hard to unite behind him and easier for liberals to unite behind her.

And now we come to what is perhaps the biggest reason of all: the conservative movement has a tendency to attract and contain higher numbers of rugged individuals among its ranks, people who very much pride themselves on their rugged individualism and orneriness, and their tendency to go against the pack. Liberals are much more often collectivists who go with the group in the political sense and consider it in their best interests. That’s a problem for a lot of conservatives and makes it hard to unite behind him and easier for liberals to unite behind her. But it also has nothing to do with Trump, and is a political problem in general on the right and makes the right much more likely to split and the left much more likely to pull together.

That’s a generalization, of course; the left has its bitter disputes, as well. But the left has its ways of getting people into line.

Did you ever wonder how Vietnamese immigrants to the US got into the nail salon business?

The New Neo Posted on by

Appraently it was due to Tippi Hedren, the actress who starred in Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” and the mother of Melanie Griffith.

Yes, that Tippi Hedren:

“The Vietnamese just happened to be the immigrant group that was willing to do anything, that was new to this country,” Osborne says.

Actress Tippi Hedren was instrumental in helping Vietnamese immigrants to California get started in the nail industry.
Kent Gavin/Getty Images

“And the suggestion for them to see this niche actually came from a Hollywood actress.”

That actress was Tippi Hedren, an elegant blond who starred in several of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies in the 1960s.

When she wasn’t onscreen, Hedren was an international relief coordinator with the organization Food for the Hungry. After Saigon fell, she was working with Vietnamese women in a refugee camp near Sacramento when several admired her long, glossy nails.

Hedren had a manicurist named Dusty at the time and asked her if she would come to the camp to meet with the women. Dusty agreed, and Hedren flew her up to Camp Hope every weekend to teach nail technology to 20 eager women…

Le and her sister manicurists have transformed the nail business, which is projected to pull in some $7.3 billion this year. Today, affordable manicures have become so synonymous with the Vietnamese that Nails magazine offers a Vietnamese-language version.

Le says the constant demand for affordable manicures has given a steady stream of Vietnamese nail technicians work across the country ”” and the globe.

Even, ironically, back in Vietnam. “If you look around, you see they go everywhere ”” and they start from California!” Le says, laughing.

I thought I’d also put up a clip of Hedren in “The Birds.” But the one I watched was just too too creepy.

Notes on blogging and this election (and more on the phenomenon of “oversampling”)

The New Neo Posted on by

I will be extremely unhappy with the results of this election, no matter who wins.

But one thing I will be extremely happy about is that the election will finally be over. Finally, after what seems like years.

Short of a 2000-type brouhaha, that is.

I’ve noticed recently that things have heated up, both on the internet and in the non-cyber-world, during this past week especially. Everyone seems testy and on edge. My liberal friends in particular are terrified that Hillary might lose, because even if they don’t like her (and many don’t like her), they feel Trump is a very dangerous man. And on this blog and others, sniping in the comments section between people on the right has increased even more than before.

There’s a general weariness that is almost palpable. I feel so weary of discussing the pros and cons of Trump vs. Hillary that I could scream.

And as I wrote that last sentence, it occurred to me that “the cons and cons” would be a much better phrase to use.

So forgive me—or thank me, as you wish—if I don’t post my near-daily Trump/Hillary discussion today. The next week promises to be a lulu, and that’s about all I’ll say right now on that score.

I also find myself spending more time lately in the comments section here, responding to various people. Often the research I do for those comments requires as much time as the research I do for a main post, and yet far fewer people see a comment than see a post.

So now I’ll take the opportunity to offer the gist of one of those previous comments in order to give you more information I found on the topic of “oversampling” (as discussed previously vis a vis the Podesta emails). Hope this will clarify things even further.

“Oversampling” is a technique that is sometimes used in certain types of polls and research in general to study small groups. Here is an explanation of what it actually means.

Oversampling is the practice of selecting respondents so that some groups make up a larger share of the survey sample than they do in the population. Oversampling small groups can be difficult and costly, but it allows polls to shed light on groups that would otherwise be too small to report on.

This might sound like it would make the survey unrepresentative, but pollsters correct this through weighting. With weighting, groups that were oversampled are brought back in line with their actual share of the population ”“ removing the potential for bias…

. When we are interested in learning about groups that make up only a small share of the population, the usual approach can leave us with too few people in each group to produce reliable estimates. When we want to look closely at small groups, we have to design the sample differently so that we have enough respondents in each group to analyze. We do this by giving members of the small group a higher chance of being selected than everybody else.

A good example is a Pew Research Center survey from June of this year, in which we wanted to focus in depth on the U.S. Hispanic population. In the previous survey from March, there were 291 Hispanic respondents out of 2,254 total respondents, or 13% of the sample before weighting. This is pretty close to the true Hispanic share of the population (15%), but we wanted to have more than 291 people responding so we could do a more in-depth analysis. In order to have a larger sample of Hispanics in June, we surveyed 543 Hispanics out of 2,245 total respondents, or 24% of the unweighted sample. This gave us a much larger sample to analyze, and made the estimates for Hispanics more precise.

If we just stopped here, estimates for the total population would overrepresent Hispanics. Instead, we weight them back down so that when we look at the whole sample, the share of Hispanics falls back in line with their actual share of the population. This way, we still have more precise estimates when looking at Hispanics specifically, but we also have the correct distribution when looking at the sample as a whole.

That’s an explanation from Pew Research of what the technique is and how it’s used in polling.

So it does not mean biased sampling or skewed polls in an attempt to fool anyone. Also, these polls Podesta was talking about were not polls that were released to the public. They were internal polls that had the purpose of studying certain small subgroups in certain areas, so that the campaign could learn more about them.

It’s possible to think, because that article by Pew that I just quoted was written after the Podesta emails came out, that it was just some sort of ex-post-facto made-up excuse. So I refer you to articles about oversampling in small populations that were written significantly before this election cycle, and therefore are not responses to Podesta and aren’t trying to make any political points at all.

Here’s an article about using oversampling in small groups, written quite a while ago (the comments there date from 2015, but according to my Google search the article was written in 2012).

Here’s some information about oversampling in small populations that was written in 2010.

Here’s an example of some type of study from 2011 that used oversampling (it’s not about politics).

There are other examples of research that uses oversampling as a technique to study groups that are a small fraction of a population. This information is easy to obtain, and has been in the public domain for a long time.

Once you are aware of what the technique of oversampling of minority populations is, you understand the Podesta emails better. His emails fit into the framework of what is being described here, and do not appear to have anything to do with faking data or deceiving anyone.

As I’ve stated before, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t attempts to deceive, either with polling or in other ways. It merely indicates that there’s no “there” there in these particular charges about Podesta and the use of oversampling.

Does socialism inevitably lead to Communism?

The New Neo Posted on by

Every now and then there’s a discussion in the comments section I want to highlight.

Such as this one from yesterday, beginning with this from Geoffrey Britain:

Progressive’ socialism’ inescapably evolves into communism. It’s incrementally happening in Europe as we speak.

That socialism must incrementally evolve into communism is not just my assessment. George Orwell, Ludwig von Mises, Vladimir Lenin and Nikita Khrushchev all declared that to be their assessment as well. This is so because socialism is an unsustainable economic system. To maintain it, gradually all thought, speech and behavior is declared to be either forbidden or mandatory.

Then there’s “OM’s” reply:

If that is so why are the Swede’s backing away from the socialist path? Why did the eastern european Warsaw pact “states” leave the blessed Soviet orbit or not continue even after the fall of USSR? Why indeed? Predictions, by any authority are just that, predictions, history and what has happened is often something else. Don’t trot out the “in the fullness of time” argument.

And here’s what I had to say in response to Geoffrey Britain’s original remark:

I know that’s a common theory, but I don’t think it bears out in practice.

I do think that socialism tends more often than not to evolve in the direction of more statism and less liberty, more PC thought, and more control of the individual by the group. But the totalitarian Communist countries I can think of did NOT evolve from a Swedish type socialism; they pretty much went the whole hog right away (Russia, China, Cuba, North Vietnam, etc.). And a place such as Sweden, which started being socialist around the 1970s, has in recent years been retreating from socialism, and when I last checked the gulags had yet to arrive. My sense of the possible future of Sweden does not include Communism, and its actually more likely that its devotion to PC thought will allow a sharia takeover than a Communist one.

…Hillary is more along the lines of European socialism, just as Obama was. I’m not in favor of it and I’m not voting for it, but I don’t think it inevitably leads to Communism. I just don’t see that when I look around me, theories of brilliant thinkers notwithstanding.

That does not mean, of course, that such a transition from European social welfare state to Communism is impossible. It certainly could happen. I just don’t see it as anything like an inevitable or even very likely progression.

And Geoffrey Britain responded this way:

European societies do not march in lockstep, Sweden among others is simply at the end of the socialistic spectrum. It’s partial retreat from socialism is temporary. But yes, Islam’s invasion of Western Europe may well derail the Left’s socialistic evolution of Europe into a theological tyranny.

The Eastern European nations today reject socialism because communism was forced upon them. Call socialism’s end result”¦ communism, bureaucratic tyranny, 1984 or any other label that resonates. What they all have in common is the collective standing upon the individual’s neck.

It occurs to me, reading all of that back right now, that part of the disagreement might come from a more narrow definition of Communism (mine), and a broader one from GB—“bureaucratic tyranny” included, for example. Well, if you include that (and I think it’s wrong to do so; “Communism” is a word with a very specific meaning), we’re already there, and have been for quite some time. The idea of reversing that particular trend is one of the main attractions of the libertarian party, when it’s not spinning off into the stratosphere.

Hello in there

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a very sweet and touching story for you, amidst all the gloom. I’ve noticed, though, that between the time I first read it late last night and now, they’re eliminated one sentence in the story, which is that the little girl first approached the elderly man by saying something like, “Hello old man, it’s my birthday!”

Reminds me of this song:

By the way, John Prine, who wrote and sings that song, has an interesting human-interest story, too:

In the late 1960s, while Prine was delivering mail, he began to sing at open mic evenings at the Fifth Peg on Armitage Avenue in Chicago. Prine was initially a spectator, reluctant to perform, but eventually did so in response to a “You think you can do better?” comment made to him by another performer. Chicago Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert heard him there and wrote the first review Prine ever received, calling him a great songwriter. He became a central figure in the Chicago folk revival..

There will be a little delay…

The New Neo Posted on by

…in getting out that further post I promised on Comey and the DOJ. It’s turning out to take longer than I originally thought.

So if anyone’s been sitting on a hot stove waiting for it, jump right off. It won’t be today.

Apologies.

The polls…

The New Neo Posted on by

…don’t appear to have changed much as a result of the Comey reveal.

That’s what I expected. But I think the situation is still very much in flux. If more revelations come out, I’m not sure what will happen. And of course, rumors abound.

Fasten your seatbelts, it’s already a bumpy ride. For everyone—including Hillary supporters.

A little historic perspective on Trump and me

The New Neo Posted on by

I often forget that not everyone here has perfect recall of everything I’ve ever written.

That’s meant to be humorous, because of course they don’t. I don’t even have perfect recall of everything I’ve ever written, and I’m the one who wrote the posts. Sometimes I barely have recall of them at all—I regularly come across posts that I don’t even remember writing until I see them, and then they look only vaguely familiar.

Well, maybe I can be forgiven, because my blog dashboard says that there are 10,976 published posts on this blog and 420 drafts (that last number would include this one, about to go from column B to column A).

And certainly you can be forgiven for not remembering, or never having read, or not really caring to read, many of the posts I’ve written. But that fact puts us both at a disadvantage, because without having done so it’s hard for you to know the deep background for some of the things I say.

For example, good old Donald Trump (yeah, you knew that he’d creep into this post sooner or later). I’ve been studying him intensely since the summer of 2015, and to date I’ve written 227 posts that feature him in some way or other. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, though, because the number of hours I’ve spent watching, listening, reading (including a biography and many interviews with him going back many years), and thinking about the man is even more enormous.

I didn’t start out with a lot of feelings about Trump, and not even many opinions. He was certainly a person I knew about, but not much, and he didn’t interest me much either. Real estate mogul, fancy European wives, loudmouth, TV show that I once tried to watch but gave up after one episode. But as I studied him, I felt a deepening sense of unease about him, and “unease” is really a euphemism for it.

I’m not going to try to recap the evolution of my reasoning; it’s too big a topic. If you’re interested, I suggest you plow through those 200+ posts. Right now I just want to talk about one, which came to mind again today because of a discussion in the comments section of this recent thread. I’m referring to the research I did for this post, written over a year ago, in October of 2015.

Doing that research taught me a lot. The post concerns some remarks Trump had made back in 2007 and 2008 about George Bush in particular but about other things as well, and also features some comments in 2011 by Mark Levin on Trump. Please take a moment now to follow the link and read the entire post, but I’ll excerpt someof it here to give you the flavor:

BLITZER: [What do you think of] Nancy Pelosi, the speaker?

TRUMP: Well, you know, when she first got in and was named speaker, I met her. And I’m very impressed by her. I think she’s a very impressive person. I like her a lot.

But I was surprised that she didn’t do more in terms of Bush and going after Bush. It was almost ”” it just seemed like she was going to really look to impeach Bush and get him out of office, which, personally, I think would have been a wonderful thing.

BLITZER: Impeaching him?

TRUMP: Absolutely, for the war, for the war.

BLITZER: Because of the conduct of the war.

TRUMP: Well, he lied. He got us into the war with lies.

And, I mean, look at the trouble Bill Clinton got into with something that was totally unimportant. And they tried to impeach him, which was nonsense. And, yet, Bush got us into this horrible war with lies, by lying, by saying they had weapons of mass destruction, by saying all sorts of things that turned out not to be true.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Their argument is, they weren’t lying, that that was the intelligence that he was presented, and it was not as if he was just lying about it.

TRUMP: I don’t believe that.

BLITZER: You believe that it was a deliberate lie?

TRUMP: I don’t believe it. And I don’t think you believe it either, Wolf. You are a very, very intelligent young man. I don’t think you believe it either.The fact is that he lied.

In 2008, by the way, when the surge in Iraq was going well, Trump suggested in an interview that we should “just leave” Iraq. This would have set up the exact situation he has criticized Obama for, which Trump now says led to the rise of ISIS. But back in 2008, Trump was advocating it himself.

Here are more of his quotes:

TRUMP: Oh, [Bush has] been a terrible president.

BLITZER: You think he’s the worst in the history of the United States?

TRUMP: I don’t think you can get much worse. Why? I mean, who is worse? Give me a couple of names. Who could be worse?

You might say it all doesn’t matter because Trump’s running against Hillary now, and Hillary is so terrible herself. Maybe you’re correct. But Trump’s history keeps haunting me because it tells me how terrible and how extreme he is, too. The things he said in those interviews are right smack out of the leftist handbook. You cannot point to anything Hillary Clinton has ever said (at least, I can’t find it) about George Bush—or any other ex-president I can think of—that is so tinfoil-hattish, so conspiracy-theory-minded, so over-the-top. When you get Wolf Blitzer defending George Bush, you know you’ve jumped the shark.

No one had a gun pointed at Trump’s head forcing him to say that or any of the other things I documented in that post. Nor has he ever repudiated them. In fact, he made some related accusations somewhat more subtly in a GOP debate last February. This is the real Donald Trump.

You might ask me why it matters what Trump said back then, because after all Trump might do this, that, and the other good thing he’s promised to do in 2016, or that his webpage has a certain policy position I should applaud. The reason I believe that what he said in those earlier interviews (and thousands of other things, too numerous to mention right now) matters is that, much more than the promises someone has made, it’s important to evaluate the workings of that person’s mind and personality. What good is a promise, or a policy written on a webpage, if the person will say just about anything? If a person has such poor judgment, or the person cannot be trusted? These remarks of Trump’s tell me that Trump’s mind works in a simplistic and conspiratorial way, that he fails to understand geopolitical realities, that he is no conservative and not even a Republican, that he will trash anyone for any reason, and praise people who are abominable (Nancy Pelosi, for example). These characteristics have not disappeared, either. They have been stable over time, and amply demonstrated by Trump during the campaign of 2016.

I assume that most Trump defenders here won’t like being reminded of these remarks of his, nor will they like the remarks themselves. But they will strongly suggest that we ignore them because defeating Hillary justifies taking a chance with Trump despite them.

I understand that argument. It’s even possible I may succumb to it myself on voting day. But every fiber of my being revolts against it, and I want to try to explain why I continue to distrust Trump so very deeply, and to consider that there is a not-insignificant chance he will be no better than Hillary, and even some small chance that he will be worse.

A few more thoughts on the Comey announcement

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I’ll probably be writing a bigger post on the topic tomorrow, because I have quite a few things to say about it. But here are some quick thoughts.]

James Comey is now the center of an even hotter firestorm of controversy than he was this past summer when he announced the results of the Clinton email investigation. And that’s saying something. One of the biggest problems at the moment, both for Clinton and the American people, is that we don’t know whether the news is important or a big pile of nothing. And we probably won’t know until after the election.

However, those who say Comey never should have disclosed this a little over a week before the presidential election because it affects that election are ignoring a huge elephant in the room, which is that there was no way for Comey not to have influenced the election, no matter what he did. Keeping a secret affects it, disclosing it affects it. The information was going to come out sooner or later, and if it was known that he knew and failed to disclose, that would create a terrible furor too.

The only difference is that at present most of the furor is on the left. Had Comey kept it secret, the furor would have been mostly on the right.

As Andrew McCarthy writes, under the usual rules Comey probably shouldn’t have taken the unusual step back in July of saying so much about an investigation that led to no indictment:

For these reasons, the common adage when I worked in the U.S. attorney’s office was: “The government speaks in court.” The idea is that it is not the business of the Justice Department and the FBI to convict people in the court of public opinion; we speak only when we are ready to put our money where our mouth is by charging someone publicly in a court of law. Unless and until charges are filed, zip it: Don’t confirm or deny the existence of an investigation, don’t publicly identify targets, subjects or witnesses, and don’t describe the evidence that has been gathered…

Director Comey departed from these guidelines in the Clinton investigation, rationalizing that the probe was a matter of great public concern. But many criminal investigations are matters of great public concern. That doesn’t mean law enforcement holds press conferences to outline the evidence that has not resulted in the filing of criminal charges. Since Americans are presumed innocent in our system, there is no reason to clear them publicly. They are “cleared” by the happenstance that they are not charged.

And now we see the fallout of bending the rules: you end up having to keep bending them. Because Comey went public when he did not have to, he created an expectation ”“ perhaps even an obligation, which is certainly how he sees it ”“ that if circumstances changed, he would have to amend or supplement the record.

There are also many people calling Comey’s move “unprecedented” for a host of reasons (I plan to write more about that tomorrow). But if it’s unprecedented, that’s because the situation itself is unprecedented. Has there ever been an FBI investigation of a nominee of a major party for the office of president of the United States during the build-up to an election? I seriously doubt it. The closest thing we have that I can think of is the Paula Jones civil trial (very different from an FBI investigation), and that was commenced after Clinton was already president (and allowed to go forward, according to the Supreme Court). We also have the three pending Trump University fraud lawsuits, which are ongoing and serious. However, they are also civil suits that commenced long before Trump became a candidate, and they don’t involve the FBI, although one lawsuit features the State of New York as plaintiff.

It almost seems as though the United States’ extraordinary good fortune—the one Otto von Bismarck referred to when he said “There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America”—may have run out all in a rush this year. The nominations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would appear to me to indicate it.

Further thoughts on this election and my vote

The New Neo Posted on by

You may notice that I’m posting today, something I don’t usually do on Sundays.

Well, first of all, I’m sick. I have a nasty cold. So my energy level for doing other more fun things (although what could be more fun than posting on a blog?) is low.

But more importantly, I’ve been thinking. And once I do that, a post is usually not far behind.

Since James Comey announced the possibility of new emails relevant to the Clinton investigation, I’ve held to the idea that it won’t make a difference in the election outcome, despite the enormous brouhaha about it in the press. I think most committed Hillary and most committed Trump supporters demonize the opponent so deeply that nothing could change their minds, literally nothing. So the only question is how many true “undecideds” there are, and will they care enough about the Comey announcement for it to change the result.

I have no idea, although I still don’t think so. But I’ll be watching the polls. And if Trump ends up winning, I will be fairly certain it was because of this announcement.

As for what I plan to do in terms of my own vote, I’ve said many times that I won’t know till I go into that voting booth, and maybe not even then. That is still the case as of this writing. The situation is in flux, and changes on a daily basis.

To many of you the voting dilemma this year has been hard, but resolvable. You have decided who is the lesser of the two evils, and you are at peace with that. Or, you may have decided you can’t vote for either, and you are at peace with that.

I haven’t found any peace with any of it, and I’m not at all sure I will by Tuesday, November 8, 2016. I do know that when I perform a thought experiment and first imagine Hillary Clinton winning, and then imagine Donald Trump winning, each prospect fills me with a sense of overwhelming dread and horror. The details of the two horrors are different (I’ve gone into that at great length already, so no need to reiterate it here), but the depth of the horror seems the same. For me, it’s not “cancer or flu” or some other facile, simplistic, reductionistic, unknowable, and IMHO incorrect analogy. For different reasons, I see both Hillary and Trump as disastrous for the country, and since I love this country I see both as tragic.

So, what will I do on November 8? The only two things I know are that (a) I won’t be voting for Hillary Clinton, and (2) I plan to vote for Republicans for offices other than the presidency. Of these two things I can pretty much assure you.

On a personal level, there are people near and dear to me on both sides who would be angry at any vote I cast, whether for Trump, for Hillary, or for someone else. I’ve been open here about my point of view on both candidates; it’s no secret how negative I am on both, and why. But right now, while I still honestly don’t know who I will be voting for (if either), I have been wrestling with the idea of exercising my right to keep my ultimate vote a secret and never disclose it.

That’s the way I’m leaning at the moment, however I decide to vote on that day. There’s a reason we have the secret ballot in this country. Since any vote of mine will make some people I love angry (and although I love you guys, I’m not talking about you), there’s no reason I am obligated to disclose my vote and give myself that aggravation and strife.

My views on these candidates are open and transparent, and have been fully and honestly expressed here. I plan to continue to do that. My vote is mine alone.