…an internet attack today.
More here:
“Someone is extensively testing the core defensive capabilities of the companies that provide critical Internet services,” Schneier added.
It Ain’t Me, Babe.
[ADDENDUM: As a result of that attack, my blog was just down for about an hour and a half. Now it’s back, I hope for good, but the attacks have been episodic and they may continue. I always find all of this anxiety-provoking.]
It is absolutely the case that individuals polls are often wrong.
But poll averages—while sometimes wrong—are more seldom wrong in terms of the general trend for candidates, win or lose. And the poll averages over time are almost never wrong.
Trump has been losing to Hillary in the average of polls over a long time; for about a year now. It is pretty safe to predict a loss for him for that reason. But of course such a prediction is never completely safe, and although I make such a prediction I definitely have acknowledged that fact and continue to acknowledge it.
Brexit polls are often cited as being a good analogy for those who would like to discount the current polls on Trump, and say that a Trump win is a very decent possibility. And it is understandable why people would make that analogy, because the pro-EU forces were ahead in the poll averages for a long time, and yet the anti-EU forces ended up winning in a squeaker, and it’s easy to believe that the anti-EU forces are roughly analogous in their makeup and orientation to the pro-Trump forces here (I happen to agree with that latter characterization).
However, if you look more closely at the Brexit polls, they had become much closer in the final few weeks before the referendum took place (for a while, the Brexit forces were even ahead). These later polls were such that the prediction went like this (I can’t seem to reproduce the chart, so if you want to take a look at it, follow the link and scroll down just a bit to “Brexit Poll Tracker”):
The chart below aggregates all public surveys and attempts to address their shortcomings, with greater emphasis given to pollsters who were more accurate in the past. Where they all agree: It’s too close to call, with the still-undecided voters likely to determine whether Britain will leave or remain.
That’s not what the aggregate is saying about Trump. Here’s a chart for the poll averages for Trump over time, and if you compare it to that Brexit data, the late trend looks very different:
There are two and a half weeks left, and unless something changes in those two weeks, I feel fairly confident making my prediction of a Trump loss, and not a close one.
[NOTE: You can take a look at more Brexit polling data here.
The Trump average trend is also bad in the state data, but I haven’t included that here because it would constitute a book.]
[ADDENDUM: See also point #3 here.
One more thing, neither scientific or mathematical. It is my gut feeling, and has been right along, that Trump will lose. My track record is good on this, because I was also one of the few people who did not predict a Romney win in 2012. Not only that, but those who know me personally can attest that I was virtually certain Romney would lose, and became extremely distraught about it in the weeks prior to the election. Various people tried to pep-talk me out of my conviction, but to no avail.
Perhaps the reason I felt that way was that I tend towards pessimism. But I was actually basing my belief on some personal anecdotal evidence in addition to my gut. The following is an excerpt from a post I wrote the day after the 2012 election:
I had been dreading yesterday for weeks, and I felt that dread especially keenly in the week leading up to the election.
The arguments on the right that the polls were rigged never made sense to me. When I researched polls I noted that, historically, poll averages have tended in most cases to correctly predict the outcome of elections. Exceptions are very rare. So the only hope I had about that was that, because the response rate to polls has gotten so low in recent years, polls had become more unrepresentative than they used to be.
But the polls stubbornly kept saying the same thing: Romney continued to fall a tiny bit short in many important states. And that’s the way the election panned out.
Last week I also discovered that, when I spoke to a bunch of liberal friends I knew who had adored Obama in 2008, they were all still very supportive of him and very strongly motivated to vote for him…Those on the right who felt that declining crowds and lack of yard signs meant that enough of Obama’s supporters had defected probably didn’t have the experience I had in talking to so many people who still had a very high regard for him. I saw almost no fall-off in support for him at all.
My anecdotal evidence this year is even worse for Trump than it was for Romney that year. I’ve written about it before so I won’t go on and on about it now, but suffice to say that the only people I know who are pro-Trump are already conservatives, and it’s a small group of conservatives at that. People I know who are moderates and/or Independents who don’t like Hillary at all and were prepared to vote for Rubio or Kasich don’t want anything whatsoever to do with Trump, whom they both detest and fear.]
[NOTE: I wrote this post quite a while ago and never published it until now, so it’s not as timely as it once was. In fact, it’s not timely at all. But I think we continue to need the relief of art. Although the subject matter is somewhat Grimm—at least we have a happy ending here.]
When it was reported, the story of 7-year-old Yamato Tanooka—put out of his car by his parents as punishment for misbehavior and then lost in the woods for six days and ultimately found—reminded a lot of people of the tale “Hansel and Gretel.”
You all probably know the story, or an approximation of the story. The parallels were obvious, but the original story as the brothers Grimm related it is very dark, the parents’ motives much darker than Yamato’s parents’ reasons for their meant-to-be-temporary abandonment of their son: Continue reading →
The MSM frame is that Trump has “contempt for democracy.” Not to nitpick, but if Trump really thinks that the election is rigged, his refusal to accept its results would show respect for democracy.
Just sayin’.
As you well know, I’m no Trump fan. And as my post on the debate indicates, that statement of Trump’s is one of the few that immediately caught my attention. I called it “pretty astounding” (and I didn’t mean that in a good way). “Pretty astounding, but not really surprising.”
Trump being Trump. It’s what his admirers admire him for, and what everyone else (the majority, as it turns out) despises him for.
You know what else that’s not surprising? That the press and the Democrats have fastened on that statement of Trump’s to the exclusion of just about anything else that occurred during the debate, including how awful Hillary was. Not that Trump took anywhere near full advantage of that fact, either. Trump is the gift that keeps on giving to Hillary.
I have long noticed that debates have become exchanges where each side is looking for the “gotcha” moment, the gaffe or the gesture or the statement that will nail the opposition. Everything else that occurs during a debate seems to fall by the wayside. Last night was no different.
It’s one of the reasons I detest debates.
Of course, Trump’s response about the election was more substantive than some of those other things in the past that were more gaffe-like (Bush Sr. looking at his watch in 1992, for example). Why did Trump say it? Stubbornness, playing to his base, not liking to be pushed to respond a certain way, not wanting to concede—plus, on some level I think he realizes he will lose, and he plans to take his followers down the long and merry road of saying that it was only because he and they were tricked and disenfranchised. It’s a dangerous game he’s playing.
Yes, it was a surprise when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
My reaction? I think it’s an absurdity. But I think quite a few of the Nobel Prize in Literature awards choices have been absurd, so this one’s just absurd in a different way.
And I like Bob Dylan. I remember the first time I heard him on the radio, on some obscure folk station before he was famous, and he sounded so different than anything I’d ever heard before. He had an awful voice that was nevertheless a great voice, completely compelling. You couldn’t figure out why it was compelling—the voice sounded like something you wouldn’t have wanted to hear another moment of—but still it was great. And even though the song was long (“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” was the selection, as I recall) it didn’t seem too long at all.
An’ it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe
I’m on the dark side of the road.
Great lines. Great song. But great literature? Nope.
If you’re going to give a songwriter a Nobel for literature (and I don’t think that makes a particle of sense), give it to Leonard Cohen.
Here’s a Dylan song I happen to really really like. It’s a cover, though; he didn’t write it. In the early days he used to sing a lot of folk or traditional songs. This seems to have been one of them:
[NOTE: See, I’m putting this post in the “Music” category. I refuse to put it in “Literature and writing.” Eat your heart out, Nobel Prize Committee for Literature.]
I will be very relieved when the last debate is over.
Are you planning to watch? I am doing something different than usual—going to visit a conservative friend of mine and watching it with her. I may or may not do some blogging during it (probably will), but at least I’ll have company. And I’ll be more likely than usual to not turn off the TV, since it won’t be my TV.
UPDATE 9:22 PM
Well, I’m watching So far it’s pretty calm. Which is fine with me.
UPDATE 9:30 PM Immigration is certainly a topic that gets them going.
Clinton is trying to discredit Wikileaks, and there’s a great deal of overtalking now. Arguing about whether Russia was responsible, which is irrelevant to the issue of what they might have revealed.
UPDATE 9:50 PM The battle of experience, good and/or bad.
Aha, now Chris Wallace brings up the women Trump accusers. Trump accuses Hillary or the Hillary campaign of being behind it, and mentions also the Wikileaks revelations about stirring up trouble at Trump rallies.
UPDATE 10:06 PM Trump declines to pledge he will accept the results of the election. Pretty astounding, but not really surprising.
“I’ll keep you in suspense.”
UPDATE 10:36 PM My gut feeling is that Trump did better than usual. But there was so much overtalking, so much repetition (on both sides), so much seemingly petty squabbling, that my basic feeling was “Ugh.” I can’t imagine this debate changing much of anything, but it might have helped Trump a little—except for that failure to say he would accept the results of the debate. That’s very—if you’ll pardon the expression—un-American.
…at Evan McMullin. He’s running for president.
If you’re determined to vote third-party, he could be of interest.
Yesterday commenter “T” wrote:
One of the things that attracted me to this site years ago was the ability to agree to disagree and to use that disagreement to sharpen and refine my own thinking on a topic. Quite frankly, this seems to have all gone to Hell as proponents of either side just can’t seem to get away from snark attacks.
The two schools of thought seem to be A) Hillary is death warmed over and will lead the country to perdition. Trump may not. And B) Trump will lead the country to perdition and discredit conservatives. Hillary is bad, but not end-of times bad. Is it possible that the truth may lie somewhere in between?
We have allowed these two faulty Pied Pipers to lead us to vehemence on a site known for its considered discussion. To quote Walt Kelly: “We have met the enemy and he is us!”
Well, it has gotten much worse, not just here but all around the blogosphere, and in non-cyber conversations as well, and is one of the many profoundly distressing phenomena this election season. In my case, there’s a very small plus side, which is that my friends I are are mostly united in dislike of Trump. But we differ mightily on what we think of Hillary, and I think my angst and my dilemma are therefore far greater than theirs.
My answer to “T”—and to everyone else who bemoans the former halcyon days here—is that I feel your pain (and I’m not being sarcastic there, either). But believe it or not, this site is about a million times better than the vitriol you can find at most other sites that don’t do as much policing of comments.
The Trump candidacy and the 2016 Trump vs. Clinton election have effectively poisoned discourse all around the right side of the blogosphere, while the left celebrates. People are exceedingly upset and emotional, and the viciousness is incredible at most other sites (except blogs that have become complete Trumpian echo chambers, which is a great many). Disagreement and discussion is fine here—we have a mix of original Trumpers, enthusiastic late-adopters of Trump, reluctant Trumpers, uncertains (that’s me), and NeverTrumpers (and every now and then a liberal Democrat comes to visti, too), and all are welcome if they remain (relatively) civil and (relatively) cerebral.
Compared to most other blogs these days, this one is a veritable Peaceable Kingdom.
If you’re in a certain mood, this might be darkly amusing:
You’ve probably noticed that a lot of people are writing what looks like post-mortems for the Trump campaign when there are still about three weeks left. Trump himself is even doing it, albeit in a sort of backwards way, in the form of a preemptive explanation that if he loses it’s because the election was “rigged.” That’s not surprising, since that was pretty much his reaction to any loss of his in the primaries, right from the very start. Here’s his response to his loss in Iowa, the very first contest of the primary/caucus season:
Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!
Among many other things that he is, Trump’s a very sore loser, and if (and when, in my opinion) he loses this election we’ll hear a lot about the betrayals and backstabbings and riggings that caused it, and we’ll hear it from Trump and from his most vociferous proponents. In fact, back in the first week April (shortly after I realized that Trump would be the almost-inevitable nominee), I wrote a draft for a post that I haven’t yet published, entitled, “Preparing the ‘stab in the back’ narrative for the Trump loss.” Here was the beginning of the draft (I didn’t get too much further than that):
Commenter “Rotten” writes: “Trump will win a general election if the GOP doesn’t knife him in the back.”
Yes indeed, that’s what will be said. If Trump is the nominee and he loses, it will not be because he is the worst candidate in modern memory and couldn’t even win over the GOP much less the general electorate. It will be because the GOPe “knifed him in the back,” despite the fact that his approval ratings and polls have been abysmal for the entire campaign.
For those aware of history, the phrase “stab in the back” has a historical significance. It was a widely-believed myth on the German right that was part of the complex chain of events that Hitler rode to power:
The stab-in-the-back myth was the notion, widely believed in right-wing circles in Germany after 1918, that the German Army did not lose World War I but was instead betrayed by the civilians on the home front, especially the republicans who overthrew the monarchy in the German Revolution of 1918”“19. Advocates denounced the German government leaders who signed the Armistice on November 11, 1918, as the “November Criminals.”
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they made the legend an integral part of their official history of the 1920s, portraying the Weimar Republic as the work of the “November criminals” who used the stab in the back to seize power while betraying the nation. The Nazi propaganda depicted Weimar as “a morass of corruption, degeneracy, national humiliation, ruthless persecution of the honest ‘national opposition’””fourteen years of rule by Jews, Marxists, and ‘cultural Bolsheviks’, who had at last been swept away by the National Socialist movement under Adolf Hitler and the victory of the ‘national revolution’ of 1933”.
And no, Trump is not Hitler. But there are certain techniques of his that have a harmonic vibration, and in addition (as I pointed out last February), there is also a resonance in the emotional state of a certain angry and disgruntled segment of the population that’s been building in the US for many many years.
Which is not to say that people (and I include myself here) don’t have things to be angry about. But it’s always a question of how reasonable the anger is, who a person is angry with and whether that’s the actual culprit, who is whipping up the anger for his or her own purposes (and what those purposes might be), and to whom or what a person turns in his/her anger.
I have maintained in many posts here that the anger at the GOPe is valid but overwrought and exaggerated, and that those who are so angry at them often imagine the GOP in Congress could have and should have done certain things that were either impossible or would have been counterproductive. I have maintained that the left profits from this anger and that some people stirring it up are on the left, although most are on the right and have their own purposes for doing it. Some are sincere, but many have as their sole or partial goal their own self-aggrandizement and increased ratings and audience. And what is done as a result of that anger—the “to whom or what a person turns” part—never should have been the nomination of Donald Trump in 2016, for reasons that have been explained over and over again but can be boiled down to Trump being an unappealing (that is, actually repulsive to many voters) and amoral loose cannon who is out for his own power and is probably more of a liberal than he is a conservative.
Yesterday commenter Irv Greenberg linked to a piece entitled “Trump’s Invisible Shield.” Here’s a quote from the article:
The Trump phenomenon is better understood as a colossal F U to all of the lies and broken promises politicians have hoisted upon the masses over the years. It is the savage blowback to the money-sucking rules and regulations and taxes that heavily burden a broad range of the middle and upper middle classes. It is a YUGE “suck it” to the self-aggrandizement and pocket lining that goes on within the Beltway. It is a swift backlash against the swarm of Beltway wannabees who want in on DC action in order to enrich themselves on the backs of the people, to the detriment of the country. ”¦ The only fix is a virus and it just so happens, Trump is the virus…
The attitude of the average Trump supporter is that no matter how much of a buffoon he might be, he isn’t as bad as all of the other career pols out there who misstate, misspeak, and misremember but always get away with it because they claim to be above the fray, of impeccable character, or to soar high when others stoop low. Whether hard-core from the get-go or johnny-come-latelies, Trump supporters have such little regard for political elites, that they’ll support anyone who isn’t making his or her money off of their votes.
There’s much more in that vein.
And now we’ll have a compare and contrast. This is an excerpt from a piece I wrote in mid-February 2016:
The following is an excerpt from Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free. The book, first published in 1955, is an exploration of Germans’ attitudes in the period leading up to WWII and including the war and its immediate aftermath. It features interviews with ten “typical” Germans, conducted a couple of years after the war’s end, and offers extraordinary and often relevant insights into how it was that Hitler came to power and stayed there so long.
Here is my general discussion of the book and its author, who was a man of the left. To understand the following excerpt, it is helpful to know that for the purposes of the book, Mayer refers to the ten interviewees as his “friends”:
National Socialism was a repulsion of my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary government””against all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving. It was the final fruit of the common man’s repudiation of “the rascals.” Its motif was “throw them all out.” My friends, in the 1920’s, were like spectators at a wrestling match who suspect that beneath all the grunts and groans, the struggle and the sweat, the match is “fixed,” that the performers are only pretending to put on a fight. The scandals that rocked the country, as one party or cabal “exposed” another, dismayed and then disgusted my friends”¦
My friends wanted Germany purified. They wanted it purified of the politicians, of all the politicians. They wanted a representative leader in place of unrepresentative representatives. And Hitler, the pure man, the antipolitician, was the man, untainted by “politics,” which was only a cloak for corruption”¦Against “the whole pack,” “the whole kaboodle,” “the whole business,” against all the parliamentary parties, my friends evoked Hitlerism, and Hitlerism overthrew them all”¦
This was the Bewegung, the movement, that restored my friends and bewitched them. Those Germans who saw it all at the beginning””there were not very many; there never are, I suppose, anywhere””called Hitler the Rattenfé¤nger, the “ratcatcher.” Every American child has read The Pied-Piper of Hamlin. Every German child has read it, too. In German its title is Der Rattenfé¤nger von Hameln.
When bringing up anything to do with Hitler in the context of today’s world, one must be ultra-careful to make it clear (as I am doing now, once again) that the analogy is not to Hitler himself but (in this case) to a state of mind in the populace that lashes out against a flawed government, and reaches out in its anger and frustration for a remedy that is in fact far more flawed than the original disease, when there were better remedies at hand. Right now, one of the probable upshots of the Trump nomination is that a likely victory over Hillary Clinton was turned into the reverse, a likely victory for Hillary Clinton.
That is another very terrible result. America will have committed what I consider an unforced error. And history—unfortunately—isn’t baseball.
Great story, adorable photo:
Well, it may not really be poetry—even though it’s a poem by a master of poetry: Robert Frost. It’s more in the vein of light verse, which Frost sometimes also wrote.
The treatment is light, that is. Not the subject matter:
Harrison loves my country too,
But wants it all made over new.
He’s Freudian Viennese by night.
By day he’s Marxian Muscovite.
It isn’t because he’s Russian Jew.
He’s Puritan Yankee through and through.
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens:
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new.
By the way, the “Russian Jew” reference in the poem is not, IMHO, anti-Semitic. Frost is suggesting that “Harrison” (not ordinarily a Jewish name) doesn’t even have the excuse for his radicalism of being a Jew in Russia, subject to the pressures and ethos there. Harrison’s “Puritan Yankee through and through.”
More background on the poem and Frost’s politics:
Frost held that not traditional religion and culture, but revolutionary Marxism and reforming liberalism were the true opiates of the people. Marxists and secular liberals rejected or were often agnostic about God, but they deified the party or the state; they rejected the traditional religious concept of heaven, but they believed in an eventual heaven on earth. They rejected religion and much in Western culture as superstition, but were themselves superstitiously addicted by the idea of progress through science and revolutionary ideology. What Frost called “the sweep to collectivism in our time,” which characterized the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, could destroy the principle of limited political power even in America, through the growth of the federal bureaucracy under the New Deal. Frost attributed the political wisdom of dividing and balancing political power against itself to the religious orthodoxy of the Founding Fathers. They knew that only God had or should have absolute power, and their religion taught them that the moral and intellectual weaknesses of man required putting bounds to political power. When modern politicians play God they invariably promise far more than they can achieve as men, and the gap between their promises and their achievements is filled by the abstract slogans and dialectics of ideological propaganda. The language of revolutionists and reformers is characterized by the jargon of rationalized deceit. In a letter to Bernard De Voto in 1936 Frost wrote: “The great politicians are having their fun with us. They’ve picked up just enough of the New Republic and Nation jargon to seem original to the simple.” In 1939, in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Frost said: “More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.”
I knew absolutely nothing of Frost’s politics when I began to admire his poetry, and nothing of them when I started this blog and designed the photograph at the top, which features Frost’s collected works as the book with the dark cover above the Churchill biography.
“A Case for Jefferon” was first published in 1947, but I can’t find anything that says when it might have been written, although obviously it was prior to that. Frost later disavowed it as “dated,” (although he wasn’t able to see the future—the late 60s—in which it became undated again), and thought it was bad as a poem.
Well, as I said, it’s not really a poem. It’s a ditty, a verse—but unfortunately, it’s not dated. I’m not sure it ever will be, because the strains in human thought it was describing seem to have a certain staying power.
[ADDENDUM: Some commenters have wondered why it’s called “A Case for Jefferson.” I’m not sure, but I found this:
To Thomas Jefferson, such would indeed be a case of democracy gone wrong…
[Frost is quoted as having said to Reginald Cook]: “I said to a person high up in the government lately, I said “As long as all my educated friends and Mrs. Roosevelt think that socialism is inevitable and can’t be avoided and has got to come that way, why don’t you and I hurry it up and get it over with? It couldn’t last…I wouldn’t favor that policy.”
Plus é§a change, plus c’est la méªme chose.]