The New Neo

The third debate: the one between the moderators and the candidates

Posted on October 28, 2015 by neoOctober 28, 2015

Here’s a thread for the third Republican debate.

I’ll be adding to it as the night wends on.

8:33: I’ve watched for the last 3 minutes or so, but within 20 seconds it was clear what was happening. This is a debate, all right, but it’s a debaqte between the moderators and the candidates, with Kasich acting as a mole on behalf of the moderators.

8:39: Rubio’s taking it to the moderators and the MSM now, with some force. And the audience is applauding. Bush tries (unsuccessfully) to take him on.

8:45 Now Cruz takes on the moderators. Very well, I might add. The moderators don’t allow him to answer the substantive question because he spent his time bashing them. I think it was time well spent; he made his point. The behavior of the moderators in this debate is a travesty.

Rand Paul was asked the next question. He could have earned many points if he’d responded by saying, “I yield my time to Cruz, because I agree with him about what’s going on here, and you haven’t allowed him to answer the question.” He chose not to do so.

9:11: I find it annoying when the second tier of candidates speak. It feels like they’re wasting our time at this point; they have no chance.

Speaking of annoying: Becky Quick, they name is supercilious.

9:18: Now the audience boos moderator Quintanilla for his truly absurd gotcha remark to Carson.

It occurs to me that it’s possible that one or two Democrats watching this debate might actually get the idea that there really is MSM bias against the Republicans.

9:27: Rubio says that the MSM is Hillary’s super PAC, and excoriates them for praising her performance in the Benghazi hearing. Excellent point, and made with vigor.

9:58: Christie has his moment, and it’s a great one. Fantasy football?? And: even in New Jersey, we call what you’re doing “rude” (to Harwood). He reminds those of us who used to like him of why we did.

10:22: It seems to me that Cruz and Rubio enhanced their standings through this debate—that is, if anyone was listening, considering it was held at the same time as the World Series. Trump and Fiorina, as well as Carson, did well. Even Christie was a lot better than usual.

The rest should drop out. Now.

I’m with Cruz on this

Posted on October 28, 2015 by neoOctober 28, 2015

This is not a “grand bargain” or negotiation””it is complete and utter surrender…

It’s ridiculous, deceitful, and a disgrace.

Make no mistake: the speaker’s golden parachute is a victory for the Washington cartel, for the politically connected elite, and for big business and lobbyists who get in bed with career politicians to grow government…

This budget completely annihilates the 2011 budget caps, the one successful attempt at spending restraint in the Obama era.

We should never default on our debt, but this deal suspends the debt ceiling, saddling future generations with the bill for our reckless spending, while making no meaningful reforms to the programs driving our runaway spending.

The topic for tonight’s debate is the economy. Should be interesting.

What makes Jeb Bush run?

Posted on October 28, 2015 by neoOctober 28, 2015

Family tradition?

He’s the establishment’s puppet and they won’t let him go, although his heart isn’t in it?

Sibling/father rivalry?

Habit?

Inertia?

Stubbornness?

He’s got the money and the time and nothing better to do?

Seriously, one of Jeb Bush’s many problems is that there is no discernible reason why he’s running in the sense of fire in the belly. And yet he says he’s not going anywhere. However, if he did drop out, some other candidate would almost undoubtedly rise in the polls to challenge Trump, who at the moment appears to be Bush’s arch-enemy.

Bush’s voters (whoever they may be) aren’t likely to turn to Trump next. So who would the Bush voters support if Jeb left the race? The obvious choice would seem to be Rubio, but this is not a very obvious or predictable year. Would that we’d get a chance to find out, though—and soon.

Oh yeah—tonight’s the third Republican debate. I’m planning to watch.

Landmark Polish election

Posted on October 28, 2015 by neoOctober 28, 2015

The Polish election of last Sunday featured a few unusual elements: both major parties fielded a female candidate as leader, and it’s the first time since Poland threw off the Communist yoke in 1989 that a party has won an absolute majority in the Polish parliament.

Oh, and that party was a conservative one as these things are defined in Europe. So the new Prime Minister will most likely be Beata Szydlo of the Law and Justice Party.

What does this all mean? Well, according to the Telegraph, it’s a “nail in the coffin” of a closer EU:

Although the party is not anti-European Union (as some lazy commentators tend to suggest), it is very much sceptical of deeper European integration as a desirable end in of itself, and it also wants Poland to assert its national interest more forcefully in a number of key areas ranging from energy and climate policies to the EU’s stance towards Russia. The key point is that while Poles still overwhelmingly back EU membership, they want a greater degree of control over its development and direction.

A PiS led government will also break with the previous Civic Platform (PO)-led government’s approach to the refugee crisis which tried to accommodate expectations of “European solidarity” with a sceptical public. The issue dominated the last couple of months of the campaign and the results illustrate there is no appetite to cede sovereignty in such a sensitive area.

Good.

Unlike the winners of a couple of other recent elections, Szydlo has been a politician for quite some time. However, the third-party candidate was more in line with recent trends: PaweÅ‚ Kukiz, a Polish singer and actor who started his own party that bears his name, received about 21% of the votes.

Programming the morals of the self-driving car

Posted on October 28, 2015 by neoOctober 28, 2015

I knew that I didn’t like the idea of a self-driving car (that’s “self” as in “the car drives itself”). The moment I heard they were perfecting such an item, it gave me very serious pause.

Maybe that’s because in some essential way I don’t trust handing over the decision-making process to a machine, even though I don’t like driving all that much and even though the evidence is that self-driving cars would almost certainly result in fewer accidents and fewer deaths. There’s just something very basic about the thechnology that I don’t trust, and it may be the very same very basic thing in me that makes me especially concerned with protecting liberty and autonomy.

But I hadn’t spent all that much time thinking about the details. It turns out others have—they must, if they’re going to program these cars. And it’s no surprise that there are some knotty ethical problems involved.

Here’s one:

Picture the scene: You’re in a self-driving car and, after turning a corner, find that you are on course for an unavoidable collision with a group of 10 people in the road with walls on either side. Should the car swerve to the side into the wall, likely seriously injuring or killing you, its sole occupant, and saving the group? Or should it make every attempt to stop, knowing full well it will hit the group of people while keeping you safe?

This is a moral and ethical dilemma that a team of researchers have discussed in a new paper published in Arxiv, led by Jean-Francois Bonnefon from the Toulouse School of Economics. They note that some accidents like this are inevitable with the rise in self-driving cars ”“ and what the cars are programmed to do in these situations could play a huge role in public adoption of the technology.

“It is a formidable challenge to define the algorithms that will guide AVs [Autonomous Vehicles] confronted with such moral dilemmas,” the researchers wrote. “We argue to achieve these objectives, manufacturers and regulators will need psychologists to apply the methods of experimental ethics to situations involving AVs and unavoidable harm.”

Psychologists? Don’t bet on it. They’re no more equipped to make this decision than the average person. In fact, that’s the point: any one-size-fits-all solution is a surrender of individual autonomy and responsibility to a nameless faceless algorithm that decides whether you live or die. There is no formula available for morality.

Of course, we all would have to make a split-second individual decision if (heaven forbid) we were faced with that hypothetical dilemma (“do I save myself or others?”) in a car we were driving. It is not clear what the “right” decision would be, but I think the individual should be the one to make it.

[ADDENDUM: There’s a fascinating conversation going on in the comments section here, and I suggest you take a look. Some commenters are saying (rather convincingly, I believe) that the situation posited by the ethicists in the above example would actually be handled in a different and better way by self-driving cars, which would prevent it from occurring in the first place because the car would have sensed the problem in advance and slowed itself down already.

I want to add that my distrust of highly automated systems remains. Perhaps it’s irrational, but the surrender of autonomy feels dangerous to me in a different way. What are we sacrificing for a predicted increase in physical safety, and is it worth it?]

Fred Hof: “I was wrong”

Posted on October 27, 2015 by neoOctober 31, 2015

First, let’s take a look at Fred Hof’s resume. Here’s an excerpt:

Frederic C. Hof is a senior fellow with the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. On March 28, 2012 President Obama conferred on Ambassador Hof the rank of ambassador in connection with his new duties as special advisor for transition in Syria. Amb. Hof was previously the special coordinator for regional affairs in the US Department of State’s Office of the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace, where he advised Special Envoy George Mitchell on the full range of Arab-Israeli peace issues falling under his purview and focusing on Syria-Israel and Israel-Lebanon matters. He joined the Department of State in April 2009 after serving as president and CEO of AALC, limited company, an international business consulting and project finance firm formerly known as Armitage Associates LC.

Amb. Hof’s professional life has focused largely on the Middle East. In 2001 he directed the Jerusalem field operations of the Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee headed by former US Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and was the lead drafter of the Committee’s April 30, 2001 Report. In 1983, as a US Army officer, he helped draft the “Long Commission” report which investigated the October 1983 bombing of the US Marine headquarters at Beirut International Airport. Both reports drew considerable international praise for fairness and integrity.

So in Hof we have a State Department guy who was part of the Obama administration, with a long history of study and service in the Middle East. That part at the end of the quote about “fairness and integrity” may not just be the usual blah-blah-blah praise, either, because Hof has actually shown himself to be a man of integrity by writing a Politico piece entitled “I Got Syria So Wrong.” [hat tip: Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club.]

I’ve devoted a lot of verbiage on this blog to demonstrating how hard it is for most people to admit they were wrong about something, and how rare it is as well. Hof has done just that, in a very public and difficult way. No, it doesn’t change the consequences of his having been wrong, but it’s still the act of a person of integrity—and, I might add, bravery. His piece makes almost tragic reading and he does not for a moment excuse himself or whitewash the truth.

I know what it feels like to feel so wrong and so duped. But I was just a little person with one tiny vote; I never made policy or advised a president. And yet it’s still a bad bad feeling, whether about something public or something so personal as having trusted a friend or a spouse who does you wrong. Hof’s mea culpa is on a bigger scale, since he was someone who helped make policy in Syria. He trusted a president who was not the man he thought he was, and a State Department that he’d known for decades.

But let him describe it:

By September 2012, when I resigned my State Department post as adviser on Syrian political transition to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, I knew that Syria was plunging into an uncharted abyss””a humanitarian abomination of the first order. And I knew that the White House had little appetite for protecting civilians (beyond writing checks for refugee relief) and little interest in even devising a strategy to implement President Barack Obama’s stated desire that Syrian President Bashar Assad step aside. ”¦

And as Syria began to descend into the hell to which Assad was leading it, I did not realize that the White House would see the problem as essentially a communications challenge: getting Obama on “the right side of history” in terms of his public pronouncements. What the United States would do to try to influence Syria’s direction never enjoyed the same policy priority as what the United States would say.

I’ve indicated I admire Hof’s honesty and courage in admitting this. But that doesn’t mean I admire everything about him. For example, why didn’t he speak up in September of 2012, which after all was prior to Obama’s re-election? Might it have mattered? I really don’t know, but maybe. And why, oh why, had this very smart man not noticed that the biggest “policy priority” of the Obama administration has long been politics and spinning to political advantage?

Seriously, by March of 2012, how could he have not realized this? His bio doesn’t say much about his political affiliation—I would guess “Democrat” and probably “liberal Democrat”—and this is the most likely explanation for his failure to notice things that were absolutely obvious but would mean splitting with the party.

Too little, too late, I’m afraid. And yet I applaud what he’s done now.

[ADDENDUM: DaTechGuy has some comments, based on an old Soviet joke.]

Here’s a quote to mull over

Posted on October 27, 2015 by neoOctober 27, 2015

Jerry Crawford, Clinton family friend and chair of her Iowa campaign back in 2008, had this to say about her recent performance in the debate and then during the Benghazi hearing:

“People, instead of getting the filtered Hillary through the media, they got the real Hillary and they were reminded how much they really like her and how much they really respect her,” Crawford said. “Then again this week, they got the real Hillary at the Benghazi hearing. And so, when she’s able to communicate directly to people she does extraordinarily well.”

The real Hillary.

In the eye of the beholder.

Boehner says, “let’s make a deal”

Posted on October 27, 2015 by neoOctober 27, 2015

Paul Ryan, Speaker heir incumbent, says, “Not without us”:

Rep. Paul Ryan blasted Speaker John Boehner, Senate leadership and the White House for cutting a budget and debt ceiling deal in secret and without input from lawmakers.

“I think the process stinks,” the presumptive speaker said, adding that he hasn’t gone through the details of the agreement, which was released Monday night.

“This is not the way to do the people’s business,” the Wisconsin Republican said. “And under new management we are not going to do the people’s business this way. We are up against a deadline ”” that’s unfortunate. But going forward we can’t do the people’s business. As a conference we should’ve been meeting months ago to discuss these things to have a unified strategy going forward.”

Can’t argue with that.

Strangely enough, even Boehner doesn’t really try:

“Totally agree, totally agree,” the outgoing speaker said in response to Ryan’s criticism.

And yet I was under the impression he was in charge. He maintains that the alternatives were worse, but even bad alternatives wouldn’t seem to dictate that this be done so secretively.

Lerner walks

Posted on October 26, 2015 by neoOctober 26, 2015

Although it’s no surprise, it still needs underlining: the DOJ (I’ll use the acronym because I refuse to use the actual word “justice”in connection with it) has declined to prosecute Lois Lerner:

With no accountability, it’s now open season on dissidents.

Is there anyone out there subject to an Internal Revenue Service audit or a multiyear delay in approval for tax-exempt status who won’t be concerned that the process is politically rigged against them?

That’s the message the Justice Department sent when, in a classic Friday night news dump, it decided to not file charges against IRS tax-exempt groups chief Lois Lerner. In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Justice said that while it found “mismanagement, poor judgment and inertia,” there was no case for a criminal prosecution.

This is absurd. Lerner was caught red-handed targeting Tea Party and other conservative groups, wrote partisan emails to prove it, then engaged in a massive cover-up effort ”” with a suspiciously crashed server, an oddly missing BlackBerry and plenty of excuses.

That IBD article ends with the following:

But two can play that game. If a Republican as unscrupulous as Obama wins the election, the same banana republic politics in government will make Democrats the next victims.

The next GOP president may not be a gentleman of the George W. Bush variety. Political parties should be careful what they wish for.

That used to be true, and it used to be part of the reason politicians tended to hold back on this sort of thing. But it’s no longer true, I’m afraid, for the Democratic Party. They are aware that they have nothing to fear.

This is for several reasons. The first is that, rhetoric aside, Democrats realize that the GOP is not playing hardball as the Democrats would define it. That is, they realize that, because Republicans are somewhat more inclined (not entirely, but somewhat) to consider that playing by the rules is an important part of their political philosophy (as in the phrase “a government of laws, not men”), they are therefore somewhat less inclined to use the IRS in this way. So although the Democrats realize it could happen, they have that little added safety cushion against it.

But far far more important is that Democrats know that if they are successful they will never have to worry about such things again, because there will never be another Republican president. That was one of the reasons that Lerner and others pulled out so many of the stops during the 2012 campaign (the Benghazi spin was another, and Candy Crowley’s collusion in that spin during debate number two); the 2012 re-election of Obama was known and understood to be absolutely crucial to the success of that plan.

That was when the immigration laws would be overturned by executive fiat, as Obama had promised. That was how the demographics would solidify and ensure future Democratic victories into the future.

That was when Lerner and other good apparatchniks would be given a pass by a completely compliant Obama-appointed DOJ, rather than having to face a Republican one.

When you’re fundamentally changing the country and solidifying your power into the future, you don’t have to worry about payback time.

It used to be…

Posted on October 26, 2015 by neoOctober 26, 2015

…that Democrats thought Republicans were evil and Republicans thought Democrats were stupid. Remember the old saying?

But on the comments thread from the Hillary mendacity post, beginning around here, it’s clear that at least some people have now graduated to the idea that Democrats are both evil and stupid. Or maybe they always felt that way.

If you want to follow the discussion, go to the link and start reading as you scroll down. I won’t recap it or refight the battle here, but I’m going to reflect on it. It’s a very bad sign of the times. The right has become desperate, and correctly so. But the demonizing of rank and file Democrats is a very ominous development. Having been one of those Democrats for many many years, living among them and loving them, I feel I know to a great extent the way a lot of liberals think.

I even know what some leftists think, because I’ve lived among them, too (that’s discussed at some length in the mendacity thread, as well). In my mind there’s a big distinction, which I summed up in that thread with the generalization, “the liberals are the pawns, the leftists are the chess players.”

I want to add here that the impulse to label all liberals as evil is the same impulse that—when on the other side—led to or at the very least facilitated the Cultural Revolution in China, the killing fields in Cambodia, the WWII Holocaust (for example, one of the ways the Nazis trained their own baby killers to get over their reluctance to kill infants was by explaining that Jewish babies would grow up to be socialists), and on a smaller scale people such as Anders Breivik.

If you don’t believe me, I’ll add that recently, in the comments section here, a regular commenter wrote “Anders Breivik was right.” That gave me serious pause, and it wasn’t the first time I’d read such sentiments here. Ordinarily, if it had come from a newcomer, I would have erased the comment and banned the writer. But coming from a regular commenter who’s been writing here a long time, I decided to merely erase it and then issue a warning if it happens again.

But, duly noted. The impulse is there, and it leads to something evil.

The joke’s on Guatemala

Posted on October 26, 2015 by neoOctober 26, 2015

It’s becoming clear that the “throw the bums out and elect an untried and untested personality” impulse is international. First we had Canada, which elected an inexperienced but telegenic son of a former prime minister, a young man who until a little while ago had led a largely apolitical life. Then there’s the continued presence of Donald Trump as the leading US Republican. Now Guatemala elects a TV comedian as president.

That’s no joke. It may sound like a “Seinfeld” episode, but this one’s a reality show. And who knows, he may even do better than his predecessors in the office, whose corruption helped lead to his election.

Nobody really knows what TV comic Jimmy Morales will be doing as president (and no, this is not the Onion, nor is the date April First). But they’re hoping for the best:

…[Morales] has given little detail on his plans to overcome entrenched corruption besides promising to put more money into justice, make government spending transparent and audit institutions.

Morales’ manifesto was just six pages long, giving few clues as to how he might govern, and his FCN party will have just 11 out of 158 seats in the next Congress.

His previous gig was a TV show that “centered on skits and lewd jokes,” although he’s also “a former theology student with socially conservative leanings.” More about Morales:

He comes from a poor family and is an Evangelical Christian. He holds degrees in Business Administration from the national Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala and in theology…

He runs on a platform of conservative values and against corruption. His slogan is “Neither corrupt nor a thief.” He identifies as a nationalist, supports the death penalty and opposes abortion.

It seems as though the world has grown weary of politicians, particularly corrupt ones. And although I’m weary of them too—and certainly of corruption—it’s not clear that Morales has any executive experience running anything, unlike most of our own current non-politician candidates.

But I think maybe Peggy Noonan got it wrong in her latest column when she wrote about Donald Trump’s candidacy:

The only thing I feel certain of is how we got here. There are many reasons we’re at this moment, but the essential political one is this: Mr. Obama lowered the bar. He was a literal unknown, an obscure former state legislator who hadn’t completed his single term as U.S. senator, but he was charismatic, canny, compelling. He came from nowhere and won it all twice. All previously prevailing standards, all usual expectations, were thrown out the window.

Anyone can run for president now, and in the future anyone will. In 2020 and 2024 we’ll look back on 2016 as the sober good ol’ days. “At least Trump had business experience. He wasn’t just a rock star! He wasn’t just a cable talk-show host!”

Trudeau and Morales indicate to me what I already thought, which is that Obama’s election is a symptom of something, not a cause. He was elected because of some change in the standards by which the electorate judges a candidate, a change that predated his election and presaged it. We just didn’t know it yet.

Those “Downfall” videos

Posted on October 24, 2015 by neoOctober 24, 2015

Here’s a meta one:

A comment I saw from an article about Downfall spoofs as a whole has this to say about why they are so funny:

Taking two polar opposites and joining them seamlessly is a standard source of humour. Hitler represents the very depths of human depravity, but when joined with utter triviality like the lack of features on the iPhone or a lukewarm response from the local WI, and the conjunction is always likely to be very funny.