…and pretty much all US political news.
Just a day. It’s necessary sometimes.
China’s population decline
Many people probably remember the Chinese policy that limited births per family to one. It officially ended just a few years ago, but the damage was done, as Austin Bay notes:
China’s fertility rate in 2010 dropped to 1.5 children per woman; the zero population growth replacement rate is 2.1 children.
It’s highly probable China will face the same “geriatric” economic conditions that already threaten Japan and several Western European countries: too few workers paying the pensions of retirees as well as shouldering their medical costs. By 2030, the median age in China will rise to 43. In 1980, the median was 23. In 2011, China had 925 million workers. By 2050, China’s working-age population will fall by 225 million, about 23 percent of the projected population. Between 2040 and 2050, 25 percent of the population will be over 65 years old, retired and drawing pensions. The “squeezed” worker cohort must then support both pensioners and dependent young.
No doubt the government’s childbirth-discouraging policy had a lot to do with the decline in childbirth statistics. It certainly had something to do with the preponderance of males in the country, because females tended to be the ones aborted.
But I’m not sure, however, that the decline in births wouldn’t have happened anyway, because it’s somewhat of a worldwide trend:
Wealth exacerbates China’s government-inflicted conundrum. Worldwide, prosperous and educated couples tend to have fewer children. This trend applies to China.
Increasing wealth and personal lifestyle preferences played key roles in the fertility rate decline in Japan and highly developed Western countries. Japan’s fertility rate is 1.4 children per woman. A recent study suggested that circa 2080 the Italian and German populations could decline by 50 percent. The same trend has begun to affect wealthy South Korea.
This is usually considered a problem, and it certainly is a problem when populations are top-heavy with the elderly, and with young males.
But it also occurs to me that in my own lifetime the population of the world has increased dramatically. I vaguely remember being told when I was a child that there were about 3 billion people in the world. Now?
Here are some figures:
200 years ago there were less than one billion humans living on earth. Today, according to UN calculations there are over 7 billion of us.1 Recent estimates suggest that today’s population size is roughly equivalent to 6.9% of the total number of people ever born.2 This is the most conspicuous fact about world population growth: for thousands of years, the population grew only slowly but in recent centuries, it has jumped dramatically. Between 1900 and 2000, the increase in world population was three times greater than during the entire previous history of humanity—an increase from 1.5 to 6.1 billion in just 100 years.
There are many charts at that link. They make for fascinating study. Here’s one, for example, that shows the doubling of the world population (“The fastest doubling of the world population happened between 1950 and 1987: a doubling from 2.5 to 5 billion people in just 37 years”—that’s the time frame I’m talking about, the one I personally experienced:
And in this one you can see how fast the Chinese population was growing, prior to the current slowdown:
Note that in 1950 the population of China was about 550 million. Now it’s about 1.4 billion, approximately triple. Of course, China is also a transformed country in the economic sense.
I’m curious what these birth rate figures indicate, other than averages. Do the averages represent a general decline in births across the board? Or do they affect just certain portions of the population? Are some groups in China having a great many children? Is the low average birth rate through choice, or has there been a marked decline in the fertility rate as well? The two things are not necessarily the same.
There is some evidence that in China—as in many regions of the industrialized world—sperm counts have been declining. If low sperm counts are an issue, they are also somewhat of a mystery. The reading I’ve done on the subject indicates that there are many possible culprits (see this, for example): chemicals, hormones in the water, obesity, lack of activity, alcohol consumption, drug consumption (including marijuana), stress, and even the increasing prevalence of tight underwear.
Brazilian elections: leading candidate Bolsonaro stabbed
I was alerted to this news by commenter TommyJay:
The leading candidate in Brazil’s presidential election is in serious but stable condition after being stabbed by an assailant at a campaign rally on Thursday, doctors said, pushing an already chaotic campaign into further disarray.
Far-right firebrand Congressman Jair Bolsonaro, a controversial figure who has enraged many Brazilians for years with divisive comments, but has a devout following among conservative voters, could take two months to fully recover and will spend at least a week in the hospital, said Dr. Luiz Henrique Borsato, who operated on the candidate.
“His internal wounds were grave and put the patient’s life at risk,” Borsato said, adding that a serious challenge now would be preventing an infection that could be caused by the perforation of Bolsonaro’s intestines.
That’s serious. I wrote about Bolsonaro last week, in a post entitled “Brazil’s Trump?” There are certain parallels, but let’s hope this particular incident doesn’t have any parallel.
I wondered how it happened, and video indicates that Bolsonaro was in the midst of seemingly unchecked and uncontrolled crowds in the street, very up close and personal. Of course, we don’t expose our presidents to that sort of thing, but presidential candidates—particularly in the early days of a campaign—mix it up with crowds here all the time, and it’s always a danger. I believe that, ordinarily, a presidential candidate only gets official protection here after he or she becomes the nominee of a party, although prior to that many candidates hire their own security.
Here’s the coverage of the Bolsonaro stabbing. The expression on his face reminds me of photographs of two famous people who were wounded in the abdomen: Lee Harvey Oswald and Ronald Reagan, the first fatally and the second near-fatally [correction: Reagan was shot in the rib and lung, and one of his Secret Service agents was shot in the abdomen]:
Bolsonaro’s opponents have condemned the attack. This is what has been revealed so far about the attacker:
Local police in Juiz de Fora confirmed to Reuters that the suspect, Adelio Bispo de Oliveira, 40, was in custody and that he appeared to be mentally disturbed.
Oliveira was affiliated with the leftwing Socialism and Liberty Party from 2007 to 2014, the party said in a written statement, in which it repudiated the violence.
Police video taken at a precinct and aired by TV Globo showed Oliveira telling police that he had been ordered by God to carry out the attack.
“We do not know if it was politically motivated,” said Corporal Vitor Albuquerque, a spokesman for the local police.
I would wager they do know, and that of course it was. In addition, de Oliveira may have been mentally unbalanced, but political motives and mental problems are hardly mutually exclusive.
[ADDENDUM: Bolsonaro was reportedly wearing a bulletproof vest but was stabbed below it.]
[ADDENDUM II: When I originally wrote that Reagan had been shot in the abdomen (rather than the lung, as was correct), I believe I may have been confusing the Reagan assassination attempt with the one on Pope John Paul II:
When the Pope passed through an adoring and excited crowd of supporters, A?ca fired four shots at 17:17 with a 9mm Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistol, and critically wounded him. He fled the scene as the crowd was in shock and disposed of the pistol by throwing it under a truck, but he was grabbed by Vatican security chief Camillo Cibin, a nun and several spectators who prevented him from firing more shots or escaping, and he was arrested. All four bullets hit John Paul II; two of them lodged in his lower intestine while the other two hit his left index finger and right arm and also injured two bystanders: Ann Odre, of Buffalo, New York, was struck in the chest, and Rose Hall was slightly wounded in the arm.
I had forgotten (or never knew) that other people were wounded in the attack. I certainly didn’t know that a nun was one of the people who helped subdue the shooter.]
Ruminations on the NY Times’ resistance member in the Trump administration
This anonymous NY Times op-ed by a supposed higher-up in the Trump administration has gotten a great deal of attention.
As it was meant to do.
It amounts to an anonymous, uncheckable, unverifiable accusation about the Trump administration—an accusation that fits in perfectly with the anti-Trump narrative that’s been repeated by the MSM and the Trump opposition during Trump’s entire administration so far. This particular op-ed purports to be from a brave official who is part of the self-titled “resistance” of anti-Trump heroes in his administration who are working hard to keep his terrible inclinations in check and thus save the Republic.
Quite a few people have pointed out that what this person is describing, if true, would be sedition (see this, for example). It has also been said (see this, for example) that the proper avenue for this person would be to quit, and that is quite obvious. Our entire system of government (one that has stood the test of time) is that the people elect the president, and that person stays in office and has certain powers, and a president’s removal from office can only come when certain constitututional processes are activated. The main one that comes to mind is impeachment/conviction, and another is the mechanism provided by the 25th Amendment.
Anything else that leads to removal is a coup. But the press, the left, and the never-Trumpers on the right have been setting the country up for a coup for the entire duration of the Trump presidency so far.
Look, I wasn’t a Trump fan; au contraire. Anyone who has read this blog for very long knows that. I’m still not what might be called a Trump fan, but I appreciate many of the things Trump has done as president—he’s been far better than I expected—and I have zero interest in undermining the will of the American people to have him serve as president.
For that matter, although I thought Obama was a terrible and even destructive president, it never occurred to me for a moment when he was president to advocate that someone in his administration work to undermine him. If there were enough votes for impeachment and conviction of Obama, so be it. But there weren’t. So he was president until his terms were up, and I completely accepted that fact, unhappy though I was with many of his actions as president.
Now, all bets are off with the anti-Trump crew. They keep screaming “constitutional crisis,” but they don’t ordinarily specify a way in which Trump has actually violated the Constitution, and they themselves advocate doing things that go against some of the most basic assumptions on which the previous stability of our form of government and our trust in it has depended—for example, “don’t work for a sitting president while at the same time secretly undermining him or his agenda.”
And yet they consider themselves heroes, appropriating the word “resistance,” as though they should be compared to those who resisted the Nazis during WWII at the risk of their lives and their families’ lives. This is a travesty and an outrage. But they would love to have us see Trump as a Hitler, although there are no points of similarity. They probably are aware of that, actually, but rhetoric demands that they assert otherwise.
The resistance against Hitler was justified because of his enormous evil, and a significant proportion of the Wehrmacht was involved in it. In fact, it was from that source—the German army—that many of the attempts to assassinate Hitler originated.
It is not hyperbole to suggest that that is the subtle goal of many of these anti-Trump stories—to puff people up with self-righteousness at being part of the anti-Trump resistance, and perhaps even to justify and/or motivate Trump’s assassination by one of the more fringe elements of that “resistance,” because Trump is just as evil as Hitler or at least close to it.
I’m not saying that an assassination will happen; I’m merely saying it would not surprise me if it did happen, and I think many people would like it to happen (I recently wrote a post about the prevalence of the anti-Trump assassination rhetoric that I’ve personally witnessed, and although it was not serious it was vicious and heartfelt, as well as oft-stated).
Obama was beloved by the press, and when he told Russia’s Medvedev (accidentally picked up by a hot mic) that he’d have greater flexibility after the election, what did he mean? He meant that the will of the people—the great unwashed, sometimes stupid American people—had to be taken into consideration prior to an election, when he had to pretend to want to do what they wanted in order to win. But after an election victory he would be freed from the constraints of having to listen to the people, and would be able to do what he, the smarter wiser Obama, wanted to do.
It’s interesting that the press generally didn’t criticize him for that. But not surprising, because it was in accord with what they believe, too: that he, and they, are the wise ones, and we the people are the great unwashed.
Another interesting thing, however, is that in representative government our elected officials don’t have to do what they promised or what the people want. They are free to exercise their own judgment, and we elect them to do just that. The people can vote them out of office (or encourage other elected officials to remove them through impeachment and conviction), and that’s the recourse for the people if the people don’t like what a president is doing.
However, the idea of trust comes into it. Politicians running for election or re-election are not supposed to purposely lie to the people about what they plan to do. Obama was caught on tape doing a version of that—saying, in effect, “I’m planning to fool the stupid American people in order to be re-elected, but afterwards I can do what I really want, which you [Medvedev] will like a lot better than the false pose I’ll be affecting till then.”
Trump voters are perceived as the great unwashed (literally; they smell of Walmart). Voters are a mere mechanism to power. In order to attain power, one must placate enough of them to be elected, and then to be re-elected. But after that, all bets are off.
So now, with Trump in office, the so-called “resistance” is not just an anti-Trump movement but an anti-populist one as well. The people elected Trump [*see NOTE below], but the people are stupid, and it’s up to the elites to destroy him.
As for the Times op-ed article itself, it seems somewhat ironic to me in terms of its timing, which roughly coincides with John McCain’s death and the anti-Trump McCain funeral orations so prominently featured in the news. In death, McCain was declared the bipartisan peacemaker he sometimes aspired to be, and the media and so many others fell all over themselves proclaiming how wonderful McCain was in comparison to the awful Trump.
But not so on the part of the NY Times, back when McCain was aspiring to the levers of real power, running for the presidency against Obama in 2008. This situation was a no-brainer for publications such as the Times, which set out to destroy McCain’s chances if they could.
One of the mechanisms for that attempted destruction was an article appearing in the Times in February of 2008. To refresh your memory:
On February 21, 2008, in the midst of John McCain’s campaign in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries, both The New York Times and the Washington Post published articles detailing rumors of an improper relationship between John McCain and lobbyist Vicki Iseman.
According to The New York Times story, McCain, who was a member of the Senate Commerce Committee during the period when Iseman was lobbying the committee, developed a close personal relationship with Iseman. The New York Times came under intense criticism for the article because of its use of anonymous sources and its timing.
Anonymous sources—why, of course.
And the following really rings a bell [emphasis mine]:
The New York Times and Washington Post reported that unnamed staff members began a campaign to “save McCain from himself” by restricting Iseman’s access to McCain during the course of the 2000 presidential primary. According to the Washington Post story published the same day as The New York Times story, Weaver met with Iseman at Union Station (Washington, D.C.) to tell Iseman not to see McCain anymore. Weaver, who arranged the meeting after a discussion among campaign leaders, said Iseman and he discussed “her conduct and what she allegedly had told people, which made its way back to us.” Weaver heard that she was saying “she had strong ties to the Commerce Committee and his staff” and told her this was wrong and for it to stop. No discussion of a romantic involvement occurred because, according to Weaver, “there was no reason to”.
Iseman confirmed she met with Weaver, but disputed his account of the conversation.
Supposedly, an unnamed campaign adviser was instructed to keep Iseman away from McCain at public events, and plans were made to limit her access to his offices. It was reported that campaign associates confronted McCain directly about the risks he was taking with campaign and career. McCain allegedly admitted he was behaving inappropriately and promised to distance himself from Iseman. Concerns about the relationship eventually receded as the campaign continued.
The theme is somewhat similar to that of the recent anonymous op-ed about Trump. Not just the part about the anonymous source, but the idea of heroic aides “saving him from himself” when the GOP politician shows bad judgment.
The Wiki article states that “A McCain campaign adviser added that the [Times] report ‘reads like a tabloid gossip sheet’.” That was ten years ago, and it’s only become more true over time. The Times counts on its readers having short memories, or not caring about the truth or journalistic standards in their eagerness to applaud the “resistance.”
[ * NOTE: The people elected Trump, but part of the function of the Russian collusion story is to say that they really didn’t elect him at all, they were tricked into it by the Russians. This gives the anti-Trump forces the defense that they’re really not against the will of the people at all. Or, they can always cite the fact that Hillary won the popular vote.]
[NOTE II: See also this.]
Haidt’s latest offering
This new book by Jonathan Haidt seems very promising. It’s entitled The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.
Now, I’m not sure the people coddling the American mind have such good intentions. But this is from a review of the book:
“The authors, both of whom are liberal academics — almost a tautology on today’s campuses — do a great job of showing how ‘safetyism’ is cramping young minds. Students are treated like candles, which can be extinguished by a puff of wind. The goal of a Socratic education should be to turn them into fires, which thrive on the wind. Instead, they are sheltered from anything that could cause offence. . . Their advice is sound. Their book is excellent. Liberal parents, in particular, should read it.”
I have a great deal of respect for Haidt, who’s done some great work. He is, among other things, one of the founders of Heterodox Academy, and he’s got some excellent videos on YouTube. Some of his biggest strengths are his calm and evenhanded tone, his clarity of thought, and his liberalism (or previous liberalism; he’s somewhat of a middle-of-the-roader now, as far as I can tell). The liberalism gives him some extra bona fides among liberals, an important audience to reach.
I haven’t read the new book, but I bet it’s good. Its title is of interest, too, in its echoes (deliberate, I’m almost certain) of Allan Bloom’s masterwork Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.
Undereye concealer in 29 languages
I bought a new stick of my favorite undereye circle concealer yesterday, Benefit Boi ing Hydrating Concealer
The package had a little folded paper insert explaining how to use it. What’s to explain? You put it on under your eyes, and then you pat it in. That’s pretty much what the instructions say.
In 29 languages. I counted them. I have no idea what most of the languages are, but Benefits really wants to make sure that everyone—and I mean everyone—knows that you put undereye concealer under your eyes and pat it in.
By the way, note that second sentence in this post: “It’s pricey, but it’s one of the few that don’t emphasize all the lines and crevices …”.
I struggled with that. There’s a tension between the “one” in “one of the few” and the “few” in “one of the few.” “One” would require “doesn’t,” as in “one of the few that doesn’t emphasize.” But “few” would require “don’t,” as in “one of the few that don’t emphasize.”
So, which is it? I researched it, and the bottom line is that the verb should be plural. Which is what I had decided on my own, but it didn’t seem quite right to me. But apparently it is.
And while we’re at it, take a look at the end of paragraph 4: …”it’s one of the few that don’t emphasize all the lines and crevices …”. Note the ending. It’s a quotation that ends with three dots, and it’s also the end of the sentence. So, do you add that final period as I did, and do you do it after the close quotation mark? I say “yes.” But who knows?
These folks purport to know. But I can’t make head or tail of their answer. Can you? Help me out here.
These are the questions that give bloggers undereye circles.
I think I need to create a new category on the right sidebar: “Trump made me do it”
And this article by Ted Koppel would fit quite nicely into that slot:
My journalistic colleagues and I are hurtling down a long, steep highway. There’s no longer any resistance on the brake pedal, and we realize, to our dismay, that we are unable to figure out what replaced the hand brake on this late-model vehicle…
Whether by strategy or inadvertence, President Trump has drawn much of the media into a distortion of their traditional roles. Editors and reporters insist that they are bound by the strictures of objectivity, but the very nature of the president’s character — the preening, the boasting, the torrent of careless tweets and the avalanche of lies, the seemingly reckless assaults on pillars of the establishment — provokes reactions that confirm precisely what Trump’s most avid supporters already believe: The creatures of “the swamp” belong to a secret society from which they are excluded…
What a brilliant piece of political jujitsu: Trump has turned reported evidence of his many failings into confirmation of his victimhood. Once that perception is pushed through the megaphone of conservative radio, especially by its pioneer and founding father, Rush Limbaugh, and once the message is crystallized on “Fox & Friends” in the morning and by Sean Hannity in the evening, it congeals into the Rudolph W. Giuliani observation that “truth isn’t truth.”
A partial journalistic remedy would be to lower the temperature, reduce the volume. Except, of course, that there is no story to match it. The world without Trump, even a world with reduced portions of Trump, would be a much duller place, and the industry of journalism does not thrive on dull. The paradox of the Trump presidency is that its very sleaziness has reenergized American journalism even while undermining it.
What a brilliant piece of journalistic sophistry, Ted, to match Trump’s “brilliant piece of political jujitsu”!
And no doubt the dog ate your homework, too.
Or was it Trump’s dog that ate your homework? Oops, trick question: Trump doesn’t own a dog. McKinley was the last president prior to Trump who didn’t own a dog, but he had other pets. Trump has no pets at all.
What a monster. Next he will be causing us to forsake our own pets. Is there no evil he cannot make us do?
Spain: another known wolf
A vicious terrorist attack occurred in Spain about a year ago. That one has merged in memory along with so many others that it resembles. It featured vehicles purposely targeting pedestrians in a crowded spot, an explosion in a house, and various known wolves and mystery men.
But this new article tells us much more about what happened—and what didn’t happen. And the information is even more chilling than what was known before.
The attack’s mastermind was killed in the house explosion, which from the start was suspected to have been what is ironically called a “work accident.” His name was Es Satty, and he was born in Morocco but came to Spain about twenty years ago:
He worked for just over a year as an imam in a small mosque in Vilanova, called Al Furkan.
For years, Es Satty also worked on both sides of the Moroccan-Spanish border, moving goods between the countries in a van. According to court documents, Es Satty was arrested in 2002 while trying to smuggle a person with a fake passport from the port in Ceuta, one of two Spanish enclave cities in Africa, to the Spanish mainland. He was sentenced to six months, but, in the end, served no time.
Es Satty later came under investigation for more serious crimes. His name appears throughout court documents related to a major terrorism case known as Operation Chacal…
Spanish police tapped his phone in 2005 on the suspicion that he had ties to the 2003 Casablanca bombings and other extremist groups operating in Spain. In Vilanova, he at one point shared a residence with Mrabet Fahsi and Belgacem [terrorists].
He seems to have probably become a police informant in the investigation of those earlier terrorist incidents, and was later arrested on smuggling charges and imprisoned. There is evidence that he was surveilled while in prison and/or an informant, and after he got out he was ordered deported. However:
…[A] judge in Castellón ruled in Es Satty’s favor, stating that he was integrated into life in Spain and didn’t represent “a real threat” that was “sufficiently grave for the public order and security.”
The accusation that the court dropped Es Satty’s deportation order in return for his collaboration in prison circulated widely throughout the Spanish and Catalan press after the attack. A spokesperson for the courts in Castellón said that the decision was not due to police involvement, but rather the lack thereof: Because Es Satty was never charged with a crime in Operation Chacal, the spokesperson said, the court had no idea of his past.
Seems to me he should have been deported just on the strength of his smuggling conviction, but the court thought otherwise. At any rate, there was additional information that he was simpatico to terrorists and terrorism, but that news never got to the proper authorities, and he continued on his merry way.
Much of the rest of the article is devoted to the lack of communication between various sections of the Spanish police and investigative units:
Ramón Cossío, a spokesperson for the union of the Policía Nacional, described the collaboration between Spanish and Catalan police as “not great.” He listed instances of information-sharing agreements that aren’t acted on, collaborations that never happen, and turf battles.
“It doesn’t make sense to have an antiterrorism unit in the Guardia Civil, another in the Policía Nacional, and another in the Mossos d’Esquadra,” Cossío said. “It’s backwards.”
This story is hardly unique. Over and over we see known terrorists or terrorist-friendly people who have been under surveillance off and on, and yet manage to pull off terrorist attacks and radicalize others, all without the knowledge of police. Our systems of government and law protect their rights and give them second and third chances to remain in countries despite their criminal behavior, suspicious ties, and lack of citizenship. They know this and exploit it.
I’ve been ignoring…
…the Kavanaugh hearings. But others have amply covered the various forms of insanity connected with the proceedings.
At Powerline, we have this, this, and this. From the latter:
It strikes me that the Democratic Party crossed a Rubicon of sorts today [Tuesday]. They abandoned all norms not just of civility–something they purported to yearn for just a few days ago!–but of sanity. They deliberately turned a Senate confirmation hearing into a farce. There was no distinction between the howling left-wing mob that infiltrated the hearing room and the Senate Democrats.
What was Harry Reid thinking when he ended the Senate filibuster for federal judge appointments?
The year was 2013. Faced with a Republican minority in the Senate that was blocking many of President Obama’s federal judge appointments, Harry Reid made a bold move to end the filibuster for federal judicial nominees with the exception of the Supreme Court.
It not as though he wasn’t warned:
Senator Mitch McConnell stood on the Senate floor and issued a warning to the Democrats who then controlled the majority.
“I say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you’ll regret this,” McConnell, then the minority leader, told them. “And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.”
Now, with the Kavanaugh hearings, Democrats are experiencing that predicted regret.
So why did the Democrats do it? After all, the old rule had held for a long time for several reasons. The first was that, at least until recent decades, each party allowed the nominees of the other party to be approved unless there was some very egregious reason to block the nominee. This ended with the famous “borking” of Bork in 1987, and near-routine blocking of nominees had slowly gotten more frequent over the years. The second was that each party knew that if the rule was changed and the nuclear option invoked, they would regret it when they lost power.
So again—why did Reid do it?
I have some theories, although I don’t profess to know for sure.
The first is that he thought he may as well because the time had come, and if he didn’t do it—and get the advantage of it while Obama was president—the Republicans would do it if and when they came into power. I’m not really sure they would have, but it’s certainly possible, and then Reid’s reasoning would make sense.
The second possibility relies on something that’s quite different, which is that Reid may have calculated that the Democrats had the presidency locked up for the foreseeable future, so it would never come back to bite the Democrats for the simple reason that it would always be a Democratic president making the nominations.
Third, it may be that Reid had so little respect for the cojones of the Republicans in the Senate that he didn’t think they would extend the rule to SCOTUS nominees, the most important judges of all. If that was his calculation, it turns out that he was wrong.
Nike ♥ Kaepernick
Nike’s support of Colin Kaepernick has caused a drop in its stock prices. But Nike is all-in:
In the crowded marketplace of athletic apparel, presumably Nike’s overnight transformation from selling an apolitical product to “woke sneakers” for the SJW set is a brand strategy similar to the reason why late night TV aims hard left, Robert Tracinski of the Federalist:
“What were once cultural institutions with a broad, bipartisan audience are becoming niche players with a narrow fan base. They no longer view partisan politics as a dangerous move that will shrink their audience. Instead, they’re using partisan politics as a lure to secure the loyalty of their audience, or what is left of it.”
It’s an interesting theory. I’m not so sure it applies to Nike, though. Nike was doing rather well, and it’s a product that ought to have a broad appeal. It is (or was) inherently non-political, with no content excerpt its material goods, unlike the movies or television.
So, why did Nike do it? Googling “why did Nike do it?” just now, I get a lot of positive responses from market analysts and websites, such as for example this one that basically says Nike may take a hit in the short run, but it will pay off in the long run because history will vindicate their decision and their position.
And this article says Nike’s decision will lead to profits:
…[Nike leaders] realize that despite the heated words and presidential tweets hurled Kaepernick’s way since he first kneeled during “The Star-Spangled Banner” in August 2016, he [Kaepernick] makes people money. Lots of it. He signed his Nike contract in 2011, and he hasn’t been used by the company in two years, but he spent a three-month period in 2017 after he left the 49ers as a free agent leading the franchise in merchandise sales.
Ching ching.
No wonder Nike officials decided to let Kaepernick lead this new ad campaign despite heavy hitters such as Odell Beckham Jr., Serena Williams and LeBron James. It didn’t hurt their choice that Kaepernick joined former teammate Eric Reid (another blackballed NFL free agent for protesting during the national anthem) in getting a standing ovation this week in New York. They were introduced during the U.S. Open match between the Williams sisters.
I preferred the olden days, when companies stayed out of politics (on either side) for the most part, and patriotism was the name of the game. But those days are long gone and I don’t see them coming back.
Et tu, Sweden?
Sweden is facing an election, and the right seems poised to make a better showing than usual:
Polling over the summer has put the ruling Social Democrats on as low as a 21% vote share – down 10% on its showing at Sweden’s last parliamentary election in 2014 and the party’s worst showing for more than a century.
“When we talk about about Sweden and other Scandinavian countries you associate them with social democracy,” Patrik Öhberg, an expert on Swedish politics from the University of Gothenburg.
“But it seems like this era is going to end now. We have become more a country like everyone else. It’s a bastion of social democracy now maybe going to rubble. Something big is going on here.”
The main beneficiary of the centre-left’s slump has so far been the far right Sweden Democrats, who some surveys have predicted will pick up 28.5% of the vote, more than double its performance four years ago before the peak of Europe’s refugee crisis.
Why this is happening is no mystery. The article quotes a Swedish social scientist as saying, “people do not feel at home culturally, they doubt that we are on the right track.” Now, why might that be?:
It is a legacy of Europe’s refugee crisis in 2015 when Sweden received a record-breaking 163,000 asylum applicants.
People were told by their government that any objection they had was racist (the following is a quote from a Swedish political scientist):
For such a long time [government officials] said: ‘This [immigration] is not an issue, you’re racist, we should not talk about it, it’s a win-win.
And then reality bit, in the form of crime:
“There are problems with burning cars, shootings and so on in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo,” said Professor Gustavsson [a political scientist].
“But you shouldn’t exaggerate it because in an international context it’s not so dramatic. But it is in a Swedish context because we have not had this kind of thing before.
“To some extent [there is a link between violent crime and immigration] of course. It’s something to do with the fact it’s difficult to integrate all the newcomers but it’s extremely exaggerated because we’ve integrated a lot of refugees from the Balkan wars in the 1990s and up to a couple of years ago the consensus was we were very successful at it.
Note the mealy-mouthed equivocation, and the conflation of one immigrant group (from the Balkans) with another (from the Middle East). Both may have been predominantly Muslim, but previous refugees were European, well-educated, and Bosnian for the most part, from the former Yugoslavia. A very different group from the recent arrivals.
If you speak to actual Swedes who are contemplating casting their votes for that far-right party, however, you get this sort of thing:
“We don’t recognize our country as it is today,” said Bengt Borg, 66. His wife, 64, says she no longer feels safe walking alone at night due to reports of rapes by immigrants. Both plan to join a growing number of Swedes voting for a nationalist and anti-immigrant party, the Sweden Democrats, in Sunday’s general election.
The article I just quoted as says that the Sweden Democrats “have their roots in a neo-Nazi movement.” What does that mean, exactly? The article doesn’t elaborate, but here’s what Wiki has to say on the subject:
The party[founded in 1988] has its roots in Swedish fascism and was primarily a white nationalist movement through the early-1990s, when it first began distancing itself from its past; The SD’s logo from the 1990s until 2006 was a version of the torch used by the UK National Front. Today, the Sweden Democrats officially reject both Fascism and Nazism.[
More here. It’s hard to say, but as best I can tell the party really does have neo-Nazi roots, at least in terms of the history of certain people originally affiliated with it, but has repudiated those roots. There is also some troubling evidence of anti-Semitism among some of the party’s local candidates.
At any rate, as with my recent post on the coming Brazilian election, one could certainly say:
“Elites” are fond of telling people what they can and cannot do, but elites are for the most part protected against the disturbing phenomena they have created in a way that the regular populace is not. So why wouldn’t a Trumplike figure [and/or populist, nationalist, anti-immigrant party] have mass appeal? And why would people heed the warnings of their “betters,” who have not seen fit to offer them any other way to deal with myriad problems except to suck it up, and grin and bear it?
It is quite obvious that whatever it was that led to Trump’s appeal in this country, there are similar (although of course not exactly the same) influences leading to the rise of similar (although of course not exactly the same) politicians in different countries. And the powers-that-be in those countries seem similarly surprised at the entire phenomenon.
Sweden—that tolerant, peaceful, welfare state—is not immune, particularly if it has invited in a group with a higher proportion of less tolerant and less peaceful people who are interested in becoming wards of the welfare state the Swedes have constructed.
The Swedish Democrats are probably not going to win the election, and other parties have so far refused to form a coalition government with them, so the results of the election will probably be that other parties will join together against them. If you want to try to make sense of the possible coalitions in Sweden that might emerge from the election, see this. Reading it may make you very happy we basically have a 2-party system in this country.