Readings for Election Day:
And a closing thought:
Think about what a world would look like if it were run by people with peaceful and contented minds.
-Dan Kervick
Richard Nixon or Hugo Chavez?
George H. W. Bush or Lyndon LaRouche?
Did you have to think hard about either of those choices? I hope not.
Suppose a candidate for high office stood up and said “We face many difficult collective action problems. Here’s how I suggest we address them…” Suppose he was a Senator from Vermont named Bernie Sanders. He’d get looked at like he had three heads. He’d get called a communist and worse. Until there’s widespread acknowledgement that we face collective action problems we’re unlikely to make much progress towards resolving them. We’ve been subject to decades of propaganda that there’s no such thing as a collective action problem. Just getting to acknowledgement that there are is a major challenge.
Food for thought from Matt Taibbi, Stop Whining About ‘False Balance’:
News media outlets are increasingly coming under fire for the sin of “false balance” or “false equivalency.” The New York Times, one of the outlets most often accused of this offense, recently defined the term:
The crime of The Times, according to some of its readers, has been its coverage of the Clinton email and Clinton Foundation stories. As one Times reader put it, “There’s too much at stake in this election for the media to stoke the belief that Hillary’s mistakes (which she has definitely made) are even close to par with Trump’s.”
When Times public editor Liz Spayd essentially told readers that her paper was just doing its job and that readers should just suck it up and deal, she was hit with a torrent of criticism.
A pack of pundits – one might call them the false-equivalency priesthood – lashed out through pieces like “Why the Media Is Botching the Election,” “Media Should Stop Treating Trump and Clinton as Equals,” “Does the New York Times Have a False Balance Problem?” and countless others.
It’s getting ridiculous. Two quick thoughts:
1) The people complaining about “false balance” usually seem confident in having discovered the truth of things for themselves, despite the media’s supposed incompetence. They’re quite sure of whom to vote for and why. Their complaints are really about the impact that “false balance” coverage might have on other, lesser humans, with weaker minds than theirs. Which is not just snobbish, but laughably snobbish. So, shut up.
2) One of the main reasons the news media has been dumbed down over the years is because audiences have consistently rejected smart, responsible journalism in favor of clickbait stupidities like “Five Things You Didn’t Know About John McCain’s Penis” and “Woman Strips Naked in Front of Police Officers. You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.” The Bachelor and Toddlers and Tiaras crush Frontline. And people wonder why Donald Trump gets a lot of coverage?
In anticipation of Clinton selecting Tim Kaine as her running mate the NY Times writes “Tim Kaine Seems Likely for Hillary Clinton’s No. 2, but Liberals Balk“. Ya don’t say? Actually, they do, “Clinton Faces Pressure to Pick VP Who Is Tough on Trade, Wall Street“. So much for that. (The Mad Biologist had something to say about this.)
Clinton also comments on Trump’s selection of Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate:
Mrs. Clinton has called Mr. Pence the “most extreme pick in a generation,” highlighting his positions against same-sex marriage and abortion rights and his support for prayer in the schools.
Labor issues? Fiscal policy? Trade policy? Environmental policy? Military adventurism? I guess those don’t rate.
Emphasis mine:
We’ve known since the work of Richard Downs in 1955 that people can be rationally ignorant about politics. We also know they can be rationallyinattentive. So why can’t they also be rationally irrational in politics?
All this poses the question: what can be done about this? The answer isn’t to dismiss people as stupid. The point about the cognitive biases programme is that it shows that we are all prone to error. In fact, this is true of those of us who are awake to such biases. Once you start looking for such biases, you see them everywhere – and perhaps exaggerate their significance. That’s an example of the confirmation bias.
Instead, we should think about policies that run with the grain of people’s biases and yet are sensible themselves. One clue here lies in that word “control”. What we saw during the EU referendum is that people want control. We should therefore offer voters just this. And meaningful control, not just immigration controls.
I’ll leave others to think about what such a platform might be: for me, it includes a citizens income and worker democracy among other things. The point, though, is that whilst we hear much about inequalities of income, the left must also think about reducing inequalities of power.
[The left] should be offering solutions to uncertainty – a stronger better social safety net and a job guarantee. We should also be offering people real control over their lives – and not control exercised on their behalf by the sort of elites they profess to despise.
Courtesy of Corey Robin:
If Donald Trump is the George McGovern of the GOP, what does that make Hillary Clinton?