This year has been a strange one. Not all of it has been bad: Taiwan's elections turned out pretty well, quite a few major discoveries were made in astronomy, some progress was made in fighting climate change, and on a personal note, my music related endeavors (such as my radio show and my Taiwanese aboriginal music related activities) mostly went well. But there's been a lot of bad news as well. Personally, I suffered a broken leg (perhaps more on that another time - at any rate I am mostly recovered), climate change is becoming much more serious, and much of the international political news has been bad or downright terrible. There have also been what seems like an unusual number of deaths of famous people: aside from many people in the world of popular music, some of whom I've written about in my music blog, people ranging from King Bhumibol of Thailand and Fidel Castro of Cuba to the recent deaths of actress/writer Carrie Fisher and her mother, actress Debbie Reynolds. Of course people die every year, and it is pure coincidence that these people died in a year in which many other things have gone badly. Still, it's no surprise that many people are saying that it's been a terrible year and are in a hurry for it to end. Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that 2017 will be better. In fact, it may be worse, since we have yet to face the real consequences of at least one of the worst events of 2016, the US presidential election. But rather than dwell too much on all this, I am going to talk instead about a few of the books I've read over the latter part of this year, as promised in my last post on my reading. This doesn't quite cover everything; I wrote about Keith Richards' autobiography in my music blog, and I'm almost finished with Jared Diamond's fascinating and educational Guns, Germs and Steel, but that will have to be covered in a later post.
The Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock
Elric of Melnibone is one of the classic characters of fantasy (more precisely, its subgenre swords and sorcery). The original saga was published in bits and pieces and out of chronological order, but was later organized into six books, though most of them consist of essentially separate episodes, reflecting the way they were originally published. These books, in internal chronological order, are Elric of Melnibone, Sailor on the Seas of Fate, The Weird of the White Wolf, The Vanishing Tower, The Bane of the Black Sword and Stormbringer. Elric of Melnibone, though first by internal chronology, was published later than the other material, and was also the first full-length Elric novel, as the other books consist of novellas and short stories originally published separately. Many years later, Moorcock wrote several additional Elric books, but as I don’t have any of these, they aren’t considered here.
I had read Elric of Melnibone and The Weird of the White Wolf in the past, but it was only later that I acquired most of the other books in the series (I still don’t have The Vanishing Tower). I decided to read all five books that I had in internal chronological order. The most obvious comparisons to be made are to Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and Fritz Leiber’s stories of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Elric is (I think deliberately) almost the polar opposite of Conan, as rather than a black-haired, muscular barbarian with a strong distrust of magic, Elric is a physically weak albino with substantial sorcerous abilities who is the last of a long line of emperors of a civilized but extremely decadent race. As such, he is certainly a more unique character, and in many ways a more interesting one. Moorcock’s stories also have the advantage of lacking some of the vaguely racist pseudoscience that Howard incorporated into his tales, such as the idea that humans or other creatures could “devolve” into less advanced species (though even Moorcock and for that matter writers like J.R.R. Tolkien rather overemphasized the idea of inherent racial characteristics). The female characters in the Elric stories are not completely helpless or incapable, though they still far too often end up needing to be rescued from villains who have kidnapped them. In this respect as well as others, Leiber’s stories are superior. One major distinction (though whether it makes one or the other better is of course subjective) is that Leiber’s tales have considerably more humor and plain fun. The Elric stories are suffused with grim melancholy, in keeping with the anti-hero who is their focus. Fafhrd and Grey Mouser are not exactly paragons of virtue – they are mercenaries and thieves – but Elric can be callous and cruel, even if he is more troubled by something resembling a conscience and has more of a sense of right and wrong than most of his people. His friend and companion Moonglum bears a bit more resemblance to the Grey Mouser in particular, but even he can’t keep up his optimism and wit in the face of some of the particularly unpleasant situations the pair encounter.
Ultimately, the Elric stories (and particularly their distinctive protagonist) are intriguing and present an interesting twist on standard fantasy fare, but while at least some of them should be read by anyone who wants to get a full grounding in classic fantasy, I wouldn’t put them at the top of my list of fantasy books to recommend to someone unfamiliar with the genre, unless I knew them to be the type of person who was likely to appreciate their dark and melancholy tone.
The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man is one of several classic novels by the early science fiction writer H.G. Wells, only slightly less famous than the two I’d read in the past, War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. Nevertheless, I was completely unfamiliar with the story, and was somewhat surprised by the character of the titular invisible man and the uses he makes of his discovery. Though he sometimes seems to be a bit exaggerated, and at times the very British behavior of some of the other characters may strike modern readers as a bit odd, they are all distinct and colorful. Wells also obviously gave a lot of thought to both providing a believable explanation for the process by which the invisibility formula was discovered and its potential consequences. The story is not exactly a cheerful one, but it is an interesting one, and the story is well worth reading for anyone interested in classic science fiction.
The Bridge by Iain Banks
This Iain Banks novel is not one of his science fiction novels (which were credited to Iain M. Banks), but rather one of his mainstream, “real world” novels. In fact, he first gained critical fame through the latter, and wrote both types of novels throughout his career (he once said literary types who were dismissive of science fiction would often assume that he wrote science fiction for the money and would be taken aback when he’d tell them that if anything the reverse was true: he wrote mainstream fiction for the money, but sci-fi was what he enjoyed writing most). I’ve read several of his mainstream novels, all of which I’ve found to be quite good, but this one might be the best. It is certainly the most imaginative. This is in part because while the basic frame story is set in the real world, the majority of the novel unfolds in settings that are not part of the real world at all, but part of what might best be described as a dream world, or rather multiple dream worlds folded into each other. As I’d rather not give away too much of the story, I will simply explain this by saying that much of the story centers around a character living on a bridge that seems to go on almost forever in both directions, and is basically a city in itself, with homes, offices, restaurants, hospitals, bars and more, densely populated by apparently normal people. The protagonist suffers from amnesia and doesn’t remember where he came from or what his original name was. From time to time, he experiences vivid dreams, including a series of them featuring yet another protagonist who appears to be a powerful but amoral barbarian warrior who tells his story in some type of Scottish dialect. Interspersed among the bridge-centered story and the dreams of its protagonist is the story of the other chief protagonist, who lives in our real world.
The real world protagonist has much in common with the protagonists of most other mainstream Banks novels. He is Scottish and politically leftist, though he struggles to reconcile his principles with his lifestyle and is often self-centered in spite of his ideals. He is a recreational drug user and is in a long-term relationship, though the relationship is not without its problems. While many of these characteristics are found in other Banks protagonists, each manages to be distinct, and this novel is even further distinguished by the other strands of narrative, which have only the most tangential relationship to the real world. Like Banks’s sci-fi Culture novels (or his occasional non-Culture sci-fi novels), The Bridge shows a highly imaginative writer at work, one who manages to be in turns clever, witty, and philosophical while telling a very engaging and entertaining story.
Saturday, December 31, 2016
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
From Thailand to Cuba: Some Comments on the Deaths of Two Very Senior Leaders
Though like a lot of other people, most of my attention over the last couple of months was largely absorbed by the election in the United States (a topic I’ll probably be addressing again soon), a number of other notable events occurred around the world in this period. Among them was the deaths of two very different individuals who nevertheless had a number of things in common. Both died at a very advanced age, both had served as head of state in their respective nations for a very, very long time, and both, as highly influential individuals, inevitably had mixed records, though one of them was considerably more controversial than the other. I am referring, of course, to King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand and Fidel Castro of Cuba.
King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who died on October 13 two months short of his 89th birthday, was the ninth king of Thailand’s Chakri dynasty, reigning as Rama IX. At the time of his death, he was the longest-reigning monarch in the world (a title which has now passed to Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom), having reigned for an amazing 70 years, making his reigns one of the longest of all time (there are only about three dozen rulers in history whose reigns are claimed to be as long or longer; many of these were from ancient times and so the dates are of disputable accuracy, and many of the rulers with verifiable dates were monarchs of tiny states, not major kingdoms like Thailand). The vast majority of people in Thailand had never known another ruler. Bhumibol was also the only monarch born in the United States, as his father was studying there at the time.
Bhumibol became king upon the mysterious shooting death of his older brother in 1946. While he was a constitutional monarch who wielded little formal power, he was respected almost to the point of worship by most Thais, and at several key points in history he quietly intervened in politics, affecting the course of events. In 1973, he pushed the military dictator of the time to resign in the face of student protests, but just three years later, disturbed by the spread of communism in Indochina (including the overthrow of the monarchy in neighboring Laos), he gave tacit approval to a massacre of student protestors and the re-imposition of military dictatorship. In 1992, the selection of the leader of a coup from the previous year as prime minister led to mass protests which the government tried to violently suppress. The king ordered the prime minister and the chief protest leader to meet with him, a meeting that was televised. This led to the resignation of the prime minister and the restoration of democracy. It is less clear what role, if any, the king played in the 2006 coup that overthrew the popular (though somewhat authoritarian) prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. So over the years Bhumibol at different times intervened both for and against democracy. Another indication of his somewhat conservative outlook was his support for Thaksin’s “war on drugs”, despite the numerous extrajudicial killings that resulted. On the plus side, he dedicated a great deal of time to numerous development projects aimed at improving the lives of ordinary Thais.
Bhumibol was a skilled sailor and held several patents, for a waste water aerator and for rainmaking techniques. He was a writer, painter and photographer, with published works in all these fields. He was also notable for being an accomplished jazz musician and composer. He was best known for playing the saxophone but also played clarinet, trumpet, guitar and piano. He played with jazz notables such as Benny Goodman and Stan Getz and performed publically with a jazz band he had formed. He composed many songs in his youth and wrote anthems for several Thai universities. I have a couple of CDs of his compositions that I bought in Thailand, though regrettably I couldn’t find any on which he himself played. Here I might note that though of course I never saw Bhumibol in person, I went to Thailand many times in the last couple of decades of his reign. His image, naturally, appeared on all Thai money and in many places in public, including along major avenues, his portrait could be seen along with portraits of other members of the royal family, particularly of his wife and his second daughter, the most popular of his children. I also recall seeing portraits of his mother, who was still alive at the time of my first trip to Thailand (she died in 1995 at well over 94 years of age).
While much of the respect Bhumibol received from his subjects was deserved, the degree to which he and the royal family were protected from criticism were unhealthy and a violation of freedom of expression. The current military government has been particularly zealous in enforcing the overly strict lese majesty laws, with people sentenced to long prison terms for Facebook posts. People have even been prosecuted for actions such as wearing black on the king’s birthday. Academics have been arrested merely for suggesting proposing reforms of the monarchy. Ironically, in 2005 the king himself said that it should be okay to criticize him, stating that saying the king could do no wrong was akin to saying he was not human. But either he was either unable or unwilling to impel the government to stop prosecuting people for lese majesty (indeed, there were far more cases after 2005 than before). The truth is Bhumibol was correct. He was indeed human and as such not perfect, though as a stabilizing force in Thailand probably he did more good than harm over the course of his life, with regrettable exceptions at certain points.
Like Bhumibol, Fidel Castro of Cuba, who died just a few days ago, was the leader of his nation for many decades and by far the most influential figure in the country over the last half of the 20th century and into the 21st. Castro was actually older than Bhumibol, having been born a year and several months earlier, and he was a few months past his 90th birthday when he died. While he wasn’t the titular leader of his country for quite so long as Bhumibol, serving as prime minister from 1959 to 1976 and as president from 1976 to 2008 (though he was on medical leave beginning in 2006 due to illness, with his brother Raul Castro taking over as acting president and eventually as his formal successor), Castro wielded far more actual power. He also had much greater influence outside his own country, particularly in Latin America and Africa. He also was a far more controversial figure, particularly in the United States, a country which maintained a decades-long embargo against Cuba with the explicit aim of forcing Castro from power.
I’m not going to try to go over Castro’s long career in any detail, as many others have done so over the past few days. Rather, I want to repeat an observation made by some of the more sensible commentators following Castro’s death and that is if one is attempting to pass judgement on his career, neither unadulterated praise nor unadulterated condemnation is appropriate. There is no question that Castro’s rule in Cuba was very repressive. Dissent was fully suppressed and many were imprisoned or killed by his regime. Even Cuba’s vibrant culture was stifled for most of his time in power. His imposition of a totalitarian system also led to economic rigidity which left Cuba impoverished, though the US blockade also contributed to the country’s economic difficulties. On the other hand, he did greatly improve education and medical care in Cuba, to the point where its level of literacy and the quality of its health care was far superior to that of most countries in the developing world and comparable to that in much wealthier nations. Cuba even sent doctors to many other countries in Latin America and Africa to provide medical help. He also improved the lot of Afro-Cubans, greatly reducing the inequality that had existed prior to his seizure of power. He also supported the fight against apartheid in South Africa. His regime had a poor record on gay rights for most of his time in power, but towards the end of his life he urged the acceptance of homosexuality and took responsibility for earlier repression in a rare admission of error. His niece, the daughter of his brother and successor Raul, is Cuba’s most prominent activist for LGBT rights.
Basically, the good Castro did does not in any way excuse the evil he did, but neither does the evil he did negate the good. One can conclude that overall he did more harm than good, or one can conclude the opposite, but unquestionably he did plenty of both. He was intelligent and charismatic but also inflexible and ruthless. Many Cuban-Americans celebrated his death and condemned him as a bloody tyrant. He certainly was that, but it is worth remembering that the Batista regime he and his followers overthrew was just as repressive and also lacked many of the Castro regime’s virtues. Conservative Cuban-Americans and right-wingers in the US opposed US President Barack Obama’s normalization of relations with Cuba in recent years on the grounds that the government headed by the Castro brothers is still regularly violating human rights. This is definitely true, but many other governments with worse human rights records are treated with much less hostility (e.g., China) or even regarded as allies (e.g., Saudi Arabia), so the US treatment of Cuba makes little sense. On the other hand, those who in response to Castro’s death have lauded him as a great revolutionary without condemning his repression are just as wrong as those who have called him a bloody dictator without acknowledging that he did in at least a few ways improve the lives of ordinary Cubans. In the end, he was both a great revolutionary and a bloody tyrant. Like Bhumibol and virtually every other person who ever lived, he did both good and bad, though in Castro’s case he did a lot more of both than most people could even dream of doing.
King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who died on October 13 two months short of his 89th birthday, was the ninth king of Thailand’s Chakri dynasty, reigning as Rama IX. At the time of his death, he was the longest-reigning monarch in the world (a title which has now passed to Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom), having reigned for an amazing 70 years, making his reigns one of the longest of all time (there are only about three dozen rulers in history whose reigns are claimed to be as long or longer; many of these were from ancient times and so the dates are of disputable accuracy, and many of the rulers with verifiable dates were monarchs of tiny states, not major kingdoms like Thailand). The vast majority of people in Thailand had never known another ruler. Bhumibol was also the only monarch born in the United States, as his father was studying there at the time.
Bhumibol became king upon the mysterious shooting death of his older brother in 1946. While he was a constitutional monarch who wielded little formal power, he was respected almost to the point of worship by most Thais, and at several key points in history he quietly intervened in politics, affecting the course of events. In 1973, he pushed the military dictator of the time to resign in the face of student protests, but just three years later, disturbed by the spread of communism in Indochina (including the overthrow of the monarchy in neighboring Laos), he gave tacit approval to a massacre of student protestors and the re-imposition of military dictatorship. In 1992, the selection of the leader of a coup from the previous year as prime minister led to mass protests which the government tried to violently suppress. The king ordered the prime minister and the chief protest leader to meet with him, a meeting that was televised. This led to the resignation of the prime minister and the restoration of democracy. It is less clear what role, if any, the king played in the 2006 coup that overthrew the popular (though somewhat authoritarian) prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. So over the years Bhumibol at different times intervened both for and against democracy. Another indication of his somewhat conservative outlook was his support for Thaksin’s “war on drugs”, despite the numerous extrajudicial killings that resulted. On the plus side, he dedicated a great deal of time to numerous development projects aimed at improving the lives of ordinary Thais.
Bhumibol was a skilled sailor and held several patents, for a waste water aerator and for rainmaking techniques. He was a writer, painter and photographer, with published works in all these fields. He was also notable for being an accomplished jazz musician and composer. He was best known for playing the saxophone but also played clarinet, trumpet, guitar and piano. He played with jazz notables such as Benny Goodman and Stan Getz and performed publically with a jazz band he had formed. He composed many songs in his youth and wrote anthems for several Thai universities. I have a couple of CDs of his compositions that I bought in Thailand, though regrettably I couldn’t find any on which he himself played. Here I might note that though of course I never saw Bhumibol in person, I went to Thailand many times in the last couple of decades of his reign. His image, naturally, appeared on all Thai money and in many places in public, including along major avenues, his portrait could be seen along with portraits of other members of the royal family, particularly of his wife and his second daughter, the most popular of his children. I also recall seeing portraits of his mother, who was still alive at the time of my first trip to Thailand (she died in 1995 at well over 94 years of age).
While much of the respect Bhumibol received from his subjects was deserved, the degree to which he and the royal family were protected from criticism were unhealthy and a violation of freedom of expression. The current military government has been particularly zealous in enforcing the overly strict lese majesty laws, with people sentenced to long prison terms for Facebook posts. People have even been prosecuted for actions such as wearing black on the king’s birthday. Academics have been arrested merely for suggesting proposing reforms of the monarchy. Ironically, in 2005 the king himself said that it should be okay to criticize him, stating that saying the king could do no wrong was akin to saying he was not human. But either he was either unable or unwilling to impel the government to stop prosecuting people for lese majesty (indeed, there were far more cases after 2005 than before). The truth is Bhumibol was correct. He was indeed human and as such not perfect, though as a stabilizing force in Thailand probably he did more good than harm over the course of his life, with regrettable exceptions at certain points.
Like Bhumibol, Fidel Castro of Cuba, who died just a few days ago, was the leader of his nation for many decades and by far the most influential figure in the country over the last half of the 20th century and into the 21st. Castro was actually older than Bhumibol, having been born a year and several months earlier, and he was a few months past his 90th birthday when he died. While he wasn’t the titular leader of his country for quite so long as Bhumibol, serving as prime minister from 1959 to 1976 and as president from 1976 to 2008 (though he was on medical leave beginning in 2006 due to illness, with his brother Raul Castro taking over as acting president and eventually as his formal successor), Castro wielded far more actual power. He also had much greater influence outside his own country, particularly in Latin America and Africa. He also was a far more controversial figure, particularly in the United States, a country which maintained a decades-long embargo against Cuba with the explicit aim of forcing Castro from power.
I’m not going to try to go over Castro’s long career in any detail, as many others have done so over the past few days. Rather, I want to repeat an observation made by some of the more sensible commentators following Castro’s death and that is if one is attempting to pass judgement on his career, neither unadulterated praise nor unadulterated condemnation is appropriate. There is no question that Castro’s rule in Cuba was very repressive. Dissent was fully suppressed and many were imprisoned or killed by his regime. Even Cuba’s vibrant culture was stifled for most of his time in power. His imposition of a totalitarian system also led to economic rigidity which left Cuba impoverished, though the US blockade also contributed to the country’s economic difficulties. On the other hand, he did greatly improve education and medical care in Cuba, to the point where its level of literacy and the quality of its health care was far superior to that of most countries in the developing world and comparable to that in much wealthier nations. Cuba even sent doctors to many other countries in Latin America and Africa to provide medical help. He also improved the lot of Afro-Cubans, greatly reducing the inequality that had existed prior to his seizure of power. He also supported the fight against apartheid in South Africa. His regime had a poor record on gay rights for most of his time in power, but towards the end of his life he urged the acceptance of homosexuality and took responsibility for earlier repression in a rare admission of error. His niece, the daughter of his brother and successor Raul, is Cuba’s most prominent activist for LGBT rights.
Basically, the good Castro did does not in any way excuse the evil he did, but neither does the evil he did negate the good. One can conclude that overall he did more harm than good, or one can conclude the opposite, but unquestionably he did plenty of both. He was intelligent and charismatic but also inflexible and ruthless. Many Cuban-Americans celebrated his death and condemned him as a bloody tyrant. He certainly was that, but it is worth remembering that the Batista regime he and his followers overthrew was just as repressive and also lacked many of the Castro regime’s virtues. Conservative Cuban-Americans and right-wingers in the US opposed US President Barack Obama’s normalization of relations with Cuba in recent years on the grounds that the government headed by the Castro brothers is still regularly violating human rights. This is definitely true, but many other governments with worse human rights records are treated with much less hostility (e.g., China) or even regarded as allies (e.g., Saudi Arabia), so the US treatment of Cuba makes little sense. On the other hand, those who in response to Castro’s death have lauded him as a great revolutionary without condemning his repression are just as wrong as those who have called him a bloody dictator without acknowledging that he did in at least a few ways improve the lives of ordinary Cubans. In the end, he was both a great revolutionary and a bloody tyrant. Like Bhumibol and virtually every other person who ever lived, he did both good and bad, though in Castro’s case he did a lot more of both than most people could even dream of doing.
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
Angry Rant Time: The Stupid, the Ignorant, and the Deplorable
So pretty much everyone now knows about the disastrous results of the presidential election in the US. And it was clearly a disaster: it is no coincidence that voices of reason and sense from all over the world and from all walks of life have bemoaned it, while it has been celebrated by Russia (which also admitted to both regular contact with the Pumpkin Hitler campaign and to having a hand in the Wikileaks releases aimed at harming Hillary Clinton), the KKK, white nationalists in general, rightwing extremists in Europe, authoritarian leaders like Orban in Hungary and Erdogan in Turkey, genocide-promoting Islamophobic Buddhist monks in Myanmar, and ISIS. There is a great deal that can be said about this election, from how it is yet another incentive for ditching the outdated Electoral College and instituting a direct popular vote for president (Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a substantial if not overwhelming margin) to what it means for the future (with a utterly unqualified, completely self-centered and generally unpredictable president-elect, it’s hard to tell – but it’s almost certainly going to be bad). However, I am going to focus my attention on – or to put it more bluntly, direct my rant at – those who brought about this result, starting with the millions of people who voted for this unqualified, bigoted, narcissistic, lying buffoon.
Basically, I long ago concluded that those who support Pumpkin Hitler (we’ll call him DT for short) have to be either stupid, ignorant, what Hillary Clinton rather generously called “deplorable”, or some combination of the three. My brother argues that the ignorant have to be considered a subset of the stupid, as he doesn’t see how any intelligent person could remain ignorant of either how awful DT was or how portrayals of the two major candidates as equal bad were clearly egregious examples of false equivalence, but while I also find it hard to fathom, I’m also aware that people, even otherwise intelligent people, have an amazing capacity to tune out information that they aren’t interested in listening to, whether because of a dislike of the subject in general (“I don’t like politics”) or because it contradicts their previously held beliefs and opinions (“all politicians are bad and dishonest, so it doesn’t really matter who I choose”). Of course one could argue that this sort of willful ignorance could just as easily be called willful stupidity, and I’ll admit the line is a bit fuzzy.
I should note here that when I talk about “stupidity”, it is not necessarily aimed at people with low IQs or diminished mental capacity. As the line in Forrest Gump goes, “stupid is as stupid does”. A lot of people with low IQs were perfectly capable of identifying DT as a terrible person and HRC as a good one. On the other hand, there were evidentially also lots of people of average or even above average intelligence who managed to ignore or rationalize all the signs that DT was a bully, a bigot, a racist, a pathological liar, and a complete narcissist, that he was an incompetent businessman who engaged in highly questionable business practices, that he was utterly unqualified to be president (you could hardly do worse if you picked someone at random off the street), and that there was very good reason to think he has committed sexual assault on multiple occasions, or who accepted the widely repeated but unfounded assertions that HRC was particularly dishonest or corrupt, that her handling of her emails was not only criminal but as morally questionable as DT’s behavior, or just that both were somehow equally bad. Exit polls indicate that a substantial number of people didn’t even decide who they were going to vote for until the last few weeks before the election. A majority of these, particularly those who decided a week before (in the days just after the FBI director took the unethical and possibly illegal step of releasing a letter containing vague insinuations against HRC, but just before he came out and admitted there was no new evidence of wrongdoing on her part) ended up voting for DT. How can anyone have still remained undecided so late in the campaign, and even more incredibly how can they have picked the obviously worse choice? Were they really so low information as to not know which was better, or was it a complete lack of critical thinking ability that made them incapable of determining who was better even with all the information that was available? In either case, it is appalling that so many people, when faced with such a huge disparity in options, could pick the terrible one. Exit polls indicated that a small majority of voters thought Clinton was qualified, while about 60% (including, evidentially, many who voted for him) thought DT was unqualified. When asked what candidate quality mattered most, voters answered “can bring change” (39%), “right experience” (21%), “good judgment” (20%) and “cares about me” (15%). Voters who picked the latter three qualities voted heavily for Clinton, particularly those who picked “good judgment” (66% for HRC) and “right experience” (an overwhelming 90% for HRC). But those who picked the first option voted overwhelmingly for DT (83%). Certainly he was the candidate most likely to bring drastic change. But why on earth would these people think that the change he was likely to bring was going to be good? It is astonishing that people could be so…well, so stupid. Unless, of course, we are talking about those people who belonged to the third (or second, if we lump the stupid and ignorant together) category of DT voters.
It was clear throughout the campaign that DT was attracting unprecedented levels of support from the people that Hillary Clinton somewhat charitably referred to as “deplorables”. These included white supremacists, extreme xenophobes, virulent Islamophobes, misogynists, anti-Semites and more. But even among supporters who were not outspoken in their hate for one or more groups of “others”, there was clearly an undercurrent of racism, even if it was couched in less blatant language (“make America great again”, with the implication that it was last great back when men were men, women stayed at home, and minorities knew their place or simply weren’t around). It was no coincidence that after a campaign in which he blamed all of the US’s problems on outsiders and minority groups (e.g., the “certain groups” that he claimed would engage in vote fraud in order to steal the election), white people voted heavily in his favor. He won almost two thirds of the white male vote, a fact that makes me ashamed to be in the same demographic. He even won a more narrow majority of white women, despite all the sexist remarks he made and the credible accusations of sexual assault (supported by his own taped remarks). While among these voters it’s impossible to be sure where the stupidity and ignorance (see above) ends and the racism and bigotry begins, the latter surely played a role for a substantial number of voters, just as has been the case for right wing parties in Europe and elsewhere. An interesting side note: some time back I saw a poll of British citizens regarding their preferences in the US election. A large majority picked HRC, men by almost as much as women. The poll was also broken down by UK party, and majorities of Labour voters, Liberal Democrat voters and even Conservative voters preferred Clinton. The one group that preferred DT? Supporters of the right-wing, xenophobic, anti-Europe UKIP. It’s also surely no coincidence that DT is the preferred candidate of nearly all of the most foul-mouthed of the Internet trolls. In fact, he is practically the king of the Internet trolls. What does it say about the US that it would elect an Internet troll to lead the country?
But aside from the outright racists, white supremacists and trolls on the one hand and the subconscious or semi-conscious racism and xenophobia of many others who voted for DT, there is one other group of voters who supported him even though they were by no means ignorant of his flaws. This group was the fairly large contingent of Republicans and conservatives who claimed to strongly disapprove of DT’s character and at least some of his remarks and actions. A number of these people no doubt retained sufficient principle to follow through with their claims that they couldn’t support him and either voted for someone else, left the top of their ballots blank or didn’t vote at all. But exit polls indicate the vast majority of self-described Republicans did vote for him in the end. In fact, some who condemned him still openly declared they’d vote for him. I saw one rightwing evangelical make the argument that because DT was running on a platform of policies he supported, he’d vote for him even though he thought he was morally speaking highly flawed. In essence, these people voted for a candidate that they knew was both extremely unqualified and morally unsound just because he (mostly) supported the policies they supported. Even leaving aside the problem of whether the policies they want are good or bad, this begs the question: exactly how morally depraved would a person have to be to lose their vote? If Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot rose from the grave to run on the Republican platform, would they vote for them? Perhaps they figure that since DT appears to be rather uninterested in the actual work of governing, he will just run around making self-aggrandizing statements and grabbing the crotches of any women who aren’t able successfully avoid him and will leave it up to Pence, Gingrich, Priebus, McConnell, Ryan, Giuliani et al to run the country. Perhaps, but that still amounts to condoning both his personal flaws and his outrageous rhetoric. By voting for him despite knowing what he was, they said that they didn’t care if minorities and women were going to suffer under his administration, or that seeing a person who bullies, insults and even sexually assaults others could still get elected president set a horrible example for children. Either you condemn a character like DT or you are condoning him, and by voting for him, they picked the latter. In other words, those who voted open-eyed for a candidate they knew was terrible because he’d cut taxes, reduce regulations, ban abortion, end gay marriage, or whatever else it is they support are just as deplorable as the outright racists and bigots.
Of course, if we’re apportioning blame, there are plenty of other people who should get some share, even if they didn’t go so far as to vote for him. While we can’t blame the conspiracy theory pandering, “HRC would be worse than DT” nonsense peddling Jill Stein and her voters for the final result, we can blame them at least in part for DT’s victories in Michigan and to a lesser extent Wisconsin, as his margin of victory was less than the number of votes Stein received. Whether it was Stein voters or self-proclaimed progressives who left the top of the ballot blank, they also are responsible for DT’s election. As I noted above and many times in the past, only the frankly stupid or ignorant could possibly think that HRC was even close to as bad as DT or that a HRC presidency would be nearly the disaster for minorities, marginalized groups, or the entire country (and even the world) that a DT presidency is likely to be. As one left-wing writer obviously leery of HRC noted, sometimes the lesser of two evils is a lot less evil. This was clearly the case here, and anyone living in a swing state (or even one where the polls were within single digits) who claims to be a progressive but did not vote for HRC shares the blame for the disaster that occurred. This also applies to anyone who was registered to vote, didn’t want DT to win, and yet didn’t bother to help make sure he didn’t. Unfortunately, the left wing also has its share of stubborn-to-the-point-of-idiocy idealists and even conspiracy theorists, such as those who were constantly claiming the DNC or even Hillary herself had “rigged” the primaries (for example, the comments on articles on The Nation are often full such claims). This claim was as nonsensical as the various conspiracy theories fomented by the right, and yet it’s possible that enough left-leaning voters bought into it (through ignorance, extreme bias or lack of critical thinking skills) to refuse to vote for HRC, despite the risks – though of course the risks most of these voters face pale in comparison with the groups who will be the first targets of this administration of extremists. Incidentally, while it is possible that another Democrat would have done better, especially given the absurd slant in media coverage (see below), there is no way to be sure. Bernie Sanders would not have been able to keep his high approval ratings in a long general election campaign, and even if Michael Bloomberg had not followed through on his threat to enter the race if Sanders was the Democratic nominee, there’s no guarantee Sanders would have won, and the same is true of other possibilities, such as Joe Biden. Ironically, even when it was clear that Clinton was going to win the primary, you’d see a few Sanders supporting calling on the party to ignore the primary results and pick Sanders as the stronger candidate, which would have been a far more serious case of the DNC interfering in the process than actually occurred. Now, of course, some are back to insisting that Sanders would have won. But when the other option was someone like DT, it shouldn’t have mattered whether the Democratic nominee was Clinton, Sanders or Biden – for any progressive, Democratic-leaning, or just intelligent centrist voter the choice should have been a no-brainer. And yet here we are.
Then there was the media. There were certainly some journalists out there doing their jobs and investigating DT’s deeds and misdeeds, and even the major media entities showed flashes of real journalism. But overall the media as an institution was a colossal failure and bears a very large share of the responsibility for the results of the election. Much has already been said about all the free coverage they gave him early in the race, completely ignoring other candidates in order to cover his rallies. While you’d think that all that exposure should have helped people see how inane and lacking in substance (not to mention occasionally offensive) everything he said was, apparently not. But the media is too attached to spectacle to pay any attention to substance. And though in the general election the media did start to give him some negative attention, all sorts of incredibly scandalous things in his record were virtually ignored or at best talked about for a day or two and then forgotten. But just as big a problem was their coverage of Hillary Clinton. The media spent a vast amount of time talking about her emails and almost none talking about her proposed policies. This in spite of the fact that the emails were a complete non-issue that were hardly worth a day of coverage. But by repeating ad nauseam vague insinuations that there was something scandalous about her emails and spending relatively little time on things in DT’s record that were a hundred times worse, they created an image of false equivalence in many people’s minds, such that they really thought the two were equally bad. To be sure, it still seems that just a bit of critical thinking ability would allow voters to tell that there was a vast difference, but if the media had done its job properly it wouldn’t even have been an issue.
All this is not to ignore other factors that amounted to cheating by the other side. Voter suppression by the Republicans may well have made the difference in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Florida. FBI director James Comey’s interference, already mentioned above, may have swung enough last minute undecideds away from HRC to make a difference. The Russia-Wikileaks alliance helped to damage HRC as well. But none of these things, especially the latter two, should have mattered if enough voters had the basic analytical skills to distinguish between black and white, which is really what the choice amounted to. Even before the election, I said that it was disgraceful that the electoral vote wasn’t going to be 538 to 0 in HRC’s favor, and I might have added that it was a disgrace the popular vote wasn’t going to be something like 75% to 25%. Surely the number of racists, unrepentant misogynists, xenophobes and other deplorables isn’t more than a quarter of the population. But if so, what’s wrong with all those other people? In any case, this election (despite good results in some local and state-level votes) didn’t do much for my already shaky faith in humanity. Yes, I know I should be looking forward and starting to think about how to win over – or more accurately educate – some of these people, but at this point I’m not in the mood.
Basically, I long ago concluded that those who support Pumpkin Hitler (we’ll call him DT for short) have to be either stupid, ignorant, what Hillary Clinton rather generously called “deplorable”, or some combination of the three. My brother argues that the ignorant have to be considered a subset of the stupid, as he doesn’t see how any intelligent person could remain ignorant of either how awful DT was or how portrayals of the two major candidates as equal bad were clearly egregious examples of false equivalence, but while I also find it hard to fathom, I’m also aware that people, even otherwise intelligent people, have an amazing capacity to tune out information that they aren’t interested in listening to, whether because of a dislike of the subject in general (“I don’t like politics”) or because it contradicts their previously held beliefs and opinions (“all politicians are bad and dishonest, so it doesn’t really matter who I choose”). Of course one could argue that this sort of willful ignorance could just as easily be called willful stupidity, and I’ll admit the line is a bit fuzzy.
I should note here that when I talk about “stupidity”, it is not necessarily aimed at people with low IQs or diminished mental capacity. As the line in Forrest Gump goes, “stupid is as stupid does”. A lot of people with low IQs were perfectly capable of identifying DT as a terrible person and HRC as a good one. On the other hand, there were evidentially also lots of people of average or even above average intelligence who managed to ignore or rationalize all the signs that DT was a bully, a bigot, a racist, a pathological liar, and a complete narcissist, that he was an incompetent businessman who engaged in highly questionable business practices, that he was utterly unqualified to be president (you could hardly do worse if you picked someone at random off the street), and that there was very good reason to think he has committed sexual assault on multiple occasions, or who accepted the widely repeated but unfounded assertions that HRC was particularly dishonest or corrupt, that her handling of her emails was not only criminal but as morally questionable as DT’s behavior, or just that both were somehow equally bad. Exit polls indicate that a substantial number of people didn’t even decide who they were going to vote for until the last few weeks before the election. A majority of these, particularly those who decided a week before (in the days just after the FBI director took the unethical and possibly illegal step of releasing a letter containing vague insinuations against HRC, but just before he came out and admitted there was no new evidence of wrongdoing on her part) ended up voting for DT. How can anyone have still remained undecided so late in the campaign, and even more incredibly how can they have picked the obviously worse choice? Were they really so low information as to not know which was better, or was it a complete lack of critical thinking ability that made them incapable of determining who was better even with all the information that was available? In either case, it is appalling that so many people, when faced with such a huge disparity in options, could pick the terrible one. Exit polls indicated that a small majority of voters thought Clinton was qualified, while about 60% (including, evidentially, many who voted for him) thought DT was unqualified. When asked what candidate quality mattered most, voters answered “can bring change” (39%), “right experience” (21%), “good judgment” (20%) and “cares about me” (15%). Voters who picked the latter three qualities voted heavily for Clinton, particularly those who picked “good judgment” (66% for HRC) and “right experience” (an overwhelming 90% for HRC). But those who picked the first option voted overwhelmingly for DT (83%). Certainly he was the candidate most likely to bring drastic change. But why on earth would these people think that the change he was likely to bring was going to be good? It is astonishing that people could be so…well, so stupid. Unless, of course, we are talking about those people who belonged to the third (or second, if we lump the stupid and ignorant together) category of DT voters.
It was clear throughout the campaign that DT was attracting unprecedented levels of support from the people that Hillary Clinton somewhat charitably referred to as “deplorables”. These included white supremacists, extreme xenophobes, virulent Islamophobes, misogynists, anti-Semites and more. But even among supporters who were not outspoken in their hate for one or more groups of “others”, there was clearly an undercurrent of racism, even if it was couched in less blatant language (“make America great again”, with the implication that it was last great back when men were men, women stayed at home, and minorities knew their place or simply weren’t around). It was no coincidence that after a campaign in which he blamed all of the US’s problems on outsiders and minority groups (e.g., the “certain groups” that he claimed would engage in vote fraud in order to steal the election), white people voted heavily in his favor. He won almost two thirds of the white male vote, a fact that makes me ashamed to be in the same demographic. He even won a more narrow majority of white women, despite all the sexist remarks he made and the credible accusations of sexual assault (supported by his own taped remarks). While among these voters it’s impossible to be sure where the stupidity and ignorance (see above) ends and the racism and bigotry begins, the latter surely played a role for a substantial number of voters, just as has been the case for right wing parties in Europe and elsewhere. An interesting side note: some time back I saw a poll of British citizens regarding their preferences in the US election. A large majority picked HRC, men by almost as much as women. The poll was also broken down by UK party, and majorities of Labour voters, Liberal Democrat voters and even Conservative voters preferred Clinton. The one group that preferred DT? Supporters of the right-wing, xenophobic, anti-Europe UKIP. It’s also surely no coincidence that DT is the preferred candidate of nearly all of the most foul-mouthed of the Internet trolls. In fact, he is practically the king of the Internet trolls. What does it say about the US that it would elect an Internet troll to lead the country?
But aside from the outright racists, white supremacists and trolls on the one hand and the subconscious or semi-conscious racism and xenophobia of many others who voted for DT, there is one other group of voters who supported him even though they were by no means ignorant of his flaws. This group was the fairly large contingent of Republicans and conservatives who claimed to strongly disapprove of DT’s character and at least some of his remarks and actions. A number of these people no doubt retained sufficient principle to follow through with their claims that they couldn’t support him and either voted for someone else, left the top of their ballots blank or didn’t vote at all. But exit polls indicate the vast majority of self-described Republicans did vote for him in the end. In fact, some who condemned him still openly declared they’d vote for him. I saw one rightwing evangelical make the argument that because DT was running on a platform of policies he supported, he’d vote for him even though he thought he was morally speaking highly flawed. In essence, these people voted for a candidate that they knew was both extremely unqualified and morally unsound just because he (mostly) supported the policies they supported. Even leaving aside the problem of whether the policies they want are good or bad, this begs the question: exactly how morally depraved would a person have to be to lose their vote? If Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot rose from the grave to run on the Republican platform, would they vote for them? Perhaps they figure that since DT appears to be rather uninterested in the actual work of governing, he will just run around making self-aggrandizing statements and grabbing the crotches of any women who aren’t able successfully avoid him and will leave it up to Pence, Gingrich, Priebus, McConnell, Ryan, Giuliani et al to run the country. Perhaps, but that still amounts to condoning both his personal flaws and his outrageous rhetoric. By voting for him despite knowing what he was, they said that they didn’t care if minorities and women were going to suffer under his administration, or that seeing a person who bullies, insults and even sexually assaults others could still get elected president set a horrible example for children. Either you condemn a character like DT or you are condoning him, and by voting for him, they picked the latter. In other words, those who voted open-eyed for a candidate they knew was terrible because he’d cut taxes, reduce regulations, ban abortion, end gay marriage, or whatever else it is they support are just as deplorable as the outright racists and bigots.
Of course, if we’re apportioning blame, there are plenty of other people who should get some share, even if they didn’t go so far as to vote for him. While we can’t blame the conspiracy theory pandering, “HRC would be worse than DT” nonsense peddling Jill Stein and her voters for the final result, we can blame them at least in part for DT’s victories in Michigan and to a lesser extent Wisconsin, as his margin of victory was less than the number of votes Stein received. Whether it was Stein voters or self-proclaimed progressives who left the top of the ballot blank, they also are responsible for DT’s election. As I noted above and many times in the past, only the frankly stupid or ignorant could possibly think that HRC was even close to as bad as DT or that a HRC presidency would be nearly the disaster for minorities, marginalized groups, or the entire country (and even the world) that a DT presidency is likely to be. As one left-wing writer obviously leery of HRC noted, sometimes the lesser of two evils is a lot less evil. This was clearly the case here, and anyone living in a swing state (or even one where the polls were within single digits) who claims to be a progressive but did not vote for HRC shares the blame for the disaster that occurred. This also applies to anyone who was registered to vote, didn’t want DT to win, and yet didn’t bother to help make sure he didn’t. Unfortunately, the left wing also has its share of stubborn-to-the-point-of-idiocy idealists and even conspiracy theorists, such as those who were constantly claiming the DNC or even Hillary herself had “rigged” the primaries (for example, the comments on articles on The Nation are often full such claims). This claim was as nonsensical as the various conspiracy theories fomented by the right, and yet it’s possible that enough left-leaning voters bought into it (through ignorance, extreme bias or lack of critical thinking skills) to refuse to vote for HRC, despite the risks – though of course the risks most of these voters face pale in comparison with the groups who will be the first targets of this administration of extremists. Incidentally, while it is possible that another Democrat would have done better, especially given the absurd slant in media coverage (see below), there is no way to be sure. Bernie Sanders would not have been able to keep his high approval ratings in a long general election campaign, and even if Michael Bloomberg had not followed through on his threat to enter the race if Sanders was the Democratic nominee, there’s no guarantee Sanders would have won, and the same is true of other possibilities, such as Joe Biden. Ironically, even when it was clear that Clinton was going to win the primary, you’d see a few Sanders supporting calling on the party to ignore the primary results and pick Sanders as the stronger candidate, which would have been a far more serious case of the DNC interfering in the process than actually occurred. Now, of course, some are back to insisting that Sanders would have won. But when the other option was someone like DT, it shouldn’t have mattered whether the Democratic nominee was Clinton, Sanders or Biden – for any progressive, Democratic-leaning, or just intelligent centrist voter the choice should have been a no-brainer. And yet here we are.
Then there was the media. There were certainly some journalists out there doing their jobs and investigating DT’s deeds and misdeeds, and even the major media entities showed flashes of real journalism. But overall the media as an institution was a colossal failure and bears a very large share of the responsibility for the results of the election. Much has already been said about all the free coverage they gave him early in the race, completely ignoring other candidates in order to cover his rallies. While you’d think that all that exposure should have helped people see how inane and lacking in substance (not to mention occasionally offensive) everything he said was, apparently not. But the media is too attached to spectacle to pay any attention to substance. And though in the general election the media did start to give him some negative attention, all sorts of incredibly scandalous things in his record were virtually ignored or at best talked about for a day or two and then forgotten. But just as big a problem was their coverage of Hillary Clinton. The media spent a vast amount of time talking about her emails and almost none talking about her proposed policies. This in spite of the fact that the emails were a complete non-issue that were hardly worth a day of coverage. But by repeating ad nauseam vague insinuations that there was something scandalous about her emails and spending relatively little time on things in DT’s record that were a hundred times worse, they created an image of false equivalence in many people’s minds, such that they really thought the two were equally bad. To be sure, it still seems that just a bit of critical thinking ability would allow voters to tell that there was a vast difference, but if the media had done its job properly it wouldn’t even have been an issue.
All this is not to ignore other factors that amounted to cheating by the other side. Voter suppression by the Republicans may well have made the difference in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Florida. FBI director James Comey’s interference, already mentioned above, may have swung enough last minute undecideds away from HRC to make a difference. The Russia-Wikileaks alliance helped to damage HRC as well. But none of these things, especially the latter two, should have mattered if enough voters had the basic analytical skills to distinguish between black and white, which is really what the choice amounted to. Even before the election, I said that it was disgraceful that the electoral vote wasn’t going to be 538 to 0 in HRC’s favor, and I might have added that it was a disgrace the popular vote wasn’t going to be something like 75% to 25%. Surely the number of racists, unrepentant misogynists, xenophobes and other deplorables isn’t more than a quarter of the population. But if so, what’s wrong with all those other people? In any case, this election (despite good results in some local and state-level votes) didn’t do much for my already shaky faith in humanity. Yes, I know I should be looking forward and starting to think about how to win over – or more accurately educate – some of these people, but at this point I’m not in the mood.
Tuesday, November 8, 2016
2016 US Elections (Texas Edition)
So here we are, finally. After months of interminable campaigning and media sensationalism, Election Day in the United States has finally arrived. I am reasonably confident that the only decent candidate will win the presidential election [Late Update: to everyone's great misfortune, I was wrong, but then I was hardly the only one], but it is frankly disgraceful that the Republican candidate will win any support at all. Anything other than a complete electoral shutout, which of course won't happen, reflects poorly on Americans (though having said that, many other countries have elected or come close to electing some pretty awful people). The outcome for Congress is less certain. I think the Democrats will probably win the Senate, though maybe not by more than a seat or two, which is all the more unfortunate because even some of the Democrats are not all I might want them to be (for example, several of the candidates running this year took the morally indefensible position of supporting a temporary halt on bringing Syrian refugees into the US in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, even though, one, the Paris attacks were not perpetrated by refugees, and, two, refugees are already very well vetted and there has not been a single terrorist attack launched in the US by a refugee since 2001). Nevertheless, even Democrats like that will be an improvement over the Republicans. Unfortunately, the House probably will remain in Republican hands thanks to gerrymandering, absent a late surge by the Democrats, but at least their majority should be reduced. Of course, if the majority of American voters were well-informed, rational, and at least somewhat empathetic to others, the vast majority of the current crop of Republicans wouldn't stand a chance and even some of the more conservative Democrats would be in danger of being replaced. But I digress.... On to my overview of the major races on my ballot for this year. Unfortunately, I'm registered in Texas, which still leans heavily to the Republicans, though that is changing slowly but surely. While the Republicans will probably still win even with such an appalling nominee on the top of the ticket, it'd be nice if it was close, and even better if the Democrats actually managed to pull off a win or two in the statewide races (not likely, but not totally impossible).
I only received my ballot only a week prior to the election (by email), so my time for both researching the candidates and writing about the results of my research was quite limited (though my ballot should get counted even if it arrives after Election Day, as long as I’ve mailed it before polls close in Texas, I’d prefer to get it there sooner). Fortunately, in most races the choices are fairly obvious. Of course I’ve already written many times about the presidential race. I didn’t know much about the local candidates, but as with the previous election and the one before that, I used the candidate questionnaires prepared by the Dallas News and Vote 411 as my main sources (though the latter is rather short). Also, many of the minor party candidates (the Greens and Libertarians) are the same as in the last race. Due to time constraints, I didn’t always take time to search for additional information on candidates who failed to respond to the questionnaires, though I did in some cases. As I noted last time, if you’re a third party candidate with no money (or even a major party candidate who wants to let voters know where you stand), you should be trying to fill out all the questionnaires you can to get your message out. While someone might have an legitimate excuse for failing to fill out one (e.g., if they simply didn’t receive it on time), it’s a bit harder to accept missing out on two, and a few of the candidates didn’t even have any blogs or Facebook pages with any information about their campaigns in the last race, though in cases where one of them was running again I didn’t always bother to check if they’ve rectified that this time around.
More generally, while in theory a lot of my own political opinions align most closely with the Green Party’s theoretical positions, I was less inclined than in the past to seriously consider their candidates, except in races where the Democrat seemed particularly weak. As noted below, Jill Stein has looked worse and worse as this year’s race has gone on (I now regret doing a vote swap with one of her supporters in 2012, even if it won Obama a vote in a swing state), and a lot of the Green candidates in Texas are weak or just odd. I still think there’s a place in the US for a serious Green Party, if only to push the Democrats to wholeheartedly embrace all the steps we need to be taking to protect our environment, but if they simply play the role of spoilers who throw the election to the anti-environmental Republicans, they are doing absolutely nothing for the cause of the environment; in fact they are hurting it (and if, like Stein, they can’t or won’t recognize this, then they are not even worthy of consideration). If they run in local races in Democratic areas where the local Democrats are weak on the environment (whether due to ties to fossil fuel interests or for other reasons), then they might accomplish something. But in most Texan races, or for that matter in a presidential race like the one this year, they are worse than useless. So while I did look at the Green candidates, if the Democrat looked halfway decent I chose them. Only in races where the Democrat looked pretty bad and the Green pretty good did I seriously consider a Green. As for the other parties, even the best possible Republican can be dismissed from consideration simply because they are still members of that party, which has come to represent the absolute worst in every way (perhaps 30 years ago it would have been different, though they were going downhill even then) – after all, not only is it the party of their current awful presidential candidate, but also of Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, Mike Pence, Scott Walker, Jeff Sessions, Steve King, Mitch McConnell and a whole lot of other awful people. As for the Libertarians, while a few of them have good positions on a few issues, all share to some degree the basic selfish, me first, anti-government outlook of their party and many are even more extreme on some issues than the Republicans, so I couldn’t vote for any of them either.
President
Hillary Clinton (D)
Pumpkin Hitler/aka Hair Furor/aka Cheeto Mussolini/aka Donnie Drumpf (R)
Jill Stein (G)
Gary Johnson (L)
My Vote – Hillary Clinton
I’ve discussed the presidential race extensively on this blog, most recently in my previous post, but to summarize: the Republican is a terrible candidate in every way, as he is a narcissist, a bigot, a xenophobe, a pathological liar, a cheapskate, a tax dodger, an admirer of authoritarians, and a probable sexual predator, and he clearly has none of the knowledge needed for the job and shows a complete inability to learn or even listen to anyone who does anything other than flatter his absurdly overinflated ego. Another point that anyone with a brain should care about is that he doesn't even have coherent policy ideas. It should be no surprise that newspaper and magazine endorsements in this race have been unprecedentedly lopsided, with almost none of them (even the conservative ones) endorsing Hair Drumpf. As for the main third party candidates, as I noted at length in my previous post, Stein shows little real grasp of the mechanics of governing, she (like the GOP con man) is overly friendly with Russia, she panders to conspiracy theorists (she even appeared on InfoWars, which sensible people avoid like the plague), she picked a running mate who has claimed the bloodthirsty Assad regime is a democratic government, and contrary to all reason she claimed that a Clinton presidency would be worse than one under the orange menace. Johnson is an idiot and would be terrible on issues like climate change, economic inequality, and getting money out of politics. And even if the other candidates weren’t so awful, Hillary Clinton is extremely well qualified, intelligent, experienced, and articulate, and she has an excellent grasp of the issues and detailed plans for governing. Her policies aren’t perfect, but she can usually be pushed to do the right thing even where she isn’t initially so inclined. She will make at worst a decent president, and possibly an excellent one.
US Representative, District 24
Jan McDowell (D)
Kenny Marchant (R)
Kevin McCormick (G)
Mike Kolls (L)
My Vote – Jan McDowell
This was another easy choice. The incumbent Marchant is terrible on virtually every issue (this time he avoids outright climate denial, but his position amounts to the same thing), and Kolls is even worse than the average Libertarian, as he is a climate change denier, a pro-gun extremist, and only moderate on immigration, where a true libertarian would be against restrictions on migration. His only virtue is being in favor of relaxing restrictions on marijuana (despite his supposed “small government” philosophy, the hypocritical Marchant is not), but McDowell and McCormick are too, and they are superior to Kolls on everything else. McDowell’s answers to the questionnaires were impressive all around. She supports admitting refugees, immigration reform with a path to citizenship, raising the minimum wage, reforming tax policies that favor the rich, addressing climate change, background checks for gun purchases, and other eminently sensible policies. McCormick sounds good on most issues, but shows flashes of ideological rigidity, and rather bizarrely punted on the gun question, so even independent of my current reservations about the Greens, McDowell would be my choice. It’s unfortunate she has little chance of winning, but perhaps if we can get rid of the pro-Republican gerrymandering after 2020, she’ll have a real shot.
Railroad Commissioner
Grady Yarbrough (D)
Wayne Christian (R)
Martina Salinas (G)
Mark A. Miller (L)
My Vote – Grady Yarbrough
This one was a slightly more difficult one than most of the others. Yarbrough’s answers didn’t really impress me – at the very least he needs an editor to polish his writing. Salinas failed to respond to the Dallas News questionnaire, but she did answer the other one, and in the last election I was favorably impressed by her responses to both questionnaires. The Democratic candidate in that race also impressed me favorably, though since two years ago I was less turned off by the Greens (despite the obvious weakness of some of their candidates), I had a hard time deciding, though I believe I went with the Democrat in the end. If the Democrat was as good this time, it would be an easy choice, even though Salinas is one of the Greens’ better candidates. As it is, I finally went with Yarborough, because as a Democrat he stands at least a slight chance of winning, and despite his somewhat unclear writing he managed to convey basically pro-environmental positions, such as cooperating with the federal government on climate issues, opposition to fossil fuel subsidies and opposition to fracking. The misnamed Railroad Commission is in charge of managing the state’s oil and gas industry, so it is important to take it out of the hands of idiotic anti-environmental, pro-fossil fuel nuts like Christian (or Miller, though at least he has reservations about fracking).
Justice, Supreme Court, Place 3
Mike Westergren (D)
Debra Lehrmann (R)
Rodolfo Rivera Munoz (G)
Kathie Glass (L)
My Vote – Mike Westergren
The questions for judicial candidates were rather general, so they weren’t as revealing about the candidates’ stances on specific issues, but Westergren had mostly good answers (with the exception of his response on arbitration, which failed to mention its many problems). Munoz would be better off working as an activist on Native American issues: all his responses revolved around the idea that US rule in Texas is illegitimate because the land was stolen from his people. While there is something to this argument, Munoz’s obsession with it is more appropriate to an advocate than a judge (and in any case, as noted above, I’d only consider even a good Green candidate if the Democrat were particularly weak). Glass ran as the Libertarian candidate for governor in the last election, and though these questions don’t make it apparent, she espoused some crazy things in that race, and I have no reason to believe she’s changed. Interestingly, Lehrmann was accused by her primary opponent of being the court’s most “liberal” justice because she frequently dissented from majority opinions. But even if the accusation is true, she would only be the most liberal in a relative sense; after all, she’s still a Republican. So in the interest of ending the Republican lock on the court, I went with Westergren.
Justice, Supreme Court, Place 5
Dori Contreras Garza (D)
Paul Green (R)
Charles E. Waterbury (G)
Tom Oxford (L)
My Vote – Dori Contreras Garza
This was a relatively easy choice. Though as noted above the questions for judicial candidates were pretty general, Garza’s answers were good as well as articulate. She seems to be far the strongest Democratic candidate for Supreme Court this year. Waterbury had some decent answers (though many seemed overly brief), but his references to the “Democrat party” were off-putting, and anyway, as discussed above, I’d only pick a Green if the Democrat were particularly weak. Oxford might be okay for a Libertarian, but he’s still a Libertarian, and Green, aside from being a Republican, didn’t even respond to the questionnaires.
Justice, Supreme Court, Place 9
Savannah Robinson (D)
Eva Guzman (R)
Jim Chisholm (G)
Don Fulton (L)
My Vote – None
I would really have preferred to vote in this race, but none of the candidates seemed worth voting for. I wasn’t about to vote for a Republican or a Libertarian for the reasons mentioned above. Chisolm has run before, and like before he didn’t even bother to respond to the questionnaires. Robinson would normally have been my choice, but her answers to the questions were very unimpressive. I don’t have any problem with concise, simple English – in fact I consider it far superior to the verbose jargon-ridden nonsense that some lawyers spew – but Robinson didn’t even seem to be taking the questions seriously, and her frequent typos and misspellings didn’t look good (also, while there may be many good reasons for admiring retired judge James Klager, “Has a Glock at his bench” doesn’t sound like a good one to me). Furthermore, in her case I did look for a campaign site, and her official Facebook page didn’t have any entries after January, so it doesn’t look like she’s a serious candidate. While I hate the idea of leaving this seat on the court in Republican hands, I couldn’t quite bring myself to vote for Robinson, so I just left this one blank.
Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 2
Lawrence "Larry" Meyers (D)
Mary Lou Keel (R)
Adam "Bulletproof" King Blackwell Reposa (G)
Mark Ash (L)
My Vote – Larry Meyers
Reposa, who calls himself a “pizza lawyer” (as he’s a “criminal defense attorney and pizza restauranteur”, seems like as much of a character as that and his name itself suggest, but that doesn’t mean he’d be a good judge. He admits that he’s running as a Green just because they asked him to (his reasons for saying yes are even more candidly self-interested). His answers on the Vote411 site are more serious, but then there’s the attached video… (I didn’t actually look up the unscrambled version, but just the thumbnail looked pretty out there). Meyers is the incumbent, and currently the only Democrat holding statewide office, though this is because after many years on the bench as a Republican, Meyers switched parties a few years ago. Unfortunately, he didn’t bother to respond to either questionnaire, but I did find a report which mentioned how he and several other candidates agree that people with drug and mental issues don’t belong in the court system (in the same article, Keel expressed little sympathy for this view, even though Republicans in other races did). In another article, one which mentioned his opposition to overly harsh sentences, he gave some good reasons for his 2013 switch in party affiliation, and in a third article focusing on him personally, he called himself a progressive and said the Republicans have become too conservative. Keel and Ash are a Republican and a Libertarian, which is enough to rule them out. If they were running for prom king, Reposa might well get my vote, but in this case Meyers seemed like the obvious choice.
Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 5
Betsy Johnson (D)
Judith Sanders-Castro (G)
William Bryan Strange III (L)
Scott Walker (R)
My Vote – Judith Sanders-Castro
Sanders-Castro gave decent responses to the questionnaires (though oddly where last time she sometimes used all caps in her Dallas News, this time she hardly capitalized at all; she could also use more proofreading). Johnson, Strange and Walker (who shares a name and party affiliation with the governor of Wisconsin, though that’s hardly a recommendation) didn’t respond at all. Oddly, I came across an article about the Republican primary for this race, and it stated that Walker didn’t have a campaign site or respond to requests for comment (all three other candidates did). It’s strange that Republican primary voters seemed to have picked the least serious of the Republican candidates; maybe they actually thought he was the Wisconsin governor. Walker did respond to a more recent article on the race, one which noted that Johnson was not actively campaigning. So, despite my issues with the Green Party in general, I decided to vote for Sanders-Castro in this race, mainly to send a message to the Democratic Party to run serious candidates.
Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 6
Robert Burns (D)
Michael E. Keasler (R)
Mark W. Bennett (L)
My Vote – Robert Burns
Keasler’s responses to the somewhat general questions aren’t too bad for a Republican, but he still is one. Burns isn’t obviously much better (though in one of the news articles mentioned above, he also spoke out on the problems drug addicts face in the legal system), but he seems okay, so I gave him my vote.
Fifth Court of Appeals, Place 4
Gena Slaughter (D)
Lana Myers (R)
My Vote – Gena Slaughter
Though most of the questions reveal little about the two candidates’ thinking except in vague terms, Slaughter’s given reasons for running as a Democrat were a point in her favor and the fact that Myers is a Republican was a strike against her, so Slaughter was my choice.
Fifth Court of Appeals, Place 7
Dennise Garcia (D)
David John Schenck (R)
My Vote – Dennise Garcia
Not a lot of obvious difference here, so since both seemed to have the basic qualifications, it came down to party affiliation.
State Representative, District 103
Rafael Anchia (D)
My Vote – Rafael Anchia
Though Anchia, the incumbent, was unopposed, I decided to vote for him, as he got a 100% grade (and an endorsement) from the Texas League of Conservation Voters.
Dallas County Sheriff
Lupe Valdez (D)
Kirk Launius (R)
J.C. Osborne (G)
David Geoffrey Morris (L)
My Vote – Lupe Valdez
I originally intended to skip the local races, as I don’t feel I know about the sort of local matters the candidates might be expected to address. However, I decided to make an exception for this race. Not only are the Republican and Libertarian unacceptable for the usual reasons, but Osbourne, the Green candidate, seems more than a little wacky, and among a number of over-the-top remarks in his responses there were some that were homophobic and xenophobic, so he also is not by any means an acceptable choice. I admittedly don’t know much about the incumbent Valdez’s record, including on controversial policing issues, but I read part of her speech to the Democratic National Convention, and it sounded pretty good, especially since she noted that members of her own family had had run-ins with bad police officers, and that she’s taken specific steps to encourage her officers to improve community relations. The fact that she has had disputes with the governor over treatment of undocumented people is a point in her favor as well. As for the local judgeships, I did cast votes in a few of them, voting for the Democrat in races where the Republican revealed from their responses that they were a right-wing ideologue (for instance, two named Scalia as the judge they most admired, and another emphasized his support for the Second Amendment).
I only received my ballot only a week prior to the election (by email), so my time for both researching the candidates and writing about the results of my research was quite limited (though my ballot should get counted even if it arrives after Election Day, as long as I’ve mailed it before polls close in Texas, I’d prefer to get it there sooner). Fortunately, in most races the choices are fairly obvious. Of course I’ve already written many times about the presidential race. I didn’t know much about the local candidates, but as with the previous election and the one before that, I used the candidate questionnaires prepared by the Dallas News and Vote 411 as my main sources (though the latter is rather short). Also, many of the minor party candidates (the Greens and Libertarians) are the same as in the last race. Due to time constraints, I didn’t always take time to search for additional information on candidates who failed to respond to the questionnaires, though I did in some cases. As I noted last time, if you’re a third party candidate with no money (or even a major party candidate who wants to let voters know where you stand), you should be trying to fill out all the questionnaires you can to get your message out. While someone might have an legitimate excuse for failing to fill out one (e.g., if they simply didn’t receive it on time), it’s a bit harder to accept missing out on two, and a few of the candidates didn’t even have any blogs or Facebook pages with any information about their campaigns in the last race, though in cases where one of them was running again I didn’t always bother to check if they’ve rectified that this time around.
More generally, while in theory a lot of my own political opinions align most closely with the Green Party’s theoretical positions, I was less inclined than in the past to seriously consider their candidates, except in races where the Democrat seemed particularly weak. As noted below, Jill Stein has looked worse and worse as this year’s race has gone on (I now regret doing a vote swap with one of her supporters in 2012, even if it won Obama a vote in a swing state), and a lot of the Green candidates in Texas are weak or just odd. I still think there’s a place in the US for a serious Green Party, if only to push the Democrats to wholeheartedly embrace all the steps we need to be taking to protect our environment, but if they simply play the role of spoilers who throw the election to the anti-environmental Republicans, they are doing absolutely nothing for the cause of the environment; in fact they are hurting it (and if, like Stein, they can’t or won’t recognize this, then they are not even worthy of consideration). If they run in local races in Democratic areas where the local Democrats are weak on the environment (whether due to ties to fossil fuel interests or for other reasons), then they might accomplish something. But in most Texan races, or for that matter in a presidential race like the one this year, they are worse than useless. So while I did look at the Green candidates, if the Democrat looked halfway decent I chose them. Only in races where the Democrat looked pretty bad and the Green pretty good did I seriously consider a Green. As for the other parties, even the best possible Republican can be dismissed from consideration simply because they are still members of that party, which has come to represent the absolute worst in every way (perhaps 30 years ago it would have been different, though they were going downhill even then) – after all, not only is it the party of their current awful presidential candidate, but also of Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, Mike Pence, Scott Walker, Jeff Sessions, Steve King, Mitch McConnell and a whole lot of other awful people. As for the Libertarians, while a few of them have good positions on a few issues, all share to some degree the basic selfish, me first, anti-government outlook of their party and many are even more extreme on some issues than the Republicans, so I couldn’t vote for any of them either.
President
Hillary Clinton (D)
Pumpkin Hitler/aka Hair Furor/aka Cheeto Mussolini/aka Donnie Drumpf (R)
Jill Stein (G)
Gary Johnson (L)
My Vote – Hillary Clinton
I’ve discussed the presidential race extensively on this blog, most recently in my previous post, but to summarize: the Republican is a terrible candidate in every way, as he is a narcissist, a bigot, a xenophobe, a pathological liar, a cheapskate, a tax dodger, an admirer of authoritarians, and a probable sexual predator, and he clearly has none of the knowledge needed for the job and shows a complete inability to learn or even listen to anyone who does anything other than flatter his absurdly overinflated ego. Another point that anyone with a brain should care about is that he doesn't even have coherent policy ideas. It should be no surprise that newspaper and magazine endorsements in this race have been unprecedentedly lopsided, with almost none of them (even the conservative ones) endorsing Hair Drumpf. As for the main third party candidates, as I noted at length in my previous post, Stein shows little real grasp of the mechanics of governing, she (like the GOP con man) is overly friendly with Russia, she panders to conspiracy theorists (she even appeared on InfoWars, which sensible people avoid like the plague), she picked a running mate who has claimed the bloodthirsty Assad regime is a democratic government, and contrary to all reason she claimed that a Clinton presidency would be worse than one under the orange menace. Johnson is an idiot and would be terrible on issues like climate change, economic inequality, and getting money out of politics. And even if the other candidates weren’t so awful, Hillary Clinton is extremely well qualified, intelligent, experienced, and articulate, and she has an excellent grasp of the issues and detailed plans for governing. Her policies aren’t perfect, but she can usually be pushed to do the right thing even where she isn’t initially so inclined. She will make at worst a decent president, and possibly an excellent one.
US Representative, District 24
Jan McDowell (D)
Kenny Marchant (R)
Kevin McCormick (G)
Mike Kolls (L)
My Vote – Jan McDowell
This was another easy choice. The incumbent Marchant is terrible on virtually every issue (this time he avoids outright climate denial, but his position amounts to the same thing), and Kolls is even worse than the average Libertarian, as he is a climate change denier, a pro-gun extremist, and only moderate on immigration, where a true libertarian would be against restrictions on migration. His only virtue is being in favor of relaxing restrictions on marijuana (despite his supposed “small government” philosophy, the hypocritical Marchant is not), but McDowell and McCormick are too, and they are superior to Kolls on everything else. McDowell’s answers to the questionnaires were impressive all around. She supports admitting refugees, immigration reform with a path to citizenship, raising the minimum wage, reforming tax policies that favor the rich, addressing climate change, background checks for gun purchases, and other eminently sensible policies. McCormick sounds good on most issues, but shows flashes of ideological rigidity, and rather bizarrely punted on the gun question, so even independent of my current reservations about the Greens, McDowell would be my choice. It’s unfortunate she has little chance of winning, but perhaps if we can get rid of the pro-Republican gerrymandering after 2020, she’ll have a real shot.
Railroad Commissioner
Grady Yarbrough (D)
Wayne Christian (R)
Martina Salinas (G)
Mark A. Miller (L)
My Vote – Grady Yarbrough
This one was a slightly more difficult one than most of the others. Yarbrough’s answers didn’t really impress me – at the very least he needs an editor to polish his writing. Salinas failed to respond to the Dallas News questionnaire, but she did answer the other one, and in the last election I was favorably impressed by her responses to both questionnaires. The Democratic candidate in that race also impressed me favorably, though since two years ago I was less turned off by the Greens (despite the obvious weakness of some of their candidates), I had a hard time deciding, though I believe I went with the Democrat in the end. If the Democrat was as good this time, it would be an easy choice, even though Salinas is one of the Greens’ better candidates. As it is, I finally went with Yarborough, because as a Democrat he stands at least a slight chance of winning, and despite his somewhat unclear writing he managed to convey basically pro-environmental positions, such as cooperating with the federal government on climate issues, opposition to fossil fuel subsidies and opposition to fracking. The misnamed Railroad Commission is in charge of managing the state’s oil and gas industry, so it is important to take it out of the hands of idiotic anti-environmental, pro-fossil fuel nuts like Christian (or Miller, though at least he has reservations about fracking).
Justice, Supreme Court, Place 3
Mike Westergren (D)
Debra Lehrmann (R)
Rodolfo Rivera Munoz (G)
Kathie Glass (L)
My Vote – Mike Westergren
The questions for judicial candidates were rather general, so they weren’t as revealing about the candidates’ stances on specific issues, but Westergren had mostly good answers (with the exception of his response on arbitration, which failed to mention its many problems). Munoz would be better off working as an activist on Native American issues: all his responses revolved around the idea that US rule in Texas is illegitimate because the land was stolen from his people. While there is something to this argument, Munoz’s obsession with it is more appropriate to an advocate than a judge (and in any case, as noted above, I’d only consider even a good Green candidate if the Democrat were particularly weak). Glass ran as the Libertarian candidate for governor in the last election, and though these questions don’t make it apparent, she espoused some crazy things in that race, and I have no reason to believe she’s changed. Interestingly, Lehrmann was accused by her primary opponent of being the court’s most “liberal” justice because she frequently dissented from majority opinions. But even if the accusation is true, she would only be the most liberal in a relative sense; after all, she’s still a Republican. So in the interest of ending the Republican lock on the court, I went with Westergren.
Justice, Supreme Court, Place 5
Dori Contreras Garza (D)
Paul Green (R)
Charles E. Waterbury (G)
Tom Oxford (L)
My Vote – Dori Contreras Garza
This was a relatively easy choice. Though as noted above the questions for judicial candidates were pretty general, Garza’s answers were good as well as articulate. She seems to be far the strongest Democratic candidate for Supreme Court this year. Waterbury had some decent answers (though many seemed overly brief), but his references to the “Democrat party” were off-putting, and anyway, as discussed above, I’d only pick a Green if the Democrat were particularly weak. Oxford might be okay for a Libertarian, but he’s still a Libertarian, and Green, aside from being a Republican, didn’t even respond to the questionnaires.
Justice, Supreme Court, Place 9
Savannah Robinson (D)
Eva Guzman (R)
Jim Chisholm (G)
Don Fulton (L)
My Vote – None
I would really have preferred to vote in this race, but none of the candidates seemed worth voting for. I wasn’t about to vote for a Republican or a Libertarian for the reasons mentioned above. Chisolm has run before, and like before he didn’t even bother to respond to the questionnaires. Robinson would normally have been my choice, but her answers to the questions were very unimpressive. I don’t have any problem with concise, simple English – in fact I consider it far superior to the verbose jargon-ridden nonsense that some lawyers spew – but Robinson didn’t even seem to be taking the questions seriously, and her frequent typos and misspellings didn’t look good (also, while there may be many good reasons for admiring retired judge James Klager, “Has a Glock at his bench” doesn’t sound like a good one to me). Furthermore, in her case I did look for a campaign site, and her official Facebook page didn’t have any entries after January, so it doesn’t look like she’s a serious candidate. While I hate the idea of leaving this seat on the court in Republican hands, I couldn’t quite bring myself to vote for Robinson, so I just left this one blank.
Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 2
Lawrence "Larry" Meyers (D)
Mary Lou Keel (R)
Adam "Bulletproof" King Blackwell Reposa (G)
Mark Ash (L)
My Vote – Larry Meyers
Reposa, who calls himself a “pizza lawyer” (as he’s a “criminal defense attorney and pizza restauranteur”, seems like as much of a character as that and his name itself suggest, but that doesn’t mean he’d be a good judge. He admits that he’s running as a Green just because they asked him to (his reasons for saying yes are even more candidly self-interested). His answers on the Vote411 site are more serious, but then there’s the attached video… (I didn’t actually look up the unscrambled version, but just the thumbnail looked pretty out there). Meyers is the incumbent, and currently the only Democrat holding statewide office, though this is because after many years on the bench as a Republican, Meyers switched parties a few years ago. Unfortunately, he didn’t bother to respond to either questionnaire, but I did find a report which mentioned how he and several other candidates agree that people with drug and mental issues don’t belong in the court system (in the same article, Keel expressed little sympathy for this view, even though Republicans in other races did). In another article, one which mentioned his opposition to overly harsh sentences, he gave some good reasons for his 2013 switch in party affiliation, and in a third article focusing on him personally, he called himself a progressive and said the Republicans have become too conservative. Keel and Ash are a Republican and a Libertarian, which is enough to rule them out. If they were running for prom king, Reposa might well get my vote, but in this case Meyers seemed like the obvious choice.
Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 5
Betsy Johnson (D)
Judith Sanders-Castro (G)
William Bryan Strange III (L)
Scott Walker (R)
My Vote – Judith Sanders-Castro
Sanders-Castro gave decent responses to the questionnaires (though oddly where last time she sometimes used all caps in her Dallas News, this time she hardly capitalized at all; she could also use more proofreading). Johnson, Strange and Walker (who shares a name and party affiliation with the governor of Wisconsin, though that’s hardly a recommendation) didn’t respond at all. Oddly, I came across an article about the Republican primary for this race, and it stated that Walker didn’t have a campaign site or respond to requests for comment (all three other candidates did). It’s strange that Republican primary voters seemed to have picked the least serious of the Republican candidates; maybe they actually thought he was the Wisconsin governor. Walker did respond to a more recent article on the race, one which noted that Johnson was not actively campaigning. So, despite my issues with the Green Party in general, I decided to vote for Sanders-Castro in this race, mainly to send a message to the Democratic Party to run serious candidates.
Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 6
Robert Burns (D)
Michael E. Keasler (R)
Mark W. Bennett (L)
My Vote – Robert Burns
Keasler’s responses to the somewhat general questions aren’t too bad for a Republican, but he still is one. Burns isn’t obviously much better (though in one of the news articles mentioned above, he also spoke out on the problems drug addicts face in the legal system), but he seems okay, so I gave him my vote.
Fifth Court of Appeals, Place 4
Gena Slaughter (D)
Lana Myers (R)
My Vote – Gena Slaughter
Though most of the questions reveal little about the two candidates’ thinking except in vague terms, Slaughter’s given reasons for running as a Democrat were a point in her favor and the fact that Myers is a Republican was a strike against her, so Slaughter was my choice.
Fifth Court of Appeals, Place 7
Dennise Garcia (D)
David John Schenck (R)
My Vote – Dennise Garcia
Not a lot of obvious difference here, so since both seemed to have the basic qualifications, it came down to party affiliation.
State Representative, District 103
Rafael Anchia (D)
My Vote – Rafael Anchia
Though Anchia, the incumbent, was unopposed, I decided to vote for him, as he got a 100% grade (and an endorsement) from the Texas League of Conservation Voters.
Dallas County Sheriff
Lupe Valdez (D)
Kirk Launius (R)
J.C. Osborne (G)
David Geoffrey Morris (L)
My Vote – Lupe Valdez
I originally intended to skip the local races, as I don’t feel I know about the sort of local matters the candidates might be expected to address. However, I decided to make an exception for this race. Not only are the Republican and Libertarian unacceptable for the usual reasons, but Osbourne, the Green candidate, seems more than a little wacky, and among a number of over-the-top remarks in his responses there were some that were homophobic and xenophobic, so he also is not by any means an acceptable choice. I admittedly don’t know much about the incumbent Valdez’s record, including on controversial policing issues, but I read part of her speech to the Democratic National Convention, and it sounded pretty good, especially since she noted that members of her own family had had run-ins with bad police officers, and that she’s taken specific steps to encourage her officers to improve community relations. The fact that she has had disputes with the governor over treatment of undocumented people is a point in her favor as well. As for the local judgeships, I did cast votes in a few of them, voting for the Democrat in races where the Republican revealed from their responses that they were a right-wing ideologue (for instance, two named Scalia as the judge they most admired, and another emphasized his support for the Second Amendment).
Tuesday, October 25, 2016
Why Hillary Clinton Is the Only Real Choice for Intelligent Progressives
The following was inspired by some of the comments on John Oliver’s recent segment on third parties on his show Last Week Tonight, plus comments I've seen elsewhere, such as on Facebook (e.g., in response to a post by Senator Jeff Merkeley's in support of Hillary Clinton). As it is rather wasted in (and too long for) the YouTube comment section, which is a cesspool that I usually try to stay out of (unsuccessfully in this case), I thought I’d post it here on my blog. Of course I should emphasize that I know the kind of people this is addressed to are a tiny though very noisy minority outside of places like YouTube and Facebook comments, and the vast majority of sensible progressive-minded people, whoever they supported in the Democratic primary, are already fully committed to Hillary Clinton. They are obviously not the targets here, but they might find a few of these arguments useful in the event that they know any Stein supporters or others who still haven’t come around to Hillary.
Among the responses to the Last Week Tonight video, I saw a lot of complaints about John Oliver attacking Jill Stein and Gary Johnson and claims that he is “biased” in favor of Hillary Clinton. Okay, let’s look at those assertions. First of all, as should be obvious, John Oliver is a progressive. I would think that the vast majority of people who watch John Oliver are also progressives, or at least open to progressive ideas. In other words, they are not at all likely to vote for, or even consider voting for, a narcissistic, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, misogynist who has at best a poor record as a businessman, has the maturity and attention span of a toddler, has no self-control, speaks incoherently, is a habitual liar, advocates torture and war crimes, has a “charitable” foundation that he has horribly misused, has no respect for rule of law or freedom of the press, has definite authoritarian leanings and a questionable relationship with an authoritarian foreign leader, has few concrete policy ideas (and terrible ones at that), peddled the ridiculous and racist “birther” conspiracy theory for years, has an appalling disregard for the facts on any issue, has no qualifications for office, clearly has no clue about most of what would be involved in the job he is running for and demonstrates no capacity or interest in learning about such things, and has been credibly accused by multiple women of sexual assault and other possibly criminal behavior, accusations supported by his own boasts recorded on tape. So I’m not addressing any of his supporters here (if you are one, I hope you will someday snap out of it, though if you haven’t by this point I don’t see much hope for you).
So if the Republican candidate (let’s call him Pumpkin Hitler) is out, that leaves three semi-realistic choices: Hillary Clinton, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein (there’s also Evan McMullin, but he’s not likely to appeal to progressives). It’s obvious that while Oliver has also criticized Hillary, he thinks she is the best choice. So, does that mean he is “biased” in her favor? I suppose in a sense it does, but of course no one is free from bias. Anyway, let’s suppose there was an intelligent, progressive person who somehow knew nothing about any of the candidates (maybe they’d been in a coma for 30 years) and was able to compare them completely objectively. Who would they end up supporting?
Gary Johnson would quickly be dismissed by this hypothetical progressive voter. Sure, his stances on marijuana, criminal justice reform, government surveillance and a few other things are good, but he is terrible on some of the most important issues, such as climate change (he admits it is real, but not only wouldn’t do anything to fight it but would make it worse by removing carbon regulations, allowing drilling everywhere, and more), economic inequality (he’s against the minimum wage, and his tax policies and anti-regulation stance favor the rich), and money in politics (he supports Citizens United and other bad court rulings). No real progressive could vote for him, even if he hadn’t demonstrated the type of cluelessness Oliver mocks him for.
So then there’s Jill Stein. I must admit, with some regret, that I actually voted for her in the last election myself, in a vote exchange with a Green supporter living in a swing state (I was voting in a solidly Republican state), and her stances on a superficial level appeal to me, as they would to our hypothetical progressive voter (policies aside, I like the idea of the US having a Green Party that wields some real influence, though in the US system it would probably accomplish more on a local level). It’s also understandable why her policy ideas would appeal to many who voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries (I’ll get back to Bernie supporters again later). Unfortunately, as Oliver shows, a closer look shows she’s not really prepared for the job. A lot of her more detailed proposals demonstrate a lack of understanding for the mechanics of governing, which is not very reassuring. Her pandering to conspiracy theorists is unacceptable (I’d known about the anti-vaccine thing, but not her answer to the 9/11 truther, which was even worse). Oliver didn’t even mention some of her other negatives. She talks about human rights, but she doesn’t seem inclined to criticize countries like Russia and China, which have terrible human rights records. She even went to Russia, had dinner with Putin, and made comments critical of the US on Russian propaganda media. Of course there is a lot the US deserves criticism for, but that is no reason to do it in a country with even more human rights issues than the US has. She also picked a running mate who is even an apologist for the bloody Syrian regime, which systematically tortures dissidents and is now deliberately bombing its own people. Stein herself has blamed the Syrian situation on the US, ignoring the fact that it started with peaceful protests by Syrian citizens with no US involvement whatever. All of these things should make any true progressive hesitate to vote for her (as should the fact that she appeared on the conspiracy nut Alex Jones's InfoWars). Finally, she once said that Hillary Clinton would be worse than Pumpkin Hitler, the Republican candidate. That statement alone should disqualify her. Look again at the description of him above, which doesn’t even cover all his flaws. Then remember that if he were to win, that would certainly mean that the Republicans would also keep control of Congress. Even aside from whatever awful things he might do on his own account, with four years of complete Republican control, the rich would get even more tax breaks; the minimum wage would not be increased at all; millions would lose food stamps and other benefits; millions more would face deportation, open discrimination and worse; women would lose reproductive rights and possibly more; polluters and other bad corporate actors would be freed from the regulations that at least partially restrain them now; we’d go backwards on climate change at a time when even limited progress may not be enough to stave off catastrophe; the Iran agreement would be torn up, likely leading to a war with Iran; the gun nuts would have free rein; the Republicans and their wealthy backers would do their best to cement their hold on power with voter suppression measure; and the Supreme Court would likely end up dominated by extreme conservatives for the foreseeable future. No progressive with a brain and an ounce of empathy for those that would suffer in such a situation could possibly say a Clinton presidency would be worse than that. This is also why the occasional self-proclaimed progressive who says that a Pumpkin Hitler presidency might be a good thing because it will lay the ground for a “real revolution” is at best ignorant and at worst an idiot with an appalling lack of empathy for others. Not only would millions suffer in the meantime, it’s more likely that four years of Republican rule would make a progressive revolution more difficult or even impossible.
That leaves Hillary Clinton. There are all sorts of criticisms of her, some more legitimate than others. I could certainly make a respectably long list of things I disagree with her on and things she’s done that I object to, sometimes strongly. But let’s just look at the broader criticisms. First, there’s the idea that she’s actually done something criminal at some point in her career. When you get down to it, this is just right wing conspiracy theorist nonsense. The truth is despite nearly thirty years of digging, the Republicans have failed to find a single thing they can credibly charge her with. Of course Pumpkin Hitler and his ilk still insist otherwise, but they aren’t interested in even the appearance of justice. So the claims that she's a criminal have no credence whatsoever. Ah, but isn’t she dishonest? In fact, objective evaluations of her statements over the years indicate that she is reasonably honest for a politician, on about the same level as Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. Those who have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the “Hillary Clinton is a liar” claims may not believe that, but it’s the truth. Take a close look at her record and, considering its length, you won’t find that many outright lies, just a lot of the evasions and obfuscations typical of politicians (note that changing one’s position on an issue is not the same thing as lying). On the other hand, her Republican opponent has set new records for false statements. In the last debate, he made about six times as many false statements as she did, and in earlier races people like Sanders and Obama made about the same number as her. So why is she the “dishonest” one?
“Oh,” I hear some protest, “but she’s a ‘Wall Street’ Democrat and a ‘corporate’ Democrat.” First of all, labeling like that is ridiculously simplistic. Wall Street itself is hardly a monolithic thing, much less corporate America. They are both made up of numerous people with different agendas. But it’s true that she has a rather disturbing number of close relationships with people on Wall Street and people with excessively pro-business leanings. However, that doesn’t mean she always does their bidding. Neither her voting record in the Senate (which overall was almost as progressive as Bernie’s and more so than Obama’s) nor her rhetoric show a slavish adherence to corporate and Wall Street interests. She voted against the Central American Free Trade Agreement, just for one example. What’s more, she also listens to people like Elizabeth Warren. With enough pressure from people like Warren, Sanders, and a motivated progressive electorate, she can be pushed to take a least some measures to restrain Wall Street and corporate interests. Again, those who have fully absorbed the anti-Hillary rhetoric may not believe that, but there’s nothing in her record to indicate otherwise. Her record shows she is somewhere between a centrist and a progressive; which side she will lean to as president will depend at least in part in which side pushes her the hardest. If you just assume she’s the enemy, on the other hand, you’ll have to hope she does the right thing in spite of you, not because of you.
We’ve mentioned Bernie Sanders a lot already. So what should those who supported him in the primary do? Well, if they truly understand what Bernie is all about, then they should be progressives who advocate most or all of the things he advocates, such as overturning Citizens United, reining in Wall Street, fighting climate change, raising the minimum wage, protecting reproductive rights, passing immigration reform, protecting voting rights, supporting LGBT rights, supporting the rights of people of color, and so forth. Hillary supports all these things too, if not always as strongly or as wholeheartedly as Bernie. What’s more, unlike Jill Stein, she has real and detailed plans for governing and an impressive grasp of all the details involved. Her policy ideas are not necessarily radical but they are highly nuanced, something that most people don’t properly appreciate. She understands that most problems are not a simplistic matter of black and white, but required a nuanced approach. Regardless, her policy ideas are generally progressive, and they are for the most part a good match for supporters of Bernie Sanders – if they truly support the things he supports.
But, we hear a small but very noisy contingent of Bernie supporters (or former Bernie supporters, since they are evidently not listening to him anymore) protest, she “rigged” the primaries and “stole” the nomination from Bernie. To put it bluntly, this is nonsense. The DNC leaks do not in any way “prove” that the primaries were “rigged”. They do show that for the most part people in the DNC preferred Hillary. But there’s a big difference between having a preference that you reveal privately to friends and colleagues and actively trying to rig an election. The worst thing in the leaks was the suggestion by one guy that Bernie be attacked as atheist (assuming that the reference was indeed to Bernie). No one else approved of this suggestion and no such attack was launched. In the event, Hillary won the primaries by a comfortable margin. Bernie did surprisingly well, well enough to have major influence on the party platform, but he lost fairly (as he himself clearly accepts) and he wouldn’t even have come as close as he did if there weren’t so many states with caucuses, which are less democratic than primaries. Hillary won the vast majority of the latter. The few supposed examples of actual rigging that I’ve seen mentioned are questionable, and in any case were not enough to make a difference in the final results. The truth is, it is extremely difficult to actually rig an election in the US, and making outlandish claims of rigging is dangerous, as it is exactly the same kind of CT nonsense that Pumpkin Hitler and his followers are spreading now to explain his likely defeat. The closest thing to “rigging” that is actually happening is voter suppression (eliminating polling places, purging voter rolls, limiting early voting, and so forth) like the Republicans have been doing in states where they have control.
Finally, while Oliver chose to ignore the “spoiler” effect that Johnson went ballistic over, it is a real issue. If it were true that there was no difference between the two major party candidates, it wouldn’t matter. But as I’ve explained, that is clearly not the case here. There is an enormous difference, particularly in this election. Hillary, whatever her flaws, is clearly prepared for the job, has generally progressive policy positions, is intelligent and actually listens to other people. The other guy – well, I’ve already said what he is, and that was understating how bad he is. The problem is, only these two have a realistic chance of winning. Granted, those that are in safely Democratic states could maybe afford to vote for someone other than Hillary, but in an election like this, not only is it unwise to take any chances whatever, but we really need the election to be a landslide. It is frankly disgraceful that he will win any electoral votes at all. He and his entire campaign should be thoroughly repudiated by the voters, and only a complete and humiliating defeat will send that message. Since there is only one candidate who can possibly beat him, the way to send that message is by voting for her.
So our hypothetical unbiased progressive would certainly conclude, as Oliver, Sanders, Warren, and other intelligent progressives around the country (even people who have been highly critical of Hillary, like Bill McKibbon and Michael Moore) have clearly concluded, that Hillary Clinton is the only reasonable choice for those who actually want to move the country in a progressive direction. Once this hypothetical voter had reached that conclusion and made it obvious to those around him, then I suppose some might say he or she was “biased” in favor of Hillary. But he would care as much about such accusations as Oliver probably does – that is, not at all.
Friday, September 30, 2016
What I've Been Reading: Early 2016
As has been usual lately, I'm a bit behind on my blogging for various reasons. Since it's been ages since I last wrote about the books I've been reading, I want to at least go back and cover the ones that I read in the first few months of this year, other than Hillary Clinton's autobiography Living History, which I've already written about. Of course, I've managed to read a number of books since then as well, but those will have to be covered in a later post.
The Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum
Like almost everyone who grew up in the United States, I saw the Wizard of Oz film multiple times in my childhood, but also like most Americans today, I’d never read the book it was based on (which originally went under the full title The Wonderful Wizard of Oz). I finally rectified that recently, and I found that overall the book is as good as the movie, though they diverge in important ways. Baum’s original novel is quite short, but nevertheless there are a number of episodes that were not incorporated into the movie, such as the journey Dorothy and her friends had to take to see the Good Witch of the South (who simply showed up in Oz in the movie). Also, in the book the Winged Monkeys were not evil servants of the Wicked Witch, but compelled to obey the wearer of the Golden Cap; later they help Dorothy when she has the cap. There are other elements unique to the book here and there, such as the Wizard requiring everyone who enters the Emerald City to wear green-tinted glasses that are locked on to the wearer’s head until they depart. Another notable difference is that the Dorothy in the book is clearly much younger than Judy Garland (though Garland seemed also to be portraying someone younger than her actual age at the time the movie was made). But perhaps a bigger distinction is that many of the Kansas scenes in the movie are not from the book (Dorothy’s aunt and uncle are the only other Kansas characters, and the family’s life there is portrayed as much more bleak and impoverished), and the book does not imply that the whole thing may have been a dream. Despite their differences, the book and movie have a lot in common, including that they are both very good if not necessarily complex or profound pieces of entertainment. Certainly the book was good enough that I’d be interested in reading some of its sequels should I ever come across any of them.
Fallen Dragon by Peter Hamilton
This is a standalone novel by a science fiction writer who seems to be pretty prolific, judging by the number of books by him I’ve seen around. This particular book is set in a distant future where humans have mastered faster-than-light travel, which they’ve used to colonize a number of planets around our part of the galaxy, though at the time the novel takes place, the initial burst of colonization has ended. Since colonization ventures are expensive, they were mostly sponsored by large, powerful corporations under contracts which apparently entitled them a share of the colony’s production, and new colonization efforts have been largely abandoned as too expensive. In the novel, one giant corporation has bought up a lot of the founding corporations of the various colony planets. It sends fleets of battleships and highly trained soldiers to the planets and demands that they hand over a substantial share of their production, using force to take what it wants if there is resistance. The main story takes place on one of these planets, with the central character Lawrence Newton, whose background is revealed in flashbacks, being one of the soldiers in the corporate army, with a secondary protagonist being a woman in the colonial resistance. The story is fairly complex, with some interesting twists. It’s a good novel that combines elements of space opera with hard SF, and I enjoyed it enough that I’d like to eventually check out another book or two by Hamilton.
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
This well-known novel by W. Somerset Maugham is in the tradition of novels like Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, in that it tells of the protagonist’s childhood and early adulthood, and his search for his place in life. However, there are some aspects that show that it belongs to the 20th century (though the early part of it), such as the much more prominent role of sexual relationships, which while not described directly are still made much more obvious than in older novels. Some elements of the novel are autobiographical, such as several points relating to the protagonist Philip Carey’s childhood, though often altered slightly from the reality of Maugham’s own life. Philip Carey can sometimes be a rather frustrating protagonist to follow because the reader really wants to shake some sense into him. Of course this is true for most good protagonists, as they are naturally flawed just like real people are, though in Carey’s case it gets a bit much, particularly when he falls for a woman who not only is clearly unattractive in terms of both her character and her appearance, but who even Carey himself thinks is unattractive even when he first meets her and who never does anything to change that initial impression. While it’s not unusual for people to fall for someone whose flaws they don’t originally see, or to gradually fall for someone whose attractive qualities are not obvious at first, neither of those situations is what happens here, so it’s a bit of mystery why he would fall for her at all. But that aside, the novel is generally deserving of its classic status, and is a much easier read than many others in that category.
The Later Roman Empire by Ammianus Marcellinus
This is generally considered one of the most important histories to survive from the late Roman Empire. The surviving portions cover several decades in the last half of the fourth century (up to 378 CE), though the missing books at the beginning covered the second and third centuries as well as the first half of the fourth, though presumably in far less detail, as there are more books extant then are missing, even though the period they cover is far shorter. In the existing sections, much of the focus is on Julian, an emperor who Ammianus clearly admired, though he also criticizes him in places. He paints a grim picture of the misdeeds of many Roman officials, from Julian’s half-brother, the Caesar Gallus, and several of the other emperors in the period covered to various high officials who lied, cheated, stole and murdered with or without the knowledge of the emperors they served. Like many ancient Romans, including earlier historians such as Livy, he believes in superstitious nonsense like portents, but in other ways he does a reasonable job of taking a fairly objective, rational view of matters. As a pagan, his admiration for the pro-pagan Julian might be considered mere prejudice, but he actually criticizes Juilian for one of his more anti-Christian actions (banning Christians from teaching rhetoric). He condemns many injustices, though occasionally is rather contradictory in this regard; for example, he acknowledges that it was the oppression of the local Roman officials that caused the Gothic rebellion that led to the disastrous battle of Adrianople which ends his history, but when a Roman leader in the east treacherously has his Gothic soldiers slaughtered before they can even hear about the rebellion, he praises that as a prudent act, if not a noble one. But while he is many ways clearly a product of his times in his prejudices and beliefs, he is a decent historian and one whose work is essential to anyone who wants to understand that period of history.
The Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum
Like almost everyone who grew up in the United States, I saw the Wizard of Oz film multiple times in my childhood, but also like most Americans today, I’d never read the book it was based on (which originally went under the full title The Wonderful Wizard of Oz). I finally rectified that recently, and I found that overall the book is as good as the movie, though they diverge in important ways. Baum’s original novel is quite short, but nevertheless there are a number of episodes that were not incorporated into the movie, such as the journey Dorothy and her friends had to take to see the Good Witch of the South (who simply showed up in Oz in the movie). Also, in the book the Winged Monkeys were not evil servants of the Wicked Witch, but compelled to obey the wearer of the Golden Cap; later they help Dorothy when she has the cap. There are other elements unique to the book here and there, such as the Wizard requiring everyone who enters the Emerald City to wear green-tinted glasses that are locked on to the wearer’s head until they depart. Another notable difference is that the Dorothy in the book is clearly much younger than Judy Garland (though Garland seemed also to be portraying someone younger than her actual age at the time the movie was made). But perhaps a bigger distinction is that many of the Kansas scenes in the movie are not from the book (Dorothy’s aunt and uncle are the only other Kansas characters, and the family’s life there is portrayed as much more bleak and impoverished), and the book does not imply that the whole thing may have been a dream. Despite their differences, the book and movie have a lot in common, including that they are both very good if not necessarily complex or profound pieces of entertainment. Certainly the book was good enough that I’d be interested in reading some of its sequels should I ever come across any of them.
Fallen Dragon by Peter Hamilton
This is a standalone novel by a science fiction writer who seems to be pretty prolific, judging by the number of books by him I’ve seen around. This particular book is set in a distant future where humans have mastered faster-than-light travel, which they’ve used to colonize a number of planets around our part of the galaxy, though at the time the novel takes place, the initial burst of colonization has ended. Since colonization ventures are expensive, they were mostly sponsored by large, powerful corporations under contracts which apparently entitled them a share of the colony’s production, and new colonization efforts have been largely abandoned as too expensive. In the novel, one giant corporation has bought up a lot of the founding corporations of the various colony planets. It sends fleets of battleships and highly trained soldiers to the planets and demands that they hand over a substantial share of their production, using force to take what it wants if there is resistance. The main story takes place on one of these planets, with the central character Lawrence Newton, whose background is revealed in flashbacks, being one of the soldiers in the corporate army, with a secondary protagonist being a woman in the colonial resistance. The story is fairly complex, with some interesting twists. It’s a good novel that combines elements of space opera with hard SF, and I enjoyed it enough that I’d like to eventually check out another book or two by Hamilton.
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
This well-known novel by W. Somerset Maugham is in the tradition of novels like Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, in that it tells of the protagonist’s childhood and early adulthood, and his search for his place in life. However, there are some aspects that show that it belongs to the 20th century (though the early part of it), such as the much more prominent role of sexual relationships, which while not described directly are still made much more obvious than in older novels. Some elements of the novel are autobiographical, such as several points relating to the protagonist Philip Carey’s childhood, though often altered slightly from the reality of Maugham’s own life. Philip Carey can sometimes be a rather frustrating protagonist to follow because the reader really wants to shake some sense into him. Of course this is true for most good protagonists, as they are naturally flawed just like real people are, though in Carey’s case it gets a bit much, particularly when he falls for a woman who not only is clearly unattractive in terms of both her character and her appearance, but who even Carey himself thinks is unattractive even when he first meets her and who never does anything to change that initial impression. While it’s not unusual for people to fall for someone whose flaws they don’t originally see, or to gradually fall for someone whose attractive qualities are not obvious at first, neither of those situations is what happens here, so it’s a bit of mystery why he would fall for her at all. But that aside, the novel is generally deserving of its classic status, and is a much easier read than many others in that category.
The Later Roman Empire by Ammianus Marcellinus
This is generally considered one of the most important histories to survive from the late Roman Empire. The surviving portions cover several decades in the last half of the fourth century (up to 378 CE), though the missing books at the beginning covered the second and third centuries as well as the first half of the fourth, though presumably in far less detail, as there are more books extant then are missing, even though the period they cover is far shorter. In the existing sections, much of the focus is on Julian, an emperor who Ammianus clearly admired, though he also criticizes him in places. He paints a grim picture of the misdeeds of many Roman officials, from Julian’s half-brother, the Caesar Gallus, and several of the other emperors in the period covered to various high officials who lied, cheated, stole and murdered with or without the knowledge of the emperors they served. Like many ancient Romans, including earlier historians such as Livy, he believes in superstitious nonsense like portents, but in other ways he does a reasonable job of taking a fairly objective, rational view of matters. As a pagan, his admiration for the pro-pagan Julian might be considered mere prejudice, but he actually criticizes Juilian for one of his more anti-Christian actions (banning Christians from teaching rhetoric). He condemns many injustices, though occasionally is rather contradictory in this regard; for example, he acknowledges that it was the oppression of the local Roman officials that caused the Gothic rebellion that led to the disastrous battle of Adrianople which ends his history, but when a Roman leader in the east treacherously has his Gothic soldiers slaughtered before they can even hear about the rebellion, he praises that as a prudent act, if not a noble one. But while he is many ways clearly a product of his times in his prejudices and beliefs, he is a decent historian and one whose work is essential to anyone who wants to understand that period of history.
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
Big Astronomy News: A Planet Has Been Found Orbiting Proxima Centauri
I’d originally intended to finish my much delayed overview of some of the books I’ve read this year, or perhaps comment on the US presidential race (particularly the incredible blathering of the Republican candidate), but instead I’ve decided on a very interesting piece of recent news in the field of astronomy. Last week it was announced that a planet had been found orbiting Proxima Centauri, which is the closest star other than the Sun (hence its name). Not only is this the closest exoplanet that has ever been discovered or will be discovered (unless we find a closer free floating planet or one orbiting a currently undiscovered nearby brown dwarf), it is at the right distance from Proxima Centauri to have a reasonable chance of having liquid water on its surface and thus being habitable to life as we know it (though as I will get into below, a number of factors could substantially increase or decrease its habitability). All things considered, this looks like the most important exoplanet discovery yet.
Proxima Centauri is just over 4.2 lightyears from our solar system. It is also sometimes called Alpha Centauri C, as it probably (though not certainly) is gravitationally bound to the binary star Alpha Centauri, orbiting the other two stars (known as Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B) at a distance. The Alpha Centauri binary is about a tenth of a light year further away and is one of the brightest stars in Earth’s sky. Proxima Centauri, on the other hand, is not visible to the unaided eye. This might seem surprising considering the proximity it is named for, but not quite as much so if we keep in mind that it is a red dwarf. Such stars are actually by far the most common in the galaxy (and presumably the rest of the universe), but they are much smaller and cooler, and thus much dimmer than even the Sun, which is less intrinsically bright than the majority of stars that are prominent in our skies.
Since Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf, its habitable zone – as the range of distances at which an orbiting planet might be reasonably expected to have liquid water on its surface is known – is far closer in than it is in the case of the Sun. The newly discovered planet, for now simply known as Proxima Centauri b (or just Proxima b), is much closer to its star than Mercury is to the Sun, and its year is just 11 Earth days. This means that it is probably tidally locked with one side always facing Proxima Centauri. Though this means that the planet would have one hot side and one cold side, if it has a substantial atmosphere that could moderate temperatures enough for it to remain habitable. Nevertheless, it is still unlikely to be as comfortable an environment for life as Earth. This is even more so because of a major issue with Proxima Centauri itself, namely the fact that is a flare star, prone to outbursts that would bathe the planet in intense radiation. Some astronomers think this alone may make it unlikely that life has arisen on the planet, but others note that if the star hasn’t always been as active as it is now, life on the planet may have had a chance to evolve some resistance, or other factors might help mitigate the radiation problem.
Another difference between Proxima b and Earth is that the former is more massive. The figure that has appeared in reports about the planet is 1.3 Earth masses, but this is actually the minimum mass – it could be quite a bit more massive, depending on the angle from which we are viewing its orbit. However, it is at least 90% likely to be less than 3 Earth masses, which is still closer to Earth in size than most known exoplanets, so in this respect at least it’s one of the most Earth-like planets found yet (on the negative side, the most Earth-like planet in terms of mass that I know of is Venus, which is not at all habitable now, though it might have been in the remote past). What we don’t know is what kind of atmosphere it has, and that is naturally a crucial piece of information in determining its habitability. It needs to have enough of an atmosphere to warm the planet up past the freezing point of water (the Earth itself would be frozen if it didn’t have an atmosphere that trapped heat, though of course our current problem is that we’re changing it so that it traps too much) and to spread heat around if it is tidally locked. Other factors that may affect how habitable Proxima b is include whether it has a strong magnetic field (which would help stop some of that deadly radiation from hitting the surface of the planet), whether it has plate tectonics (which keep things stirred up inside the planet, ensuring that elements essential to life as we know it get to the surface), and how much water is in the system.
Despite all the unknowns which could potentially lower or even eliminate the chance of life having developed on the planet, it is clear that based on what we know now, this is the most exciting discovery yet in terms of potential life bearing planets outside our solar system. Proxima b is, as noted above, fairly close to Earth in mass, orbits in the habitable zone, and is closer than any other potentially habitable exoplanet we have found or that we will ever find in the future. The only discovery that could beat this one would be an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A or Alpha Centauri B. Why? Because these two stars, unlike Alpha Centauri C (Proxima Centauri), are much like the Sun, with A being a little larger and B being a little smaller. However, my understanding is that even if there is such a planet around either of these stars, it would be undetectable with the technology we have now. This is because an Earth-sized planet at that distance would not tug on its star enough for us to detect it. There was an announcement several years ago that a planet had been found orbiting Alpha Centauri B; I even wrote a blog post on it. But that discovery has never been confirmed, and later analysis seems to indicate it doesn't exist. In any case, it was said to be orbiting very close in (making it much easier, though not actually easy, to detect than a planet in the habitable zone). So until in the (we hope near) future advances in technology make it possible for Earth-like planets, if they exist, to be found in the right orbits around the Sun-like Alpha Centauri stars, Proxima b is our best bet for exploring a potentially life-bearing exoplanet.
One thing must be kept in mind, though, when we use words like “close” to describe Proxima Centauri and its planet, and that is they are only close in comparison to other stars and their planets. They are still extremely far away. As I’ve mentioned in several previous posts, it’s important to keep in mind that interstellar distances are enormous, so much so that even Proxima Centauri is currently far beyond our reach. It took New Horizons almost 10 years to reach Pluto, while light makes the same journey in just over five hours. By contrast, it takes light over four years to travel from the Sun to Proxima Centauri. Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft humanity has launched, has traveled more than 100 AU since its launch in 1977, but that’s a tiny fraction of the distance to Proxima Centauri. Neither Voyager 1 nor New Horizons is aimed at th is e Alpha Centauri system, but if they were, it would take them tens of thousands of years to get there. As for exploration by humans, we haven’t gotten as far as Mars yet, so it will take some really big technological advances to send humans to Proxima b, if it ever becomes possible at all.
However, this isn’t to say that Proxima b will remain beyond our reach forever. While humans are unlikely to go there in the foreseeable future, we might send robotic spacecraft there as soon as the next half century. Unless we make a major effort, we probably won’t find a way to accelerate New Horizons-type craft to the speeds necessary to reach the Alpha Centauri region this century, but we might pull it off with something smaller, such as the miniature spacecraft of the Breakthrough Starshot project. By the (possibly optimistic) timeline that those involved have suggested, a fleet of these laser-propelled probes could be launched within a few decades, if all the difficulties can be overcome. If they are launched, are successfully accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light, and a few of them make it all the way without incident (a collision with even a piece of dust at that speed would likely destroy the craft), we might be getting some kind of pictures and other data (depending on how successful the project is at miniaturizing the science instruments to fit on such small probes) from Proxima b forty to fifty years from now. I hope, however, that a few craft are sent on to Alpha Centauri A and B, since whether or not a planet has been found in the habitable zone around either star by launch time, if no search has been able to rule such a planet out, it would be worthwhile to look for one, since as noted above these two stars are much more similar to the Sun than their dim companion Proxima (or for that matter any other star within ten light years). There’s even a slim chance that all three stars have habitable planets or even inhabited ones. If just one planet in the Alpha Centauri system, whether it’s Proxima b or a planet orbiting the other two stars, is indeed home to life, it will drastically change our view of the universe. Even if the system is without life, close-up views of a planet orbiting another star would be well worth the time it would take to get there.
Proxima Centauri is just over 4.2 lightyears from our solar system. It is also sometimes called Alpha Centauri C, as it probably (though not certainly) is gravitationally bound to the binary star Alpha Centauri, orbiting the other two stars (known as Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B) at a distance. The Alpha Centauri binary is about a tenth of a light year further away and is one of the brightest stars in Earth’s sky. Proxima Centauri, on the other hand, is not visible to the unaided eye. This might seem surprising considering the proximity it is named for, but not quite as much so if we keep in mind that it is a red dwarf. Such stars are actually by far the most common in the galaxy (and presumably the rest of the universe), but they are much smaller and cooler, and thus much dimmer than even the Sun, which is less intrinsically bright than the majority of stars that are prominent in our skies.
Since Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf, its habitable zone – as the range of distances at which an orbiting planet might be reasonably expected to have liquid water on its surface is known – is far closer in than it is in the case of the Sun. The newly discovered planet, for now simply known as Proxima Centauri b (or just Proxima b), is much closer to its star than Mercury is to the Sun, and its year is just 11 Earth days. This means that it is probably tidally locked with one side always facing Proxima Centauri. Though this means that the planet would have one hot side and one cold side, if it has a substantial atmosphere that could moderate temperatures enough for it to remain habitable. Nevertheless, it is still unlikely to be as comfortable an environment for life as Earth. This is even more so because of a major issue with Proxima Centauri itself, namely the fact that is a flare star, prone to outbursts that would bathe the planet in intense radiation. Some astronomers think this alone may make it unlikely that life has arisen on the planet, but others note that if the star hasn’t always been as active as it is now, life on the planet may have had a chance to evolve some resistance, or other factors might help mitigate the radiation problem.
Another difference between Proxima b and Earth is that the former is more massive. The figure that has appeared in reports about the planet is 1.3 Earth masses, but this is actually the minimum mass – it could be quite a bit more massive, depending on the angle from which we are viewing its orbit. However, it is at least 90% likely to be less than 3 Earth masses, which is still closer to Earth in size than most known exoplanets, so in this respect at least it’s one of the most Earth-like planets found yet (on the negative side, the most Earth-like planet in terms of mass that I know of is Venus, which is not at all habitable now, though it might have been in the remote past). What we don’t know is what kind of atmosphere it has, and that is naturally a crucial piece of information in determining its habitability. It needs to have enough of an atmosphere to warm the planet up past the freezing point of water (the Earth itself would be frozen if it didn’t have an atmosphere that trapped heat, though of course our current problem is that we’re changing it so that it traps too much) and to spread heat around if it is tidally locked. Other factors that may affect how habitable Proxima b is include whether it has a strong magnetic field (which would help stop some of that deadly radiation from hitting the surface of the planet), whether it has plate tectonics (which keep things stirred up inside the planet, ensuring that elements essential to life as we know it get to the surface), and how much water is in the system.
Despite all the unknowns which could potentially lower or even eliminate the chance of life having developed on the planet, it is clear that based on what we know now, this is the most exciting discovery yet in terms of potential life bearing planets outside our solar system. Proxima b is, as noted above, fairly close to Earth in mass, orbits in the habitable zone, and is closer than any other potentially habitable exoplanet we have found or that we will ever find in the future. The only discovery that could beat this one would be an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A or Alpha Centauri B. Why? Because these two stars, unlike Alpha Centauri C (Proxima Centauri), are much like the Sun, with A being a little larger and B being a little smaller. However, my understanding is that even if there is such a planet around either of these stars, it would be undetectable with the technology we have now. This is because an Earth-sized planet at that distance would not tug on its star enough for us to detect it. There was an announcement several years ago that a planet had been found orbiting Alpha Centauri B; I even wrote a blog post on it. But that discovery has never been confirmed, and later analysis seems to indicate it doesn't exist. In any case, it was said to be orbiting very close in (making it much easier, though not actually easy, to detect than a planet in the habitable zone). So until in the (we hope near) future advances in technology make it possible for Earth-like planets, if they exist, to be found in the right orbits around the Sun-like Alpha Centauri stars, Proxima b is our best bet for exploring a potentially life-bearing exoplanet.
One thing must be kept in mind, though, when we use words like “close” to describe Proxima Centauri and its planet, and that is they are only close in comparison to other stars and their planets. They are still extremely far away. As I’ve mentioned in several previous posts, it’s important to keep in mind that interstellar distances are enormous, so much so that even Proxima Centauri is currently far beyond our reach. It took New Horizons almost 10 years to reach Pluto, while light makes the same journey in just over five hours. By contrast, it takes light over four years to travel from the Sun to Proxima Centauri. Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft humanity has launched, has traveled more than 100 AU since its launch in 1977, but that’s a tiny fraction of the distance to Proxima Centauri. Neither Voyager 1 nor New Horizons is aimed at th is e Alpha Centauri system, but if they were, it would take them tens of thousands of years to get there. As for exploration by humans, we haven’t gotten as far as Mars yet, so it will take some really big technological advances to send humans to Proxima b, if it ever becomes possible at all.
However, this isn’t to say that Proxima b will remain beyond our reach forever. While humans are unlikely to go there in the foreseeable future, we might send robotic spacecraft there as soon as the next half century. Unless we make a major effort, we probably won’t find a way to accelerate New Horizons-type craft to the speeds necessary to reach the Alpha Centauri region this century, but we might pull it off with something smaller, such as the miniature spacecraft of the Breakthrough Starshot project. By the (possibly optimistic) timeline that those involved have suggested, a fleet of these laser-propelled probes could be launched within a few decades, if all the difficulties can be overcome. If they are launched, are successfully accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light, and a few of them make it all the way without incident (a collision with even a piece of dust at that speed would likely destroy the craft), we might be getting some kind of pictures and other data (depending on how successful the project is at miniaturizing the science instruments to fit on such small probes) from Proxima b forty to fifty years from now. I hope, however, that a few craft are sent on to Alpha Centauri A and B, since whether or not a planet has been found in the habitable zone around either star by launch time, if no search has been able to rule such a planet out, it would be worthwhile to look for one, since as noted above these two stars are much more similar to the Sun than their dim companion Proxima (or for that matter any other star within ten light years). There’s even a slim chance that all three stars have habitable planets or even inhabited ones. If just one planet in the Alpha Centauri system, whether it’s Proxima b or a planet orbiting the other two stars, is indeed home to life, it will drastically change our view of the universe. Even if the system is without life, close-up views of a planet orbiting another star would be well worth the time it would take to get there.
Sunday, July 31, 2016
Bullying, Bribery, and Brazeness: China and the South China Sea Arbitral Court Ruling (plus Taiwan's Unfortunate Reponse)
A few weeks ago, an international arbitral court (the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague in the Netherlands) handed down its ruling in a case brought by the Philippines against China with regard to its claims in the South China Sea. China claims ownership over nearly the entire sea, including parts which are distant from China but close to other countries such as the Philippines and Malaysia, based on the so-called "nine-dash line" that goes back to a map first drawn in 1947 by the Chinese government (then controlled by the KMT, prior to its defeat by the Communists in the Chinese civil war) and further claims exclusive economic rights throughout much of the region based on an assertion that the rocks and atolls in the area are islands. The Philippines challenged both Chinese claim to historic control over the region and its assertion that the features in the sea are islands rather than mere rocks. China refused to participate in the hearings, claiming the court had no jurisdiction over the disputes in the regions (while also claiming that China's claims were "indisputable").
Unsurprisingly, the court ruled against China, finding that the "nine-dash line" hand no validity and that the features in the sea are rocks, not islands. It didn't rule on the sovereignty claims made by China and other countries in the region (including the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei). Equally unsurpisingly, China rejected the ruling. But not only did it reject the ruling, it engaged in a massive campaign including propaganda against the court, recrutiing countries to supposedly support its claim that the court had no jurisdiction, and even blatant bribery to ensure that its neighbors were unable to present a untied front in support of the ruling. Tellingly, China started its propaganda campaign well before the ruling was actually handed down, no doubt because it knew it would lose. But its most extreme behavior came after the ruiling was handed down. A few days after the ruling was announced and in advance of a meeting of foreign ministers of the 10 states making up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), China announced an aid package to Cambodia, its closest ally in ASEAN, worth a reported US$500 million. Cambodia then proceeded to block efforts by other ASEAN members to include any reference to the ruling in the joint statement issued following the meeting (while ironically also claiming that the South China Sea dispute had nothing to do with it). Since ASEAN operates by consensus, meaning that any statements or actions by the group have to be agreed to by all its members, China's bribery (to call a spade a spade) of Cambodia and also Laos, another recepient of massive Chinese aid, has once more prevented the group from presenting a united front against China, even though four of its members are rival claimants in the South China Sea and Indonesia has also recently expressed opposition to some of China's more expansive claims. China continues to insist that any disputes should be settled in bilateral talks, which of course favor the much larger China. In the meantime, China can continue its blatant bullying of its rivals, using its greater military might to push and keep them out while it engages in massive land reclamation projects and builds air strips and other installations on the artifical islands it is creating in the sea.
Despite China's repeated protestations that it has the "facts" on its side, its "historical" claims are flimsy at best. A few historical artificats of Chinese origin found on the rocks in the South China Sea hardly constitute evidence that the islands were actually occupied by China, any more than the various items left on the Moon by the Apollo missions constitute evidence that the Moon belongs to the US. There's no evidence that the islands were ever actually inhabitated, and as recently as the Ming dynasty Chinese maps of the area were full of imaginary places similar to in contemporary Eurpoean imagination such as the "Island of Women" (女人國). China also may be altering less fanciful historical maps to erase evidence contrary to their claims. This isn't to say that the other countries involved necessarily have much stronger claims, but at least they don't claim the entire sea, just the areas relatively close to them, with one exception that I will come back to. In any case, as I have said before in talking about the dispute between China, Japan and Taiwan in the East China Sea, passionately arguing over rocks in the ocean makes all sides look at best a bit silly.
One other claimant in the South China Sea has also disputed the ruling by the arbitral court - Taiwan, the country where I live. One of Taiwan's biggest objections was the finding that Itu Aba, called Taiping Island by Taiwan and China, is a rock rather than an island. Since Taiwan actually occupies Itu Aba, the largest feature in the area, this objection is not surprising. Since I don't know the exact definitions used to determine whether a feature is a rock or an island, I don't have any particular opinion one way or another on whether the Taiwanese government or the court is correct on this particular point, though Taiwan might well have a case. But other aspects of Taiwan's reaction to the ruling were a bit absurd, even if the worst reactions came not from the current DPP-led govenment but from the anti-reason KMT (which bears a fair bit of responsibilty for the entire dispute due to their creation of the original 1947 map with its baseless claims). Rather than taking the opportunity to distinguish its position from that of China, such as by abandoning its equally ridiculous claim to virtually the whole sea, Taiwan is mistakenly simply aping China's reaction, marginalizing itself and incidentally endangering its own sovereignty, as China's absurd "historical" claims apply to Taiwan as well as the South China Sea. Regrettably, the curse of nationalism makes it hard for even the more Taiwan-oriented DPP government to take a rational approach to the issue, one which might allow to Taiwan to put forth its own independent claims in the area (for example, to Itu Aba) without appearing as irrational and fact-free in its claims as China.
Unsurprisingly, the court ruled against China, finding that the "nine-dash line" hand no validity and that the features in the sea are rocks, not islands. It didn't rule on the sovereignty claims made by China and other countries in the region (including the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei). Equally unsurpisingly, China rejected the ruling. But not only did it reject the ruling, it engaged in a massive campaign including propaganda against the court, recrutiing countries to supposedly support its claim that the court had no jurisdiction, and even blatant bribery to ensure that its neighbors were unable to present a untied front in support of the ruling. Tellingly, China started its propaganda campaign well before the ruling was actually handed down, no doubt because it knew it would lose. But its most extreme behavior came after the ruiling was handed down. A few days after the ruling was announced and in advance of a meeting of foreign ministers of the 10 states making up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), China announced an aid package to Cambodia, its closest ally in ASEAN, worth a reported US$500 million. Cambodia then proceeded to block efforts by other ASEAN members to include any reference to the ruling in the joint statement issued following the meeting (while ironically also claiming that the South China Sea dispute had nothing to do with it). Since ASEAN operates by consensus, meaning that any statements or actions by the group have to be agreed to by all its members, China's bribery (to call a spade a spade) of Cambodia and also Laos, another recepient of massive Chinese aid, has once more prevented the group from presenting a united front against China, even though four of its members are rival claimants in the South China Sea and Indonesia has also recently expressed opposition to some of China's more expansive claims. China continues to insist that any disputes should be settled in bilateral talks, which of course favor the much larger China. In the meantime, China can continue its blatant bullying of its rivals, using its greater military might to push and keep them out while it engages in massive land reclamation projects and builds air strips and other installations on the artifical islands it is creating in the sea.
Despite China's repeated protestations that it has the "facts" on its side, its "historical" claims are flimsy at best. A few historical artificats of Chinese origin found on the rocks in the South China Sea hardly constitute evidence that the islands were actually occupied by China, any more than the various items left on the Moon by the Apollo missions constitute evidence that the Moon belongs to the US. There's no evidence that the islands were ever actually inhabitated, and as recently as the Ming dynasty Chinese maps of the area were full of imaginary places similar to in contemporary Eurpoean imagination such as the "Island of Women" (女人國). China also may be altering less fanciful historical maps to erase evidence contrary to their claims. This isn't to say that the other countries involved necessarily have much stronger claims, but at least they don't claim the entire sea, just the areas relatively close to them, with one exception that I will come back to. In any case, as I have said before in talking about the dispute between China, Japan and Taiwan in the East China Sea, passionately arguing over rocks in the ocean makes all sides look at best a bit silly.
One other claimant in the South China Sea has also disputed the ruling by the arbitral court - Taiwan, the country where I live. One of Taiwan's biggest objections was the finding that Itu Aba, called Taiping Island by Taiwan and China, is a rock rather than an island. Since Taiwan actually occupies Itu Aba, the largest feature in the area, this objection is not surprising. Since I don't know the exact definitions used to determine whether a feature is a rock or an island, I don't have any particular opinion one way or another on whether the Taiwanese government or the court is correct on this particular point, though Taiwan might well have a case. But other aspects of Taiwan's reaction to the ruling were a bit absurd, even if the worst reactions came not from the current DPP-led govenment but from the anti-reason KMT (which bears a fair bit of responsibilty for the entire dispute due to their creation of the original 1947 map with its baseless claims). Rather than taking the opportunity to distinguish its position from that of China, such as by abandoning its equally ridiculous claim to virtually the whole sea, Taiwan is mistakenly simply aping China's reaction, marginalizing itself and incidentally endangering its own sovereignty, as China's absurd "historical" claims apply to Taiwan as well as the South China Sea. Regrettably, the curse of nationalism makes it hard for even the more Taiwan-oriented DPP government to take a rational approach to the issue, one which might allow to Taiwan to put forth its own independent claims in the area (for example, to Itu Aba) without appearing as irrational and fact-free in its claims as China.
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