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The title of this post indicates my reaction to what is happening in the US. So Brexit was not the biggest political earthquake of 2016. Though, mixing my metaphors, I think Brexit was the gateway drug to President Trump. As I said at the time, “People worldwide have seen that impossible things can happen.” It’s always fun to see Guardian readers’ heads explode, but a place behind my own ear is feeling a little tingly. He’s a bit… er… November 9th, 2016 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I am broadly speaking of Perry’s mindset, though should Trump win I would quite enjoy seeing the shock and horror on the faces of most of the people who are shocked and horrified by him. But that is because I think Trump and Hillary are in the same order of magnitude of badness. Then again, I have found Eliezer Yudkowsky to be right about a lot of things and thought provoking about everything. And he is writing on Facebook.
November 8th, 2016 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yes, government’s increasing involvement in the economic and moral lives of citizens have made political stakes high. It’s true that 2016 features the two suckiest candidates probably ever. It’s also true that our collective vision of the American project has frayed, perhaps beyond repair. With the intense scrutiny of contemporary political coverage, more people are invested in the daily grind of elections, which intensifies the sting of losing. This anger compounds every cycle (although winning brings its own disappointment with its unfulfilled promises). That’s not to say our constitutional republic isn’t slowly dying. It probably is. This condition isn’t contingent on an election’s outcome, but on widespread problems with our institutions, politics, and voters. Whatever you believe the future of governance should look like, one election is not going make or break it. – David Harsanyi, writing “This is the least important election of our lifetimes” November 7th, 2016 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was searching for God and found Cthulhu. So I asked why he wasn’t running for President of the United States this year. He replied the market for Greater Evils was saturated. November 2nd, 2016 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Oh yeah. I was going to tag this post as ‘humour’ (not being a ‘u’ starved American) but I decided not to 😛 October 17th, 2016 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s the big fact of American life now, isn’t it? That we are patronized by our inferiors. – Peggy Noonan, behind the Wall Street Journal paywall, but quoted by Ed Driscoll at Instapundit. America’s political division now, in one sentence. October 15th, 2016 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is an insular quality to the Democrats’ current fears, along the lines of ‘how could Clinton be tied with Trump, when I don’t know anyone who supports him?’. For the most part, they’ve blamed Trump’s rise on the media, saying the fourth estate is not calling out his lies. This is ridiculous, since about 99 per cent of pundits are against Trump, and even ‘straight reporting’ news journalists are saying they have a moral duty to oppose the Republican candidate, apparently because he is such a threat to the country. September 21st, 2016 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
Justin Webb writes in the Times: Amazing what these Americans can do just by thinking about it. Webb, or whatever sub-editor wrote that headline, has finally acknowledged the truth first revealed in dramatic form sixty years ago:
Donald Trump must have an especially American id. He is always calling violence upon himself by the sinister power of his subconscious. By the way, monsters from the Dallas branch of the id also killed Kennedy: “The city of hate had, in fact, killed the President.” Update: Evidently Dallas is a sort of wi-fi hotspot of the id. The fabric of reality wears thin in Texas. (Oklahoma isn’t so bad, being protected by Rodgers & Hammerstein. And New Mexico votes Democrat.) Getting back to Dallas, no individual can be blamed for the recent murders of policemen there. In Texas such things are inevitable. September 19th, 2016 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
The effort to wire the world — or to achieve “extreme reach,” in the NRO’s parlance — has cost American taxpayers more than $100 billion. Obama has justified the gargantuan expense by arguing that “there are some trade-offs involved” in keeping the country safe. “I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said in June 2013, shortly after Edward Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency (NSA), revealed widespread government spying on Americans’ phone calls. Since Snowden’s leaks, pundits and experts (myself included) have debated the legality and ethics of the U.S. surveillance apparatus. Yet has the president’s blueprint for spying succeeded on its own terms? An examination of the unprecedented architecture reveals that the Obama administration may only have drowned itself in data. What’s more, in trying to right the ship, America’s intelligence culture has grown frenzied. Agencies are ever seeking to get bigger, move faster, and pry deeper to keep pace with the enormous quantity of information being generated the world over and with the new tactics and technologies intended to shield it from spies. This race is a defining feature of Obama’s legacy — and one that threatens to become never-ending, even after he’s left the White House. – James Bamford (£) September 13th, 2016 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
As an aside, one thing that might change the minds of a lot of sceptics about Trump is whether he gets to choose any decent people on the US Supreme Court, which is an aspect of presidential power that a lot of those in the conventional media ignore. As for Reynolds’ point about pushing back against the bias and corruption of organisations such as the Internal Revenue Service, I am not so sure. Tim Sandefur, a legal scholar and commentator, is unlikely to be swayed by the checks and balances argument for Trump:
I think this is probably over-wrought, but not by a lot. Essentially, what I read from serious libertarians/conservatives/Objectivists who have said they will vote for Trump (yes, I know several Objectivists who are pro-Trump) is a version of “it’s a big gamble, he’s horrible, vulgar and corrupt but less horrible than Hillary and anyway he upsets the right sort of people and we can always impeach him”. That’s quite a big gamble to make when choosing someone with access to the nuclear codes. I agree with Reynolds, by the way, that Gary Johnson and Bill Weld aren’t that impressive, although in my view they are still the best out of a lousy field. Weld sounds like a US-style liberal on the 2nd Amendment and Johnson did not impress me over support for use of executive orders on immigration (this is regardless of what one thinks of immigration as such). Obama’s use of executive decrees has been one of the worst, if not the worst, parts of his presidency, and surely any serious libertarian should make this point constantly. September 9th, 2016 | 103 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a certain sort of Republican who hates Donald Trump so much that he regularly appends the #NeverTrump hashtag to his tweets and would much rather that Hillary Clinton won the election. Which is fine as far as it goes. It is not as if I, personally, think Trump would make a good president. I have always found him obnoxious and he seems to have little idea of the depth of the economic crisis affecting not just the United States but the western world in general. But, hey, he would at least be amusing. And I have twenty quid on him to win. But I am seriously turned off by a lot of the Trump hatred that goes on. Particularly because it comes from people I had hitherto regarded as ideological soulmates. I think this is because they display so little humility. When Trump announced his bid for the Republican nomination no one gave him a prayer. He had no experience, he had no grounding beliefs, he had no connections. He didn’t even have that much money. All he had – seemingly – was his name. And yet he still won. It was an astonishing achievement. You really would have thought that some people might be asking themselves how he did it. How was it that in the midst of the greatest depression in history the supposedly fiscally conservative party voted for someone who went around promising to raise spending? How come even candidates like Rand Paul didn’t seem to have anything sensible to say on getting the federal budget into balance? How come that when faced with the Trump threat supposedly sensible Republicans were incapable of uniting around a single candidate? I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had encompassing, economics, identity, the electorate’s fears and Trump’s media-savvy. But all his detractors seem able to do is to produce a stream of bile. And this is where it all gets rather troubling. They said of the Bourbons that they had forgotten nothing and learnt nothing. The sense of entitlement prevented them from engaging in anything resembling introspection. #NeverTrumpers sound just the same. “How dare you take my unsuccessful political party away from me!” seems to be the attitude. It’s not so much #NeverTrump as #NeverLearn.  About to be re-named? September 4th, 2016 | 175 comments - (Comments are closed)
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