Obsidian Wings

Voting the Party Line

by Doctor Science

The rest of New Jersey is going to the polls on Tuesday for state and local elections: Governor (& Lieutenant Gov. running mate), legislature (one state Senator and two Assemblypeople per district), county Board of Chosen Freeholders and Sheriff, and township Committee. There are also School Board elections, which are explicitly non-partisan, and a couple of ballot questions.

I won't be going because I already voted by mail-in ballot. I knew months ago that I would be voting for Democrat Phil Murphy for Governor, and to re-elect my state Senator and Assembly reps, all of whom are Democrats. For the county and township offices, in the past I've normally gone over material on both Democratic and Republican candidates, choosing on a case-by-case basis. This year, though, I didn't even bother: I voted the Democratic party line all the way down the ballot.

When I image-searched for "party line", I discovered that many people use it to mean a telephone wire where birds congregate. This is a stencil by a Brazilian artist, Lucas.

I changed my policy because over the past year I've repeatedly seen (apparently) nice, rational Republicans go off the rails--injecting anger, political rants, and nutty conspiracy theories into all kinds of conversations, activities and settings. It's happened to me, to Mister Doctor Science, to Elder Daughter, and to my parents, and it's just so exhausting.

Basically, I don't feel I can count on a Republican not to derail a random Township Committee meeting because they've become exercised about uranium or a planned civil war or amoral college students or whatever the meme of the week is.

I do know a few Republicans who are consistently rational, regardless of topic. But I've been surprised and disappointed enough by some Rs I know personally that I'm not going to bet on the rationality of a random R politician. Judging by my friends, even if they're rational now they might fall into the fever swamps at any point.

Local politics is usually not particularly ideological: it's about small-scale, pragmatic issues, with lots of room for common ground and cross-party alliances. But these days my biggest disagreement with many Republicans seems to be about the nature of reality itself, and I can't expect small-scale disagreements to stay that way.

I'd rather not vote the party line, but until Republicans break their conspiracy-theory habit I don't have any choice. I don't know if this can be done without a major shift in the conservative media landscape. A Harvard study of online media during the election found that news sources on or linked to by the left are broadly distributed, with their center of gravity in the center-left. On the right, there is no such thing as too far right:

Figure 4: Partisan distribution of top 250 most-linked-to media sources by total inlinks*
*"Inlinks" refers to the incoming cross-media hyperlinks to stories and media sources.
From Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, by Rob Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman, & Yochai Benkler.

I have no idea what it would take to break this cycle. Removing a single news organization, even Breitbart or Fox, doesn't remove the incentives that push them ever rightward, chasing and being chased by their audience.

I wonder---it's conceivable that the incentives are not what they seem. It's not clear to me that Breitbart is making a profit: everyone talks about how it's funded by the Mercer family. FoxNews is highly profitable, but its tone and direction were set by Roger Ailes for political purposes. And then there's the Russian-bot angle. Maybe the conservative audience is being dragged or lured ever rightward, and an actual, functional free market in right-side media would reset to something like center-right sanity. A scientist can dream!

Two choices

by liberal japonicus

Something new that doesn't have math in it. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, We were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy is reviewed here by Kevin Young, the Poetry editor of the New Yorker and a poet of great power himself. 

Young makes an observation that I find interesting, which is

If there’s anything to critique in Coates, it is that for him black autobiography — the story black folks tell themselves and sometimes others — is chiefly trauma. There is another, blues-based tradition, embodied by the likes of the poet Lucille Clifton or Zora Neale Hurston — an ethos that is often as Southern, countrified and womanist as Coates’s vision is Northern, urban and male — which, while forgoing easy optimism, sees black life as a secret pleasure, or at least sees joy, however hard-earned, as “an act of resistance.”

Young's invocation of that binary division places African-Americans in the same place as other immigrants, where they have a "choice" to maintain their culture or try and become part of the majority culture. And what is key is that it is neither possible to completely assimilate or to maintain your own culture. 

So a thread not about taxes. Have at it.

[post edit: scare quotes added around "choice"]

Your proactive cooperator thread

by liberal japonicus

From this link

The young Trump campaign aide has been described as a “proactive cooperator” by investigators, a sign he’s being used by Mueller’s team to form a case against other aides — including former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was indicted on Monday. 

Don't know why, but 'proactive cooperator' struck me as funny. A thread for various and sundry observations about this.