Obsidian Wings

What fresh hell is this?

by liberal japonicus

I think that everyone gets their info and news from other sources, ObWi was never really going to be a place to post hot takes or red meat, but this is one of those things where I really fear for my sanity. The NYTimes podcasts have been interesting, Ezra Klein interviewed Tim Walz just before he got the VP nod, and I started clicking on the other ones and went to this one, comparing the economic proposals of Trump and Harris and they say have this

Trump: the Colossal influx of migrants into our cities is driving rent rent absolutely through the roof.

Tankersley (economic policy reporter for NYT): Now maybe his most concrete plan is how he says he's going to bring down the cost of housing.

 

Trump: but that's why as president I will seal the Border I will send them all back back to their countries where they belong prices will come down and come down dramatically and

come down fast

 

Tankersley: and that is by deporting millions of immigrants who currently live in houses, a dramatic reduction in housing demand this is theoretically possible if you drive a bunch of people out of their houses by deporting them then you would reduce demand for housing that could bring prices down particularly in in certain markets but of course deporting millions of people would be disruptive to the economy in a whole bunch of other ways would be disruptive to American society and American politics and deporting millions of immigrants is a really difficult thing that would require a massive federal law enforcement effort and again the feasibility here is not at all certain and we do not have a lot of details on on how it would be carried out.

I'm sure Hartmut can give more details, but here is an amuse-bouche.

The Vugesta (also VUGESTAP) for "Vermögens-Umzugsgut von der Gestapo" ("Property Removed by the Gestapo") was a Nazi looting organization in Vienna that from 1940 to 1945 seized the possessions of 5,000-6,000 Viennese Jews.[1][2] It was a key player in the aryanization of Jewish property, redistributing private property stolen from Jewish Austrians to non-Jewish or Aryan Austrians during the Nazi reign in Austria. [3]

Is there some other explanation that I'm missing?

A post-conference open thread

by liberal japonicus

Thought that we need the space. A few things that have been rattling around my head.

-GftNC has some questions about the rallying cry "Not going back". I think, because Americans have such a glossy memory of previous times, it works perfectly for USaians. I mean, it covers people who love Reagan, people who love Obama and people who love the Greatest Generation, making it the ultimate coalition builder against Donald Trump. For Brits, "not going back" is something the NDL would probably use. Ironically, the book that Kristi Noem wrote to try and get Trump's attention for the VP nod was titled 'No Going Back'. The jokes, they write themselves.

-Speaking of not going back, there is this.

-Darkly ironic, choosing to name your yacht Bayesian.

-The funniest jokes from the Edinburgh Fringe were pretty disappointing this year. Just for comparison here is

• 2023
• 2022
• and the 100 funniest from past years

Have at it.

 

Coming soon, to a conference center not particularly near you

by wj 

We're overdue for another Open Thread.  And this coming week's Democratic National Convention seems likely to provide cause for comment.  So here's your chance! 

Open Thread

The key to comedy?

by liberal japonicus

The report that Politico was given documents from the Trump campaign that were hacked by Iran, including a 270 page(!) dossier on JD Vance has me retell this joke:

A: Ask me how I became the greatest Iranian comedian?

B: Ok, how did you become...

A: Timing!

The Politico article reports that they received the hacked materials on 22 June and sat on them for two weeks. Biden withdrew as a presidential candidate on 21 June. Feel free to discuss this and other campaign related topics.

Tim Walz and dad jokes

by liberal japonicus

As everyone is probably aware, Governor Tim Walz is Harris' VP pick so a thread about that. Here is his first speech, in Philadephia (starts at 32:39). A few observations/questions in order to put up a quick post.

Listening to Shapiro's introduction speech, I'm glad they chose Walz. Not that the speech was bad, just that Walz gives off better vibes for me. Part of it might be the whole Midwestern Dad vibe, which has me wonder how much of a stretch is it for other cultures. My wife kind of gets it, but I don't think she enjoys it the same way I do, so I'm wondering what our non-US folks think about the dad jokes.

According to this page, he went to undergraduate at Chadron State College. As was noted by Paul Campos at LGM, this is the first P/VP candidate that didn't go to law school, which is telling to me.

Walz was a teacher, and did a year in Guangdong China on a program called WorldTeach. This link talks about his China experience, if anyone finds a video of him speaking chinese, please toss a link. This NYPost article is a foreshadowing of the line of attack indicting his experience. It's going to be interesting to see the Walz-Vance debate, because I assume that Vance will try to outflank him on China, and Vance was mentored by Amy Chua, who makes claims about Chinese parenting.

Here's his inauguration speech as governor.

Best for last, in by FB feed, someone posted an observation that with Harris and Walz as candidates, we have now entered apostrophe hell.

Have at it.

 

Fellow travelers, useful idiots or something else?

by liberal japonicus

This started as thinking about pundits but has overflowed into a lot of other news. I had in mind the categories fellow travelers and useful idiots. These are pretty radioactive terms, and I welcome some alternatives, but absent any substitutes, I have to trudge on. As I understand it, fellow traveler was a term denoting people sympathetic to Communist thought in the 20s and 30s, but not officially part of the party. A useful idiot, on the other hand, is often posited to be from Lenin, but the OED traces it back the NYT in 1948. Wikipedia says "a pejorative description of a person, suggesting that the person thinks they are fighting for a cause without fully comprehending the consequences of their actions, and who does not realize they are being cynically manipulated by the cause's leaders or by other political players." Another thing that is interesting is that it seems like useful idiot is harsher than fellow traveler, at least to my ears.

As a first pass, NYT having a Gang of Four palaver about what's been happening, consisting of Ross Douthat, David French, Michelle Goldberg and Lydia Polgreen provides some data. Taking them in order, with some quotes,

Douthat

It’s a mistake to go all in on Harris, obviously, because she’s still the exceptionally weak candidate whose weaknesses made President Biden so loath to quit the field for her. Potential rivals like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan are throwing away an unusual opportunity because they imagine some future opening for themselves — in 2028 and beyond — that may never materialize. And the party clearly has an interest in having a better-situated nominee: A swing-state governor who isn’t tied directly to an unpopular administration would be a much, much better choice for a high-stakes but still winnable race than a liberal Californian machine politician with zero track record of winning over moderate to conservative voters.

Fellow traveler vibes. How about David French?

It’s a gamble either way. Do you gamble that Harris is a better candidate than she was before and that, on balance, it’s better to unify now and go with the person who’s poised to take over? Or do you gamble that you can initiate a divisive and potentially chaotic selection process, unify immediately afterward and then make the new candidate a household name in three short months?

Useful idiot? This exchange between Polgreen and Douthat is comedy gold.

Polgreen: It is puzzling to see Ross increasingly appeal to moderation, because Harris is a moderate. This was one of the reasons her primary campaign failed. I’d love to know what she has to do to prove to anti-Trump conservatives that she is a moderate and why someone like Whitmer or Shapiro is assumed to be more moderate. A great example of this is Harris’s incredibly convoluted student loan forgiveness program in the primary campaign — just classic moderate, technocratic, means-tested stuff. Much more moderate than where Biden ultimately landed. I am guessing that she sensed that this issue was a political loser.

Douthat: I will concede that Harris is relatively moderate by the standards of the 2020 Democratic primaries, in which the various candidates competed to take the most gonzo left-wing stances possible. By the standards of broader American political alignments, she is a doctrinaire liberal, several ticks to the left of her boss, boasting exactly zero experience in appealing to a non-Californian electorate. And also currently trailing Trump, I would add, in most available polling. I think the case for her staking out some heterodox positions in those circumstances is obvious.

And here is Douthat on the lack of an Obama endorsement and why he's really right, it's only because there are no people challenging Harris that you can't see his blinding insight.

Douthat: The absence of an immediate Obama endorsement suggests that there is at least some appetite for a contest among Democratic power brokers. But you would need an actual rival candidate to make one happen, and instead we’re already reduced to Joe Manchin floating a trial balloon and then puncturing it himself, going on TV and wringing his hands about how it would be nice if someone would go up against Harris but insisting that it won’t be him.

Wondering why Obama hasn't immediately jumped up and endorsed Harris, Glenn Thrush explains in a link that is now unfortunately behind a paywall, that Obama didn't want to be accused of being a puppeteer. Which seems logical to me, but I guess that's why Douthat gets paid so much.

I had set this aside, but John Oliver's Last Week tonight devoted a sizable portion of his program to RFK Jr. It came out before he revealed his fascination with the Bear Necessities and I'm wondering how Oliver would have put that in the mix. Oliver's point about He who runs with Bear Cubs, that he could throw the election to Trump, makes me wonder if he transcends our fellow traveler/useful idiot categories.

Keeping up with the fellow travelers/useful idiots, I find myself wondering about the leadership candidates for the Tories. I've often heard about the diversity in the race, with Kemi Badenoch (immigrant from Nigeria), Priti Patel (daughter of Ugandan/India immigrants), Suella Braverman (withdrew, but was initially in the race, daughter of Indian immigrants), James Cleverly (son of Jamaican father and Sierra Leonean mother), in addition to the woefully underrepresented White male demographic (Tom Tugendhat, Mel Stride, and Robert 'Generic' Jenrick). It's diverse, but given my political leanings, I feel like it just shows how diverse the categories of fellow traveler/useful idiot are. I realize that I could be accused of only wanting diversity if the people agree with me, but I'd say it brings to mind the take on the nomination of Carswell to the USSC. "Even if he [Carswell] were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they? We can't have all Brandeises and Frankfurters and Cardozos."

I think the Tory leadership race is an interesting contrast with the US, in that I'm hard-pressed to think of a Black republican other than Tim Scott. Though this Guardian article about the governor of NC withdrawing as a VP candidate brings up another candidate.

The Democratic governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, withdrew from consideration for Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential pick in part because he feared his extremist Republican lieutenant governor could try to seize power – or at least the spotlight – in his absence.

“Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor, is the most extreme statewide candidate in the country right now,” Cooper told Politico in an article published on Saturday, as Harris prepared to name her choice to take on Donald Trump and JD Vance. Harris’s decision is expected before a rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

“If I were to be out of state at a campaign event, if I had been the vice-presidential nominee, he could claim he was acting governor,” Cooper said.

Robinson is a polarising figure who has wielded pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ and antisemitic rhetoric, including quoting the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, a choice he has defended.

Here's an older article with more details. Fellow Traveler? Useful Idiot? Or something else altogether? Discuss in the comments.

 

 

 

"However you imagine it’s going, that’s how it’s going": Tautologies examined

by liberal japonicus

The title is lifted from a comment by Pete that had GftNC at a loss. I thought I'd talk a bit about tautologies, as an invitation to an open thread.

The linguist Paul Grice is probably most famous for a set of maxims, which are now termed Gricean maxims, that he proposed to explain communication in conversations. They were of Quantity (i.e. providing information that the listener was assumed to need), Quality (i.e truthful), Relevance, and Clarity. So it is supposed to work out that when we talk to each other, we expect that the other person's contribution(s) are going to be informative in the sense of containing new information), truthful, relevant to the conversation and understandable. They are also referred to as principles, but might best be called presumptions, if the idea of presumptions didn't have such a bad rap. Grice argued that if we violate those maxims, we have a reason to do so, be it saving face, being humorous, avoiding offending someone, among others. Some researchers take issue with both the argument that they apply to all conversation (some note that certain cultures don't accept these). Others reject the idea that speakers are cooperating to reach the same goal, and adding AI to the mix, one wonders if an algorithm driven program can be thought of as 'cooperating'. But by and large, what Grice started has been largely accepted.

Tautologies are especially interesting when we start dealing with Grices's Maxims. Grice thought tautologies like 'business is business' were semantically vacuous, so he argued, in an aside, that they were flouting the maxim of Quantity, but that isn't really satifactory. The usual violations of this maxim would be providing too little information or too much and if it does that, the information that is being transmitted has to be an implication. Looking at the case of Pete's comment, it doesn't seem like he's withholding information. However, examining it from a Gricean foundation where you start with the assumption that Pete has something he wants to communicate, I think it must be something like 'you know what he is like and if you imagine how an event like this might go with him at his usual, you wouldn't be wrong.'

Pete's use of the tautology is interesting in that it has us ponder the range of things we imagine Trump doing. I can't find anything in the literature, but I imagine you might be able to call a phrase like 'imagine what he would do and then multiply it by 10' could be termed a multiplicative tautology, where the speaker and listener share some image and use that.

But not everyone is enamored of tautologies. This APA blog points out Trump's use of tautologies, and argues that they are linked to Trump's turning away from questions and wanting to have the last word. And that tautologies are where conversation dies. I'd also note that Chief Justice Roberts complained about another tautology recently.

Roberts’ attention, however, was elsewhere. He said he found the appeals court opinion lacking in sufficient grounding, and he derided the unanimous panel decision as circular and tautological.

“As I read it, it says simply a former president can be prosecuted because he’s being prosecuted,” Roberts said.

The court apparently answered that with 'the president is the president'. Unfortunately, the time we live in is the time we live in. And an open thread is an open thread, so have at it.