John Holbo

Just in case Corey is too modest to link to it himself. Because he’s still talking about all that Hayek stuff – now with Mike Konczal. (Maybe he thinks you – the CT reader – have had enough of that.)

I hadn’t had enough. I enjoyed it. As I’ve told Corey: I agree with what he’s getting at – all the Hayek stuff is very much of a piece with his other stuff, and I endorse that big picture. But I felt the “Nation” article, in particular, didn’t give him enough room. The big picture ended up weirdly cropped. The argument can look unsound, even though it’s basically sound. The follow-ups have improved things considerably, but maybe some of you feel you have lost the plot in all the multi-post critical back-and-forth? A 53 minute bloggingheads might seem like it just adds to the pile. But I think Corey does a good job of just taking it from the top and making his points pretty clearly.

Following up my Shelby post: Dave Weigel has a post, “Do Republicans Really Need Hispanic Votes? Nope!” He links to part two of a three-part analysis by Sean Trende (part 1, part 3). Trende proposes that even if Dems get 90% black, Hispanic and Asian, this is likely to depress the Dem share of the white vote to the point where Reps remain competitive for decades. He suggests that, electorally, the ‘Arizona model’ – i.e. apparently go out of your way to piss off Hispanics (he doesn’t put it that way) – is about as likely to work as the ‘Full Rubio’.

I have no opinion about Sean Trende and I don’t usually rely on “Real Clear Politics” for my wonky analysis, to say the least. But, whatever the merits or demerits of his specific deployments of data, this does strike me as noteworthy. It’s the first time I’ve seen a ‘wonky’ Republican suggest maybe extreme racial polarization should be on the table as a strategic option. It’s so obvious it would be a bad thing for the whole country that I find it dismaying.

I’m not a big believer in ‘heighten the contradictions’. Too Lenin-meets-slatepitch. But I wonder to what extent the Shelby decision will prove disadvantageous for Republicans because the party will now pursue measures that are inconsistent with making any credible attempt to not be a regional, ethnocentric party. Because they have to at least try this new stuff, as a solution to the problem that demographics are shifting. But surely everyone is going to notice them doing that.

Maybe it will backfire, as voter discouragement measures seem to have backfired in 2012. Or maybe it will work, at least in the near term. Minorities will vote in smaller numbers. That will help Republicans. But it seems like doom for Republican moderates, hence death for tender green shoots of Republican moderation (were one to believe such a delicate blossom could ever compete with that hardiest of conservative perennials – the extremist spasm.) No Republican is allowed to call a fellow Republican a racist, obviously. That’s beyond the pale (no pun intended!) But that means no moderate Republican will be able to talk, critically, about what their fellow Republicans are going to be up to, thanks to Shelby. Because anything the least bit negative they say about anything Shelby has made possible will be construed as a charge of ‘racism!’ by other Republians. So the most ethnocentric elements of the party will loudly drag the rest quietly along for the rightward ride. But no one along for that ride is going to look moderate in the least. The overall optics are going to be terrible.

Read this column by Matt Lewis. It’s about immigration, not Shelby. But the dynamics are the same. Just apply Lewis’ discovery that dog-bites-man – yep, it happens – to the Shelby case. The Supreme Court has made it legal to do stuff you couldn’t do before. Hence there is a practical point to Republicans talking about doing that stuff. But the talk is going to get ugly. But no one on the right is allowed to notice it getting ugly. No one who aspires to office, anyway – even though this is precisely the same lot who most appreciate that you need to keep the ugly talk to a minimum. Lewis is a Rubio fan, and I can see him worrying: in 12 years, is it going to be possible to have a figure like Rubio in the party? Or will he have died the death of a thousand cuts from both sides. He will look to minority voters like a profile in putting up with increasing amounts of crap. (At best, it will be largely symbolic stuff, intended to signal to whites that Republicans think they’re still tops. At worst, it may be much worse than that. We’ll see.) Rubio-types will look to white Republicans like a liability waiting to happen. When is he finally going to call us racists, which will have the Times all over us in a New York minute, costing us more than all the good he ever did for us, in terms of minority outreach.

You might say this only affects Republicans in the regions affected by Shelby. But other Republicans will have to comment on it, and ‘it’s not my district’ isn’t going to sound very moderate to ticked off minority voters.

Going back to my first point: it’s too clever by half to argue that vote suppression measures will surely backfire, having the opposite of the intended effect. So let’s just ask: to what extent will Shelby discourage the Republican Party from mending its ways (by liberal lights, of course)?

My Things To Come post got a modest response. Let’s try for more, considering ‘How Things Have Changed Dramatically’.

Kevin Drum’s nickel summary works for me, comparing and contrasting the new decision, in Shelby County v. Holder with Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (PDF).

So here’s your nickel summary. If a law is passed on a party-line vote, has no justification in the historical record, and is highly likely to harm black voting, that’s OK as long as the legislature in question can whomp up some kind of neutral-sounding justification. Judicial restraint is the order of the day. But if a law is passed by unanimous vote, is based on a power given to Congress with no strings attached, and is likely to protect black voting, that’s prohibited unless the Supreme Court can be persuaded that Congress’s approach is one they approve of. Judicial restraint is out the window. Welcome to the 21st century.

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I’ve posted about this before – here and here and here and here. What film is that? The H. G. Wells-scripted/William Cameron Menzies-directed Things To Come (1936), of course. Everyone should have a hobby.

The Criterion Collection just released a new, restored version on Blu-Ray. Oh joy!

Here are some stills – all crisp and clear for the first time! [click to continue…]

So, in case you are curious, this is what the sun looks like, above the trees, in Singapore, when the haze index hits 401.

Bleah.

So I walked around the neighborhood collecting shots of ghastly tree sillouettes. They have a kind of beauty, so long as you don’t have to breathe it.

All this stuff about conservative reformers – the lack thereof – is right up my alley! But I’m too busy. But here’s something. I was thinking back to good old ‘and a pony‘ days. Almost 10 years on, it’s time for a new pony joke.

Conservative reformers are such Charlie Brown figures. Lucy and the ball and all that. But that’s a bit too obvious. And it lacks ponies:

I suppose Charlie Brown is David Frum and Josh Barro and co., and Snoopy is the Republican Party, and the Little Red-Haired Girl is America. If you chop off the final panel, then Charlie Brown is Ross Douthat and David Brooks. Admittedly, the joke needs a bit of explaining – always a bad sign. Fortunately for all of us, I don’t have the time.

I’ve been reading a lot of Peanuts lately (so maybe I was lying about not having time, but it felt like I was telling the truth.) My 9-year old daughter just loves it, and the 11-year old likes it, too, which makes me so happy. (Blessed is the parent whose children actually like the old pop culture things he wants them to like, thereby feeding his adult nostalgia craving for childhood to be a certain way. You are supposed to read Peanuts! They like those old Rankin Bass holiday specials, too. Belle doesn’t really like them.) We check the fat, Fantagraphics volumes out of the library. We’re in 1967-1970 now. I think that was a particularly good period for the strip.

Quiet around here! How do you like the new Daft Punk album, “Random Access Memories”?
Speaking of which, I was suffering from horrific ‘file not found’ syndrome until I finally found it. “Instant Crush” is basically a discofied version of Midlake’s “Roscoe” – which has been discofied before, in a mellow sort of way.

And here’s another funny musical experience you can have: you are listening to a band that is known for a certain sound, and you realize that one of their songs – which isn’t really a paradigm of their sound – is sort of a paradigm of a different sound paradigm that came later … if you get me. For example, the Police’s 1978 tune “The Truth Hits Everybody”, which was not a hit, doesn’t sound like their signature rock reggae post-prog-compacted-into-punk power trio sound. It does sound the Foo Fighters – it’s that chorus. And I can’t really think of anything else from 1978 that sounds like the Foo Fighters. (Here you can hear the Police trying to turn “Truth” into a Police song, but it doesn’t quite work. It just sounds like Sting trying to cover a Foo Fighters song.) [click to continue…]

Man does not live by long Hayek posts alone!

Take this TLS piece on Frankenstein (via Andrew Sullivan). I love this stuff. I haven’t read the books being reviewed, but differences between the 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein are a hobbyhorse of mine. It started with my interest in the history of sf, and the interesting way in which Shelley invented the genre, then un-invented it by rewriting the book to be less sf. Funny sort of backtrack. But that’s far from being the weirdest thing about the book. [click to continue…]

I’m a bit late, responding to Corey’s ‘Nietzsche’s Marginal Children’ essay (and post). But here goes.

In this post I will say what I think is right about Corey’s basic thesis. We can then – if you like – argue the degree to which I’m agreeing with what Corey actually said, or maybe substituting something that’s more my own, but clearly in the same vicinity, conclusion-wise. (We’ll be pretty tired by then, however. Long post.)

I know Nietzsche well, Hayek well enough – The Constitution of Liberty, in particular – and the rest of the marginalists not well at all. So this is going to be a Hayek-Nietzsche post.

The proper way to put the Nietzsche-Hayek ‘elective affinity’ thesis – that is a good term for it – is going to sound weak and disappointingly loose. But it’s actually interesting. Showing the interest, despite the looseness, is where it gets a bit tricky. [click to continue…]

This is, in a silly way, a footnote to my previous Kevin Williamson post, but, more seriously, to my contribution to our Erik Olin Wright event. In my post on Wright I remarked that, in a sense, he’s pushing against an open door: he wants Americans, who think ‘socialism’ is a dirty word, to be more open to utopian thinking. The problem, I pointed out, is that thinking ‘socialism’ is a dirty word is positively, not negatively, correlated with utopianism, because conservatives are, typically, very utopian, especially in their rhetoric – more so than socialists these days; certainly more so than liberals. Wright responded that his project “is not mainly directed at ideologically committed Conservatives whose core values support the power and privilege of dominant classes. The core audience is people who are loosely sympathetic to some mix of liberal egalitarian, radical democratic and communitarian ideals.” [click to continue…]

I know, I know, it’s just another of those ‘How many of you know that Saruman used to walk in the forest, a friend of the trees!’ posts by Kevin Williamson. (See also: Rand Paul at Howard.) But it’s the comments that get me, and make me sorry for all the times I’ve said, ‘A-ha! so there are two Confusatrons!’ rather than saving that line for a more special occasion.

To put it another way: the inability of conservatives to keep their alternative reality stories straight is inducing a kind of minority outreach-as-Crisis On Infinite Earths continuity collapse. There’s our world – call it Earth-1, or Nixonworld – in which Dems got better on civil rights in the 60’s, and Republicans got worse. The Southern Strategy. Then there’s Williamson’s World – sort of like Earth-3, a reverse earth. [click to continue…]

“All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.” – J. K. Galbraith

Kickstarter is glorious insofar as it is a well-earned kick to a rotten door.

That’s why a lot of people are griped about Zach Braff funding his Garden City sequel this way.

The idea – and it’s a great one – is that Kickstarter allows filmmakers who otherwise would have NO access to Hollywood and NO access to serious investors to scrounge up enough money to make their movies. Zach Braff has contacts. Zach Braff has a name. Zach Braff has a track record. Zach Braff has residuals. He can get in a room with money people. He is represented by a major talent agency. But the poor schmoe in Mobile, Alabama or Walla Walla, Washington has none of those advantages.

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I was going to get started listening to Ian Tregillis, Bitter Seeds today. It’s book 1 of a trilogy whose conclusion is getting a boost on Boing Boing:

Milkweed began in 2010 with Bitter Seeds, an alternate history WWII novel about a Nazi doctor who creates a race of twisted X-Men through a program of brutal experimentation; and of the British counter-strategy: calling up the British warlocks and paying the blood-price to the lurking elder gods who would change the very laws of physics in exchange for the blood of innocents. These elder gods, the Eidolons, hate humanity and wish to annihilate us, but we are so puny that they can only perceive us when we bleed for them. With each conjuration of the Eidolons on Britain’s behalf, the warlocks bring closer the day when the Eidolons will break through and wipe humanity’s stain off the universe.

Sounds like fun!

But not today! Henry tells me I’m late to The Rise of Ransom City. Which is, come to think of it, probably similar, rock and hard place-wise. In this faux-19th Century America fantascientifiction alt-history, and the previous installment, The Half-Made World, Gilman’s human protagonists spend most of their time on the run, or watching for their chance to run, or just laying low, for fear of being crushed between sinister, inhuman, vaguely unworldly forces of Line and Gun. The Line is technological, but also demonic – demon trains, running on rails laid down by regimented, reduced human servants. And how long are such masters likely to need even such machine-servicing specimens as we humans can be made into? I listened to Audiobook versions of both books, so I can’t flip through to transcribe tasty quotes. I’ll just crib from Hermann Melville, The Confidence-Man, which is public domain and – eh, close enough: [click to continue…]