Quote of the Day

Chemi Shalev, Haaretz --

In recent weeks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly spread word of his intention to call snap elections. In the latest version of his unattributed leaks, November is the target date, in close and even suspicious proximity to the November 3 elections in the United States. Perhaps Netanyahu envisages a joint heroic leap with U.S. President Donald Trump into the abyss, a la Thelma and Louise.

Joe Biden, do not pick Susan Rice as your VP nominee

Susan Rice, 16 January 2017 --

We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile.

Intergenerational

A great detail in the New York Times obituary for Peter Green --

Mr. Green’s main instrument in Fleetwood Mac was a 1959 Les Paul Standard, known as Greeny, that had one pickup installed in reverse, creating a distinctive tone because it put the instrument’s two pickups magnetically out of phase. After leaving Fleetwood Mac, he sold the guitar to the Irish rocker Gary Moore; in 1995, Mr. Moore made an album of Mr. Green’s songs called “Blues for Greeny.” The guitar is now owned by Kirk Hammett of Metallica.

Bobos of Summer

Janan Ganesh in the FT Weekend (subs. req'd)

The corollary, of course, is a view of summer as the vulgarian's season, good for socialising but not real intimacy, for surface pleasures but not the life of the mind.  

It's an excellent rumination on the low cultural esteem in which summer is held, especially in the mid-upper latitudes (both income and geographic). 

There is more that could be said. On any question of elite consumption patterns, it's always worth heading back to Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and sure enough the great man has a ready quote:

Time is consumed non-productively (1) from a sense of the unworthiness of productive work, and (2) as an evidence of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness. But the whole of the life of the gentleman of leisure is not spent before the eyes of the spectators who are to be impressed with that spectacle of honorific leisure which in the ideal scheme makes up his life. For some part of the time his life is perforce withdrawn from the public eye, and of this portion which is spent in private the gentleman of leisure should, for the sake of his good name, be able to give a convincing account. He should find some means of putting in evidence the leisure that is not spent in the sight of the spectators. This can be done only indirectly, through the exhibition of some tangible, lasting results of the leisure so spent — in a manner analogous to the familiar exhibition of tangible, lasting products of the labour performed for the gentleman of leisure by handicraftsmen and servants in his employ.

In other words, as wealth grows while the old means of signalling status decline -- titles, castles, land, huge household staffs, banquets -- it's only so far that visible spending will get you. For the time that the well-off person is not engaged in conspicuous consumption (Veblen's famous coinage), he has to be able to show that, even then, he was consuming his leisure in a way that others with whom he's competing for status would have trouble replicating. 

Thus, for the upper middle class, summer is useless. The most visible manifestation of a leisurely summer is ... a tan. Which anyone can get, from a cheap holiday, or a bottle. Of course you could try to up the ante with the "beach bod," but that's a dangerous arena of competition for Bobos, because it's vulnerable to competition from other classes through luck, effort, or wealth, and in any event, increasingly prone to bourgeois guilt as a goal. 

As Ganesh indicates with a hygge example, winter is much, much better for conspicuous leisure than summer. All sorts of refined wealth signalling are possible through activities, decor and culture, more than access to sun alone will allow. 

The final, almost cosmic, irony is that it was those winter conspicuous leisure types who brought Coronavirus from the Alps to all over Europe, and beyond, and ruined summer for the rest of us. 

[Previously on Veblen: his "epic troll" (as the kids say) of dog owners]

Quote of the Day

Dr Ashish Jha, Harvard Global Health Institute, quoted in a Wall Street Journal article on how Europe has kept coronavirus under control compared to USA:

"When I look at Europe, there is no single, best way: There are lots of ways," he adds. "There is no magic formula, but they all begin with taking the virus seriously and not having debates about inane things."

A campaign foretold

New York Times, 1 September 2013 (yes, 2013), headline Campaign Journalism in the Age of Twitter by the great David Carr (died far too young, aged 58) --

What does this all mean for the next election? Liz Sidoti, national politics editor for The Associated Press, loves social media’s ability to reach and involve audiences, but she is less fond of what it is doing to the political press corps that is feeding the beast. “I worry that reporters are so busy looking after the bells and whistles that they need to on social media that they are not working as finders of fact, asking the tough questions and doing the analysis,” she told me. Mr. [Peter] Hamby suggested that politicians who came of age in the Twitter era — Gov. Chris Christie, Gov. Martin O’Malley, Senator Marco Rubio and others — will have an advantage over Hillary Rodham Clinton, who relies on a command-and-control approach in which information is carefully doled out and any journalistic offenders are disciplined. “I wonder if the machinery of Clinton-world, the layers of staff and ’90s-era wise men, are prepared to deal with the next generation of Instagramming journalist, social media natives who fetishize authenticity,” he said.

It's not over till it's over

New York Times, 6 November 2016. Yes, 2 days before the election:

And they [Trump campaign staff] know that his chances of winning the election are iffy: Perhaps their best hope, the F.B.I. inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s email server, fizzled on Sunday with no charges or revelations. But they maintain that there is unseen money and muscle behind Mr. Trump’s political operation — and a level of sophistication that outsiders, and people who have run traditional campaigns, cannot fully appreciate. At times, however, that is hard to detect. Over a cheeseburger, fried calamari and an “Ivanka Salad” at the Trump Grill in the basement of Trump Tower last week, several aides flipped open a laptop and loaded the popular website 270towin.com, which allows users to create their own winning electoral maps. For 10 minutes, they clicked through the country, putting Democratic-leaning states won by Mr. Obama four years ago, like New Mexico and Colorado, into Mr. Trump’s column. Their analysis seemed more atmospheric than scientific. “You can go to Pennsylvania,” the campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, said, referring to a state that polls show favors Mrs. Clinton. “You can almost slice the excitement with a knife. You can feel it in the air there.” And even as early-voting returns indicated a surge for Mrs. Clinton, they tried to reassure themselves, over and over, that nobody finishes stronger than Mr. Trump, comparing the wisdom of his political judgments to Babe Ruth pointing his bat to the stands to predict where he would hit a home run. Back on his plane, heading into the campaign’s final weekend, Mr. Trump reclined in his leather chair and refused to entertain any suggestions that his unorthodox, unpredictable and now uncertain campaign for the presidency would end in defeat. “I’m going to win,” he said.

That crazy guy who's spending all his money in San Antonio

As with the previous post, looking at how Trump was perceived as a candidate is ... interesting. Here's a summer 2016 New York Times discussion of how Republican insiders thought he was a lost cause and they need to conserve their money for Congressional races:

The party is in turn providing much of the fund-raising expertise and technological backbone, including up-to-date donor lists and systems that will send roughly a billion emails by Election Day. A third of the party’s digital team is now embedded at the San Antonio firm that formerly built websites for Mr. Trump’s properties and is now leading his campaign’s online efforts. Payments to that firm, Giles-Parscale, amounted to $8 million in July, most of which was paid out for online advertising to reach grass-roots supporters and donors, according to party officials. “The R.N.C. has built the most efficient and effective ground game in the party’s history,” said Lindsay Walters, a party spokeswoman. “No other campaign, committee or organization has been doing this for as long as we have. We are the infrastructure for the entire G.O.P. ticket. And the Trump campaign has embraced that.”

Giles-Parscale was the then obscure firm, identified by Jared Kushner and run by Brad Parscale, managing the campaign's digital strategy. Subsequent events made them look like geniuses. 

A kinder, gentler Tweeter

New York Times, 5 October 2015 --

Mr. Trump has called Arianna Huffington, the liberal website publisher, “unattractive both inside and out”; described Bette Midler as “extremely unattractive”; and declared that President Obama had guaranteed “you won’t see another black president for generations.” Asked about his judgment in sending those messages, he defended all but one: his mockery of Ms. [Kim] Novak. “I would have preferred I didn’t send it,” Mr. Trump said. “That was done in fun, but sometimes you do things in fun and they turn out to be hurtful, and I don’t like doing that.”

Electoral polarisation or polarising elections?

In last week's Polish presidential election runoff, Andrzej Duda got 10,440 648 votes and Rafal Trzaskowski got 10,018,263 votes. The percentages are 51-49. 

The explanation of this result concentrated on highly plausible factors like rural / urban, culture, party, and of course potential unfairness in terms of stance of state media and the incumbent government. 

But in fact, this knife edge result is strange. It's a bit remarkable that Poland is just 210,000 individual decisions apart on ostensibly fundamental issues (the number of voters that had they switched from Duda to Trzaskowski, it would have changed the result). 

The 2016 USA presidential election was even stranger, because of the thresholds caused by the electoral college. Looked at in terms of impact on electoral college margins, there were around 80,000 critical votes. 

In both countries, lots of people (around one-third in Poland and nearly one-half in USA) did not vote. 

So is it that Poland is really divided almost exactly 50:50 on the issues at play in the election, or that the election itself sets off its own dynamic that sorts the voting public (not the overall public) into these balances of power? 

We tend to think of elections as reflecting societal divisions, which they certainly do. But the messier possibility is that elections aggravate them. The median voter may be a very noise-susceptible voter. 

Quote of the Day

A mask is but a sum of lines; a face, on the contrary, is above all their thematic harmony. 

Roland Barthes, The Face of Garbo (1957). 

They Know

New York Times, evening of 10 July

Farewell then, Russian bounty "scandal"

Re-upping our April post on the futility of outrage cycles based on upstream intelligence.  Trump is a horrible president. We don't need partial leaks of fragmentary intelligence to insider reporters looking for red meat to toss to Putin-phobic rolling news audiences to know that. 

How others see us

Peter Beinart's much-discussed Jewish Currents article in which he converts himself to a one-state solution for Israel / Palestine --

The reasoning is intuitive. In divided societies, people are more likely to rebel when they lack a nonviolent way to express their grievances. Between 1969 and 1994, when Protestants and the British government marginalized Catholics in Northern Ireland, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) killed more than 1,750 people. When the Good Friday Agreement enabled Catholics to fully participate in government, the IRA’s violence largely stopped.

Adopting this terminology, Catholic participation in government was implemented in 1973-74 ("Sunningdale") but was done in by Unionist opposition and a weak Labour government that wouldn't stand up to them. The edifice collapsed and was painstakingly rebuilt first through a renewed acceptance by Britain of a role for Ireland in Northern Ireland (the Anglo-Irish Agreement, 1985) and then through the GFA to which Beinart refers -- which was Sunningdale 2.0.

The issue was not the lack of mechanism for marginalized Catholics to participate in the political system. There were many issues, among them opportunism and cynicism within (not between) the communities, the reluctance of Britain to deliver what it had committed, and the reticence of Ireland to trigger a disastrous conflict. By 1997, the blockers and spoilers of 1974 and 1985 were the ones doing the deal to share power, and the violence tapered off. But that was less about a novel formula to share power, and more about the right circumstances for a deal that had been available for 25 years. That analogy leads the Israel / Palestine discussion in a very different direction. 

How others see us

Austrian newspaper Wiener Zeitung doesn't hesitate to use class descriptions of Irish politics, the context being Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe elected as president of the group of eurozone finance ministers --

Der 45-jährige Politiker der bürgerlichen Partei Fine Gael ist seit Juni 2017 Finanzminister seines Landes und war vorher unter anderem Verkehrs- und Europaminister.

bürgerlichen means bourgeois.

If it's any consolation, they describe Fianna Fáil the same way. 

In case you're wondering who orders those really expensive wines

Wall Street Journal on Wirecard #2 Jan Marsalek:

 In the early 2010s, he celebrated a personal business success with an extravagant lunch in Munich, asking the sommelier to open dozens of high-end wine bottles for a taste, according to a friend who attended. The bill was more than €100,000 ($112,000). 

There is always a Tweet

Trump cares about the opioids issue on an emotional, just-get-it-done level. https://t.co/8TjltLu4av

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) September 10, 2017

Greatest Spongebob Classic Rock Reference

[It's from the episode Shell Games]