How Much Do Elections Matter? (3-4-21)

Posted on March 4, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Trump Has Been Good For The GOP, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/david-shor-2020-democrats-autopsy-hispanic-vote-midterms-trump-gop.html
06:15 Sanford Levinson: How Much Do Elections Matter?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMpzTEnfrHY
11:00 Rush Limbaugh’s legacy, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/rush-limbaugh-is-still-dead/
16:40 Dr. Seuss nonsense, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/this-weeks-dr-suess-nonsense/
22:00 A Failure of Governance in Texas, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/a-failure-of-governance-in-texas/
36:00 Tom Landry: Prisoner of his Own Myth, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-09-09-bk-367-story.html
1:09:00 Constitutional Dictatorship: Its Dangers and Its Design, https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1220&context=fss_papers
1:26:20 Fidelity to law & constitutional dictatorship, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0X2NRjeoM4
1:28:30 Gad Saad: My Chat with Jordan Peterson – Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KF2cwcADtU
1:36:00 Covid-19 death rates 10 times higher in countries where most adults are overweight, https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/04/health/obesity-covid-death-rate-intl/index.html
1:41:00 QAnon is not going anywhere, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-qanon-has-attracted-so-many-white-evangelicals/?ex_cid=538twitter
1:48:00 The Reality of Electoral Fraud, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the-reality-of-electoral-fraud/
1:50:00 A Return to the (Lack of) Evidence of Significant Fraud, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/a-return-to-the-lack-of-evidence-of-significant-fraud/
2:08:00 We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-design.html
2:18:00 #501: Steven Pressfield on The Artist’s Journey, the Wisdom of Little Successes, Shadow Careers, and Overcoming Resistance, https://tim.blog/2021/02/26/steven-pressfield/
2:41:00 In the summer of 1995, I began working on a documentary about what women want, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzBnpmJyauY
2:50:00 What Women Want 20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgFouRg8Bj0
2:56:00 What Women Want 34.5, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxJ6JwJ9J0Q
2:58:00 Stormy Daniels in Feb. 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDy10Tzwdqw

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Rush Limbaugh’s Legacy

Posted on March 4, 2021 by Luke Ford

Political scientist James Joyner writes:

Limbaugh’s schtick ultimately transformed the conservative movement in destructive ways because it showed how lucrative playing to the predudices of an aggrieved base can be…

a business model that depends on keeping people riled up and feeding their belief system will inevitably become mean-spirited and dishonest. Discussions of nuanced differences of emphasis—which is where politics in a democracy should naturally gravitate—aren’t enough to get millions to tune in for three hours a day, every day. No, the opposition must be monsters out to destroy all that the Good People hold dear.

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Failure of Governance In Texas

Posted on March 4, 2021 by Luke Ford

Political scientist Steven L. Taylor blogs:

Yes, markets work because supply and demand are real forces that drive human behavior. So, yes, it makes sense that as electrical supply dwindled in Texas at the same time that demand was surging that the spot market for energy would see a price increase.

But what a lot of people fail to see/understand is that just because markets work, doesn’t mean they produce the human outcomes that we might want, and that is where government often has to act.

It is not unreasonable, I would assert, for a citizen in a developed country to expect power to stay on and clean water to flow during most circumstances, and for the government to absorb the costs and responsibility to assure that outcome. I know it is not possible to always guarantee access to utilities, but we have the technology to keep the heat on and the water flowing when it is cold outside. This is not asking for power when a category-5 hurricane makes landfall. This is asking for something that happens in the northern parts of the country on annual basis.

We live in a society for a reason, after all.

To pick another example that some pro-market folks might not want to hear: illegal immigration is very much about supply and demand. There is a supply of labor that the market in the US has a demand for, and any attempt to curtail that flow of supply is an inteference in the market.

Another example is what we are seeing in the fragmentation of media. Nonsense sells on cable TV far more than does hard news and analysis. So, we get more infotainment and less news, even as we have more and more outlets. That is the market at work, giving people what they want, but to the broader detriment of society.

Heck, peasants in the Andes grow coca bushes and not food crops because supply and demand dictate that a pound of coca leaves pays more than a pound of bananas.

Those examples are to point out that markets working does not always mean producing unvarnished goods.

To put all of this starkly: is the end goal of human society to maximize market outputs or is the goal of human society the flourishing of its members? While it is possible that sometimes those two things align, they do not always. It is a fundamental reason that government is needed.

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Trump Has Been Good For The GOP

Posted on March 4, 2021 by Luke Ford

Socialist pollster David Shor says:

* …between 2012 and 2016, the Electoral College bias changed from being one percent biased toward Democrats to 3 percent biased toward Republicans, mainly because of education polarization. So Donald Trump is unpopular. And he does pay a penalty for that relative to a generic Republican. But the voters he’s popular with happen to be extremely efficiently distributed in political-geography terms.

* So I think the Trump era has been very good for the Republican Party, even if they now, momentarily, have to accept this very, very, very thin Democratic trifecta. Because if these coalition changes are durable, the GOP has very rosy long-term prospects for dominating America’s federal institutions.

The question is: Can they get all of the good parts of Trumpism without the bad parts? And I don’t know the answer to that question. But when I look at the 2020 election, I see that we ran against the most unpopular Republican ever to run for president — and we ran literally the most popular figure in our party whose last name is not Obama — and we only narrowly won the Electoral College. If Biden had done 0.3 percent worse, then Donald Trump would have won reelection with just 48 percent of the two-party vote. We can’t control what Trump or Republicans do. But we can add states, we can ban partisan redistricting, and we can elevate issues that appeal to both college-educated liberals and a lot of working-class “conservatives.” If we don’t, things could get very bleak, very fast.

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Old Right Vs New Right (3-3-21)

Posted on March 3, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 I hear the drizzle of the rain (Kathy’s song)
02:00 What neo-Nazis have inherited from original Nazism, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcCu3Yia6WU
07:40 Biden’s border disaster
10:00 Who is Mercedes Carrera? Porn star and husband who had sex with minor have trial put off 12th time, https://meaww.com/mercedes-carrera-porn-star-arrested-daemon-cins-child-sexual-abuse-daughter-court-trial-postponed-12
23:00 My Chat with Porn Star Mercedes Carrera, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBZJLomEiwc
1:33:00 The right-wing extremists plot to overthrow the German government, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeEr3rQxfdw
1:36:00 As Neo-Nazis Seed Military Ranks, Germany Confronts ‘an Enemy Within’, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/world/europe/germany-military-neo-nazis-ksk.html
1:42:00 My commentary on German extremists, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=132687
2:16:00 The Science of Happiness with Fred Luskin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvfauh-XZiQ&t=2009s

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