Thursday, August 31, 2023

He grants particularism to the experience and suffering of his own tribe while denying it to others.

A very informative interview from The Obama Factor by David Samuels.  The subtitle is A Q&A with historian David Garrow.  It is a quirky read with the interviewer having as much to say as the interviewee.  Lots of interesting background information, several assumptions confirmed.  A sample.  

There is a fascinating passage in Rising Star, David Garrow’s comprehensive biography of Barack Obama’s early years, in which the historian examines Obama’s account in Dreams from My Father of his breakup with his longtime Chicago girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism. As readers, we know that the stakes of this decision would become more than simply personal: The Black American man that Obama wills into being in this scene would go on to marry a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago named Michelle Robinson and, after a meteoric rise, win election as the first Black president of the United States.

Yet what Garrow documented, after tracking down and interviewing Sheila Miyoshi Jager, was an explosive fight over a very different subject. In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.

At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spertus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city’s power echelons, with some prominent Black officials supporting Cokely and others calling for his firing.

In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism. While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.

No doubt, Obama’s evolving race-based self-consciousness did distance him from Jager; in the end, the couple broke up. Yet it is revealing to read Obama’s account of the breakup in Dreams against the very different account that Jager offers. In Obama’s account, he was the particularist, embracing a personal meaning for the Black experience that Jager, the universalist, refused to grant. In Jager’s account, the poles of the argument are nearly, but not quite, reversed: It is Obama who appears to minimize Jewish anxiety about blood libels coming from the Black community. His particularism mattered; hers didn’t. While Obama defined himself as a realist or pragmatist, the episode reads like a textbook evasion of moral responsibility.

Whose version of the story is correct? Who knows. The bridge between the two accounts is Obama’s emerging attachment to Blackness, which required him to fall in love with and marry a Black woman. In Obama’s account, his attachment to Blackness is truthful and noble. In Jager’s account, his claims are instrumental and selfish; he grants particularism to the experience and suffering of his own tribe while denying it to others.

In evaluating the truthfulness of these two competing accounts, it seems worth noting that Jager is something more than a woman scorned by a man who would later become president of the United States. Obama asked her to marry him twice; she refused him both times, before going on to achieve her own high-level professional successes. A student of the great University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, Jager is a professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College whose scholarship on great power politics in Southeast Asia and the U.S.-Korean relationship is known for its factual rigor. In contrast, Dreams from My Father, as Garrow shows throughout Rising Star, is as much a work of dreamy literary fiction as it is an attempt to document Obama’s early life.

The personal brand marketing was always a stretch.  It is interesting to see some of the background materials and realities begin to surface.

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Beach umbrella, 1971 by David Hockney

Beach umbrella, 1971 by David Hockney































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Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Even worse, there are no “solutions” in the sense of definitive and objective answers.

From way back in 1973.  From Dilemmas in a general theory of planning by Horst W. J. Rittel & Melvin M. Webber.  From the Abstract

The search for scientific bases for confronting problems of social policy is bound to fail, becuase of the nature of these problems. They are “wicked” problems, whereas science has developed to deal with “tame” problems. Policy problems cannot be definitively described. Moreover, in a pluralistic society there is nothing like the undisputable public good; there is no objective definition of equity; policies that respond to social problems cannot be meaningfully correct or false; and it makes no sense to talk about “optimal solutions” to social problems unless severe qualifications are imposed first. Even worse, there are no “solutions” in the sense of definitive and objective answers.

Very aligned with work I am doing on complex, dynamic, evolving systems with Pareto effects, and multiple interconnections with other, systems with similar characteristics.  We can specify outcomes from stables processes.  We can predict outcomes from dynamic systems with stable variability.   

Further, if there is human interaction within the evolving dynamic system, it is further complicated by human reluctance to prioritize goals and aversion to making necessary trade-off decisions.  These human traits make the system yet more inherently unpredictable.  

But what can we do with those evolving complex systems?  I think there are some useful answers, but we are not yet well versed in discussing them.

Non sequitur - the rhetorical fallback when the data does not support the ideological argument

An ideological red flag, possibly signaling weak methodology.  From Market Response to Racial Uprisings by Bocar A. Ba, Roman Rivera & Alexander Whitefield.  From the Abstract:

Do investors anticipate that demands for racial equity will impact companies? We explore this question in the context of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement—the largest racially motivated protest movement in U.S. history—and its effect on the U.S. policing industry using a novel dataset on publicly traded firms contracting with the police. It is unclear whether the BLM uprisings were likely to increase or decrease market valuations of firms contracting heavily with police because of the increased interest in reforming the police, fears over rising crime, and pushes to “defund the police”. We find, in contrast to the predictions of economics experts we surveyed, that in the three weeks following incidents triggering BLM uprisings, policing firms experienced a stock price increase of seven percentage points relative to the stock prices of nonpolicing firms in similar industries. In particular, firms producing surveillance technology and police accountability tools experienced higher returns following BLM activism–related events. Furthermore, policing firms’ fundamentals, such as sales, improved after the murder of George Floyd, suggesting that policing firms’ future performances bore out investors' positive expectations following incidents triggering BLM uprisings. Our research shows how—despite BLM’s calls to reduce investment in policing and explore alternative public safety approaches—the financial market has translated high-profile violence against Black civilians and calls for systemic change into shareholder gains and additional revenues for police suppliers.

The red flag is:

. . . the financial market has translated high-profile violence against Black civilians and calls for systemic change into shareholder gains and additional revenues for police suppliers

But the BLM riots were violence by BLM supporters not violence by police against Black civilians.  

The proposed question:

Do investors anticipate that demands for racial equity will impact companies? 

Is an interesting one but that is not the question they actually research.  The question they are actually answering is:

Do urban riots increase the valuation of companies who are primarily suppliers to police departments?

A different way of putting that might be:

Do riots fuel demand for police services and does that increase demand for police services also fuel demand for the goods and services of companies supplying police departments?

If that is the question (and it is certainly the question they end up answering) then the answer by common sense, experience and classic economics is necessarily Yes.  If you increase demand for something (demand for civic stability through more and better policing) and the supply is relatively inelastic, then the cost and valuation of suppliers will rise.  All the researchers have demonstrated is that Supply and Demand are alive and well.

It is hard to imagine who the "economics experts" were that the researchers interviewed who apparently believed that mass civil disturbance would reduce demand for police services and therefor would reduce the demand, and therefore valuation, of companies supplying police departments.  

Quite possibly there is a lag in some jurisdictions between mass civil violence and demand for policing, but overall, one can, and should, easily anticipate overall demand for police services will rise and therefore an increase in valuation for companies supplying police departments with materials and services will occur.

The increase in crime and departure of populations from urban jurisdictions who most enthusiastically embraced defunding police and the flight to safer, better policed suburbs, exurbs, and towns suggests that civic violence will increase demand for increased policing, even if that demand shifts to other jurisdictions.  

And the ideological conclusion that "the financial market has translated high-profile violence against Black civilians and calls for systemic change into shareholder gains and additional revenues for police suppliers" is a complete non sequitur.  That was a conclusion in pursuit of supporting evidence.  A conclusion unsupported by the evidence.  

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Sissinghurst Gardens by David Lloyd Glover

Sissinghurst Gardens by David Lloyd Glover 



























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Tuesday, August 29, 2023

Years later, the bishop returned, carrying with him "precious stones and the odiferous essences of that country".

From The incredible journey by William Dalrymple.  The subheading is Did St Thomas found a church in south India? William Dalrymple unravels a Christian mystery.  

The rains come to Kerala for months at a time. It is the greenest state in India: hot and humid, still and brooding. The soil is so fertile that as you drift up the lotus-choked waterways, the trees close in around you, as twisting tropical fan vaults of palm and bamboo arch together in the forest canopy. Mango trees hang heavy over the fishermen's skiffs; pepper vines creep through the fronds of the waterside papaya orchards.

In this country live a people who believe that St Thomas - the apostle of Jesus who famously refused to believe in the resurrection "until I have placed my hands in the holes left by the nails and the wound left by the spear" - came to India from Palestine after the Resurrection, and that he baptised their ancestors. Moreover, this is not a modern tradition: it has been the firm conviction of the Christians here since at least the sixth century AD.

In 594 AD, the French monastic chronicler Gregory of Tours met a wandering Greek monk who reported that, in southern India, he had met Christians who had told him about St Thomas's missionary journey to India and who had shown him the tomb of the apostle. Over the centuries to come, almost every western traveller to southern India, from Marco Polo to the first Portuguese conquistadors, reported the same story.

The legend of St Thomas led to the first-ever recorded journey to India by an Englishman: according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, King Alfred (he of the burned cakes) sent Bishop Sighelm of Sherborne "to St Thomas in India"; years later, the bishop returned, carrying with him "precious stones and the odiferous essences of that country".

The stories that the travellers brought back with them varied little: all said how in India, St Thomas was universally believed to have arrived in AD 52 from Palestine by boat; that he had travelled down the Red Sea and across the Persian Gulf, and that he landed at the great Keralan port of Cranganore, the spice trading centre to which the Roman Red Sea merchant fleet would head each year, to buy pepper and Indian slave girls for the Mediterranean market.

In Kerala, St Thomas was said to have converted the local Brahmins with the aid of miracles and to have built seven churches. He then headed eastwards to the ancient temple town of Mylapore, now in the suburbs of Madras. There the saint was opposed by the orthodox Brahmins of the temple, and finally martyred. His followers built a tomb and monastery over his grave which, said the travellers, was now a pilgrimage centre for Muslims and Hindus, as well as Christians in southern India.

Read the whole thing.

We can get on with the work of improving our epistemic environment.

An additional example of increasingly questionable academic quality.  From Age of Invention: Does History have a Replication Crisis? by Anton Howes.  He begins by referencing the 2011 replication crisis in the hard sciences and then transitions to his field, history.

But I’ve become increasingly worried that science’s replication crises might pale in comparison to what happens all the time in history, which is not just a replication crisis but a reproducibility crisis. 

[snip]

Historical myths, often based on mere misunderstanding, but occasionally on bias or fraud, spread like wildfire. People just love to share unusual and interesting facts, and history is replete with things that are both unusual and true. So much that is surprising or shocking has happened, that it can take only years or decades of familiarity with a particular niche of history in order to smell a rat. Not only do myths spread rapidly, but they survive — far longer, I suspect, than in scientific fields.

Take the oft-repeated idea that more troops were sent to quash the Luddites in 1812 than to fight Napoleon in the Peninsular War in 1808. Utter nonsense, as I set out in 2017, though it has been cited again and again and again as fact ever since Eric Hobsbawm first misled everyone back in 1964. Before me, only a handful of niche military history experts seem to have noticed and were largely ignored. Despite being busted, it continues to spread. Terry Deary (of Horrible Histories fame), to give just one of many recent examples, repeated the myth in a 2020 book. Historical myths are especially zombie-like. Even when disproven, they just. won’t. die.

Or take the case of the 12,000-franc prize instituted by Napoleon for an improved method of preserving food for the use of his armies, which prompted Nicolas Appert to invent canned food. It’s frequently cited to show the how prizes can have a significant impact. Except that, despite being repeated hundreds of times, it literally never happened. Appert was given money by the French government, but it was a mere reward in recognition of his achievement, given over a decade after he had invented the method. The myth of the food canning innovation prize is a truly ancient one, which I traced back to a mis-translation of a vaguely-worded French source all the way back in 1869. That’s over 150 years of repeated falsehood, and I see no signs of it slowing.

More than four decades ago, I had a revelatory experience in a class in my junior or senior year.  Regrettably I recall neither the name of the class or the name of the teaching assistant.  It was an economic development class perhaps or possibly government.  

The TA had given us an assignment to read and critique an assigned paper that was only 10-20 pages long in which the author made an argument.  We were to come to class prepared to discuss our critique. 

We all came in prepared and had a reasonably robust discussion over the first fifteen minutes or so of the class.  Interesting, but nothing out of the ordinary.

But then the TA did something very out of the ordinary.  We had all read the 20 pages and taken the sourcing at face value.  There was perhaps a page or two worth of footnotes at the end, providing source referencing to support the argument in the paper.  We had read the paper and never looked at the sources.

The TA closed the conversation about the argument and turned our attention to the footnotes.  Patiently, one by one, he showed us the actual source in the footnote versus how it was referenced in the text.  Time and again, the footnote was irrelevant, erroneous, or misinterpreted.  We had accepted that the building blocks of the argument were all correct and had been critiquing the assemblage of those blocks into an argument.

The TA's point, masterfully made, was that most of the building blocks were not actually building blocks at all.  That once we stripped out all the elements of the argument which had no source or were irrelevant, misinterpreted or erroneous, there was really hardly an argument at all.  We had wasted our intellectual energy by attacking a perceived narrative rather than doing the hard work of checking the facts first.

Howes proceeds to offer an example in his column.  

This lack of effective institutions or incentives was really brought home to me recently by the publication of a paper in the prestigious journal History & Technology by Jenny Bulstrode of UCL, in which she claimed that the inventor Henry Cort had stolen his famous 1783 iron-rolling process from Reeder’s iron mill in Jamaica, where it had been developed by 76 black metallurgists by passing iron through grooved sugar rollers. It was a widely-publicised paper, receiving 22,756 views — eleven times as many views as the journal’s next most most read paper, and frankly unheard of for most academic papers — along with a huge amount of press coverage.

Bulstrode argued that Cort had heard of the invention via a relative, the master of the ship Abby, who had been in Jamaica and in November 1781 visited him in Portsmouth; that in March-May 1782 Reeder’s mill was destroyed by the British army on the pretext that it might be used for weapons in a slave revolt during wartime, but that this was really at the behest of Cort to destroy the competition; and that the grooved rolling machines at Reeder’s mill were dismantled and sent to Portsmouth where Cort could use them.

Howes demonstrates that this argument by Bulstrode was a complete muddle of cognitive pollution.  Incorrect timelines, factual errors, leaps of imagination, etc.  What looked like a properly researched history paper was, when you did the hard work of going back to the source information, just a load of tosh or ideological tripe.  

It is easy to feel like we are at a precipice, beginning a long and perhaps accelerating slide into decline.  It feels as if cognitive pollution is everywhere and getting worse.  Activists and ardent ideologues advance self-evident nonsense and expect everybody to be bullied into accepting it.

I suspect that we are actually in a different metaphor.  We have been slogging through a moorland of wetlands and ridges, mixed ecologies, with little idea of where we are heading and no path to get there.

We are given a compass and a topographical map that shows us the sloughs to avoid, the hills that don't necessarily need to be climbed natural pathways and, perhaps most importantly, the larger view of the entire landscape that allows us to know where we need to be headed.  

For fifty or seventy-five years, we have subsidized massive knowledge creation through universities but with exceedingly weak quality control.  Hundreds of billions of dollars for creating research but virtually nothing to ensure that any of that research which was produced was actually usefully true.  

Arnold Kling frequently observes that American government policy in the market place is to effectively restrict supply and subsidize demand, leading to inflation, shortages, and corruption.  In contrast, in academia, a non-market economy, we seem to have the reverse government policy.  Policies which subsidize supply while restricting demand (most papers are cited fewer than five times.)  

We are in a bad place from an historical perspective.  We have made the moorlands and wetlands and marshes of knowledge much more difficult to traverse through bad policy.  

On the sunny side, though, what we are now seeing is that we are indeed in bad terrain but because of a  more engaged public and better knowledge access (internet, smartphones, et al), the terrain is getting clearer.

We have a lot of clean-up to do, some wasteland rehabilitation, some some brown site restoration, some drainage of marshes.  But the internet and universal knowledge access serve as a compass and map.  We will still occasionally wander into muddy waters and barren fells but now we are in a better position to spot them and size them and avoid them.

There is a lot of cognitive pollution and we can bewail just how much there is.  Or we can celebrate that we are now beginning to realize just how weak was our understanding of how extensive was the cognitive pollution.

Now that we know, we can be more rigorous, more skeptical, more diligent.  

Institutions will continue to subsidize the production of low quality "knowledge," incentives will still reward cognitive pollution over clean-up work, the mainstream media will still celebrate the improbable and ideological over the useful.  

But we can see that as our challenge better now than we did ten years ago.  Just because we expected better from academia doesn't mean we deserved better.  It is what it is and we can see that more clearly.  And we can get on with the work of improving our epistemic environment.  Rather than simply and blindly remaining ignorant of the torrent of cognitive pollution spewing forth.  

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Academic studies - guilty till proven innocent.

In the academic fields of medicine and psychology (and sociology), we are well into the decade of the replication crisis - studies which were performed but never checked.  Only now are we beginning to discover that 50-70% or more of supposed studies are actually erroneous or non-replicable.  

As we continue to discover just how bad and extensive is the problem, we are also beginning to discover the myriad ways by which the errors occur or deceits created.  This is an interesting one.
If Marinos is correct, it is interesting because it turns virtually the entire world of academia on its head.  

Ideally, we ought to be able to assume that research is conducted in good faith and reasonable diligence and rigor.  We ought to be able to assume that the results should be able to be accepted at face value.  Errors will obviously manifest on occasion but as a relatively rare occurrence.  

Where we are heading is that we should assume most of research generated is wrong and that a material portion of it will be deceitfully wrong.  

Which puts us in the position that no research should be accepted until thoroughly and skeptically assessed.  Marinos's example shows just how thoroughly it needs to be done.  The error the researchers committed was neither apparent nor obvious.  It was a subtle, implied decision hidden in a morass of detail, papered over with inaccurate verbiage.  You would not find their error unless you assumed that an error had occurred and actively went searching for it.  

The Academia, as an institution, is pushing us away from the desirable position that all research is innocent and accurate till proven false, to the much less desirable position that all research is error-ridden and deceptive until proven true.  

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The Thames Near London Sun, 1890 by Willem Witsen

The Thames Near London Sun, 1890 by Willem Witsen 





















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Monday, August 28, 2023

It appears that there is little substantive discrimination based on citizenship status

Counter-intuitive but it is being praised for its rigor.  First seen here:
From Does access to citizenship confer socio-economic returns? Evidence from a randomized control design by Jens Hainmueller, Elisa Cascardi, Michael Hotard,  Rey Koslowski, Duncan Lawrence, Vasil Yasenov, and David D. Laitin.  From the Abstract:

Based on observational studies, conventional wisdom suggests that citizenship carries economic benefits. We leverage a randomized experiment from New York where low-income registrants who wanted to become citizens entered a lottery to receive fee vouchers to naturalize. Voucher recipients were about 36 percentage points more likely to naturalize. Yet, we find no discernible effects of access to citizenship on several economic outcomes, including income, credit scores, access to credit, financial distress, and employment. Leveraging a multi-dimensional immigrant integration index, we similarly find no measurable effects on non-economic integration. However, we do find that citizenship reduces fears of deportation. Explaining our divergence from past studies, our results also reveal evidence of positive selection into citizenship, suggesting that observational studies of citizenship are susceptible to selection bias.

You would assume that having citizenship would make many things easier for immigrants and that ease would in turn improve income, credit scores, access to credit, financial distress, and employment.  That appears to be not the case.  We could plausibly imagine that immigrants, particularly illegal immigrants, might face all sorts of barriers and constraints which would retard their accomplishments.  This study indicates that the fact of citizenship itself has no measurable impact.  Outcomes are driven by other, yet to be identified, factors.

Gun deaths mapped

A very interesting resource, The Trace.  It maps gun deaths and wounding by location and date since 2014.  I live in Atlanta, among the top cities for murder and gun death rates, so of course, that is what I looked at.

Murder rates and death by gun are of course strongly correlated with effective policing.  Regardless of gun laws, the more active and effective the policing, the lower the murder rate.  Given that Blue states and Blue cities in any state, tend to have weak policing, that is among the reasons that their murder rates tend to be high.  

What the visual maps highlight is also the topography of murder and gun violence.  It again underscores how strong is the correlation between policing strategies and crime.

In our instance, Atlanta has terrible murder numbers, but those numbers are highly concentrated in particular neighborhoods.  Observations:

Murders are very unevenly distributed with some neighborhoods having a lot and some having none.  

In my neighborhood, and its adjacent neighborhoods, there have been no murders since 2014.  Touch on wood that it stays that way.

The murders tend to be most concentrated in the inner most city neighborhoods.

If you zoom out a little, you quickly see that murders tend to be concentrated along particular road systems.  Presumably due to bars and similar establishments.

For my location, the nearest murders are three neighborhoods away, and are along busy city roads lined with bars, tattoo parlors, vape stores, peep shows and the like.  

At first order of approximation, all Atlanta's murders tend to be concentrated in the southwestern neighborhoods and the northeastern neighborhoods tend to be absent gun violence other than a few select drinking streets.

As you keep zooming out to a state, regional, and national level, it takes on the feel of those night time pictures of North and South Korea - South Korea, with its prosperity, is lit up whereas North Korea is dark save a few candles in Pyongyang.  Same here except in terms of gun deaths.  The cities shine out as meccas of gun death.  Outside the cities, there are places you can drive to for an hour or two where there have been no gun deaths for 25 miles either side of the highway for a decade.  

It is like a kaleidoscope.  You can stare at the map for hours, coming up with all sorts of observations and hypotheses.  

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Seriously versus literally - the same MSM mistake being made again

Ann Althouse has another example of the mainstream media's incapacity to report news based on evidence, logic, and reason.  The MSM are desperate for column inches which can  be produced quickly and cheaply.  Hence, the press release journalism and emotive innumeracy.  

She is posting about Trump's indictments: Polling shows half of Americans want him to suspend his campaign, and more takeaways by Tal Axelrod.  The subheading is Despite what he claims, he isn't getting a continued bounce in support.  ABC is the news organization.

They did a poll.  It found the same numbers as other recent polls.  Both Biden are equally popular and unpopular.  No new news.  But there is an argument to be made but Axelrod whirls around it like bumper car at an amusement fair.  A lot of noise and flashing lights but little movement towards a reasoned argument or report.

Trump is making the argument that the more he indicted, the more support he garners from the public.

"Any time they file an indictment, we go way up in the polls," Trump boasted during a Republican Party dinner in Montgomery, Alabama, earlier this month. "We need one more indictment to close out this election. One more indictment, and this election is closed out."

Is that true?  Axelrod does not answer.  We are back to the same issue we dealt with in 2016, neatly captured by Salena Zito.  Back in 2020, I noted,

Everything I am reading is more subtle than that and comes back to Salena Zito's key observation during the 2016 campaign.  That Trump's supporters take him seriously but not literally.  That his opponents take him literally but not seriously

Once again, Trump is making a bombastic argument - that the more indicted he is, the better he does in the polls.  Taken literally, that does not appear to be true.  The more he is indicted appears to have little or no affect on his polling results.  But there we are again with the mainstream media idiocy.  You should always steel-man your opponent's arguments.  

If the general polls don't fluctuate much, is there any other empirical evidence that might support his bombastic argument?  

Sure.  From ABC:

At the same time, Trump remains the clear favorite so far for the Republican presidential nomination according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, with a nearly 40-point lead nationally over nearest rival Ron DeSantis

Apparently, indictments are either irrelevant or beneficial in the Republican Primary.  Further:

According to FiveThirtyEight, the former president did see a primary polling boost after his first indictment, in New York. His fundraising in the second quarter of 2023, amid his mounting legal troubles, was also nearly double the previous period.

So, if we are talking about the Republican Primary, there is at least some evidence to suggest that Trumps argument is correct.  The more the indictments, the more the Republican Party base support.

But that is not the report Axelrod wants to write.  Consequently he seems to choose to focus on the general election fifteen months from now, which is absurd.  The predictive power of underpowered push-polls fifteen months in advance of a national election are de minimus.  

Instead, Axelrod starts careening around with declarative statements which don't really withstand scrutiny.

Early this month, 49% of adults said in the ABC News/Ipsos poll that Trump should suspend his campaign -- and 50% say the same in the most recent survey. Only about a third of Americans in these polls don’t think Trump should suspend his campaign, with the rest undecided.

Well, yes.  Broadly half the electorate will vote Democrat and half will vote Republican.  If you survey the electorate, the half that will vote Democrat are likely to support Trump suspending his campaign.  Congratulations ABC, your poll reveals that Democrats would like an easy win.  I am sure that is true.  I am also certain that it is irrelevant.

I view both Biden and Trump as challenging candidates with significant baggage.  I have no idea whether either or both will win their respective parties' nominations.  I have currently, no strong view as to who might win in a straight up competition in fifteen months.

I can be certain that Axelrod has written a meaningless and sloppy article making political points he wants to score but without the evidence, logic or reasoning to support the argument he wishes to make.  

Let's move away from Axelrod's literal argument.  What is the serious version of Trumps bombastic literal argument?  I suspect it would look something like this:

The more my Democratic opponents use the institutions of government to indict me on obviously frivolous charges which I will eventually defeat; the more my Democratic opponents behave like banana republic autocrats by obviously trying to jail their political opposition; the more the Democrats appear to ignore the interests and issues of a plurality or majority of Americans, the more likely it is that I will win both the Republican nomination and win the general election.

What does this poll contribute in considering that argument?  Really, almost nothing.  The indictments might indeed turn out to be a benefit in the general election.  None of us wants government power wielded nakedly for political benefit, and we especially don't want to see the rule of law set aside for political gain.  

Might Trump's non-literal, serious argument end up being true?  Possibly.  Possibly not.  I don't know and Axelrod does not even think to engage with the serious argument rather than the cheap and easy literal bombast.  He is making the same mistake as in 2016.  

Blackfriars Bridge and St Paul's, London, c.1762 by William Marlow

Blackfriars Bridge and St Paul's, London, c.1762 by William Marlow
















Click to enlarge.

By focusing on the emotionalism of the story, they miss the substance

From Texas sends 10th migrant bus to Los Angeles after mayor decries move as 'political act' by Adam Sabes.  The subheading is The bus had a total of 39 migrants. 

For a year or more, governors of border states, to protest the crime and economic burdens created by Biden's catastrophic near-open borders policies, have been sending busloads of illegal immigrants to self-styled sanctuary states and cities such as New York and Los Angeles.  In comparison to the hundreds of thousands of illegals in each of the border states, the buses are merely symbolic.  A few hundreds of illegal immigrants or a few thousand at most in total over more than a year compared to millions.

Those on the left are outraged at having the crime and economic costs imposed on them and object on humanitarian grounds to other governors playing politics with the lives of illegal immigrants.  Fair enough argument.

Those on the right chortle at the moral and governance anguish of those on the left due to the clear hypocrisy of the left wanting the status of being a sanctuary city (or state) without wanting to actually bear any costs for actually being a sanctuary city or state.  

As political theater, it is entertaining but it does make a mockery of basic humanitarianism.  Keep them at the borders or let them in but don't bandy them about.

There is another way of viewing this though.  Our mainstream media pays little attention to facts, truth, logic, reason, or evidence.  They literally do not think particularly much.  They advance narratives and manufacture propaganda, often with complete sincerity.  They churn out cheap-to-write emotionalism while ignoring the expensive work needed to chase facts.  They have abandoned the engine of the Age of Enlightenment with its commitment to pursue Truth via the Scientific Method, Logic, Reason, and Evidence.

The article linked focuses on the hypocrisy of the Mayor of Los Angeles, Mayor Bass, in wanting to be both a sanctuary city but also not wanting to bear the costs of providing sanctuary to minuscule numbers of illegal border crossers.  

Texas has sent a 10th bus with migrants to Los Angeles on Saturday, days after its mayor harshly criticized the southern state for sending migrants.

According to FOX Los Angeles, the bus had a total of 39 migrants, which included 12 families and 21 children.

The 10th bus was sent five days after the previous bus, according to the outlet.

[snip]

The Los Angeles City Council voted in June to make the city a sanctuary city for immigrants.

Fair enough; hypocrisy warrants mockery.

But there is a substantive argument that does not garner much attention.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass criticized Texas Governor Greg Abbott when the ninth bus was sent when Tropical Storm Hillary was impacting the city, saying "LA has not extended an invitation asking for people to come. This is a political act."

Bass is of the same political party which has chosen the policies which have created the border crisis being experienced by the border states.  Those states can make exactly the same argument made by Mayor Bass in that those states have "not extended an invitation asking for people to come. This is a political act."

It seems to me that that is the core issue.  The mockery is fun and pertinent.  But the problem is that the Biden Administration has chosen to impose immigration policies with material humanitarian, crime, and economic negative consequences which fall largely on a few states, which happen also to be politically unsupportive states.

Governors from both affected and unaffected states appear to agree that the Federal Government policies should not create conditions under which non-citizens arrive illegally.  They should not be forced by the Federal Government and Biden Administration to extend "an invitation asking for people to come."  

Both Governor Abbott of Texas and Mayor Bass of Los Angeles are making the same argument that they did not invite these illegals to come to their state or city and they should not have to put up with it.

The news is not that the sanctuary politicians are hypocrites.  The news is that Republican and Democrat governors and mayors agree that the Biden Administration should not have an open borders policy.  

By focusing on the human emotionalism of the story (the mockery), the mainstream media overlooks the much more substantive news that Republican and Democrat governors and mayors can agree on something and that that is that the Biden Administration should not have an open borders policy.

Sunday, August 27, 2023

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

Unknown title by René Gruau (Italian, 1909-2004)

 Unknown title by René Gruau (Italian, 1909-2004)































Click to enlarge.

Saturday, August 26, 2023

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

The Rescue, 1890 by Ivan Aivazovsky

The Rescue, 1890 by Ivan Aivazovsky
































Click to enlarge.

Friday, August 25, 2023

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

Two Chickens, 1917 by Edmund Dulac (French/English, 1882-1953)

Two Chickens, 1917 by Edmund Dulac (French/English, 1882-1953)




















Click to enlarge.

Thursday, August 24, 2023

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

Escaping Criticism, 1874 by Pere Borrell del Caso (Spanish/Catalan artist, 1835–1910)

Escaping Criticism, 1874 by Pere Borrell del Caso (Spanish/Catalan artist, 1835–1910)





























Click to enlarge.

Wednesday, August 23, 2023

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

Marseille Porte de l'Afrique du Nord, poster 1920-1932, designed by Roger Broders, (France, 1883-1953)

Marseille Porte de l'Afrique du Nord, poster 1920-1932, designed by Roger Broders, (France, 1883-1953)





































Click to enlarge.

Tuesday, August 22, 2023

History

 

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

Fig and Peacock, 1895 by Walter Crane (English, 1845-1915)

Fig and Peacock, 1895 by Walter Crane (English, 1845-1915)


































Click to enlarge.

Monday, August 21, 2023

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things