Society

2024 Election Plus/Delta

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Pluses: admittedly much the shorter list, but we did resolve a few things.

  1. Thanks mainly to vote shifts in California and New York, the popular vote outcome was not at variance with the Electoral College vote, and it wasn’t particularly close (over 4-1/2 million votes).
  2. Largely as a result, the losing side, and VP Harris herself, have indicated cooperation with formal certification and transition processes.
  3. Harris is gone. She’ll get a chunk of money for a book and retire to the lecture circuit.
  4. Walz, same, and given the likelihood that he would have been a 21st-century version of Henry Wallace, with Chinese instead of Soviet agents in his inner circle, that might be more important than getting rid of Harris.
  5. Taking a somewhat longer view, Trump is gone too (perhaps not a much longer view; see the final Delta item below).
  6. By extension, there is some chance that ’28 will not have the electorate choosing between a crook and an idiot for President.
  7. Whatever one may think of prediction markets, and there are arguments on both sides regarding their functionality, the biggest prediction market of all, the US stock market, was forecasting a Trump victory all year (not coincidentally, the same thing happened in 2016).
  8. By the way, the media will actually report negative economic news now.
  9. I could have put this in either category, but I’ll leave it here: your Cluebat of the Day is a reminder that Trump is as old as Biden was in ’20, and notwithstanding some of my more apprehensive items below, to expect anything much of him is a waste of time.
  10. Likely continuation of relatively good space-industry policy across Administrations, which should be the only thing that matters several decades from now.

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Dedicated Followers of Fashion

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It’s kind of depressing, reading the various stories linked here and there by various blogs and social media about pro-Palestinian/pro-terrorist orgies of protest on the grounds of various colleges and universities, and in the streets of certain big cities. This reminds me of the anti-war demos of the Vietnam War era. Massive turnout, lots of signs, lots of free-floating rhetoric … which turned out to mean absolutely nothing at all, in the long run. Much of the ruckus wasn’t motivated by sincere conviction about the welfare of the South Vietnamese, or the lives of our military troops. It was all just the followers of fashion, making a show of their fashionable conviction.

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Mwen Rekòmande Panik Imedyat

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Having sensed that my public is calling: “In fair Springfield, where we lay our scene …”

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Janice Fiamengo on Kamala Harris

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From Yes, Kamala Harris Slept with a Powerful Man for Political Advancement:

Such is a common mode of operation for ambitious young women looking to jump the queue to career gain and influence. It deserves to be seen as the feminine side of sexual harassment and as an equally toxic, if more insidious, form of sexual discrimination.
 
It is almost inconceivable that Harris would have been appointed to the two board positions on her own merits. She moved ahead of better qualified and more worthy candidates, male and female, because she was involved with Brown. It’s also likely that her successful bid to become district attorney of San Francisco was in large part due to Brown’s influence in the city.
 
Unlike in instances of sexual harassment, there is not usually a complainant in cases of sexual exploitation. It is possible that both Harris and Brown look back on their affair with satisfaction.
 
But that doesn’t mean that their conduct was victimless. It was an abuse of power, and it should concern those who value merit and common fairness. Less attractive and more scrupulous people, those with integrity who might have earned the positions Harris bagged, never had a chance to compete for them on anything like a level playing field.
 
Furthermore, the incidents speak to Harris’s ruthlessness, lack of genuine ability, and moral corruptibility. Unlike in the case of Trump, whose “grab them by the pussy” comment never indicated sexual assault of women (quite the opposite—he was making the point that an extraordinary number of women are willingly bedazzled by powerful men), Harris spent years choosing to trade her body for political profit.
 
If men are to be harshly condemned for exploiting their power for sexual access—supposedly because it hurts all women and warps public culture—then why are women held guiltless when they exploit their sexual power for political and other access? Do their actions not also corrupt public culture, breeding favoritism, resentment, mistrust, apathy, and rancor?

She’s got a point.

Differences Between Left and Right Political Viewpoints

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A friend of mine writes with the following thoughts, which I’ve edited for readability:

This election is highlighting a lot of the distinction between the way people on the Left and people on the Right think and feel. For the people on the Right, this election is about whether there will be a world war, whether the economy will be ruined, whether the southern border will be secured, what material steps need to be taken so that bad things will be prevented and some positive things happen. It’s about policy being implemented and government power being used in positive ways and not being used in damaging ways.
 
The Left is much more about personality and feelings. Identifying with Harris because she’s black and a woman, and feeling that she in some ambiguous but nonetheless important way represents some vague ideal that people care about. I have a friend whose daughter is voting for Harris, and he asked her why, and she said: Because she’s black and a woman and she’s not Trump; I don’t need to know what her policy views are.
 
It’s a completely different way of looking at the world. Frankly, it’s female, and I don’t like it, and it’s destructive if it’s given political power. The idea of this type of female mindset operating a system where people are arrested or people with guns show up at the door is terrifying. Such a system would be based on arbitrary female sentiments, and gestures of submission, rather than some agreed-on set of rules.