Another Round of Chicken…

Or as another Open Saloner called it, some years ago, “The semi-annual national unity game of chicken”; that is the ostentatious round of saber-rattling which has been played by North Korea every six months or so since … since the armistice which divided the Norks from the Sorks about the time that I was born. I wrote in 2013;

“The Norks do this every six months, usually when they want to squeeze some concessions out of the outside world. It’s like an overgrown toddler throwing an international temper tantrum. Likely, all of his generals (or uncles, even the generals who are not his uncles) have to go along and make the usual noises and poses for the cameras, in spite of the fact that for all their resplendent ribbon-salad displays – they have not fought an all-out, balls-to-the wall war since 1954. Which war was nearly sixty years and three wars ago, as Americans are counting it, which means that their equipment must be getting pretty worn-out as well as their tactical schemes and field practice for using them – outside the boundaries of a pretty tightly-controlled war game which will allow no margin for making the Kim dynasty’s pet soldiers look bad in any way, shape or form … while they might have been able to buy some new stuff on the international black market – which hints that those drug sales by their diplomatic staff must really be paying off, big-time, and they might actually be able to hit what they might be aiming at, on a good day, depending on what they have purchased, and if their vendors didn’t rob them blind, and if the Chinese actually gave them some of the good stuff … I do believe they can hit Seoul on a good day with their artillery, and kidnap lonely strangers off the beachfront towns in Japan in the wee hours, and possibly come close to hitting Japan with something high-explosive … whacking the continental United States with a ballistic missile is a bit of a chancy prospect.”

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Book Review – Shattered

This really isn’t a traditional book review. “Shattered” is a book about the last presidential campaign from Hillary’s advisors’ perspective. I bought it on Amazon and read it and it was just an amazing view into the mechanics of that doomed campaign. Highly recommended.

First of all, I want to commend her camp for getting the basics so right. They reviewed the 2008 campaign which failed for her and took all the tactics of the winning side. They consisted of:
1. Focusing solely on the super delegates. Apparently this is much more technical than you’d expect and if you don’t carefully understand each state and district and how everything works you may win a lot of votes but receive few delegates
2. Play the long game and ignore distractions. When Bernie blew her out of a lot of states they just waited to get back to states with large minority populations so she could cover over those losses. This generally ignores the fact that Bernie was competitive in states which were critical to the electoral college and “in play” which made a difference in the general election but not in the primary election
3. No one was going to change their mind about her. Their campaign strategist, a guy named Robby Mooks, didn’t spend any money on “persuasion” because those that hated her weren’t changing their mind and the more she was in the news tied to the email scandal or her health or the DNC leaks the worse it got. At one point they said they were considering not putting more money into a state (Michigan) right up before the election because they believed that they were just inflaming the other sides’ base
4. No matter what happened, she soldiered on. She was unflappable.

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Oxytocin and Conformity – Public and Private

An interesting article by Robert Sapolsky distinguishes between public conformity, in which subjects change their opinions to be more agreeable to the crowd, and private conformity, where the individual actually adopts the crowd’s opinion as his own.

Sapolsky describes a classic experiment for studying conformity, in which solitary subjects are first asked something with an obvious answer such as, “Here’s a line.  Which of these three other lines is it closest to in length?”  Then a subject is asked the question which amid a group of other “participants,” actually confederates of the researcher who have been instructed to give a unanimously wrong answer. When these false answers were given first, the real study subjects would agree with that answer up to three-quarters of the time.

Neuroscience research suggests that “the discovery that everyone disagrees with you turns out to typically activate the amygdala and the insular cortex, brain regions associated with anxiety, disgust, and unease.”

In another experiment, which involved watching a documentary and then being quizzed about it, subjects were divided into two groups.  One group was administered oxytocin, the so-called ‘cuddling hormone,’ which is said to promote bonding and affiliation in couples and also among social groups.  The other experimental group got a placebo.  Among the placebo group, about 2/3 conformed to the crowd opinion…but of these, about half reverted to the correct answer when they were on their own again.  Among those who got oxytocin, there was a 15% increase in the rate of public conforming, but no increase in the rate of private conforming.

I’m not sure how definitive a 15% increase really is given the sample size of only 92 subjects, but it is consistent with what has been frequently claimed about the effects of oxytocin.  It is slightly comforting (again, to the extent that these results are validate-able)  that the increase in public conformity does not drive a corresponding increase in private conformity.  Only slightly comforting, though–the mob can still burn you at the stake for witchcraft even though most of its members privately believe that there is no such thing.)

This is obviously connected to the idea of the preference cascade.  Failure to understand this concept is surely one reason why Hillary Clinton and her minions were so taken aback by Donald Trump’s presidential victory.

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Seth Barrett Tillman: Have I Got A Sweet Deal For You …

Are you a law student in desperate search of an interesting topic for a note? … Or, are you a fundamentally burned out and deeply disappointed legal academic tired of writing papers lacking relevance and resonance—papers which no one reads—papers which are never cited and are soon forgotten? … Because if so, have I got a sweet deal for you. You can have this idea—with no money down, and at no cost to you. But you will want to post your work-product on SSRN or otherwise publish prior to May 26, 2017.

Read Seth’s full post.

Will Seth get any takers on his generous offer? He should. However, since the emoluments issue is mainly a political bat that partisans use against Trump, that would lose its value if Seth’s argument against its applicability to the President became widely accepted, it seems not unlikely that the answer (at least in the short term) is no.

The Memoirs of Field Marshall Montgomery

I read the memoirs of Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery a year or two ago, and I recently discussed the book elsewhere, so I pass these thoughts along here.

It was very good. Anyone with an interest in the Second World War and early Cold War should read it. Monty’s involvement in setting up the postwar military alliance with the United States was a surprisingly interesting part of the book which I knew little about. His personal connection with senior US military personnel proved to be very important.

Montgomery, like Slim, was an unglamorous commander, and he is probably underrated. They both focused on the basics, particularly adequate supply, and they both also recognized the limitations of what their own men and equipment could do.

Monty is castigated, often by American writers, for not being more dashing. He preferred meticulous planning, and sticking to the script, and he was willing to forgo targets of opportunity. He recognized that to try to operate in a more extemporaneous way would be to play to the strength of the Germans. They were good at that sort of thing, but he recognized that his own army was not. Recognizing that armies have national character seems to be a feature of the thinking of senior British commanders.

Wolseley in his memoirs thinks in a remarkably similar way, offering his unsentimental comments about the relative strengths and weaknesses of his own English, Scottish, and Irish troops versus those of their opponents. Montgomery similarly understood that the Germans were good at certain things, the English were good at other things: Do what you are good at.

Montgomery also has a reputation for being egotistical and self-serving, which certainly has some basis in fact. Nonetheless, his book comes off as reasonably fair, and seems to be honest, with the single major exception of his discussion of the way the Normandy campaign played out. He claims in the book that it was always his intention to wage an attrition battle against the Germans on the left flank of the lodgment with his own troops, so that the Americans could break out on the right. I don’t believe a word of this. His repeated, major ground offensives, such as Goodwood, failed because the Germans outfought him. Monty was not intentionally waging an attrition battle. He wanted the American to wear down the Germans, and to break out with his own army on the left. That was, so I speculate, always his actual plan. But of course the enemy always gets a vote.

Monty had good reason for wanting it to play out this way, with the main breakout on the left. Montgomery always paid attention to the larger political aspects of the war. My guess is that his goal was always to clear the channel and North Sea coasts, and capture the exits from the Baltic to secure Britain’s position, including capturing Antwerp, and lock up the Russians. This would be consistent with centuries of proven British strategic thinking and practice. It was almost an axiom of British strategy and international politics that it is essential to neutralize or secure control of the Low Countries, the most likely and most threatening locale for a foreign invasion base to attack Britain. This was a perpetual British imperative, particularly in wartime. This would explain why Monty was willing to roll the dice on Market Garden, to regain the initiative for the left-wing of the Allied advance.

Montgomery is improperly understood, largely by American readers, as a foil to the American commanders in the Second World War. We view him as a jarring note in an otherwise predominantly American story. But this is not an enlightening way to look at Montgomery. He is better understood in the context of British history, British strategic thinking, and long-standing British military practice.