Election thoughts

Having shot my mouth off beforehand, I feel I should reflect afterwards.

The Republican party deserved Trump. They still do. The rest of us did not, including most of the people who voted for him hoping for some kind of positive change. As I said before the election, the best we can hope for from Trump is a standard Republican administration, which is not what the country needs right now. The worst is.... worse.

For example, both Trump and the Republicans have promised to repeal Obamacare. The Republicans have been foaming at the mouth about it for years, and they are the ones who would pass the legislation. Even if Trump was lying about it, he would have to not merely fail to do anything about it, but actively veto the legislation when it came up. So a great many people will lose their health care; some of them will get sick; and some of those people will die. In the middle east on the other hand, Trump has openly promised to kill more people. Carpet-bombing Isis-held areas might sound appealing, but actually doing it would kill a lot of innocent people and make a bad situation a whole lot worse.

So I hope that most of what he said was lies - excuse me, "campaign talk". Comments since the election have been consistent with that, but frankly I've no reason to believe anything Trump says.

A couple of things about the reaction to Trump's election:

• Protesting that Trump is "not my president" is not smart. Sure, Trump was thoroughly hypocritical to complain about it, having called for protests in 2012. But all that means is that protesters now sound as much like sore losers as Trump did then. The USA has a process for picking a president. It was followed, and Trump is what we got. So he is "your president". By all means protest when he picks unqualified or unhinged people for his administration, or when he starts making terrible decisions. Protesting just because he's been elected will leech away the credibility of later protests.
• Don't imagine that the electoral college will undo this for any reason. Clinton might have won the popular vote, but that's not the system. I think it's a daft system, but that's the system that both sides campaigned on and everyone voted on. Change it and you'd need a fresh election. The time to fix it is before the next election, not just after the last one.
• No, the election wasn't hacked. Hacking an election on that scale would leave very visible traces, given the mish-mash of systems in use and all the people involved. It might get hacked in the future and we need serious work on the electronic voting systems across the country... but hoping for recounts to get the "right" result back is living in dreamland. If you want to worry about election-rigging, fight voter suppression laws. In time for 2018.

And a couple of things to hope for:

• Only Nixon could go to China, as they say. Perhaps Trump will turn out to be a really smart president who will bring people along on something like health care or climate change, once he gets into office and confronts the realities. An ice-free arctic in a couple of years might prove a convincing argument. I will not be holding my breath.
• An incompetent version of an infectious agent is called a vaccine. I said before the election that we needed to reject Trump strongly, because the next version would be sharper and more insidious. But if Trump is incompetent in office or clumsy in his support for the alt-right, he could well be wrecking the chances of the next populist right winger.
• Ignoring the administration itself, a close Democrat victory might have been the worst possible result. The Democrats would feel no need to reform, because they won; and the Republicans would feel no need to reform beyond some primary rule changes to keep out the next Trump. After all, they would have run Donald Trump and nearly won anyway! But now, the Democrats will need to face the reality that they lost to Donald Trump; and the Republicans will need to face the reality that their support is heavily Trumpified - and in four years, that support may melt in the face of a failure to deliver on its promises. Much of what Trump promised was irresponsible or depended on rolling back the clock; it will either not be done, or will end in disaster.

So that's my hopeful scenario - a disastrous Trump presidency sparks reform. Good luck, everyone.
 

Endorsement is probably a strong word.

Hillary Clinton is an unexceptional centrist politician, made slightly scary by 25 years of Republicans behaving like she's the dark lord incarnate. She's smart, determined, and experienced - even her enemies will give her that - and I think she'll make a decent president. Because of all that experience, she'd be very unlikely to be much worse than expected; and it's quite possible that she'd be better. Her big problems are that she's neck deep in the money pool that plagues US politics; and she's really bad at connecting with voters in public. She does not strike me as inherently worse than most of the political class; she's just better at it.

I have been waiting some time for an election where I could reasonably vote third party, to try to encourage the major parties to clean up their act. All I need is a fairly generic pick from each side, so that it wouldn't make that much difference which one got in. I hoped that the 2012 campaign would encourage the Republicans to move back into the center so I could do that. I have been utterly disappointed.

Donald Trump is an ignorant, incoherent, inconsistent blowhard. He isn't even a very good liar; for example he publicly denied saying something that was still up on his own twitter feed. He talks as if he assumes that no-one will remember anything he's ever said before, and he treats people as suckers to be milked for whatever they have. When the Access Hollywood tape came out I was amazed that it caused such a stir. With everything he'd said and done, *this* is what it takes to make people look twice? He treats everyone like that; it's just that there are extra ways of treating women badly that aren't available with others.

If Trump got into office the best we could hope for is that he would do nothing but play golf and make irrelevant bloviating speeches about how great everything was now. If not he might use his office to further his own business career, turning the US government into a tool for attacking his enemies and rewarding his friends. At worst he might wreck our foreign policy and start a major war, or leave his successor heading towards a cliff at high speed. If he loses, he may overturn the table and bleat about vote rigging, eating away at public confidence in the very system of government. Putin would love that.

But even that is not the full story of the harm he is doing. A great many people are watching him and taking notes on what works and what does not. The next Trump may well have a better record in business, a smoother delivery, no incriminating tapes, a capacity for hard work and preparation, and a more subtle way with dog whistles - but the same divisive message that it's all *their* fault. The next Trump might win, and win well; eight years of a capable politician wreaking the same havoc could do incredible damage to the US and the world.

For all these reasons, Trump must lose and lose badly. He needs to lose by a margin that makes clear that he has been rejected utterly by the country and that next time it will be worse. This country has the chance to make a statement on November 8th. Vote against Trump; vote to make Republicans feel that by embracing Trump they have given the presidency to Hillary Clinton. Vote against down-ballot Republicans who endorsed him, so that next time they will feel they have more to lose by tolerating such people than by calling them out.

Better ethics through faster decision-making

I have heard a few discussions recently about the problem of how self-driving cars will make ethical decisions. I am completely unworried about this.

There are certainly things that we should worry about with self-driving cars. Chief amongst them are software bugs; there's an enormous scope for unexpected consequences in a piece of software controlling a vehicle at high speed in an open environment. Not far behind is security; who can control the car you are driving in (and the cars around it) and under what circumstances? And the question of how machines and software make ethical decisions is one we will need to grapple with as they become more powerful in what they control. I suspect we will find that it is not the machines they control that will be most important; it will be the social decisions. But cars, I am not so worried about.

For the rest of this discussion I will assume that self-driving cars (SDCs) are not subject to software bugs, and that they do pretty much what they were intended to do. That may not be true, but if so then it is bugs and not ethical decisions that are the problem.

In my lifetime I have been involved in four car accidents. All of them were low-speed collisions, caused by some clown not paying enough attention to what he was doing (yes, always he). In only one case was I the clown, and in my defence I was learning to parallel park at the time. Almost all of the car accidents I see the results of are clearly rear-enders in stop-start traffic; and many of the remainder are the result of someone going through an intersection when they don't have the right of way. SDCs will not suffer from attention lapses; continuous attention is something computers do well.

SDCs will not get drunk. They will not show off to their mates and/or girlfriend. They will not turn to yell at the kids in the back seat, or take their eyes off the road to text. They can be programmed not to speed, or drag race. They will not fall asleep. They will notice that the brakes are squishy, or that one of the wheels is rattling alarmingly.

The vast majority of accidents - no matter what the cause - do not involve ethical decisions of any kind. Even the ones that SDCs cannot eliminate (brake failures; bad decisions by other cars; rocks falling from cliffsides) will usually leave the car trying to avoid something either by stopping short of it or dodging into open space. The SDC is probably better at that than you. It does not panic and forget the proper braking technique; it does not hit the accelerator by mistake. It uses engine braking to its utmost, and shortens its stopping path as much as possible. When it cannot avoid hitting something, it can make sure the impact point is optimal for the airbag systems. It may even trigger airbags in advance of the impact, or tighten the seatbelts, or deploy all sorts of collision mitigation that depends on advance notice that we don't have yet and reflexes that only machines can achieve.

I expect that SDCs will quickly become safer than human driving for most people, even if you assume that the software is programmed to sacrifice the driver whenever there's an ethical decision to be made. And SDCs will keep getting better, where humans have to be retrained every generation.

But even in those limited cases where an ethical decision is involved, the SDC will quickly do a better job than a human. It will react faster to the situation; it will see the kid who runs out on the road quicker, and brake faster. It will be more likely to see the third option of not hitting anything, and it will be more accurate in taking it. Adrenaline is useful for many things, but precision maneuvering is not one of them. An SDC will be quicker to realize that there is an ethical decision to make, and it will be more capable of thinking through the possibilities in time to act on them. If nothing else, it will be able to make a definite decision and sacrifice one of the people involved, rather than acting too late and killing both of them. Even if it does the machine equivalent of flipping a coin, your chances of surviving such a crash are likely to be better than if you drove and chose to save yourself.

Greater capability means the ability to avoid ethical decisions; not by making someone else make them, but by finding a course of action that avoids harm to anyone. Humans have been using technology to get themselves better outcomes for as long as we've been human; and that has often meant no longer having to choose who lived and who died. Self driving cars are just another step along the (literal) road. I look forward to it.

First beats second

A while ago, Marc Randazza posted an article at Popehat arguing that a rebellion against the government was not a good reason to own guns. Basically, the government has artillery, air support, tanks and trained troops; and they're going to roll right over you. Commenters made a number of arguments in response, one of which was that it would be very hard to get troops to shoot their own people.

This is partly true. But the world is replete with examples of government troops firing on civilians, or otherwise squelching revolts with deadly force. Any number of right and left wing dictatorships have done it; the trick is to ensure that the troops see the protestors/rebels as them, rather than us. Religion, ethnicity and politics have all been used, and it helps to associate the dissenters with some evil foreign power. It can be dangerous if the troops in question don't buy the setup; and Syria is a prime example of what can go wrong. A chunk of the early revolt was army units that defected.

But one key question here is numbers. If the number of rebels (and supporters) is so low that a fair vote would be easily lost, then an armed revolt isn't going to help. At best it will just switch which side has taken undemocratic control. It's also very unlikely that the revolt is going to succeed, even if it were armed as well as the government - weight of numbers is going to tell. And to get back to the problem of "firing at your own people", if the rebels are small enough in number it will be easy to find troops who consider them as the bad guys. If the revolt is to get somewhere useful, it really needs to have the support of a majority (or nearly so) of the population.

And then it becomes a question of convincing people of things. Convincing the troops that they are fighting for the good; convincing the non-rebellious part of the population of the same (lest they also decide the government is not worth keeping at such a cost); and convincing the rebels that they are on the wrong side. It's usually counterproductive to quell a rebellion by exterminating half your population.

Bottom line: your troops will only have a problem firing on their own people if they think the rebels are their own people. If the government controls the media, this is going to be extremely hard. Some leakage will always occur, but a government will always have some ability to sweep a few things under the carpet. And the less free the media, the harder it is to see how much is being swept.

I have often seen people say that their second amendment rights protect their first; but the reverse is rather more the case. Without the first amendment, mass oppression (say, confiscation of precious guns) can be done piecemeal. With the first amendment, word spreads quickly and the argument becomes a general one.

I have made the argument before that protecting your rights is easier the more of them you have. The logic of this post is that if you had to defend yourself against encroaching tyranny with only one of them, the first would be more useful to you than the second, as well as being less likely to get people killed.

Procedural failings

Two things this week made me feel some sympathy for Donald Trump, which is an unfamiliar experience.

One was the widely reported story that he was being substantially outdone by Hilary Clinton in fundraising. Whatever the causes of this, it concerns me that this was translated into "his campaign is doomed" without any apparent questioning of the mechanisms that turn money into votes. It costs an enormous amount of money to run for office in the US, and this gives enormous influence to the kind of person who has large amounts of money to spend on politicians and an interest in controlling legislation. That has been a recipe for corruption and bad government since at least the days of the Roman Empire.

I'm sure he's smart enough to turn this into a talking point about where Clinton is getting that money from, and anything that increases the scrutiny on such deals can only be a good thing. Still, Trump has been grandly talking about self-funding his campaign and not being controlled by money interests. It is rather amusing to see what happens when he is literally invited to put his money where his mouth is. He doesn't need to be controlled by outside interests; he is one already.

The other was stories about the "Dump Trump" movement  preparing to try to stop Trump even getting the nomination. Whatever you think of Trump, he got the required votes in the Republican primaries - in a system deliberately designed to stop non-establishment candidates like him. If the Republicans can stop him now, they ought in future to dispense with the fictional holding of primaries and simply choose a candidate internally. Or perhaps pre-select a few and restrict the primaries to them. This is not a ridiculous idea; political parties in other countries do exactly this. But it's not what they said they would do, and I strongly suspect there would be a revolt if they did. Particularly by Trump's supporters, already primed with stories of delegate shenanigans; and in general, by Americans who see it as their right to vote on everything.

Set against that is the whole purpose of political parties in a democracy; to vet and select candidates who will effectively represent the advertised principles of the party. If you know what a party stands for and agree with it, you should be able to just vote its ticket blindly and get a competent, effective representative. Dogcatcher or president, if they put up incompetents they are not doing their job and deserve to lose other contests as well. But what can a party do when it realizes halfway through the election process that it has picked a turkey? There is still time to fix the problem, but not by following the advertised process.

The best thing that could come out of this election is a great deal of soul-searching on all sides - Democrat, Republican, and public. There's no shortage of things that need fixing. I might have to settle for some Republican soul-searching after the massive loss that they frankly deserve. And if Trump wins, I will take some consolation that it will certainly illuminate some of the system's flaws with a most harsh and unforgiving light. Sadly, that light will stay on for at least four years.

Come November, I hope to be feeling even more sympathy for Trump as he struggles with public failure. But if all the blame is heaped on him, we will lose a precious opportunity to improve things.

Kabuki in politics

I hope I'm better at predicting general election results than primaries.

I find it interesting that people are discussing Paul Ryan's comments on Trump as if there's no question that Ryan really doesn't like him. I think this ignores the very real possibility that he's just another politician, setting up to maximize the chances of a Republican win.

In fact, he is creating a wide-open door for all the people who blasted Trump during the primary contest to get back on board and endorse a Republican win. It goes something like this: Ryan says, "At this point, I'm just not there right now." Trump fires back. They have a publicly announced meeting and issue a boilerplate statement about progress. Later, Trump gives some speeches with words that can be interpreted as contradicting a few of his more egregious early comments. Senior Republicans (the ones who want to, anyway) gravely announce that Trump has shown a more measured side to his candidacy. When enough important people have done that, Ryan praises Trump for helping to unify the party, and calls on everyone to get together and defeat the apocalyptic threat posed by Clinton.

The result is a mess of contradictory statements from Trump; but the Democrats already have that. He'd have to "clarify" some of the things that primary voters found most attractive about him; but they've already ignored things they didn't want him to have said, and what's a few more? They've got six months to get over any cognitive dissonance.

The overall effect is a classic advertising trick - "I was skeptical of this product, but I tried it and I couldn't be happier!". Ryan can't just stand up and say everything is fine (well, not without blowing his credibility), but if there's a pretend slugging match first everyone can say it was all on the level.

This doesn't make Ryan a bad person, even if it's what he's consciously doing. He might well think that Trump can work sensibly once in power; that he can be kept in check by a responsible Congress; and most importantly that he would not be as bad as a Clinton presidency. I don't agree, but then there is no way I would ever join the Republican party. There's a little bit of smoke and mirrors required from even the most straightforward politician.

The real problem is that the US political system can't find better candidates than Clinton and Trump; but I'd much rather have the Democrat problems than the Republican ones. You can say all you like that they're both liars, but I'd rather vote for someone who's lying like Clinton than someone who's lying like Trump. Trump could do just about anything in office and say it's what he promised.

And now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go turn my TV off. The attack ads are about to get ugly.

...so shall ye reap.

It turns out that Marco Rubio can't save the Republicans from their decades of folly.

If there's anyone that has been enjoying the Republican nomination contest more than me, it would have to be the Democrats. Running against Trump would be a gift from the heavens for them, no matter what candidate they end up with themselves. I'm pretty sure that Obama is savvy enough to know that there's a core group of Republicans that hate him with a passion, and will take glee in doing anything that he opposes; and I'm pretty sure that was at least part of his motivation for coming out strongly against Trump himself. He would love to leave another Democrat administration behind him to protect his legacy, and Trump is the best way for that to happen.

But perhaps better even than a straight nomination win for Trump is the contested convention that looks increasingly likely. We would then have three groups - Trump, Cruz, and Establishment (represented by Kasich or perhaps some other drafted candidate). Trump would claim the nomination on the grounds of having the most delegates; Cruz would claim it on the grounds that most people voted against Trump, and he is the leading non-Trump candidate; the Establishment would claim it on the grounds of electability, compromise, and whose party is this anyway?

Each group regards the other two with a mixture of fear, hatred and contempt. It wouldn't matter who won or for what reason, a big chunk of the losing candidates' supporters would go away feeling cheated and vowing not to vote for the nominee. Perhaps someone would run as a third party (and how can we not be amused at the idea of the establishment candidate running as a third party?) or perhaps people would just stay home. Either way, the Republican vote looks likely to be woefully split, and the effect on all the down-ticket races would have the Democrats rubbing their hands with glee.

Best of all, the Republicans can see it coming - have seen in coming for a while - and still can't seem to do anything about it. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

Now, if I could be confident that the Democrats would do something genuinely worthwhile with this windfall...

As ye sow...

I've been really enjoying the Republican primaries this year. This is not because I like any of the candidates; the only reason I would vote for any of them is to stop one of the others from getting anywhere near the presidency. No, the reason I'm enjoying them is because the Republican party likes its front runners even less than I do.

The reason that's entertaining is because the GOP deserve it. They've spent my entire life (and probably longer) courting the kind of voters they have now, and telling them that they're right to be angry and resentful and that everything is going to hell (often literally). Along comes a superstimulus like Trump or Cruz, and they'll vote for that instead of the "proper" candidates like JEB.

The establishment dislikes Trump because he's a loose cannon, and they dislike Cruz because they've spent the last three years trying to work with him. But between them they represent a bigger and better version of the voodoo economics and social hatefulness that the GOP has come to represent. They have sown the wind; they are reaping the whirlwind.

Something that enjoyable never comes without cost, however. At the end of the day, somebody will get the nomination. It's the end of eight years of Obama presidency, and that usually means a change of parties. So whoever gets the nomination has an excellent shot at becoming president.

It is still possible that Marco Rubio will save them, even after they chewed up and spat out his attempt at immigration reform. But that will not be easy, since Trump and Cruz between them currently have more than 50% of the opinion polls. Rubio would need to grab almost all of the remaining support as the other candidates fall away, and then rely on a few winner-take-all contests to turn a plurality into a majority. The next few weeks are crucial.

The one saving grace for the GOP is that Trump didn't just steal oxygen from the crackpot wing of the party; he stole it from everyone. He's not given anyone a chance to try to out-extreme him even if they wanted to. If he is finally overtaken, the winner won't have an especially horrid series of debate quotes that the Democrats can replay; instead he'll be the guy that took on Trump and won.

I like to think that the US electorate is smarter than to elect Trump or Cruz; that it will elect whoever the Democrats put up if that's the choice. But I didn't think Trump would come close to the nomination, either. So while I'm laughing at the GOP, I'll still be worrying.