Random links

The Green party won in Auckland by reaching beyond its own bubble
"In Auckland, we flipped a seat Green, which had been held by centre-right National party politicians for 12 years. We did it by bursting our own bubble. In our bubble, we can’t fathom that working-class people would vote against their own self-interest for a strong-man built on strawman logic. It’s wild to reckon with how policies to fairly tax millionaires are warped through talkback radio to scare tradies and hospo workers into thinking their jobs are on the chopping block. In our bubble, it’s slanderous to question the orthodoxy of our university educations and how the vernacular they normalise may alienate the very people we say we want to help."
Americans are more worried about their sons than their daughters
One interesting take from a since-appeared tweak is that liberal respondents are more worried about the prospect of girls in general but more worried about the prospects of their sons in particular.
Daniel Marans on Twitter
"MLK was so conscious of the political impact of slogans, that in a speech very shortly before he died, King said he wished the phrase "Black power" had never come into being because it was "confusing" and "gives the wrong connotation." https://gendlergrapevine.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Conversation-with-Martin-Luther-King.pdf

How US voters responded to 4 years of "white supremacy"

I think I've stated this over and over again in various contexts but much of the news you see reads like disinformation. What's interesting is how if you actually look at polling data how respondents have classified what I sometime hear described as "white supremacist dog-whistles" / what is described in the following article as a message of "racial fear". To quote How Democrats can talk about race and win from earlier this year:

Unsurprisingly, 72 percent of Republicans found this message convincing [rated it 51 or higher out of 100]. But we found that 52 percent of Democrats found this message convincing as well.

Roge Karma

The proportion of Democrats who found that narrative compelling is interesting in its own right. But what I found even more shocking was how people of color responded to the racial fear message.

Ian Haney López

Yes. Sixty percent of Latinos and 54 percent of African Americans found it convincing, which isn’t much lower than the 61 percent of whites who did.

If your message of "racial fear" is one that minorities - including African Americans - support at a similar rate as white Americans, the description of as such seems misleading, perhaps intentionally so. What you seem to be seeing is nativism rather than racism yet it's the latter branding that gets most attention. I'm not a fan of nativism but it's not quite the same thing as racism.

Related, it's also interesting how a follow-on New York Times article on the aftermath of city council in one major US city deciding to "defund the police":

But what seemed like a rising progressive tide distorted a more complicated picture, argued Dave Bicking, board member of Communities United Against Police Brutality, a grass-roots group in Minneapolis that was founded in 2000. He said that groups like Black Visions Collective and its partner organization, Reclaim the Block, had the ear of the new City Council, but that those in power seemed to treat the activists as stand-ins for all Black, progressive or younger residents, glossing over the diversity of those electorates.

“You can’t lump everybody together,” said Mr. Bicking, who is 69 years old and white but represents a wide-ranging community group. “The City Council would say: ‘Oh, we went out and talked to a lot of people. We listened to a lot of people.’ And, well, it was people from those two groups only. They weren’t listening to anybody else.”

One later section also seems of particular relevance:

As the commission weighed its options, evidence mounted that the public wanted police reform, but did not support the actions of councilors or share the aims of influential activists. A poll from The Minneapolis Star-Tribune found that a plurality of residents, including 50 percent of Black people, opposed reducing the size of the police department.

i.e. not only were the city council's actions to "defund the police" unpopular amongst the population as a whole, they were even more unpopular amongst African-Americans. i.e. in the name of listening to that demographic the council undertook actions that the group in question actually appears disproportionately opposed to.

I'm still not sure what the results of US election are going to be. I suspect (though am not sure) that exit polls probably solely or disproportionately account for in-person rather than mail-in votes, which I'd expect to consist disproportionately of Trump-voters. Guess we'll wait and see.

EDIT: Sort reconsidering how much, if exit polls only cover in-person voting, how well the exact voter trends will sort themselves out in the end. That said, think the general position of the-media-representation-of-the-interests-of-particular-demographics-is-often-highly-and-predictably-inaccurate holds up OK regardless. I didn't even talk about any of the large swings in certain areas among Hispanic (not Latinx!) voters, such as:

EDIT (again): Looks like the exit polling didn't just tackle outside of polling places per one NYT columnist who's very annoyed at the sorts of results noted above:

"Fascim's Fellow Traveler" -> an outlet's "Best Journalist"

Glenn Greenwald recently jumped ship from The Intercept - an outlet he'd cofounded - protesting of censorship which caused a certain outlet to post an article whose headline conflicted drastically with a previous article on the platform.

It's not entirely irrelevant to that the authors of the two pieces are different, but I think that the following take is perhaps the best on the subject:

Glenn Greenwald leaves for Substack. Greenwald is kind of a dick. He’s very disagreeable and often unpleasant. This is one reason I actually trust him more than other journalists. He deludes himself, he’s human, but he’s not a conformist, which is the norm among most journalists (look at the middle school level burns coming from some bluecheck reporters at places like The New York Times).

It seems to me basically the whistleblower personality type - the sort of thing that I've spoken about before. You're likely to be particularly pleased when the issue such a person raises is one you agree with, but other cases seem likely to provoke different reactions. It should be noted that they're not always right and may have certain blindspots. They live by their own moral code, where you might agree with certain elements while disagreeing with others.

Different flavours of idiocracy: edition N+1

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