Just How Dumb Is Trump’s Team?

 Media, Politics  No Responses »
Jan 222017
 

News story.

We’re all used to politicians lying – either baldly (“Is the sky blue? No, it’s pink.”) or by avoiding the subject altogether (“Is the sky blue? I think the question shouldn’t be is the sky blue, but whether the colour really matters.”). But normally you can see some rationale behind the lie – there’s some genuine advantage to the politician by lying.

And seeing a politician who doesn’t bow down to the media is somewhat gratifying. At least when it serves some purpose.

But headbutting the media and spouting easily disproved lies about the number of people attending Trump’s inauguration?

Crass stupidity and arrogance of the first order.

There’s no point to it – after all who really cares how many people were stroking Trump’s ego on the day? After all his ego doesn’t need any bolstering, and even if it did there were still plenty of people in attendance.

Shattering the establishment (which is something I don’t believe Trump really intends no matter how much he claims) is all very well, and indeed to be encouraged. But you don’t accomplish it by picking stupid fights over nothing important.

Trump is in danger of giving a new word to label stupidity – Trumpidity.

 

Two US Free Speech Myths

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Jan 142017
 

One of the things you regularly encounter online is the fetish Americans have for free speech; not entirely a bad thing, but some of what they believe is a bit of a myth. Part of the problem is that the first amendment to the US constitution is just a little vague and handwavey :-

or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press

First of all, what is that word “abridging” supposed to mean? It literally means shortening which makes the phrase nonsense even if it was supposed to be read as if “restricting” was the word used. Of course the meaning of language does change and it could well be that at the time, “abridge” would have unambiguously meant restrict. And “freedom of speech”? We normally take that to mean any form of expression whether spoken, written, drawn, or generated in some other way. But was that what was meant?

But now onto the myths … the first is a simple one and there is no real debate about it.

The right of free speech does not give you a right to be published by a third-party. If you are on Facebook for example, there is no right to free speech there – Facebook can decide to arbitrarily restrict what you can say perfectly legally. The government cannot restrict what you self-publish, but your publisher (including forum admins, mailing list admins, etc.) is free to refuse to publish for any reason at all.

Ultimately the only recourse to such censorship is to self-publish which is relatively easy on the Internet.

The second “myth” is a bit more debatable, but arguably the right to free speech is more about being free to criticise the government; in an era of lese-majesty and seditious libel, the major concern of the American revolutionaries was with political free speech. And whilst there has been free speech, there have always been restrictions on that freedom or consequences :-

  • Obscenity (as determined by the Miller test).
  • Inciting imminent lawlessness such as encouraging a lynch mob. Although this one can be a dangerously slippery slope given it’s historical use against people protesting the draft.
  • Commercial speech including advertising, and copyright.
  • Libel and slander.

So when looking at a particular restriction on free speech – such as hate speech (i.e. racial or religious hatred) – it is perfectly feasible for a law to be enacted to make such speech punishable in some form.

The Morality of Drone Killings

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Dec 282016
 

There is an interesting video from 33c3 dealing with drone killings :-

As an aside, one of the thing that makes the Chaos Computer Club congress more interesting than many security conferences is the attention given to more “political” issues.

Drones offer the enticing possibility of tackling terrorist groups without putting people at risk, but the reality is somewhat different.

  1. Drone killings are in effect an act of war against the citizen(s) of a foreign country; very often where war has not been declared. To put it into perspective what if the UK operated drones in the 1970s and targeted US citizens who were helping to fund the IRA? And sometimes these actions resulted in “regrettable collateral damage”?
  2. Why is it not possible to provide information on targets to the law enforcement officials in the country where the target is living? It is possible that the law enforcement officials are compromised in some way of course (for example the US authorities were often against dealing with IRA terrorism), but not in all cases.
  3. Who decides that a target is so evil that they deserve death from the sky? The obvious solution here is a higher court order rather than an arbitrary decision by the military, although secret court orders are almost as bad as arbitrary military decisions. At the very least, such court orders must be made public after the death of the target.
  4. Just how reliable are drone killings anyway? How many times have we heard of “collateral damage” (the sanitised version of “Ooops! We killed the wrong people.”)? And how many times have we not heard of collateral damage? Many videos of drone killings show vehicles being targeted which leads to the most obvious problem – you do not know that the target is within the vehicle and you do not know that he or she is alone in the vehicle.
  5. “Spinning” the effectiveness of drone killings by counting all “military aged males” as militants unless they can be demonstrated to be innocent (i.e. guilty until proven innocent) is about as despicable as it gets. You cannot claim to be in the right if you resort to such claims.

It is all too easy to claim that we’re all under threat from terrorism and that anything that might reduce that threat is justified. But criminal activity by governments is never justified.

Trump? Am I Having A Fever Dream?

 Politics  No Responses »
Nov 112016
 

So Trump has been elected as the next president of the USA.

Now setting aside my disbelief for a moment (really? He actually won?), let’s look at some of the reasons why he may have won, and why the poll takers got it wrong.

First of all, the polls were not that far out – whilst they got the winner wrong, they did predict that it would be close. And it was close – Clinton got 47.7% of the popular vote whereas Trump got 47.3%. Yes, Clinton actually won the popular vote, but the US electoral system does not work quite so well when the result is so close. But not bad for a 200-year old system, but perhaps it is time for a long and careful review of the process in the light of modern communications.

In addition, there is also the embarrassment factor – if you had decided to vote for Trump, would you really admit it publicly? On a more serious note, when elections are particularly acrimonious, there is a good chance that a significant amount of the electorate will lie (or just keep quiet) about their choice when asked by pollsters.

Enough about pollsters though, how did he win? Of course everyone wants one simple answer to that question, and there isn’t one. There are many factors as to why he won, and each contributes a little.

The first thing to remember is that there are many stupid people in any population. Nothing wrong with being stupid; some of my best friends are stupid (that didn’t come out quite right!). Really! And it is a fact of life that there are many stupid people – it’s how intelligence tests work. You measure everyone’s intelligence, and those who are below average are stupid, and those who are above average are bright.

Besides, Trump won didn’t he? QED.

And stupid people are easily conned by anyone who tells them what they want to hear no matter how fantastical it might be. And Trump has been telling them what they want to hear – abortion is wrong, he can restore manufacturing jobs (presumably by overturning the laws of economics), making America great again (that one always goes down well, even if America is already great), that climate change is not man-made, etc.

Every time that he pushed one of those buttons, and pandered to every wing-nut grouping out there, he gained more supporters. He either didn’t care or didn’t know that he came across as a cretinous fool, as long as he got some votes.

The second big factor was that although Trump was nominated by the Republican party, he was the closest thing to an anti-establishment candidate of the two major parties (I’ll come to the other parties shortly). Of course he isn’t really not part of the establishment being a billionaire property developer, but he hasn’t previously held public office. And anti-establishment is very popular right now. Given that Clinton was very definitely old political establishment, this could very well be the most significant reason.

And of course there is the economy. Like the rest of the world, the US has just been through a huge recession where many lost their jobs or even their homes. And any ruling party suffers in the wake of a recession. Whether or not the Democrats were to blame, they were going to get blamed by the voters – or at least enough of them to make a bit of a difference.

Next there is of course the poor old sane Republican who has always voted for their party. This time around, they had a buffoon to vote for and although some couldn’t face voting for Trump, a good number couldn’t see any other options.

The reason that some people are blaming are the “other” candidates. Despite the media coverage implying that there are only two candidates, there were in fact nearly 30. If all those who voted for one of the others, had voted for Clinton instead, it might have made a difference, but it seems a touch unlikely that they would have all voted for her. Best guess? They would have divided more or less evenly just like everyone else did.

Having said that, it would be nice if the US had a transferable vote system whereby you could vote for (say) the Green Party, but have your vote go towards another if the Green party didn’t win.

I’m not going to bother mentioning those who couldn’t be bothered to vote. They didn’t vote so they don’t count.

So how about the reaction to Trump’s victory?

It’s almost as bizarre as the lead up to the election: When you’re in a room the morning the results came out, and the two embarrassed Americans both apologise for the US having voted in Trump, you know there’s something odd going on. The reaction has been extreme – not just the usual moaning about having an idiot in charge for four years, but protests, riots, and even a group in California that wants to declare independence. It is sort of understandable (after all, it’s Trump!), but the division in the US today may be almost as damaging as the idiocies that Trump will enact.

On the subject of which, Trump himself probably can’t remember all the rubbish he has promised all over the campaign trail. Of course there are those who will remind him of things he has promised, and probably a lot more besides. But how much damage will he actually do?

The worst case scenario (and there’s more than one) is that he brings about some sort of theocratic form of government (he certainly has supporters who would like to see this), and launches nuclear weapons (Trump with his hand on the launch button? Shudder!).

This is not that likely – there are too many obstacles in the way, including the constitution. And there is just the slightest hint that Trump might not be quite that bad.

His first reaction to the protests was typical paranoia – blaming them on paid activists. But his second reaction was quite sympathetic saying he was pleased that the protesters loved their country so much. Trump probably likes being popular, and there’s one obvious thing to do with a president like that – when he proposes some idiocy, protest. Don’t protest about Trump (however tempting it is); protest about his bad policies.

Of course I might be overly optimistic.

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Brexit In The High Court: No It Wasn’t!

 Politics  No Responses »
Nov 062016
 

There has been a great deal of fuss over the recent High Court decision recently that requires the government to ask parliament to authorise Article 50 to trigger leaving the EU. Most of it complete rubbish, and the more extreme responses were childish too.

The court case had nothing to do with Brexit itself – it was a constitutional issue over whether the government had exceeded its authority by trying to use the royal prerogative to authorise Article 50. The court decided it had, and that parliament should decide on the Article 50 issue.

It was not an attempt to defeat Brexit. There wasn’t some sort of remainer conspiracy to block Brexit. It was “just” a standard constitutional law case deciding on whether the government was using the royal prerogative unnecessarily to act in an undemocratic way.

As a side effect of the decision, there is a chance that parliament might decide to ignore the referendum result and try to remain within the EU. This would probably be a dumb move (and I would prefer to remain within the EU), but the blame for that loophole is down to how the original referendum was drawn up.

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