I’m kind of amazed at how the conventional wisdom is that people are only voting for Hillary Clinton to prevent a Trump White House.

It seems really clear to me that Clinton is:

• experienced; she’s spent years making relationships with people in the Senate, the House, state governments, the administration, the military, business, unions, …
• pragmatic: her policy suggestions are about what can be done from where we are, not where we want to get to with no obvious way to get there. For example, she seems clear on the benefits of a single-payer Medicare-for-all scheme, and equally clear on the upheaval that would cause if implemented overnight;
• productive: for all her opponents’ speechifying, she’s done more as a Senator and Secretary of State than any of them, sometimes despite personal and vitriolic opposition;
• responsive: if there’s one thing that the last few months show, it’s that she can hear dissent, listen to it and modify her own opinions when she’s convinced otherwise.  I don’t want an idealogue for President;
• motivated: she’s clearly in this for the public good.  She has a vision of how America can be, and she wants to use public service to help get it there.  If all she wanted was power and money, she could run the Clinton Foundation and give speeches to the 1% for the rest of her life.

She is not a great orator.  She has made mistakes of judgement (her personal email server, for example, the kind of mistakes I see people making every day sending their tax returns by email).  But she’s clearly, far and away, more than qualified for the Presidency, and I’m enthusiastically looking forward to a Clinton term.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/how-technology-disrupted-the-truth

I’ve been talking about the inherent sexism of calling Candidate Clinton by her first name, Hillary, while using last names or full titles with the other candidates (“Trump”, “Bush”, …). Then, of course, there’s Bernie, which throws a wrench in my theory.

Ian McEwan has another theory, as evinced by his one-line throwaway in an article in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/09/country-political-crisis-tories-prime-minister): it’s a way to make us disenfranchised plebs more interested in the goings on of the elections.

“Our first-naming paradoxically measures our distance from events.”

Digital Reality | Edge.org.  An essay by Neil Gershenfeld, MIT Center for Bits and Atoms.  What’s important about digital fabrication: assemblers, social constructs, …  More in here than I’ve encountered elsewhere, from one guy.  He’s obviously thought about this a lot.

I’m leery of Hitler comparisons, given the observation that political discussions on the web inevitably devolve into parallels between whatever and Nazism, and Trump reminds me more of Berlusconi, but this paragraph from a New Yorker article, http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-dangerous-acceptance-of-donald-trump?mbid=social_facebook, gave me pause:

He’s not Hitler, as his wife recently said? Well, of course he isn’t. But then Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis. The radical progressives decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable.

I remember when Republicans were vociferously against any form of national identity card in the US; it smacked of Europe in the 30/s.  But apparently the same Repulicans insist we need it now to avoid fraud at the ballot.  Am I missing something, again?

1. Dialog boxes that congratulate me when, for example, an update is installed. As far as I’m concerned, I shouldn’t have to do anything, so why congratulate me? It’s really the developers’ perception of the amount of effort the computer just went through. Perhaps it should say “Thank god, we didn’t fail”

This quote from BoingBoing encapsulates what I was talking with dB and Calder about back east:

“We have given rise to a race of post-human, immortal, uncaring superbeings, called transnational corporations. We humans are their gut-flora, tolerated so long as we help them get on with their metabolic processes, but treated as pathogens when we threaten their well-being.”

In https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-more-rational-than-those-who-nudge-us Steven Poole argues against the coercive anti-rational implications of the Nudge thesis.  I remember reading Sunnstein’s “Nudge” years ago, and how it opened my eyes to the possibilities of inducing rational behavior on a societal scale.  Since the book came out, as the article points out, Western governments have embraced its policy suggestions, in some cases hiring “choice architects” to create policy such that the general populace “did the right thing” by default.

Not far from here to Lessig’s “Tweed-ism” primary thesis.  In fact, we might be seeing the breakdown of this in the surging candidacies of Sanders and Trump, as described by Clay Shirky

Gang of Four: Apple / Amazon / Facebook / Google Scott Galloway, Founder of L2 | DLD16 – YouTube.

Whirlwind tour of the state of tech, with some astounding numbers flying by.  Summary: winner-takes-all, companies opting out of nations, but not providing the necessaries.