Holiday Discussions and Observations

One comment I stumbled into was an Ezra Klein article that Democrats Won the Most Votes in the Election. They Should Act Like It. The title pretty much says it all. I ran into that courtesy of Daring Fireball - a pro-mac tech commentary site where the blogger further decided to state:

We lost the election, but we’re the plurality. That’s the truth. It doesn’t change the results, but it’s so uncomfortable for Trump that he’s just making shit up that he somehow actually won the popular vote.

That "making shit up"? It links to the following tweet:

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016

It's been observed before. Despite ample evidence of illegal voting in the past, despite Democrat operatives tearing up republican voter registration cards on video, SJW sympathizers like Colbert snickered about the possibility of election rigging (unless of course, Russia "hacked" it). Even after the election with affidavits filed of rooms where stacks of ballots were being filled out - and the judge told, when asking, that the people were "correcting" the ballots - shenanigans caught on video of driving out poll watchers and blatant violation of poll site electioneering law, people discovering they had "already voted", and people receiving stacks of ballots with other people's names at their houses, we are told over and over again that there is nothing to see here.

They can't or won't see it. It's a theme we will return to.

As an aside - that's one site I'm stripping out of my feed. While an Apple partisan, Gruber did a damn good job of observing business trends and explaining why Apple was making the choices it did, and the pros and cons. His second biggest weakness was that all of the free market insight and long-term strategy he discussed was something he could not apply to the political and governmental realm outside of pure business.

His biggest weakness was that he'd keep dragging politics into his site - often enough that I've been tempted in the past to stop paying attention, much like I had stopped paying attention to Gawker-related properties or to the Verge (beyond using it to track the SJW cause du jour).

Oh well.

Additionally, on Saturday I was hanging out at a brewery local to my Dads house with my youngest brother, my wife, and my mom, and the discussion finally, after avoiding it most of the weekend, turned to politics. It was interesting, as I was the only non Democrat at the table - though in fairness my brother was more Bernie than Rodan Clinton. We kept it civil by mostly sticking to philosophy rather than specific issues, but something else became clear.

Let me make it clear, my brother and most of the liberal end of the family - basically everybody but one of my brothers and my Dad - are liberals but not SJW's. The discussion stayed polite. That said, I had never seen a clearer demonstration that Haidt, in his discussions of axes of values, while there's arguments to be made about the axes he chose, was on to something. Namely, as a generalization, that conservatives make decisions by using a broader mix of six different virtue axes, and liberals mostly on three.

We had discussed, among other things, the vilification of conservatives in the media, and how it had driven voters away. I brought up how it could be career ending - using Brendan Eich as an example. The conversation somehow turned to North Carolina and into a discussion of freedom of association, with me taking the position that people had just as much of a right to deny a wedding cake to a gay couple as a hipster had to deny service to someone wearing a rebel flag shirt. I also mentioned Bruce Springsteen cancelling concerts in NC, and while my brother stuck to his guns that it was perfectly OK for him to decide that, he still believed it should be illegal for a business to "discriminate" against gays.

Interestingly, my mom actually backed me up on that after hearing about the various cancellations - either everyone had the right to decide who they'd do business with based on moral belief, or no one should, even if that meant people would make the "wrong" choices.

We also delved into the precinct by precinct breakdown, and that the vote was effectively urban vs rural, and why. I pointed to Eric Raymond's "Ethics From The Barrel of a Gun" - one of my favorite essays - and to Haidt's points about virtue axes and how conservatives could predict liberal responses but not vice versa.

And I was told, flat out, that he had no idea why gay marriage, feminism, etc. affected their livelihood, their feelings, etc., because he couldn't see why the sacred was important. 

I told ya the theme would come up.

I figured at that point that trying to get into "the future belongs to he who shows up" and second-order consequences of the greater acceptance of gay marriage, female careers, later marriages, disparagement of families and housewives, etc. would be futile without a lot more time.

That said, I did leave him with Antifragility and Taleb's article on the dictatorship of the minority to look at, and that may cause him to rethink of how those principles apply in a broader sense.

And being family, but family that considers being family more important than yelling over politics, we went home on good terms and hung out some more.