09 December 2022
08 December 2022
Tank Defeats Not Limited To Conscripts And Ill-Trained Soldiers
Some commentators pinned the heavy losses of Russian tanks in Russia's attempt to take Kyiv in the early days of the Ukraine war on the user errors of ill-trained conscripts and soldiers.
But the heavy losses suffered by Russia's elite 1st Guards Tank Army (with 25,000 of Russia's best trained soldiers at full strength) whose primary mission is to defend Moscow, in the fighting in Kherson Oblast, near Crimea, casts doubt on this narrative.
Map from here.
The more plausible narrative is that the long standing Spy v. Spy race between tanks and anti-tank weapons has finally by won decisively by the anti-tank weapons.
Notably these defeats have taken place in parts of Ukraine which has terrain that has commonly been seen as close to optimal for tank warfare (unlike mountains with narrow passes, urban warfare in dense old cities with narrow streets, jungles, or extreme cold or heat).
Meanwhile, Ukrainian drones have struck at Russian bases deep within Russian territory:
The Respect For Marriage Act
This is the bill that was ultimately passed by the House and the Senate, which will probably be signed into law today or tomorrow by President Biden. It passed the Senate 61-36 (with the support of 12 Republicans - 24% of the Senate GOP Caucus) and passed the House 258-169 (with the support of 39 Republicans - 18% of the House GOP Caucus). All Democrats who voted on the bill voted in favor of it. Per the Washington Post (linked below):
Seven Republican lawmakers voted no Thursday after supporting the bill in July. Two GOP lawmakers — Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) and Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) — switched from no to yes. One member, Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah), supported the bill in July but voted present on Thursday.
As the Washington Post explains, the Senate Amendment which the House accepted, "clarifies that the federal government would not be authorized to recognize polygamous marriages and confirms that nonprofit religious organizations would not be required to provide “any services, facilities, or goods for the solemnization or celebration of a marriage.”"
The vote underscores a nearly three-decade evolution, from 1996 when President Bill Clinton signed legislation that defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman, to the 2004 election when President George W. Bush used the issue to energize GOP voters, to the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage.The Respect for Marriage Act would not force states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples but would require that people be considered married in any state as long as the marriage was valid in the state where it was performed.The bill also would repeal the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. In addition to defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman, it allowed states to decline to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. That law has remained on the books despite being declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in United States v. Windsor and its 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which guaranteed same-sex couples the fundamental right to marry.
It is not precisely the same as the current U.S. Constitutional law protections of interracial and same sex marriages, but it is very similar in practical effect (except, of course, that this statute could be repealed by a future Congress).
This law also makes it much harder for a court to reach the constitutional issue in order for the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule its existing precedents on point in a future case, while the law is in force.
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the “Respect for Marriage Act”.
Congress finds the following:
(1) No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family.
(2) Diverse beliefs about the role of gender in marriage are held by reasonable and sincere people based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises. Therefore, Congress affirms that such people and their diverse beliefs are due proper respect.
(3) Millions of people, including interracial and same-sex couples, have entered into marriages and have enjoyed the rights and privileges associated with marriage. Couples joining in marriage deserve to have the dignity, stability, and ongoing protection that marriage affords to families and children.
SEC. 3. REPEAL OF SECTION ADDED TO TITLE 28, UNITED STATES CODE, BY SECTION 2 OF THE DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE ACT.
Section 1738C of title 28, United States Code, is repealed.
SEC. 4. FULL FAITH AND CREDIT GIVEN TO MARRIAGE EQUALITY.
Chapter 115 of title 28, United States Code, as amended by this Act, is further amended by inserting after section 1738B the following:
Ҥ 1738C. Certain acts, records, and proceedings and the effect thereof
“(a) In General.—No person acting under color of State law may deny—
“(b) Enforcement By Attorney General.—The Attorney General may bring a civil action in the appropriate United States district court against any person who violates subsection (a) for declaratory and injunctive relief.
Section 7 of title 1, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:
“(a) For the purposes of any Federal law, rule, or regulation in which marital status is a factor, an individual shall be considered married if that individual’s marriage is between 2 individuals and is valid in the State where the marriage was entered into or, in the case of a marriage entered into outside any State, if the marriage is between 2 individuals and is valid in the place where entered into and the marriage could have been entered into in a State.
SEC. 6. NO IMPACT ON RELIGIOUS LIBERTY AND CONSCIENCE.
(a) In General.—Nothing in this Act, or any amendment made by this Act, shall be construed to diminish or abrogate a religious liberty or conscience protection otherwise available to an individual or organization under the Constitution of the United States or Federal law.
(b) Goods Or Services.—Consistent with the First Amendment to the Constitution, nonprofit religious organizations, including churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, nondenominational ministries, interdenominational and ecumenical organizations, mission organizations, faith-based social agencies, religious educational institutions, and nonprofit entities whose principal purpose is the study, practice, or advancement of religion, and any employee of such an organization, shall not be required to provide services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges for the solemnization or celebration of a marriage. Any refusal under this subsection to provide such services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges shall not create any civil claim or cause of action.
SEC. 7. STATUTORY PROHIBITION.
(a) No Impact On Status And Benefits Not Arising From A Marriage.—Nothing in this Act, or any amendment made by this Act, shall be construed to deny or alter any benefit, status, or right of an otherwise eligible entity or person which does not arise from a marriage, including tax-exempt status, tax treatment, educational funding, or a grant, contract, agreement, guarantee, loan, scholarship, license, certification, accreditation, claim, or defense.
If any provision of this Act, or any amendment made by this Act, or the application of such provision to any person, entity, government, or circumstance, is held to be unconstitutional, the remainder of this Act, or any amendment made thereby, or the application of such provision to all other persons, entities, governments, or circumstances, shall not be affected thereby.
07 December 2022
The Main U.S. Political Parties Have Grown More Ideologically Distinct
The data in the chart is from the General Social Survey, a long standing effort to track American's views on a variety of matters over a long time frame in a comparable way.
Quote Of The Day
A few years ago, I was working with the State of Wyoming in Cheyenne. Every morning I would hear sirens at 11 am. I asked about the sirens. That is the time that the maids in hotels find the opioid overdoses.
- Brad Lyman (today on Facebook).
Lots Of Wives And Children, Many Mistreated
The leader of a small polygamous group near the Arizona-Utah border had taken at least 20 wives, most of them minors, and punished followers who did not treat him as a prophet, newly filed federal court documents allege.Samuel Bateman was a former member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or FLDS, until he left to start his own small offshoot group. He was supported financially by male followers who also gave up their own wives and children to be Bateman’s wives, according to an FBI affidavit.The document filed Friday provides new insight about what investigators have found in a case that first became public in August. It accompanied charges of kidnapping and impeding a foreseeable prosecution against three of Bateman’s wives — Naomi Bistline, Donnae Barlow and Moretta Rose Johnson. Bistline and Barlow are scheduled to appear in federal magistrate court in Flagstaff on Wednesday. Johnson is awaiting extradition from Washington state.The women are accused of fleeing with eight of Bateman’s children, who were placed in Arizona state custody earlier this year. The children were found last week hundreds of miles away in Spokane, Washington.Bateman was arrested in August when someone spotted small fingers in the gap of a trailer he was hauling through Flagstaff. He posted bond but was arrested again and charged with obstructing justice in a federal investigation into whether children were being transported across state lines for sexual activity.Court records allege that Bateman, 46, engaged in child sex trafficking and polygamy, but none of his current charges relate to those allegations. Polygamy is illegal in Arizona but was decriminalized in Utah in 2020.
From the Associated Press via the Denver Post.
This FLDS offshoot is small and exceptional, but clearly abusive. I hadn't been aware of the decriminalization of polygamy in Utah in 2020 (if that is an accurate description), in response to less troublesome cases:
Marion Timpson’s own marriages reflect Utah’s recent legal battles over polygamy.“I married Holly in 2005 and Katie in 2013, and I married Lisa in 2014,” the polygamist said, referring to his wives.One of his marriages took place shortly after a federal judge struck down Utah’s anti-polygamy laws. Reality TV polygamist Kody Brown and his wives sued the state and won, effectively decriminalizing plural marriage as a religious belief. Then a federal appeals court reinstated the bigamy law and the Utah State Legislature passed a law that re-criminalized bigamy. . . .
In 2020, the Utah State Legislature passed a law to decriminalize polygamy, reducing bigamy among consenting adults from a third-degree felony, punishable by prison time, to an infraction on par with a speeding ticket.
From the Fox News.
06 December 2022
Democrat Wins Senate Runoff Election
The Democrats have secured one net U.S. Senate seat pickup for a 51-49 majority after incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia defeated deeply flawed Republican candidate Herschel Walker, in a runoff election that concluded today in a roughly 51.3% to 48.7% race with 99% of the vote counted (a 2.6 percentage point margin of victory), which are results significantly better than in the first round race, which Warnock won by a 0.9 percentage point margin with about 2.1 percentage points going to a Libertarian candidate. Warnock apparently won about 90% of the third-party vote in the runoff election (holding all other things equal).
In the races of the U.S. House, taking the last outstanding race, CO-3, in which deeply flawed Republican incumbent Lauren Boebert is almost sure to survive the automatic recount currently underway, by roughly 0.16 percentage points, the closest federal election in the country this year (in which should have been a safe Republican seat).
Democrats have lost a net ten seats and their majority in the House. Republicans will have four more seats than they need for a bare majority in the U.S. House (almost exactly 51% of the total number of seats outstanding in a mirror image of the Senate).
The marginal seats in both chambers were resolved in elections with less than two percentage point margins of victory in a nation poised on a knife edge of equal support for the two major political parties in the context of the current rules of the game.
So, with a Democratic President and Vice President, and a 6-3 conservative majority in the U.S. Supreme Court, the federal government will spend the next two years in a gridlock even deeper than the current one in which the lack of a Democratic filibuster-proof majority in the Senate has prevented almost all significant legislation from being passed. But Democrats will have an easier time getting President Biden's appointees confirmed.
Where Did Originalism Come From?
The reality of the history of the originalist movement in legal history, and the myth about its origins are quite different.
Empirically, the paper shows that the realigning GOP’s originalism grew directly out of political resistance to Brown v. Board of Education by conservative governing elites, intellectuals, and activists in the 1950s and 1960s.
From here via Fully Myelinated.
Citizenship and Place Of Birth In The United States
The population of the United States in the 2020 census was 331.44 million people.
People Born In The United States
In the United States about 85.9% of the population consists of U.S. citizens born in the United States.
There are some people born in the United States who are not U.S. citizens (basically children of certain diplomats), but they make up less than one in a million of the people born in the United States who reside in the United States at any given time (i.e. less than 285 people). Thus, roughly 99.9999% of the people in the United States who were born in the U.S. are U.S. citizens.
Foreign Born Americans
The remaining 14.1% of people who reside in the United States are foreign born. About 24.3% of the foreign born population of the United States was born in Mexico.
- U.S. Citizens Who Were Born Abroad
About 6.6% of people in the U.S. (about 21,875,000 people) are foreign born persons who are U.S. citizens.
This is mostly made up of naturalized U.S. citizens (probably 6.0%-6.5% of the total U.S. population).
Over the last ten years an average of about 740,000 people per year have been naturalized as U.S. citizens. Adult naturalized citizen break down demographically as follows;
The median years spent as an LPR for all citizens naturalized in FY 2021 was 7.3 years. The median years spent as an LPR varied by the citizens’ country of birth. The countries with the largest number of new citizens in FY 2021 . . . applicants from Mexico spent the longest time, with 10.7 years, and applicants from Nigeria spent the shortest, with 6 years.
About 13.9% of recently naturalized U.S. citizens were born in Mexico.
But about 0.1%-0.6% of the U.S. population (about 21,875 to 131,250 people), based upon my back of napkin estimates, are people born outside the United States who are U.S. citizens because one or both of their parents were U.S. citizens (under rather complicated rules). I have not been able to locate good direct statistics for the size of this population.
My estimate of the number of people who are U.S. citizens at birth who are born abroad is based in part upon the fact that at any given time, about 1% of U.S. citizens live outside the United States. This population is male biased due to the significant share of these U.S. citizens who are active duty military personnel serving abroad (a population that is about 82% male), and even female U.S. military personnel tend to receive a discharge from the military or to be in the U.S. rather than being deployed abroad when they give birth.
- Non-U.S. Citizens
About 7.5% of the people in U.S. are not U.S. citizens. About 4.3% of the people in the United States are foreign born people who reside in the U.S. pursuant to visa granted by the federal government, and about 3.2% of the people in the United States are foreign born people who are undocumented.
About 43% of non-U.S. citizens who reside in the United States are undocumented. About 47% of undocumented non-U.S. citizens who reside in the U.S. were born in Mexico.
About 6% of undocumented U.S. residents (about 0.2% of the U.S. population) are active participants in the DACA program. About 80.6% of DACA participants were born in Mexico.
About 47% of foreign born people in the United States are U.S. citizens, about 30% of of foreign born people in the United States are "documented" non-citizens, and about 23% of foreign born people in the United States (about 10.5 million) are "undocumented" non-citizens.
Midterm Election Voter Turnout
Voter turnout in the U.S. midterm elections in 2022 as a percentage of eligible voters (of the 50 states and the District of Columbia) was as follows:
#1 Maine 61.5%#2 Oregon 61.4%#3 Minnesota 61.0%#4 Wisconsin 60.1%#5 Colorado 58.5%
. . .
#47 Oklahoma 40.1%#48 Alabama 37.7%#49 Mississippi 37.1%#50 West Virginia 35.7%#51 Tennessee 31.6%
National average: 46.8%
Turnout was slightly lower nationwide than the record modern midterm election turnout of 2018.
About 88% of people who are eligible to vote are active registered voters in Colorado. In Colorado, about 5.8% of adults (i.e. people who are at least 18 years old) are ineligible to vote because they are not U.S. citizens and about 15,000 adults (0.3%) are ineligible to vote because they are currently in prison.
The adult population of Colorado in 2022 was 4,631,586, of whom 4,346,493 were eligible to vote.
Nationally 7.3% of the adult population is not eligible to vote, because they were not citizens (in most cases), or as collateral consequences of a criminal conviction 1.2% (or both). About 7.5% of people in the U.S. are not U.S. citizens, but some of those non-citizens are not adults or are also disqualified from voting due to criminal convictions in the state where they live. Disqualification from voting as a collateral consequence of a criminal conviction differs materially from state to state.
Natural Increase
Population change is a result of natural increase (births minus deaths) adjusted by migration. But crude national increase is influenced by migration - because births mostly take place where young adults have migrated to, and deaths mostly take place where elderly adults live.
04 December 2022
Twelve Reasons To Not Move To Florida
A couple of friends of mine have moved to Florida. Here are twelve reasons that you should not follow in their footsteps:
1. Most shark attacks in the nation.
2. Alligators.
3. Pythons.
4. Hurricanes.
5. Humidity.
6. Rising sea levels.
7. Pro-Infection COVID policies.
8. Laws that encourage gun violence.
9. Rampant anti-gay violence.
10. Pervasive racism.
11. Sinkholes.
12. No snow.
02 December 2022
The 2022 Midterm Election Turnout And Colorado State House Results Analyzed
Turnout
Turnout in the 2022 midterm elections in Colorado this year was 2,540,666 voters who voted ballots (not necessarily in every race), out of 3,833,468 active registered voters in the state, a 66.28% voter turnout rate. Turnout in the 2020 Presidential election in Colorado was 86.54% by the same measure.
Interpolating slightly from the state demographer's office's estimate, the voting age population of Colorado was 4,167,610 in 2019, and this probably increased by about 1.5% between 2019 and 2022. So, the voting aged population of Colorado at the time of the midterm election was about 4.23 million, so voter turnout was about 60.1% of the voting aged population in the midterm elections. Thus, about 90.6% of people who are part of the voting aged population in Colorado are registered to vote which, given disqualifications from voting for felons who are incarcerated and non-U.S. citizens, is exceptional.
The turnout rate in Colorado was also well above the historical U.S. norm for midterm elections, almost double the long term national average turnout as a percentage of the voting age population. Voter turnout in Colorado has consistently been among the two or three highest of U.S. states in recent years, and the 2022 midterms were no exception to that rule.
The Colorado State House Race
There are sixty five seats in the Colorado state house, all of which are elected every two years.
One of the seats won by Democrats (HD-7 in Denver) and three of the seats won by Republicans (HD-20 in suburban Colorado Springs, HD-51 in exurban Fort Collins, and HD-63 in the rural Front Range east of Fort Collins) were uncontested. The other 61 seats had at least a Democratic party candidate and a Republican party candidate. There was also a Libertarian candidate in 20 of those 61 seats, and in one of the 20 seats where there was a Libertarian candidate (HD-1 in Denver) there was also a fourth unaffiliated candidate in the race.
Democrats won 46 seats and Republicans won 19 seats in the Colorado state house in 2022, which is two more seats than the Democrats needed to have a two-thirds supermajority. Going into the election Democrats had held 41 house seats and Republicans held 24 for a net gain of five seats.
The map below from Ballotpedia is from before the election in what appear to be the newly drawn districts, but it does illustrate the geography of partisan politics in the State of Colorado.
In the Colorado state senate race, the results left Democrats with 23 seats to 12 Republican seats, a net gain of three seats and a single seat short of a two-thirds majority in that house of the Colorado General Assembly. Going into the election in which only half the seats were before the voters, Democrats had 20 seats and the Republicans had 15. That race is harder to analyze, however, because only half of the seats in the chamber were in play in this election.
Democrats also control all statewide elective offices in the state.
The justices on the state supreme court are officially non-partisan and nominated by a blue ribbon commission in groups of three prospective candidates from which the Governor can choose. But, a majority of the current state supreme court justices (and state judges in Colorado more generally) were appointed by Democratic Governors.
Close Races
Few of the races were close, and the Republicans didn't win a single one of the six genuinely competitive races this year. Neither party won any of the other side's safe seats. If there is an overall theme is that the Democrats won in swing voting suburbs this year.
Each of the sixteen Republicans who were elected who won a contested House District race won by at least 13.6 percentage points, and the median margin of victory for a winning Republican in a contested race was 24.29 percentage points.
The Democratic Party's margin of victory in the median race in the state house, which it needed to win to secure its majority control of that house was 11.22 percentage points in HD-62 in eastern Pueblo and the San Luis Valley.
Democrats won all 18 races where the margin of victory was less than the closest Republican win, all 11 races where the margin of victory was less than 8 percentage points (the next closest race had an 11.97 percentage point margin of victory), and all 6 races where the margin of victory for the winner was less than 5 percentage points (in which the Democratic margin of victory ranged from 0.9 percentage points to 3.37 percentage points).
The closest race was the 0.9 percentage point margin of victory in the two candidate HD-43 race in the Highlands Ranch suburb of Denver. The other two close house races that Democrats won which didn't involve potential third-party spoiler effects were HD-19, in suburban Colorado Springs, with a 3.37 percentage point margin of victory, and HD-61, which includes many mountain resort towns including Aspen and the surrounding area, with a 2.82 percentage point margin of victory.
Democrats secured an outright majority of the votes cast in 43 of the 46 house races that they won. They won three races (HD-16, HD-25, and HD-50) with pluralities that were smaller than the third-party Libertarian vote. Colorado does not have runoff elections at the state level if the plurality winner fails to receive a majority of the votes cast in the first round.
In HD-16, in suburban Colorado Springs, the Democratic candidate's margin of victory over the Republican was 2.17 percentage points and the Libertarian candidate received 2.66% of the vote. It is possible, although unlikely, that the Libertarian candidate was a spoiler in this race whose candidacy caused the Republican candidate's defeat.
In HD-25, in the mountainous portions of the Jefferson County western suburbs of Denver, the Democratic candidate's margin of victory over the Republican was 1.39 percentage points and the Libertarian candidate received 2.05% of the vote. It is plausible that the Libertarian candidate may have been a spoiler in this race whose candidacy caused the Republican candidate's defeat.
In HD-50, in Greeley, the Democratic candidate's margin of victory over the Republican was 1.89 percentage points and the Libertarian candidate received 3.51% of the vote. It is very possible that the Libertarian candidate may have been a spoiler in this race whose candidacy caused the Republican candidate's defeat.
The other 17 Libertarian candidates in house races and the 1 unaffiliated candidate in a house race, were irrelevant to the ultimate outcome of the 17 house races in which the other 18 third-party candidates contended. Likewise, third-party candidates were not potential spoilers in any of the statewide partisan races this year, all of which Democrats won with an outright majority of the votes cast.
The combined third-party candidate performance in HD-1 in Denver which had two third-party candidates was 4.53%; the Democrat won that seat by a 32.29 percentage point margin of victory. The best performance by a Libertarian candidate alone in a house was this year was in HD-15 in suburban Colorado Springs, where the Libertarian won 4.14% of the vote; the Republican won that seat by a 17.66 percentage point margin of victory.
The HD-50 race was also the marginal race that gave Democrats a two-thirds majority in the house. They could have secured a two-thirds supermajority in the house even if the Democrats had lost HD-43 which they won by 0.9 percentage points and HD-25, which they won by 1.39 percentage points.
The Popular Vote Compared
The popular vote (including votes cast for candidates in the four uncontested races) was 53.32% for Democratic house candidates, 45.84% for Republican House candidates, 0.82% for Libertarian candidates, and 0.02% for a single unaffiliated candidate.
If the 65 seats in the Colorado house had been allocated on that basis, as the would have been in a proportional representation list system, for example, the Democrats would have won 35 seats, the Republicans would have won 29 seats, and one Libertarian candidate would have won a seat.
Of course, this is distorted by the fact that turnout as measured by votes cast for house candidates by party omits Republican and Libertarian voters in the one uncontested house seat won by a Democrat, omits Democratic and Libertarian voters in the three uncontested house seats won by a Republican, and omits Libertarian voters in the 41 contested races that didn't have a Libertarian candidate running. It also doesn't fully account for reduced turnout by Democrats in safe districts given that there were no close partisan statewide office elections in 2022 in Colorado. Still, many statewide ballot measures gave every voters some incentive to vote, and turnout was overall quite high.
The percentages for the aggregated house vote races aren't far outside the range of the performance of Democrats in statewide partisan races in 2022 in Colorado, although they rival the best performances that the Republicans had in any of the statewide partisan races (in part because there was a smaller third-party vote in the state house races since there were no third-party candidates in 41 of those races).
In the U.S. Senate race, incumbent Democrat Michael Bennet defeated Republican candidate Joe O'Dea by a 55.88% to 41.27% margin, with the Libertarian candidate securing 1.74% of the vote, the next most popular third-party candidate getting 0.66% of the vote, and one more third-party candidate getting 0.45% of the vote.
In the Governor's race, incumbent Democrat Jared Polis defeated Republican candidate Heidi Ganahl by a 58.53% to 39.18% margin, with the Libertarian candidate receiving 1.15%, and the other two third-party candidates receiving 0.86% and 0.27% of the vote respectively.
In the Secretary of State race, incumbent Democrat Jena Griswold defeated Republican Pam Anderson, 55.1% to 42.08% (in a race Griswold was administering by virtue of holding that office), with the Libertarian candidate receiving 1.47%, and the other two third-party candidates receiving 0.71% and 0.18% respectively.
In the State Treasurer's race, incumbent Democrat Dave Young defeated Republican candidate Lang Sias, 53.67% to 43.03%, with the Libertarian candidate receiving 3.30%. The other two statewide parties didn't field candidates for this race.
In the State Attorney General's race, incumbent Phil Weiser defeated Republican candidate John Kellner, 54.74% to 43.04%, with the Libertarian candidate receiving 2.21%. The other two statewide parties didn't field candidates for this race.
In the State Board of Education At Large race, Democrat Kathy Plomer defeated Republican candidate Dan Malloit, 53.43% to 43.04%, with the Libertarian candidate receiving 2.84% and another third-party candidate receiving 0.68% of the vote.
Of course, as I have noted previously, Democrats won five U.S. House seats (CO-1, CO-2, CO-6, CO-7 and CO-8) all of which are in Denver, Boulder, and the suburbs of Denver, of which, CO-8 was a highly competitive seat that they won by only a small margin. Republicans won what should have been three safe Republican seats (CO-3, mostly CO-4 in the rural Front Range, and CO-5 in Colorado Springs), but won CO-3 covering the the mountain towns, Western Colorado, and Southern Colorado which is a heavily Republican district by only 0.16 percentage points (the race is currently undergoing an automatic recount to be completed by December 16, 2022), which was the closest Congressional race in the entire United States (although it didn't make a difference for control of the U.S. House which Republicans secured in the midterms by a thin margin). This race was absurdly close for such a safe seat because Lauren Boebert, the Republican incumbent in the race seeking re-election, was such a deeply flawed candidate.
30 November 2022
Lessons From Qatar
The short and pithy response to idealistic anarchists and extreme libertarians used to be, "if you want to try life without government, move to Somalia."
A world with minimal government is a nice pipe dream, but the state of nature looks more like Hobbs described it, where life is nasty, brutish and short, in a society that devolves into clans, tribes, and warlords, than it is an Eden-like paradise.
Qatar is another place that exemplifies the visions of a lot of the factions of the New Right.
It offers "Flight 93ers" the strong man leadership that crushes liberals that they crave, treats women and outsiders poorly, and makes speaking ill of the nation or the Founding Fathers that were the ancestors of its ruling dynasty a crime.
It offers "Integralists" a society with strict, governmentally enforced religious values where the dominant religion guides policy and members of other religions are second class citizens.
It offers "National Conservatives" a society that is fervently anti-woke, with God in schools, and a monocultural society that provides all sorts of benefits to local citizens who are native speakers of the local language and treats everyone else as second class people (who aren't even second class citizens because they aren't citizens at all).
It offers "Red-Pilled Anarcho Bros" a society without the leveling blight of democracy with a government is highly responsive to corporate whims with almost no taxes or regulations of corporate economic conduct. Local men who are citizens are privileged at the expense of women and outsiders.
But, Qatar is not a positive role model that anyone should want to emulate in the United States.
Qatar is rich, although this is almost entirely due to its dumb luck to be situated in control of vast mineral wealth that no one knew it possessed when the country and its dynasty was established.
This makes it possible for Qatar to ignore the economic pressures that shape a society that productive middle class and decentralized class of business owners exert in an economy based upon commerce and industry, instead of mineral wealth rents. Those pressures lead to a democratic, meritocratic, cosmopolitan society with more economic regulation and less regulation of people's personal lives.
Without its oil and gas revenues, its migrant workers would all go home leaving it depopulated, its monarchy would have collapsed long ago, and Qatar would probably be a lot like Somalia and Yemen are today - war torn and impoverished. It might have become haven for bona fide pirates of the Persian Gulf.
Qatar must import 90% of its workforce because its own people are unwilling because they are too spoiled, or unable because they lack the skills and abilities they need, to generate economic value, apart from the wealth that flows from the natural resources it owns that is exploited with foreign labor; a wealth that the monarch shares with a small group of citizens (but one that is fast growing with fecundity due to the abundance the monarch shares) whom he treats like extended family.
For all that conservatives and libertarians and business people whine about the costs of taxes and complying with government regulations, the truth is that economies with high taxes and lots of government regulations are vastly more productive than those with minimal taxes and little government regulation.
Regulation advances public safety, public health, worker health and safety, and environmental quality, while minimizing economic exploitation, yet doesn't prevent advanced economies from being vastly more productive and prosperous than countries where business has a free hand to do as it wishes.
If you want an economy without workplace safety regulations, like the U.S. had in 1913, you aren't going to have an economy that adds value to natural resources the way that the U.S. economy of 2022 does. While regulators are criticized when they make missteps, their many quiet successes go unnoticed. But regulators are the intelligent designers of modern economies, and produce more benefits than costs the vast majority of the time.
The lack of government regulation and taxation of Qatar's economy, which is typical of Middle Eastern monarchies, strongly echoes Western societies in the mid- to late 1800s and early 1900s, in much the same way that their harsh criminal punishments, heavy public regulation of private morality, treatment of women, and recent abandonment of slavery does. Much of the Islamic world seems to be living the Victorian era a century and a half later.
Even trends like the recent tendency of the Arab monarchies to build skyscrapers is happening in lock step with the parallel development of this trend in the early 20th century in major Western cities, where skyscrapers started to be built in 1884, reached a notable milestone with the Woolworth building in 1913, and culminated with the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building which were commenced before the Great Depression began and finished shortly after it struck riding on the inertia that the projects had already acquired. The engineers know a bit more and materials are better now than they were then, but the complex threads of economics and societal evolution seem to be guiding these societies down similar paths in the same sequences.
Maybe there really is just one path of progress and everybody's society has to walk it, admittedly in their own distinct way, to have a developed economy and a society in which a developed economy can thrive.
If so, we can expect the Middle East and much of the rest of the Islamic world to undergo the economic, religious and cultural transformations similar to those that followed the Victorian era in England and the West in the decades to come.
Worker Safety In Qatar Is Poor
Basic Facts About Qatar
Qatar is shown in green.
As the Huffington Post which is my source for the map and pronunciation of the country's name explains:
Qatar is a small Middle Eastern peninsula in the Persian Gulf bordered by Saudi Arabia. It has been ruled by the Al-Thani family since the mid-1800s, according to the CIA World Factbook, and has a population of about 840,000 people. It is slightly smaller than Connecticut. This tiny nation holds the world's third largest oil reserves, and oil and natural gas account for over 50 percent of the GDP.
Qatar is pronounced so that it sounds roughly like "cutter" and is one of the only words in which the letter Q appears without being followed by the letter "u" in its English spelling.
According to Wikipedia:
Qatar has been ruled as a hereditary monarchy by the House of Thani since Mohammed bin Thani signed a treaty with the British in 1868 that recognised its separate status. Following Ottoman rule, Qatar became a British protectorate in the early 20th century until gaining independence in 1971. The current emir is Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who holds nearly all executive and legislative authority under the Constitution of Qatar, as well as controlling the judiciary. He appoints the prime minister and cabinet. The partially-elected Consultative Assembly can block legislation and has a limited ability to dismiss ministers.In early 2017, Qatar's total population was 2.6 million, with 313,000 of them Qatari citizens and 2.3 million expatriates. Its official religion is Islam. In terms of income, the country has the fourth-highest GDP (PPP) per capita in the world, and the eleventh-highest GNI per capita (Atlas method). Qatar ranks 42nd in the Human Development Index, the third-highest HDI in the Arab world. It is a high-income economy, backed by the world's third-largest natural gas reserves and oil reserves. Qatar is one of the world's largest exporters of liquefied natural gas, and the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide per capita.
Qatar In The Spotlight
Qatar is currently hosting of the 2022 FIFA World Cup (the global championship for professional soccer, the world's leading sport) which has turned the spotlight on the country, not necessarily in a positive way.
Qatar has received attention for its restrictions on beer consumption in a country where alcohol consumption is mostly banned due to Islamic prohibitions on consuming it, the hostility of the venue to LGBT associated symbols since hostility towards gays attributed to Islam is the norm there, its treatment of women justified by Islam, and its weak protections for human rights (particularly for migrant workers who make up 90% of the workforce) and its lack of democracy.
I say "attributed to" and "justified by" because many of the "Islamic practices" of countries like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia are not universal in predominantly Islamic countries and are justified with Islamic religious authorities in ways that do not compel the conclusions that these communities reach about what Islamic law requires according to many Muslims and Muslim religious scholars.
Worker Safety In Qatar
The issue addressed in this post, however, worker safety, is an issue with regard to which Islamic and Western norms, secular and religious alike, are not meaningfully in disagreement. The Qataris, like almost everyone else in the world, would prefer that there are no workplace fatalities.
World Cup chief Hassan Al-Thawadi said that between 400 and 500 migrant workers have died as a result of work done on projects connected to the tournament [since Qatar was selected to host this year's World Cup in 2010].
In an interview with Piers Morgan which aired on TalkTV on Monday, Al-Thawadi was asked about the number of fatalities to migrant workers as a result of the work done in the tournament and said: “The estimate is around 400, between 400 and 500.“I don’t have the exact number, that’s something that’s been discussed. One death is too many, it’s as simple as that.”
From CNN.
* Fatal Occupational Injuries in U.S. in 2019: 5,333
World Almanac 2022 citing U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
* U.S. Population in 2019: 328.3 million
Google
* Fatal Occupational Injuries per year in U.S. per million people: 16.2
* Per Capita GDP in U.S.: $63,554
World Almanac 2022
* Average Annual Migrant Worker Fatal Deaths in Qatar: 650
2010-2019 for South Asian migrant workers only per CNN citing the Guardian
* Percentage of workforce made up of migrant workers in Qatar: 90%
CNN citing Amnesty International
* Qatar Population in 2019: 2.832 million
Google
* Fatal Migrant Worker deaths per year in Qatar per million people: 229.5
* Adjusted Qatar rate since migrant workers are 90% of the workforce: 255
* Per capita GDP in Qatar: $89,949
World Almanac 2022
Migrant workers in Qatar, who make up 90% of the workforce there, are about 15 times as likely as U.S. workers to die on the job in any given year.
The workplace death rate in Qatar is roughly what it was in the United States in 1913, before there was any significant governmental regulation of workplace safety in the United States.
In 1913, the Bureau of Labor Statistics documented approximately 23,000 industrial deaths among a workforce of 38 million, equivalent to a rate of 61 deaths per 100,000 workers. Under a different reporting system, data from the National Safety Council from 1933 through 1997 indicate that deaths from unintentional work-related injuries declined 90%, from 37 per 100,000 workers to 4 per 100,000. The corresponding annual number of deaths decreased from 14,500 to 5100; during this same period, the workforce more than tripled, from 39 million to approximately 130 million.
From the U.S. Center For Disease Control citing National Safety Council. Accident facts, 1998 edition. Itasca, Illinois: National Safety Council, 1998 and Corn JK. Response to occupational health hazards: a historical perspective. New York, New York: Nostrand Reinhold, 1992.
29 November 2022
What Factions Are There In The New Right Coalition?
Executive summary
The author thinks (and I'm not entirely convinced he's right but it is an illuminating oversimplification) that the GOP coalition of religious conservatives, foreign policy hawks and fiscal conservative/libertarians is dead.
The "New Right" has four factions:
"Flight 93ers" who believe the end of smashing liberals who don't think that the U.S. has always been awesome and are incensed at efforts to treat women and minorities better, justifies the means;
"Integralists" who are Christian dominionists with a Catholic flavor;
"National Conservatives" with a nationalist anti-immigration, anti-market, and anti-woke agenda who want to break up tech companies, defund the left, impose trade barriers, build a border wall, increase the size of the child tax credit and put God back in schools. They want an English only, white Christian country where everyone else is a second class citizen rather than a cosmopolitan, tolerant, multi-cultural society; and
"Red-Pilled Anarcho Bros" are Social Darwinists who think progressive elites use the language of equality and justice to give special privileges to women and minorities to keep themselves in business while robbing men, especially white men, of even the vocabulary to protest their loss of freedom or the unfairness they are forced to endure, and that . democracy and freedom are inherently at odds because democracy is based on notions of equality—while freedom would lead to the emergence of natural hierarchies based on physical and mental strength and a world where government exists to serve corporate power.
In more depth:
The conservative movement as we knew it pre-Trump arose in the heyday of the Cold War when the threat of Soviet communism loomed large in the American political consciousness. The movement was famously described by Ronald Reagan as a three-legged stool with each leg representing a different faction, to wit: religious/social conservatives, foreign policy hawks and fiscal conservatives/libertarians. . . .What kept the stool together, however, was the fear of an external leftist enemy that each side feared for its own unique reasons. This is not to deny that there was also some genuine common ground between them. Indeed, to the extent that they all took America’s founding project seriously, none of these factions were fundamentally illiberal—or whatever streak of illiberalism they might have had was kept in check by the competing commitment to this project.Trump’s arrival changed all that. The new right, which started taking shape even before Trump, is in a different mood altogether. Its unifying force is not the leftist enemy abroad, but the leftist enemy within. And it doesn’t just fear this enemy, it hates it. Indeed, the new right’s dislike of the domestic left is so great that it is rethinking America’s historic foreign policy commitments in light of it. If you have been puzzled by the post-Trump right’s love fest with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin despite his invasion of the liberal democratic and pro-West Ukraine, it is because Putin has declared himself the enemy of the woke left that he claims is destroying Western civilization of which he is now the self-avowed champion.In contrast to the previous one, this has four identifiable factions. It is, if you like, more a table than a stool. But not, for all that, more stable because the four legs are uneven. In fact, were it not for the various factions’ joint hatred of their common leftist enemy, there would be less to keep the coalition standing than with the previous conservative movement.I would label the four factions as follows: Flight 93ers, the Integralists, National Conservatives and Red-Pilled Anarcho Bros. . . .Flight 93ersThis faction is named after the infamous Flight 93 essay that Michael Anton wrote in the Claremont Review of Books under the pseudonym of Publius shortly after Trump landed the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Claremont Review is the premier publication of the Claremont Institute, the flagship of the West Coast Straussian school of political philosophy. In contrast to East Coast Straussians, many of whom broke away from Trump, the Claremonsters, as they had long been called, went the other way. They weren’t without qualms about Trump but still submitted to him enthusiastically. Anton’s Flight 93 essay played an important role in convincing the Claremont Institute and the broader conservative establishment, at a time that it was still in shock over Trump’s primary win, that it needs to abandon its squeamishness and rally around him. Four years later when Trump launched his Big Lie, the Claremonsters supplied him with not just bogus arguments to justify his claims but also the notorious John Eastman, the legal brains behind the scheme to get Vice President Mike Pence to reject Biden state electors so that they could be subsequently switched with Trump state electors.To understand how odd these machinations were, consider that Claremont Straussians have long regarded the American Constitution as a sacred document. . . . Just like their leader and founder, the late Harry Jaffa, they consider America’s Founding Fathers as gods among men. They also worship Abraham Lincoln whose statesmanship abolished slavery—and fully delivered on the Constitution’s promise of liberty for all—while keeping the Union intact.So how did Lincoln lovers end up embracing Trump?It is unclear, actually, if Jaffa, a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, would have ever gone along with his institution’s pro-Trump turn; his son insists that he would not have. But his Claremont heirs’ annoyance with what they see as the anti-Americanism of the progressive left has grown into a burning rage over the years. They consider the left’s depiction of America as a racist, sexist, and homophobic country—despite the heroic efforts that have been made to abolish slavery and Jim Crow—as intolerable blasphemy. They have always seen the left’s demands for special privileges for minorities and women as a perversion of the constitution’s promise of equal rights. Then, on top of this, when the leftist elites who control the media, academia, the government bureaucracy, Hollywood and other commanding heights of the culture use their power not just to press their anti-American agenda but, in their woke arrogance, silence objectors like them through a regime of censorship, political correctness and cancellation, they are incensed. Denying the left control of the state, arguably the last remaining bastion of power, became a paramount concern for them.Whatever Trump’s character and other flaws, they paled in comparison to his big virtue, namely, his unapologetic and no-holds-barred willingness to take on the left and obliterate it. . . .What distinguishes Claremonsters from the other factions of the new right is that they alone see themselves not as anti-liberals but adherents of the true liberalism. The illiberal subversion of elections to install a strongman like Trump, in their book, is a temporary measure to crush the left and return America to a true, originalist commitment to individual liberty and limited government.IntegralistsDefending any kind of liberalism is emphatically not the integralist project, however. Whereas Claremonsters see progressive leftism—its attacks on institutions of ordered liberty such as the family, churches and schools—as a perversion of liberalism, integralists see it as a natural outgrowth of the political individualism enshrined in the Constitution. . . . If Patrick Deneen, a professor at University of Notre Dame and a leading integralist, is to be believed, the source of America’s current travails, its communal and moral breakdown, lies in the Declaration of Independence itself. . . . Nothing irritates them more than Justice Anthony Kennedy’s famous quote in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992): “At the heart of liberty, is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” As far as they are concerned, one can draw a direct through line between this kind of thinking and the rise of sexual promiscuity, pornography, abortion and radical demands for gender self-authorship of the woke movement. And like the other three factions, integralists hate the progressive elite that advances and defends transgender surgeries and multiple pronouns.Integralists are all Catholic and integralism is a very old doctrine that authorizes the state to promote the earthly common good as ordained by God. . . . the integralists do aspire to a return to some kind of a pan-Christian confessional state that uses its muscle to ban abortion, gay marriage and other progressive aims and that allows preferential expression of Christianity in the public square. Other religions wouldn’t be prohibited but they would not enjoy state support. Their role model in this is Hungary’s Viktor Orban who is taking affirmative steps to restore Christian domination in his country by barring Muslim immigration and embracing natalist policies to encourage Christians to have more babies and boost their demographic footprint.If integralists could turn back the clock to some halcyon period in America, it would be 17th and 18th Century Puritan New England where a thick and unified community used a muscular government to impose widely shared religious norms or understanding of the common good. Deneen, along with his fellow integralists Gladen Pappin and Adrian Vermeule, has started a Substack publication called The Postliberal Order to develop their integralist critique of modernity and liberalism. . . .(To understand the nuttiness of these Catholic intellectuals using bad boy Trump, the very embodiment of the ruggedly atomistic spirit of Appalachian “backcountry” Scottish-Irish settlers, to return America to a communal New England Puritan Protestant order, read this fascinating account by Tanner Greer, “The Problem of the New Right.”)National ConservativesNatCons . . . morphed into something of a MAGA organ, workshopping an anti-immigration, anti-market, and anti-woke agenda. . . . American NatCons want to break up tech companies, defund the left, impose trade barriers, build a border wall, increase the size of the child tax credit and put God back in schools. . . .Their dream is to elect a contingent of Republicans who are committed to using state power to, as Hillsdale College's David Azerrad, declared, “defund and humiliate the institutional centers of power of the left...and reward friends and punish enemies." . . . .If one is going to pick one figure and one moment that launched this movement it would be Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony with his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism. . . .His rap against liberalism is that it is a fundamentally imperialistic ideology because it claims to be founded on universally applicable political doctrines. That, he says, leads to a crusading moral universalism that denies the validity of alternative principles of national self-determination based on local, cultural commitments. Liberalism judges every polity by whether it respects individual rights and allows religious pluralism. That bars the state from using its power to protect indigenous ways and customs. Instead of nurturing citizens of a nation with strong local blood, soil and cultural attachments, liberalism encourages individuals to see themselves as citizens of the world. Cosmopolitanism is a dirty word for him—as it had become for many on the MAGA right. Ironically, Hazony’s critique of liberalism is a warmed over version of the anti-globalization left’s slams against capitalism which, it alleged, obliterated local ways and homogenized every country in the image of the West.Hazony does not reject liberalism out of hand. He thinks it might be suitable when local conditions warrant—for example in a naturally diverse and multicultural community. But in Hazony’s post-liberal world, liberalism is merely one legitimate possibility among many. When a dominant majority exists, it should be allowed free rein to determine its destiny. It can choose a religious, linguistic, ethnic or cultural principle around which to order itself depending on the self-understanding of the majority.
So if India’s dominant Hindu population chooses to jettison its liberal commitments and become an explicitly Hindu nation, that is fine. Also kosher is America declaring itself a Christian country with English as its only official language—as is Israel remaining a Jewish nation without pressure to accord equal rights to non-Jews. Hazony says that in such regimes, minorities wouldn’t be persecuted. They would be tolerated—but not awarded equal rights. In other words, they’d have to accept their second-class status. . . . he dismisses as “elitist” liberals who insist that the rights of minorities and immigrants be respected in a polity. His streak of populism is pretty evident.Red-Pilled Anarcho BrosIf Hazony is the godfather of the NatCon movement, then a long-haired dude called Curtis Guy Yarvin— who wrote under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug—is the godfather of this movement. . . . he started writing a blog called Unqualified Reservations under his pseudonym in 2007 . . . Many of the terms and concepts that gained popularity in the alt-right and then entered the political bloodstream along with Trump were coined by him.Yarvin believes that a complex of progressive elite institutions—the press, academia and the federal bureaucracy or the Deep State—run the country and exercise control more totalitarian than authoritarian China—a country that he admires precisely because it is so openly authoritarian in contrast to liberal states that mask their true intentions behind mind-numbing pieties. He calls this complex of institutions “The Cathedral” and he believes that their ideology permeates everyone and everything. . . . progressive elites use the language of equality and justice to give special privileges to women and minorities to keep themselves in business while robbing men, especially white men, of even the vocabulary to protest their loss of freedom or the unfairness they are forced to endure. It’s all an elaborate ruse to keep the truly good subservient to a false progressive ideology. . . . democracy and freedom are inherently at odds because democracy is based on notions of equality—while freedom would lead to the emergence of natural hierarchies based on physical and mental strength. . . .
Mencius Moldbug, who has made an hour-long appearance on Tucker Carlson, has had a deep influence on Peter Thiel and was even rumored to have a line to Steve Bannon, wants to tear down the whole liberal edifice and replace it with a techno-state in which corporations run the country like their private holding. . . . So if, under fascism, the state directs private industry toward its ends, in the Moldbug world private industry directs the state towards its goals.Moldbug was deeply influenced by Hans-Herman Hoppe, who subscribes to a perverted version of the libertarian Austrian School of Economics. This would be comical if it were not so dangerous given that key figures of this school like Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek (who has been a deep intellectual influence on me) are among the most eloquent defenders of liberalism—and ardent opponents of authoritarianism . . .
Damon Linker at Eyes on the Right has written extensively about some of them, but the most prominent perhaps is Yale PhD Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) who has developed a huge following among young, white men of the reactionary bent. Just like Moldbug, BAP’s animus is directed at those whom he calls “bugmen”—reminiscent of Nietzsche’s last men—because they are filled with ressentiment against those who are more beautiful, powerful and stronger than them and therefore want to tear them down. In a calculated bid to provoke fear against the left, BAP has gone so far as to compare the anti-male and anti-white rhetoric of the new left to the “extermination”-level anti-Tutsi propaganda that the shorter, phenotypically African Hutus in Rwanda deployed before massacring the more European-featured, taller Tutsis (never mind that the extermination of the Tutsis was possible only because they were a reviled minority in an illiberal state that did not offer them protections from the depredations of the Hutu majority, precisely the kind of polity that BAP disses.)If integralists have a problem with liberal secularism, the anarcho bros are upset with liberalism’s democratic egalitarianism. They don’t have a beef with religious pluralism like the intergralists—or even gays (Thiel, their fan and benefactor, is gay, after all!). They have an obsession with biology and natural differences and are far more concerned with feminist—and to a lesser extent, racial—demands for equality. They are at core Neitzcheans who believe that a good society is one that is ruled by the principle of meritocracy in all its forms—not equality, a creed for losers.
From UnPopulist.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)