A quick word about how footnotes are implemented on this site…
In a recent post, The Case For a Demagogue, I used footnotes on this site for the first time, but I was not completely satisfied with the result. By using the HTML <sup> tag surrounding a hyperlink, it’s easy enough to format the footnote reference as a superscript and jump to it:
<ul><li>The 2016 election was the second of the last five in which the
winner won while losing the popular vote (Bush #43 in 2000 was the
other), and only the fourth in U.S. history
<sup><ahref="#footnote1">1</a></sup>.
</li></ul>
The problem is getting back to where you were in the text. A quick search revealed a good solution from John Gruber at Daring Fireball. He suggests 1) adding an ID for the footnote reference (I’ve used id="ref-footnote1" in the superscript), and 2) at the end of the footnote text, adding a link back to the footnote reference using its ID, along with a Unicode character often used to represent a carriage return. The way I’ve done it looks like this:
<ul><li>The 2016 election was the second of the last five in which the
winner won while losing the popular vote (Bush #43 in 2000 was the
other), and only the fourth in U.S. history
<supid="ref-footnote1"><ahref="#footnote1">1</a></sup>.
</li></ul><!-- And the footnote section... --><divclass="footnotes"><ol><liid="footnote1">
From <ahref="http://www.pewresearch.org/...">Pew Research</a>:
<em>In the 1824 election, which was contested between rival
factions of the same party, Andrew Jackson won a plurality of the
popular and electoral vote, but because he was short of an
Electoral College majority the election was thrown to the House of
Representatives, which chose runner-up John Quincy Adams.</em>
Some sources refer to this as the <em>fifth</em> time the winner
did not get a plurality of the popular vote, but for the purpose
of this blog post, I consider this a special case since Congress
intervened to pick the candidate. <ahref="#ref-footnote1"class='footnoteBackLink'title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the
text.">↩︎</a></li></ol></div>
I like the way this works, so this will be the convention I follow going forward.
Donald Trump won the states he needed to put him over the top, and may end up winning 306 to 232 electoral votes. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a few hundred thousand (Update: by 2.8 million). While the electoral vote sends the president to office, the popular vote has a significance that is often ignored by a new administration and Congress.
An electoral/popular vote split last occurred in 2000 when George W. Bush won against Al Gore. Our country has been split pretty evenly for years. The numbers for and against the winner of each election are often closer than you might think:
Presidents typically win slim majorities. In recent years, convincing even half the population to support a candidate has been tough:
The 2016 election was the second of the last five in which the winner won while losing the popular vote (Bush #43 in 2000 was the other), and only the fourth in U.S. history 1.
Trump’s share of the popular vote was near historic lows at just 47.7%. Only Nixon in 1968 (43.4%) and Clinton in 1992 (43%) were lower.
In six of the past fifteen elections, the winner received less than 50% of the popular vote.
In the past eight elections, going back to Bush #41 in 1988, no one has received more than 53.4% of the popular vote.
In the past fifteen elections, only three winners got more than 53.4% of the popular vote, with Lyndon Johnson in 1964 getting the highest percentage in history (over 61%), followed by the second terms of Nixon and Reagan.
Note that the three “landslides” in the past 56 years (Reagan in 1984, Nixon in 1972, and Johnson in 1964) all had a winning margin within two points of 60%. Even having merely 40% of voters opposed to your presidency – a best-case scenario – is still a significant number.
There is a lot of talk about unity right now. So what should we expect?
Getting roughly half the popular vote or less should be the first thing a new president considers if he is concerned about uniting the country, especially if he has any sense of humility (though I suppose most politicians don’t have much of that). If I were the president-elect in this scenario (a completely different concern for everyone!), I would probably realize that one of my objectives would be winning over, to some extent, those that did not support me. That’s not because I would want to be “likable,” but because I would see it as an obligation to work for the concerns of all. Though I would certainly make some decisions that would not be popular with one constituency or another, my hope would be that the group that had opposed me would at least see my efforts as honest and fair.
In that spirit, I believe all leaders should “govern from the middle”, identify issues in which both sides have a stake, and build consensus to solve those problems. Instead, new presidents typically rationalize that the team that won gets to do what it wants.
One example of this is from President Obama’s first term. While he deserves credit for several things (such as the role he played in successfully combatting the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression), I believe he made a significant mistake during his first two years in office.
In 2009 and 2010, Democrats had control of the House and Senate. It was a historic chance to unify the country. But they overreached with the Affordable Care Act. A consensus-driven approach might have worked to pass a few of the major pieces of that law, such as a ban on denying coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, or the ability for anyone to get catastrophic coverage. These were among the parts of that law that conservatives would have likely supported as much as liberals, and passing just those pieces might have been a great start. Instead, Obama led the Democrats in enacting sweeping health care legislation while mostly ignoring the outcry from opponents.
“Obamacare” was deeply unpopular with conservatives, and Democrats paid dearly for it. It galvanized the right during the 2010 elections, launched the Tea Party, and gave the political right control of both houses of Congress. Conservatives remained ignited by this for years and were able to stretch this sentiment into a wider narrative about “big government,” weaving it all into something that at times resembles mythology, mixing shards of truth with some eye-opening embellishment.
That backlash persisted for the rest of Obama’s tenure. It was the catalyst for the movement that has now put Donald Trump into the White House.
Maybe Trump will break the endless cycle of winner-take-all-and-loser-be-damned by showing restraint and focusing on a common set of concerns shared by both conservatives and liberals. Despite his campaign rhetoric, it would be fair to give him that chance, rather than anticipate that his administration will act as though it has a clear mandate to make sweeping changes that many in the majority who voted against him will oppose.
So, will conservatives push their agenda hard in the face of majority opposition? Or, will the outright loss in the popular vote tally concern the new administration and prompt Trump to seek consensus in any meaningful way? We will soon find out, but the initial indications are not promising.
If conservatives ignore popular opinion and move ahead with a contentious governing agenda, the opposition will throw its weight down hard. We may remain stuck in a cycle of bitterness, with unity eluding us for another four years.
Big league.
From Pew Research: In the 1824 election, which was contested between rival factions of the same party, Andrew Jackson won a plurality of the popular and electoral vote, but because he was short of an Electoral College majority the election was thrown to the House of Representatives, which chose runner-up John Quincy Adams. Some sources refer to this as the fifth time the winner did not get a plurality of the popular vote, but for the purpose of this blog post, I consider this a special case since Congress intervened to pick the candidate. ↩︎
Demagogue - a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.
Much ink has been spilled and many pixels have been lit by writers and bloggers and pundits and Facebook friends about the 2016 U.S. presidential election. With only one day left before we vote, writing about my own views now may see them washed out in all the noise, or simply ignored by many made-up minds. Yet because we are about to make a momentous choice (for many, an unfortunate choice), I am compelled to make a case. If there is anyone left who may still be wondering what to do, maybe it will shed some useful light on what we face.
This year’s election puts us in the extraordinary situation of having to choose between two candidates who are perhaps more damaged than any in history. While I agree with quite a bit of the criticism by each side against its respective opponent, my view, simply stated, is this: we cannot elect a demagogue to lead our country.
Donald Trump is the definition of a demagogue, a man pandering to the worst tendencies of a small but notable slice of society. His momentum has spread from that group and swept up a frighteningly large number of others who just want someone – anyone – to make changes – any changes – to shake up our political system. His appeal is one of catering to frustrations, making grandiose promises, and reassuring those who want to believe in a message of strength and jingoism, even though he offers very few specific plans, ignores facts, and propagates outright lies. Regardless of what he says, what is most important to a large part of this group is that he is the alternative to the much-vilified Hillary Clinton. Trump is hoping to ride a wave of hype and hysteria to the White House. To those who support him because he is the “non-politician” satisfying their thirst for upending the system, you may get what you wish for. And you may regret it.
The politics Trump promotes should be deeply troubling to those who want true change. If it isn’t already obvious, take a fingernail and flake off the thin coat of garish paint he’s slapped on his brand of populism and see what hides underneath. He rises on a shaky foundation of fear and anger. It is nothing new. What his election to the highest political office on the planet would mean for all of us is alarming.
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
When I was growing up in the 1970s, there was a TV commercial featuring a man with his grandson fishing on a quiet lake in a rowboat. The child mentions that someone called him prejudiced, and mentions his friend, his Jewish friend, and the grandfather points out how calling him that is an example of being prejudiced. It is a mild portrayal of unintentionally bad behavior compared to that willfully demonstrated by Trump. The point is, most of us learned as children that making judgments about a person based on race or religion is wrong, or at least we all should have learned that.
Trump embraces that kind of ignorance, concentrates it into a potion, and makes it into a bomb. I was floored when I saw the now Republican presidential candidate allege that Mexican immigrants are typically criminals, and speculating that – yes! – there may be some that are good people. That single event forced me to consider this man unfit for the presidency. He never had to elaborate or say anything else. Those comments were completely unacceptable and should have been enough to disqualify him from anyone’s consideration. I was certain that that would be the end of his campaign, but it was just a preview of the race-baiting and xenophobia that would drive his support. He continued to build on it with a litany of crazy shit he did and said, all actively defended by his most rabid supporters and cronies. A small and incomplete list follows:
There is a lot I’m leaving out because it would take hours to compile it all. See “176 Reasons Donald Trump Shouldn’t Be President” for a whole bunch more, written in mid-September, before some of his most damning controversies erupted.
While there are people who will see many of these items as disqualifying, others will see them less critically. To the latter group, these things may only prove that Trump is an oaf, or they are relatively minor, or he doesn’t mean them, or that Hillary Clinton is just so much worse. While I may disagree overall, I get all that. My enthusiasm for Clinton, for example, has never been high (an understatement). However, you have to take what candidates say seriously. It is now a stark choice, one he has made thoroughly certain I don’t need to deliberate.
What I think might make an even stronger case for Trump’s unsuitability and ineptitude for the job of president is highlighted by what others have said about him – others who are not just experienced in governing our country, but Republicans who are, or have been, opposed to him. Here is a partial list of quotes by Republicans:
Maybe the most troubling development in this election is the support Trump has received from white supremacist groups, exemplified by just one example here:
The support for Trump from the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, and many hate groups is frightening. To be fair, Trump has renounced these endorsements, but he was slow to do so when they began early in the campaign, and some of his behavior, such as retweeting an anti-Semitic image of Hillary Clinton from a white supremacist message board, leaves me concerned about how much he values the support from these groups. Thankfully, I think this is not an indication of what most Trump supporters believe, and hopefully, the most these groups can ever aspire to is relegation to the fringes of a fading piece of our culture.
On Election Day, I will do what I can to deny Trump the presidency. That doesn’t mean I will be happy with the result, but the choice for two qualified candidates was never given to me. The Republicans took that possibility away when they nominated Trump. The blame for the outcome of this election, whatever it is, rests largely with them.
Someone I know posted this on a social media site recently:
The Obama administration wants to hand over the Internet to the UN and the international community. You need to wake up to what’s going on…
This has been a talking point lately for some politicians. It should be obvious that it’s complete bullshit.
Obama is not “handing over the Internet.” What this is about is no longer having the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) (at the Department of Commerce) oversee the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) (administrator of the DNS servers that translate something like google.com into something Internet protocol understands, like 8.8.8.8). Obama had nothing to do with the original plan for transitioning ICANN to an independent organization. ICANN was supposed to become independent in 2000, and this plan was pushed back many times while everyone tussled over how this arrangement would work. As of 1-Oct-2016, it became independent. The major tech companies that have taken a position on this are all for it. There are some concerns about how this will work going forward, but the concerns are speculation at this point.
Note that ICANN has been managing DNS for eighteen years. NTIA opposed it in ONE case in all that time, when the .xxx top-level domain was proposed, and then let it go ahead anyway. In other words, ICANN had already been operating much like an independent organization.
The politicians and others spouting alarmist rhetoric about this apparently do not or deliberately choose to not understand how the Internet works (e.g. DNS administration will allow governments to censor the Internet – really?).
I think we should be more concerned with the Internet becoming a cesspool of misinformation and bile spewed by extremists on both sides… I wonder when that will start to happen.
Siri’s huge promise has been shrunk to just making voice calls and sending messages to contacts, and maybe getting the weather, using voice commands. Some users find it a reliable way to set timers, alarms, notes and reminders, or to find restaurants.
It’s not even that great for getting information from the iPhone that I would think is a no-brainer. Some examples:
How many steps have I taken today?
Siri: I can’t answer that on your iPhone, but you can find it in the Health app: Open the health app
Siri can show info from other built-in apps, and it would be nice if Apple could expose other useful and probably innocuous data, like steps taken, miles walked, calories burned, etc.
Turn on the flashlight
Siri: Sorry, but I’m not able to do that.
Siri can turn on the camera, and can toggle WiFi, Night Shift, Airplane mode, but not the flashlight.
Show me my last photo
Siri: (no audio response, immediately opens the Photos app showing my camera roll, oddly in Select mode with the Select and Cancel buttons and my query at the top of the screen.)
It would be helpful to at least put me at the end of the stream of photos, but even easier, why can’t Siri just pull up the last one?
I don’t know what features are restricted from access by Siri, how many queries are pre-programmed, or how much artificial intelligence is actually being used, but there is a lot of room to improve obvious queries in the system. Regarding how much AI is actually used, what Mossberg discovered after he contacted Apple about the examples he tried that did not work (and now do) is troubling – it seems like a lot of queries are actually pre-programmed:
If you try most of these broken examples right now, they’ll work properly, because Apple fixed them after I tweeted screenshots of most of them in exasperation, and asked the company about them.
Google announced a phone (which they’ve done several times before but because pundits apparently received a collective bump on the noggin no one seems to remember this), a WiFi hub (Apple already makes one of those), a VR headset (which is just goggles to put the Pixel in and a remote) and an Echo-like smart home assistant. The fawning over the last is a delightful insight into the Apple double standard. Echo sales to date are probably only in the low millions but pundits are falling over themselves about this incredible hit. Meanwhile, Apple’s sold about 15 million Watches, owns the smartwatch market and is doing exceedingly well in the watch category as a whole, and has driven Android Wear into the ocean… and the Apple Watch is somehow a flop.
The media does seem to have some weird mental illness when it comes to reporting about Apple.
Some Yahoo employees were upset about the decision not to contest the more recent directive and thought the company could have prevailed, the sources said. They were also upset that [chairman Marissa] Mayer and Yahoo general counsel Ron Bell did not involve the company’s security team in the process, instead asking Yahoo’s email engineers to write a program to siphon off messages containing the character string the spies sought and store them for remote retrieval, according to the sources.
That Yahoo allowed this is certainly troubling. How Yahoo handled this internally is also troubling. Also of concern is a bug that could have allowed hackers to access all Yahoo emails:
When [Alex] Stamos found out that Mayer had authorized the program, he resigned as chief information security officer and told his subordinates that he had been left out of a decision that hurt users’ security, sources said. Due to a programming flaw, he told them, hackers could have accessed the stored emails.
But the larger issue, that of government access to our data on all the major email services, hasn’t changed. Read how carefully-worded the denials are by some of Yahoo’s competitors:
Google, whose Gmail is the world’s largest email service, said on Tuesday that it hadn’t received a similar spying request from the request from the US government. If it had, Google said, its response would be: “No way.”
Microsoft, whose email service also is larger than Yahoo, also said it has “never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic.”
Twitter, which doesn’t provide email service but does allow users to exchange direct messages, likewise said it has never received such a request and would challenge it in court if it did.
A Facebook spokesperson said: “Facebook has never received a request like the one described in these news reports from any government, and if we did we would fight it.”
These statements all deny a similar effort like Yahoo’s, which scanned every incoming email for some targeted text. But none of these statements indicates that our data is protected with any type of encryption, which is the only way these providers could keep this data private, or that these companies never hand emails over to the government when requested. And some egregious practices continue and are possible only because our data is not encrypted. For example, recall how Google scans all of our emails to target us with ads, a different but still troubling privacy concern.
As for Apple, the one major tech company that has very publicly opposed some types of government efforts to get our data, they said this:
“We have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will.”
In a further statement, Apple said “We have never received a request of this type. If we were to receive one, we would oppose it in court.”
Apple should get kudos for things like iMessage and device encryption, but it has never stated that it would not or has never turned over email data when requested, and their issues with how they store iMessage metadata should also be a concern.
The only way to truly keep our information secure is to encrypt it, both end-to-end and while stored. None of these services do that. Remember that before you slam Yahoo about this exclusively.
All Signal messages and voice calls are end-to-end encrypted using the Signal Protocol, which has since been adopted by WhatsApp and other companies. However, unlike other messaging apps, OWS makes a point of not keeping any data, encrypted or otherwise, about its users. (WhatsApp, by contrast, keeps encrypted messages on its own servers—this allows for message history to be restored when users set up a new device.)
“The only information responsive to the subpoena held by OWS is the time of account creation and the date of the last connection to Signal servers,” [ACLU attorney Brett Max] Kaufman continued, also pointing out that the company did in fact hand over this data.
There is a notable contrast between Signal’s philosophy about storing metadata and the practice adopted by Apple as reported in last week’s story about how it retains iMessage metadata. I think several articles in the media last week almost rationalized that Apple keeps this data because it helps it in debugging iMessage issues. That certainly may be true, but the downside is that this metadata is very revealing even without the content of the encrypted messages, and it is hard to believe that iMessage metadata has not been subpoenaed in the past. Signal’s approach shows that they understand this.
