Donald Trump remains an electorally weak candidate

The US political system provides an unusually clear measure of how strong or weak a major Party nominee for President is: compare their popular vote with the share of the vote their nominating Party got in the House of Representatives election.

On that measure, Hillary Clinton was a mediocre candidate: she received essentially the same share of the vote as the Democrats did in the House of Representatives (48.2% to 48.0%). Obama was a strong candidate: in 2012 he received a significantly higher vote than his nominating Party did in the House of Representatives (51.1% to 48.8%, +2.3%pts).

Donald Trump was an electorally weak candidate: he received significantly lower vote than his nominating Party did in the House of Representatives (46.1% compared to 49.1%, -3%pts). That he won the Electoral College anyway is the basis for my position that almost anyone the Republicans nominated in 2016 would have beaten Hillary.

When we compare an average of the polls in 2016 with the current pattern, we can see that Vice President Joe Biden has a generally larger, and much more persistent, lead in the polls than Hillary did. Not surprising, Hillary was, according to the polling, the most disliked major Party nominee in decades. Apart, of course, from the present incumbent.

For President Trump to be re-elected, he either needs a remarkable late surge in support or the polls have to be systematically wrong to a startling degree.

The polls could be systematically wrong. There are three ways in which they could be systematically wrong.

1. Who ends up voting systematically diverges from the selected samples. The sampling patterns of the pollsters could be misreading the likely voters, skewing their results, if the error is disproportionately in a particular direction.
2. Who ends up voting systematically diverges from who is being polled. If non-responders disproportionately support one candidate, that can skew the results.
3. People responding to the polls misrepresent their voting intentions. If people intending to vote for one candidate disproportionately misrepresent their voting intentions, that can skew the results.

It is certainly possible to posit a scenario where one or more these factors are significant and operate to under-state support for President Trump. Especially in a society with rising concern about digital privacy. Nevertheless, that would have to be true, and true to a startling degree, for, on current trends, the polls to be as wrong as would be required for President Trump to be re-elected.

The US has become a society where people are hesitant to express various views, including support for President Trump. In a society where people are systematically sanctioned for expressing particular opinions, you end up with a pervasively dishonest society with broken feedbacks. Public spaces become dominated by preference-falsification.

If the polls do turn out to be wildly wrong on Election Day, that will likely say something rather unfortunate about the state of public discourse in the United States.

Cross-posted from Medium.

Vampire Diaries versus True Blood

I have long been fond of vampire stories, particularly films and TV shows. This is something of a cliche among same-sex attracted folk -- intimate sharing of bodily fluids in intense, often apparently orgasmic, experiences manifesting desire incorporating folk of the same-sex by powerful beings who get others to conform to those desires: what's not to like?

I very much enjoyed all 7 seasons of Buffy and all 5 seasons of Angel. The musical episode of Buffy is according to IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base) ratings, close to perfect television. And who can forget the puppet episode of Angel? I also very much enjoyed the vampire noir of Ultraviolet which, across its episodes, never used the "V-word".

When True Blood came along, billed as "vampires for adults", I was initially quite engaged. I had read and enjoyed many of the books in the Southern Vampire series by Charlaine Harris that inspired the TV series. Yet I gave up on True Blood in the 4th season.

Conversely, I had ignored The Vampire Diaries as just teen angst vampire romance. Having eventually given it a go, I am now watching the 8th (and final) season. I enjoy even more its spinoff series The Originals (now in its 5th season, though I have only seen the first two).

Which made me wonder, why did The Vampire Diaries hold my attention much more than True Blood did?

I find the IMDB ratings, if enough people rate a show, to be pretty good wisdom-of-crowds indicators of quality. The IMDB ratings (out of 10) of the aforementioned shows, are, in downward order:

The Originals, 8.3
Buffy, 8.2
Ultraviolet, 8.1
Angel, 8.0
True Blood, 7.9
The Vampire Diaries, 7.8

So, not a lot of variance; though The Vampire Diaries-Originals franchise is the most successful (producing the highest IMDB rated show of the group, though slightly lower combined rating, and more total seasons than the Buffy-Angel franchise).

True Blood and The Vampire Diaries are a mere 0.1 apart in IMDB ratings and why one engaged me more successfully than the other is not because of any clear difference in acting performances, eye candy or dialogue. Indeed, my stand-out favourite performance in either series is the (sadly) late Nelsan Ellis's performance of Lafayette in True Blood.

Nor is it a matter of moral seriousness. The Vampire Diaries has no moral centre whatsoever. (Nor, for that matter, does The Originals, which operates rather as a supernatural gangster show.)

True Blood has a much stronger queer element, starting with Lafayette, than The Vampire Diaries but that hardly seems a drawback for moi.  Nor am I one of those sad queer folk who demands queer content to enjoy something, though I devour male-male romance e-books.

The fabulousness that is
Lafayette

The Vampire Diaries has no moral centre, but it does have an emotional one. I have found it genuinely moving at times. Which gets to why it held my attention much more than True Blood.

First is place. Mystic Falls, the town at the centre of The Vampire Diaries, is more successfully and engagingly evoked as a place than Bon Temps in True Blood. The Originals has New Orleans, which almost counts as an unfair advantage, but has meant that The Originals continues and improves the evocation of place that worked for The Vampire Diaries.

Second, and related, is family. True Blood does not really take family seriously. It appears to, but families tend to be dysfunctional adjuncts to characters rather than engaged structural elements of the story. Vampire Diaries takes family more seriously, starting with the two central characters, the Salvatore brothers Stefan and Damon. Characters are very much placed in family contexts, with family histories which operate more than backstory props, with family being treated as a serious factor in people's emotional lives for good and ill. Which, in turn, helps Mystic Falls be a more successfully evoked place than Bon Temps.

Again, this strength applies even more to The Originals, which is centred around the original Vampire family, the Mikkaelsons. Particularly the brothers Klaus and Elijah, but extending to their father, mother, and siblings. But families as living and shaping legacies applies also to other The Originals characters, human, witch or werewolf.

True Blood, particularly in its opening credits, is more self-consciously culture-political than Vampire Diaries, which is a mixed feature, as it can get in the way of the story telling. True Blood is a bit too inclined to see the South in terms of its flaws, which weakens the show's use of family and invocation of place.

The Vampire Diaries also ends up creating a richer metaphysics than True Blood. In True Blood, supernatural creatures just are, and flit across the story more as mystery-marvels than things with a place. The Vampire Diaries, by contrast, is very much concerned to provide origin stories.

Which rather summaries why The Vampire Diaries held my interest more successfully than True Blood. It was more committed to story. Families as having stories, a specific town shaping stories, supernatural beings and structures as having stories. I stopped caring about what happened to characters in True Blood because it was too much one damned thing after another and too little people in connecting webs of people and place. For people who are inside stories have more capacity to engage than people who are story-props. The Vampire Diaries even managed to make a character who was off-screen for the last two seasons a continuing part of the story, both because of the way that was a continuing touchstone for the other central characters and because it enabled the show to return to the "diary" device by having various characters write entries to a journal of "what happened while you were away".

The character of Klaus Mikkaelson, played beautifully by Joseph Morgan, a recurring character in a couple of seasons of The Vampire Diaries and one of the central characters of The Originals, is an excellent example of character both in and driving story. He is clearly both embedded in his family and shaped by it. His life becomes focused around his (miraculous but explained) daughter. He is both highly intelligent and deeply emotionally flawed (for entirely understandable reasons: when you meet his parents, so much is explained--including why his brother Elijah is so keen to emotionally redeem Klaus). Indeed, being so smart, so cunning, yet so emotionally unbalanced, is central to Klaus's character dynamic -- he is smart/cunning enough to cope with his emotional flaws but too shaped by them to overcome them. Which generates plenty of dramatic tension, of course. But also makes him a deeply engaging, if at times horrifying, character. (Remember, no moral centre.)

The Vampire Diaries was more committed to story, which meant more committed to connections and place, than True Blood, which is why the former kept my interest in a way that the latter failed to do.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

Humanising law

One of the standard complaints against giving queers (by ‘queer’ I mean any person who does not conform to being definitively male-or-female and heterosexual: i.e. same-sex oriented, same-sex attracted, intersex, transgender people) equal protection of the law is that it is an offense against the Christian, or Judaeo-Christian (if Christians want to include the Jews rather than practising more traditional exclusion thereof), traditions of the Western civilisation. To put it another way, it involves de-Christianisation of law.

Controlling women
This is true. But so did giving women equal protection of the law and giving Jews equal protection of the law. Giving women the right to exit a marriage, and to control their fertility, was equally an “offense” against the Christian traditions of Western civilisation. Indeed, if one examines the Christianisation of Roman law, and of proto-common law, one sees the same pattern. As Christianisation advances, women lose the right to control their fertility, they lose the right to exit a marriage. Being so completely untrusted as decision makers in such key areas of their life, the natural corollary was that they lost control over property as well; hence the development of coverture marriage and married woman as chattel of her husband. A free women in C8th England had far more legal standing, property rights and social opportunities than a free woman in C18th England and the reason for the difference was a thousand years of Christianisation of law.

As institutions and technology developed, and the ambit of religion as a source of meaning and explanation (and so authority) shrank, the legal status of women rose in a steady unravelling of the aforementioned Christianisation of law. They regained property rights, they regained the right to exit a marriage, they regained control over their fertility. (Such rights and control having been features of Celtic, Germanic and late Republic/early Empire Roman law.) Women became legally and socially recognised as full decision-makers, with dramatic expansion of their social opportunities.

That Islam, particularly in the Middle East, has not experienced the same shifts—institutional and technological changes being either outside impositions or grudging adjustments to outside pressure—and the ambit of religion as a source of meaning and explanation has (after a temporary period of retreat) resurged, explains the precarious status of women in such countries.

Oppressing Jews
The case of the Jews is, if anything, even clearer. Christianisation of Roman Law involved a steady process of stripping Jews of legal protections and imposing ever more legal constraints. (Pagans were even more severely treated.)

The Germanic conquests of the lands of the former Western Roman Empire was generally a benefit to the Jews, since persecution of belief was not a feature of Germanic law. Indeed, the Carolingian dynasty valued Jews as revenue-producing, law-abiding believers in God. The relentless hostility of the Catholic Church, however, led to the steady stripping of legal protections from Jews and the imposing of harsher and harsher legal constraints. (To their credit, both Karl-lo-magne and his son Louis the Pious resisted the Church’s demands that Jews be stripped of rights, but the collapse of Carolingian power removed that block.)

It was only with a process of de-Christianisation of law that Jews were able to enjoy full legal protections. By the middle of the C19th, places where a monopoly Catholic or Orthodox Christian Church had the most power (the Papal states, Tsarist Russia, Romania) were where oppression of Jews were most intense. During the C19th and early C20th, the Catholic Church put considerable resources into promoting Jew-hatred.

It has been a standard Catholic refrain over the last few centuries that liberal modernity is evil because it gives people rights. Liberal modernity is evil because it gives Jews equal standing law; liberal modernity is evil because it gives women control over their fertility and the right to exit a marriage; liberal modernity is evil because it gives queers equal rights. The Catholic Church has been a strong proponent of the “insult of equality”—that it is an insult to decent, God-fearing Christians that Jews have the same rights as them, that women have control over their lives, that queers have equal rights. All this is even more intensely true in Islam.

Which leads to two questions: why is monotheism so hostile to equal protection of the law? Why has liberal modernity successively embraced equal protection of the law?


[Read the rest at Skepticlawyer.]

Blatant internet plug

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She also makes great kimchi, but only for family and invited guests :)