Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Democrats and Dunkin' Donuts
As you have surely noticed, many businesses are organized as franchises. Fast-food restaurants, some auto-repair shops, and car dealers are examples. The point I want to make here is how these businesses advertise: centrally. GM does not take its advertising budget and hand it out to its dealerships to buy ads, nor does Perdue hand over its advertising dollars to its chicken farmers. Nearly all advertising in national franchises is done nationally. And I doubt the franchisees would wish it otherwise; it's hard to believe that Ernie Boch Toyota could do a better job of advertising the Camry than Toyota could.
Yet no one ever does this in politics. The job of the House and Senate campaign committees, and of the national committees, is to raise money for individual candidates to use on making their own commercials. Why does national advertising make sense for Dunkin' Donuts, but not for Democrats?
"All politics is local!" someone will say, meaning that voters really only care about local issues. Well (sorry, ghost of Tip O'Neill), that's not true. Democrats are having a tough time this year all over the country. This is not some bizarre coincidence; the fortunes of politicians of a particular party tend to rise and fall together. After all, some of the determinants of burger sales are local, too, but that doesn't mean a Hardee's franchise is worth as much as a McDonald's franchise. Even supposing that a Hardee's burger is better suited to local tastes, I'd rather own a McDonald's franchise, because it's a brand name supported by a lot of advertising.
Clearly, Democrats have a brand-name problem. But before they decide that people don't like their product, they need to make sure people know what it is. And when misinformation is being spread nationally, why rely on locals to deal with it? In New Hampshire, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is running an ad accusing Paul Hodes, the Democratic candidate for Senate, of having voted for a "government takeover" of health care. Why should individual candidates be the ones to deal with this nonsense? (Especially since some of them don't seem to have the spine for it. Instead of hitting back, Hodes is running an ad which doesn't mention that he's a Democrat--the equivalent of running a burger ad and hoping people won't notice that you're a Hardee's. Coincidentally, the ad uses a hot-dog eating contest as a metaphor for those awful people in Congress.)
If we really are moving toward an increasingly polarized politics (which I think is, given the American constitutional system, not a good thing), let's have the parties duke it out one-on-one, with advertising and slogans and idiotic sound bites and the whole thing. At least then people would know what they're voting for. More or less.
Yet no one ever does this in politics. The job of the House and Senate campaign committees, and of the national committees, is to raise money for individual candidates to use on making their own commercials. Why does national advertising make sense for Dunkin' Donuts, but not for Democrats?
"All politics is local!" someone will say, meaning that voters really only care about local issues. Well (sorry, ghost of Tip O'Neill), that's not true. Democrats are having a tough time this year all over the country. This is not some bizarre coincidence; the fortunes of politicians of a particular party tend to rise and fall together. After all, some of the determinants of burger sales are local, too, but that doesn't mean a Hardee's franchise is worth as much as a McDonald's franchise. Even supposing that a Hardee's burger is better suited to local tastes, I'd rather own a McDonald's franchise, because it's a brand name supported by a lot of advertising.
Clearly, Democrats have a brand-name problem. But before they decide that people don't like their product, they need to make sure people know what it is. And when misinformation is being spread nationally, why rely on locals to deal with it? In New Hampshire, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is running an ad accusing Paul Hodes, the Democratic candidate for Senate, of having voted for a "government takeover" of health care. Why should individual candidates be the ones to deal with this nonsense? (Especially since some of them don't seem to have the spine for it. Instead of hitting back, Hodes is running an ad which doesn't mention that he's a Democrat--the equivalent of running a burger ad and hoping people won't notice that you're a Hardee's. Coincidentally, the ad uses a hot-dog eating contest as a metaphor for those awful people in Congress.)
If we really are moving toward an increasingly polarized politics (which I think is, given the American constitutional system, not a good thing), let's have the parties duke it out one-on-one, with advertising and slogans and idiotic sound bites and the whole thing. At least then people would know what they're voting for. More or less.
Why Californians Should Vote for Prop 19
In a nutshell, to keep us from destroying Mexico.
California's Proposition 19 would legalize possession and cultivation of small amounts of marijuana. The big argument people have been making in favor is that it would generate maybe $1 billion in tax revenue in a state with a huge budget crisis.
But I would say that the strongest argument is not fiscal but moral. You can't have missed the reports of the huge wave of drug-related violence in Mexico recently. It started after Mexico decided it had to take on the cartels, lest they end up controlling the government. As a result, hundreds of Mexican cops, soldiers, politicians, journalists, and bystanders have been killed.
What is rarely mentioned is that this violence is being funded by U.S. drug consumers. And so is the corruption of a nascent democracy. Americans near the border tend to think that Mexico is the problem. No, we are the problem, and it is Mexicans who are paying the price, a very high price.
It is our obligation to stop funding the cartels; unless you think you can successfully organize a boycott of marijuana, it appears that legalization (particularly of cultivation in small quantities) is the only way to do it. According to the RAND Corporation, legalization would lower the price by up to 80%. And there goes all the fun in smuggling pot. (The lower price would increase consumption by, well, who knows? Their guess is consumption might be equivalent to levels of the late '70s. Think Jimmy Carter, not Woodstock.)
True, the cartels' product line isn't limited to pot; it also includes cocaine, meth, and so on. But according to FBI testimony to Congress:
...marijuana is the top revenue generator for Mexican [cartels]—a cash crop that finances corruption and the carnage of violence year after year. The profits derived from marijuana trafficking—an industry with minimal overhead costs, controlled entirely by the traffickers—are used not only to finance other drug enterprises by Mexico’s poly-drug cartels, but also to pay recurring “business” expenses, purchase weapons, and bribe corrupt officials.
Not all of this money comes from California, of course. Nor would eliminating all marijuana profits to the cartels make them disappear. But they would take a big hit to their wallets, and therefore their power. We owe it to Mexico.
California's Proposition 19 would legalize possession and cultivation of small amounts of marijuana. The big argument people have been making in favor is that it would generate maybe $1 billion in tax revenue in a state with a huge budget crisis.
But I would say that the strongest argument is not fiscal but moral. You can't have missed the reports of the huge wave of drug-related violence in Mexico recently. It started after Mexico decided it had to take on the cartels, lest they end up controlling the government. As a result, hundreds of Mexican cops, soldiers, politicians, journalists, and bystanders have been killed.
What is rarely mentioned is that this violence is being funded by U.S. drug consumers. And so is the corruption of a nascent democracy. Americans near the border tend to think that Mexico is the problem. No, we are the problem, and it is Mexicans who are paying the price, a very high price.
It is our obligation to stop funding the cartels; unless you think you can successfully organize a boycott of marijuana, it appears that legalization (particularly of cultivation in small quantities) is the only way to do it. According to the RAND Corporation, legalization would lower the price by up to 80%. And there goes all the fun in smuggling pot. (The lower price would increase consumption by, well, who knows? Their guess is consumption might be equivalent to levels of the late '70s. Think Jimmy Carter, not Woodstock.)
True, the cartels' product line isn't limited to pot; it also includes cocaine, meth, and so on. But according to FBI testimony to Congress:
...marijuana is the top revenue generator for Mexican [cartels]—a cash crop that finances corruption and the carnage of violence year after year. The profits derived from marijuana trafficking—an industry with minimal overhead costs, controlled entirely by the traffickers—are used not only to finance other drug enterprises by Mexico’s poly-drug cartels, but also to pay recurring “business” expenses, purchase weapons, and bribe corrupt officials.
Not all of this money comes from California, of course. Nor would eliminating all marijuana profits to the cartels make them disappear. But they would take a big hit to their wallets, and therefore their power. We owe it to Mexico.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Redstate Revisited
After my deeply untraumatic experience of being banned by Redstate.com, I was curious about what the reaction had been to my post. So a friend who will remain nameless went to the site and copied the thread for me.
To recap, a Redstate regular contributor (named Vladimir) had posted an article about how those crazy Democrats were proposing to raise the liability cap on oil spills to $20 billion or even remove it, how this would turn the Gulf coast into a ghost town, and how the likely result was $8 a gallon gasoline. There were two sorts of response. The first was from people who offered technical discussion of exploratory versus production wells and the Brent spot price (along with discussion of how crazy, or evil, the Democrats were).
The second was more along the lines of this: "Nothing more enjoyable than causing misery. Plus, if everybody’s income goes down, if people suffer more, won’t they turn to government for help? How can the collectivists lose? They just vote themselves raises and move on," and "I know this is all part of the sob’s in charge grand plan to destroy this country and if he cant get crap and tax [I think this is a reference to cap and trade] through the Senate this will do just fine."
Which brings us to my comment (under the name of one of my heroes from fiction) and the responses I never saw, starting with Neil, one of the ironically titled "moderators" at Redstate:
I don't get it
panzer Tuesday, July 27th at 3:52PM EDT
Sorry, Vladimir, I don’t see why the government is getting involved at all. Why should the government be subsidizing the industry by setting liability limits? Nobody puts limits on my liability when I drive. If drilling is so safe, insurance will be cheap. If it’s not, why should we say don’t worry about the damage you do to everyone else? Let the market decide.
G'bye
Neil Stevens Tuesday, July 27th at 4:05PM EDT [Thirteen minutes later!]
Nice try, but you can’t bootstrap a small government argument that way, when it’s the government that is enforcing this liability to begin with.
These liability laws are passed on the grounds that making people pay for this kind of spill is for the greater good, but we can also decide a cap is also for the greater good.
Because we need oil, thanks to you leftys who short-sightedly ban shallow water drilling so much.
Actually, I have an answer for that, Mr. panzer.
Vladimir Tuesday, July 27th at 5:55PM EDT
Nobody ever, ever, ever suggested that an oil company’s (or a tanker company’s) liability be limited as to the cost of cleaning up the spill.
Anybody who spills oil into the waters of the United States is absolutely liable for the cleanup costs, even if it puts them out of business.
What is at issue, and what liability limits cap, are economic damages. I imagine that there is a joint in Bozeman, MT that can make a claim of being economically damaged by the BP spill since they don’t have their regular supply of shrimp for All-You-Can-Eat Thursdays.
The concept of liability limits was to put smaller firms on a competitive footing with larger ones, since smaller firms could never hang with the cost of litigating all the potential (and some specious) claims that might arise from a spill of this magnitude.
You may disagree, and that’s fine (we’ll never know, R.I.P.), but at least that’s the rationale for why the limits were there in the first place. If you prefer that the biggest companies always have a competitive advantage, that’s cool.
But whatever it is, it ain’t a “subsidy”.
Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down. - Ernest Hemingway
Alas, Vlad, I won't have the chance of responding to you there, but in case you ever find your way here, here are replies to Neil's comment and to yours:
Neil: Please don't interrupt when the grownups are talking. I never had any intention of making a small-government argument; I was making an argument about the relative efficacy of markets and government-imposed solutions. Yes, it is true that you can refer to our civil-law system as "government," as long as you're comfortable with the statement, "The entire private sector would quickly grind to a halt without government." Yes, it is true that that we can change the civil-liability system; the question is whether that change will make the market work better or worse. Drop me a line when you've read Posner and we'll talk.
Vlad: If you're saying oil companies drilling in the Gulf should be liable for damage they cause in the Gulf but not in Bozeman, MT, I'm OK with that. But I don't think that's what the current law says. It says that any damage above a very low cap is not their problem.
I don't understand this distinction you're making between "economic" damages and other damages. Apparently you think that oil companies should be responsible for cleaning up the oil they spill, but not for the damage they cause if they fail. If you think about it, you'll see that a rule like that doesn't give companies any reason to invest money in effective cleanup. If, however, we make companies responsible for damages, then they will have the appropriate incentive to invest (but not overinvest) in cleanup, without government needing to tell them what the right amount is.
As for subsidies, in effect we're saying, "Do something risky and if you succeed you can keep all the profits. If you fail, we'll pay the bill." Doesn't that sound a bit like what we told the banks? By putting a cap on liability we're giving oil companies something of value-- that's the point, after all-- by telling them we'll pick up the bill if things go wrong. If a loan guarantee is a subsidy, then that's a subsidy. As for the independents, if we're so worried about them that we're cutting them a break on liability, why are we cutting the same break to the majors who could afford to pay for the damage they cause?
And btw, what's the deal with your friend Neil? Is he afraid that he'll turn out not to be as smart as those "leftys" [sic] he scorns? (If that's his fear, I'm afraid it's justified.) Has he named himself the Inquisitor of the Church of Redstate, whose job it is to keep the simple faithful from being confused by heretics? Don't you find it all kind of embarrassing?
Finally, Vlad, I've got $500 that says we won't see $8/gallon gas during Obama's current term. Interested?
To recap, a Redstate regular contributor (named Vladimir) had posted an article about how those crazy Democrats were proposing to raise the liability cap on oil spills to $20 billion or even remove it, how this would turn the Gulf coast into a ghost town, and how the likely result was $8 a gallon gasoline. There were two sorts of response. The first was from people who offered technical discussion of exploratory versus production wells and the Brent spot price (along with discussion of how crazy, or evil, the Democrats were).
The second was more along the lines of this: "Nothing more enjoyable than causing misery. Plus, if everybody’s income goes down, if people suffer more, won’t they turn to government for help? How can the collectivists lose? They just vote themselves raises and move on," and "I know this is all part of the sob’s in charge grand plan to destroy this country and if he cant get crap and tax [I think this is a reference to cap and trade] through the Senate this will do just fine."
Which brings us to my comment (under the name of one of my heroes from fiction) and the responses I never saw, starting with Neil, one of the ironically titled "moderators" at Redstate:
I don't get it
panzer Tuesday, July 27th at 3:52PM EDT
Sorry, Vladimir, I don’t see why the government is getting involved at all. Why should the government be subsidizing the industry by setting liability limits? Nobody puts limits on my liability when I drive. If drilling is so safe, insurance will be cheap. If it’s not, why should we say don’t worry about the damage you do to everyone else? Let the market decide.
G'bye
Neil Stevens Tuesday, July 27th at 4:05PM EDT [Thirteen minutes later!]
Nice try, but you can’t bootstrap a small government argument that way, when it’s the government that is enforcing this liability to begin with.
These liability laws are passed on the grounds that making people pay for this kind of spill is for the greater good, but we can also decide a cap is also for the greater good.
Because we need oil, thanks to you leftys who short-sightedly ban shallow water drilling so much.
Actually, I have an answer for that, Mr. panzer.
Vladimir Tuesday, July 27th at 5:55PM EDT
Nobody ever, ever, ever suggested that an oil company’s (or a tanker company’s) liability be limited as to the cost of cleaning up the spill.
Anybody who spills oil into the waters of the United States is absolutely liable for the cleanup costs, even if it puts them out of business.
What is at issue, and what liability limits cap, are economic damages. I imagine that there is a joint in Bozeman, MT that can make a claim of being economically damaged by the BP spill since they don’t have their regular supply of shrimp for All-You-Can-Eat Thursdays.
The concept of liability limits was to put smaller firms on a competitive footing with larger ones, since smaller firms could never hang with the cost of litigating all the potential (and some specious) claims that might arise from a spill of this magnitude.
You may disagree, and that’s fine (we’ll never know, R.I.P.), but at least that’s the rationale for why the limits were there in the first place. If you prefer that the biggest companies always have a competitive advantage, that’s cool.
But whatever it is, it ain’t a “subsidy”.
Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down. - Ernest Hemingway
Alas, Vlad, I won't have the chance of responding to you there, but in case you ever find your way here, here are replies to Neil's comment and to yours:
Neil: Please don't interrupt when the grownups are talking. I never had any intention of making a small-government argument; I was making an argument about the relative efficacy of markets and government-imposed solutions. Yes, it is true that you can refer to our civil-law system as "government," as long as you're comfortable with the statement, "The entire private sector would quickly grind to a halt without government." Yes, it is true that that we can change the civil-liability system; the question is whether that change will make the market work better or worse. Drop me a line when you've read Posner and we'll talk.
Vlad: If you're saying oil companies drilling in the Gulf should be liable for damage they cause in the Gulf but not in Bozeman, MT, I'm OK with that. But I don't think that's what the current law says. It says that any damage above a very low cap is not their problem.
I don't understand this distinction you're making between "economic" damages and other damages. Apparently you think that oil companies should be responsible for cleaning up the oil they spill, but not for the damage they cause if they fail. If you think about it, you'll see that a rule like that doesn't give companies any reason to invest money in effective cleanup. If, however, we make companies responsible for damages, then they will have the appropriate incentive to invest (but not overinvest) in cleanup, without government needing to tell them what the right amount is.
As for subsidies, in effect we're saying, "Do something risky and if you succeed you can keep all the profits. If you fail, we'll pay the bill." Doesn't that sound a bit like what we told the banks? By putting a cap on liability we're giving oil companies something of value-- that's the point, after all-- by telling them we'll pick up the bill if things go wrong. If a loan guarantee is a subsidy, then that's a subsidy. As for the independents, if we're so worried about them that we're cutting them a break on liability, why are we cutting the same break to the majors who could afford to pay for the damage they cause?
And btw, what's the deal with your friend Neil? Is he afraid that he'll turn out not to be as smart as those "leftys" [sic] he scorns? (If that's his fear, I'm afraid it's justified.) Has he named himself the Inquisitor of the Church of Redstate, whose job it is to keep the simple faithful from being confused by heretics? Don't you find it all kind of embarrassing?
Finally, Vlad, I've got $500 that says we won't see $8/gallon gas during Obama's current term. Interested?
Terrorists and Freedom Fighters: A Quick Murk-Reduction
There are few phrases that irritate me more than "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Last Tuesday on NPR we got the unusual reversed form, when Michele Norris said, "But as you know, one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist."
My point is neither the rhetorical difference nor the logical equivalence between these two versions of the phrase. My point is the idea that animates both: that some people are terrorists (bad) and others are freedom fighters (good), and it's essentially subjective whom you assign to which group. This has given many in the news media the cover to refuse to describe anyone as a terrorist ("militant" is a popular, if almost meaningless, alternative).
The result has been less informative news. In particular, while it may be questionable to describe organizations as terrorist (just as it's questionable to describe individuals as "evil," implying some fixed nature), there are clearly actions that can be called terrorist.
So let's start with a definition of terrorism. Let's say that terrorism is the deliberate targeting for violence of noncombatants in a conflict, in order to induce fear. This practice is generally regarded today as barbaric, and indeed criminal. Note that under this definition, not only were Guernica and the London blitz acts of terrorism, but some of the Allied bombing in World War II was as well. I think the definition is still worth using for the sake of having a clear line: deliberate targeting of civilians is terrorism.
So where does that leave freedom fighters? An analogy is useful. In the Bosnian war, and many others, we saw the systematic and large-scale use of rape as a weapon of war. Did the Serbian soldiers consider themselves freedom fighters? Probably. Yet I have never heard a single person say, "One man's rapist is another man's freedom fighter." The absurdity of such a statement is too obvious: one can be a freedom fighter, at least in one's own mind, and still be a rapist. Being a freedom fighter does not excuse rape; rather, rape demeans the fight for freedom. And similarly for terrorism.
The mistaken idea that terrorism and freedom-fighting are mutually exclusive, then, leads to the mistaken idea that terrorism is a purely subjective matter. And that leads to the current tendency to use "terrorism" to mean "anything I don't like." I recently heard a British academic say that he would accept calling certain actions of Hamas terrorism, if he could call the building of West Bank settlements terrorism. Now, there are many things you could call the building of West Bank settlements. You could make a case, at least, that they are destructive, unjust, even illegal. But you can't call them marzipan, and you can't call them terrorism, because they're not. Baruch Goldstein was a terrorist because he opened fire in a mosque full of civilians, not because he lived in a settlement. And, contrary to an assertion I heard recently on TV, the Somali pirates are not terrorists. They're pirates.
In fairness to Norris, she was the less confused one in the interview. The subject was the woman who organized the shooting attack by Puerto Rican nationalists in the U.S. Capitol in 1954. Norris asked the president of the National Institute for Latino Policy:
NORRIS: Did she consider what she did terrorism?
Mr. FALCON: No, no, she was basically - saw herself as a freedom fighter for the freedom of Puerto Rico.
NORRIS: But as you know, one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist. I'm wondering about the people who were injured that day on Capitol Hill or the others who were probably trying to flee to safety, hearing this hail of bullet fire coming down from the gallery. And I can't imagine that they would use that word to describe her.
Mr. FALCON: Oh, I wasn't referring to them. I mean, freedom fighters against the United States. They walked into the central, one of the central institutions of the United States and fired upon that institution.
I wasn't referring to them? No, apologists for terrorism rarely refer to the victims. Consider them freedom fighters if you want, Mr. Falcon, but they're also terrorists.
This is an important issue. It takes humanity a long time to come to a new moral consensus. We appear to be coming to one about deliberate killing of civilians. Let's not lose our focus.
My point is neither the rhetorical difference nor the logical equivalence between these two versions of the phrase. My point is the idea that animates both: that some people are terrorists (bad) and others are freedom fighters (good), and it's essentially subjective whom you assign to which group. This has given many in the news media the cover to refuse to describe anyone as a terrorist ("militant" is a popular, if almost meaningless, alternative).
The result has been less informative news. In particular, while it may be questionable to describe organizations as terrorist (just as it's questionable to describe individuals as "evil," implying some fixed nature), there are clearly actions that can be called terrorist.
So let's start with a definition of terrorism. Let's say that terrorism is the deliberate targeting for violence of noncombatants in a conflict, in order to induce fear. This practice is generally regarded today as barbaric, and indeed criminal. Note that under this definition, not only were Guernica and the London blitz acts of terrorism, but some of the Allied bombing in World War II was as well. I think the definition is still worth using for the sake of having a clear line: deliberate targeting of civilians is terrorism.
So where does that leave freedom fighters? An analogy is useful. In the Bosnian war, and many others, we saw the systematic and large-scale use of rape as a weapon of war. Did the Serbian soldiers consider themselves freedom fighters? Probably. Yet I have never heard a single person say, "One man's rapist is another man's freedom fighter." The absurdity of such a statement is too obvious: one can be a freedom fighter, at least in one's own mind, and still be a rapist. Being a freedom fighter does not excuse rape; rather, rape demeans the fight for freedom. And similarly for terrorism.
The mistaken idea that terrorism and freedom-fighting are mutually exclusive, then, leads to the mistaken idea that terrorism is a purely subjective matter. And that leads to the current tendency to use "terrorism" to mean "anything I don't like." I recently heard a British academic say that he would accept calling certain actions of Hamas terrorism, if he could call the building of West Bank settlements terrorism. Now, there are many things you could call the building of West Bank settlements. You could make a case, at least, that they are destructive, unjust, even illegal. But you can't call them marzipan, and you can't call them terrorism, because they're not. Baruch Goldstein was a terrorist because he opened fire in a mosque full of civilians, not because he lived in a settlement. And, contrary to an assertion I heard recently on TV, the Somali pirates are not terrorists. They're pirates.
In fairness to Norris, she was the less confused one in the interview. The subject was the woman who organized the shooting attack by Puerto Rican nationalists in the U.S. Capitol in 1954. Norris asked the president of the National Institute for Latino Policy:
NORRIS: Did she consider what she did terrorism?
Mr. FALCON: No, no, she was basically - saw herself as a freedom fighter for the freedom of Puerto Rico.
NORRIS: But as you know, one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist. I'm wondering about the people who were injured that day on Capitol Hill or the others who were probably trying to flee to safety, hearing this hail of bullet fire coming down from the gallery. And I can't imagine that they would use that word to describe her.
Mr. FALCON: Oh, I wasn't referring to them. I mean, freedom fighters against the United States. They walked into the central, one of the central institutions of the United States and fired upon that institution.
I wasn't referring to them? No, apologists for terrorism rarely refer to the victims. Consider them freedom fighters if you want, Mr. Falcon, but they're also terrorists.
This is an important issue. It takes humanity a long time to come to a new moral consensus. We appear to be coming to one about deliberate killing of civilians. Let's not lose our focus.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
I Join the Crowd: Banned by Redstate
You may recall my recent posting suggesting that people periodically read websites they disagree with, and if unconvinced, politely disagree. Following my own advice, I went to Redstate.com and browsed a little. I came across a posting in which someone was criticizing recent moves by Democrats to raise the liability limit for oil spills to $20 billion, or even remove it altogether. The author was claiming that this was equivalent to making every driver buy incredibly expensive liability coverage for wildly improbable events.
I politely disagreed (after first registering, and then waiting a couple days for my registration to age before I was allowed to post). Why, I asked, should government be involved at all? Why should it be subsidizing oil companies by limiting their liability? If accidents are really wildly improbable, then insurance will be cheap. Why not let the market take care of it?
Not an absolutely invulnerable argument, but nothing there, you will agree, that should offend the sensibilities of any conservative. Against government intervention? For free markets? My reply was posted. A few days later I went back to see if there were any replies, as people are wont to do in a discussion.
Or rather, I tried to. Every time I tried to get to the site, whether via Google or by typing directly into my address bar, I got an error message. Specifically, it said: "601 Database redigestation error."
Redigestation? Redigestation? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Genuinely puzzled, I typed "redigestation" into Google. It turns out I'm part of quite a trend. All over the Internet, people are getting the message, "601 Database redigestation error." All these people have tried to log into Redstate.com. And all have previously posted comments disagreeing with something on the site.
It's not a computer error at all. In fact, it's become a bit of an Internet scandal. Wikipedia says [footnotes deleted]:
The site's moderators have been criticized for banning some users who disagree or dissent permanently from the site. Responses to any viewpoints deemed unwanted by site moderators have included replacing all of a person's diaries with messages designed to be offensive. Banned users may be accused of being "progressive trolls" or "moby," the latter being a person with over-the-top political positions making conservatives look bad. Banned users may be greeted with an error message reading "601 Database redigestation error." The site moderators' behavior is a topic of discussion among moderate conservatives and internet discussion sites.
Not just moderate conservatives, actually. One moderate-conservative site has a thread of posts from more than fifty people who got the purported error message. They include liberals, moderate conservatives,and some fairly extreme conservatives, all of whom disagreed with something posted on the site. A few people insist that all these people who think they're blocked just haven't tried hard enough, and one poor sap even says that this is a Microsoft error message (it's not). Please note, by the way, that I am not only blocked from posting, but even from seeing the site, even via links on other sites.
This is pretty disturbing. The site is not an obscure one. Its founder was recently hired by CNN as a political commentator despite, or because of, a history of making bizarrely vitriolic comments, like calling Justice Souter a child-molester and, let's say, a person who engages in bestiality with goats. Oh, and saying that he assumes "Obama's Marxist harpy wife would go Lorena Bobbit on him" if he were cheating on her.
So I'm not exactly crushed to be judged unworthy of participation in the feast of reason at Redstate.com. But I am a bit depressed that denizens of the house of mirrors are trying so hard to exclude the outside world. Shouldn't the ideologically fervent want to convince people? Shouldn't patriotic Americans see polarization of the country as a bad thing? (Of course, I also keep expecting Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe to admit they've failed their countries dismally, and so far no luck there.)
Oh, well. On to Townhall.com ("Where you opinion counts"). Let's hope their database redigestates properly.
I politely disagreed (after first registering, and then waiting a couple days for my registration to age before I was allowed to post). Why, I asked, should government be involved at all? Why should it be subsidizing oil companies by limiting their liability? If accidents are really wildly improbable, then insurance will be cheap. Why not let the market take care of it?
Not an absolutely invulnerable argument, but nothing there, you will agree, that should offend the sensibilities of any conservative. Against government intervention? For free markets? My reply was posted. A few days later I went back to see if there were any replies, as people are wont to do in a discussion.
Or rather, I tried to. Every time I tried to get to the site, whether via Google or by typing directly into my address bar, I got an error message. Specifically, it said: "601 Database redigestation error."
Redigestation? Redigestation? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Genuinely puzzled, I typed "redigestation" into Google. It turns out I'm part of quite a trend. All over the Internet, people are getting the message, "601 Database redigestation error." All these people have tried to log into Redstate.com. And all have previously posted comments disagreeing with something on the site.
It's not a computer error at all. In fact, it's become a bit of an Internet scandal. Wikipedia says [footnotes deleted]:
The site's moderators have been criticized for banning some users who disagree or dissent permanently from the site. Responses to any viewpoints deemed unwanted by site moderators have included replacing all of a person's diaries with messages designed to be offensive. Banned users may be accused of being "progressive trolls" or "moby," the latter being a person with over-the-top political positions making conservatives look bad. Banned users may be greeted with an error message reading "601 Database redigestation error." The site moderators' behavior is a topic of discussion among moderate conservatives and internet discussion sites.
Not just moderate conservatives, actually. One moderate-conservative site has a thread of posts from more than fifty people who got the purported error message. They include liberals, moderate conservatives,and some fairly extreme conservatives, all of whom disagreed with something posted on the site. A few people insist that all these people who think they're blocked just haven't tried hard enough, and one poor sap even says that this is a Microsoft error message (it's not). Please note, by the way, that I am not only blocked from posting, but even from seeing the site, even via links on other sites.
This is pretty disturbing. The site is not an obscure one. Its founder was recently hired by CNN as a political commentator despite, or because of, a history of making bizarrely vitriolic comments, like calling Justice Souter a child-molester and, let's say, a person who engages in bestiality with goats. Oh, and saying that he assumes "Obama's Marxist harpy wife would go Lorena Bobbit on him" if he were cheating on her.
So I'm not exactly crushed to be judged unworthy of participation in the feast of reason at Redstate.com. But I am a bit depressed that denizens of the house of mirrors are trying so hard to exclude the outside world. Shouldn't the ideologically fervent want to convince people? Shouldn't patriotic Americans see polarization of the country as a bad thing? (Of course, I also keep expecting Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe to admit they've failed their countries dismally, and so far no luck there.)
Oh, well. On to Townhall.com ("Where you opinion counts"). Let's hope their database redigestates properly.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
BP's Sterling Character
Remember the Anglophobia phobia and all the talk of how BP was a British national icon, so Americans should stop saying such mean things? I do. It looks like that was pretty much a scam. Now everybody's fine with the national icon having an American CEO. An AP reporter comments, "While residents of Paris or Rome might be chagrined to see a foreigner running one of their country's corporate giants, politicians and the public here appear relaxed about it." She goes on to quote the editor of a British business magazine: "British investors care about one thing and one thing alone, and that is the share price."
And that, of course, is what the American bad-mouthing of BP really jeopardized. How crass. One doesn't like to stereotype, but obviously Dickens was right when he made Fagin a Briton.
And that, of course, is what the American bad-mouthing of BP really jeopardized. How crass. One doesn't like to stereotype, but obviously Dickens was right when he made Fagin a Briton.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
News From the Fringe
1. Fringe? Us? You may have seen the story of the Iowa Tea Party billboard featuring pictures of Hitler, Obama, and Lenin, with the titles, respectively, "National Socialism," "Democrat Socialism," and "Marxist Socialism." If not, it's worth a look just for the photo. (Update: The billboard has been papered over, but you can still see the photo.) A few quick remarks:
"If we're going to take our country back, we've got to remember where we came from — not only as adults, but we need to teach our children," said Tim Fairfield, one of the teachers, who wore a three-cornered hat at the opening class of Vacation Liberty School....organizers say the program has drawn interest from people looking to start new chapters in Ohio, Colorado, New York, Florida and other communities in Kentucky.
The curriculum includes "understanding the falsehoods of separation of church and state," but it's not all dry lectures. Students simulated the oppression of colonial-era England by being told they must suppress their laughter, sit apart from their friends and flawlessly recite "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." Then after a difficult journey to America, they recreated the practices of John Winthrop and Cotton Mather by playing basketball, tossing beanbags, and riding a teeter-totter, while being showered with confetti.
After history, time for social studies. Students were given water pistols to shoot soap bubbles out of the air. They discovered that they could do it more quickly by refilling from individual buckets of water than from a collective one, thus demonstrating the superiority of the free enterprise system to secular communism. Good thing they weren't playing basketball in this part.
3. The Hall of Mirrors: Further Reflections. I was reading a few of the two thousand comments on a news story about the car bomb in Mexico, when I came across an utterly irrelevant comment. (This was not in itself surprising, as the same writer had posted several comments on the same story which were quotations from Thomas Jefferson about the evils of big government.) In this comment, he was inveighing (oyveighing? McVeighing?) against a recent statement by Sen. Chris Dodd, to the effect that a Republican attempt to require a 5% down payment on all mortgages was bad because it "would restrict home ownership to only those who can afford it." "You can't make up stuff like this!" he crowed.
As it turns out, though, you can. Dodd never made the statement. It comes from a "satirical" posting on a conservative website, and it immediately spread across the Internet. When I talked recently about politics blogs being like two mirrors facing each other and creating the impression of a vast corridor, I was thinking of opinions, not of the endless propagation of Internet urban legends. (Though since the Sherrod affair, that aspect has become more obvious.)
Anyway, this time I decided to look into the sociology a bit, and try to reconstruct some chronological order on this "quotation."
May 15, 2010: azconserv1.wordpress.com; labeled By John Semmens: Semi-News — A Satirical Look at Recent News
May 15: freerepublic.com; labeled A Semi-News/Semi-Satire From AzConservative
June 1: congress.org; letter to Rep. David Obey from a constituent
June 4: townhall.com; reader comment
June 6: libertymaven.com
June 6: blogs.forbes.com (breakout into mainstream media)
June 7: yallpolitics.com; reader comment
June 7: lucianne.com; reader comment
June7: libnot.com
June 7: kpbj.com
June 8: factcheck.org: Debunked
June 11: inthisdimension.com
June 15: starcourier.com (Kewanee, Illinois)
June 18: truthorfiction.com: Debunked
June 20: snopes.com: Debunked
June 25: lexelibertas.blogspot.com
July 7: preparedsociety.com (survivalists)
Sociologically, what is interesting is how much this looks like a classic Internet rumor-spreading, with much of it going on through individuals rather than formal (even by Internet standards) outlets. As for Mr. Semmens, whose other rib-ticklers include "Hispanic Caucus Wants Illegals to Be Covered by Obamacare," "Justice Department Rebuffs Inquiry on Kagan Pay," and "President Calls Sherrod Firing 'Racist,'" two points. First, you're no Jon Stewart. Second, there gets to be a fine line between satire and lying.
4. Ingratitude. The AP recently reported that the California Highway Patrol arrested a man involved in a shootout with them on a freeway, who told them that he had been planning attacks on the ACLU and a liberal-leaning foundation in San Francisco. The most disturbing thing about this story is that it's so funny: as you peel the layers off the onion, there's a punchline under each one.
- One surprise for me was the comment of a leader of the national Tea Party Patriots, who not only made the obvious political point that, "It's going to make people think that the tea party is full of a bunch of right-wing fringe people," but added, "When you compare Obama to Hitler, that to me does a disservice to the Jews who both survived and died in the Holocaust and to the Germans who lived under Nazi regime rule." I predict a brief career in the movement for Shelby Blakely.
- Less surprising is the comment of the Iowa coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, who said that the billboard was offensive and unproductive, but he can understand the North Iowa group's feeling that Obama is "Hitler-esque." What does that even mean? That he has a little mustache? That he plans to annex Manitoba? That he has caused literally millions of people to be loaded into boxcars and sent to death camps?
- Finally, in the Sad Irony department we have the caption for the billboard: "Radical Leaders Prey on the Fearful & Naive." I would suggest that as a motto for the movement: "The Tea Party Wants You-- Because Radical Leaders Prey on the Fearful and Naive."
"If we're going to take our country back, we've got to remember where we came from — not only as adults, but we need to teach our children," said Tim Fairfield, one of the teachers, who wore a three-cornered hat at the opening class of Vacation Liberty School....organizers say the program has drawn interest from people looking to start new chapters in Ohio, Colorado, New York, Florida and other communities in Kentucky.
The curriculum includes "understanding the falsehoods of separation of church and state," but it's not all dry lectures. Students simulated the oppression of colonial-era England by being told they must suppress their laughter, sit apart from their friends and flawlessly recite "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." Then after a difficult journey to America, they recreated the practices of John Winthrop and Cotton Mather by playing basketball, tossing beanbags, and riding a teeter-totter, while being showered with confetti.
After history, time for social studies. Students were given water pistols to shoot soap bubbles out of the air. They discovered that they could do it more quickly by refilling from individual buckets of water than from a collective one, thus demonstrating the superiority of the free enterprise system to secular communism. Good thing they weren't playing basketball in this part.
3. The Hall of Mirrors: Further Reflections. I was reading a few of the two thousand comments on a news story about the car bomb in Mexico, when I came across an utterly irrelevant comment. (This was not in itself surprising, as the same writer had posted several comments on the same story which were quotations from Thomas Jefferson about the evils of big government.) In this comment, he was inveighing (oyveighing? McVeighing?) against a recent statement by Sen. Chris Dodd, to the effect that a Republican attempt to require a 5% down payment on all mortgages was bad because it "would restrict home ownership to only those who can afford it." "You can't make up stuff like this!" he crowed.
As it turns out, though, you can. Dodd never made the statement. It comes from a "satirical" posting on a conservative website, and it immediately spread across the Internet. When I talked recently about politics blogs being like two mirrors facing each other and creating the impression of a vast corridor, I was thinking of opinions, not of the endless propagation of Internet urban legends. (Though since the Sherrod affair, that aspect has become more obvious.)
Anyway, this time I decided to look into the sociology a bit, and try to reconstruct some chronological order on this "quotation."
May 15, 2010: azconserv1.wordpress.com; labeled By John Semmens: Semi-News — A Satirical Look at Recent News
May 15: freerepublic.com; labeled A Semi-News/Semi-Satire From AzConservative
June 1: congress.org; letter to Rep. David Obey from a constituent
June 4: townhall.com; reader comment
June 6: libertymaven.com
June 6: blogs.forbes.com (breakout into mainstream media)
June 7: yallpolitics.com; reader comment
June 7: lucianne.com; reader comment
June7: libnot.com
June 7: kpbj.com
June 8: factcheck.org: Debunked
June 11: inthisdimension.com
June 15: starcourier.com (Kewanee, Illinois)
June 18: truthorfiction.com: Debunked
June 20: snopes.com: Debunked
June 25: lexelibertas.blogspot.com
July 7: preparedsociety.com (survivalists)
Sociologically, what is interesting is how much this looks like a classic Internet rumor-spreading, with much of it going on through individuals rather than formal (even by Internet standards) outlets. As for Mr. Semmens, whose other rib-ticklers include "Hispanic Caucus Wants Illegals to Be Covered by Obamacare," "Justice Department Rebuffs Inquiry on Kagan Pay," and "President Calls Sherrod Firing 'Racist,'" two points. First, you're no Jon Stewart. Second, there gets to be a fine line between satire and lying.
4. Ingratitude. The AP recently reported that the California Highway Patrol arrested a man involved in a shootout with them on a freeway, who told them that he had been planning attacks on the ACLU and a liberal-leaning foundation in San Francisco. The most disturbing thing about this story is that it's so funny: as you peel the layers off the onion, there's a punchline under each one.
- You may recall that former Attorney General Ed Meese once referred to the ACLU as "the criminals' lobby." Apparently not all criminals agree; Mr. Williams had two previous convictions for bank robbery.
- According to the Oakland police, Williams wanted "to start a revolution." Here's a tip for revolutionaries that I read somewhere, possibly Mao's On Guerrilla Warfare: When you're out on parole and you're driving on the freeway carrying three guns and wearing a bulletproof vest, do not speed and weave in and out of traffic.
- His mother told the San Francisco Chronicle her son had been angry with "the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items." This makes sense. After all, who values liberty more than an ex-con? And who values capitalism more than a bank robber?
- Williams was arrested while driving his mother's Toyota Tundra. So he planned to take back our country while driving a Japanese car. Well, it was probably built in San Antonio. By legals.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Saving the Republic: A Primer
You've no doubt noticed that the views represented in Congress these days seem more extreme than in the past, with moderates disappearing. As a result, it has become harder and harder for parties to work together, and therefore harder and harder to get anything done. I don't think even libertarians could rationally consider this a good thing.
A large part of the problem can be attributed to party primaries, as I observed in my post "Bring Back the Smoke-Filled Room." When party nominees are chosen by primary, they represent the mainstream of opinions in their own parties, which may be far from the mainstream of opinion in the country as a whole. Even though candidates start scuttling toward center as soon as they're past the primary, they still have to act in Congress with one eye on the next primary, lest they find at re-election time that their disloyal moderation is still resented by the party faithful. (See under McCain, John.)
It is perhaps a sign of how desperate things have become that people have started seriously discussing alternatives to the party primary. It turns out getting rid of party primaries is fairly easy, as the Constitution gives states a lot of freedom to decide how to run their elections-- no amendment required. There are a couple of prominently proposed replacements.
The Jungle Primary. The simplest alternative is to hold non-partisan primaries, with the top two candidates going on to the general election. This alternative is sometimes referred to as the "jungle primary" (I have no idea why) or the "Louisiana primary." The idea is that now candidates will be able to appeal across the full spectrum of ideologies, rather than having to cater to a narrow slice of it. This alternative was recently urged in an Op-Ed in The New York Times by Phil Kiesling that does a good job of summarizing the "pro" side of the argument. More remarkably, California just passed a ballot measure establishing a non-partisan primary, referred to as "top two," for all elections other than presidential. This, of course, has generated lots of comment pro and con.
Some of the pundits warn of unanticipated consequences-- particularly, that the added expense of appealing to a broad electorate (without a party to pick up the tab) will further empower interest groups and the rich, and force out third parties. But the biggest unknown is: will it work? Will more moderates get elected?
At FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver has done a simulation of the two different electoral systems, and finds that moderate candidates do much better with the jungle primary. His post not only gives a good summary of the logic, but has very pretty bar graphs showing the difference in outcomes (Bactrian versus dromedary, or to be pedestrian, bimodal versus unimodal). I am not wholly convinced by this approach, however. Silver's simulation generates candidate ideologies randomly, but real candidates are likely to adjust their ideologies depending on which other candidates are running-- for example, running as an extremist when many moderates are running. In technical terms, it's less a statistical problem than a game-theoretic one.
Did someone say game theory? Eric Maskin, a Nobel laureate in economics, points out in a reply to Kiesling that a top-two system is essentially what made Jean-Marie Le Pen, an extremist's extremist, a candidate in the final election in France in 2002, pushing aside a candidate who would easily have beaten him in a head-to-head matchup. Similarly, the Louisiana ancestry of this voting system is not reassuring; this is the system that led to David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, getting more than 40% of the vote for the U.S. Senate. True, neither Le Pen nor Duke was elected, but when one of the two final candidates is a wacko, voters could not be said to have a real choice.
There's not much empirical research on the effects of non-partisan primaries. What there is suggests a real but modest moderating effect. We'll have more evidence soon in California.
Instant Runoff Voting. In Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) voters rank-order some or all of the candidates first, second, third, etc. Then the last-place candidate is eliminated and those voters are reassigned to their second choices. This process continues until someone has more than fifty percent of the votes. So there's no need for a runoff; in effect, the primary and the general election are the same.
Like the top-two (jungle) primary, IRV keeps a minority from being gatekeepers to a general election. Unlike the top-two primary, it keeps an extremist from profiting from a split vote among moderates. To my knowledge, no one has mentioned another benefit, which is that it would give much more information on what voters actually intended when they voted for a particular candidate, because we can see whom else those voters liked.
IRV has gotten support from some surprising places recently. Thomas Friedman endorsed it in an op-ed in The New York Times, and even more remarkably, it was used in the last Academy Awards, where it is credited with allowing "The Hurt Locker" to beat "Avatar." It's in use in Australia (in case anyone in America cares about that), and, under the name "alternative voting," it recently became an issue in coalition negotiations in Britain, where the centrist Liberal Democrats have gotten tired of being everyone's second choice. (The Conservatives agreed to hold a referendum on it next year, which should give it more visibility in the US.)
IRV does seem to me to have significant advantages over the jungle primary. It might be a little tricky to make it easy to use with optical scanning, but the main obstacle is probably getting people used to the idea. A good place for some of that "states as laboratories of democracy" stuff that lovers of federalism are always talking about.
What's Wrong With Partisanship? There is a counter-argument that, rather than being a problem, partisanship is a good thing, because it gives voters a clear choice and accountability; voters should know what they are getting when they vote for a party. The argument is stated by Matthew Yglesias here. Moreover, some argue, other countries, such as those in Europe, seem to get along fine without bipartisanship. (See, for example, comment 1 here, and my reply at comment 3.) Even in those parliaments where coalitions are the norm, nobody worries about reaching across the aisle to parties outside the coalition.
The problem with this argument is that we're not a parliamentary system. In our system, extreme partisanship does not produce accountability. It produces paralysis, which is pretty much the opposite of accountability. But we theoretically could, and perhaps should, tinker with the system to make partisanship much more workable. The obvious place to begin would be to eliminate or drastically curtail the filibuster. The Founders listed quite specific situations where supermajorities are required in the Senate, and never intended to make it a body where nothing can happen without three-fifths support. Other Senate rules are even more inimical to accountability, such as the one that allows a single Senator to keep a bill or appointment from coming to the floor.
The argument that paralysis has more to do with structural rules than with partisanship has even more force in California. The surest way to overcome dysfunction there would be to abolish the two-thirds supermajority requirement for tax increases-- itself, ironically, a product of the referendum process as part of Proposition 13. It's going to take an awful lot of moderation to overcome that rule.
But at the Federal level, there are Constitutional limits on how far we can go toward workable partisanship. As long as there's the possibility of a House and Senate, or a Congress and Presidency, controlled by different parties, the parties will have to work together to get anything done. So it looks like we may need to take seriously the idea of reforming the primary system.
A large part of the problem can be attributed to party primaries, as I observed in my post "Bring Back the Smoke-Filled Room." When party nominees are chosen by primary, they represent the mainstream of opinions in their own parties, which may be far from the mainstream of opinion in the country as a whole. Even though candidates start scuttling toward center as soon as they're past the primary, they still have to act in Congress with one eye on the next primary, lest they find at re-election time that their disloyal moderation is still resented by the party faithful. (See under McCain, John.)
It is perhaps a sign of how desperate things have become that people have started seriously discussing alternatives to the party primary. It turns out getting rid of party primaries is fairly easy, as the Constitution gives states a lot of freedom to decide how to run their elections-- no amendment required. There are a couple of prominently proposed replacements.
The Jungle Primary. The simplest alternative is to hold non-partisan primaries, with the top two candidates going on to the general election. This alternative is sometimes referred to as the "jungle primary" (I have no idea why) or the "Louisiana primary." The idea is that now candidates will be able to appeal across the full spectrum of ideologies, rather than having to cater to a narrow slice of it. This alternative was recently urged in an Op-Ed in The New York Times by Phil Kiesling that does a good job of summarizing the "pro" side of the argument. More remarkably, California just passed a ballot measure establishing a non-partisan primary, referred to as "top two," for all elections other than presidential. This, of course, has generated lots of comment pro and con.
Some of the pundits warn of unanticipated consequences-- particularly, that the added expense of appealing to a broad electorate (without a party to pick up the tab) will further empower interest groups and the rich, and force out third parties. But the biggest unknown is: will it work? Will more moderates get elected?
At FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver has done a simulation of the two different electoral systems, and finds that moderate candidates do much better with the jungle primary. His post not only gives a good summary of the logic, but has very pretty bar graphs showing the difference in outcomes (Bactrian versus dromedary, or to be pedestrian, bimodal versus unimodal). I am not wholly convinced by this approach, however. Silver's simulation generates candidate ideologies randomly, but real candidates are likely to adjust their ideologies depending on which other candidates are running-- for example, running as an extremist when many moderates are running. In technical terms, it's less a statistical problem than a game-theoretic one.
Did someone say game theory? Eric Maskin, a Nobel laureate in economics, points out in a reply to Kiesling that a top-two system is essentially what made Jean-Marie Le Pen, an extremist's extremist, a candidate in the final election in France in 2002, pushing aside a candidate who would easily have beaten him in a head-to-head matchup. Similarly, the Louisiana ancestry of this voting system is not reassuring; this is the system that led to David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, getting more than 40% of the vote for the U.S. Senate. True, neither Le Pen nor Duke was elected, but when one of the two final candidates is a wacko, voters could not be said to have a real choice.
There's not much empirical research on the effects of non-partisan primaries. What there is suggests a real but modest moderating effect. We'll have more evidence soon in California.
Instant Runoff Voting. In Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) voters rank-order some or all of the candidates first, second, third, etc. Then the last-place candidate is eliminated and those voters are reassigned to their second choices. This process continues until someone has more than fifty percent of the votes. So there's no need for a runoff; in effect, the primary and the general election are the same.
Like the top-two (jungle) primary, IRV keeps a minority from being gatekeepers to a general election. Unlike the top-two primary, it keeps an extremist from profiting from a split vote among moderates. To my knowledge, no one has mentioned another benefit, which is that it would give much more information on what voters actually intended when they voted for a particular candidate, because we can see whom else those voters liked.
IRV has gotten support from some surprising places recently. Thomas Friedman endorsed it in an op-ed in The New York Times, and even more remarkably, it was used in the last Academy Awards, where it is credited with allowing "The Hurt Locker" to beat "Avatar." It's in use in Australia (in case anyone in America cares about that), and, under the name "alternative voting," it recently became an issue in coalition negotiations in Britain, where the centrist Liberal Democrats have gotten tired of being everyone's second choice. (The Conservatives agreed to hold a referendum on it next year, which should give it more visibility in the US.)
IRV does seem to me to have significant advantages over the jungle primary. It might be a little tricky to make it easy to use with optical scanning, but the main obstacle is probably getting people used to the idea. A good place for some of that "states as laboratories of democracy" stuff that lovers of federalism are always talking about.
What's Wrong With Partisanship? There is a counter-argument that, rather than being a problem, partisanship is a good thing, because it gives voters a clear choice and accountability; voters should know what they are getting when they vote for a party. The argument is stated by Matthew Yglesias here. Moreover, some argue, other countries, such as those in Europe, seem to get along fine without bipartisanship. (See, for example, comment 1 here, and my reply at comment 3.) Even in those parliaments where coalitions are the norm, nobody worries about reaching across the aisle to parties outside the coalition.
The problem with this argument is that we're not a parliamentary system. In our system, extreme partisanship does not produce accountability. It produces paralysis, which is pretty much the opposite of accountability. But we theoretically could, and perhaps should, tinker with the system to make partisanship much more workable. The obvious place to begin would be to eliminate or drastically curtail the filibuster. The Founders listed quite specific situations where supermajorities are required in the Senate, and never intended to make it a body where nothing can happen without three-fifths support. Other Senate rules are even more inimical to accountability, such as the one that allows a single Senator to keep a bill or appointment from coming to the floor.
The argument that paralysis has more to do with structural rules than with partisanship has even more force in California. The surest way to overcome dysfunction there would be to abolish the two-thirds supermajority requirement for tax increases-- itself, ironically, a product of the referendum process as part of Proposition 13. It's going to take an awful lot of moderation to overcome that rule.
But at the Federal level, there are Constitutional limits on how far we can go toward workable partisanship. As long as there's the possibility of a House and Senate, or a Congress and Presidency, controlled by different parties, the parties will have to work together to get anything done. So it looks like we may need to take seriously the idea of reforming the primary system.
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