This new kind of angertainment

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos posted one of his occasional Ukraine updates. In the Kursk region of Russia, where Ukraine invaded their territory, Russian troops retook a major road, putting one area held by Ukraine in a precarious position. In the area west of the city of Donetsk Russia is gaining ground slowly but steadily. Sumner wrote:

Russia isn't walking freely into these areas. Drones and artillery are continuing to extract a high price for Russian advances. But the story of what's happening now near Pokrovsk is essentially the story of this war: Ukraine is extracting a lopsided cost from Russia at every advance, but that cost is not so lopsided that they can stop the Russian advance.

Sumner’s important message of the post is that Russia is getting help from China, Iran, and North Korea. Most of that is weaponry. Some of that is now soldiers. None of them are placing restrictions on how their gifts are used. They don’t fear being drawn into a wider war. That’s different than the US and NATO, who tell Ukraine there are certain things you can’t aim at, and are afraid of a wider war.

The Authoritarian Axis is growing stronger and more committed. And it's not hard to see why the authoritarian regimes are all in. They see Putin's invasion of Ukraine as a chance to defeat and humiliate the West, demonstrate the inferiority of liberal democracies, and open the door for the expansion of their own regimes through aggressive military action. For them, Ukraine is an experiment. If Putin can do this and get away with it, well then ... anything goes. They also see the war in Ukraine as the end of Pax Americana; as the point when the United States steps away from its role as the greatest among equals. If the end of the Cold War was supposed to be a repudiation of international communism, this open military conquest of Ukraine by a brutal dictatorial regime marks the end of stability, the end of democracy, and the end of the progress that's defined the last century. They are making the world safe for large-scale war again.

That’s while the nasty guy obviously sides with the authoritarians. On Fox News he argued the risk of stopping them is too high. That means he fears them too much to stand in their way. Or that’s an excuse. Ted Cruz is one of the worst of the far right senators. Since he is representing Texas one could see his job as secure. Kos of Kos reported that Cruz is only 1 percentage point ahead of his Democratic challenger Colin Allred. Cruz and Allred recently debated and Cruz didn’t fare well. Kos reported the highlights. Here is a bit of what Allred said:

If you don't like how things are going in Washington right now, well, you know what? He is singularly responsible for it. He has introduced this new kind of angertainment where you just get people upset and then you podcast about it and you write a book about it and you make some money on it, but you're not actually there when people need you. Like when the lights went out, when 30 million Texans were relying on a senator to spring into action, he went to Cancún.

Harris went on Fox News for an interview. Yeah, that’s like sticking your head in the mouth of a lion. But she did just fine. Kos discussed his thoughts after watching it.

My original plan was to write a reaction story immediately after the interview, and I’m glad I took the time to digest. That initial reaction was one of anger—Fox anchor Bret Baier was rude, sanctimonious, and wouldn’t let Harris finish her answers. He used right-wing Trumpian frames in every single one of his questions, and even tried to sanewash Donald Trump’s fascist “enemies within” rhetoric. After receiving relentless criticism from the conservative base for scheduling the interview, Baier had clearly decided to give them what they wanted—a rude, combative, red-themed show. In short, Baier did everything we expected a Fox News host on Fox News would do. F that guy!

On reflection Kos found eight ways in which Harris helped her campaign. + She easily refuted the nasty guy’s claim that she’s “slow and lethargic.” He won’t notice (some projection here?), but some of his fans may stop that line of attack. + She handled Baier’s rudeness, showing how tough she is. + Her performance allows squishy conservatives to consider her. + It silences the media claims that she does interviews with only friendly media. + Her performance has annoyed the nasty guy. + She showed she can remain on message in a hostile environment and turn most answers into an indictment of the nasty guy. + She did battle with the enemy and won, giving us more reason to work to get her elected. + Her performance reminded everyone the nasty guy is a coward. He’s done only friendly media. Oliver Willis of Kos wrote that the next morning Fox hosts were quite annoyed with how well Harris did. They complained that she kept talking about the nasty guy (well, he is her opponent). They complained that she was prepared (they’re used to their candidate, who isn’t) and her answers were substantive. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, mentioned the winners of the Nobel Prize in economics. Bill quoted from the Nobel committee’s announcement:

Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson [won] for research that explains why societies with poor rule of law and exploitative institutions do not generate sustainable growth. The three economists “have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity,” the Nobel committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said at the announcement in Stockholm. ... “Reducing the vast differences in income between countries is one of our time’s greatest challenges. The laureates have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for achieving this,” Jakob Svensson, Chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, said. He said their research has provided "a much deeper understanding of the root causes of why countries fail or succeed.”

Some of the related questions explored in this finding (which I heard elsewhere): Was the country colonized for wealth extraction? They tend to remain poor. Was the country able to establish the rule of law after colonization? Those fare much better. An Associate Press article posted on Kos discussed why voter fraud is rare and that there are safeguards to catch it. Yes, it does happen and in 2020 across the six close states there were 475 problematic ballots out of the millions cast. Here are some of the reasons why it is so rare: + American elections are decentralized. The thousands of voting jurisdictions are independent. A large-scale operation to rig enough votes to change an election is almost impossible. + Lies associated with fraudulent voting have hefty fines and prison time. Non citizens are deported, so they won’t risk it. + Voter lists are updated based on death notices and citizens who move to another state (which is different that voter purges). + Absentee and mail ballots have verification protocols. Many states offer ballot tracking tools. + Ballot boxes have security protocols and have ways to prevent a lit match from burning the ballots. A lot of the alleged voting fraud isn’t true and investigations prove that. Even so, the nasty guy and his followers will amplify the claims. An example is a claim of many people registered at the same address. It was nuns who lived together. Another was a person who tried to vote twice who simply forgot they had voted by mail. Yes, there is some fraud in each election. But it is almost impossible to do on a large enough scale to flip an election. In the comments of a pundit roundup exlrrp posted a couple good memes. The first one is about school integration. “The people who threw rocks at Ruby Bridges for trying to go to school in 1960 now are upset their grandchildren might learn about them throwing rocks at Ruby Bridges for trying to go to school.” The second meme uses as its starting point an 18th century painting of two young women talking. They are given modern speech bubbles. One says, “I’ll keep observing Columbus Day. Thanks.” The other replies, “What do you do to ‘observe’ Columbus Day? Get lost in a grocery store looking for spices?”