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USA: The Next Steps (after the election)
2017 is not going to be pretty, regardless who wins this election. Let’s reason it out. There are four basic electoral outcomes (all of which are possible IMHO): Clinton wins in a landslide. Clinton wins narrowly. Trump wins narrowly. Trump wins in a landslide. In the two narrow cases, the next steps are likely litigation […]
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Couple Questions for my Republican-Leaning Friends
(This is not about Trump.) I have the impression that many Republican-leaning people not just think Hillary Clinton would be a bad choice as president. Their views seem to go beyond “oh no, she really isn’t qualified for this”, or “I really disagree with these policies over there that she’s advocating”. Instead, I often come […]
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The political cage fight drug
If you had to design a political system where big, urgent problems can remain unresolved and connected criminals can stay out of jail, without (much) protest or repression, how would you go about it? I think I’d invent a supposedly all-powerful “grand prize” position called the Presidency, and make sure everybody believes it is a […]
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In other news, Dezinformatsiya has been democratized
Many of the countless mesmerizing stories in the Mitrokhin Archive deals with the KGB’s disinformation campaigns, mostly to sway public opinion in various European countries. We, in the West with upper-case Freedom-of-the-Press were outraged to learn that the press sometimes was printing deliberately falsified information, planted, for money or otherwise, by the KGB. How Could […]
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How complex systems fail, or the curious Brexit paralysis
After losing the Brexit vote, prime minister Cameron resigned. That sounds reasonable: he lost and so he resigned. But did you notice that nobody, absolutely nobody, wants to become the next prime minister? Not even senior politicians like Boris Johnson that campaigned in favor of Leave and wanted to be PM for a long time? […]