Month: September 2013

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In short, these eighty members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.

In one sense, these eighty members are acting rationally. They seem to be pushing policies that are representative of what their constituents back home want. But even within the broader Republican Party, they represent a minority view, at least at the level of tactics (almost all Republicans want to defund Obamacare, even if they disagree about using the issue to threaten a government shutdown).

In previous eras, ideologically extreme minorities could be controlled by party leadership. What’s new about the current House of Representatives is that party discipline has broken down on the Republican side. On the most important policy questions, ones that most affect the national brand of the party, Boehner has lost his ability to control his caucus, and an ideological faction, aided by outside interest groups, can now set the national agenda.

Through redistricting, Republicans have built themselves a perhaps unbreakable majority in the House. But it has come at a cost of both party discipline and national popularity. Nowadays, a Sunday-school teacher can defeat the will of the Speaker of the House.

Dysfunction in Washington is now structural in nature. Gerrymandered House districts electing more extreme partisans unwilling to compromise, a Senate that requires 60 votes to accomplish anything substantive, and the loss of earmarks as a tool to enforce party discipline leads to a Congress incapable of acting. Under these circumstances, it’s only to be expected that the current Congress is one of the least productive in recent memory, or that we’re now a mere days away from a government shutdown, and have a non-trivial chance of defaulting on US debt in about a month.
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64 bits. It’s Nothing. You Don’t Need It. And We’ll Have It In 6 Months

64 bits. It’s Nothing. You Don’t Need It. And We’ll Have It In 6 Months

A pundit brushes off the 64-bit A7:

We’ll see just how good Apple’s marketing team is trying to leverage 64-bit. 64-bit add more memory and maybe registers. Period.

After benchmarks showed the iPhone 5s performance to be monstrous, the same pundit opines:

The improvements Apple made with the A7 are truly incredible, and they really went against the grain in their choices. With an industry obsessed with more cores, they went with fewer, larger and efficient cores. With people expecting v8 and 64-bit ARM in late 2014, Apple brings it out in 2013 with full Xcode support and many performance optimizations.” […] “Apple has done it again, but this time in unexpected fashion.

Unexpected to whom?

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Russell Brand and the GQ Awards

Russell Brand offers an amazingly cogent assessment of how elites protect and reinforce themselves by way of his appearance at the GQ Awards (who knew there even was sucha thing?):

Before long, John Bishop is on stage giving me a lovely introduction, so I get up as Noel hurls down a few gauntlets, daring me to “do my worst”.

I thanked John, said the “oracle award” sounds like a made-up prize you’d give a fat kid on sports day – I should know, I used to get them – then that it’s barmy that Hugo Boss can trade under the same name they flogged uniforms to the Nazis under and the ludicrous necessity for an event such as this one to banish such a lurid piece of information from our collective consciousness.

I could see the room dividing as I spoke. I could hear the laughter of some and louder still silence of others. I realised that for some people this was regarded as an event with import. The magazine, the sponsors and some of those in attendance saw it as a kind of ceremony that warranted respect. In effect, it is a corporate ritual, an alliance between a media organisation, GQ, and a commercial entity, Hugo Boss. What dawned on me as the night went on is that even in apparently frivolous conditions the establishment asserts control, and won’t tolerate having that assertion challenged, even flippantly, by that most beautifully adept tool: comedy.

The jokes about Hugo Boss were not intended to herald a campaign to destroy them. They’re not Monsanto or Halliburton, the contemporary corporate allies of modern-day fascism; they are, I thought, an irrelevant menswear supplier with a double-dodgy history. The evening, though, provided an interesting opportunity to see how power structures preserve their agenda, even in a chintzy microcosm.

And later:

It makes me wonder, though, how the relationships and power dynamics I witnessed on this relatively inconsequential context are replicated on a more significant scale.

For example, if you can’t criticise Hugo Boss at the GQ awards because they own the event, do you think it is significant that energy companies donate to the Tory party? Will that affect government policy? Will the relationships that “politician of the year” Boris Johnson has with City bankers – he took many more meetings with them than public servants in his first term as mayor – influence the way he runs our capital?

I highly recommend reading the whole thing. Some of it is hyperbolic – I wouldn’t describe Monsanto or Halliburton, horrible as they are, as fascist – but overall it’s a very thoughtful and fairly sophisticated analysis of modern power structures.