The Constitution Lets the Electoral College Choose the Winner. They Should Choose Clinton.
Lawrence Lessig, writing at The Washington Post:
The framers believed, as Alexander Hamilton put it, that “the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the [president].” But no nation had ever tried that idea before. So the framers created a safety valve on the people’s choice. Like a judge reviewing a jury verdict, where the people voted, the electoral college was intended to confirm — or not — the people’s choice. Electors were to apply, in Hamilton’s words, “a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice” — and then decide. The Constitution says nothing about “winner take all.” It says nothing to suggest that electors’ freedom should be constrained in any way. Instead, their wisdom — about whether to overrule “the people” or not — was to be free of political control yet guided by democratic values. They were to be citizens exercising judgment, not cogs turning a wheel.
I agree, but the odds of this happening are infinitesimally small.
Fighting Authoritarianism: 20 Lessons
Reproduced on Kottke:
Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. Here are twenty lessons from the twentieth century, adapted to the circumstances of today.
1) Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.
2) Defend an institution. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don’t protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.
3) Recall professional ethics. When the leaders of state set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become much more important. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state without lawyers, and it is hard to have show trials without judges.
Read the whole thing.
For Helping Immigrants, Chobani’s Founder Draws Threats
By many measures, Chobani embodies the classic American immigrant success story.
Its founder, Hamdi Ulukaya, is a Turkish immigrant of Kurdish descent. He bought a defunct yogurt factory in upstate New York, added a facility in Twin Falls, Idaho, and now employs about 2,000 people making Greek yogurt.
But in this contentious election season, the extreme right has a problem with Chobani: In its view, too many of those employees are refugees.
As Mr. Ulukaya has stepped up his advocacy — employing more than 300 refugees in his factories, starting a foundation to help migrants, and traveling to the Greek island of Lesbos to witness the crisis firsthand — he and his company have been targeted with racist attacks on social media and conspiratorial articles on websites including Breitbart News.
Facebook Needs to Get Their Shit Together
The most obvious way in which Facebook enabled a Trump victory has been its inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news. Fake news is not a problem unique to Facebook, but Facebook’s enormous audience, and the mechanisms of distribution on which the site relies — i.e., the emotionally charged activity of sharing, and the show-me-more-like-this feedback loop of the news feed algorithm — makes it the only site to support a genuinely lucrative market in which shady publishers arbitrage traffic by enticing people off of Facebook and onto ad-festooned websites, using stories that are alternately made up, incorrect, exaggerated beyond all relationship to truth, or all three. (To really hammer home the cyberdystopia aspect of this: A significant number of the sites are run by Macedonian teenagers looking to make some scratch.)
An American Tragedy
David Remnick, at The New Yorker:
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.
A long time reader of the website sent me some @jimmyeatworld “Integrity Brews” beer to enjoy this weekend. It almost feels wrong to open it. Gonna have to play the new album and crack one a little later. #beer #jimmyeatworld
Yes, American Democracy Could Break Down
There are three interlocking reasons why our confidence in the system is naïve. For one, we’re in genuinely uncharted territory with Trump: we’ve simply never seen a candidate with this much disregard for typical Constitutional values get this close to the White House. There’s no precedent for what might happen if he got there. For another, if you look at how our system of checks and balances is really built, it has relatively few resources to stop an authoritarian president from violating the Constitution and getting away with it. And the third reason may be the most unsettling of all: In a democracy, the final brake on the tyrannical exercise of power is public opinion. And polls suggest the American public has never been as skeptical of democracy or as open to authoritarian alternatives like military rule as it is right now. If a President Trump really blew down the walls of our system, a worryingly wide swath of the public would likely stand behind him.
The Internet Is Still Actually Controlled by 14 People Who Hold 7 Secret Keys
It sounds like something out of a Dan Brown book, but it isn’t: The whole internet is protected by seven highly protected keys in the hands of 14 people.
And in a few days, they will hold a historic ritual known as the Root Signing Ceremony.
On Friday morning, the world got a good reminder about the importance of the organization these people belong to.
The IT Era and the Internet Revolution
Newspapers obviously weren’t the only industry to benefit from information technology: the rise of ERP systems, databases, and personal computers provided massive gains in productivity for nearly all businesses (although it ended up taking nearly a decade for the improvements to show up). What this first wave of information technology did not do, though, was fundamentally change how those businesses worked, which meant nine of the ten largest companies in 1980 were all amongst the 21 largest companies in 19951. The biggest change is that more and more of those productivity gains started accruing to company shareholders, not the workers — and newspapers were no exception.
Can’t get enough of this album. Whole podcast about it up on chorus.fm right now. #jimmyeatworld
How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages
There is a 19-year-old black man in Illinois who has no idea of the role he is playing in this election.
He is sure he is going to vote for Donald J. Trump.
And he has been held up as proof by conservatives — including outlets like Breitbart News and The New York Post — that Mr. Trump is excelling among black voters. He has even played a modest role in shifting entire polling aggregates, like the Real Clear Politics average, toward Mr. Trump.
How? He’s a panelist on the U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll, which has emerged as the biggest polling outlier of the presidential campaign. Despite falling behind by double digits in some national surveys, Mr. Trump has generally led in the U.S.C./LAT poll. He held the lead for a full month until Wednesday, when Hillary Clinton took a nominal lead.