So much in our culture emphasises long-term love; it may be time to hear a word or two in praise of the short-term approach.
30 June 2016
Slate: It Can’t Happen Here
These numbers suggest that anti-immigration sentiment drove support for the referendum but wasn’t enough to pass it. On the most generous interpretation, 81 percent of leavers were driven by migration concerns. That translates to 42 percent of the electorate. If you define the anti-immigration vote more narrowly, it was about 30 percent to 45 percent of leavers, which works out to 16 percent to 23 percent of the electorate. You could argue that people who expressed concern about “sovereignty,” “Britain’s ability to make its own laws,” and “Britain’s right to act independently” were really just anti-immigration voters. But that slights their legitimate grievances about the British–EU relationship—an arrangement for which there’s no clear parallel in the United States. And even if you include these people, they don’t boost the anti-immigration “Leave” vote above 40 percent. [...]
These numbers don’t mollify some of Trump’s critics. They worry that pundits have consistently underestimated Trump and that his victory in the Republican primaries, followed by the Brexit vote, shows broad support for his nativist agenda. Brexit suggests that “victory is possible” when “hostility to migrants” is coupled with anti-intellectualism, writes Jonathan Freedland in the New York Review of Books. “There are lessons here aplenty for Americans contemplating their own appointment with nationalist, nativist populism in November.”
That’s true. Brexit is a warning, and we did underestimate Trump before primary season. But in the American electorate as a whole, as opposed to the GOP, there’s no majority for Trump’s views on immigration or ethnicity. [...]
The poll’s GOP respondents broadly support Trump’s agenda. Seventy-three percent say immigration from predominantly Muslim countries is too high or shouldn’t be allowed at all. Sixty-eight percent say the same about immigration from the Middle East. Sixty-six percent want a wall on the Mexican border, 66 percent want a ban on Syrian refugees, 64 percent want a temporary halt to entry by foreign Muslims, and 60 percent favor “a serious effort to deport all illegal immigrants.”
IFLScience: Cracking The Mystery Of The ‘Worldwide Hum’
Deming began by describing the standard history: The Hum was first documented in the late 1960s, around Bristol, England. It first appeared in the United States in the late 1980s, in Taos, New Mexico.
He then examined the competing hypotheses for the source of the Hum. Many have pointed to the electric grid or cellphone towers. But this theory is dismissed on two grounds: cellphones didn’t exist in the 1960s, and the frequency emitted by both cell towers and the electric grid can be easily blocked by metal enclosures.
He wondered whether mass hysteria was to blame, a psychological phenomenon in which rumor and “collective delusions” lead to the appearance of physical ailments for which there’s no medical explanation. The fact that so many people have researched the Hum on their own, using a search engine – rather than hearing about it from some other person – moves the conversation away from delusion and hysteria spread by word of mouth. [...]
The latest update of the Hum Map, from June 6, presents roughly 10,000 map and data points, and we’ve already made some notable findings.
For example, we’ve found that the mean and median age of Hum hearers is 40.5 years, and 55 percent of hearers are men. This goes against the widely repeated theory that the Hum mainly affects middle-aged and older women.
Interestingly, there are eight times as many ambidextrous people among hearers as there are in the general population. As more data are collected from Hum hearers, I hope that specialists in demographics and inferential statistics will be able to generate more detailed result.
Vox: Europe needs a real opposition party
o save itself, the European Union is going to need a real opposition political party: one that can formulate a coherent alternate policy agenda and give dissatisfied voters the opportunity to “throw the bums out” without tearing down the entire institutional edifice they inhabit. [...]
The notion of a “loyal opposition” is in many ways the key innovation in the institutionalization of democracy. The idea is that an organized political movement may object stridently to the agenda of the current governing regime without being seen as disloyal to the state or the nation. This means that incumbent rulers face meaningful electoral accountability. If voters are displeased with their performance, a rival team waits in the wings ready and eager to take over.
Traditionally we think of a loyal opposition as being absent because of repression by the rulers. But the European Union suffers essentially from the opposite problem — too much consensus. [...]
In institutional terms, developing a real opposition party would also require entrenching the idea that the European Commission should be accountable to the European Parliament in the way that a normal national cabinet is accountable to the national parliament.
The Atlantic: The Psychology of Voting to Leave the EU
These feelings help explain why immigration was such a controversial issue during the Brexit campaign, just as it is currently in the U.S. No doubt, xenophobia and racism were motivators for a minority of voters. Jo Cox, a member of Parliament and Remain advocate, was horrifically killed by an avowed racist during the campaign, and attacks on immigrants and minorities spiked 57 percent in the days after the vote. But for the majority of Leave voters, the immigration issue was perceived as one of reciprocity and a loss of control. Rightly or wrongly, many voters felt immigrants have been getting a better deal in terms of jobs, benefits, and public services than they were. They felt immigrants were unfairly “jumping the queue.” And they felt the country had lost control of its borders.
The reason the Remain camp lost was that they didn’t understand the game they were playing. They thought they were playing a rational game, appealing to people’s pocketbooks and sense of security. They fought their campaign with facts and figures and by highlighting the risks of Brexit. But the voters were playing the Ultimatum Game. Leave understood this and fought with promises to “take back control.” Like the Remain campaign, Hillary Clinton is also playing the rational game, appealing to voters’ economic and security self-interest. Donald Trump is the weapon of the altruistic punishers. Clinton needs to recognize that voters are not playing the same game she is. She needs to convince voters that she hears them and will restore the fundamental promises of capitalism and democracy. If she doesn’t, November 11 might be as shocking a day as June 23.
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