Vox: How gun ownership became a powerful political identity

If only gun owners had voted in the 2016 election, then Donald Trump would have won every single state save Vermont. If only people who don’t own guns had voted, then Hillary Clinton would have won every state, save West Virginia and maybe Wyoming.

SurveyMonkey, which conducted the poll reaching these conclusions, found that the voting divide between gun owners and non-owners was starker than divides between white and nonwhite Americans, between working-class whites and the rest of the nation, and between rural and urban voters. “No other demographic characteristic created such a consistent geographic split,” the New York Times’s Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy write.

That doesn’t mean that gun ownership is more important in explaining American political behavior than race or class or gender. But it does mean that gun ownership has an extremely strong correlation with conservative, pro-Republican voting. [...]

“Few people realize it, but the Ku Klux Klan began as a gun control organization,” UCLA law professor Adam Winkler writes in Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. “After the Civil War, the Klan and other violent racist groups sought to reaffirm white supremacy, which required confiscating the guns blacks had obtained for the first time during the conflict.” He notes that a century later, in the 1960s, politicians turned to gun control measures to “disarm politically radical urban blacks, like the Black Panthers.” [...]

The gun gap could just be an artifact of other demographics. For instance, we know that for a whole host of historical reasons, black Americans overwhelmingly vote for Democrats and whites mostly vote for Republicans; whites are also likelier to own guns, so the gap might reflect racial differences. Same goes for partisan gender gaps (women are more likely to be Democrats and less likely to own guns), rural/urban gaps, and so forth.

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Vox: After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat. Utilities are freaking out.

Thanks to a combination of greater energy efficiency, outsourcing of heavy industry, and customers generating their own power on site, demand for utility power has been flat for 10 years, and most forecasts expect it to stay that way. The die was cast around 1998, when GDP growth and electricity demand growth became “decoupled”: [...]

The last IRP, completed in 2015, anticipated that there would be no need for major new investment in baseload (coal, nuclear, and hydro) power plants; it foresaw that energy efficiency and distributed (customer-owned) energy generation would hold down demand.

Even so, TVA underestimated. Just three years later, the Chattanooga Free Press reports, “TVA now expects to sell 13 percent less power in 2027 than it did two decades earlier — the first sustained reversal in the growth of electricity usage in the 85-year history of TVA.” [...]

As I have explained at length, the US utility sector was built around the presumption of perpetual growth. Utilities were envisioned as entities that would build the electricity infrastructure to safely and affordably meet ever-rising demand, which was seen as a fixed, external factor, outside utility control.

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Vox: Will a boycott hurt the NRA? Take a look at Bill O’Reilly.

While the NRA has faced public pressure in the past, this the first time it’s been hit with such a broad boycott, according to Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and the author of the book Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.

Something similar happened last year, when more than 80 brands pulled their ads from The O’Reilly Factor after sexual harassment complaints against host Bill O’Reilly became public. The advertising boycott wasn’t the only factor behind his ouster from Fox News, but it was a major one. Faced with an exodus of advertiser money, the network that had been protecting O’Reilly for years finally decided to cut ties.  [...]

The NRA boycott is different from what happened to O’Reilly in a number of ways. Most obviously, the NRA, a nonprofit group, doesn’t depend on companies like Delta and Avis the way a TV show depends on advertisers. It does, however, depend at least to some degree on deep-pocketed donors — in 2016, the group’s political arm took in more than $124 million in contributions and grants from individuals, corporations, and other entities, including a single donation of $19.2 million, according to Mother Jones. An exodus of corporate partners could have a chilling effect on those donations. [...]

Still, Winkler noted, corporate boycotts are “an increasingly important avenue for social change” in America. In addition to O’Reilly’s departure, the repeal of North Carolina’s anti-transgender “bathroom bill” may have been influenced by the NCAA’s pledge not to hold championship events in the state until the law was scrapped.

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The Atlantic: Trump Is Preparing for a New Cold War

There are problems with this. President Trump’s national security documents make “competition” sound like an inevitability rather than a choice. Thus, they skip over a critical question: When can America best achieve its interests not by competing with China and Russia but by trying to cooperate with them? It’s no coincidence that the same National Security Strategy that downplays the importance of great cooperation also omits the words “climate change.” [...]

It’s the latest evidence that, in the words of Freedom House, “China’s authoritarian regime has become increasingly repressive in recent years. The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is tightening its control over the media, online speech, religious groups, and civil society associations while undermining already modest rule-of-law reforms.” Last summer, Beijing became the first regime since Nazi Germany to have a Nobel Prize winner, the heroic intellectual Liu Xiaobo, die as a prisoner of the state. [...]

Not many people around the world likely saw the Axios report. But many have noted that the United States, under Trump, exhibits less respect for the liberal and democratic norms they admire. Over the past few years, Pew has asked people around the world, “Do you think the government of the U.S. respects the personal freedoms of its people?” Between 2013 and 2017, the percentage answering “yes” dropped 12 points in the Philippines, 13 points in Indonesia, 16 points in Japan and 25 points in Australia. By vast margins, non-Americans also disapprove of Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate change agreement and Trans-Pacific Partnership and his threats to scuttle the Iran nuclear deal, ban Muslims from entering the United States, and build a wall along America’s southern border. In Trump, they see a leader who respects neither human dignity nor the rule of law at home or abroad. Which is perhaps why, between Obama’s last year in office and Trump’s first, the percentage of non-Americans who expressed confidence that America’s president will “do the right thing regarding world affairs” dropped a massive 42 points.

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The Guardian: Have we reached peak English in the world?

In China last month, Theresa May attended the launch of the British Council’s English is Great campaign, intended to boost interest and fluency in our national language. This might sound like Donald Trump’s notorious “Make America great again”, but comes in fact from a stronger position. Beyond doubt, the use of English is greater than ever, and far more widespread than any other language in the world. All non-English-speaking powers of our globalised world recognise it as the first foreign language to learn; it is also, uniquely, in practical use worldwide. The British Council reckons that English is spoken at a useful level by some 1.75 billion people, a quarter of the world’s population. It is taught from primary level up in all China’s schools; it is the working language of the whole European Union. [...]

Considering the windfall benefits of English as one’s own language, some immediate advantages are undeniable. It has given direct access to the world’s principal medium of communication: good for having an inside track on “news we can use”, as well as facilitated access for well-educated anglophones to influential jobs. It has also put us in a position to charge some kind of rent for allowing others admission to this linguistic elite: hence the massive earnings from teaching English as a foreign language (now well over £2bn in the UK alone, reaching £3bn by 2020), and global markets for English-language publishing (£1.4bn in exports in 2015). This is another spin-off from Britain’s recent history of dominance, like the siting of the Greenwich meridian, giving daily opportunities for global trades between Asia and America, or the association of investment, and hence global finance, with the City of London. [...]

For English, therefore, its current peak is likely to be as good as it will ever get, its glory as a world language lasting just a couple of centuries – almost a flash in the pan, not yet comparable with those forerunners Latin or Farsi. And on present form, its fall is likely to coincide with the latest rise of China, whose documented history has run for three millennia. Chinese, too, is great.

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