Posts Tagged ‘get out the vote’
Monday Morning Links!
* Permanent addition to the sidebar: Resources for planning a trip to the Octavia E. Butler Archives at the Huntington. Send me anything I’ve missed!
* CFPs I have going: Women and Science Fiction Media (SFFTV Special Issue). Buffy at 20 (April conference at Marquette).
* My friend and colleague Dan Hassler-Forest has been composing a Trump Film Studies Syllabus: 1, 2, 3, 4.
* Political Economy of Fascism Syllabus.
* So you think you elected an autocrat.
* Dr. Strange and the Trump Presidency.
* Trump poised to violate Constitution his first day in office. Not even the same scandal: Donald Trump Pauses Transition Work to Meet with Indian Business Partners.
* Electoral College fan fiction getting good now.
* This seems fine. Disabled People Will Die Under Trump. Trumpwatch. Trump’s big infrastructure plan? It’s a trap. Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi Have a Plan to Make President Trump Popular. @EveryTrumpDonor. Trump vs. neoliberalism, #whoeverwinswelose. Racism with No Racists. Garbage In, Garbage Out. The Man in the High Castle. After Trump. Being Mike Pence.
* It can’t happen here. It probably can’t happen here. It probably won’t happen here. Okay but that was a long time ago. George Takei.
* Successful propaganda, O’Shaughnessy argues, does not traffic in outright falsehoods, but trades on half-truths and innuendos and depends on “people’s ability to perform a great deal of selective perception, and to edit out the unpleasant.” So propaganda is bullshit — in the philosophical sense.
* Don’t normalize this. Don’t ever, ever normalize this.
* We’ll be talking about this question for a long time, whether we like it or not: The End of Identity Liberalism. Why Social Media Is Terrible for Multiethnic Democracies. And yet: Blame Trump’s Victory on College-Educated Whites, Not the Working Class.
* Close Reading Hamilton: “What’d I Miss?” I only did two days on Hamilton in my class this time around and wound up focusing a lot on these two songs myself.
* Abolish Chuck Schumer. Abolish the Presidency.
* More than 100 campus leaders urge Trump to take more forceful stand against “harassment, hate and acts of violence.” Campuses Confront Hostile Acts Against Minorities After Donald Trump’s Election. Wesleyan declared sanctuary campus.
* It doesn’t matter how effective a deterrent it is — it’s cruel and unusual and we need to act.
* Only the superrich can save us… oh forget it.
* Meet the Professor Who’s Trying to Help You Steer Clear of Clickbait.
* Michigan fights court order to give Flint residents bottled water.
* Keep an eye on North Carolina.
* A Brief History of Fascism in the Pacific Northwest.
* When a Sibling Goes to Prison.
* The Limits of Gossip: Informal system of warning colleagues about senior scholars who engage in inappropriate behavior doesn’t really protect anyone, study finds.
* The Alphabet That Will Save a People From Disappearing.
* A Mere 12,000 US Schools Are Within a Mile of a Hazardous Chemical Facility.
* Science proves the rich really are different.
* We might be done with climate change, but climate change is not done with us.
* It’s official: NASA’s peer-reviewed EM Drive paper has finally been published.
* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.
Though sports culture continues to be a domain of intense patriarchal production and violence — rape jokes are just locker room talk, after all — these days jocks in the news are just as likely to be taking a knee against American racism in the image of Colin Kaepernick. The nerds, on the other hand, are shit-posting for a new American Reich. The nerd/jock distinction has always been a myth designed to hide social conflict and culturally re-center white male subjectivity. Now that the nerds have fully arrived, their revenge looks uglier than anything the jocks ever dreamed.
* And because you demanded it…
Rage, Rage against the Dying of the Links
* Some of my own stuff from the weekend: Making America Great Again with Octavia Butler and the formal, official, can’t-take-it-back-now release of Octavia E. Butler in Kindle, hardback, and paperback. CFP: Buffy at 20. Jaimee’s election poem at the New Verse News: “Donald Trump, Kate McKinnon, Leonard Cohen.”
* CFP: Capital at 150. CFP: Marxist Reading Group: Genre and the Crisis of Narrative.
* Jerome Winter on the new space opera.
* Other books I’d rather be reading: In a Galaxy 90 Miles Away: The View from Cuban Science Fiction. No Mind To Lose: On Brainwashing.
* How I Wrote Arrival (and What I Learned Doing It). A Ted Chiang profile in The Guardian.
* A history of Chinese science fiction. An Islam and Sci-Fi Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.
* Shirtless Trump Saves Drowning Kitten. The Trump Meltdown Begins. There is no way to predict where this is heading. (Okay, maybe we can predict a little bit.) How Trump Won. The counties that flipped parties to swing the 2016 election. It probably wasn’t voter suppression (except maybe in Wisconsin). We have 100 days to stop Donald Trump from systemically corrupting our institutions. Yeah, good luck. It Can’t Happen Here in 2016. The Plot Against America in 2016. Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America. Preparing for the Worst: How Conservatives Will Govern in 2017. Trump takes to Twitter to blast ‘hater, loser’ children; vows retribution. Where the Democrats Go From Here. How to Build an Exit Ramp for Trump Supporters. Amazing what a week can do. Blue Feed, Red Feed. Abolish the Electoral College. Post-Election College Grading Rubric. Google Emoluments Truth. The nine liberals you meet in hell.
* He might as well try: Obama Can and Should Put Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court.
* Hillary Clinton’s Vaunted GOTV Operation May Have Turned Out Trump Voters. The Democrats’ Real Turnout Problem. Clinton Aides Blame Loss on Everything but Themselves. Comey! The Clinton Campaign Was Undone By Its Own Neglect And A Touch Of Arrogance, Staffers Say. Epic. This didn’t have to happen. They Always Wanted Trump: Inside Team Clinton’s year-long struggle to find a strategy against the opponent they were most eager to face. Twilight of the Messageless Candidate. Blame the Clintons. Obama after Obama. Whatever happened: The whole Democratic Party is now a smoking pile of rubble. 2009: The Year the Democratic Party Died. The decimation of the Democratic Party, visualized. Does the Democratic Party Have a Future? Well, have you met the Democrats? The Worst Possible Leader at the Worst Possible Time. These are the key governors’ races the Democrats will blow in 2018. Blueprint for a New Party.
* From the archives: Umberto Eco on Ur-Fascism.
* Historians under Hitler. When Hitler Pivoted. Autocracy: Rules for Survival. What Is The “Alt-Right”? A Guide To The White Nationalist Movement Now Leading Conservative Media. Prepare For Regime Change, Not Policy Change.
* Why FiveThirtyEight Gave Trump A Better Chance Than Almost Anyone Else. More from Nate’s Twitter. And from another angle entirely: Things look an awful lot like they would if we decided elections by coin flip.
* So many more examples could be given, but it’s getting late, and one general takeaway from the 2016 Election seems clear: our popular media, from those producing it to those sorting it with editors and algorithms, are not up to the task of informing us and describing reality. This won’t happen, but those people who got Trump sooo consistently wrong from the primaries to Election Day should not have the job of informing us anymore. And if you were surprised last night, you might want to reconsider how you get information.
* The New Inquiry has been all over the Trump Resistance. Waking up in Trump’s America. Lose Your Kin. Against Extinction. Fuck. The Gamble. And the struggle goes on: “Thanksgiving is the festival of white reconciliation.”
* No President. What a proper response to Trump’s fascism demands: a true ideological left.
* Do any laws bind electors to vote along with their state? Not really. But this cuts both ways, and basically ruins any sort of “hack the Electoral College scheme” from the jump too. Meanwhile, let’s hack the Electoral College, because what could possibly go wrong.
* Truly, only the superrich can save us now.
* Beginning to look a lot like Christmasttime: UPS strike. O’Hare strike.
* Rise of the Sanctuary Campus.
* And yet, to my knowledge, no one has explained clearly enough that globalization is over, and that we urgently need to reestablish ourselves on an Earth that has nothing to do with the protective borders of nation-states any more than the infinite horizon of globalization.
* Being Productive in Scholarly Publishing: Advice from Jason Brennan. No one said you’d like it.
* A GoFundMe for SEK’s medical bills. I only wish the prognosis were better.
* The New Intellectuals: Is the academic jobs crisis a boon to public culture?
* Title IX is effectively finished, at least in its current form. More here. “College” as a concept may not be all that far behind.
* On toxifying, rather than repealing, the ACA.
* Trump Will Have Access To Personal Info Of “Dreamers” For Deportation Efforts. This precise possibility, of course, was raised as an objection to Obama’s action at the time.
* Democrats, 2016, preserving the state, and the man of lawlessness.
* After a tweet blaming this all on Bill Clinton, Steve Shaviro provided a time-travel novel to soothe my pain: The X-President.
* The coming Democratic defeat on infrastructure.
* What Women Used Before They Could Use the Law.
* I want things to be different.
* This world is so messed up. Let’s go do something good.
* How to Reverse Engineer Smells.
* The Official November 2016 Guide for Making People Feel Old.
* The 100-Year-Old Man Who Lives in the Future.
* Fact-checking doesn’t ‘backfire,’ new study suggests. Calling people racist might, though.
* Harry Potter and the Conscience of a Liberal.
* What if X-Men were a Gothic novel?
* Calexit.
* The economists are leveraging their academic prestige with secret reports justifying corporate concentration. Their predictions are often wrong and consumers pay the price.
* Huge, if true: Report finds many graduate students are stressed about finances.
* An Oral History of My So-Called Life.
* The Fate of Reading in a Multimedia Age.
* I think I did this one a few months ago, but at least somebody has a plan: Optimal search path for finding Waldo.
* We asked eighty-six burglars how they broke into homes.
* New research suggests the Earth’s climate could be more sensitive to greenhouse gases than thought, raising the spectre of an ‘apocalyptic side of bad’ temperature rise of more than 7C within a lifetime. With Trump’s election I think any hope of solving this without geoengineering is over, and perhaps all hope period.
* The North Pole is a mere 36 degrees warmer than normal as winter descends. Give it a chance!
* Stephen Hawking says we’ve got about 1,000 years to find a new place to live. So you’re saying we have 999 years before we even need to think about this.
* But it’s not all bad news! Blood from human teens rejuvenates body and brains of old mice.
* And the thrilling conclusion to the thisisfine.jpg trilogy, truly the epic of our times.
Sunday Night Links with Yoda, Clark Kent, and Banksy
* George Lucas, saved from himself: Yoda was very nearly played by a monkey in a mask.
* Christopher Cokinos argues in The American Scholar that geo-engineering is, as the saying goes, a terrible idea whose time has come.
* Self-serving egocentric rosy retrospection: How Republicans remember the 1990s.
* Bill and Steve’s GOTV video has gone viral with 45,000 views.
Tuesday Night Links
* The Daily Show rally backlash has begun in earnest, with worries that the rally will sap GOTV efforts alongside well-founded attacks on its basic premise. Still, I think we’re going, if only as an excuse to see my D.C. friends.
* How segregated is your city? Via MeFi.
* “In 1946, 53 percent of articles mentioning a research university were about that university, focusing on its research or activities,” the authors wrote. By 2005, “Just 15 percent of articles mentioning a university are about that university: the remaining 85 percent simply cite high-stature faculty for soundbite commentary on current events.”
* Being Franklin W. Dixon, author of The Hardy Boys.
* Kos, Josh Marshall, and Nate Silver see possible good news in Democratic poll numbers. Still, Democrats will lose big this November.
* Mad Men vs. the civil rights movement?
* And Amazon is having a huge sale on the entire run of Scott Pilgrim. Enjoy.
Scene from the Revolution
Voter turnout is the highest since the enfranchisement of women, with the youth vote at the highest level since 1972.
Prediction Thread
Predictions. Who’s got them? Leave ’em in the comments.
I was on Poli-Sci-Fi Radio yesterday (podcast forthcoming) and they cajoled us all into making predictions. Unexpectedly, I was among the most optimistic people on the show, expecting Obama to cross 360 electoral votes and over 50% in the popular vote. I stand by this. To the extent that the polls are wrong, I (honestly) believe they will be wrong in our favor, underreporting Obama’s depth of support and his GOTV operation and underestimating the level of Republican demoralization and widespread discomfort, in different registers, with Bush, Palin, and McCain all.
I’ve been predicting / hoping for a Reaganesque landslide since January—it was one of the biggest early factors in my decision to support Obama in the primaries in the first place—and I think that outcome is finally at hand. If things go the way I think / hope they will tomorrow, 2008 will come to be seen as a realignment election along the lines of 1980 or 1932.
If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, and I’ve been very wrong before—but that’s my prediction.
So let’s have two numbers, the EV spread and the popular vote spread. (Use 270towin to calculate the electoral votes.)
I’ll go first with what will surely be way-too-high estimates of 397 EVs and eight points in the popular vote, 52%-44%. In my heart of hearts, I think we’ll run the table, including taking Omaha.
But of course I’ll be just as happy scrapping by with 269…
Indiana, Proud Birthplace of Shankar D
A Selzer poll of Indiana, proud birthplace of Kurt Vonnegut, Orville Redenbacher, and our own Shankar D, puts Obama three points ahead in the state. I wouldn’t give it any credibility at all if it were anyone but Ann Selzer, who is widely considered the gold standard of polling in the Midwest. (You might remember Selzer & Co. from the Des Moines Register poll that was the first to predict Obama’s big win in Iowa.)
More than anything else this reflects the change in momentum I’ve been talking about all week, arising from five or so factors:
* the evaporation of the convention bounce in general and the Palin bounce in particular;
* the continued stunning collapse of the banking system;
* the widening perception that McCain has been running an unusually dishonest, throw-shit-at-the-wall campaign;
* self-inflicted wounds from the McCain camp, most importantly the “fundamentals” line;
* and Obama (finally) taking a tougher line.
Marc Ambinder has a post up talking about the different approaches McCain and Obama take to a state like Indiana. McCain is right that if Obama wins Indiana, he probaby already won the election somewhere else. But by the same token McCain is playing on such a limited field that he can’t allow Indiana to go uncontested, which if nothing else will be a nice drain on his resources and time. As has been said here time and time again, on a state-by-state level McCain is pretty clearly on defense, which bodes well; an unexpectedly successful GOTV operation anywhere in NV, CO, VA, IN, OH, FL, or even NC could be enough to put Obama over the top.
With the map above, even an unexpectedly strong showing in Montana (vote Ron Paul) would do the job. And don’t think Obama’s strategy people aren’t on this; they’ve even put resources in Omaha, Nebraska, to try to win the city’s lone electoral vote.
In terms of how-we’ll-actually-win, the eight-point lead in New Mexico from Survey USA is much more promising. I think McCain will probably retain Indiana, when it comes down to it, unless it’s the sort of blowout that’s already cost him Ohio; putting New Mexico in the Obama column is a strong sign for us even if we’re trying to win by just one EV.
Gerry Canavan 