Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto/ZUMA Press

I have some thoughts on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica affair. Actually, it’s just one thought, I suppose. And hardly a new one.

Anyway. Mark Zuckerberg has learned not to admit this publicly anymore, but back in the day he was pretty open about the fact that he personally believed the world would be a better place if we all got over our privacy bugaboos. Facebook was his way of helping that along: every default in the software was set for maximum exposure, and he figured that everyone would soon get used to this and we’d all be comfortable with everyone knowing everything about ourselves.

In pursuit of this vision, Zuckerberg has relentlessly followed the same strategy for years: reduce privacy within Facebook in every way possible until somebody gets mad. Then he apologizes, says he “didn’t realize” how sensitive Facebook’s customers were about this, and eliminates the one specific thing people are complaining about—but nothing else. Needless to say, this kind of massive data collection is great for Facebook’s business model. However, I think it’s more important to remember that Zuckerberg really does seem to have a sincere personal belief that he’s creating a better world by making everything about everyone as public as possible.

So what we have is a controlling CEO with a monomaniacal personal vision that lines up perfectly with his company’s business vision. This is not all that common. Usually CEOs have diffuse power to begin with, and their personal beliefs are often in conflict with what’s good for the business. Facebook isn’t like that. Zuckerberg has absolute control, and his vision matches perfectly with what’s best for shareholders.

In other words, what happened with Cambridge Analytica wasn’t just some glitch. It’s Facebook’s business model. What I mean by this is not that Facebook wanted Aleksandr Kogan to turn over massive amounts of personal data to CA. They might genuinely be annoyed by that.¹ What I mean is that the general idea of collecting and disseminating massive amounts of personal data is what Facebook is all about. It’s what Mark Zuckerberg is all about, and given his vision of the world it’s inevitable that things like the CA affair will happen periodically. He really doesn’t care much about it except as a PR problem—which is why he’s spent the past two years trying to get better at PR.

In a sense, though, I don’t blame either Facebook or Zuckerberg for any of this. As a country, we’ve made it crystal clear that we don’t care about personal privacy. We mock European privacy directives. We ignore the dozens of companies that do exactly the same thing as Facebook but have lower profiles. We allow credit reporting companies to collect anything they want with no oversight at all when they screw up and wreck someone’s life. On a personal level, we’re routinely willing to turn over every detail of our lives in return for a $1 iTunes coupon.

If we don’t like the idea of Facebook making our personal lives an open book to anyone, we can do something about it. The way to do that is to elect “politicians” who will write “laws” that regulate it. But Republicans don’t like regulations in general, and Democrats are queasy about regulating Silicon Valley since they get lots of money from there. As it happens, this is not one of my personal hot buttons,² but I wouldn’t be surprised if Democrats could make some real inroads among older voters if they took a strong stand on this.

¹For one thing, CA didn’t pay Facebook for it. That’s really annoying.

²Except for supermarket loyalty cards, of course. You all know how I feel about those.

Laura Dale/PA Wire via ZUMA

Driverless cars are equipped with video, lidar, radar, sonar, and probably every other “ar” that exists. I assume this means that we will soon have massive amounts of evidence about what happened with the Uber car that killed a pedestrian in Arizona. Because of this, I’m willing to wait a few days before getting too hysterical about the whole thing, and I’d recommend everyone else do the same thing. But that means Uber better release some of this stuff pretty quickly. They’re going to have to do it in court anyway, so why not now?

And while we’re on the subject, an awful lot of people seem to think that we’re now in terra incognita over the question of who’s at fault. What if it’s just an algorithm on a chip? Sue the chip? ZOMG!

So I would like to personally assure everyone that this kind of thing has been adjudicated ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. A driverless car is just a machine. It is owned by someone and insured by someone. If subcontractors are responsible for software development, they have contracts in place that apportion responsibility. If the contracts aren’t clear, a court will decide who’s at fault. Ditto for the safety driver. There is nothing new or unusual about any of this, so can everyone please stand down on the allegedly unprecedented legal mess we’re all about to embark on?

Here’s a series of charts from Pew Research showing the party ID of white voters. I have helpfully added a dashed line for the year 2010:

With the (odd) exception of the group with some college, the party ID of white voters had a big inflection point in 2010. There was only modest movement before then, but starting in 2010 the high school crowd suddently flocked to the Republican Party while the college crowd flocked to the Democratic Party.

Two things happened around 2010 that could have affected voters strongly: the Great Recession and the presidency of Barack Obama. However, the Great Recession affected everyone fairly equally: high school grads saw an income drop of about 7 percent while college grads saw an income drop of 5 percent (between 2008 and 2012). There’s no special reason that high school and college grads should have reacted in violently opposite directions to that.

So that leaves Barack Obama. White high school grads saw a black Democrat in the White House and fled from the Democratic Party. White college grads saw a black Democrat in the White House and stampeded to the Democratic Party.

Note that among high school grads, Donald Trump really had nothing to do with this: they had already abandoned the Democratic Party by 2015 and nothing much changed over the next two years. Among college grads, however, the change of party ID accelerated when Trump took the stage. This suggests, perhaps, that Trump hasn’t done much to attract more white votes to the Republican Party, but he has done a lot to lose white votes. This is not good news for Republicans in 2018. As Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham so vividly said once, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” We can hope he was right.

CEO pay is up!

The chief executives of America’s biggest companies are on track for another banner year of compensation, fueled by a soaring stock market and an improving economy….Total pay—including salary, cash incentives, equity, perquisites and more—rose at least 9.9% for half the executives, the fastest annual growth since 2014, while about a quarter of the executives received raises of 25% or more. Most of the gains came from stock awards, as firms largely held the line on cash compensation and stock options.

So the top half of CEOs saw their pay go up more than 10 percent. I don’t know exactly how the rest of us did on that scale, but people with bachelors degrees are a rough proxy for the top half of the general population. According to the BLS, their pay went up 1.6 percent last year. So I guess the CEOs did pretty well. It’s no wonder they were rewarded with a nice tax cut from the Republican Party.

From the Washington Post:

President Trump did not follow specific warnings from his national security advisers Tuesday when he congratulated Russian President Vladi­mir Putin on his reelection — including a section in his briefing materials in all-capital letters stating “DO NOT CONGRATULATE,” according to officials familiar with the call…..It was not clear whether Trump read the notes, administration officials said. Trump, who initiated the call, opened it with the congratulations for Putin, one person familiar with the conversation said.

I’m sure we’re all glad to know that it’s henceforth official US policy to congratulate autocrats for winning rigged elections. That’s making America great again.

TPG via ZUMA

Why does President Trump feel “liberated” just because he’s done a few dumb things lately? Dan Drezner has the right idea: “Trump has such a short-term worldview that if something calamitous does not happen immediately after he does something, it bolsters his assumption that he’s bulletproof.” So if Trump levies tariffs on steel and aluminum and the world is still spinning on its axis a week later, he figures that all the Chicken Littles were wrong yet again.

Oddly enough, the rest of the world seems willing to confirm this worldview. Here’s Europe:

EU officials are urging the White House to consider both significant trans-Atlantic economic links and risks the duties could pose to the broader alliance that shaped the postwar global order. The EU is also calling on the U.S. to jointly tackle China’s market-distorting policies instead of punishing partners world-wide. “What we want to do is to clear up this mess,” Ms. Malmstrom told the European Parliament last week. “We don’t want a trade war.”

And here’s China:

China responded to the threat of new tariffs from the United States by vowing Tuesday to further open its own markets to foreign trade and investment, while warning that a trade war between the two nations would hurt both sides….China’s premier, Li Keqiang, said the issue should be solved through dialogue and negotiation. “No one will emerge a winner from a trade war,” Li told a news conference at the conclusion of China’s annual parliamentary session. “What we hope is for us to act rationally instead of being led by emotions.”

I’m happy to see both China and Europe acting as the adults in the room, but I’m a little surprised they think it will accomplish anything other than to embolden Trump. His takeaway from this is going to be that he was right all along: if you follow through on your loud, brassy threats, your enemies will back down like the paper tigers they really are. He’s done this to the Republican Party, and sure enough, they’ve mostly acted like cowed teenagers. Now he’s doing it to Europe and China, and they’re begging for mercy and mewling that “no one wants a trade war.”

I don’t know if Trump wants a trade war or not, but I know exactly how he’ll interpret “no one wants a trade war”: as a declaration of preemptive surrender. And having won this round, he’ll now be even more likely to start another.

I don’t especially care if Europe or China gets hurt ever so slightly by Trump’s tariff idiocy. What I do care about is Trump deciding that governance via threat and bluster works. If he gets away with this, it’s a lot more likely that he’ll decide to just kill NAFTA, even though all the big brains say he shouldn’t. And if that hasn’t caused any big problems within a few weeks, he might decide that, say, blockading North Korea is also a great idea. Sure, it makes all the national security “experts” nervous, but he knows that Kim Jong-Un won’t have the balls to retaliate. No one ever does.

Until someone does, that is.

The only way to get through to a guy like Trump is to hit back hard enough that his teeth rattle. Ideally, Republicans would have done this from the start, but they abdicated their responsibility to the country long ago. So now it’s up to the rest of the world. Trump has told them exactly what he wants to do, and they’d do well to take him both seriously and literally.

I’ve often wondered how long Republicans will tolerate President Trump’s war on the FBI. Conservatives love the FBI! It’s one thing to put up with Trump’s attacks on teachers or doctors or whoever else happens to catch his eye on a given day, but the FBI? Doesn’t that cause them at least a little bit of angst?

Funny you should ask. Lt. Col. Ralph Peters is a warmonger’s warmonger. As such, he fits in perfectly as a commentator on Fox News. But he’s finally decided he’s had enough and has decided to leave the network. Here’s his email explaining his resignation:

Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association. Now I am ashamed. In my view, Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration. When prime-time hosts—who have never served our country in any capacity—dismiss facts and empirical reality to launch profoundly dishonest assaults on the FBI, the Justice Department, the courts, the intelligence community (in which I served) and, not least, a model public servant and genuine war hero such as Robert Mueller—all the while scaremongering with lurid warnings of “deep-state” machinations—I cannot be part of the same organization, even at a remove. To me, Fox News is now wittingly harming our system of government for profit.

As a Russia analyst for many years, it also has appalled me that hosts who made their reputations as super-patriots and who, justifiably, savaged President Obama for his duplicitous folly with Putin, now advance Putin’s agenda by making light of Russian penetration of our elections and the Trump campaign. Despite increasingly pathetic denials, it turns out that the “nothing-burger” has been covered with Russian dressing all along. And by the way: As an intelligence professional, I can tell you that the Steele dossier rings true—that’s how the Russians do things. The result is that we have an American president who is terrified of his counterpart in Moscow.

Note that Peters didn’t quit when Tucker Carlson gave a platform to a congressman who thought ISIS was behind the Las Vegas shooting. He didn’t quit when Fox was reporting sympathetically about Trump’s response to white supremacists in Charlottesville. He didn’t quit over Benghazi. He didn’t quit over the birther conspiracty theories. He didn’t quit when Sean Hannity was peddling lies about the DNC murdering Seth Rich. He didn’t quit when Megyn Kelly and other were pushing racial hysteria over the New Black Panthers. He didn’t quit over the Shirley Sherrod affair.

I could go on, but that would be boring. The point is this: He didn’t care about all that other stuff. After all, lying about liberals is fine. It’s only when Fox started lying about the FBI and Vladimir Putin that he got upset.

I’m breaking one of my rules here: I normally think that when someone finally has a change of heart, we should be grateful. There’s no point in hammering them because they haven’t become full-on Bernie bros, after all. Just welcome them to the fold. I believe this about Peters too, but it’s hard to contain myself when, after a decade of taking their money, he finally pretends to have just noticed that Fox News is a lunatic propaganda machine, not a news outlet.

Still, welcome to the land of reality, Col. Peters. Obviously I’m saying that grudgingly, but I still mean it. I just wish that attacks on your own personal hobbyhorses hadn’t been the only thing that could get you to see the light.

This is a mushroom at Kew Gardens. Unless, that is, some smart aleck in comments tells me this isn’t really a mushroom, it’s an Eastern Albanian retrofungus, which is often mistaken for a mushroom. For another view, see here.

UPDATE: The consensus in comments is that this is a parasol mushroom.

Well, let’s see what’s new on this fine Monday mor—

BREAKING: *CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA SUSPENDS CEO ALEXANDER NIX

— Mike Dorning (@MikeDorning) March 20, 2018

I guess that Channel 4 undercover video might not have been edited to distort the truth after all.

Matt Yglesias points today to an interesting chart from a new paper by Larry Bartels. Basically, Bartels is looking at partisanship in the Trump era, and finds that Republicans aren’t very divided on cultural issues while Democrats are. Here’s how the divisions play out:

Much of this is no surprise, of course, but there are a few interesting tidbits:

• Aside from explicitly partisan figures and groups, no one is all that disliked. Among Democrats, even Wall Street bankers can only manage 3.5, and among Republicans it’s the same story for journalists. Sure, they’re disliked, but not really all that much.
• Nobody likes politicians all that much. Among Democrats, Barack Obama scores around 8.2. Among Republicans, no one does even that well. The NRA is the most liked group at about 7.2.
• Among political figures, Mitch McConnell is uniquely disliked.
• Poor old atheists can’t catch a break. Republicans rate them lower than Mitch McConnell, while Democrats barely tolerate them too, rating them slightly below Walmart. Sigh.
• Republicans claim to like poor people and single mothers. They are lying.

Among politicians, Republicans hate Hillary Clinton the most. Democrats hate Donald Trump the most. No surprises there.