Guest Post: Lies, damn lies and post-truth

Lee McIntyre, Boston University

Most politicians lie.

Or do they?

Even if we could find some isolated example of a politician who was scrupulously honest – former President Jimmy Carter, perhaps – the question is how to think about the rest of them.

And if most politicians lie, then why are some Americans so hard on President Donald Trump?

According to The Washington Post, Trump has told 6,420 lies so far in his presidency. In the seven weeks leading up to the midterms, his rate increased to 30 per day.

That’s a lot, but isn’t this a difference in degree and not a difference in kind with other politicians?

From my perspective as a philosopher who studies truth and belief, it doesn’t seem so. And even if most politicians lie, that doesn’t make all lying equal.

Yet the difference in Trump’s prevarication seems to be found not in the quantity or enormity of his lies, but in the way that Trump uses his lies in service to a proto-authoritarian political ideology.

I recently wrote a book, titled “"Post-Truth,” about what happens when “alternative facts” replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence. Looked at from this perspective, calling Trump a liar fails to capture his key strategic purpose.

Any amateur politician can engage in lying. Trump is engaging in “post-truth.”

Beyond word of the year

The Oxford English Dictionaries named “post-truth” its word of the year in November 2016, right before the U.S. election.

Citing a 2,000 percent spike in usage – due to Brexit and the American presidential campaign – they defined post-truth as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Ideology, in other words, takes precedence over reality.

When an individual believes their thoughts can influence reality, we call it “magical thinking” and might worry about their mental health. When a government official uses ideology to trump reality, it’s more like propaganda, and it puts us on the road to fascism.

As Yale philosopher Jason Stanley argues, “The key thing is that fascist politics is about identifying enemies, appealing to the in-group (usually the majority group), and smashing truth and replacing it with power.”

Consider the example of Trump’s recent decision not to cancel two political rallies on the same day as the Pittsburgh massacre. He said that this was based on the fact that the New York Stock Exchange was open the day after 9/11.

This isn’t true. The stock exchange stayed closed for six days after 9/11.

So was this a mistake? A lie? Trump didn’t seem to treat it so. In fact, he repeated the falsehood later in the same day.

When a politician gets caught in a lie, there’s usually a bit of sweat, perhaps some shame and the expectation of consequences.

Not for Trump. After many commentators pointed out to him that the stock exchange was in fact closed for several days after 9/11, he merely shrugged it off, never bothering to acknowledge – let alone correct – his error.

Why would he do this?

Ideology, post-truth and power

The point of a lie is to convince someone that a falsehood is true. But the point of post-truth is domination. In my analysis, post-truth is an assertion of power.

As journalist Masha Gessen and others have argued, when Trump lies he does so not to get someone to accept what he’s saying as true, but to show that he is powerful enough to say it.

He has asserted, “I’m the President and you’re not,” as if such high political office comes with the prerogative of creating his own reality. This would explain why Trump doesn’t seem to care much if there is videotape or other evidence that contradicts him. When you’re the boss, what does that matter?

Should we be worried about this flight from mere lying to post-truth?

Even if all politicians lie, I believe that post-truth foreshadows something more sinister. In his powerful book “On Tyranny,” historian Timothy Snyder writes that “post-truth is pre-fascism.” It is a tactic seen in “electoral dictatorships” – where a society retains the facade of voting without the institutions or trust to ensure that it is an actual democracy, like those in Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey.

In this, Trump is following the authoritarian playbook, characterized by leaders lying, the erosion of public institutions and the consolidation of power. You do not need to convince someone that you are telling the truth when you can simply assert your will over them and dominate their reality.

Lee McIntyre, Research Fellow Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Sweet potatoes, Donald Trump – and the Special Relationship

Rebecca Earle, University of Warwick

Two days after the US presidential election, The Independent reported that “Donald Trump has spoken with nine world leaders but has yet to call Theresa May, throwing her claim of a ‘special relationship’ into tatters.”

Eventually, the phone call was made. “Concerns over ‘special relationship’ allayed as Trump calls May,” read the headline in The Guardian a few days later. Time magazine reassured US readers that “Donald Trump and Britain’s Theresa May Affirm ‘Special Relationship’.”

It seems especially apt, as people in the US gather to celebrate Thanksgiving, to ponder the nature of the relationship between the two countries. After all, Thanksgiving forms part of an origin myth about how English settlers began the slow process of transforming themselves into Americans. The holiday commemorates the 1621 celebrations held at the Puritan settlement in Plymouth, which included, apparently, a large meal, some parading and a short religious service.

Scholars (and cartoonists) have deconstructed the holiday comprehensively, noting the invented nature of many of its core elements, its sporadic celebration before the 20th century, its erasure of European violence towards Native Americans and many other aspects. Overall, it’s clear that this holiday, like all national holidays, is an invented tradition based not only on collective remembering but also collective forgetting.

At the same time, while Thanksgiving masks a range of troubling and enduring aspects of US history, one feature merits some serious celebration: the sweet potato. Sweet potatoes in some form or another are now a structural element in the canonical Thanksgiving menu.

The authoritative New York Times cookery section recommends 14 different sweet potato side dishes, from classic maple-candied sweet potatoes to less traditional takes such as roasted sweet potatoes with horseradish butter. And that’s not even starting on sweet potato pies and puddings. This year, I plan to bake Paul Prudhomme’s sweet potato pecan pie. (After that, I will hibernate for an entire year while my digestive system processes the 4m calories it has ingested.)

A tart that is courage

The sweet potato is in fact part of a transatlantic food alliance that predates the original Thanksgiving feast. Sweet potatoes originated in the Americas, and formed a staple of the diets of Caribbean islanders. Columbus had never seen anything like them when he landed in the Bahamas in 1492. He compared them to African yams; others thought they tasted like turnips or chestnuts.

Once introduced into Europe, however, sweet potatoes quickly spread. By the late 16th century, they were grown on a commercial scale in the area around Malaga, Spain, and were considered “a good thing to eat” – in the words of one Spanish Jesuit.

But when did the sweet potato reach the British Isles? The English herbalist John Gerard included an illustration in his 1597 Herball. “Howsoever they bee dressed, they comfort, nourish, and strengthen the body”, he reported enthusiastically. Sweet potatoes quickly became popular in England, and many of the earliest recipes for “potatoes” may in fact refer to sweet potatoes. They were even grown at Hampton Court, for the delectation of Henry VIII, who reportedly learned to enjoy their honeyed delights from the ill-fated Catherine of Aragon.

Sweet potatoes: ‘they comfort, nourish, and strengthen the body’.
John Gerard's 'Herball' (1596)

After their marriage disintegrated, Henry had to rely on home-grown sweet potatoes, rather than Spanish imports. Gardeners at Hampton Court have recently demonstrated that sweet potatoes grow perfectly well in our scarcely tropical climate. The first printed recipe containing sweet potato is probably the description of how to make “a tart that is a courage to a man or woman”, which appeared in the Good Huswife’s Jewell, a cookbook published in London in 1596.

Before NATO … the sweet potato

Ironically, while Henry VIII enjoyed sweet potatoes in Tudor England, pilgrims in 1621 New England almost certainly did not feast on maple-candied sweet potatoes, or any sweet potatoes at all. Early records of the settlement make no mention of them and they were not native to the chilly shores of the north Atlantic. The oldest documents in the US that refer to sweet potatoes are actually from England.

Washington’s Folger Library, which holds a major collection of Shakespeariana, has recently unearthed an early recipe for sweet potato pudding from … Warwickshire! The pudding calls for potatoes (sweet or ordinary), eggs, sugar and a good dose of sherry. So new world sweet potatoes have been criss-crossing the Atlantic since the 16th century, forming a special relationship of eaters and growers that long predates NATO.

But what about Donald Trump? Does he have anything to do with this long history? Not really, although the internet is replete with images of sweet potatoes that resemble the president-elect and critics have called him a “xenophobic sweet potato”. Will Trump tuck into a traditional sweet potato pie or candied sweet potatoes for his Thanksgiving dinner? I don’t know and I certainly don’t care. But the sweet potato, unlike Trump, is unquestionably one of the new world’s gifts to Britain – and the world.

A recipe for sweet potato tart from Charles Carter, The Complete Practical Cook (London, 1730).

POTATOE TORT.

TAKE a Pound and half Spanish Potatoes [sweet potatoes]; boil them and blanch them, and cut them in Slices, not thin; sheet a Dish with Puff-paste, lay some Citron in the Bottom, lay over your Potatoes, and season them with Ginger, Cinnamon, Nutmeg, and Sugar; then take the Marrow of two Bones, cut it into Pieces as big as Walnuts, roll it in Yolks of Eggs, and season it as the Potatoes; lay it on them, and between the Lumps of Marrow lay Citron and Dates slic’d, and Eringoe Roots [I’d use candied angelica], sprinkle over some Sack and Orange-flower Water; then draw up a Quart of Cream boil’d with the Yolks of ten Eggs, and pour all over, bake it, and stick over some Citron, and serve it.

Rebecca Earle, Professor of HIstory, University of Warwick

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Repost: Jeff Flake, Donald Trump, and Edmund Burke

Last week Tuesday, at a fundraising reception for his reelection campaign, Jeff Flake and I briefly reminisced about our – well, his – early days in Washington a quarter century ago, when we were both policy wonks working on African issues.

Rick Sincere & Jeff Flake

Those were simpler times. George H.W. Bush was President. The Cold War had just come to an end, and the West and its liberal values had won. We were riding a tide of prosperity buoyed by the Reagan administration’s economic policies and the 1986 tax reforms. Jeff had not yet run for public office but I had tested the political waters in a special election for the Virginia House of Delegates.

Jeff Flake went on to bigger and better things: president of the Goldwater Institute in Arizona, Member of Congress, U.S. Senator and chairman of the Africa subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Earlier this year, he wrote Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle, borrowing a title from Barry Goldwater's 1960 book.

Today he stunned us with his announcement that he would retire from the Senate because of the debasement of the Republican Party and government institutions by their putative “leader,” Donald J. Trump.

He explained his decision not to seek reelection to the Arizona Republic by saying “there may not be a place for a Republican like me in the current Republican climate or the current Republican Party."

In an eloquent and hard-hitting speech on the floor of the Senate – which became the lead story on today’s edition of All Things Considered on NPR and no doubt flooded the headlines and airwaves of Arizona news outlets – Flake laid out his reasons for retiring and made it clear that Trump is a cancer eating away at the body politic. If anyone deserves blame for the destruction of the Republican party and its values, it is Trump.

What was once the party of Goldwater, Ford, and Reagan has become listless, boneheaded, and petulant.

But those are my words, not Flake’s. Here is what he had to say to his colleagues in the Senate today:

It must also be said that I rise today with no small measure of regret. Regret because of the state of our disunion, regret because of the disrepair and destructiveness of our politics. Regret because of the indecency of our discourse. Regret because of the coarseness of our leadership.

Regret for the compromise of our moral authority, and by our, I mean all of our complicity in this alarming and dangerous state of affairs. It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end. In this century, a new phrase to describe the accommodation of a new and undesirable order, that phrase being the new normal. That we must never adjust to the present coarseness of our national dialogue with the tone set up at the top. We must never regard as normal the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals, we must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country. The personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms and institution the flagrant disregard for truth and decency.

And more:

Without fear of the consequences and without consideration of the rules of what is politically safe or palatable, we must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal. They are not normal. Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as telling it like it is when it is actually just reckless, outrageous and undignified.

And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy. Such behavior does not project strength because our strength comes from our values. It instead projects a corruption of the spirit and weakness. It is often said that children are watching. Well, they are. And what are we going to do about that? When the next generation asks us, why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you speak up? What are we going to say?

Mr. President, I rise today to say: enough. We must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalous never becomes the normal. With respect and humility, I must say that we have fooled ourselves for long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner, a return to civility and stability right behind it.

Read the whole thing here, with its citations of James Madison and Theodore Roosevelt. Watch it here.

Make no mistake – talented, wise legislators like Jeff Flake depart the Senate and political life because a blowhard in the White House has no sense of propriety, or empathy, or humility, and no understanding of the Constitution or the rule of law or the limits of his own authority. This bodes ill for the Republic.

As I write this, I am still shaking in anger and sadness. Edmund Burke wrote that the “only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” When sinister forces like Steve Bannon and his orange-rind puppet gleefully sideline good men like Jeff Flake, evil triumphs.

This has been reposted and slightly adapted from an article on Bearing Drift published October 24, 2017.

Guest Post: Anti-Trump backlash gags free expression at universities

James Turk, Ryerson University

We are living in difficult and worrisome times.

There has been a resurgence of racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and nativist nationalisms in many parts of the world — including Canada.

This renaissance of hate has been intensified by the actions of Donald Trump before and after his election. Fortunately, many have responded against the hate. For some, regrettably, part of that response has been to call for suppression of free speech.

As the director of the Centre for Free Expression at Ryerson University, I was deeply troubled when Ryerson recently decided to cancel a panel discussion whose topic, ironically, was to be “The Stifling of Free Speech on University Campuses.”

The panel discussion — scheduled to include University of Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson and former Rebel Media journalist Faith Goldy — was not a march riddled with Klan and neo-Nazis. It was a group of three conservative academics and one right-wing journalist whose ideas are odious to many people, including me. But then, my ideas are likely odious to them.

The security excuse

Free speech wall in Charlottesville, Virginia

The university said it cancelled the event after a security review concluded it was “not equipped to provide the necessary level of public safety for the event to go forward.” The violent confrontation and deaths in Charlottesville may have both spooked Ryerson officials and made their decision seem prudent to many.

Opponents of the planned panel contributed to the fears — with their Facebook page headlined “No Fascists in Our City” adorned initially with a photo of a crossed-out swastika and a call for mass turnout to stop the panel. “This shit stops now. Either you’re with us or you’re not….”

In cancelling the event, Ryerson gave in to intimidation, prevented a panel discussion of difficult ideas and disagreement over deeply held views, and denied free speech rights to those with opposing views.

Part of freedom of expression is the right to dissent, protest and criticize, but that right does not extend to intimidation, harassment or violence that denies others their free speech rights.

Differences of views are the lifeblood of any university and essential to the mission of advancing knowledge and educating students. Most universities even have statements of principle that guarantee and support free expression.

Depriving views

Yale University’s statement says “to curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily also deprives others of the right to listen to those views.”

The University of Toronto’s statement of purpose guarantees the “rights of freedom of speech, academic freedom, and freedom of research. And we affirm that these rights are meaningless unless they entail the right to raise deeply disturbing questions and provocative challenges to the cherished beliefs of society at large and of the university itself.”

Ryerson’s decision to cancel the event violates its own Freedom of Speech policy which states:

“Ryerson does not avoid controversies, difficult ideas, or disagreements over deeply held views. When such disagreements arise within the University or within a broader social context, the University’s primary responsibility is to protect free speech within a culture of mutual respect. The right to freedom of speech comes with the responsibility to exercise that right in an atmosphere free of intimidation and in an environment that supports the free speech rights of those with opposing views.”

This is not a new issue. During the anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthy period in the 1940s and early ‘50s, many universities abandoned their commitments to academic freedom and freedom of expression. Loyalty oaths were imposed on faculty and many professors accused of being Communists were fired.

The then-president of Yale University, Charles Seymour, famously said in 1949: “There will be no witch hunts at Yale because there will be no witches. We do not intend to hire Communists.”

In her book No Ivory Tower, Ellen Schrecker summarized the role of the universities during this period: “In its collaboration with McCarthyism, the academic community behaved just like every other major institution in American life. Such a discovery is demoralizing … . Here, if anywhere, dissent should have found a sanctuary. Yet it did not.”

Cowardice and complicity

That harmful legacy of university cowardice and complicity took years to overcome. We need to remember this past if we do not want to relive it, albeit in the name of new passions and different ideologies and concerns.

Instead, it appears as if we are starting down a dark road that threatens the raison d’être of the university and the fundamental rights to freedom of expression guaranteed by Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

If standing by its principles requires a university to make a greater investment in security personnel to protect freedom of expression, that must be seen as a proper cost of doing business.

If threats continue to blossom, then there needs to be discussions with governments to ensure universities have the additional financial resources to ensure free expression does not fall victim to intimidation.

Not only are censorship and suppression fatal to the purpose of the university, they undermine the foundation of democratic society.

When individual rights to freedom of expression are diminished or taken away for an allegedly good cause, they are necessarily invested in some higher authority that is given the right to determine what is acceptable.

The result is censorship from above — ultimately the state — with the likelihood that the champions of that censorship today are its vulnerable targets tomorrow.

James Turk, Director, Centre for Free Expression & Distinguished Visiting Professor, Ryerson University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Big Lie and How It Travels

After White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer audaciously lied, in his first news media briefing, about the attendance estimates at Friday's presidential inauguration, a friend on Facebook posted an analysis that has since gone viral on social media, particularly on Twitter.  For instance, Oscar-winning composer John Legend, Helen Hayes award-winning actor Will Gartshore, and Republican political consultant Ana Navarro all tweeted a screenshot of the mini-essay to their thousands of Twitter followers.

The provocative analysis has caused a stir -- a real conversation about facts, lies, and propaganda -- so, since the original author gave his permission to "copy and paste" his status as long as his name was removed and the originator remained anonymous, I'm offering it here to expand its reach. It deserves to be read, reposted, restated, and challenged.

The White House

If you are puzzled by the bizarre "press conference" put on by the White House press secretary this evening (angrily claiming that Trump's inauguration had the largest audience in history, accusing them of faking photos and lying about attendance), let me help explain it. This spectacle served three purposes:

1. Establishing a norm with the press: they will be told things that are obviously wrong and they will have no opportunity to ask questions. That way, they will be grateful if they get anything more at any press conference. This is the PR equivalent of "negging," the odious pick-up practice of a particular kind of horrible man (e.g., Donald Trump).

2. Increasing the separation between Trump's base (1/3 of the population) from everybody else (the remaining 2/3). By being told something that is obviously wrong—that there is no evidence for and all evidence against, that anybody with eyes can see is wrong—they are forced to pick whether they are going to believe Trump or their lying eyes. The gamble here—likely to pay off—is that they will believe Trump. This means that they will regard media outlets that report the truth as "fake news" (because otherwise they'd be forced to confront their cognitive dissonance.)

U.S. Capitol

3. Creating a sense of uncertainty about whether facts are knowable, among a certain chunk of the population (which is a taking a page from the Kremlin, for whom this is their preferred disinformation tactic). A third of the population will say "clearly the White House is lying," a third will say "if Trump says it, it must be true," and the remaining third will say "gosh, I guess this is unknowable." The idea isn't to convince these people of untrue things, it's to fatigue them, so that they will stay out of the political process entirely, regarding the truth as just too difficult to determine.

This is laying important groundwork for the months ahead. If Trump's White House is willing to lie about something as obviously, unquestionably fake as this, just imagine what else they'll lie about. In particular, things that the public cannot possibly verify the truth of. It's gonna get real bad.

The point is, if the Trump administration and the President himself are willing to lie about such petty things as the number of people who were or were not on the National Mall on January 20, what will they do when they want to send American soldiers into battle in some far-off place? What will they do when the Bureau of Labor Statistics issues a monthly unemployment figures that is unflattering to the Administration? What will they do when the number of anti-Administration protesters far outnumbers the guests at the inauguration?

A final note: Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau proves himself amazingly adept at interpreting Donald Trump. His comic strip today, which had to have been drawn days before the inauguration, as the President in the White House challenging the news media's reports on the inauguration's attendance numbers. You can't make this stuff up.

Update: Russian chess champion and political dissident Garry Kasparov made a similar, and pithy, point on Twitter:

The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) December 13, 2016

A Quick Transition: Inauguration 2017

This is what the White House web site landing page looked like at 11:59 a.m. on January 20, 2017:

And this is what it looked like at 12:01 p.m. on January 20, 2017:

Proof positive that Donald J. Trump is the 45th President of the United States.

Guest Post: Why Lord of the Flies is the perfect Christmas gift for 2016

Matthew Whittle, University of Leeds


It’s the story of a society in which democracy descends into tribalism and tyranny. One of a civilisation built by those committed to the rule of law who turn on each other, scapegoating the marginalised and powerless. Ultimately, it’s a reminder of a human barbarism lying just beneath the fragile veneer of decency.

Sound familiar? That’s right: it’s the plot of Lord of the Flies, a novel about a group of English boys who survive a plane crash and are marooned on an island in the South Pacific. After a short period of harmony, a power struggle between the two leaders, Ralph and Jack, causes the group to split. Jack wins out by promising to hunt and kill a common enemy – the strange phantom living in the jungle known only as the Beast. It’s a successful campaign of fear and division.

Lord of the Flies was first published in 1954, largely in response to the rise of Nazism and the horrors of World War II. And yet, in many ways, it speaks directly to the world of 2016, where austerity, the refugee crisis, Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump have emboldened nationalist fervour and stoked societal fragmentation.

The racialised language of tribal “savagery” in the novel quite rightly makes contemporary readers bristle. It marks author William Golding’s failure to move beyond a fundamentally eurocentric and colonialist view of the world. But ultimately, the book’s message is that “savagery” is universal. It is not racially or nationally defined. It’s a moral that encourages us to reflect on just how far-right extremism has crept back into mainstream politics throughout Europe and America.

The far right traffics in the populist language of national allegiance to legitimate racism. America’s so-called alt-right, France’s National Front, UKIP and xenophobic Leavers in Britain all feed off dissatisfaction with globalisation to create enemies within. The solution to complex economic and political realities for these groups is as simple as hunting the Beast. Jack lives on in Trump, Le Pen, and Farage.

The voice of reason

In counterpoint to Jack’s sloganeering and scaremongering, Lord of the Flies gives us Piggy and Simon. The former is a firm believer in scientific progress, but he is also aware that human progress will be halted if “we get frightened of people”. Piggy is debilitated when the boys steal his glasses – his means of vision and clarity – and use them to start a fire. They instantly lose control of the flames, leading to the destruction of part of their new home. Rather than representing the first act of a united civilisation, the making of fire signals the disunity that splits the group and leads, finally, to Piggy’s death at the hands of Jack’s tribe.

If Piggy is “progress” then Simon is “reason”. He knows that the Beast isn’t real and is in fact borne of the boys’ own fear. “However Simon thought of the beast,” we’re told, “there rose before his inward sight the picture of a human at once heroic and sick.” Despite this insight, Simon is regarded as weak and is shunned.

After a lone expedition, he discovers that the Beast is no more than a dead airman – a casualty of the war raging far off in the distance, whose parachute has swept him onto the island. Simon returns to camp to share the news, but the boys’ imagination awakens a blind desire for blood. They no longer see a fellow human being, only a threat to their society. Simon’s screams are drowned out by the “tearing of teeth and claws”.

During his 1962 lecture tour of American universities, Golding discussed his reasons for writing Lord of the Flies:

My book was to say: you think that now the [Second World War] is over and an evil thing destroyed, you are safe because you are naturally kind and decent. But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country.

So far, so bleak. And yet, while Golding depicts humankind’s propensity for prejudice, there is a small glimmer of hope. After fleeing the manhunt ordered by Jack, Ralph encounters a uniformed naval officer whose vessel has landed after seeing the smoke rising from the scorched island. As Ralph weeps “for the end of innocence”, the officer turns around to let his eyes rest on his warship in the distance. This final image of the book is a moment of self-reflection. In the savagery and environmental catastrophe of the boys’ rudimentary civilisation, the adult world is afforded a vision of its own folly.

The moral of Lord of the Flies isn’t just that barbarity knows no borders. It’s also that it can be prevented from flourishing through the commitment to a shared humanity. “If humanity has a future on this planet of a hundred million years,” said Golding in his 1962 lecture, “it is unthinkable that it should spend those aeons in a ferment of national self-satisfaction and chauvinistic idiocies.”

The novel may not be a heart-warming Christmas tale, but it gifts us an unflinching portrayal of a society driven by fear. For readers in 2016, it remains both an urgent warning and an invocation.



Matthew Whittle, Teaching Fellow in English (Contemporary and Postcolonial), University of Leeds

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Today's RTD: Should presidential electors exercise independent judgment?

In the commentary section of today's Richmond Times-Dispatch, I argue that presidential electors can, and should, exercise independent judgment when they cast their states electoral votes in December.

In "Electors should vote their consciences," I begin by telling the story of Roger MacBride, a Virginia elector in 1972 who was pledged to vote for incumbent Republican President Richard Nixon. MacBride chose, instead, to cast his ballots for the Libertarian ticket of John Hospers and Tonie Nathan.

The Libertarian Party had been founded barely a year earlier, and its presidential ticket appeared on the ballots of only four states. (Nixon, you may recall, thumped George McGovern that year, winning every state but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. He went on to resign in disgrace two years later.) The notoriety MacBride achieved by this brazen act catapulted him, four years later, to become the LP's second presidential nominee.

While "faithless electors" may break the law in some states, what few court decisions that have addressed the matter indicate that presidential electors may vote their consciences:

State laws (like Virginia’s) that bind electors to particular candidates have rarely, if ever, been tested. An Oklahoma elector in 1960 who voted for Virginia Sen. Harry F. Byrd rather than Richard Nixon did so even though he was threatened with a $1,000 fine. “I am not worried about $1,000,” he said, and the only penalty imposed on him was a refusal to pay his travel expenses to Oklahoma City.

Few court decisions have addressed the independence of presidential electors. An 1896 Kansas court decision said that electors were under “no legal obligation” to support any particular candidate and were “authorized to use their own judgment as to the proper eligible persons to fill these high offices.” In 1948, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that all electors were free to vote as they pleased, because it was “only by force of a moral obligation, not a legal one, that the presidential electors pledged to certain candidacies fulfill their pledges after election.”

Each elector can make up his or her mind about whether to follow the election returns or to vote independently, but this year's decision making process carries unusual moral and ethical weight. Both of the two largest parties have nominated flawed presidential candidates. While Democratic electors are, for the most part, satisfied with Hillary Clinton (if not enthusiastic about her) as their party's candidate, Republican electors are, like Republicans at large, conflicted about Donald J. Trump.

So, I argue:

The electors’ right to independent judgment may be most pertinent this year, when GOP presidential electors are expected to vote for a nominee who has brought shame to their party. The vulgar and impolitic Trump has expressed contempt for the Constitution, undermined confidence in the integrity of the electoral system, dismissed any interest in the legislative process, and been at loggerheads with time-tested conservative, Republican values.

A Republican “faithless elector” in 2016 will bravely and astutely avoid the future taint of association with Trump, the most unfit character ever to seek the presidency, simply by casting his ballot for Gary Johnson (my choice, and the choice of this newspaper) or another suitable person.

If either Democratic or Republican electors, in Virginia or elsewhere, choose to vote their consciences on December 19, I'll give them full credit for having moral courage. It would be nice to think my op/ed piece influenced their choices -- and perhaps some of them will have seen it, since (if the metrics app is believable) more than 3,700 readers have recommended the article to their friends on Facebook.

Gary Johnson on Donald Trump's contempt for democratic transitions: 'Unbelievable'

Last night, in the third and final Democratic-Republican presidential debate, GOP candidate Donald J. Trump suggested that he may not accept the results of the election on November 8, continuing his theme of asserting that massive electoral fraud will take place and that is the only reason he will lose to Hillary Clinton.

Today, Trump doubled down on his refusal to accept the central tenet of American democracy, that when a person or party loses an election, they become the loyal opposition and wait for another opportunity to win public office.

According to the Associated Press:

Trump kicked off a rally Thursday in Delaware, Ohio, by saying that he "would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supports and to all of the people of the United States that I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election."

But he added: "If I win."

In response to Trump's bizarre break with tradition, the Libertarian Party's nominee for President, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, issued this statement:

Gary Johnson

“As a former Governor, who was elected and served as a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, I have to say that Donald Trump’s refusal to say he will accept the outcome of an election is just one more straw too many. It’s offensive to the thousands of election officials across the nation, and it’s offensive to a nation for which the integrity of elections is what sets us apart from much of the world.

“Peaceful transition of power, which depends entirely upon honoring the results of elections, is as fundamental to our greatness and Constitution as anything else we do in America, and Donald Trump can’t even accept that fundamental without hedging.

“Unbelievable.”

Johnson and his running mate, former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld, have achieved ballot access in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia -- the first third-party presidential ticket to do so since Libertarian Harry Browne and his running mate, Jo Jorgensen, did it in 1996.

Guest Post: Vote Against Both Evils, by Will Hammer

This November 8th, if you decide to vote, you have a huge choice to make. You can either vote for a corrupt crony politician, or you can vote for a vulgar corrupt crony reality TV star. Because of the media, the partisan Commission on Presidential Debates, and the two major parties who have a vested interest in only having two parties, you would think those are your only choices.

Will Hammer, left, with Robert Sarvis in Buena Vista, Virginia

Well, you actually do have a choice at the ballot box this November. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, is on the ballot in all 50 states and D.C. He is an honest and a great man, not your typical crony politician or a bigoted, morally corrupt, gaudy salesman. Do I agree with Johnson on everything? No, but he is leaps and bounds better than Clinton or Trump and represents real change from the business as usual in Washington that has gotten us here. Is Gary Johnson perfect? No, but he actually admits that and it’s refreshing when a politician admits their humanity. Will you agree with him on everything? Probably not, but at least you know he does not have an agenda and he’s not speaking out of both sides of his mouth, or other orifice.

The biggest smear the media can come up with for Johnson is his ‘Aleppo moment’, in which he didn’t know what Aleppo was when randomly asked during a live interview. Should he have been able to answer that question? Of course, he’s running for President, but it’s definitely not a disqualifier. I’d rather have someone whose foreign policy won’t cause Syrian and other middle eastern strife, than someone who would know, but only because she was part of the administration that caused the major humanitarian crisis. He had another moment where he couldn’t name a foreign leader he respected. A week later, he still can’t. The media would have you believe that he couldn’t name ANY foreign leader, but that’s untrue. He cannot name a current foreign leader he admires and he explained that he doesn’t want to defend them against things that he’s not even aware of. Again, this was an unscripted, live question. The other candidates NEVER have unscripted questions. They are screened, planted, and given well beforehand to prepare.

So those are Gary Johnson’s big ‘scandals.’ Now, let’s compare those to Trump and Clinton. If I were to include all of them, this article would take up the whole newspaper, not 1600 words. Trump and Clinton are different sides of the same corrupt, crony coin. One sells her political power and influence and the other buys it. Trump is definitely no outsider, and Clinton is no progressive politician putting people before profits.

Trump has a horrible temperament and would be a disaster diplomatically, saying whatever came to his head on a whim in public, completely alienating us and quite frankly being a national embarrassment. He has spoken about media organizations such as the Washington Post having issues if he becomes President because of stories they have written about him. He has spoken about companies such as Amazon (both owned by Jeff Bezos) getting taxed essentially out of business. His careless speech may even incite violence, with him making suggestions about gun owners taking care of Clinton and many other situations. Trump has exploited horrible eminent domain laws to obtain private land to build his developments. He scammed people with Trump University, used bankruptcy to screw people and contractors over while walking away with millions, and the list goes on. He’s a bigot, demonizing Mexicans and others. And he’s a misogynist, saying crude and horrible things to and about various women. That’s bad enough, but we have just found out that he sexually assaults women and brags about it in private. This latest revelation was caught via a hot mic. Some are defending him, saying that it’s ‘locker room’ talk. Of course men do that, just as women do the same. But, there is a HUGE difference between what Trump said and ‘locker room’ talk. Trump actually talked about how being famous and a star allows him to sexually assault women and get away with it. I could care less about the “lewd language”, I care about the actions he described and he gets away with. This is DISGUSTING. This is it, this is your moment of truth. Are you going to defend and vote for this loathsome egomaniac?

Gary Johnson and William Weld at Libertarian Party Convention, May 2016

Clinton is definitely no saint either. Clinton is about as hawkish as they come. She voted for the Iraq War, costing thousands of US lives, an estimated 250-500k Iraqi lives, instability, and nearly $2 TRILLION. She was Secretary of State while the Obama administration bombed at least 8 countries, thousands upon thousands of innocent lives. She was part of regime change that created more and more instability, which led to the rise of ISIS. Simply put, she is one of the biggest advocates for and participants in our horrible foreign policy that has cost us US lives, innocent foreign lives, trillions of dollars, created more terrorists and allowed for ISIS to fill the void, and so on. War is a racket and Clinton is no peace candidate. The Clinton Foundation and pay to play with foreign governments/leaders. Recently she has also had some scandals involving emails. A leak revealed the DNC conspired to make sure Bernie Sanders did not receive nomination and that Clinton would. As a Ron Paul supporter in 2007 and 2012, I feel your pain and disgust Sander supporters.There is also the private email server that was in a bathroom that Clinton used instead of secure servers provided by the government for classified and official business while Secretary of the State. The FBI decided not to pursue charges against Clinton, but made it clear that she was extremely careless and frankly inept at handling classified information. But, why the double standard? Others have been charged with mishandling classified information, not intentionally. 30,000 emails deleted with BleachBit, 30 new emails recovered by FBI recently related to Benghazi, Clinton IT specialist asking Reddit how to alter ‘very VIP’ emails, and the list goes on. And now, the same day that Trump’s sexual groping audio comes to light, Wikileaks has released emails from Clinton’s campaign manager, revealing excerpts from Clinton’s Goldman Sach and other speeches, where she has earned more than $22 million, such as “If everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.”

I recommend voting against both evils and voting for Gary Johnson. He is a two term Republican governor from a heavily Democratic state, as is his running mate Bill Weld. They will bring sanity and non-partisanship to the office, reaching across the aisle and working with coalitions of all parties. They are fiscally responsible and socially accepting, like the majority of Americans. They do not want to continue our failed foreign policy of drone strikes, invasions, backing various rebel groups, and overthrowing governments. They want to balance our budget and stop the growing $20 trillion deficit, which has doubled under Bush and then again under Obama. Reject both of the two major party Presidential candidates, the most hated in US history. The Democrats and Republicans believe they own your vote. They do not, you own your own vote. A vote for anyone is not a vote for someone else, like the narrative they are trying to play right now. Gary Johnson is polling roughly 10% nationally. But these are polls that do not include people under 40 (which actually favor Johnson) and/or have only Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on the top line, head to head. In reality, they are not going head to head. This is at least a 3 way race in all 50 states, and a 4 way race in most states with Jill Stein. Johnson is polling over 19% in five states, over 15% in 15 states, and over 10% in 42 states. He currently is actually polling within margin or error to Trump in New Mexico. If Gary Johnson does get 10% in Virginia, then the Libertarian Party would get major party status and be able to run candidates within obtaining the ridiculous amount of signatures required currently. There are many other states where Johnson’s success would create more choice on the ballot as well. If he was allowed on the debate stage, run by the Commission on Presidential Debates which was founded by former Democrat and Republican national chairs, then I have no doubt that he would be even higher, and possibly overtake both candidates. But thanks to Ross Perot’s success, who was polling lower than Johnson and was allowed to debate, the CPD raised the arbitrary percentage to be in the debates. It’s a scam and even the League of Women Voters, who used to run the Presidential debates, dropped their sponsorship because they did not want to help “perpetuate a fraud on the American people.” Even dozens of major newspapers and publications are calling for Gary Johnson’s inclusion into the debate, with over 60% of polled Americans wishing for Johnson to be included. Gary Johnson has even received six major newspaper endorsements, to Trump’s zero.

Will Hammer is a Libertarian who ran in 2014 for U.S. Congress and 2015 for Virginia House of Delegates. Hammer was the sole recipient of the Libertarian Party’s Patrick Henry award in 2016, which recognizes a very effective campaign for public office at the state or federal level, while communicating Libertarian ideas, principles, and values.