Me at Samizdata, commenting on this, about the bonkersness of North Korea:

No. North Korea is not socialism betrayed. It is socialism done.

Which everyone here knows, but it is worth repeating.

Commenting on that, Perry de Havilland said:

That North Korea is ‘late socialism’ is a meme worth spreading.

Indeed it is.

Duly spread.

A bit.

Various people have been nagging me (a bit) about getting into Twitter, which things like this suit well.  It reminds me (a bit) of when people got contemptuously angry (a bit) because I still didn’t have an email address.

Yesterday, I lived my life, but I am determined, having started, to finish telling you about last Thursday.

So, okay, I have now arrived at Westminster Tube Station.

Most tube stations consist of lots of underground tubes, not just for the trains but also for the people.  Westminster Tube Station is different.

In its original form, it was a regular tube station, made entirely out of tubes.  But then they built Portcullis House across the road from Big Ben and Parliament, the one with the giant chimneys on top, where MPs now have vast new quantities of office space to wreak their havoc.  Many think powerful MPs are a good thing, because they will “hold the executive to account” better, but what they mostly now do is nag the executive to bite off more and more unchewable activity, and complain if the executive ever doesn’t.

While they were building Portcullis House, they combined that with doing a total rebuild of the tube station right underneath it.

And this time around, instead of grubbing about in the ground like moles, they just dug a huge, huge hole, like they do when building any other new building.  Just deeper.

As a result, the process of getting from station entrance to train, or from train to train (what with the station now being an interchange between the District and Circle Line, and the newer Jubilee Line - which is the one I was taking), is as dramatic and theatrical as battling through a regular tube station is grim and demeaning and demoralising.  At Westminster Tube, you now go up and down inside a huge open space, like a department store with no stuff in it, and grey rather than all spangly and coloured.  I love it, even though it has a decidedly fascist feel to it, maybe even because it has a decidedly fascist feel to it.  At least its stylish fascism, rather than just lumpy and cloddish.  But mainly, I think I love it because it is so different from a regular tube station.

While there last Thursday, I only took one shot, namely this:

Had I known I was on a Blogged Odyssey, I would have taken many more shots, of all that dramatic open space with science fictiony structure in among it, supporting the building above and the escalators within, but on Thursday all I thought I was doing was taking the tube.  I would have taken shots like the ones here.  Someone really should set a movie gun fight in this place, don’t you think?  Perhaps they already have.

As for my picture above, it puzzled me for a while.  At first I thought the right-way-round Westminster tube sign was some kind of double reflection, but there is only one sheet of glass involved, so it can’t be that.  In the end I cracked it, metaphorically speaking.  The Westminster tube sign is where it seems to be, but how it looks is confused by the reflection of the wall behind me.  It looks like the sign is projected onto the wall.  In fact, the wall behind me is projected onto the sign.  To the left, you can see the regular wall that the tube sign is actually attached to.

That white circular thing behind me, actually a fire hose I think, looks like a full moon.

Once again, I fear most may not care.  But photographed reflections are a thing of mine.

This afternoon Antoine Clarke and I, all being well, will be having a recorded chat about the US presidential election.

[LATER: Here is the recording.  Not everything went well.  If my computer’s response is anything to go by, you will hear this through only one speaker, and in somewhat imperfect sound.  But nobody listens to BrianMicklethwaitDotCom sound files to be knocked out by their superb sound quality.  What we both say is audible, and the good news is that the file is far smaller than usual.  I hope that, if you listen, you enjoy it.  It lasts just under 45 minutes.]

Meanwhile, here is another attempt to embed a video here.  This time it’s John McCain, talking about just how badly Obama screwed up this Benghazi business.

That got shown on CBS.  How many people have watched it, or will watch it before the election, I have no idea.  The importance of this and all the other Obama scandals is not that they are scandalous, but whether or not large numbers of Americans are hearing about them.

I have been speculating that the “mainstream” media would maybe desert Obama.  Well, a few people in it are expressing doubts, but on the whole media bias has never been more blatant and brazen.  This is because Obama is, far more than any previous Democrat, their perfect candidate.  Hard left, and determined to inflict (in a thoroughly bad way) fundamental change on America.  I really want these media people to get the kicking of their lives.

Obama’s enemies are still trying to sort out whether they think Obama is merely crass by nature, or evil on purpose.  We may never know.  Successful people (and Obama has been very successful by most measurements) do what they are best at.

I cannot for the the life of me see how re-electing Obama could possibly be anything but a giant act of folly and self-destruction on the part of America.

The BBC, by the way, are still saying that this election is a dead heat.  Or this is what they said on the 9am news bulletin on Radio 3, just before CD Review last Saturday.  Others say Obama is going to get landslided.  I think landslide, but ... we shall see.

If the video isn’t working properly, please let me know.  Not that I will then know what to do, but it will influence my enthusiasm for further such attempts.

Well, well. I just added, to the posting below, this:

Actually, I think I got the first two sentences of the paragraph above wrong.  It should read: “What polls tell you is not what voters are thinking.  They tell you what the pollsters think the voters are thinking”.  What I actually put is indeed “not entirely true”.  This explains, I think, and as my original version does not, why pollsters don’t get the result right, but do get right the direction in which opinion is heading at any particular moment, which, as I introspect, I have been letting them tell me about.  Because they do get that right. The misleading samples of people that the pollsters each talk to include a few who change their minds, and the pollsters do pick up on this.  So, now, the pollsters are getting right that opinion is flowing steadily away from Obama and towards Romney.  But at no stage in this process did, or do, or will they register how bad things were, and are, and will be, for Obama.

And mere hours later, I read this:

One way of avoiding this error is to look at the same poll over a long period of time.  The numbers themselves might be off, but as long as the same flawed methodology doesn’t change, you should still be able to pick up trends.

Indeed.

But he’s not even sure that Obama will lose, although he definitely inclines that way.  I incline that way more and more definitely with every day that passes.

And now, it seems I’m only one of a stampede.

Already, I am turning my mind to a piece about Romney, entitled something like: Okay, he’s going to win, but then what?

I now think Romney is going to win big.  Part of why I think that is captured in point 2 in that graphic, which I found here.  No one has to know.

In particular, the pollsters do not have to know.  I think the polls have, all along, been wrong about this election, wronger than ever before.  The polls are not being told what people have been, are, and will be thinking.  The polls were wrong when they said Obama was walking it.  They are wrong now that they are saying it’s close.  They will be wrong when they say Romney will just about win, as they soon will.  But on the day, in the real poll, Obama is going to be slaughtered.  Romney will win all the “battleground” states and several which are not now even thought to be in contention.

What polls tell you is not what the result will be.  They tell you what the pollsters think the result will be.  How do they know what they know?  Same way I do.  They guess.  (In this respect, poll results remind me of economic models.) Okay that isn’t entirely true.  I myself factor in what the polls say when I make my guesses.  But the polls are sufficiently wrong to be very wrong indeed, for an event that can be bent into a completely different shape by single figure percentage point errors.

[LATER: Actually, I think I got the first two sentences of the paragraph above wrong.  It should read: “What polls tell you is not what voters are thinking.  They tell you what the pollsters think the voters are thinking”.  What I actually put is indeed “not entirely true”.  This explains, I think, and as my original version does not, why pollsters don’t get the result right, but do get right the direction in which opinion is heading at any particular moment, which, as I introspect, I have been letting them tell me about.  Because they do get that right. The misleading samples of people that the pollsters each talk to include a few who change their minds, and the pollsters do pick up on this.  So, now, the pollsters are getting right that opinion is flowing steadily away from Obama and towards Romney.  But at no stage in this process did, or do, or will they register how bad things were, and are, and will be, for Obama.  End of LATER.]

We shall see, etc.

Debate Two between Obama and Romney has now become about whether Obama can win by a knockout.  Maybe he can.  But, he won’t.

Romney’s final burst of adverts will have further impact.  Obama’s adverts have accomplished little.  They said Romney isn’t likable, is a right wing nutjob, etc.  Debate One negated this message.  They said something about “Big Bird”.  Ridiculous.  But that doesn’t prove that adverts accomplish nothing, by their nature.  Just as in the debates, and unlike Obama, Romney (and Ryan) have plenty of persuasive things that they want to say.

In a comment on this, I noted that the TV Umpire lady in the Vice President debate did Biden no favours by allowing him to behave so very badly.  Had she told him early on to stop his giggling and interrupting, Biden might well have won that debate.  But give TV Umpire lady her due, she did at least interrupt Ryan, whenever his speeches were starting to sound too eloquent.

But Romney’s adverts can correct that, by saying everything Team Romney now wants to say, and which the mainstream media have until now stopped them saying by less expensive means.  And, they can use the exact words which will work best.

Plus, Team Romney will have, I believe, another two debates worth of Obama waffle to use, like they have already used Biden’s laughing.

Like Jim Bennett said:

John, let me suggest that the criteria for victory are changing. The debate no longer ends when the debaters walk off stage. And now it no longer ends when the TV spinners have, like cuckoos, laid their eggs and flown away. There is now the long, long reverberation in social media, where the basic debate footage serves as raw material for mash-ups and parodies and treatments for the rest of the election cycle and beyond. And Biden’s performance, which won him some tactical advantage in the debate, has set him up as the target for rich satire and a way that Ryan’s conventional performance didn’t and cannot do. His performance is comic gold, and although within hard-core Dem/left circles he will be celebrated as the warrior, everywhere else, and especially for basically apolitical young YouTube viewers, he will be the jackass supreme. I suspect that by Election Day, the various parodic videos will have had a larger viewership than the debate itself. By this criterion, the tactic was a massive miscalculation.

If the same thing happens to Obama, between now and the election (I believe it will), he really will be slaughtered.

But … we shall see.

LATER: Mitt Romney in a landslide.

I stayed up, not so much to watch the Vice Presidential Debate, as to see what would be made of it by others, most especially the BBC.

The BBC’s lady with big blond hair said (a) that it was too close to call, but then (b) called if for Ryan.  Two reasons for making Ryan the winner.  One, Biden had to win, to get some momentum back for Obama.  A draw was enough for Ryan.  So Biden actually lost.  Two, Biden actually did lose, because of all his smirking and interrupting and condescending.  Biden did all that wrong.  Ryan did nothing wrong.  So, Ryan won.

The BBC agreed, in other words, with PJTV drunk blogger Steven Green, who also had Ryan winning.  It’s not a knockout, but it is a win.

My personal take?

At first I was rather impressed by Biden, but then I started to find his air of forced merriment unsuitable for the grim things he was arguing about.  I was glad to see that others thought that too and that it wasn’t just me.

Biden was the more obvious “performer”.  Which is not good.  He was the one trying to create an atmosphere, like an old school stage actor.  Ryan seemed more himself.  Which could just mean that Ryan is a better performer.

Because Ryan was defending while Biden attacked, it looked like Ryan was the actual Vice President, defending four defendable years of him being Vice President and Romney being President, rather than Romney and him being the challengers.  But that may have been because I had the sound switched off for quite a lot of it, while I read other stuff.

If you had seen those two faces in a thirties or fifties political movie, you’d have said Ryan was the young brainy lefty Democrat, while Biden was the old country club Republican President.  But old Republican President is not the persona you want for an attack.

As it was, Young Ryan was under pressure from both Old Biden and the big blond American TV lady.  Ryan kept his cool.  He proved himself a better guy than lots of those watching may have realised.  The general American opinion of Ryan will surely go up, even if only a bit.  He was under big pressure.  He did not buckle.  He was the one who proved he had the Right Stuff.

I participated in an interesting exchange today at Samizdata, on the subject of this posting, about why I support the Tea Party.  But the exchange came towards the end of a longish, and nearly dead now, comment thread, so few will read it, and I at least want to remember what was said.

“bradley 13”:

I disagree with this article for one main reason: the Tea Party has been nearly entirely co-opted by the social conservatives. The small-government folks seem to accept this as a necessary compromise, without realizing that they have lost control of the movement.

If you took a poll of people identifying themselves with the Tea Party, you would find that religious issues (abortion, gay marriage, etc.)) are more important than government spending.  From an article from 2011: “Tea Party supporters … are much more likely than registered voters as a whole to say that their religion is the most important factor in determining their opinions on these social issues.” (Emphasis mine)

Farther down in the same article: 42% of Tea Party supporters agree with the conservative Christian movement, while 11% disagree. The remainder are somewhere in the middle, but the dominance is clear.

The Tea Party was a great idea, until the religious zealots got ahold of it ...

My response:

bradley 13

Some of what you say is obvious and not bad news at all.  None of what you say is definitely bad news.

Much depends, in surveys, on what questions are asked.

It’s obvious that Tea Party Christians get their social issue opinions from their Christianity.  Who has ever doubted it?  This does not prove that they will use the Tea Party primarily to spread or to enforce these Christian views to or upon others.

Even the claim that they take social issues more seriously than government spending, though suggestive of what you are arguing, does not prove it.

If any question had asked: What do you think the Tea Party is for?  Cutting government spending?  Or: propagating (or even enforcing) Christian values?  Then, the answers would be interesting, and very troubling if the Christians mostly said: For propagating and enforcing Christian values.  The government spending stuff is just something we say, in order to spread Christianity.

But a quick read of the piece you link to tells me that no such question was asked, or if it was, the answers was not reported.  What this survey seems to be about is what else Tea Partiers tend to believe, besides believing in the Tea Party.  Nothing in it surprised me, or lowered, or even altered, my opinion of the Tea Party.

By the way, not only am I a libertarian, I am also a strong atheist.  I think Christianity is not just untrue.  I think that Christian beliefs about such things as the virgin birth and the meaning of the crucifixion of Christ are downright daft.  If I thought that the Tea Party was either founded to create a Christian theocracy or if I ever think in the future that it has degenerated into such an enterprise (as it certainly might), I would not merely stop supporting it, I would, for whatever difference it would make, oppose it.  Meanwhile, what seems to unite Tea Partiers now is, see my posting, the belief that the US government does too much, spends too much and borrows too much, and making that idea stick is what the Tea Party is for.  Nothing in this survey says otherwise.

I agree that Christians loom very large in the Tea Party, but Christianity is not the Tea Party’s publicly agreed purpose.  As of now, I remain optimistic that whereas most Tea Partiers seem to be Christians, and as such profoundly influenced in what they think by their Christianity, these Christians do not think that the purpose of the Tea Party is to spread Christianity, and that the government spending stuff is just a front.

If your response to that is: well, of course they wouldn’t say that.  My response to that would be that nothing is this survey settles that particularly argument about what these Christians are trying to accomplish one way or the other.  Are you aware of any other evidence that Christian Tea Partiers are actually engaged in a huge deception of this sort?  I am not, but that proves very little.  What I do know is that your link does not supply such evidence.

An analogy.  The libertarian movement seems to consist largely of men.  (It’s certainly that way in London.) But this absolutely does not mean that the libertarian movement’s purpose is to spread the idea of male domination of the world generally.  To say that “libertarianism has been taken over by men” is sort of true, in the sense that it is indeed mostly men.  But as an attempt to describe what the men in the libertarian movement are really trying to accomplish, such an observation would be seriously misleading.

As yet there has been no reply, and probably there won’t be.  That’s not itself any sort of argument.  Just because you had the last word, if you did, that doesn’t mean you won.  Merely that communication ceased.

More to the point, if there is any news or evidence that Tea Party Christians are indeed trying the old Popular Front routine rather than supporting the public agenda of the Tea Party in good faith, I would very much like to learn about it.

I am a godless supporter of gay marriage, but I do love this, not just because it says Don’t Vote Obama, but because it says it so eloquently.  He is such a great speaker.

Proof that eloquent speaking straight to camera is more than good enough for the YouTube age.

Thanks, yet again, to Instapundit.