…I’m proud of my employer, the University of Sangamon at Big City. A certain very controversial presidential candidate from one of the major parties will soon be holding a rally at a campus event center, and the chancellor has declined to heed calls to forbid that candidate from appearing.

The chancellor has issued a statement that says in part, “Consistent with its role as a public university, the University of [redacted] is not endorsing, sponsoring or supporting any candidate for political office,” said the statement. “At the same time, it has been our standard practice for decades to rent available space on campus to any political candidate when requested. As a result, we have a long history of campaign events on campus, and no legal basis to exclude any candidate because of the views he or she expresses.”

Elsewhere, perhaps the same statement (I’m cut and pasting from a couple different articles), the chancellor says “”[the university]’s core values of freedom, equality and social justice for all, regardless of race, religion, national origin, disability status or sexual orientation, are deeply rooted in our diverse community and not endangered by the presence of any political candidate on campus,” [the Chancellor] wrote. “We encourage public and civic engagement by all members of our University and we endorse the idea that the answer to speech that one does not like or finds offensive is more speech and not censorship.”

Some faculty and staff have signed a petition claiming that university should cancel the rally for safety concerns. I hope they’re wrong. But even if they’re right, I wouldn’t want to forbid political speech just because of safety concerns. And this is political speech in the most obvious sense of the word. If a rally by the front runner for a major party’s nomination for president doesn’t count as “political” speech, I’m not sure what does. And for what it’s worth, the university is taking safety precautions (although I don’t know what kind).

I won’t be going to the rally. My biggest worry about it happening on campus–aside from the fact that I don’t support the candidate–is that it will probably make it hard to leave work on time this Friday by tying up buses and city trains.

I’m used to criticizing my university. It has in the past had a tendency to adopt the most weak-willed, tepid positions in defense of mediocrity. Its sister university–the University of Sangamon at Flagship City–recently had a controversy where it denied a job it had offered to someone seemingly because of that person’s extramural political speech. That was a closer case than this one, but from what I have heard, the chief negative consequence wouldn’t have been “safety” concerns, but some major donors discontinuing their support for the university.

So good on the university and the chancellor for doing the right thing. Here’s hoping everything goes off peaceably and that the candidate and the inevitable protesters enjoy the right to make their views heard.

Last week, I tweeted this:

@ThomasHCrown Ted Cruz is how a good writer with an ideological blind spot writes a Republican character. Donald Trump is how a hack does.

— Will Truman (@trumwill) March 6, 2016

And now I’m going to expand on it:

Donald Trump is a Republican character as though written by a crappy liberal writer who cannot see Republicans as anything more than caricatures. Ridiculously over the top. The writer needs to go back to writing school.

Ted Cruz is a mastermind villain written by genuinely good writer with an ideological blind spot who assumes that most people who disagree with his worldview are either insanely slimy and corrupt or stupid. The script called for the former, and Ted Cruz was what they created.

Marco Rubio was written by one of the rare breed of conservative Hollywood writers. Unfortunately, the role was entirely miscast and when he changed jobs, subsequent writers just screwed him up.

John Kasich was written by a well-intentioned liberal writer who wanted to create a sympathetic Republican character but just didn’t know how. The result is that the character is wooden and inconsistent.

Jeb Bush was written as the hapless foil the whiz-kids working on the Democratic campaign had to take down in the primary so that they face a weaker opponent. The writers omitted what, exactly, made the character somebody that they didn’t want to face. Because, as written, he seemed like a great character to face in the general.

Ben Carson was suggested as a potential character, but everybody else in the room laughed at it because it was such a ludicrous concept. They told the writer that his character was bad and he should feel bad. And feel bad he did, because the character was stupid.

Chris Christie was written because a mobster show had a political tie. Because they wanted a character who was obnoxious and corrupt, they made sure to let slip that he was a Republican. Writers spent a lot of time coming up with inventive, tortuous death scenes for the character.

Carly Fiorina was created on the spot, without much forethought. The writers must have needed a Republican character from California because that’s where the show is filmed, and they went with a businessperson because no Republican gets elected to major office in California.

Mike Huckabee was created by a frustrated southern transplant who has some major issues about where he comes from. Another writer kind of resented this, and suggested Rick Santorum instead, but everyone agreed that Pennsylvania is a blue state and that wouldn’t work as well.

Rand Paul was the unfortunate biproduct of a writing room war. A couple of the writers thought that he should be cool and sympathetic, but others couldn’t fathom that in a Republican politician and so would insert plots about Neo-Confederate supporters. The result was a mess, and a character that once had promise had to be written off the show.

Lindsay Graham was written as an embarassing relative of one of the main characters in a comedy. People on Twitter get mad because such a right-wing character is presented as a mildly sympathetic goofball, but others point out that his rightwingery is usually a setup for a joke at his expense.

Scott Walker was written to be the Republican opponent, but the writers never cared so they never fleshed out the character. The writers would later express regret that they never fleshed out the character, one of them swearing up and down that the Rick Perry character had been swimming around in his head the whole time.

Robert Jarvis was written to be an out-of-touch blue blood with contemptuous attitudes towards the poor, but later stories called for a religious nut so that was retconned into his story. After writing the character, there were some concerns from the studio about diversity, so they decided to make him an Indian-American, but it was too late in the process to change much else.

George Pataki was written by an aging writer who stopped following politics 25 years ago and isn’t current on who Republicans are anymore.

Jim Gilmore was only sort of written. There was, presumably, a Republican opponent in the last election, but they never talked about him or developed him. You only know his name is Gilmore because the main character is an officeholder and there is a flashback scene on election night where you see on the vote totals television and the other guy was named “Gilmore.”

Cruz rising! At least, it seems that way. A lot of attention was paid to Kansas and his massive victory there, but it was really Maine that caught my interest. Jokes about the Canadian border aside, that’s really outside his jurisdiction. It’s important to note, however, that both Kansas and Maine are closed primaries, and closed primaries play to Cruz’s strengths. That could also explain his good showing in Minnesota. Which leaves the open question as to whether or not he can compete anywhere else in a primary system, which he will need to do in order to win the nomination outright. It’s… looking unlikely. It would seem to need both Rubio and Kasich to drop out, and while it’s possible that Rubio will after 3/15, Kasich has no real incentive to and seems relatively accepting of a Trump nomination if it’s not going to be him. So how does he Cruz get there?

The goal of #NeverTrump has shifted from trying to outright beat Trump and force a convention. That’s… far from ideal. Trump’s ceiling appears to be real – for now, at least – and seems to stand a decent chance of preventing him from getting to 1237.

Which brings us to the possible importance of Rubio and Kasich. Kasich in particular could be strong in the remaining states. He has no path to winning the nomination outright, but seems best positioned deny Trump the delegates that he needs until or unless Cruz can demonstrate a national viability that runs contrary to his entire campaign strategy.

Rubio is hurting pretty badly right now, and looks likely to lose in Florida a week from now (assuming he’s still in the race). He’s being hounded by a dour narrative and it appears his support is being eaten off at both ends by Cruz and Kasich. If he can win Florida, though, he’s back in the game to perform the role assigned to Kasich in the previous paragraph. It seems likely that even in the most optimistic of scenarios that Trump will have a plurality of delegates. However, if Trump can’t expand his share of the vote and #NeverTrump can point to a low plurality, and he starts losing, his winning at the convention seems far from assured. If Rubio or Kasich can have a good late run, they may be the beneficiary of recency bias and could actually get the nomination at a convention even with a lower delegate count. If we get to one.

On the docket today is Michigan, Mississippi, Idaho, and Hawaii. This is a pretty Trump-friendly state of affairs. Unless Kasich can perform a miracle, most polls have his opposition in Michigan pretty divided and while the delegates will be awarded proportionally, “winning states” feeds the narrative in a significant way. The opposition in Mississippi is less divided, but Mississippi has always been one of Trump’s best states. In a different universe, Rubio would be looking good in Idaho but he’s never polled well there and that’s an opportunity for Cruz. Rubio’s only opportunity is Hawaii, for which the returns will be too late to feed any narrative.

Michael Brendan Dougherty is in favor of Trumpism, but against Donald Trump. I can actually understand this, to a degree. But what raises my ire is when Dougherty and others are more excited about their correct prior diagnosis than disturbed by the actual prognosis.

Among the sillier attacks against Donald Trump are his allegedly short fingers. That works better than pointing out that he’s a national security threat, I guess? Whatever the case, it’s an accusation that really bothers him.

The ever-inspirational Chris Christie: “I wasn’t being held hostage.” He can say that all he wants, but the flood of endorsements that were supposed to follow didn’t. Nobody likes being a prisoner.

I’m not fond of linking to Uncle Steve when he’s directly talking about immigration, but his look at Merkel and Clinton contains some good analysis.

Gretchen explains how her life became restricted when she married a sex offender, affecting everything from where they live, whether they should have children, and perhaps where they can travel internationally.

Florida is stepping up enforcement against left-lane snails.

As a Twitter follower, I’ve seen directly Bethany Mandel attract the hate mobs of Breitbart, and it’s not pretty. It’s even creeped on to Facebook.

Mankind’s greatest enemy: The white man.

Too many movies fail the Bechdel Test, so some scripts are up for a rewrite.

The New York Times looks at some of the changes in store for Sesame Street under HBO management. Not sure I like the changes, but it is what it is I suppose.

Something that cuts against arguments right and left, Freddie points out that most PhD’s are doing pretty well, actually.

Bradley Birzer reviews a John J Miller story The Polygamous King, which sounds fascinating.

Emily Badger says cities haven’t run out of room so much as they’re shoo-ing away potential neighbors.

I haven’t read the paper, but the idea of conferring automatic relationship status on couples that have kids together strikes me as the law back home that says young girls who get pregnant can become emancipated from their parents early. Some added diceyness to incentives for gents and ladies who want to hold on to their partner.

Loneliness is a public health hazard that may be akin to smoking and obesity. Remember, though, how justified we are in socially isolating smokers and the obese because their behavior is so unhealthy.

{Ed note: This was written prior to the GOP debate last night.}

The good news for the #NeverTrump crew, is that the momentum we feared for Trump did not especially materialize. He didn’t get 50% in Massachusetts, didn’t have a shutout or a near-shutout. He doesn’t appear invulnerable in the abstract. Yet.

The problem, of course, remains the rest of the field. Little long-term clarity was achieved.

Rubio lost by inches, but lost big. A couple couple points in Virginia and he’d look a lot better. A few points in some other states would have gotten him across the delegate threshold. Whenever I write these up, there is always something that I don’t talk about that happens. Usually it’s been a near-tie, so when I talk about placing second or third I didn’t account for the fact that #3-5 would tie in New Hampshire or #2-3 would tie in South Carolina. In this case, it was those delegate thresholds and the overall delegate count. Which I did actually consider, but did not convey. It turned out to be really important to the narrative. It’s become even more critical that he win Florida, and it’s become even harder for him to do so. The media’s comparative generosity towards him has run out, and what yesterday could have been a Rubio endorsement by Romney was instead a general anti-Trump speech.

While Trump did worse than I feared and Rubio worse than I had hoped, Cruz is the only one I can point to and say definitively “He had a good night.” Good enough that it props up an iffy narrative that he can be the Trump Alternative. The problem for Cruz remains that the rest of the map looks a lot more like Massachusetts, Virginia, and Minnesota than it does like Texas and Oklahoma. He has also continued to show no message agility and it just seems unlikely that he’s going to be able to pivot to be competitive in the North. There were three data points, two largely overlooked, that could give Team Cruz hope. First, while Rubio won Minnesota, Cruz came in a close second. Minnesota is a quirky little state and it had a closed caucus, but that’s still something! The second overlooked thing is that he won the Colorado straw poll, which was also a closed caucus and is unbinding, but take the three of them together and you can sort of paint a picture of Cruz being strong-ish in the west. I’ll need to run the math, but while he wouldn’t be able to win the nomination that way he could rack up some serious wins to help his narrative against a generally hostile media. Speaking of which, one of the reasons Cruz’s outing impressed me is that he did it largely being ignored by the media, but Cruz being Cruz, it’s entirely possible that helped him.

Kasich’s campaign rationale is starting to become a little bit clear. He doesn’t have much of a chance at the nomination by way of delegates, and is unlikely to get it in a convention even if it is in Ohio, but if you tilt your head you could see him starting to get a lot of attention as the guy who can possibly beat Trump in the north more realistically than Cruz. He’s probably about to get some money from people who just want to prevent Trump from getting 1237.

This weekend are Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Maine. Trump seems to have made Maine a priority, and it’s on his turf, so it’s easy to expect him to take it pretty easily. There could be a challenge from Kasich, however, as there was in Vermont. Trump looks strong in Louisiana, but I should point out that Louisiana has a closed primary and an unusually high number of ornery bubbas are still registered Democrats in that state. That dynamic carried Cruz to victory in Oklahoma and could do so in Louisiana. However, the gap in the polls is just too large to make that likely, and Louisiana has a soft spot for strongmen. Kansas and Kentucky are both closed caucuses and there’s not much indication that Trump has much organization there. Assuming that Cruz has organization just about everywhere, both bode well for him (especially Kentucky, which seems like Cruz country though the last and only poll there did not bode well for him). Rubio is competing in Kansas but seems to have ceded Kentucky.

Puerto Rico comes on Sunday, where it’s likely that Rubio would have the inside track. He is the only candidate to have paid it any mind and he’s received the endorsement of the Republican former governor. There has been no polling, however, and even if he does win it is unlikely that anyone will notice because most people don’t even know Puerto Rico sends delegates.

I am predicting a Trump win, however, because what the hell that’s just the sort of primary it’s been.

Megan McArdle talks to the #NeverTrump Republicans, and sizes up the Trumpkin response.

Meanwhile, John Podheretz and Matthew Continetti assess the virtues and ludicrosity of taking Trump to the convention and fighting him there. #BanPrimaries

On the vaping front, formaldehyde concerns are out and exploding ecigarette batteries.

Olivia Goodhill wants to know why we’re not researching how to treat period cramps.

Samuel Goldman takes exception to the “social science” of Trumpkins-as-Authoritarians. I nodded with solemnity when I read of the correlation, but I’m pretty sure Goldman is correct here.

I’m not sure how much the world needed Fuller House, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t need a Full House porn parody.

Elizabeth Picciuto reacts to the misportrayal in the media of Microcephaly (the product of the Zika virus).

Somewhere along the way, Taco Bell quietly became healthy.

BBC looks at the gender imbalance in Sweden, which among 16-17yo’s outstrips that of China.

According to a new study, segregated schools mean more crime

I ran across an article on a weird way to hijack cars the other day, and so of course I had to Snopes it, and turns out it’s a myth. This is not as bad as fearmongering Halloween candy, but the drip-drip-drip is really deleterious to the public health.

Here are the things that immigrants were pleasantly surprised about in the US.

If it’s immigrant tolerance that you seek, look not in Denmark but in Texas.

Meet the 500-lb man wanting to bike across the county.

If things don’t go well in 2016, the GOP really needs to do this with just about every demographic. They don’t have to rearrange their agenda to maximize popularity, but they (just as with the Democrats, though it’s less pressing for them) do need to know exactly which stances are hurting them and how much.

Freddie de Boer on anti-Trumpism:

You can confront a monster like Trump in a few ways. You can play precisely to the narrative that he’s using by trying to manipulate his party’s primary, acting like exactly the meddling liberals he accuses you of being, and speaking with naked, classist contempt for several million people. Or you can try and peel off many of the people who have rallied under his banner by showing them that you take their economic distress seriously and that the fight for economic and social justice can help them too, if they are willing to join it.

Not a long blog post, but I think he’s (mostly) spot on. The only point I disagree is that in an open primary, it’s not a bad thing to cross the aisle to prevent someone winning who you think is bad for the country. And Freddie’s view of what exactly constitutes “economic and social justice” probably differs from mine in some particulars. But he understands some of Trump’s appeal and how anti-Trumpism can backfire.

I look at the state warily. I assume the state is necessary but dangerous. I support certain state-initiatives (like Obamacare or “for cause” termination policies) but still worry over the cost they enact in limiting individual autonomy, redistributing wealth the “wrong” way, or creating the wrong incentives. I believe that the more discretion one gives the state, the more control of the state becomes an ever higher stakes contest that risks empowering people who shouldn’t have power.

Timothy Snyder, in his conclusion to Black  Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015), seems to provide a reason to embrace the state with less apprehension than I do. (Disclosure: I’ve read only the conclusion to Snyder’s book, not the book itself.) Snyder says Hitler’s destruction of state institutions in eastern Europe and the German-occupied parts of the Soviet Union made the Holocaust possible (p. 337):

The dominant stereotype of Nazi Germany is of an all-powerful state that catalogued, repressed, and then exterminated an entire class of its own citizens. This was not how the Nazis achieved the Holocaust, nor how they even thought about it….The Nazis knew they had to go abroad and lay waste to neighboring societies before they could hope to bring their revolution to their own….Not only the Holocaust, but all major German crimes took place in areas where state institutions had been destroyed, dismantled, or seriously compromised. The German murder of five and a half million Jews, more than three million Soviet prisoners of war, and about a million civilians in so-called anti-partisan operations all took place in stateless zones.

From the next paragraph (p. 337-338):

When the Holocaust is blamed on the modern state, the weakening of state authority appears salutary. On the political Right, the erosion of state power by international capitalism seems natural; on the political Left, rudderless revolutions portray themselves as virtuous. In the twenty-first century, anarchical protest movements join in a friendly tussle with global oligarchy, in which neither side can be hurt since both see the real enemy as the state. Both the Left and the Right tend to fear order rather than its destruction or absence. The common ideological reflex has been postmodernity: a preference for the small over the large, the fragment over the structure, the glimpse over the view, the feeling over the fact. On both the Left and Right, postmodern explanations of the HOlocaust tend to follow German [“Leftist,” per Snyder] and Austrian [“rightist,” per Snyder] traditions of the 1930s. As a result, they generate errors that can make future crimes more rather than less likely.

Snyder follows with what in my opinion is a heavy-handed, unconvincing, and strawman argument against freer markets and a somewhat more convincing, but still heavy-handed argument about the need for states to do something about global warming.* His fear is that if global ecology is not improved, some polities might adopt a zero-sum stance toward world resources reminiscent of Hitler’s quest for Lebensraum and engage in the same eliminationist policies that Hitler did.

That said, Snyder’s comments about the state are worth considering. I trust that the book (again, unread by me) documents pretty well the Nazis’ success at dismantling state institutions.

And what I’ve read of his argument seems to jive with what I know of the Holocaust. There were concentration camps and forced labor camps in “stated” areas, but the bulk of mass murders and actual extermination camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka were located in places whose state institutions had been destroyed. At one point in the conclusion, Snyder states that Jewish people who could escape the “stateless” areas, which in a previous book he called the “Bloodlands” of eastern Europe, to “stated” areas, like Germany proper, stood a much better chance of surviving because some semblance of the rule of law existed. And as Snyder also points out in the conclusion, people with official (or official-seeming) passports could bank on better treatment. Hence the efforts of some diplomats to save Jewish people by issuing passports to safe areas.

Elsewhere in the conclusion [p. 340-341], Snyder says

When states are absent, rights–by any definition–are impossible to sustain. States are not structures to be taken for granted, exploited, or discarded, but are fruits of long and quiet effort. It is tempting but dangerous to gleefullly fragment the state from the Right or knowingly gaze at the shards from the Left. Political thought is neither destruction nor critique, but rather the historically informed imagination of plural structures–a labor of the present that can preserve life and decency in the future. One plurality is between politics and science. A recognition of their distinct purposes makes possible thinking about rights and states; their conflation is a step toward a total ideology such as National Socialism. Another plurality is between order and freedom: each depends upon the other, although each is different from the other. The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny. The claim that freedom is the lack of order must end in anarchy–which is nothing more than tyranny of a special kind. The point of politics is to keep multiple and irreducible goods in play, rather than yielding to some dream, Nazi or otherwise, of totality.

In my opinion, Snyder’s distinction between “politics” and “science” is too neat. And perhaps the problem isn’t statelessness, but absence of governance. I’m aware there’s a distinction between government and governance, and I’m hard put to explain it but the former seems to have something to do with a state and its monopoly on legitimate coercion, and the latter to do with….well, I’ll  have to do more reading on it, but it seems hard to imagine governance of densely and highly populated societies without something like a state structure.

Or maybe what’s missing isn’t “the state” or “government” or “governance,” but that nebulous thing(s) called “civil society.” That’s another term I’m not sure how to define, but I take it to mean the existence of autonomous groups and voluntary affiliations independent of the state, but not asserting a prerogative to coerce beyond, say, determining who can and cannot be members. Taken as a whole, perhaps “civil society” offers the “multiple and irreducible goods” that can help fend off totalitarianism.

My own understanding of prewar Nazi Germany seems to support this. Nazi rule was disastrous, but civil society in Germany seems to have endured enough after 1933 to successfully oppose some Nazi policies, such as the “euthanasia program” against people with disabilities.**

All in all, though, and with the caveats I’ve mentioned, I find what Snyder’s argument difficult to refute. I’m not sure I’m quite on board, but I don’t wish to dismiss it entirely.

*And to be clear, my objection isn’t that his argument is unconvincing, but that it’s wrong to conflate opposition to addressing AGW and AGW denialism (not necessarily the same things in themselves) with what Snyder seems to think is the self-evident argument for a specific policy he supports, which as I understand is taxing carbon-emitting companies for the excess carbon they produce.

**See this account: “…the ‘euthanasia’ program quickly become an open secret. In view of widespread public knowledge of the measure and in the wake of private and public protests concerning the killings, especially from members of the German clergy, Hitler ordered a halt to the euthanasia program in late August 1941.” I do not wish to make too much of this resistance. According to the site I linked to, the program had been going on for about two years, which means many, many were murdered under this program before it was discontinued.And however successful the protesters may have ultimately been in this case, they certainly didn’t prevent the Holocaust and were probably (most of them) silent. It’s also unclear if a similar protest movement could have been so successful in, say, a hypopthetical 1951 Germany that had won the war. But the protest against the program suggests a certain power that some elements of civil society (in this case the clergy) could exert even in a totalitarian regime.

This is, of course, why Lisby does not like the Fourth of July:

It’s also how I’m going to be spending my Super Tuesday, probably.

Ellen Wexler at Slate discovers that student loans may be inflating tuition costs.

Diversity in the workplace may boost creativity, but it’s exhausting employers. I remember when I was at Mindstorm and a project leader on another group talked about, in the most apologetic manner possible, how difficult it is managing a team compromised of a half-dozen nationalies and religious traditions.

Ben Domenech explains the evangelical appeal of Donald Trump, and Elizabeth Breunig explains how Ted Cruz lost it.

I could see Trump doing this after Tuesday, if he wins by enough.

Uncle Steve pings for names of the anti-Trump third party. Given the speaker and the audience, most suggestions are not complimentary. For my own self, I dig into historical named: New Federalist Party, National Union Party, or Constitutional Union Party.

It is things like this that help make the guns debate no-hold-barred for me.

I didn’t leave my home city for college, so I can’t imagine going to Germany, but nonetheless it seems like kind of a sweet deal even if the universities are a bit less posh.

If you were raised poor, college doesn’t reap the same gains as if you were raised wealthy.

This makes sense: According a new study (PDF), ability grouping raises outcomes in competitive cultures and lowers them in cooperative cultures.

Having a child has likely changed my politics in some subtle ways I do not realize, but one overt change is my views on funding PBS, so this makes me happy.

Florida is stepping up enforcement against left-lain snails.

For Sale! The most troubled half of one of our most troubled states.

Well, with all of the babies being born in Utah, I suppose this was bound to happen at some point.

Ostana, Italy, has welcome a young baby into its community. The first since 1987.

Mental Floss has fifteen facts about Blockbuster, including the whole Alaska thing.