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David Fickling Profile picture
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14 Jan, 4 tweets, 2 min read
This is very interesting. Look forward to reading the whole thing.

IMO, a lot of people are far too credulous about self-reported public opinion data taken in authoritarian countries.
This fascinating study by @junyanjiang found evidence that people whose stated opinions about government grew more positive after a 2006 purge of a Shanghai official in fact had *more negative* views if you looked at less sensitive, hot-button questions:

junyanjiang.com/uploads/5/8/1/…
@JunyanJiang "50% believe their form of govt is best" would still be very popular by any normal standards. But it wouldn't be the overwhelming 80%+ support that a lot of standard surveys indicate, and which IMO we should treat with a lot more scepticism.
@JunyanJiang You rarely see those sorts of levels of support anywhere, for anything, so I think there's a fairly high burden of proof for believing they're correct rather than the result of preference falsification.

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More from @davidfickling

David Fickling Profile picture
15 Jan
"All energy transitions have one thing in common: They are prolonged affairs that take decades to accomplish" 🤔 ImageImage
The quote is @VaclavSmil
@VaclavSmil Notable that if Germany had just maintained nuclear at 2005 levels, all that brown coal could have been shut down by now (though black coal will probably be first to go)
Read 4 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
15 Jan
I know I should be, but I'm still a bit stunned by this barefaced hackery by @toadmeister:

Image
@toadmeister First he says the infection fatality rate of Covid-19 is 0.025%, which would imply about 12,000 deaths in the U.K. before reaching herd mortality at 70% of the population.

(in fact there have been about 85,000 deaths so far).
@toadmeister Then he cites a number that's different by an order of magnitude (0.27%) from this meta-analysis of seroprevalence studies: who.int/bulletin/onlin…

At 0.27%, mortality goes from about 12,000 deaths to about 130,000 deaths.
Read 12 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
13 Jan
The trajectory of Sheldon Adelson's life tells a fascinating story about how the patronage politics of the 20th century American urban political machine has come to rule the world in the 21st century (thread):

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Adelson and the greatest recipients of his patronage Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, grew up in oddly similar circumstances. ImageImageImage
All were products of immigrant communities in the less tony sections of the U.S. northeast, in a postwar era when such cities were still dominated by the last of the great political bosses.
Read 26 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
12 Jan
One thing that everyone who's studied truth and reconciliation commissions knows, but that other people almost universally don't know, is that they generally don't work that well and are often actively counterproductive.
South Africa is often held up as a model and almost as a synecdoche, the sole discussed example of the process (in fact there have been more than 60 TRCs, depending on gow you define them).
But in fact the successful thing that happened in South Africa is IMO that the majority non-white population gained the political power they'd been denied under apartheid.

The new order has been stable not because of healing via TRC but because Black people have political power!
Read 5 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
11 Jan
Here's a rare piece of good news: Despite the tragic #SJ182 crash, air safety in Indonesia is rapidly improving.

The accident rate in 2018 and 2019 was *lower* than it was in the U.S. and EU:

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Indonesia has a terrible reputation for air safety. Its carriers were banned from Europe from 2007 to 2018 because standards were felt to be so lax.

But why was the ban lifted in 2018? Because standards are now a lot better. Image
When aviation was deregulated in the late 1990s after the Asian financial crisis and fall of Suharto, a huge number of dodgy small airlines opened, with regulation too lax to handle the vast growth in air traffic.

The result was a series of well-publicized disasters. Image
Read 14 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
11 Jan
Was listening to @WesleyLivesay podcast on the rise of Mussolini while I did some housework.

One really telling thing is how important *impunity* was to the fascists' Proud Boys, the squadristi.
They weren't *that* numerous, but the reluctance of courts and police to punish their violence — even as they aggressively punished defensive counterviolence by socialists and anti-fascists — made it much more powerful.
Mussolini didn't seize power. He was handed power by a King who thought giving the fascists what they wanted when they marched on the capital was a better option than calling a state of siege and letting the influence of the left rise any further.
Read 4 tweets

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