Linked List: August 25, 2020

Tuesday, 25 August 2020

Ezra Klein: ‘The RNC Shows the Republican Party Is Now Trump’s Personality Cult’ ★

Ezra Klein, writing for Vox:

I have covered American politics for two decades and never have I seen a party more ferociously committed to supporting whatever it is their leader tells them to support.

The problem for Republicans is that the main thing Trump has told them to support is himself. There are no detailed policy proposals, much less a coherent ideology or set of governing principles. And so speech after speech followed the same template: How was America going to stop the coronavirus? By reelecting Donald Trump. How was it going to revive its economy? By reelecting Donald Trump. How was it going to ensure domestic harmony? By reelecting Donald Trump.

The contradiction at the heart of the convention, of course, is that Donald Trump is currently president. I’m dead serious. How would reelecting Trump resolve these crises that Trump has proven unable to resolve — and has, in many cases, worsened — in office? No one even took a shot at that Rubik’s cube. Instead, the speakers awkwardly talked around the fact of Trump’s incumbency. He was presented, strangely, as both incumbent and challenger; the man who had fixed America’s problems, but also the man needed to fix an America beset by more problems than ever.

The Republican Party Is a Cult, RNC Day One: Kimberly Guilfoyle’s Speech ★

If you watched day one of the Republican National Convention last night, you surely remember Kimberly Guilfoyle’s speech. If you didn’t watch but read about the convention, you probably heard about it. But you really should watch it. It is… something. It’s worth noting that Guilfoyle’s speech wasn’t live — they recorded this and either this was the good take or it was one and done and they thought this was good to go.

Angry, screaming, jingoistic speeches are not new to Republican conventions. Proto-Trump white nationalist Pat Buchanan delivered a speech in 1992 about which the late Molly Ivins famously quipped, “it probably sounded better in the original German”. But at least Buchanan’s speech was coherent. One needn’t agree with the style or the substance to agree that it at least had substance. Guilfoyle’s speech, removed from her histrionic delivery, was pure authoritarian pablum. Just read the transcript. Mother Jones set Guilfoyle’s speech to North Korean propaganda music and it works perfectly. This isn’t preaching to the choir; it’s screaming at one’s fellow fundamentalists.

You really have to see it.

Rumors Suggest Pixel 5 Is Slower Than the Pixel 4, Continues to Use Same Camera Sensor Since 2016 ★

Ron Amadeo, writing at Ars Technica:

The other piece of hardware you can put in the “upgrade”-with-scare-quotes category is the Pixel 5’s Snapdragon 765G SoC. The Pixel 4 has a Snapdragon 855 SoC, and since Qualcomm chips perform similarly no matter what phone is built around them, we don’t need device-specific benchmarks to know the Pixel 5 will be slower than the Pixel 4. […] With the Pixel 5, Google is making a transition from a flagship device to a midrange phone, which leads to awkward comparisons like this.

Plastic back too, supposedly. If all of this is true, what phone is someone supposed to buy if they want top-shelf hardware and the pure no-junk Android experience?