Please Do Not Destroy (Portland)

Now that I've lived in Portland for a few years, it is time to buckle down and complete my local politics journey from angry ignorant voter to angry informed voter.

Portland has a new city council -- literally, we only just switched to a city council form of government this past election cycle -- and it's definitely still finding its sea legs. Our election system is a bit convoluted, dividing the city into four geographic districts (I'm in District 4, which encompasses Portland's west side) represented by three councilors each. 

The voting system is, as far as I understand it, designed to promote some measure of ideological pluralism via multi-winner ranked choice voting, leading to a city council that is (mostly by design) divided into a center-left and left bloc. The latter includes several DSA or DSA-aligned politicians, including one of my three councilors, Mitch Green (the other two District 4 councilors are Olivia Clark and Eric Zimmerman, who are part of the center-left bloc). My pre-election post last year gave a bit of a hint as to the wild-west character of our first council election, but I'm pretty sure I ended up ranking all three of the figures who eventually were elected (I know I ranked Clark first). With respect to Green in particular, the DSA endorsement gave me pause (as I noted), but he had gotten enough praise from enough of a diverse base for me to think he earned a shot.

Unfortunately, now that everyone's in office, there have definitely been some actions that have given me pause. The first was when Green threatened Portland State University's budget unless it altered disciplinary decisions meted out to pro-Palestinian protesters. Obviously as an academic I'm especially sensitive right now to politicians holding university budgets hostage in order to get them to change their self-governance practices, what with the outright war Trump has declared on American academia and the existential threat his actions pose to university independence and academic freedom. That Green saw those actions and thought not "that's repulsive!" but rather "that's inspirational!" is deeply worrying to me. To be clear: government should not be leveraging the power of the purse to get universities to punish pro-Palestinian protesters more harshly or more leniently. From the get-go, this sort of conduct by Green smacks of someone who is far too comfortable utilizing MAGA-style authoritarian tools so long as it meets his preferred ideological objectives.

More recently, a huge controversy is starting to brew after the council, in a 7-5 vote (with the left/DSA bloc, including Green, in the majority), decided to reject the Portland Children's Levy grant package and instead extend funding to preexisting grantees for another year.

The council’s June 4 vote is the first time the PCL, established in 2002, had its selections rejected en masse. The consequence is that 36 nonprofits expecting $17.4 million in funding to begin flowing July 1 won’t receive that money for at least a year.

That’s an extraordinary move by the newly elected 12-member body, who cited concerns about equity and racial justice as a reason for rejecting two years of work by program staff, a group of volunteer scorers, and a community council set up to help guide funding priorities. It’s the latest signal of the council’s appetite to reassess long-standing city funding practices, and has left members of the PCL Allocation Committee seething.

The opposing councilors cited "doubts about the fairness of the PCL’s scoring process, citing anecdotal examples of organizations, some of which are Black-led, that were not recommended for funding," but the PCL experts explained that many minority-led or -focused organizations received funding and the non-recommendees lost out because they badly underperformed on transparent metrics. As the Oregonian noted in its editorial (which called the vote "the most reckless" decision the council has made in its short tenure), the putative arguments against the PCL's recommendations were mutually inconsistent and seemed nakedly pretextual, with a thin veneer of "anti-racism" used to mask an uninformed council protecting politically well-connected but underperforming legacy organizations. It smacks of cronyism, and it's gross. And while the blowback has led some unidentified councilors to express "regret" over "unintentional consequences" (they're not "unintentional"; it was very clear what the council voted to do), they do not as of now seem inclined to reverse their decision. It is reminiscent, again, of the games the Trump administration is playing with its various grants -- overriding expert judgment to reallocate spoils to its special favorites.

What do I make of all of this? Well, right now I'd be very disinclined to rank Green again. But -- rhetoric about being an "angry" voter aside -- I'm not as upset as you might think with the council. These people won a chance to govern Portland, fair and square. If they end up doing a bad job and making bad choices, the remedy is to vote them out. But I don't view it as some existential catastrophe that they were given a shot in the first place. As obnoxious as these decisions are, they are not going to destroy Portland. We live, we learn, and hopefully we elect new people.

The subtext here is the DSA's Zohran Mamdani getting the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York. He's not a complete shoo-in -- won't make that mistake again -- but he's the heavy favorite. I've seen people suggest that his socialist ideas are pie-in-the-sky fantasies that will never work and will be terribly destructive to the people of New York. For me, I have no strong opinions about city-owned grocery stores. Maybe they'll work, maybe they won't. But I am reasonably sure that New York City will not be irreparably damaged by his mayorship. Maybe his ideas will work, maybe they won't. I don't view it as an existential catastrophe that we'll find out.

Don't Rank Cuomo, and Other Less Important Thoughts

The Democratic primary for the NYC mayoral race is today. The front-runner has been former Governor Andrew Cuomo, but he's facing a stiff challenge from a surging Zohran Mamdani, who's aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America.

I don't live in New York, obviously. But I've been casually following the race, and I do have some thoughts.

1) Don't rank Cuomo. That's the mantra of nearly all the progressives in the race, and it is correct. It's not just that Cuomo is a sex pest (though, dayenu). He was also an awful governor who actively sabotaged Democratic prospects in New York in order to promote his own presidential ambitions -- and yet was so manifestly incompetent he ended up wrecking his presidential ambitions too! Personally mendacious, hostile to his own party, and piss-poor political instincts? No. Get this guy out of here. And honestly, "don't rank Cuomo" is, far and away, the most important thought.

2) David endorses Lander. Not that it matters, but if I had a vote in New York I'd probably rank Brad Lander first. I always liked him. And with ranked choice voting, I could do it without worrying that I was tossing my vote away and/or involuntarily supporting Cuomo.

3) The NYT's cowardly Cuomo quasi-endorsement is nauseating. The NYT recently said it would stop issuing endorsements in local races (why?). But that makes this editorial, where it twisted itself in knots to not-expressly-say it is endorsing Cuomo while effectively endorsing Cuomo because Mamdani is just too lefty and scary, the most spineless thing I've seen in opinion journalism since everything the Washington Post has done over the past 8 months.

4) I'd rank Mamdani. But... I think there is a lot to like about Mamdani. He's clearly better than Cuomo (see #1, above). And I don't think he's antisemitic. But people are allowed to not like his evasive defense of the phrase "globalize the intifada". His response to that question is a reasonable source of criticism, and he can take those lumps.

5) It's not cheating when they don't roll over. On that note, one of the single most annoying habits of the Bernie/DSA wing of the left is how they act as if it's cheating when more centrist candidates don't just roll over and let them win. "The DNC conspired to defeat Bernie Sanders and coronate Joe Biden" -- no it didn't. Biden ran a campaign and beat Sanders, fair and square. That's how democracy works. In any given race, I hope my preferred candidate or faction wins, but I don't expect the opponent to not try (see also: Democrats are responsible for MAGAism because Barack Obama inexcusably refused to just concede the 2012 race to Mitt Romney). We're already seeing similar moaning about how "the Democratic establishment" apparently moved heaven and earth to anoint Cuomo and defeat Mamdani. Again, I think Cuomo is scum, and there are absolutely things he's done in his campaign which aren't kosher. But yes, the left-wing of the Democratic Party is going to have to actually win races where their opponents show up -- it's not going to have things handed to them. Grow up. 

6) If Mamdani does win, he should get a chance to govern. That's the perquisite of winning, and he deserves a fair shot. And I'm still curious how DSA domestic policies will play out if implemented (though I still wish we had gotten a test-run a bit further from spotlight in Buffalo). That said, the fact that he won't have a perfectly pliant city council and agreeable municipal bureaucracy putting his policies on a glide path is not sabotage, it's city politics. Much like having to actually win an election against an opposition that's actively campaigning, one is not being sabotaged when one faces the same basic set of obstacles and frictions that are inherent features of local governance in a large city with diverse stakeholders

Calculated Deaths

One of the macabre realities of developing self-driving cars is that someone, somewhere, has to program them to kill people.

I don't mean that in a nefarious or conspiratorial way. What I mean is that the car's algorithm must have a decision tree governing how it will respond to unavoidable tragedies -- say, a person suddenly jumping into the road, and the only choice is for the car to strike the pedestrian or swerve into oncoming traffic. Someone is (likely) going to be seriously hurt, the car's manufacturer has to decide who that will be.

Human drivers, of course, also periodically face these situations. But in most cases, they don't "decide" who they're going to strike -- at least, not in the same way. A human driver faced with a sudden and unavoidable calamity is likely to make a "decision" based on some mix of instinct, reflex, and random chance. Some will hit the pedestrian, some will hit oncoming traffic, but virtually none of it is based off of any sort of real consideration or calculation.

In the abstract, this seems worse, philosophically-speaking. Philosophers might disagree on the right resolution to various trolley problems, but I can't imagine they don't think that it'd be better if we didn't think up an answer at all. Yet in this case, my instinct is that knowing someone was killed by operation of a programmed algorithm feels worse, somehow, than knowing they were killed by what is essentially thoughtless chance. The former invites a sort of "who tasked you with playing God" response. The latter, by contrast, is clearly tragic, but is a tempered one. We understand the driver could not have reasonably even made a decision, so we can't hold him or her accountable for it. What happened, happened.

That non-intuitive intuition intrigues me. It suggests there are cases where it is better that decisions -- including critical life-or-death ones -- be made thoughtlessly and without advance consideration. Obviously, the first question to ask is whether I'm alone in holding this intuition in this case. But assuming I'm not, the next question is where else this intuition extends to. Notably, I don't think I'd feel better if the self-driving car was programmed to essentially randomly choice who to kill or maim in one of these situations. But why not?

Anyway, that's my thought of the evening. Further thoughts welcome.