Vox Sentences: Justice for RSS Boaty McBoatface

The New York primary has some Sanders fans crying foul even before the polls close; Iraq's political meltdown; Great Britain proves it can't have nice things like democracy.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

New York enjoys rare taste of political relevance

(Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

• In case you have somehow missed weeks of exhaustive (not to say navel-gazing) coverage in New York-based media, the New York primaries are today.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Donald Trump is expected to win. Donald Trump is still expected to win the nomination. This is despite the fact that he's had a rough enough month to engage in a full-blown campaign staff shakeup (arguably the most traditional thing he's done yet)…

  [CBS News / Major Garrett]

• …and despite his referring to "7-11" instead of 9/11 at a rally in Buffalo last night. (Greg Sargent has a nice meditation on why this might matter to New Yorkers.)

  [Washington Post / Greg Sargent]

• Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is expected to win the Democratic primary — despite the fact that Bernie Sanders is gaining momentum.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• One big reason for this is that New York state only allows registered Democrats to vote in the Democratic primary, and the party-registration deadline closed six months ago — far earlier than it does in other states.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Leah Libresco]

• Many Sanders supporters are attacking this as undemocratic or unfair. At least one celebrity Sanders endorser (Vampire Weekend lead singer Ezra Koenig, the most famous Ezra K. born in 1984) is already saying, before the polls have even closed, that the primary is illegitimate.

  [Ezra Koenig via Twitter]

• Closed primaries aren't unusual, and the six-month deadline is probably restrictive but not disqualifyingly so. The bigger problem might be that 50,000 voters have mysteriously vanished from the rolls in Brooklyn, and city officials don't really know why.

  [New York Post / Yoav Gonen and Carl Campanile]

• P.S. Here is a shockingly exhaustive list of who characters in New York-set television shows would vote for.

  [Vulture / Nate Jones]

Great news for ISIS

(Visam Ziyad Muhammet/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

• Iraq has suspended its Parliament indefinitely, a day after some MPs voted to replace the speaker (meaning there are now two people claiming the title).

  [Middle East Eye]

• As Vox's Jenn Williams explains, Iraq's ongoing political crisis has suddenly become critical, after mass protests associated with the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr restarted on Friday.

  [Vox / Jennifer Williams]

• Al-Sadr and company are demanding the removal of some cabinet ministers and an investigation of corruption. But the protests are crystallizing widespread frustration with the Iraqi government's inability to deliver services or fix itself.

  [Al Jazeera / Jane Arraf]

• (It is possible, for what it's worth, that al-Sadr himself has worked to block reform, as a kind of Mitch McConnell strategy to make the incumbent prime minister look worse.)

  [Brookings / Kenneth B. Pollack]

• Reportedly, the Iraqi government is so concerned that the unrest will turn violent that it's recalled some troops from the war on ISIS to protect government property in Baghdad.

  [The National / Matthew Ayton]

• That's just one way in which the unrest might help ISIS. As Williams points out, the impotence of the Iraqi government is one of the factors that helped ISIS grow to begin with.

  [Vox / Jennifer Williams]

None of us is above voting for Boaty McBoatface

(NERC)

• You may have heard about the online poll to name a new British icebreaking ship, which was won, overwhelmingly, by the submission "RSS Boaty McBoatface."

  [CNN / Tiffany Ap]

• But the will of the people is likely to be thwarted. The UK's science minister (who's in charge of the agency that held the poll) has hinted that the official pick will probably be a "more suitable" name.

  [NPR / Laura Wagner]

• Patriotic Brits are outraged (as well they should be!). This rant by Stuart Heritage(!) is well worth reading: "It’s a symbol of a small and very British rebellion; the sort of thing that sets us apart from the rest of the world."

  [The Guardian / Stuart Heritage]

• Then again, Mr. Heritage might be overstating it. In 2006, a poll to name a bridge in Hungary resulted in the people's choice — again tragically thwarted — of the "Stephen Colbert Bridge."

  [Wikipedia]

• Even when online polls limit the options, they can't prevent mischief. Not only did the online forum/troll hatchery 4chan rig the online vote for Time's 2012 Person of the Year for North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, they rigged the top 14 slots so that the first letters read "KJU GAS CHAMBERS."

  [Gizmodo / Leslie Horn]

• Direct democracy hasn't been feasible in the past for logistical reasons. Now (or in the future), it might be. But all this is enough to make one reconsider whether it would really be such a good idea.

  [Flash Forward / Rose Eveleth]

MISCELLANEOUS

The case that Better Call Saul is better than Breaking Bad. [Slate / Julia Turner]

• There will never be enough articles in the world on Hillary Clinton's obsessive love of hot sauce.

  [Time / Denver Nicks]

• Let us now praise Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world by declining to nuke the United States even though sensors showed five US nukes headed to Russia.

  [The Atlantic / Megan Garber]

• The latest DSM recognizes hoarding as an independent mental illness — one from which 6 percent of Americans, or 19 million people, suffer.

  [Washington Post / Sara Solovitch]

• One sign of how horribly overcomplicated taxes are: Only two out of 24 personal finance writers and editors at Money magazine did their own without software or an accountant.

  [Money / Ethan Wolff-Mann]

VERBATIM

"In northern China, multiple bulldozers apparently got so mad at each other that they started one of the craziest demolition derbies I’ve ever seen on a public road … It’s like deer fighting each other head to head, only they’re giant construction machines and it’s not just a one on one battle." [Sploid / Casey Chan]

• "The usual gore and mayhem of a first-person shooter doesn’t work as well in VR. Exaggerated scenarios that are merely compelling in a flat world can be overwhelming when you’re immersed in them."

  [Wired / Kevin Kelly]

• "Flight attendants are often made to play referee when hundreds of humans with wildly different life experiences are crammed into an aircraft cabin. … Sometimes you’re asked to be someone’s accomplice — in their racism, their homophobia, their cruel joke about the larger person seated next to them or their conviction that the mother in front of them should drug their child to shut them up."

  [Washington Post / Gillian Brockell]

• "The women whose stories we are reconsidering now—Marcia Clark, Anita Hill, Monica Lewinsky, Tonya Harding, and others still on the horizon—have one thing in common: they indicted America. … All these women confronted us with truths we did not want to consider, and so we terrorized them, mocked them, abused them, and rendered them finally voiceless. That was how terrified we were of listening to what they had to say."

  [Fusion / Sarah Mitchell]

• "All three immediately disrobed. Then the husband snapped photographs as his wife and the other man had sex in various positions. Foos recorded the encounter in minute detail. When it was over, he wrote, 'They all three laid quiet on the bed and relaxed, discussing vacuum cleaner sales.'"

  [New Yorker / Gay Talese]

WATCH THIS

Watch: we asked the cast of Syfy’s 12 Monkeys about 12 famous monkeys [Vox / Alex Abad-Santos and Estelle Caswell]

Vox / Alex Abad-Santos and Estelle Caswell

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