TSN Open Mic for the week of 2/27/2023
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to Ten Second News.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these on the Sidebar every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
It takes a while for secondary and tertiary effects to kick in.
Report
I was more surprised that the ‘peak’ in 1970 was only 13% for men. For English, Philosophy and Languages. Seems low. Is there a reason why History and Economics and other Humanities aren’t included?Report
In many places, Economics, and, to a lesser extent, History, get grouped in the social sciences.Report
True, but then I’d like to see Math and Astronomy added back in 🙂Report
Related to Jaybird: The End of the English Major
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-majorReport
It makes sense to get a degree as an English Major for $X.
It does not make sense to get a degree as an English Major for $4X.Report
Besides the cost, a big problem is that many of the algorithms used to shift through job applications before a set of human eyes sees them seem designed to eliminate people with humanities degrees. Even if you go to a big Ivy. Since most Ivy grads have more informal methods of getting jobs, this doesn’t effect them though.Report
Moving from the old previous week to proper week:
Heard it here first, the Kagan, Jackson, Barrett, Alito, Thomas coalition on Section 230.
https://reason.com/volokh/2023/02/27/why-big-tech-will-lose-its-supreme-court-case-on-section-230/Report
Something, something, something Baltimore schools have have zero competent learners, something something…
Oh wait …
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/28/desantis-florida-school-performance/Report
You don’t get it. The problem isn’t that the Baltimore schools are in Baltimore, or that Baltimore is controlled by Democrats. The problem is that those schools are not educating students.Report
I get it, which is why I was needling Jaybird about Florida’s nasty failures as well.
But sure, preach away brother man!Report
Well, then, good work showing Jaybird that you care more about partisan politics and less about kid’s futures than he does.Report
What I care about is educational success across the board. Jaybird has confined his discussions if that to a Democratic led city in the mid Atlantic. If he’s as concerned as you say about this, he ought to be here ranting and raving about this drop as well.
Hell – so should you. But hey, you do you.Report
Personally, I think that this represents an institutional failure too.
But I don’t think that this is one that will be fixed by more funding either.
Do you?Report
When teacher pay is 48th out of 50 states I think there are indeed funding issues that can be a significant contributing factor.Report
If they had top quintile funding, do you think that they would be significantly better?Report
yesReport
Why?
I ask because it’s not helping the schools in the mid-Atlantic.Report
Well for starters, you can’t recruit or retain effective teachers when you are 48th in teacher pay.
And frankly you can’t mitigate all the non-school system related factors preventing educational success without additional funds either.Report
The schools in the mid-Atlantic are in the top quintile in the country.
And they have dozens of schools without a *SINGLE* proficient student and dozens more with only one or two.
(Personally, I assume massive (like, *MASSIVE*) amounts of fraud and graft going on there.)Report
The humanities did well when fewer people went to university and going to college was a near guarantee of some type of white collar employment. It also helped that before the mid-20th century, the elite educational ideal was too produce all-rounders with a smattering of knowledge about everything rather than specialists. Specialists were always the middle management underlings until recently.Report
Everyone here has seen the reveals about how Fox News deliberately lied to their viewers about nearly everything.
What is particularly revealing however is the reaction from the viewers. Upon being told that Tucker Carlson and Hannity were straight up lying to them, did the base react with outrage? Astonishment? Disbelief?
Nope.
They shrugged and continued watching, swallowing lie after lie after lie. This is one of the many reasons I just don’t take their words or arguments at face value anymore.
They lie so often, with such breathless self assurance, that I just assume everything they say is a lie until proven otherwise.
Do they want to peacefully divorce? Nah.
Do they want abortion returned to the states? Nah.
Do they care about free speech? nah.
Federalism? Limited government? Fiscal responsibility? Nah, nah, nah.
The thing they are clear about, and speak honestly about, is the idea that white males are victims of some wide ranging persecution.Report
ICYMI
Of course, the on-air talent didn’t believe it, either:
Everyone knew it was lies and the on-air talent pushed it anyway because they were afraid of Newsmax eating their audience. And Murdoch, who also knew it was all lies, did nothing to stop it, despite him admitting:
When you’re involved, and you’re doing nothing to stop it, you’re choosing to allow it to happen. Maybe that’s not “endorsement,” but it also fails to exonerate.Report
Just like there is no bottom to Trump, there is no shame in these folks. No matter what happens in the real world, Fox tells them how they want it to be.Report
And my comment isn’t aimed the liars.
It’s aimed at the people demand they be lied to, and who continue to amplify the lies.
Because they haven’t stopped lying.
Covid, Ukraine, groomers, white male grievance, they lie about it constantly.
I’m done with playing “let’s pretend” and politely giving lies a respectful hearing.Report
As was mine.Report
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/02/28/1154339942/abortion-texas-laws-twins-selective-reductionReport
I think that this is a bad play.
Report
Huh.
Another Rorschach test.
I think it looks like a banana.Report
Personally, I don’t think that people should have to make trade-offs.Report
New York Mayor Eric Addams wants to bring back school prayer.
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/new-york-playbook-pm/2023/02/28/eric-adams-when-we-took-prayers-out-of-schools-guns-came-into-schools-00084832
School prayer is weak tea. We should have animal sacrifices and libations of wine before the school day starts. Students can fondle the entrails of animals before games and tests to divine the future.Report
Libations before school are a not uncommon southern thing.Report
Or during lunch break.Report
Does he want to bring it back though? The article doesn’t say so.Report
https://dailymontanan.com/2023/02/27/bill-banning-vaccinated-blood-donations-would-decimate-blood-supply-opponents-say/
Montana GOP: Today is a good day to dieReport
I notice that in this election cycle, the Republicans aren’t even hiding it anymore.
This year, they’ve gone full metal fash, and letting their freak flag fly. Anti-vax bills, book banning bills, child labor bills…Not to mention things like Jessa Duggar getting an abortion with almost certain impunity, while other women live in terror of being forced to choose between prison for an abortion or death by infection.
In the Before Times, these were the sort of things that Respectable Republicans indignantly assured us were mere hysteria, wild hyperbole that they would never do such a thing. Now? They brag about it.
Will it work? Bold move, Cotton, lets see how it works for them.Report
The problem with our electoral system is that it insulates Republicans a lot from their worse instincts. This bill is almost certainly doomed to failure but it the craziness will continue.
The big problem is that the urban-rural divide for partisan affiliation and voting gives the GOP a lot of advantages and their voters clearly want this stuff and can’t resist it. So on the Presidential level, enough people might think this is nuts and it could take the GOP out of the White House for a while. On a state level or even for the House and Senate, there are still a lot of people who might view this as crazy but will not break with the GOP under any circumstances because it means voting for those socialist, atheist, abortion loving, gun hating, prison abolishing, tax raising, DEI enforcing Demycraps.Report
We see this pattern repeated thru history where only a tiny faction actively wants purges and pogroms, but the larger group of petit bourgeoisie can be counted on to shrug and handwoven it away so long as it doesn’t touch them.
As the Jessa Duggar case shows, Republicans are still confident that the leopards won’t eat their faces.Report
“The problem with our electoral system is that it insulates Republicans a lot from their worse instincts.”
That’s actually a benefit and it goes in all directions.Report
Many liberal commentators thought that Trump might be able to get away with imposing authoritarian rule on the United States because it would be the boring type of authoritarianism found in South East Asia where normal life is undisturbed for most people as long as they keep their heads down. I knew that the Evangeliban wouldn’t allow for boring authoritarianism and would go for the hardcore stuff.Report
One of the cool aspects of my day job is funding and participating in work like this. Sadly, using tax money for these sort of things always seems to be on the chopping block.
https://apnews.com/article/great-lakes-shipwreck-discovery-ironton-91f6db8e3c42d37b2f8ade7b4df0a4bbReport
Analysis: How Lightfoot went from political rock star to rock bottom
https://chicago.suntimes.com/elections/2023/2/28/23614274/analysis-mayor-lori-lightfoot-second-term-vallas-johnson-garcia-wilson-buckner-king-sawyer-greenReport
Yeah she didn’t do the job lots of people expected. That said, she’s been tossed by her own.Report
Good riddance. She was dealt a terrible hand coming into office when she did, but she didn’t play it well at all.
The only downside is we have 2 candidates in the runoff who are beholden to public employee unions. Blech.Report
A good many of us on the left have long argued that when it comes to the global climate crisis, what China and India are doing or not doing about their emissions should not be a factor in US decision making. We can do good things, things that grow new industries, and things that make the Earth more sustainably livable regardless.
But China’s emissions keep being thrown in our faces. So here’s some interesting reporting by the WaPo – showing fairly conclusively that the Chinese won’t emit more CO2 then the US does until 2050. If that’s true, and the WaPo article presents some compelling evidence, then waiting for the Chinese to clean up their act before us is a red herring.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2023/global-warming-carbon-emissions-china-us/Report
Iowa attempting to ban gay marriage despite Obergefell: https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/iowa-lawmakers-propose-ban-sex-marriage-rcna72759Report
Compromise.Report
Also, horse-trading. Neither is possible in a world where people insist that bad-faith actions be treated as the equivalent of good-faith actions.
I can imagine some things conservatives might suggest in good faith, like legislatively carving out an exception to anti-discrimiantion-in-public-accommodation laws for providers of products and services intended for weddings. That probably wouldn’t violate the Full Faith and Credit Clause on its face the way this proposal does. I don’t know whether I’d support or oppose such a proposal, but I wouldn’t think it offered in bad faith.
This isn’t such a proposal.
(N.b., of course, almost no one of any political alignment actually cares about abstract principles of Constitutional law and in particular the nuances of federalism; such things are weapons to use or, alternatively, obstacles to be dodged, in pursuit of victory.)Report
Here’s a totally reasonable non-bigoted Republican who merely wants to curb the excesses of bad DEI:
“There are those attempting to push a sick and twisted ideology that seeks to convince our kids they’re in the wrong body and the solution is to drug, sterilize, and castrate themselves.
To these radical activists I only have one thing to say: Not in Mississippi!Report
And Ironically he may well loose the governors election this year anyway.Report
Remember how just a couple years ago we were all talking about how same sex marriage was accepted by Republicans, and how wonderful it was and how much progress we have made?
Like a bad infection, bigotry was just dormant, and now has a breeding ground in Republican circles.Report
Welcome to the party, pal!
LAPD should stop handling many non-emergency calls, police union says
As part of its upcoming contract talks, the Los Angeles Police Protective League intends to tell city negotiators that it is willing to let other city departments or nonprofit agencies respond to calls about panhandling, illegal sidewalk vending, urinating in public, mental health episodes in which there is no threat of violence or criminal activity, and dangerous dog complaints in which “no attack is in progress.”
…
The proposal coincides with efforts by some council members to shift certain duties away from the LAPD, including traffic enforcement and nonviolent mental health calls. Two of the council’s newest members — Eunisses Hernandez and Hugo Soto-Martinez — called during last year’s election campaign for the city to shift money out of the LAPD and into social services, such as mental health teams.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-01/lapd-officers-want-to-stop-responding-to-nonviolent-callsReport
When leftists write about systemic racism in America, they look at things like this – where Black Americans still suffer redlinning, receive significantly higher mortgage rejections rates, and are more cost burdened by housing costs. None these outcomes is, in and of itself, created or maintained by openly avowed racists. But all of them come from systems that are not race neutral and are maintained by the dominant culture.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/02/homes/race-and-home-buying-nar/index.htmlReport
Stop, I’m feeling uncomfortable. /sReport
Ron DeSantis’ Florida, where free thought goes to die:
DeSantis Promises Florida Will Control Disney’s Content
Right-wing board to clamp down on “woke ideology” in cartoons.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/desantis-promises-florida-will-control-disney-content.html
Bari Weiss was not available for comment.Report
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAReport
Hey, did you go see “Strange World” or “Lightyear”? Did anyone you know go see them?Report
This may not be as bad as berating people who push the lab leak theory, but still… Am I the only one who thinks this looks bad to anyone not already a googly eyed lunatic?
Florida bill would require bloggers who write about governor to register with the state
https://www.wfla.com/news/politics/florida-bill-would-require-bloggers-who-write-about-governor-to-register-with-the-state/Report
It’s worse than that.
Brodeur’s proposal, Senate Bill 1316: Information Dissemination, would require any blogger writing about government officials to register with the Florida Office of Legislative Services or the Commission on Ethics.
It’s about writing about government officials in general!
This is as unconstitutional as using the Covid emergency to pay off student loans!Report
You always have to be trolling don’t you? Plus the bill Biden is using was issued in the early 2000s.Report
Surely you’re not opposed to tossing a completely unrelated reference into a comment about the ostensible topic.Report
The proposed Florida law is a clear prior restraint on speech and anyone who took Con Law should be able to tell you that. You might not like or approve of Biden’s proposal and that is fine but the constitutionality on the issue is not based on whether Republicans or Libertarians think it is a good policy or not.
You aren’t as clever as you think you are.Report
I don’t know of *ANYONE* who supports this policy nor of anyone who thinks it’s constitutional nor of anyone who thinks it’s a good idea.
It’s a bad unconstitutional idea and the *ONLY* people it benefits are the people in power.Report
Dude – if this holds up – and I can see DeSantis signing it – every writer or commenter here will have to register. Including you. Do you think that’s Constitutional? Do you think its morally right?Report
I’ll let others comment on the constitutionality of it.
What it means for us citizens is yet more evidence that DeSantis and his supporters fully embrace state-mandated coercion of thought and speech.
Unlike a lot of other measures, we don’t even need to engage in the sly fan dance of pretending that there is some reasonable purpose or noble principle here.
If you speak up and dissent from the party line, DeSantis will try to punish you, whether you are a business or individual.Report
It is every American’s right to speak freely about his/her wish to see this country ruled by a king.Report
It’s neither constitutional nor morally right and, you know what?
I’m going to refuse to register. I’ll just never get around to it.
Hey. Do you think that whomever is setting this up is trying to make an oblique point about the 2nd Amendment?Report
They do not appear smart enough to be engaged in multi-dimensional chess.Report
Well, it seems obvious to me that you shouldn’t have to be a member of some sort of special class to engage in this particular Constitutional Right.
I also don’t understand the mechanism whereby Florida law on this issue would apply to me. Are the cops going to arrest me in Colorado for something that isn’t illegal in Colorado for something that is illegal in Florida?
There is, at the very least, a jurisdiction issue.
This strikes me as, at best, showboating and, at worst, tin pot dictatorship bullshit that would be laughed out of the room no matter who floated it as an idea.Report
The question for us citizens is how to distinguish this from any other Republican branding efforts.
Like, really, how is this any different than Chris Rufo promising to install ideological straightjacket on colleges? Or DeSantis promising to restrict Disney from making films he doesn’t like?
Or more generally, the millions of Republicans across the country trying to make drag shows illegal, or ban books, or demonize trans support as “child mutiliation”.
Hard for me to see how this is off-brand. This just seems like who they are, what they want.Report
I feel the exact same way about (insert any number of laws here, including (but not limited to!) ones that were later found unconstitutional).
This is what those people are actually like.
They accurately represent the people who voted for them.
They accurately represent the people who identify as being in the same party as them.
The only moral response is to register independent and vote 3rd party.Report
Additional information:
So this wouldn’t require me to register.
I mean, I wouldn’t have… but it would have been nice to feel defiant in my inaction.Report
Wait, a Republican legislator passing a bill to deflect from examinations of HIS OWN campaign conduct (no doubt by bloggers)?!?!?!?!
OMG.
These people really will burn down the bureaucracy to save their own skins won’t they?Report
Just the ones getting paid to do it, I guess.
The ones doing it for free can still write whatever they want without being put on a list first.
I remain opposed to registries, myself.Report
What’s “paid” for this? Salary as a columnist? Single payment for piecework? Money for clicks on ads?Report
If I understand the wording of the bill correctly, it sounds like non-paid bloggers/writers would have to apply for a waiver to not have to register.Report
The text of the bill is here.
It looks like the relevant section is Section 3. Section 286.31.
Here’s the sub-section:
So it apparently means “anything of value”.
If your “boss” pays you in dime bags, you have to register that you got dime bags in exchange for your post that so much as mentioned an elected state officer.Report
That feeling of satisfaction you get after completing a post.Report
I thought about including, you know, thingy.
But the only way the joke worked was to make it ‘R’ rated.Report
Don’t know about Florida, but most Cabinet officials in Colorado are very much appointed, not elected.Report
Oof. I am never going to move out of my house.
Report
The interest rates in the early 80s were between 12 to 16 percent on home mortgages.Report
Good news about Zimbabwe:
Zimbabwe’s central bank cut its policy rate by 50 bps to 150% on February 2nd, 2023, saying monthly inflation has been trending down since the last quarter of 2022. Consumer prices went up 1.1% from a month earlier in January, easing from a 2.4% rise in December, prompting the annual rate to ease to 229.8% from 243.8%.Report
Is there a fraction small enough to compare Zimbabwean currency to the dollar?Report
Someone told me once that in this sort of situation the local economy runs on US $20 bills. Many are counterfeit, but the inflation due to counterfeiting is much lower than the inflation in the local currency.Report
It’s 361.9 ZWD = 1 USD as of today. If trends continue, we won’t get to 500:1 until at least June!Report
Our first mortgage was in that time frame and was 14.5%. Friends who did not have a sufficient down payment paid 17.5%. The good news was that we got to ride the interest rate decline for 20 years, refinancing when we could do it on terms we liked, and paid the mortgage off early.
More importantly there was a brief period where you could buy 30-year Treasures that paid 13%.Report
My brother was buying CDs with his summer job money that were paying in the neighborhood of 15%, IIRC.Report
I think this is an incomplete data point, but what you suggest sounds right.
It looks to me like if you compare median home price to media income, both nationally and by region,, things started to get seriously out of whack in the early 90’s along the NE corridor and the west coast, and other NE and W markets following by the mid-to-late-90’s.
But average mortgage rates over about the same period of time slowly but steadily declined, up until literally less than a year ago.
Seems to me that this data suggests mortgage rates don’t have a direct effect on the price-to-income ratio, but lowering mortgage rates over time might have catalyzed whatever other thing it is that’s made housing prices escalate faster than incomes.Report
Hey, there’s a First Amendment problem here as well . . . .
https://www.wfla.com/news/politics/florida-bill-would-require-bloggers-who-write-about-governor-to-register-with-the-state/Report
duplicate post. Darn me!Report
At first, very slowly.
Report
So, Teen Vogue is Marxist. Should I have known that?Report
It’s been Marxist for a while.
It’s kind of weird.Report
Well, teens are naturally stupid…Report
Are conservatives out of touch with the concerns of young women, with an unseemly obsession with their private parts?
No. It is the young women who are wrong.Report
LOL. Marxist.Report
“The corporate capitalist regime that controls American university boards today has manufactured the current crisis of higher education…”Report
Little does the author suspect those people have been sitting on the boards of regents for years.Report
Just skim the headlines-
“This fall’s HOTTEST Mao jackets!”
“Also, how to tell if he is really your dreamboat, or just a counterrevolutionary running dog of imperialism!”
“What to do when Matt Gaetz shows up at your little sister’s slumber party”Report
Bravo.Report
Excellent work here, Chip.Report
4. Now it’s run by Christopher Rufo.Report
I don’t agree with Gilman’s framing. First of all, what he calls a rightist critique is simply reading universities’ statements aloud. And I’ve never heard libertarians make the critique he credits to them. But most importantly, the “waste of time and money” argument has become fairly common. It’s not bound to any ideology, if it even had an origin in one.Report
I think that the libertarian critique was something that missed the point entirely. Something like “just get a certification in C++! Go to a boot camp! Become a programmer in 6 weeks for 10k instead of 5-6 years for $190k!”Report
The step after that is “hack into a major company, extract secrets, and get hired as security, because their current security is idiots.”Report
That isn’t really a critique as much as career advice. It may be a good fit for a libertarian’s personality, but it doesn’t derive from libertarian principles.Report
Local news about a guy who made himself a national figure. The readout from Multnomah County Circuit Court is:
Sentencing is in three weeks.Report
Looks like he’s a serial offender.Report
What’s remarkable about this story is that it is greeted with a collective yawn:
Trump calls for contest to create futuristic ‘Freedom Cities’
Trump’s plan, shared in advance with POLITICO, calls for holding a contest to design and create up to ten new “Freedom Cities,” built from the ground up on federal land. It proposes an investment in the development of vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles; the creation of “hives of industry” sparked by cutting off imports from China; and a population surge sparked by “baby bonuses” to encourage would-be-parents to get on with procreation. It is all, his team says, part of a larger nationwide beautification campaign meant to inspire forward-looking visions of America’s future.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/03/trump-policy-futuristic-cities-00085383
The fact that this is creating absolutely no news, either positive or negative is remarkable for several reasons.
One, it shows that no one takes his words seriously. He may actually become President again, and is still a major figure in our national politics. So it isn’t that he is irrelevant.
But like one of those figures from a banana republic or East Bloc Communist country, everyone knows better than to take his words as anything other than a jumble of mouth-noises, untethered from reality or meaning.
Which by itself is revealing of the Republican party mindset, where there aren’t really any ideas, like free markets or national security, but merely an inchoate sense of grievance and resentment which can’t really be put into words anyway so no matter what you say, it doesn’t matter.
But another aspect of his mouth-noises is actually more interesting. His proposal is straight up Maoist Great Leap Forward stuff, where the government seizes command not just of the factors of production, but the personal lives of the people themselves, using its brute force to steer their family planning and social lives.
This is where he merges with Ron DeSantis and party figures like Chris Rufo and the Christian Nationalists. The purpose of government is to steer the moral and social lives of the people, to coerce them into correct ways of thinking and action.
Even twenty years ago this sort of thing would have been a bizarre fringe of the Republican Party. But today it can be spoken of casually, without causing so much as a ripple.
Not because no one takes it seriously, but because so many of them do.Report