Open Mic for the week of 1/22/2024
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 the front page.
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 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.
Grand jury indicts Alec Baldwin in fatal shooting of cinematographer on ‘Rust’ set
https://ktla.com/entertainment/ap-grand-jury-indicts-alec-baldwin-in-fatal-shooting-of-cinematographer-on-movie-set-in-new-mexico/
“Special prosecutors brought the case before a grand jury in Santa Fe this week, months after receiving a new analysis of the gun that was used.”Report
It seems we are still not decided which way Worklife balance should break –
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/22/opinions/remote-work-jobs-bergen/index.htmlReport
We should have a compromise. High-skilled, educated people should be able to work from home if they want, tradesmen should have to go in.Report
A lot of tradesmen around here have “offices” at home where they do their paperwork, take calls etc.
They real issue for a lot of that return to work drivers is vacant office space where lease returns are going down. Which is a thing, but not really.Report
I’ve been doing the same type of job for 30 years. 20 years ago I worked at a company that did SW coding for Airports. There was NO official WFH policy, but there were coders who worked 100% at home (usually stay at home moms with young kids). As long they made their productivity quota, no one needed to know they technically violated corporate policy.
Once the internet became widespread, I’ve never really HAD to work in the office. In fact, as I probably posted here before, during covid, I realized how much my work time was “wasted” listing to people bitch about work, or personal conversations before/after work conversations. In my last job, I had the option of partial WFH or 3 days in the office. WFH came with a 5K less paycheck. I took it as I’d spend that much on gas commuting.Report
Huh. MattY has a post about how journalists tend to be on the left.
Now, of course, he goes on to explain that this does *NOT* mean that there is a liberal media bias and people in comments also all agree that there is not a liberal media bias. I mean, just read The Nation’s Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media?!
Maybe just being educated at all makes you more liberal than people who are functionally illiterate!
But it’s an interesting post anyway.Report
If you live in a bubble, you have no understanding of “outside the bubble”. That bubble can be location, only having friends with similar views, etc. I live in a very liberal area, but grew up in a conservative area, so when folks where I live start spouting off on stuff they know nothing about, farm subsidies, or guns, I’ll play devil’s advocate and give them a different view. The most common response was “I can’t believe you think like that” and mine is “I can’t believe you’re that ignorant that half the country doesn’t share your views.Report
Those sort of things always … amuse me as well, what with the media constantly reporting on variations of “:Why does Kansas vote against their own self interest.”Report
That’s not what he says. He says that there is a liberal bias but not a partisan bias controlled for liberality.Report
Some of the comments discussed the anti-DEI exposé piece that ran in the NYT a few days before and, more interestingly, how the comments were all disagreeing with the piece.
Huh.
So I checked it out and, yep, you should check this out just for the comments: ‘America Is Under Attack’: Inside the Anti-D.E.I. CrusadeReport
Its interesting when people talk about “The Media”.
Like, does MattY’s description of young progressive media creators fit say, the employees of Fox News? Or maybe your local Fox News station?
Does it fit your local Sinclair station? Does it fit your local newspaper, if you still have one?
Well, ha ha, of course it doesn’t.
Those media outlets are not part of “The Media”. Whenever people say “The Media” they specifically mean the major papers like NYT, WaPo, or cable news like CNN or MSNBC. The Baltimore Sun is part of The Media, too, but since its purchase by a right wing crank, will probably no longer be.
The biggest cable news provider anywhere in the world and conservative media generally is specifically and consistently exempted from being a part of The Media.
Why is this? I don’t think its that MattY is consciously hiding the ball, I think he genuinely doesn’t consider Fox News or any conservative media to actually BE media.
This is supported by how people in general behave.
When people are online trying to prove a point, they will link to the marquee media, but never, ever to Fox or Sinclair.
Part of this is because it is actually true.
How much actual reporting does Fox or the Murdoch papers do, compared to the NYT? Do they do any real original reporting at all, or just shrieking commentary on stories reported by others?
So its probably better to reframe the question: Why is it that any media which can be described as “conservative” is so uniformly awful that its own consumers are embarrassed by it?Report
I don’t know. I DIDN’T READ IT EITHER!!!
HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA
But, seriously, the answer to your question is contained in the essay that I linked to that will open when you click on the link.Report
I didn’t see MattY address my question.
But if I missed it, feel free to paste it.Report
So the question of whether MattY talked about something has been answered to your satisfaction by reading the column? Excellent.Report
Why is it that any media which can be described as “conservative” is so uniformly awful that its own consumers are embarrassed by it?Report
I admit, the majority of Fox Watchers that I know say stuff like “Fox isn’t horrible like CNN but it’s still pretty awful” rather than “I only read it for the articles”.
So I’m not particularly familiar with the whole “embarrassed by watching Fox” thing.
Is this local to your city, maybe?Report
Pasted:
“Conservatives find it annoying that American journalists are so left-wing. But in practice, this generates a much more complicated partisan landscape than you might think. The conservative audience is alienated by the values of mainstream journalism and spends a lot of time consuming propaganda news that is optimized for partisan purposes. The progressive audience finds mainstream journalism congenial enough that it’s hard to compete with, and yet, mainstream journalism produces a steady stream of negativity and ultra-specific focus on the idiosyncratic problems of young urban professionals.”
He’s basically saying: conservatives constantly criticize liberals and Mainstream Media also constantly criticizes liberals. Woe is me, a liberal popularist espousing popular ideas liked by liberals (and some conservatives). If MSM progressives weren’t myopically focused on their unpopular issues, the consensus liberal ‘base’ would be popular and not unpopular.
That’s the point of the article.Report
Because, much like GOP politicians, he wants someone else to do the hard work of saving us from all this, rather then owning his complicity.Report
As I read the article I think I can answer your question chip. MattY does mention these various right wing media outfits you are talking about. He wraps them up under a blanket term “right wing media” and describes them as being purposefully and strategically operated right wing propaganda operations*.
He further observes that this sets up an infuriating paradigm wherein:
-Right wing media propaganda is both less factual and presents its stories in ways designed to encourage and empower right wing political figures, energize right wing voters and discourage left wing voters.
-Main stream media outlets, though dominated by urban progressive employees, focuses on subjects and couches them in terms that are primarily geared to with urban progressive readers.
-This has the ironic effect that right wing media purposefully empowers the right and discourages the left while main stream media accidentally empowers the right and discourages the left.
So left of center politicians are, enormously, swimming against the media currents and a large part of that blame lies with the progressive young people who populate the ranks of the main stream media.
*In fact he is even more scathing than you are in that he relegates them to the status of propaganda outfits and doesn’t even bother making detailed arguments about it because it’s so self evident.Report
This was my point, that everyone, liberals and conservatives alike, just automatically and without question assume that the word “media” refers only to liberal outlets.
There doesn’t exist any such thing as “conservative media”.
This is similar to my point once before about how there is no such thing as a “well regarded conservative university”.
Part of this is a tautology; “liberal” and “conservative” are defined in such a way as to make the existence of a conservative media or well regarded conservative university impossible.
This all points to how contemporary conservatism rejects reality; climate change, the so-called round earth theory, Joe Biden being the legitimate president.Report
I’d question whether conservative is defined in such a way as to make the existence of conservative media or universities impossible.
I agree, though, that whatever we generally call conservative in the US is generally so decayed as a political and ideological movement right now that it doesn’t support a conservative media apparatus outside of the right wing propaganda arm. That being said, the media industry in general is so distressed by the paradigm shift of the advent of the internet that I question whether a conservative media apparatus could economically survive.
But all that being said this just amounts to yelling “Conservatives are bad” right now which doesn’t excuse out own side or progressives for their own failures. It doesn’t make what MattY is saying wrong.Report
I think the point on MSM being primarily geared for urban progressive readers is true and not true. Often both and depending on the publication.
I think a lot of MSM is still obsessed with old-fashioned notions of being objective but they are also kind of lazy and confuse neutrality with objectivity. This is how you get view from nowhere journalism partially or largely and why it gets hair pulling reactions when the Times absolutely refuses to use words like Fascist or Authoritarian to describe Trump and Trumpism.
The confusion of objection and neutral as synonyms is what frustrates left-liberals with the MSM and why many (including me from time to time) think the MSM is more interested in being steongraphers with access rather than actual journalistsReport
Yeah it’s ironic, really, that the MSM manages to offend everyone so reliably but that doesn’t mean they’re doing a good job.Report
I think both of these things are true at the same time and in the same publications, which has given many a schizophrenic tone. I don’t subscribe to the NYT but my wife and I still have online subscriptions to the WaPo. The View From Nowhere stuff has been an issue forever, and the retrospective on WaPo’s reporting in the lead up to the Iraq war for example isn’t much better than how the NYT fared.
At the same time the part of the piece that Dean Banquet had in the Economist last month that really stuck out to me was where he described NYT doing lots of hiring of young people from click-baity online publications and content mills. That really does change a culture, and I can’t imagine the dynamic has been much different at the WaPo. It’s toned down slightly there (and I don’t get the sense the NYT ever fell as far) but since Trump a lot of WaPo has the tone of a college sophomore back for break eager to give everyone an insufferable lecture about how the first Thanksgiving didn’t really happen the way they were told in kindergarten. This is of course still side by side with the attempt to maintain a tone of stodgy institutional credibility and VFNW reporting.
I can of course only speak for myself, but to the MY piece I find it very discouraging on multiple fronts. Not that the point of these publications is to encourage me or people with my worldview but it does create an asymmetry of sorts in the media environment, when compared to the conservative media.Report
Did you mean the Bennet article? The biggest revelation in the sense of someone from the inside saying what seems to be true is, in fact, true was that the Newsroom as opposed to the Editors and Opinion Journalists had fully embraced ‘narrative’ journalism.
“The new newsroom ideology seems idealistic, yet it has grown from cynical roots in academia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth; that there is only narrative, and that therefore whoever controls the narrative – whoever gets to tell the version of the story that the public hears – has the whip hand. What matters, in other words, is not truth and ideas in themselves, but the power to determine both in the public mind”
This is, in a nutshell, the besetting sin of all American media — left and right. Maybe since forever; but the sea change is the full-on embrace as Narrative as power… without even a fig leaf of ‘truth’ or challenging narratives with skepticism. And, importantly, that’s the Newsroom not the Editorial stance.
He does provide the ‘old’ newsroom to contrast if you’d like to check his math.
To be clear, *everyone* says this about Fox and the ‘Right Wing’ media… the man bites dog bit is that NYT is evolving in the same direction.Report
Also considering that all JB seems to post about is the favorite hobbyhorses of Barstool Sports/Gamer Gate conservatives* and/or Chris Rufo’s crusade against woke/DEI/campaign to make Harvard white again**, or any pushback at trolling on Very Serious People predicting a Trump win in 2024.*** why should I see him as anything but a Trumpist who likes to hide behind his love of geeky things as a mask?
*The Burkini issue killed Sports Illustrated/pointing out that it chases women from gaming to have female video game protagonists in Bikini Armor led to Trump’s victory.
**See continuing on about Claudine Gay below.
***See when he posted an article to Chip Daniels on the NY Times article on how the World Economic Forum/Davos folks predicted a 2024 Trump win. This is obvious trolling. It comes from the Times so it should be a trusted “liberal” source and the Davos folks are not resentment filled MAGAs but serious people with serious data crunching. Never mind that Davos generally represents the richest of the rich and they probably realize that Trump 2.0 means more for the plutocracy so they have motive to put their thumb on the scale with alleged neutrality. Just like Dimon at Morgan. But when I pointed out that Davos was wrong in 2016, 2020 (and perhaps 2012, I can’t find that one but saw they got the last three Presidential elections wrong), he snapped back with Sam Wang in 2016 and his eat a bug promise.
Any fact that is put against him is ignored and discarded like the 2022 and 2023 general and special election results. He is just as disliking of dreaded winemoms as some dirtbag leftist who resented his mom telling him to vote for Hilary after she sent the monthly allowance from the family trust.Report
Saul, please look at it from my perspective.
During 2016, I was arguing that Trump was stronger than we thought and that we were in a bubble. You called me a Trumpist then for thinking that he *MIGHT* win. When I talked about Nate Silver’s polling and how they were kinda shaky, you brought up Sam Wang and said that we should use him instead.
I’m interested in what is going to happen and why it’s going to happen and what we might be missing that we think that it won’t happen if it will.
I’m not particularly interested in emoting about how I feel about it. Well, beyond whether it’s particularly funny.
You interpret my willingness to look at even evidence that is unpleasant without talking about how unpleasant I find it for two paragraphs first as being on the side of Barstool or Rufo.
It’s merely that it looks like, on some stuff, Barstool or Rufo happen to be technically factually accurate. As for GamerGate, to the extent that videogames were made worse for a while there and stuff like Sarkeesian directly contributed to the creation of games like Gotham Knights, I am *SQUARELY* on the side of GamerGate. Seriously, Gotham Knights was an act of aggression and if you had played it after playing the Arkham series, you’d see what I mean. Suicide Squad also looks like it’s going to suck and I resent that too.
Now this part is *REALLY* interesting. Let’s go through sentence by sentence:
“See when he posted an article to Chip Daniels on the NY Times article on how the World Economic Forum/Davos folks predicted a 2024 Trump win.”
This article, like, actually exists. I did not write it. I did not have anything to do with anyone who wrote it. I did not have anything to do with anyone who had anything to do with anyone who wrote it. Seriously. It’s there.
This is obvious trolling.
I may not understand what you mean by “trolling”.
It comes from the Times so it should be a trusted “liberal” source and the Davos folks are not resentment filled MAGAs but serious people with serious data crunching.
This is why it’s an interesting article. It comes from the Times so it should be a trusted “liberal” source and the Davos folks are not resentment filled MAGAs but serious people with serious data crunching.
Never mind that Davos generally represents the richest of the rich and they probably realize that Trump 2.0 means more for the plutocracy so they have motive to put their thumb on the scale with alleged neutrality.
This talks about their motivations rather than whether they’re right. Do you notice that?
Just like Dimon at Morgan. But when I pointed out that Davos was wrong in 2016, 2020 (and perhaps 2012, I can’t find that one but saw they got the last three Presidential elections wrong), he snapped back with Sam Wang in 2016 and his eat a bug promise.
Because I think that getting 2016 wrong is something that a *LOT* of people did and it should have taught a lot more people humility than it appears to have.
And the Sam Wang thing? Please understand. We never saw a post-mortem on what went wrong there so I will probably continue to bring up Sam Wang whenever there’s some obvious motivated reasoning to ignore polling.
I mean… how do you know that you’re not doing the same thing you did then? Do you care whether you’re doing the same thing you did then?
Because, from my perspective, I very much do *NOT* want to do what I did then and am trying to compensate for what I did then and make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
Any fact that is put against him is ignored and discarded like the 2022 and 2023 general and special election results. He is just as disliking of dreaded winemoms as some dirtbag leftist who resented his mom telling him to vote for Hilary after she sent the monthly allowance from the family trust.
Oh, dude. I *WISH* I had a family with that much dough. As it is, I came from one of those families that had cultural capital (education, library cards, that sort of thing) rather than Capital capital. As it is, I’m just in a place where when I see motivated reasoning, I try to wave it away.
(Winemoms?)Report
“This article, like, actually exists. I did not write it. I did not have anything to do with anyone who wrote it. I did not have anything to do with anyone who had anything to do with anyone who wrote it. Seriously. It’s there.”
Yes, but you wanted us to “consume” it, you thought it was meaningful, you presented only one side of the issue and didn’t admit the existence of other viewpoints (which are obviously correct and you are obviously totally wrong and that’s obviously why you don’t want to talk about them.)
Oh, what did the article actually say? Some bullshit, I imagine, that’s the kind of thing that Trumpies like Jaybird always post. I’m not going to waste my time reading it, what kind of dummy do you think I am?Report
There are about 30 topics that Jaybird is interested in. He brought up the SI story in the context of how I originally posted it, which was AI. Jaybird is really interested in AI. It’s almost like he’s a well-rounded person with interests outside politics.
His main interest is intellectual consistency, which means he never leaves an argument unfinished, G-d help us. Intellectual consistency also makes him fascinated by hypocrisy. I never really understood his fixation on elites not masking, but every new picture was like a new puzzle he had to solve.Report
At first it was “Dang it! Look at these guys not masking!”
And it was only after people started *DEFENDING* the guys not masking that I got *REALLY* interested.
Like, the Met Gala? My complaint was that I didn’t like the whole “important people don’t have to mask, the little people have to mask” thing that they had going on.
And people, SOCIALISTS!, argued that “the masked people are being paid very well”.
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON
I FEEL LIKE I’M TAKING CRAZY PILLSReport
I’ve said it before, you should be forced to print the description of INTP before each of your comments. You INTP’s are such easy targets for us INTJ’s. “Hey, look, the same thing that always bothers you!”. Heh. An obvious contradiction is like a string in front of a kitten.Report
There’s no self-awareness! There’s no ability to look at it from another POV!
There’s no THEORY OF MIND!Report
THE END OF THE STRING WIGGLES AS IF IT’S ALIVE!!!Report
Nope. Not always. And not by that name.
Your INTP nature is not the problem. Your word salad writing style is the problem.Report
You’ve got to learn to take a joke.Report
“Your word salad writing style is the problem.”
manyword plusbad! blipvert plusgood!Report
“To an extent these are just observations.”
He doesn’t seem to present any data, just inferences drawn from what stories get covered.Report
Do you have any suggestions on how this best be measured quantitatively? Maybe someone out there has already done the measurements.Report
Not to dodge your question, but Yglesias’ article skews more young economic than left/right. I think we can still rely on the fact that editors pick the stories and reporters report on them, plus newspaper want to sell newspapers. So, the stories that get picked and covered are going to skew demographically and economically to the demography and SES of the editors and writers.
If there has been actually substantiation of reporters skewing one way or another politically, I’ve never run across it.Report
I read the Matt Y piece and think there are some decent observations but I think he and JB are drawing the wrong conclusions from the observations
This is going to seem like anecdata but look at Andrew Cuomo’s two reelection primaries and the most recent NYC mayor election. In the reelection primaries, Teachout and Nixon tried to take Cuomo out and they did very well all things considered. Teachout received 34 percent of the primary vote and so did Nixon. In a primary election, it is not great for a sitting incumbent to have a third of his party vote against him. But Teachout and Nixon won generally among college-educated professionals who tend towards the left on social and economic issues for the party as a whole. Cuomo’s victories were among more moderate income Democrats who tend to be more socially and economically conservative than the Brooklyn set.
The same thing happened in the NYC Mayor election where The Garcia and Wiley coalitions battled it out in different parts of educated and well to do NYC and Adams won by racking up votes from groups that think being a court clerk is a great rise up the security ladder. Garcia almost won but there were a surprising number of Wiley to Adams voters who did not trust Garcia because she was the bougie liberal choice.
That being written, I think MY and JB interpret this as stating Biden is doomed in 2024. He might lose but I also think the media focus on stuff like student loans means that there are probably a lot of voters out there who like Biden and think he is doing fine but it doesn’t get coverage.
Biden’s political superpower, one he has had for his entire political career of over 50 years, is knowing exactly where the median Democrat is and sticking himself there. His other political superpower seems to be that he is the Columbo of elected politicians, everyone seems to underestimate him and he runs laps around them. He has been doing this for almost all his adult life. I trust he knows what he is doing more than armchair political strategists on OT or LGM who love to scream “The Democrats are doing it wrong!!! They need to listen to me.”
I am not stating that I think 2024 is going to be an easy race but I think Biden has a lot of hidden strengths that everyone ignores. Trump is still really, really unpopular and disliked being one of the big ones. The others being I suspect polling is missing stuff and doesn’t know how to act in a world dominated by negative partisanship.Report
I’m *NOT* saying Biden is doomed in 2024! I don’t know what’s going to happen!
But if I find evidence that Trump is doing well, I am not going to dismiss it merely because I find it personally distasteful.Report
I believe the big X Factor is what happens when Trump is re-introduced to Normie America. Right now it’s only the sick, deranged people like us at OT paying attention.
One thing Trump hasn’t done much of is stick his neck outside of the safe space of ultra conservative media and his own cult of personality events. I would think that at some point he will have to do that if he wants to win the election. Which isn’t to say it is pre ordained that doing so will go poorly for him, and the legacy media could give him a huge boost if they immediately revert to the total hysteria they went into during his first term. But I also have this feeling that his negatives will be a much bigger deal this time, now that he is a known quantity. Biden’s big task is to live up to being the generic Democrat, which at least plays to his strengths.Report
Yeah there have been several articles rolling around pointing to various sources, including the Biden campaign itself, saying that the majority of voters they talk to literally -don’t believe- that Trump will be the GOP nominee. Low info voters literally don’t know who the contest this year will be between.
That means that most approval and horse racing polling is, thus, simply a “Am I happy with Biden in isolation” question regardless of the wording. Not a binary choice question.Report
I think that’s a lot of it, which shouldn’t mean we ignore Biden’s weaknesses. I also think there’s the distinct possibility that we have a repeat of episodes where legacy media types attempt to take Trump down a notch backfiring into perceived as wins by Trump.
However it’s also hard not to notice that Trump himself has gotten a lot weirder than he was in 2016. Like it or not voters are in an immigration skeptical mood and so his outrageous statements on that subject probably don’t hurt him. But are Joe and Jane Normie in these swing states really invested in the election conspiracy stuff or the alleged hypocrisy of the media in how they handle his personal scandals versus those of various Democrats? As I understand it that really has become the centerpiece of his pitch and I don’t see it working with the people he needs to win.Report
Yep. A lot of people don’t believe it will be a Biden-Trump rematch yet because they simply do not pay attention to the news.Report
“I believe the big X Factor is what happens when Trump is re-introduced to Normie America.”
Do you mean Trump-as-personality or Trump-as-news-story?Report
Trump as personality. See also comment above to North. I think there is a non 0 chance that what played as plain spoken truth to power, sort of using vulgarity to throw the hypocrisy of the elites in their faces, may come off differently the second time around. Sort of a joke that’s already been told effect. Time will tell.Report
Are you looking to measure media bias based on coverage? Something like this perhaps?
https://adfontesmedia.com/gallery/Report
Before I click on that, is that the chart that says that the Air Force’s news division is straight down the middle and Vox is only a little bit to the left?Report
This study hints at the answer. Journalists are more likely to believe that every side doesn’t deserve equal treatment. Liberals moreso, whether journalists or non-journalists.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/07/13/u-s-journalists-differ-from-the-public-in-their-views-of-bothsidesism-in-journalism/Report
Do you believe the Trumpist faction’s lies about 2020 deserve equal treatment?Report
That’s a fair question. I think any common error should be rebutted, so I’d say “equal” with regard to the truth.
Surveys ask generalized questions, and expect generalized answers. If you think about a survey question long enough, you could find a reason to choose any answer. They’re typically not asking True / False type questions where any exception changes the answer; they’re looking for clusters of common thinking. It says something that journalists and the left generally don’t prioritize equal coverage.Report
So you believe the 2020 election lies deserve equal coverage? Noted.Report
Did you note my explanation? If so, could you repeat it?Report
What I know is that you claim that journalists don’t prioritize equal coverage of the truth. And that error should be rebutted.
And yeet you did not choose to directly answer my direct question.Report
“you did not choose to directly answer my direct question”
Does that mean you admit that your “noted” version wasn’t a fair representation of what I said?Report
Depending on the source, somewhere around 60% of Republicans and/or conservative voters believe i’s possible to probable that Biden’s election was the result of fraud. That’s not a majority of Americans, but definitely a majority of people who both decry the alleged left leaning bias of the legacy media, and are likely to vote for Trump in the various GOP nominating contests. for that rather large number of people, the Big Lie is actually the truth.
So when you talk about both sides of the “truth” needing to be reported, and you refuse to directly the answer the question I asked, one reasonable conclusion is that while you may not like Trump – as you have often stated – you may still believe the Big Lie deserves equal coverage. from there, my “Noted” comment is just the next stop on the train.
All of which could be eliminated by a straight up answer to the question asked.Report
No, I’m not talking about “truth”, I’m talking about truth. I said that any common error should be rebutted. That’s a simple statement. Falsehoods about the 2020 election should be reported upon and rebutted if they are common.
“Equal” treatment can mean a few different things. The equality can refer to the extent of coverage, the lack of bias, or equality of presentation. I’m guessing you hear “equal treatment” and think of each party given the same amount of time without any fact checking. When I say equality with regard to the truth, I mean that if one party says something false, it should be reported that the statement was false. That doesn’t mean that “Party Said Something False” has to be the lead story every night, but a person who reads the news should be able to tell what the truth is.
Do you understand now?Report
I think that lies should be reported as lies. And in the legacy media they generally are. Not so much the conservative media. Which is a significant origin of the problem.
I look at equality in this context as mean there are always two sides to a story; they deserve to both be reported, and there is not to be any rebuttal or critical analysis. Some news deserves that. Trump’s illegal actions and lies to stay in office do not.Report
Quid est Veritas?Report
I wonder if this is a problem peculiar to DJT and his ilk. America has never really dealt with his kind before, at least as far as his ability (use of social media and more or less house organ cable TV networks) to get his followers to believe in and spread his crackpot theories.
That said, as a consumer of news I don’t really want anyone to have to spend time responding to utter nonsense that doesn’t deserve a response. We’ve kind of entered an age where Art Bell would be considered a valid source of info.Report
“the free market idea that if you’re poor you should just get sick and die untreated”
Pay attention to both of the magician’s hands. Yglesias can talk about non-biased information all he wants, as long as he keeps writing stuff like this, he’s at least a part of the problem.Report
Here is a fun little article on how there are now more billionaires because of inheritance than new billionaires and the subsequent generations are not super-interested in philanthropy but are very interested in “wealth defense”: https://www.vox.com/2024/1/22/24043104/billionaire-get-rich-people-parents-generational-wealth-transfer-trust-fund
What is interesting and depressing here is how many people still hold to the “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” thing as received wisdom even though it comes from a much more bygone age and might not have been terribly true to begin with.Report
People believe in the shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations because the families that flame out tend to do so in a very openly destructive manner. It was also from a time where the young very wealthy did double duty as national celebrities. The families that quietly managed to keep the fortune in their families through various legal instruments and behaving like reasonable adults are a lot less spectacular.Report
Not many mega-rich Rockefellers out there, but nobody seems to be the least bit uncomfortable.Report
I don’t think I am parsing this commentReport
Well-off but not mega-rich Rockefellers unto the present generation.Report
The Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision has decided to grant the Biden’s administrations emergency application to be able to take down razor wire put up by Texas to deter people seeking asylum. Please note that the pro-life state of Texas allowed a mother and two children to drown recently and prevented DHS from going to aid the refugees.
https://www.vox.com/scotus/2024/1/22/24047314/supreme-court-texas-homeland-security-razor-wire-eagle-pass-biden
“But Texas sure sounds like it is trying to secede.
This razor wire barrier, moreover, is one of several steps Texas’s government has taken to limit migration, often in defiance of the Biden administration and of federal law. Texas also enacted a law that will allow state judges to issue deportation orders, a power that belongs to the federal government. And it is engaged in another court fight regarding a floating barrier of buoys the state erected in the Rio Grande.”Report
“Please note that the pro-life state of Texas allowed a mother and two children to drown recently and prevented DHS from going to aid the refugees.”
Maybe, but the fact-checkers are wary.Report
This ties to my comment about the non-existence of reliable conservative media.
If you wanted the actual truth of what is happening at the border, including this story of the woman and child who drowned, what would be your go-to trusted source of accurate information?>
Fox News?
NewsMax?
OAN?
Gateway Pundit?
Catturd 2.0?
Or, like everyone else, would you urn to the marquee news outlets like NYT?Report
I have an answer: The Bulwark is generally reliable and I would say still kind of right-leaning or at least the most moderate edge of the Democratic Party. Charlie Sykes should not be anyone’s idea of a liberal. Of course, they resisted Trump so they are outsiders to nearly everyone.*
But you know it as well as I do, “conservative” (let’s just call it right-wing) media will ignore stories it finds inconvenient or dangerous or display the facts in such an incorrect and/or biased light that its army of followers can go out and spread propaganda and whataboutism with a slight air of plausible deniability. They will pick up one little inconsistency or incorrect statement from the mainstream media and amplify that to the loudest possible degree. And then the well awkstually brigades launch into full deflect and attack mode.
*Notice how LGM is still generally really suspicious about #NeverTrumpers eight years out from 2016.Report
Per usual, I clicked on the links of your ‘just so story’ and the reality isn’t what the headlines suggest. It struck me as odd that you’d have us believe that a bunch of random young Texans just watched a mother and two babies drown. Possible, but improbable… it doesn’t really match what we know of real National Guard units; and the idea that it was happening *while* they were preventing Border Patrol from helping? Goes from improbable to most likely confabulated for The Narrative (TM).
Basically the narrative that people were drowning in front of the Texas National guard while holding the Border Patrol at bay is false.
And, even if you want to discount the National Guard’s account, there’s no guaranty that the Border Patrol could have done anything other than “search the river with lights and night vision goggles”
If the Border Patrol were onmipresent where all migrants were illegally crossing, we wouldn’t have illegal crossings like we have.
This is from CNN:
“The Texas Military Department Saturday said it was contacted by Border Patrol at 9 p.m. Friday about a “migrant distress situation” and searched the river with lights and night vision goggles, but “no migrants were observed.”
About 45 minutes later, Mexican authorities were seen responding to an incident on the Mexican side of the riverbank, said the Texas Military Department, which then “reported their observations back to Border Patrol, and they confirmed that the Mexican authorities required no additional assistance,” according to its statement.
“At no time did TMD security personnel along the river observe any distressed migrants, nor did TMD turn back any illegal immigrants from the US during this period,” the Texas Military Department said. “Also, at no point was TMD made aware of any bodies in the area of Shelby Park, nor was TMD made aware of any bodies being discovered on the US side of the border regarding this situation.”
And, when reading the account from *Border Patrol*, it doesn’t claim that they could have saved anyone, just that they were barred from entering the area — at which point according to TMD they did what Border Patrol would have done. In both accounts, the story says that the people drowned at 8:00 and Border Patrol was alerted at 9:00.
“Around 9 p.m. Friday, “Mexican officials advised Border Patrol of two migrants in distress on the US side of the river in the area near the Shelby Park boat ramp,” the Biden administration wrote in Monday’s Supreme Court filing. “Mexican officials also informed Border Patrol that three migrants – one woman and two children – had drowned at approximately 8:00 p.m. in the same area.”
Both the distressed migrants and drowned victims were recovered on Mexican side of the river. By the time Border patrol was aware of the drownings, the people had already drowned; most likely without anyone knowing.
If there’s an actual accusation of a failure to rescue drowning victims (there isn’t) then we can evaluate how that happened, and I’d expect the soldiers and chain of command that ignored drowning victims subject to inquiry on the circumstances would be court martialed.
Border Patrol has SCOTUS backing them up that they can go through any TX obstructions without being sued… so the drownings can continue per usual. According to NPR (hopefully another satisfactory source for you) approximately 1 person a day drowns crossing the Rio Grande — with Border Patrol on the ready.Report
Which confirms that TMD was more interested in blocking the Border Patrol than rescuing anyone.
The whole point of the razor wire in the middle of a river is to demonstrate their depraved indifference to human life.
Which tracks with their de[raved indifference to pregnant women, children working in hazardous conditions, and pretty much anyone who isn’t them.
Like, when these people witness a guy mocking a disabled person, they laugh.Report
It doesn’t confirm any such thing; at this point you’re just a fountain of disinformation.
Starting a movement to liberate New Dealer Chip!Report
If there is anyone out there who wants an answer to the question “Do Republicans/ conservatives have a depraved indifference to human life?”
I would just invite them to attend a Trump rally, or read a few conservative websites or even browse a few court opinions by Federalist jurists, and decide for themself.
I mean we use to joke that conservatives wanted a moat filled with alligators, and here we have 25 conservative governors thundering their desire for a moat filled with razor wire.
We used to charge that they were willing to let pregnant women die, but here we are.
I can’t damn them any more than their own words and actions already do.Report
Can I suggest to people, and I know I sound like a podcast or something, Ground News? I just subscribed to it like a month ago, and it is incredibly useful seeing a) the same story with a dozen different sources that I can compare, and b) the stories that each side is ignoring.
Seriously, I do sound like a podcast, but you know I’m not getting paid because I don’t have some weird sponsor code…or even a link, just google it. It was $5 a month or something like that.Report
Breaking News:
Report
I think I posted this before but can’t remember but if anyone wants to see future rock stars as gawky teenagers, here is the Who performing a cover of Gotta Dance to Keep from Crying by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles before they become the Who: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBendsEKJCY&list=RDNBendsEKJCY&start_radio=1Report
Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las has died at 75: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8UKf65NOzMReport
I would have thought she was much older,given how long ago the Shangri-Las were big.Report
Lots of the girl groups got started as teenagers. The four in the original Shangri-Las were 15, 16, or 17 when their parents signed the first record deal for them. Mary Weiss was the 15-year-old lead singer.Report
That makes me feel better. I was beginning to see death uncomfortably close.Report
Biden appears to be cruising to a crushing victory in NH as a write-in candidate. Trump is winning but not crushing it in the NH primaryReport
I can’t wait to see the turn out on each side. The GOP turned out less this year in Iowa than 4 years ago. If that holds all the way to the general – always a big if – we may see something positive for the nation.Report
The GOP primary appears to have higher turn out but I think that is somewhat to be expected because I think most Democrats know Biden is their nominee and NH is also in the dog house for getting hissy about losing their first primary status among DemocratsReport
I’m more interested in year over year GOP turnout. Again, Iowa was reportedly down from 2020. Granted its Iowa and that’s a caucus, but still.Report
Really a fine outcome for the Dems. A Biden write in victory eliminates any danger of the media “Err mer gawg Biden loses to Dean!!” narrative while Biden refusing to campaign there will cement in NH’s dethroning as a first in the nation Primary. At least Iowa crapped the bed so badly that even they were too shamefaced to try and fight getting punted as first for caucuses.Report
Trust the science: Top Harvard cancer researchers accused of scientific fraud; 37 studies affected
Report
And caught by scientists. Fortunately, the integrity of science depends not on the integrity of individual scientists, but on the ability of other scientists to check their work.Report
TL:DR – Peer review worked like it was supposed to.Report
No it didn’t. Peer review is what happens prior to publication — these were published studies. We should be disturbed that these made it through the process and were only found out by a separate group of people who go hunting for this stuff.
As an analogy, this is like where a person is charged with murder, is found guilty by the jury and put on death row, but then the Innocence Project comes in and shows that the accused was clearly innocent. The right reaction is not “Yay the system worked”, it’s “Yikes, the system failed — we’re lucky that this other organization found it but we need to figure out how to do better.”Report
Peer review is not one and done. Especially for novel or controversial results, peer review continues every time something is cited or someone tried to test a new hypothesis by incorporating previous methods or results.
So yes the system worked because it caught the mistake.Report
it caught the mistake
The researchers are accused of manipulating data images with simple methods, primarily with copy-and-paste in image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop.Report
+1
PubPeer “the online Journal club” is a 501(c)3 foundation hosting a post-publication forum for publicly raising factual questions about papers that were already peer reviewed.
However, unlike the peer review process, there’s no methodology as to what studies/papers are checked. The papers in question may all be cited in other papers/studies unless/until retracted. The article suggests that $B funding may follow some of these potentially fraudulent studies. If I recall correctly, a significant portion of Alzheimer’s research follows potentially fraudulent image manipulation.
https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-diseaseReport
What gets me is that this isn’t a case of an outlier failing to replicate but, like, *FRAUD*.
Did the researchers think that this wouldn’t get found out?
Why in the hell did the researchers think that this wouldn’t get found out?Report
Because they are humans, and subject to the same hubris we all are.Report
Jesus, dude. How many studies have *YOU* lied about to us?Report
He’s a government worker. He knows what the answer ought to be, and that sometimes it just needs a little “help” to get there. It’s okay to not tell 100% the complete entire actual truth if the outcome is good, right?Report
None that I am aware of. Granted, most of my science publications over the last 10-15 years (the few I have had time to write) have been synthesis pieces were I take other people’s reported conclusions and pull them together into a bigger picture.
Everything I’ve published here I have cited, ad a good many times other commenters here have disagreed with the conclusions I have reached. Once or twice others have presented alternate peer reviewed work that calls my stuff into question. And I deal openly and honestly with it when it happens.
But you and Density seem to think its fun trolling to all but call me liar publicly. The level of bad faith embedded in that is enough to make me vomit.Report
Sounds like you’re afflicted with a different kind of hubris than the guys who did this, then.
Like, they have a different kind entirely than you do.Report
These are the sort of penny wise – pound foolish cuts that take prominent legacy media to the grave yard. Notice that the story says the newsroom is loosing money. Not the paper; not the company. The newsroom. Which is heavily unionized. Hum . . .
https://laist.com/news/los-angeles-times-to-cut-around-20-of-its-newsroomReport
Taylor Lorenz has a take on this:
I agree with her.
Pretty much the entire digital media ecosystem that she and a lot of other millennial journalists came up in has been completely hollowed out.Report
But – Lorenz isn’t part of the news ecosystem, is she? From what I know she’s part of that digital TMZ level garbage that everyone can do without.Report
She’s still employed by the WaPo and she moved there after wreaking havoc at the NYT.Report
The WaPo and NYT digital crowd certainly overlap with the kind of Gawker and Buzzfeed stuff I was thinking of.Report
I swear. At this rate we’re going to find out that that was Obama in the “Woomp, There It Is” music video.
Body of the tweet:
Report
Juxtaposing this comment, alongside the ermagerd multiple comments about a scientific paper, demonstrates the conspiratorial mindset at work.
Notice how the level of skepticism flickers on and off again, depending on what conclusion is desired.
For scientific papers, one fraud is enough to taint the credibility of the entire scientific community.
Here, a single assertion from a proven liar is treated with childlike credulity.Report
I would be *DELIGHTED* to classify the FBI Director as a proven liar.
Wait, is your argument that the FBI Director did *NOT* give this testimony?Report
Jaybird, we’re already established that Chip doesn’t think the FBI’s crime statistics are trustworthy or useful; you think he’s interested in anything else the FBI says or does?Report
I’m dubious of this. Racket appears to be a writer owned news website focused on and based in the Twin Cities. IF they were reporting on the lab leak theory (and I couldn’t find that story using their search function) they were not doing so as original reporting. I can’t find any online presence for any news site simply called “Public” though there is an investment guide app by that name.
Now, I don’t Tweet – never have – so I don’t have a way to burrow down into X to see if there are imbedded links. And if there are I’ll read them and see what they actually say. Not looking good however.Report
I just found stuff from CNN, NPR, and Al-Jazeera.
So it’s just stuff that they said in public too.
Much less interesting.Report
Hold on here… Schellenberger’s *new* news here is that the FBI acknowledged that they had HumInt on the origins — which would indeed be significant.
But, the links are to March 2023 (which is the old news) and without paying for Schellenberger’s substack, I can’t find any reference to an actual FBI statement or leak.
The only thing that would move the needle is Schellenberger providing that info/leak.
And then, if I were a cub-reporter, I’d ask questions about how the FBI rather than CIA has HumInt in Wuhan before I ran with the story…Report
LOL. The usual unhinged replies below that tweet. “I knew it was a lab leak from day 1, because China, you know.”
Like newspapers who are starving for readers and ad revenue would be actively suppressing a story this huge. How are we still discussing this nonsense 4 years later?Report
Did you ever read the post-mortem on the whole Cotton op-ed written by that guy who was fired by the NYT?
Seriously, it is CRAZY if you come in with assumptions about the news media that would have made sense when Pinko Cronkite was on the television every night.Report
I did not. Got a link?Report
It came out a little over a month ago. Here’s something from the middle:
Report
The intelligence agencies are divided over the virus’ origins.
Some think it more likely that it was a lab leak, and some think it was more likely from a wet market.
But of course, only the ones agreeing with desired conclusion can be trusted. All the others can be ignored because, um, reasons.Report
No, if Schellenberger is correct, the FBI assessment was based on Human Intelligence and not statistical probabilities around furin cleavages.
It would be *new* information that wasn’t public before.
But, as I note above, I haven’t seen any actual connection to the FBI saying this other than ‘multiple sources’ — which might be solid, but that’s too anonymous for me.Report
It being “divided” is significantly different from it being a “conspiracy theory” that requires suppression.Report
Right.
So when other intelligence agencies say it is more likely to be from a wet market, are they as trustworthy the FBI?Report
I’d certainly not say that discussing their alternate theories qualifies as a conspiracy theory that should be suppressed.
Why do you ask?Report
OK so if you want to discuss alternate theories, are the sources in your tweet reliable?
Like, who is this organization called “Public”? Did you independently check their story, before rushing in here to spread their claims?Report
You mean, did I compare their newly reported story to other stories that also covered the FBI saying that the origin was a lab leak?
Yes.
This story has new information, though. Information we didn’t have. I don’t know how you’d expect me to check it.
How do you check your information from the CIA?Report
That’s not what I asked.
We’ve known for a long time what the FBI and CIA were saying, and both you and I are taking them at their word since we both have no other reason to think they are lying about this. Mistaken perhaps, but not lying.
What I’m asking is did you independently check the veracity of your tweet?
Like, do these “sources” exist?
Or are you just taking them at their word?
Are there reasons to think the person making these claims is not being truthful?Report
Now, Public has learned from multiple sources that the FBI knew since at least March 2020 that Covid was the result of a lab leak.
What the FBI knew is that somebody told them that. If memory serves, that’s old news.Report
I don’t know how I would “independently check their story”.
Could you explain how I would independently check their story?
I compared their story to other stories reported by other outlets and the other outlets agree with this story. Well, except the new piece of information.
How do you expect me to independently verify the new piece of information?
Could you compare to how you independently verified the CIA’s statements?Report
He’s not asking you to verify things already reported. He’s asking you – as I did – to verify the existence and credibility of the providers of the information contained in the Tweet. We know the CIA exists, and we can be reasonably sure that when they say something – it was in fact them saying it.
I have managed to verify that Racket exists and appears to be a legit new site – albeit focused on Twin Cities news and not international virology. Public? Who are they? What’s their origin? How do they fund their work? That’s what he’s after.Report
Oh, well then. Here’s the “about” page.
They have information on both of the authors associated with the story on that page as well.
As for their funding, it looks like it’s crowdsourced.Report
So its a “news” organization run by the twitterfiles guy. I mean they won “journalism awards” from conservative organizations.
Got it.Report
One of the twitterfiles guys, yes.
Which, if I recall correctly, was an accurate story that also provided evidence and sources for its claims.Report
Well it accurately quoted its sources and did a lot of interpretation of the alleged evidence. Had it been legit it would have been Pulitzer Prize stuff. Instead it was “awarded” by a foundation focused on researching conservative values and another that is all about empowering lonely young conservatives in schools.
And Public is really a Substack feed – which is generally an opinion site isn’t it?Report
Had it been legit it would have been Pulitzer Prize stuff.
You make assumptions that I don’t make to say this.
And Public is really a Substack feed – which is generally an opinion site isn’t it?
From the Google: “Substack is an American online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters.”
It’s a platform. Some (many? most?) of the newsletters sent out are opinion, yes.Report
My point is that of course you have no way of independently verifying Shellenberger’s claims.
So you just take him at his word, even though he is a known liar.
Your skepticism flickers on and off depending on what you want to believe.
You hear about a fraudulent paper, and this casts doubt over all of the scientific community, after all, you cry “it is *Fraud*”
But Shellenberger has been discovered to have made a lot of fraudulent claims, yet with his claims your skepticism vanishes and is replaced with the open mouthed gullibility of a child at Christmas.Report
Oh? Do you have these fraudulent claims at your fingertips?
My research shows that Greenpeace disagrees with his claims about the safety of Nuclear Power.Report
Start here:
Book review: Bad science and bad arguments abound in ‘Apocalypse Never’ by Michael Shellenberger
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/07/review-bad-science-and-bad-arguments-abound-in-apocalypse-never/
Guardian article: “The environmentalist’s apology: how Michael Shellenberger unsettled some of his prominent supporters”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/04/the-environmentalists-apology-how-michael-shellenberger-unsettled-some-of-his-prominent-supportersReport
Yeah, I saw those as part of my 20-second google.
The Environmental Catastrophe credulists have different opinions on the claims made than other folks less willing to take excitable claims at face value.Report
By “excitable claims” do you mean “I have here secret anonymous witnesses who say some wild things, but you will just have to trust me on this”?
I’m not asking you to dismiss Shellenberger’s excitable claims.
I’m just trying to get you to understand why it looks like your skepticism switch goes on and off depending on whether you like the conclusion or not.Report
Oh, I understand *EXACTLY* what it looks like.
But I also suspect that this claim, like the last half-dozen, will be validated in the next few weeks.
Then even you will be able to pivot to “that’s old news, we already knew that”.Report
Then even you will be able to pivot to “that’s old news, we already knew that”.
my favorite is “you only thought that because you’re racist. I, on the other hand, waited for all the information to come out, which is why you were wrong back then even though what you said turned out to be completely correct.”Report
Sounds about right.Report
Waiting for all the facts to come out is just what They want you to do!Report
I’d prefer “waiting for all of the facts to come out” to “suppressing some of the facts that come out” and “suppressing some of the discussions about the few facts we actually have”.
If you aren’t willing to wait for all of the facts to come out, that would indicate a problem, don’t you think?Report
Who’s suppressing what now?Report
Did you not know that discussions of the lab leak hypothesis were suppressed?
New York Magazine has an article about it.
I’m surprised you hadn’t encountered this.
The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability had a hearing about it.
The Wall Street Journal had an article about Facebook bowing to White House pressure to remove COVID posts.
Is this the first time you’re hearing about this?Report
More brilliance from Texas, the pro-life state:
Kyte Baby is apparently a trendy maker of clothing and accessories for baby’s and new mothers. An employee of the company adopted a son who was born prematurely and is in the NICU. She asked for permission to work remotely, may or may not have been granted it, but then the company decided it could not let her work remotely, and terminated her instead of allowing her the option to return to the office. The CEO of the company manages to apologize poorly and then keep digging a deeper and deeper hole: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/kyte-baby-ceo-ying-liu-apology-rcna135141
Yes, technically everything the company did was legal and the scandal is what is legal but it always amazes me that it is hard for company’s to think for a second “Wait a minute, we are a baby clothing company. Won’t it look bad for us to sack a new mother?”Report
I really think that fewer people make these associations than we would like.Report
I think the stronger charge is less about abortion and more about the impossibility of being both the pro family party and the anti worker protections, anti taxes on rich people party.Report
I’m talking about the company in this case. “We are a baby clothing company that aims at affluent liberal young mothers, so we need to take special when one of our employees is a mother in need of flexibility” might seem like common sense optics to us but it really doesn’t seem that way to other people.Report
Oh yea. Then again corporate credos mean nothing.Report
They do if you are specialty corporation whose customers take you literally.Report
Kyte Baby produces expensive organic baby clothes for UMC wannabe hippie moms. But sure, this is a pro-life problem.Report
So you believe that being pro-life doesn’t carry responsibilities beyond birth.
Noted.Report
Are you trolling? I can’t be sure any more.Report
Where did my brother mention anything about abortion in his observation?Report
“More brilliance from Texas, the pro-life state:”Report
So you believe that being pro-life doesn’t carry responsibilities beyond birth.
Noted.Report
This, dear readers, is what economists might call the beginning of a market failure:
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/25/1225957874/housing-unaffordable-for-record-half-all-u-s-renters-study-findsReport
We need to start hiring high-school graduates to do environmental impact studies on where it’d be the least harmful to build housing as soon as we can get the paperwork through the governor’s office!Report
Nope. NIMBY zoning and environmental obstruction of housing construction has been a problem for decades and tens of thousands of housing units didn’t get built (especially in blue states and urban areas) because the local regulators didn’t permit them to be built. I am struggling to think of a worse example than this for someone trying to push a “market failure” line.Report
Call me nuts but that NIMBY-ism is driving a market failure, exacerbated by the desire for ever increasing rents.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketfailure.aspReport
You’re ignoring the elephant in the room, Philip, which is that is state regulation both in the form of zoning regulation and environmental obstruction is the instrument by which this problem in supply and demand is being caused.
Foundationally you can’t call something a market failure when there’s a glaringly obvious regulatory issue by the state that’s causing the “failure”. Well, you can, but it comes off as nonsensical.
This is important because the solution to actual market failures can often be state intervention whereas that same solution, in regulatory failures, has the opposite effect and makes the issue worse.
In this specific case the core solution to the housing issues would be correcting or removing the regulatory barriers and obstructions that’re preventing more housing stock from being added. Branding the issue a “market failure” points in the opposite direction of more subsidies or more regulations which would, almost assuredly, make the problem worse or, at best, be ineffective.Report
Regulations can be a “something.”Report
Ehhh yeah semantically sure… but again the problem is that misdiagnosing this as market failure both dillutes and weakens the market failure term and suggests courses of action that’ll be ineffective or even exacerbate the problem.
The liberal goal is, after all, good government for the sake of good governance; not more government for the sake of more government.Report
Its a situation where we need government to overcome government.
Most NIMBY laws are local, while the state has requirements for a housing master plan which has affordable components.
So it often requires a state level mandate to overturn local zoning restrictions.
Using the terms “Market failure” or even “free market” doesn’t help since they can’t offer any direction for a solution.Report
Absolutely! Precision in language and diagnosis is essential to those ends. I quite strongly agree that moving zoning decisions up to a higher level of government strikes me as a highly plausible potential solution though, again, something will have to be done about NEPA/CEQA sooner or later (for combatting global warming as well as housing).Report
Economists use the term “market failure” when a market fails without or not due to government interference and “government failure” when a fails because of government interference.Report
This notion that markets and regulations are not tightly in the same circle of the Venn diagram is ludicrous; not unlike the persistent myth that humans are not part of, nor influenced by, the ecosystems around them. That definition I linked to above accounts for any and all influences on market successes.Report
Given the regulations and the predictable (and predicted) outcomes of the regulations, the market failure was, presumably, the point.Report
You might be right Jay.
I’ll make a note of the date and time so I have for when people say you and I never agree.Report
Regulatory capture, man. It’s a bear.Report
That page agrees with the standard definition and mine, not with yours. Obviously the economy is affected by both market conditions and governmental actions, just as a person may have low blood pressure caused by a physical problem and a medication, but it makes sense to be able to use terminology that distinguishes the cause.Report
Using the word “interference” is the flaw here, and is a relic of the Cold War struggles between competing economic systems.
The big change that occurred in the 1990s was the absolute victory of regulated markets over all other competing theories.
“Regulation” is a necessary component of markets so using the term “interference” doesn’t help point to a solution.Report
Call it “intervention”, “regulation”, whatever.Report
Iatrogenic (adjective)
Defintion: induced unintentionally by a physician or surgeon or by medical treatment or diagnostic proceduresReport
Which is the point.
Markets can’t exist without regulation, interference, or whatever you want to call it.
So the solution can’t be to “remove interference”, it has to be identifying which interferences we want and need, versus those we don’t. Or identifying new interferences which might help, versus ones that won’t.Report
I didn’t say anything about removing interference. You’re confusing definition and analysis. Or, rather, anyone reading the above might confuse definition or analysis. I wanted to clarify it for them.Report
Question:Why is the existence of real estate ownership not considered a ‘regulatory barriers’?
Someone owning a piece of property that others wish to build housing on is, in a technical sense, a regulatory barrier preventing more housing stock.
Why exactly does the line get drawn where it is for ‘market failure’ and ‘regulatory failure’? Maybe the regulatory failure is letting people own land at all.
I’m not saying it is, but you can’t just pretend it’s some natural market thing going on there.Report
We even have Kelo vs. New London to fall back on.Report
I suppose in an extremely expansive sense private property is a regulatory barrier of a sorts. I’m also not a constitutional, economic or legal scholar enough to feel confident in waxing eloquent about about how/why the rules governing property ownership rights are of a different kind from zoning rules or environmental rules that obstruct building on ones own property.
I do feel comfortably, however, in observing that every time we as a species have experimented around with everyone owning all property (and thus no one owning property) it’s been, at best a somewhat tolerable clusterfish like ones local grafiti, trash riddled bus shelter and then gets worse from there.
Basically, introducing the tragedy of the commons incentives into building development, maintenance and upkeep strikes me as a colossally horrible idea.Report
Lots of 3rd world nations have done what he’s suggesting. It’s a big reason why they remain 3rd world nations and creating private ownership of property is key to moving past that.
If I don’t legally own my home, then I can’t use the legal system to protect my assets and I shouldn’t make improvements on it.Report
You’re correct, but that’s not really the right way to say that. They haven’t ‘done’ that, but a pretty major problem is that many counties often do not have very strong records of property ownership. They never bothered to come up with them…everyone in the community knew who owned that property, and he left it to his son, and now his son owns it, etc, and no one ever really wrote that down. And then the son got paid some money to let a factory be built there, but no one really wrote that down either…
And if some dispute comes up, well, who knows?
Meanwhile, letting people ‘not own land’ is not really workable at all. Because what that really means is that the government owns the land, and give people permission to use it, but in a completely haphazard way that isn’t just ‘owning deeds’. The only places where ‘no one’ owns land and you can just do whatever you want are places without functioning governments.
Even people that we like to imagine ‘didn’t own land’ actually did…Native Americans, for example, often had ownership of specific farming fields or hunting land…perhaps with somewhat more vague boundaries than modern times but not weird for back then. And they certainly owned their own housing and the area around it. (In fact, hilariously for this misinterpretation of history, there were often disputes between European settlers treating land public property they could do anything in, like graze cattle. Completely screwing up a forest maintained for decades by a specific Native American family with berry bushes or whatever. Like ‘This is literally our berry forest, that is literally my family’s job in this tribe, maintaining that, and your stupid cows ate them all. No, we don’t have fences around it because we don’t _need_ fences cause everyone knows that!’)
The dividing line, the thing required in a modern world, is ‘Is who owns what exact square foot of land well documented to the level of creating an assurance that no surprising claim will show up later?’. And if the answer is ‘no’, it changes the entire calculation of the risk of building anything.
What doesn’t change such risk is having solid ownership documentation, but having the government own a lot of land, and be willing to forcibly purchase it from the owner. Because then there’s compensation. It’s literally why we put that people can’t be deprived of property without due process of law.Report
I just brought up owning property that people wish to build on, as if there is imaginary empty land everywhere that people own, because that is fairly obvious ‘blocking to increase housing stock’. So it was a good starting example, if not entirely real.
But there is also ‘owning already-built housing and yet not letting people use it’, which also reduces housing stock in the practical sense even if the housing technically still exists.
And whether or not people do that is pretty much entirely due to regulations.
What we define as property is itself a decision being made. Absolutely no nation in human history has ever let people own the air, for example. Whereas almost no nation has ever asserted that people can’t own clothing or whatever…hell, even in places where women were not allowed to ‘own property’, there literally were exceptions for clothing and items like that.
Likewise, someone owns Superman, and no one owns Sherlock Holmes, and those are choices we’ve made about the timeline of a specific form of property.
There’s not a binary choice of ‘people can own property or not’. We choose what can be defined as property, and we choose the rules that exists under. And in fact, that’s an oversimplification, because by ‘property’ we actually mean ‘the right to stop others from using a thing’, and that has insane levels of complexity. For the most obvious real-estate example, public right-of-ways, where you can own a specific piece of property and yet be unable to stop others from using it in certain ways.
Every rule we have about ‘Who specifically is in charge of ‘this concept’ and what they can stop others from doing in relationship to it’ is entirely invented, from top to bottom. Every piece of it was us.
And a lot of politics relies on pretending the lines we have draw there are magical pre-existing lines instead of us just deciding those things at some point.
And, yes, in b4 anyone mentions Chesterton’s fence. I am not saying tear anything down, I am just saying any sort of distinctions between ‘market’ and ‘regulation’ here is almost nonsense, because the market literally exists because regulation created the framework of ownership to start with…I guess there’s some hypothetical ‘natural law’ where people freely trade objects they are holding instead of resorting the violence, some hypothetical ‘pure’ market, but real estate ain’t that.Report
Where are you trying to go with this?
You’re making very broad claims about how property rights have many different forms. What is the specific change that you’d like to see?Report
I think his point is that there’s no “property rights” issue with the idea that you don’t “legally own your home” because he thinks that’s not possible, that the government “owns” literally everything and you’re just being permitted to use it. So there’s no such thing as “government taking”, it’s only “actual owner deciding that current tenant is no longer allowed to use the property”…Report
The building of high end apartments and condos, and the drastic increases in rent are only secondarily related to zoning, much like the drastic increases in grocery prices are only secondarily related to COVID policy. Capitolistic greed for more 9literal) rents is the basis of this, and while the NIMBY’s certainly aren’t helping, the market is driving away the very people who participate in it, all the while adding to all sorts of negative economic forces that derive from being unhoused.
Its a market failure. The NIMBY part is just an excuse the real estate investment companies are able to hide behind.Report
phil
“market failure” does not mean “it’s different from how phil would like”
nobody ever said the market would do a nice thing that everybody liked
what they said was that the market would find the most wealth-maximizing response to the situation at hand
if we don’t like the shape of that response it’s on us to investigate the structure of costs and rewards that caused it to be the most wealth-maximizing one, in order to change it in ways that make our preferred solution the most wealth-maximizing oneReport
I would say it is due to structural shifts less than greed, because greed has always been around.
What we’ve seen over the past half-century is a stagnation in wages while the price of housing escalates faster than general inflation.
The global marketplace hasn’t resulted in land getting cheaper, or building materials getting cheaper and advances in technology hasn’t affected the construction industry the way it has other sectors.
So a house built in 2024 is more expensive than one built in 1974 when compared to the wages of the potential purchasers.Report
I would say Greed fueled and was less restrained by those structural changes. Which in turn led to more structural changes.
And here we are. A nation that arrests its own citizens for not having enough money to acquire housing on the private market, prosecutes pastors for following their religion and offering housing to the “least of these,” and cites community organizations for feeding the unhoused where the unhoused are.Report
Abandon focusing on “greed”. The Point of a System is What It Does.
See also: Regulations intended to help people.
See also: Regulations intended to address greed.Report
According to google’s AI:
The median income of US households has been increasing since 1970. In 2018, the median income was $74,600, which is 49% higher than it was in 1970, when it was $50,200.
If we look at places that don’t have the gov able to shut down the creation of housing, prices are fine. This is a political problem and the fix is for the state or feds to take these tools away from local politicians.Report
When building is capped by NIMBY regulations and environmental obstruction only highest margin housing units will get built first, then the next most and so on. Luxury housing is the highest margin so it gets built first and the regulatory obstructions kick in long before lower rate housing kicks in. This is not greed, it’s economics, it’s utter simplicity.
Additionally building more supply helps with housing prices no matter what kind of housing supply you build. Luxury housing frees up slightly less new/luxurious housing for lower income people and so on down the chain.
NIMBY and environmental obstructions are the core problem, not an excuse or a scapegoat. Squalling about “evil developers” is just a distraction. Socialized housing schemes would (and have) collided head first into the same obstructions at ruinous cost to the polities that have attempted them.Report
Luxury is also a marketing term that people get their underwear in twists about. The housing is actually not that luxurious. It isn’t like a modest starter home of yesteryear but it is not a Manhattan Penthouse for a 1 percenter either.Report
Very true Saul- especially in the NY and urban Cali markets.Report
To that point, even building more luxury housing, however defined, brings prices down.
Example:
Palm Springs capped short-term rentals. Now some home prices are in free-fall
In Palm Springs, a cap on short-term rentals in specific high-demand neighborhoods has all but frozen the market in those communities.
Sales are down. Homes languish on the market for months. And investors who bought up Palm Springs properties during the COVID-19 pandemic are facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-01-23/palm-springs-capped-airbnb-rentals-now-some-home-prices-are-in-free-fallReport
That is a fishin amazing article- whole lot of moving parts in there but a fascinating read Chip. Thank you.Report
“Home prices” has multiple different meanings in that article.
There are “homes” built for rental use which are now being converted into single family home and this is affecting prices.Report
Another down-stream effect of the original warrantless wiretapping parts of the Patriot Act:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/tech/the-nsa-buys-americans-internet-data-newly-released-documents-show/index.htmlReport
“Biden administration is preparing an executive order meant to curb foreign purchases of US citizens’ personal data.” but wont do anything about stopping the NSA from doing so.Report
Of course they won’t, just like the Obama Administration didn’t take apart the Patriot Act after it went into force. One of the few things I remain torqued at Obama about.Report
Yep…because fundamentally politicians are mostly the same. Changing this would be working against the system. None of them really want to use their capital to do that. So many easier tasks.Report
The last one to even hand wave in that general direction was Jimmy Carter.Report
New article from City Journal explains why no one has been able to find the SARS2 virus infesting a colony of bats.
Old news by now, I’m sure.Report
You really need to get better at interrogating your sources Jay. The City Journal is an urban policy publication of the Manhattan Institute, which is a moderate to hard right think tank. In other words they have a significant amount of bias. U.S. Right to Know seems to lean left for its staff, yet they still seem to have a strong anti-government bias.
The documents they point to include a series of completely redacted black pages, draft proposals for unfunded work, and emails asking people if they have seen the proposals. There’s an alleged hint of scandal when the US project lead is quoted as saying he wants the work to reflect US involvement and oversight so that DARPA is comfortable. But even on the U.S. Right to Know web page they have to state that the project was not funded by DARPA – or USGS from whom the FOIA documents were obtained. They further go on to state that they don’t have any evidence whether the proposed work was carried out – though the Manhattan Institute folks claim that it must have given the similarities.
There is no smoking gun here.Report
Agreed. It merely points out the circumstantial evidence.
This is not a smoking gun. It is not “proof”.Report
Its conjecture. Pure conjecture in service of an agenda:
Report
Its conjecture. Pure conjecture in service of an agenda
Lotta pure conjectures in service of agendas out there, it seems.Report
I read that article, and almost posted it here as an example of why these sorts of articles only serve to confuse laypeople.
Not one person here understands the article on a level well enough to critically examine it.
No one here understands what a “furin cleavage site” is or how it works or why it is important that it is or isn’t “found in other known members of the viral family”.
Compare this article to the papers we have seen which later turned out to be frauds or riddle with error.
Has this article been peer reviewed and accepted by established community of scientists? Of course not.
When you say sarcastically “Trust the science” isn’t this an example of what you mean, where so-called “scientists” make wild claims which can’t be substantiated or replicated?
So why just accept this uncritically? Why not apply the same caustic lens to this as you would a statement by the FDA?Report
No one here understands what a “furin cleavage site” is or how it works or why it is important that it is or isn’t “found in other known members of the viral family”.
I do.
But I switched majors in college.
If you’d like a quick bit of info to help you understand what a “furin” is, Wikipedia has a section for you. A furin cleavage site is the part of the virus that attracts a furin and cuts it.
The site where the furin is cleaved, if you will.
There’s a guy from Caltech who explained this back in 2021:
While it may be true that you do not have the ability to understand that paragraph, you do not have the ability to state conclusively that there is no one on the board who does.
As for the “wild claims” which can’t be substantiated or replicated, I can’t help but notice that there are “wild claims” that get boosted and “wild claims” that get suppressed.
And your calls for rigor are sometimes there and sometimes not.
As such, I’ll wave them away and say that these insights are at least as worth meditating upon as those that involve “bat soup”.Report
No, you don’t understand it and you keep demonstrating why not.
A couple classes in college doesn’t give you the depth of knowledge to interrogate a scholarly paper, and even if you did, the fact that you accept a paper which doesn’t have the support of peers shows you didn’t pay attention in class when they talked about the scientific method.
This paper might end up being peer reviewed and its conclusions accepted by the community of scientists. But it hasn’t yet.
And until it does, all we can say is that it is just somebody’s claim, awaiting review and verification.Report
None of these things are scientific papers.Report
And did you notice how he pivoted from “No one here understands what a “furin cleavage site” is or how it works or why it is important that it is or isn’t “found in other known members of the viral family”” to “A couple classes in college doesn’t give you the depth of knowledge to interrogate a scholarly paper”?
Because he did.Report
Its not a pivot, its the entire point.
One moment, you scornfully sneer at “trust the science” and question the authority of scientists who have spent their life studying the subject.
The next moment, you eagerly tell us that you have the authority to comment on it because you took a couple classes.
The flickering switch of trust no one/ trust me is conspiracist thinking at work.Report
Chip, I’m mocking *DUMPING THE INTERVIEW WHEN A BAD QUESTION GETS ASKED*.
THIS IS NOT SCIENCE.
Only one of us is claiming that it is.Report
You’re so willfully obtuse on this.
No one is adjudicating the science; this is journalism — like Watergate, or Pentagon Papers, or any other episode where journalists pull on the thread back to the source. Usually unpacking various cover-ups and motivated reasoning behind various explanations and denials.
What’s ultimately unsatisfactory in this case is that the threads start with what we have in the US, because we have US scientists/funding involved — but they all go back to China. And China won’t allow for further investigation or audits.
You could say, see? There’s nothing to see here. Or you could say, well, we know what questions we’d like to ask, and what data we’d like to see, and what accounts/files we’d like to audit… but we can’t.
And, because we can’t, last I heard WIV (at least) is ineligible for funding. Ecohealth Alliance has changed it’s focus to another part of SE Asia. So, *some* action has been taken, but given the scope of unknowns… probably not enough.Report
Yes, and yet Jay (plus whole bunch of normies) seem to think that automatically means something nefarious, and equally something nefarious that is being driven by the U.S. government.
The rest of us think “what have we learned from this response that can be used next time to do better” is a more important angle of attack, but nothing in the way of a hotwash seems to be public yet.Report
It doesn’t necessarily mean something nefarious.
But neither can it be waved away as being an empty set.
Remember this interview with the guy from the WHO?
That doesn’t necessarily mean something nefarious!
And yet.
And yet.Report
Manhattan Institute is well within bounds for ‘serious discourse.’ Better by far than many of the nakedly leftist stuff linked here that we’re asked to take seriously.
I haven’t read the article yet, but every link/document I’ve opened so far is not redacted.
Also, you’re missing the point specifically being made — not that Defuse was funded by the US, but we have no idea what may have been funded by China. You also know as well that sometimes labs apply for funding based on work already done… just because the funding isn’t granted (or got suspended owing to, say, a moratorium on that type of research) doesn’t mean that the work wasn’t done — or that alternative funding wasn’t sought.Report
Since we are not ever likely to get a straight answer from the Chinese, I view continued attempts to go down that road as if there is evidence as bad faith trolling.
If the City Paper managed to track down any evidence of funding – from anywhere – we could have the conversation you and Jay and they want to have. But they can’t. You can’t. Jay certainly can’t. And a million dead Americans don’t really care.
Move on.Report
Sure, since all we can do is put together a ‘grand jury’ type indictment but can’t get access to the alleged crime scene… then let’s move on.
1. Put back the ‘Obama Mortarium’ on GOF research, since we can’t determine the origin or rule out the lab’s culpability we have to conclude that the risk now outweighs our ability to manage it.
2. Suspend joint funding/research projects with all Chinese labs, since an important lesson learned is that they won’t allow for audits. Every grant is contingent upon this.
3. Suspend Ecohealth Alliance’s Grant requests for 5-years for failure of oversight… this comes from the fact that even during the Pandemic EHA asked for their funding to be reinstated and NIH asked them for oversight materials from the lab which EAH stated they could not get owing to the Chinese authorities.
4… feel free to add other lessons learned.
Absent additional information that would (probably) come from the lab, I don’t have a particular axe to grind with NIH leadership… so they get to retire with their pensions.
[But I’d revisit if the threads lead to more evidence of cover-up… honestly, the stuff related to the Lancet article really does look like a cover-up — and I wouldn’t rule out that smoke turning into a fire]
How is this not baseline accountability? It’s fine to say, move on — as soon as we’ve applied the lessons learned. Right?Report
5. Pay attention to people who know what they’re talking about, not politicians or quacks who get laughed at by their peers.
6. For God’s sake, don’t get your medical advice from Youtube, or Reddit, or some rando on the internet.Report
RE: Move on.
Where it becomes a reasonable concern is with the question of how many more labs there are and how many more diseases they’re “researching”.Report
Every first world country has these labs – including our own. Every country is researching diseases that might become bio-weapons. Including our own.
And?Report
Maybe this will do it?
Report
No doubt he will fundraise off this, and use a bunch of money to pay off more lawyers to try and delay the imposition of this penalty through appeals. Then, when that fails he will declare bankruptcy as he has done numerous times in the past to avoid paying other judgements against him.
Of course, if Democrats were smart they’d have ads ready about him being the biggest looser.Report
Trump will have to come up with an appeal bond for 111% of the judgment, once there is one, within 30 days or we may see the E. Jean Carroll Tower on 5th Avenue.I happen to think he has a decent shot at getting the damages reduced. (Indeed, when I first skimmed the report, i unconsciously shifted the decimal point to the left and thought the 8.3 million I thought I saw was a bit stiff, but well within bounds.) But even a big reduction leaves a big number.
I saw Trump’s lawyer’s post-trial melt-down where she whined about not being able to contest liability in a damages trial. I wonder if she will get paid?Report
She got 5 million for the sex assault. This is for him using his bully pulpit to bully her. 80 million is an effort to get him to stop (and for her to protect herself), since even during the trial he was continuing.
So it passes some sort of smell test for being reasonable.Report
Hit dog hollers:
Scott hammers Democratic opponent as ‘liar’ over abortion attack
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who is up for reelection this fall, says his Democratic challenger is a “liar” after she accused the first-term senator of supporting a national abortion ban, a charge that Democratic candidates will push against Republicans in Senate battlegrounds this year.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4431558-scott-hammers-democratic-opponent-as-liar-over-abortion-attack/Report
So he actually supports a national abortion ban and he’s lying when he says he doesn’t?Report
Can a woman trust him, or any Republican anywhere, to hold fast to a principle when it comes to reproductive freedom?Report
So, yes, he’s lying when he says he doesn’t support a national abortion ban?Report
I spent about an hour listening to Aljazeera talk about the UN’s judgement on the Gaza war and the war in general.
After a while I realized that they weren’t mentioning Hamas, like “at all”. They weren’t just skipping 10/7 and the hostages. It was like Hamas didn’t exist and Israel was there bombing the people of Gaza for no reason and totally without resistance.Report
Yeah both sides do that. *shrugs* The israeli’s never bring up how they sponsored and supported Hamas to split the Palestinian movement or how they’re still occupying the West bank or how they have no actual plan for what to do with all the Palestinians they have under their control (and very well may end up with even more if they re-occupy Gaza long term). Likewise the Palestinians supporters never bring up the Palestinians endemic corruption, murderousness or historical ability to pass up every opportunity to advance their cause. Both sides are nuts, though the Israeli’s seem to be steadily descending towards the Palestinians level rather than vice versa. Quite depressing.Report
I expect issues and history to be ignored or spun.
I don’t expect an entire side to be airbrushed out of the picture.
It’s like going over the war in Ukraine without mentioning Russia is involved.Report
Hamas isn’t a “side” it’s just a piece, both for the Palestinians and the Israeli’s. Up until October the 7th Hamas was Likuds playing piece in internal Israeli politics and one that had served them exceedingly well.Report
RE: Hamas isn’t a “side”.
I’ve seen “man on the street in Gaza” interviews where they describe Hamas as the embodiment of Palestinian political asperations.
That mindset means all of Gaza are civilians when Israel attacks but Hamas gets a pass when they kill civilians. There is no such thing as “civilians”, there are just Arabs and Jews.
I’m not sure this ethnic conflict is solvable.Report
“I’m not sure this ethnic conflict is solvable.”
After a hundred years, it might be solvable. Maybe. The only other option would not look good for the Jews, but would be effective.Report
The Philistines are mentioned in Judges 14 when Samson is looking for a wife.
That’s somewhere between 1300BC and 1000BC.
I don’t think that another 100 years will do a whole lot.Report
No, I don’t either.Report
I’m a big fan of “normal rules applying”.
The big things that stand out here are…
1) Israel doesn’t have set borders.
Since we’re not going to get agreement, Israel should just set what it considers to be it’s borders.
2) The Palestinians are considered “refugees”.
This is just nuts. It only makes sense in the context of “Israel will be destroyed soon”, and we’re generations past that point.
Those two things are huge in keeping the conflict going. I doubt fixing both of them results in peace anytime soon, but they’d help a lot at ending the bleeding.Report
No one has a real interest is settling it. Just like the US southern border, just like race, just like a lot of things. If someone can milk it for money, power, whatever, they will. Resolving it takes the need for their existence away. So we wait for a “turning point” where everything shifts.Report
This is what the Pro-Palestinian activists have been doing since October 8th. They acted like the Simchat Torah massacre never happened and Hamas doesn’t exist but Israel just got up and decided to wage war in Gaza for no good reason besides the lulz.Report
And right on cue, the pivot goes from “Bad DEI” to Back in the closet, perverts”
Ohio, Michigan Republicans In Released Audio: “Endgame” Is To Ban Trans Care “For Everyone”
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/ohio-michigan-republicans-in-released
Audio from a small Twitter Space featuring legislators from Ohio and Michigan was automatically posted publicly, wherein Republican legislators revealed the “endgame” of anti-trans legislation was to ban trans care “for everyone.” The Space, which ejected uninvited guests, included several Michigan senators and representatives, as well as Representative Gary Click from Ohio, who sponsored the state’s recent controversial gender-affirming care ban. Throughout the Space, the legislators seem to freely discuss their plans and strategies for targeting transgender care. Towards the end of the Space, the conversation shifts to a plan for the “endgame,” where Republican legislators and anti-trans activist Prisha Mosley discuss various plans aimed at “banning this for everyone,” referring to gender-affirming care.Report
These people are disgusting cowards.Report
We need to nail this to the forehead of every reactionary centrist who gave us lectures on “Bad DEI” and “Parent’s rights” or dismissed charges of bigotry as hysterical overreaction.Report