Open Mic for the week of 5/20/2024
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.
On this day in history: King George III approves the Coercive Acts in response to the Boston Tea Party
Not that this is going to change minds or things but the ICC seeks arrests warrants for Sinwar and Netanyahu: https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/20/middleeast/icc-israel-hamas-arrest-warrant-war-crimes-intl/index.htmlReport
The Iranian helicopter crash is a likely technical failure: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/05/19/world/iran-president-crashReport
There’s “technical failure”. (Helicopters apparently are less safe that fixed wing aircraft), and then there is “technical failure”, if you know what I mean. Not saying it was…Report
The pictures of the fog and weather yesterday looked like awful flying weather, FWIWReport
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/05/20/uc-santa-cruz-strike-gaza-union/Report
How many of them realize that Trump is going to be a billion times worse for people here and for people in the West Bank/Gaza? Trump would not build a pier for aide to Gaza, Trump would allow Bibi and Co to fully stop the flow of aide to Gaza and ran rampant in the West Bank. But seemingly a generally small but very loud and potentially consequential slice of the American electorate cares more about their own feelings of moral purity than real world political effects and consequences, and operates under the delusion that Biden can call Bibi and state “cool it.”Report
Are you suggesting that instead of striking to affect change at one university, the union should do nothing, because a strike at one university could hurt Biden’s election prospects? I’m confused.Report
Trump Social media account shares video with discussion of unified recich: https://apnews.com/article/trump-election-2024-rhetoric-germany-antisemitism-31002afb91b642c0314223d19e51f427Report
Biden can do many things, including adhering to US law that says we can’t sell arms to those who commit war crimes – for which the ICC has now issued arrest warrants.
That aside I don’t think the slice of people in America who are being vocal about this are wrong – either about the Palestinians or about how universities are handling these protests.Report
1. Israel is not the 51st state;
2. The President is not a bronze age God Emperor;
3. Biden is withholding military weapons pledged to Israel;
4. Aide to Israel was necessary to get aid for Ukraine and Taiwan through Congress and because American Jews are still an important Democratic constituency and vote more regularly than college students;
5. Biden ordered a pier built to deliver more aide to Gaza;
6. He has placed sanctions on Israeli reactionary extremists.
7. There is no universe where Trump is morally equivalent to Biden;
8. There are always trade offs and compromises. Moral purity is an impossible myth.
If Trump wins it will be a trillion times worse for minorities, women, and many here as well as for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. This is something I believe very firmly and I have very little patience for anyone who can’t see this blindingly obvious truth. At least Trumpists are honest about the future they want. I have no time for the beautiful loser left who would rather romanticize themselves as part of the resistance than realize politics is tricky and requires tough compromises at times.Report
1. Biden only paused – not stopped – some forms of military weapons delivery when he had no domestic political choice. An outcome created by clamoring fro the doey eyed left you so despise.
2. Biden is no emperor, but if he wants to reinforce the appearance that the Democrats are now and have always been the “rule of law party” then following actually US laws – and explaining why he is choosing to do so – is a moral imperative for him.
3. I’m glad he built that pier – now we have to see if he and the DoD can make actual use of it.
4. Moral purity may be a myth, but right and wrong still exist.
5. I am WELL aware of which candidate is moral and which one isn’t. TFG represents an existential threat to one of my daughters and my nieces and nephew. Frankly if he gets back in office I EXPECT to be fired and then jailed for my politics (I would likely have been reclassified in his Schedule F had he stayed for a second term).
6. IF you actually believe that visceral threat entitles Biden to a pass on criticism of his policies and actions you are as delusional as the left you are disparaging here.Report
Philip: Moral purity may be a myth, but right and wrong still exist.
Genocide is an act of intent. Ergo 10-7 was an act of genocide.
There is a conflict in claims in what Israel is doing. We have claims that Israel is committing war crimes against Palestinian civilians.
But if we count dead bodies, Israel seems to be killing one or two civilians for every soldier.
My impression is various groups are trying to claim a brutal urban war is illegal. In practice this would mean if Hamas hides in a hospital, Israel isn’t allowed to attack them there.
Having said that, given where Israel’s head is at I’m sure they’re crossing lines. But they seem to think they’re not.
Israel thinks that about a fifth of it’s dead soldiers have been killed by “friendly fire”. If they’re occasionally killing their own soldiers and even their own hostages, then the occasional aid worker should be expected.Report
As if Daniel Perry’s pardon weren’t enough of a reminder that gun laws in the US don’t in fact apply to everyone, there’s this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/20/black-airman-shot-police-florida/Report
Some years ago, there was a TV show called Picket Fences. In one episode, a drug dealer was indicted for shooting and killing a policeman who had come, gun drawn, through the door of the defendant’s drug den. Like most drug dealers, he had a weapon on him when the door was busted and had drawn it, expecting to see some business rival. He was acquitted because of testimony that, under the circumstances, the department policy was for the cop to fire upon seeing the gun and that the drug dealer knew the policy. Therefore, his shooting the cop that would have shot him was self-defense.Report
Caltrans pilot program tests replacing gas tax with charging per mile driven
https://abc7news.com/post/caltrans-to-test-california-road-charge-for-miles-driven-instead-of-gas-tax/14828291/
10 to 1 the keep the gas tax too.Report
Click on this article and let me know if you can spot the problem: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-posts-social-media-video-seemingly-suggesting-victory/story?id=110422766Report
I’d say that the major problem is that it doesn’t really explain how clearly bad-faith these accusations are:
1. The text was faded and in the periphery; you really have to look close to see it.
2. There is not actually anything legitimately objectionable here; it’s taken from the Wikipedia article on World War I and refers to the Second Reich (1879-1918); several other phrases visible in the full video come from the same article.
That’s obviously not your beef with the article, though, and I have no guesses as to what is.Report
Well we could start with the active campaign for president of one party openly posting a video that supports the Naz.i party and Hitler’s approach to ruling a country … but that’s too easy I’m sure.Report
Listen if these recalcitrant people would just fall in line we could all be happily enjoying our apfelstrudel to the enchanting tunes of the best damn oompah bands the world has ever heard.Report
In the long list of things I want to “get to some day” I think oompah bands would make great backing tracks for Electronic Dance Music. Granted I’d need some software and a mixing board or three to pull off the conversion . . .Report
Not oompah, but this rendition of Kraftwerk’s The Model is really fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPIYCD1eJjwReport
You’re free to indulge in whatever fantasies you want in your own home, but please don’t involve others in your kink without consent.Report
You do realize that outside of about 5 people in the US, when someone hears the phrase “Unified Reich” they are going to think of Hitler, right? Like your interesting Wikipedia link is not how the normies, or MAGA, or pretty much anyone else understands that phrase?Report
“No! It’s like the ‘From the River to the Sea’ chant! It’s just about peace!”Report
Brandon certainly thinks so.Report
Do you find his argument compelling?Report
Brandon’s argument that this is more ado about nothing? That TFG doesn’t represent a threat to the US and is in no way leaning toward facism?
No, not really.
Do you?Report
I find the argument that TFG represents a threat to the US as compelling as the arguments that DeSantis did, that Romney did, that McCain did, that Bush did, that Dole did, that the other Bush did, and that Reagan did.
As for leaning toward fascism, it’s more that I don’t see the threat posed by Trump as being a left/right thing but an elite/populist thing. So I don’t see it as a fascism threat but a populist threat.Report
I’m kinda in between here. Trump’s an idiot and most likely had f*ck all to do with this.
It is concerning, however, that the people working for him default to non-American imagery for their social media posts. Why would you use a picture with the word Reich (whatever ordinal number it is) in an American political post? There is no good connotation here.Report
The explanation that I heard that came closest to being exonerative was “they’re using a WWII news template and only changed some of the headlines but not all of them!”
So the best argument that the most motivated defenders were able to come up with is that the social media team is lazy and inept and didn’t include that imagery deliberately.
As it is… they included it.
If I had to guess as to the motivations for why they would (assuming it was deliberate), it’d be for one or two things.
1. To excite all of the white supremacists and get them energized.
2. To get the Progressives to start screaming about how Trump’s a Nazi and there are Nazis behind every fencepost and how do you guys not see that Trump is a Nazi, Nazi, Nazi. MAYBE YOU’RE A NAZI TOO!!!
And maybe #3 is “both”.Report
Heh, dumb lazy geniuses! Maybe it was an own the libs thing all along. It does seem to be a prime motivation. Plausible deniability seems to be, “Hey, we’re just idiots!”
Then you get cartoons like this: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/9LNRpDzAogVXKmSUWJ9B8o-768-80.jpg.webpReport
It’s always hard to tell. On the one hand I think the whole phoney electors plot shows that there are people in Trumpland well within spitting distance of the darkest accusations people make about them. Then at the same time you have totally farcical stuff like Four Seasons landscaping, or the Anthony Scaramucci episode, or basically everything that’s happened with Giuliani, where you can’t help but wonder how these people get themselves dressed in the morning.Report
Yeah, call me a crazy American, but anything with even a whiff of the 3rd Reich makes you immediately suspect in this country, stupid or not.Report
It needs to be remembered that all tyrannical regimes were and are chaotic shambles of comical incompetency.
The absurd incompetence of the Trumpists only makes them more, not less a threat to democracy.Report
Do you think anyone would look at that video and see “Unified Reich”? I’ve only seen that one screengrab, but c’mon, you can’t count that as support for the Nazi party.Report
https://apnews.com/article/trump-election-2024-rhetoric-germany-antisemitism-31002afb91b642c0314223d19e51f427Report
Why does the video feature screen grabs/text from the Wikipedia article on WW1 and the Second Reich?Report
There is not actually anything legitimately objectionable here; it’s taken from the Wikipedia article on World War I and refers to the Second Reich (1879-1918)
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like if your defense of an article shown in an American political ad/post is to get pedantic about which Reich it’s referring to, you’ve already lost the argument.Report
Like, could you -IMAGINE- the absolute storm of pants wetting and shrieking that’d ensue if the Biden campaign put out some add that obliquely included some Soviet symbolism or language similar to this Reich reference? The MSM, to say nothing of the RWM would be eating out on that for months.Report
Anyway, the thing wrong with the article was how the media framed it as “his critics state mirrors Nazi Germany” or something close. The media even had to both sides/view from nowhere this.Report
Intrepid reporter Brian Stelter tweets out an article in The Guardian:
Medhi Hasan calls this “Insanity. A media failure of epic proportions.”
Damon Linker makes a very cogent point: “Why blame the media when no reputable media outlet is saying we’re in a recession? The problem is much deeper & more troubling: Voters don’t have enough trust in the media or other authorities (incl gov’t, “experts,” etc.) for their claims about the world to have an influence.”Report
So if you exclude Fox News, and OAN and the like from “media” then this is correct. Unfortunately, they are part of the media universe; they are both anti-expert and anti-Biden, and a significant portion of the US get’s their “news” from these sources. Fox in particular has spent a LOT of time talking about how horrible the current economy is.
There’s also the unspoken issue of WHY trust in the media and government has eroded – which is not fully legacy media or government’s fault.Report
Well, my question would be “what is the definition of a recession?”
If it’s not “two consecutive quarters of negative growth”, and there’s reason to believe that it’s something more esoteric than that, I’d wonder whether three in five Americans might be right.Report
We haven’t had two consecutive quarters of negative growth in a while . . . . The only thing people are STILL reacting to is inflation. Wages are up, unemployment remains down; new job growth remains strong.Report
If we agree that the definition of “two consecutive quarters of negative growth” is not the definition of “recession”, maybe three out of five Americans are, in fact, personally experiencing a recession, even if the S&P is higher than it’s ever been.Report
A quick Google tells me there are multiple definitions of a recession. What definition do you propose?Report
Two consecutive quarters of personal or household negative growth, maybe.
Do you see how that definition might be useful?Report
What are you defining as negative household growth?Report
Maybe something like “income vs. consumption/saving” or something like that.Report
So you’re defining “recession” on the individual level?Report
He’s using his usual “Teory of mind” approach to try and suss out why we don’t accept the framing as well as why the respondents might feel this way – so long as he doesn’t have to blame conservative media for this.Report
so long as he doesn’t have to blame conservative media for this.
Given the ratings of conservative media, you could probably argue that 10-15% of people out there think that we’re in a recession based on Fox News.
60%? I think that there are more interesting approaches than “my enemies are venial and stupid and easily misled and lying”.Report
Well, I’m trying to come up with a way that both things are true:
1. The economy is doing better than it ever has before, just look at the S&P and Nasdaq!
2. 3 out of 5 people feel like we’re in a recession.Report
Inflation is demoralizing in a way that people under 50 don’t remember. It’s not just that a burger costs $5 instead of $4 today and you feel the loss; it’s that it’ll coast $5 instead of $4 tomorrow and it’ll feel like another loss. Lose a job, get a new one 6 months later, you feel even. It’s a different psychology.Report
as I keep saying – its a perception around inflation. Growing wages haven’t tamped it down. Over two years of job growth haven’t tamped it down. stable low unemployment figures haven’t tamped it down.
People are paying more for things then they want to and then they think they should. Major segments of the media are not framing that story accurately.
And so here we are. A strong economy by multiple measures that a lot of people are sour on.Report
Major segments of the media are not framing that story accurately.
Do you feel that better headlines, better coverage, and more flooding the zone would do a good job of changing peoples’ minds?Report
I think that Fox News reporting the statistics accurately and not calling the economy a scorched earth nightmare would be a good start.Report
They’re supposed to be “conservatives”. You’d think that they’d be excited that the stock market is going up. People are doing better than ever! Look at the NASDAQ!Report
Not hard for both things to be true. One is a matter of what is so, another is a matter of what people think is so. Disconnects between the two are common. As you would be the first to point out if you found the facts more congenial than the perceptions.Report
Well, if we use a different definition of “recession” than “two consecutive quarters of negative growth” at the country level and reduce it down to the personal/household level, I’m wondering if we can even align the perception with what may be the case.
Like, maybe the people aren’t mistaken about whether they, personally, are in a recession at the personal/household level.
(Though I understand the argument that we’ve had one particular definition of “recession” for a good long while and there’s no reason to change it now. Seriously, I do.)Report
Nobody is ever “personally. .. in a recession.” A recession, however measured, is a description of the economy as a whole. An accurate reading of the temperature is a very different thing from some individual feeling cold or hot. An individual or a family can be in straitened circumstances in boom times or flush in a depression. If 3 out of 5 people thought “they” were in a recession, based on their own economic circumstances, there would be riots in the streets. If 3 out of 5 people think “we” are in a recession, and are not rioting in the streets, and indeed are, on the whole, spending as they normally would and meeting their bills, they are basing it on something other than their own economic circumstances, probably misinformation.Report
If 3 out of 5 people thought “they” were in a recession, based on their own economic circumstances, there would be riots in the streets.
This is a premise that I don’t share.
I think that a couple of quarters of negative growth at the household level is something that many households can withstand, though it would be uncomfortable. Maybe they’d cut back on this or that or put a little more on credit.
I don’t think that two quarters of negative household growth, even among 60% of the country, would necessarily result in mostly peaceful protests.
People just learn and internalize Mohel’s Law: You can handle taking 10% off of anything.Report
Well, once you crack that nut, perhaps you can figure out how these two things can be true:
1. The Earth is an irregularly shaped sphere.
2. Approximately 10% of Americans think the Earth is flat.Report
See: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/Report
Is 10% the percentage that we’re fretting about?
If so, that’s something that we can shrug off.
You can get 10% of any large enough group to agree with anything, after all.Report
I’m not fretting about it.
You seem to be confused at the notion that 1 thing can be factually, demonstrably true and that a bunch of people can think otherwise. I’m pointing out that happens all the time.Report
I’d say that if the number is 10%, we could easily conclude that the 10% is wrong.
If the number is 60%, I’d want to explore whether I am in the group of people who are wrong.
People are wrong all the time, of course.
But it’s not limited to other people.Report
“49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.”
So, nearly half the people believe something that is demonstrably incorrect. That so many believe it does not make it any less incorrect.
Now, if I was worried that I might be incorrect on what the S&P did this year, it wouldn’t take much exploring: simply Google the S&P’s performance this year.
I’d venture to guess most of these people don’t think much about the S&P unless asked by pollsters.Report
They’re wrong. Yes.
Absolutely.
Why are they wrong? If the answer is that they are familiar with economies that feel like the stock market that is booming and they are familiar with economies that feel like the stock market is not and their answer reflects their “vibe” that the stock market is not…
Well, I doubt that better headlines explaining that the stock market is higher than it has ever been will change much.
Perhaps half of them will answer something like “I guess it’s technically up” when asked next time.
“Sir, I need you to respond with one of the three answers” is something that pollsters have said to me.Report
Here’s an interesting article about who owns stock that might explain why people are ignorant about the value of the stock market: https://www.fool.com/research/how-many-americans-own-stock/.
Charts in the piece indicate that the overwhelming majority of stock is held by older and more affluent Americans, which isn’t too surprising. I doubt the reporter in Jaybird’s article was asking people ambling down Wall Street about the state of the Dow.Report
If it’s possible for there to be local, household-level, recessions despite really rich people becoming even really richer, that could well explain how people might think that the economy is in a recession.
Even if the green line is going up and has never been higher.Report
I’m fortunate enough to be able to notice how much prices have risen, while also being able to not worry too much about it. For me, the price of eggs and milk has always been a barometer. Pre-2020, I could go over to the grocery store and grab a dozen and a gallon for $3 total. I always wondered how anyone could make money at those prices.
Perhaps the pandemic induced a price rise to the natural price of goods, doing away with whatever artificially depressed prices beforehand. That said, I am certainly not an economist.Report
Also important is how many own stock indirectly, maybe without realizing it, so they don’t follow the markets.Report
Exactly. I own a lot of stock, but it’s all in my 401k.
Now that the DOW is up around 40K, I’m old enough to remember when people scoffed at this: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/09/dow-36-000/306249/.Report
Leave Kyrie Irving alone!Report
https://www.sciencealert.com/one-third-millennials-believe-flat-earth-conspiracy-statistics-yougov-debunk
Basically it’s bad polling and/or trolling.Report
Here:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2022/07/21/how-do-economists-determine-whether-the-economy-is-in-a-recession/
“The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Business Cycle Dating Committee—the official recession scorekeeper—defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.”
That’s the official organization that makes the call and the criteria in the US.
This is NOT the IMF’s definition, it is the same as Jaybirds.
https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/basics/recess.htm#:~:text=Most%20commentators%20and%20analysts%20use,of%20thumb%2C%20it%20has%20drawbacks.
The only other question is whether or not the data is being manipulated to keep the stats outside the definition.Report
Yes, that was one of the sources that popped up when I searched.
But if you actually read the article mentioned in the Tweet, you’ll say that the poll does not identify a disparity between people’s experiences and particular economic indicators; rather, it identifies folks who are misinformed on what those indicators are saying.Report
That’s not surprising. Most folks probably don’t understand statistics or what the data means. Perhaps that’s a failing of our public education system?Report
Having skimmed this whole discussion, I think y’all have gotten bogged down in Jaybirdian discourse, and lost the real thread (seriously, why do y’all always do that? you can click the x next to his name when he’s doing what he’s clearly doing here).
I fully understand the urge to call this a media failure, but I think the real issue is most people don’t understand the economy, or their position in it, and their perception of whether the economy is good or bad is based almost entirely on, as the kids would say, vibes. Most people know shite about the economy, and don’t have the vocabulary to talk about it. All that matters is the vibes.
And it’s perfectly understandable, to me at least, why the vibes would be bad even for what is objectively a good economy. Grocery prices are way higher than they were just 4 years ago, as are rent, gas (here, at least, where it’s lower than in most of the country), electricity (thanks Texas deregulation and the people profiting off their own failures), new and used car prices, etc. The cost of living in Austin, like many (maybe most) cities, has gone up a great deal in the last few years. And since 2020, real wage change is net negative (even if wage growth is now outpacing inflation, people’s memories go back more than 10-12 months). Unemployment may be low, but there have been a bunch of high profile layoffs, which, unless you have a great deal of job security, is going to make you feel pretty anxious about your own job (it probably doesn’t help that the publicly acknowledged strategy for reducing inflation is to increase unemployment). On top of that, the climate is trying to kill us (and insurance rates are reflecting that), with all the wars the world seems to be on fire, etc., etc.
All of which is to say, it seems pretty reasonable to feel like the vibes are bad right now, and I don’t know that the media pounding the goodness of the economy into people’s brains is going to fix that. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing the media could do: it could acknowledge that, you know, the vibes are kinda bad, even if the big numbers are quite good, and start to explore that. Perhaps the Democrats, if they wanted to convince people that you should vote for them, instead of just convincing people to vote against the other guy, could start talking about what they want to do to improve the vibes: what are they going to do about rising costs? How can they help make rents more reasonable? Maybe they could talk about how they can help you with big expenses, like health care (remember in 2016 when there was a segment of the Democratic Party that actually cared about health care?)?
Put more succinctly, “You’re just being irrational, and it’s the media’s fault” doesn’t seem like a winning electoral strategy to me, but it kinda seems like the strategy a lot of liberals want to adopt.Report
See? Now *THIS* addresses the issues that I’m talking about rather than explaining how these people are just being irrational!
This talks about the real problem with the economy!
And, for what it’s worth, after the first paragraph, I pretty much find nothing in the following paragraphs worth disagreeing with beyond a nitpick here or there or an inclination to change a particular phrasing.Report
There’s nothing wrong with the economy. There’s plenty wrong with the stories being told about it.Report
If we want to shift to an Austrian (as opposed to Keynesian or Monetarist) interpretation of the economy and start discussing “the business cycle” and talking about stuff like “wringing out the rot” and whatnot, I agree that there’s nothing wrong with the economy.
It’d be like asking “what’s wrong with the bear?” at the beginning of hibernation season.
There’s nothing “wrong” with the bear. The bear is doing what bears do.Report
It isn’t an “electoral strategy,” it’s a strategy for confronting on-line liars. Nobody here is talking, here, to the vibe voters, so pointing out that what they say here isn’t what you would say to them is beside the point. Of course, the best electoral strategy is to address the vibe-based concerns and say what you will do about them. For reasons that are all too familiar, however, even the best electoral strategy is likely to be ineffective. Which is sad.Report
I don’t think the conclusion that the economy on a personal or national level is bad is reasonable, rational or beneficial based either on personal experience or national statistics. It’s partly the right wing media’s fault for directly and repeatedly lying about it. It’s legacy media’s fault for not pushing back HARD on the lies or for clearly describing what politicians can and can’t actually do. It’s partly corporate America’s fault for insisting that clawing back profits lost during the pandemic is more important then long term economic health.
And here’s the thing – right now Democrats can’t do much more then message. They don’t have control of the House, so they can drive healthcare costs down by passing single payer. They passed medicare prescription price negotiation – and were promptly sued for it. They can’t make rent more reasonable nationally because that’s a local control issue. And they can’t drive prices for milk and eggs down because we don’t have a centrally planned economy.
People’s fears are base on gut level fantasies of returning to an economic time that didn’t actually exist, as a proxy for keeping a racial and gender based hierarchy that they believe they benefit from. Liberals – and leftists – do no one any favors by pretending this is ok.Report
First off, I think very few people have a real sense of the economy on a national level, or even a state level in most cases (there are obvious exceptions, e.g., everyone knows things are grim in West Virginia), and even if they do, I don’t think it matters that much to them. I mean, we’re not living in the 1950s U.S., where the economy is doing so well that it means everyone (well, most people) is seeing a noticeable improvement in their quality of life year after year. The numbers we judge economies by — unemployment rate, GDP growth, job growth, etc. — just aren’t the sorts of things that have noticeable impacts on most people’s lives most of the time, unless they get much worse or much much better. So it doesn’t really matter that people are ignorant of those things; even if they’re talking about them (and they likely aren’t except when surveyors call or pop up on Facebook or wherever), they’re not really talking about them. So you can tell them that the unemployment rate is 3.9% and that economists consider this full employment, or you can tell them that GDP growth has been good every quarter for some time, or even that for a year or so now wage growth has outpaced inflation, etc., etc., but you’re not going to be talking to them about anything they care about, or that shapes their view of the economy.
And second, there’s a separate question of whether this economy is actually a good one for most people at all. I don’t think most of you are particularly frequent Twitter users, but last year, one of Twitter’s most posting of posters, Will Stancil, was making pretty much the exact same argument y’all are here: the economy is good, and it’s a major failure of the media that everyday people keep saying they think the economy is bad. The husband of former OT contributor Elizabeth Bruenig was one of the more prominent posters to argue that Stancil was wrong, noting, for example, that the share of inflation accruing to capital far outpaces that accruing to labor, or that real incomes have declined under Biden, or that the sorts of social democratic economic reforms that were very popular with the Democratic electorate just a few years ago have not only not been enacted, but almost completely left the Democratic Party discourse. Biden turned back on student loan payments; the pandemic-era stimulus payments and enhanced unemployment benefits that genuinely improved people’s lives, are gone. Etc., etc., etc. (sadly, Bruenig deleted all of his tweets from that time, so I can’t link them here). When the cost of living goes up significantly in a relatively short time (the increase, in cities, in just 4 years is pretty incredible), when we see a lot of high profile layoffs, when corporate profits sore while wages do not, and when government programs that, though they took place under extreme conditions, were producing serious material improvements in people’s lives just a few years ago are now gone, I don’t think people are basing their opinions on “gut level fantasies of returning to an economic time that didn’t actually exist,” much less one that is a “proxy for keeping a racial and gender based hierarchy they believe they benefit from” (this is a strange inference, given that no race or gender information is given, that I can see, in the original article). I think they’re just noticing what has changed in their lives in the relatively short term, and perhaps more importantly, what hasn’t change.
I realize that almost everyone here (maybe everyone) is going to be well to the right of Bruenig on the economy, but I find his explanation for why people don’t feel the economy is good (even, again, if they get the reasons wrong when surveyed about only things that they aren’t actually thinking about) when the usual indicators say it is much more compelling than “the media has failed [to manufacture consent].”Report
Putting it another way, though I worry this is a bit outside of this blog’s discourse, there’s an important question, when interpreting survey results like these (and this survey is one of many to show similar attitudes among the majority of Americans): putting aside the actual content of their survey responses, which I don’t think says what it looks like it says (because I don’t think most people know, or care, about these economic indicators), why should people adopt the sorts of ends that are implicit in judging the economy by the standard economic indicators? As I mentioned, good standard economic indicators at a level well below that of the 1950s, which is the sort of boom few if any of us will see in our lifetime, may, over an extended period of time, produce improvements in people’s material conditions, but mostly they vastly improve a few people’s material conditions, and we’re just sort like pilot fish following those people around picking up the scrap. When times are good, sure, there are slightly more and better scraps, but still, we ain’t living like sharks. What if most people have different ends in mind for the economy? Ends that include, for example, the sorts of improvements for everyday people our parents and grandparents saw? Perhaps they want a more democratic economy, in which, if not everyone can be sharks, then nobody can be? Of course, most people probably aren’t thinking like this explicitly, because again, they’re not thinking systematically about the economy at all. But they probably have a sense that, hey, it’s much more difficult to buy a house, or a car, or send your kids to college, on a middle class income, than it was 50 years ago. They may think unions are bad (because they’ve been told for decades that unions are bad), but they might all the things that you lose in an almost entirely un-unionized workforce. Etc., etc., etc.
Anyway, all of this is to say I don’t think blaming the media is helpful. At the very least, it doesn’t tell us how to make people see things the way you want them to be seen, because I can promise you that you can tell people a thousand times a day that we’re at full employment, the stock market’s at record highs, and the GDP is growing steadily, and they’re still gonna think things aren’t looking so great every time they walk out of the grocery store having spent twice as much as they would have 4 years ago.Report
Like Damon Linker said: “Why blame the media when no reputable media outlet is saying we’re in a recession? The problem is much deeper & more troubling: Voters don’t have enough trust in the media or other authorities (incl gov’t, “experts,” etc.) for their claims about the world to have an influence.”
Very slowly.
And then all at once.Report
Let’s see…maybe folks are paying attention their pay check and that it might be buying less than sometime in the past? People notice when food costs go up, when gas goes up, when airfare goes up, etc.Report
So… I read the article. Some interesting things stand out:
“55% believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think the US is experiencing a recession, though the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP), has been growing.
49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.”
This does not seem linked to people’s personal experiences but rather, their (mis)understanding of basic facts.
If people were saying, “I’m feeling the pain every time I open up my wallet so don’t talk to me about GDP,” I think that would be really important to listen to.
But people are saying, “I think the stock market is doing one thing when it’s really doing the opposite.” Well… that’s interesting because people may. make decisions based on what they think and if they’re poorly informed or misinformed, they’re potentially going to make different decisions than if they were properly informed. So we should set a goal of helping them be properly informed.
Your takeaway seems to be that “Economic measures aren’t capturing the lived experience of Americans.”
But nothing in this poll supports that. Rather, the takeaway ought to be, “Americans are misinformed on certain economic indicators.”
But you do you…Report
I actually think both these things are true.Report
Yes. I believe that both of those things are true too.
I also believe that there is a phenomenon where a person is asked “How are you doing?” and the answer is, on an awful-to-awesome scale “fair to middling”.
If they are told “you should be doing better than that! Look at how good the stock market is doing! Look at the NASDAQ! Look at these economic numbers! Look at the crime stats!”, I’m going through their various responses possible:
1. Holy cow, this guy is right. I am doing better than I thought.
2. Jeez, dude. Calm down. I didn’t say that I had been shot. I said “fair to middling”. I’m certainly not doing “best stock market numbers ever” good. But if everything else is as great as you say and I only feel fair to middling, maybe I’m doing worse than I think…
3. You asked me how I was doing and I told you. If you don’t like the answer, that’s a “you” problem, not a “me” problem.
Now, Kazzy says “This does not seem linked to people’s personal experiences but rather, their (mis)understanding of basic facts.”
Above, the NBER defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.”
If a household that has a significant decline in economic activity that lasts more than a few months, can you see why they’d say “yeah, I think we’re in a recession”?
I can.
Even if the economy as a whole is going gangbusters.
Even if the S&P is higher than its ever been.Report
Other then persistent inflation – which is set against wage growth in ever sector of the economy – there is no evidence of household economic activity declining. None. in 2023 household spending grew 5.9% which matched wage growth. There is no annual grwoth data for 2024 yet, but what I can find for monthly data shows growth each month this year and growth compared to the same month last year.
Which means as Chip and Kazzy point out, people’s lived experiences are not matching polling, much less economic data. That tells me that a sizable portion of the population is working from under or misinformation when forming opinions about the economy.
Which is a bad thing.Report
The missing piece in the puzzle is that people who work at Chipotle also eat at Chipotle. They may be making more but they’re also spending more, and the little things that used to be cheap have become noticeably more pricey. I also think there’s a very real psychic shock from inflation. The last generation to truly experience it was the baby boomers and even for them it’s been 40+ years. It doesn’t surprise me at all that the government spent decades fretting about it, up to and including when the threat of it actually happening was negligible.
So while you’re right that economic literacy isn’t particularly high (polls consistently show people have misperceptions about all kinds of topics) I don’t think it’s misinformation. It’s a result of things like paying 1.5 or 2x for the same groceries and getting a few sandwiches at a shop going from 15-20 bucks to 35-40 bucks.Report
When has this ever been different?
Except for times when the economy is deflating, which is when things are REALLY bad, people are always paying more for less- this is why 3% inflation is considered normal.
And as always, when people are paying more, they are also usually getting paid more.
This is why the economic indicators say things are good, that wages are keeping pace with inflation.
And again, this is normal, it is the way things have always been.
The only thing that seems to be abnormal is the unusually high percentage of people saying the economy is bad.Report
It was only 2 years ago that inflation was 8 or 9% depending on where you look. No one under 40 has experience with anything like it and no one under 60 or so has experience dealing with it as an adult. Interest rates while not terrible by historical standards are still pretty high compared to where they just were (like I said to North below, don’t go looking for a mortgage right now because it will make your eyes water).
Does that make the economy ‘bad’? Not exactly and it’s certainly better than a lot of other places. But neither are the polls particularly mysterious IMO. There’s plenty of things about the current situation that would make someone sour on the subject.Report
What is the most curious wrinkle, Jay, is that in a lot of those surveys the surveyors ask “How are your personal finances doing?” and the respondents say ‘Great!” while also saying that the overall economy sucks.Report
I don’t think it’s that hard to square. If you’re making all of your payments on the essentials your personal finances are good. That’s especially so if you’re locked into good interest rates from the before time.
But you can still think the economy is in bad shape based on a noticeable and seemingly stubborn increase in the prices of basically everything. And definitely don’t even think about trying to buy a house.
Now is all of this fairly pinned on the Biden admin? Of course not. It’s been a rocky journey and there’s only so much that could have been done. At the end of the day I think it’s better to acknowledge the sentiments and try to make the case that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel than get flustered about people just being… well people.Report
I know that my household is doing fine… but I also know that I’m buying chicken instead of steak and I am incredibly grateful that I re-learned to cook during the pandemic and re-learned how to learn to cook so that not only am I a better cook today than I was at the start of 2020, I’m a better cook today than I was at the start of 2023.
I also know that I have gone from just throwing stuff in the cart to looking at the price first.
So… yeah. I’m doing great. But has my household’s economic activity declined? Yeah, it has.
“You’re still eating meat!”
“Yes, I am.”Report
I’ve seen a number of articles over the last year or so that have noted a sharp divergence in CPI and the Economist’s Big Mac Index, with the former lowering/getting under control but the latter still rising. I am way out of my lane on economics but I’ve seen it suggested that it may be a sign that CPI is (perhaps significantly) under measuring inflation. Now, we are all still eating Big Macs, which is good, but something else seems to be going on here that’s defying conventional measurements.Report
Are you spending less on groceries by substituting chicken? If you aren’t then no, your economic activity hasn’t declined. Yes, you have made substitutions in what your economic activity brings to you. But that’s not the same thing. Your purchasing power MAY have changed – if you previously bought 6 steaks a month and now only buy for due to price changes. But your ECONOMIC ACTIVITY hasn’t changed one bit.Report
I’m purchasing less desirable products than the ones I would prefer, and you say that that’s *NOT* a decline?
That’s really interesting.
Please go on.Report
Its a decline in purchasing power not economic activity. Two different concepts. two different definitions. two different potential solutions.
Though if your wages are growing at the national average you should be able to afford the price increase for steak.Report
That’s kind of what the Big Mac Index thing may be suggesting though. Even as inflation is being tamed there is still a purchasing power issue that is really apparent and which may be the source of the sentiments showing up in the polls.Report
There may be a purchasing power issue. But the framing in the media – especially conservative media – is the economy is bad. The American dream is ending. Which is bonkers. 49% of people believe the S&P 500 is going down because they can’t buy three Big Macs anymore for the price they now pay for two. That’s a narrative problem. Not an economic problem.Report
You’re framing me saying “I’m buying chicken instead of steak” as me arguing that the American Dream is ending?
I’ll repeat myself because I love to:
Which of the above do you think takes the interpretation of my statement as “The American dream is ending” into account the closest?Report
No Jaybird. I framing the people saying that the S&P 500 is down when its really up are doing that. I’m framing people as saying record low unemployment and steady wage growth are an economic disaster as doing it. Best I can tell you have not framed your situation thusly.Report
Well, perhaps if you have better headlines on the newspapers, better chyrons under the talking heads on the cable channels, and do a better job of flooding the zone with how a decline in purchasing power does not mean anything about a decline in economic activity, you’ll be able to convince these people that we’re in a boom.
Point to the S&P again. Point to the NASDAQ.Report
Everything you have pointed to says that people are concluding the economy is trashed because their own personal purchasing power has changed relative to a prior time that – frankly – we would have moved steadily away from absent the pandemic anyway since annual inflation would still be a thing. That’s definitely a thing worth noting and discussing, but to say the American Dream is thus dead is fear mongering of the worst kind. And our fellow Americans don’t deserve to be fear mongered.Report
but to say the American Dream is thus dead is fear mongering of the worst kind
Is that what is being said?
Or implied by my pointing out that I’ve lost purchasing power?
Huh. Maybe we should do a better job of teaching children a sense of generalized gratitude.Report
I think that grants way more power and importance to narratives than they are due. I have my doubts that anyone other than the most politically engaged know what the narrative is or is supposed to be, or would even be able to distinguish the idea of a narrative from self interested BS politicians and/or the media say. I’m not even sure I can distinguish it.
We should also just be open about the fact that the only reason this interests any of us or is being debated is the potential impact on the election. I want Biden to win it as much as anyone and I really hope he does. Repudiating Trump is IMO equally as important as any matter of policy. But all the major papers could run months of front page headlines saying ‘ECONOMY AWESOME, ACTUALLY!!!!’ and I don’t think it would matter much (and it isn’t like they aren’t dutifully reporting employment and the job numbers). It may not even reach the people who need to feel better about things to secure their votes. The campaign needs to find other ways to speak to them.Report
I agree the campaign needs a way better story. I also believe part of that – perhaps the most significant part – needs to be showing the lying fear mongers for the spineless cowards they are.Report
I don’t have time to look it up now but I seem to recall that in these same pollings, most people feel their personal financial situation is pretty good, but the economy overall is terrible.
Similar to how most people feel their own neighborhood is safe, but crime is outtacontrol *over there* in *those neighborhoods*.
Or that all congressmen are crooks, but hey my congressman is pretty good.
In other words, the economic data is accurate, and accurately captures people’s actual lived experience, but people’s opinions are shaped by misinformation.Report
I concur. But the survey doesn’t really help us understand the form.Report
tired: “bringing out statistics showing how well-off average modern Americans are is merely a disingenuous attempt to derail the discussion, which is about addressing the feelings of people who have actual concerns about economic insecurity…”
wired: “people who have concerns about economic insecurity are idiots and claiming that we should address their feelings is a disingenuous attempt to derail the discussion, which is about these statistics showing how well-off average modern Americans are…”Report
People who are factually wrong should be provided factually correct information.
People should be free to feel and express whatever feelings they have about their individual experiences.
One can feel economically insecure while being factually correct about what the stock market is doing.
Seriously… why is this so hard?Report
“People who are factually wrong should be provided factually correct information.”
When the “factually correct information” that the vast majority of people at Occupy Wall Street demonstrations were healthy people with smartphones the reply was that this did not at all indicate that they were actually very wealthy by current worldwide (or historical American) standards.Report
When people’s wages are up, why do they feel economically insecure?
When unions are winning massive economic concessions from companies after strikes, why are they feeling economically insecure?
When inflation is in fact coming down to “normal” levels why are they feeling insecure?
I’ll give you a hint – it’s because their fears are not about their personal economics.Report
The best way to win this argument is to accept the claim that people are feeling economically insecure, and therefore capitalism isn’t working.
“B-but our poorest are richer than medieval kings! Capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty! We carry in our pocket a device containing all the world’s knowledge!”
Etc.Report
I accept that people feel their purchasing power has gone down. I can accept that people are feeling nervous about their place in the world. I can also accept that politicians and media with a particular political alignment are exploiting that fear for political gain.
None of that relieves me – or you, or Jay or DD – of the responsibility for pushing back on outright lies. And its a lie that the economy is bad. Its a lie that Biden has done nothing to lift the lowest up while protecting the middle. Its a lie that taxing the rich will turn down the economic heat. It is a lie that expelling the 11-15 million undocumented migrant will increase opportunity for native born Americans.
And accept that capitalism isn’t working based on people’s fears? You should know better Chip – that’s exactly how capitalism works.Report
This is the “you’re still eating meat, aren’t you?” argument, alluded to above.
Pushing back on outright lies by saying “the American Dream is *NOT* dead!” to someone saying that their purchasing power has gone down won’t “feel” like someone telling a bold truth to the person who said that their purchasing power has gone down.
It’ll feel like the bold truth-teller is beating up a strawman because it’s easier.Report
I can’t – and won’t – help construct a world where our nation is dying because you have to buy more chicken for a year or two instead of more steak, all because we are still sorting out the downstream impacts of a once in a century world wide economic disruption. I most certainly won’t do it when the dystopia is being built on lies which are intentionally told by people who only want to retain political power and not actually make anything better for the chicken buyers.
I’m happy to talk about that loss of purchasing power – because its a fact – and what we might then do about it as a nation. But I’m not going to kindly coddle liars.Report
Well, if you want to argue as if acknowledging that the 60% of people who are arguing that the country is in a recession are wrong or lying instead of communicating distress and are somehow fooled or misled or dishonest, I think you’ll fail.
“But I’m not going to kindly coddle liars.”
I know that you don’t remember when you and I discussed the definition of recession being two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
But do you believe that I remember that conversation?Report
I’m very late to this party but there’s a misconception you and InMD are operating on that I think needs to be addressed. People aren’t saying in the polls that the overall economy is poor while they’re doing fair to middling. They’re saying the overall economy is poor while they’re doing excellent.
I just don’t think that you can say your “we’re cutting back and eating chicken instead of steak” is equivalent to you saying “my personal finances are excellent”. That’d be more equivalent to you saying “we’re doin ok and tightening our belts but we’re eking by”.
What seems more likely is a combination of three factors. Two rather brutal and one somewhat understandable:
-People view their wage increases as being caused by their hard work and unrelated to inflation while viewing price increases as due to inflation and thus foisted on them by the people in power. That’s Understandable but tough to address.
-Partisan imbalance. The right is much more partisan in their view of the economy. They view economies as bad when the dems are in power and vice versa. The left does this too but to a lesser degree. Also, the further left views the economy as invariably terrible because that supports their “down with capitalism” stance.
-The media reports bad economic news obsessively and mostly ignores good economic news. If it bleeds it leads.
How one addresses all that as a Biden center leftist, I’m unsure, but there it is. We certainly would benefit from a more vigorous candidate and a less divided activist set but ya go to war with the divisions ya have.Report
Please, you can’t spoil the fun like that.Report
My personal finances are fine, though.
That said, I have changed my habits due to my loss of purchasing power.
Neither do I believe that I am particularly unique.
Do I believe that the country is in a recession? Nope. Look at the green line. Look at the definition of a recession and look to see if we’ve had two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
Does it *FEEL* like a recession?
Well… it doesn’t feel like “the S&P is bigger than it’s ever been”, I’ll tell you that much. I’ve been in “the stock market is booming!” economies before and this one feels differently than those ones.Report
I don’t believe you’d honestly describe your personal financial situation as excellent based on what you’ve said. Nor have you. You’ve used like “fine” or, at best, “Great but we’re watching prices now”.
So, I’d conclude that you are not part of the set of respondents who describe the overall economy as poor but say their personal finances are excellent.Report
I went into the Harris Poll to find exactly what the numbers are for poor/excellent but didn’t find anything.
Can you give me a keyword to search for in there?Report
I think a good way to find it is “Axios majority of Americans say the economy is bad but their finances are good.” and your top results should lead you to the relevant polls or to an article that links them.Report
I found this from last August.
Is that the one we are talking about?
I suppose it depends on how much can change over how much time.Report
I think 1 is at minimum a contributing factor, and 2 I generally agree is something that exists albeit I am not sure how to measure it (to me this seems like an ongoing factor in politics not something specifically related to the current situation).
The third is the one I’m not sure I agree with. I browse WaPo website every day, tend to have the local weather/traffic/short soundbite news radio on for short drives, and have the local broadcast news on for noise when child managing in the morning and evening. I do not feel I have heard the drumbeat of negativity others seem to have, and most of what I can think of is relatively positive about unemployment and jobs creation.
Now, I do not watch cable news, and my social media presence is limited to a lightly used Facebook page, so maybe that’s where I’m missing things.
Where are you and others seeing the all of the negative reporting?Report
To clarify I’m certain a negative spin is coming out if any expressly right wing news outlet, Fox News, etc. I’m just curious if people are seeing stuff outside of that.Report
Does The View count?
I could easily see someone arguing that it doesn’t, of course.Report
Sure we can count it.Report
My own media consumption is wierdo high interest in politics so I definitely can’t honestly point to examples that qualify as a personally witnessed perspective.
Kevin Drum beats this drum (heh) a good bit, though, and I don’t think he’s crazy to assert it.Report
Fair enough. I guess I also still have my Economist subscription. I click over once in a while when I remember, though my general sense of the relevant reporting is along the lines of ‘America consistently bucking trends, expectations, physics, laws of nature, can it continue?’
I also read lots of substacks that talk about it. I subscribe to Yglesias for example, and he mentions the coverage too. For some reason I still can’t shake the feeling that I read more people talking about the media being negative on the economy than I do actual stories from the media being negative on the economy.Report
Err this would be the best way to lose the argument unless you have a plausible alternative system to capitalism. Here’s a hint: Norway and other social democracies also run on capitalism. If you’re not actually planning on doing away with capitalism it might be a good idea to leave the capitalism talk out of it. Especially in an American context.Report
The argument being presented by conservatives is “People are feeling economically insecure so therefore the Biden administration has failed.”
Or is it? They aren’t really following the observation with a conclusion.
I guess that’s my point, that in all this talk there is no mention anywhere about a plausible solution to this economic insecurity.
ETA: I guess one argument is “People are feeling economically insecure so therefore hoo boy am I glad Joe Biden is President!”Report
Saying “When people feel down, they blame the guy at the top” is so anodyne it’s not even cliche.
That said I suspect that, unless you have a true alternative to capitalism in your back pocket and are just waiting to collect on your Nobel prize for just the right moment, moving the discussion to debating the merits of capitalism feels like a play to weakness to me.Report
That cliche has been decisively disproven by actual events 2016-2020.
A lot of Trump supporters were demonstrably worse off economically, but continued to support him.
A conservative might point to the Democratic base who languish economically but continue to support Democrats year after year.
People have other priorities.Report
Negative partisanship is very much a thing, but for the muddled low-info middle on whom the election will turn, God(ess?) help us, the cliche still holds.Report
I think Chris is on the right track on his comment way up thread.
I’m also shocked that among the few specific policy proposals Trump has made (besides vengeance of course) are a 10% VAT on all imports plus massively inflationary unfunded tax cuts for the rich, yet no one ever talks about it.Report
Obviously someone is talking about it or we wouldn’t know about it. The real question is who should talk to whom about it, in what way, and what would be the likely result? Are there voters out there who don’t know this (yes, there are — lots of them), who would listen to people who do (doubtful), whose vote would be affected if they did (I suspect not)?Report
By virtue of his office Joe Biden has the biggest platform on the planet. Are you telling me you are skeptical of him going on the stump about his adversary’s unpopular plans? In an election polls currently show him losing?Report
It’s easily arguable that polls in May mean nothing.
Which is why polling trutherism is so confounding.Report
The more meaningful takeaway should have been this:
“A similar percentage of respondents agreed “it’s difficult to be happy about positive economic news when I feel financially squeezed each month” and that the economy was worse than the media made it out to be.”
You had to dig to find exactly what they meant by “similar percentage” but best I could tell the number was approaching 70%. 70% of people feeling like the positive economic news isn’t positively impacting them is a big deal!!! Why not start there?Report
For the exact same reason that there was a flurry of arguments over whether the definition of recession that said “two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth” should be used when we had two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.
Because to admit that things aren’t awesome is to admit that critics have a point.
Which is unthinkable, apparently.
Better to argue that the critics are, instead of complaining of loss of purchasing power, complaining that the American Dream is over.
And then mock the idea that the American Dream is over.Report
The “Critics” in “conservative” news media are in fact claiming the American Dream is over. They are in fact claiming that things are getting worse for Americans under Biden. They are in fact trying to deflect from economic success because it means they have nothing to offer politically, and thus their power is threatened.
When Wages are growing the American Dream is alive.
When unions negotiate once in a generation wins for labor in terms of wages, healthcare and retirement, the American Dream is alive.
When unemployment is at historic lows for over two years after a once in a century pandemic, the American Dream is alive.
Is it perfect? No. But guess what – 99 cent gas and $5 steaks are not coming back. And no amount of wishing or stamping your feet or anything else will make it so. We can deal with lingering concerns like purchasing power, but only if they are framed in reality, not apocalyptic doom and gloom.Report
So you chose to share a Tweet highlighting the point that it did because… something something American dream?
Ok…………..Report
I don’t believe that any of the tweets I pointed to mentioned the American Dream, Kazzy.Report
UK Calls General Election for July 4.Report
Rude.Report
This is probably the best joke possible on the date.Report
Now here is a lighter, feel good story with no relationship to Donald Trump or Israel/Gaza. Fan gets her own baseball card after being hit in the face with a 110 mph foul ball.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/40191329/toronto-blue-jays-liz-mcguire-foul-ball-topps-baseball-cardReport
Someone in PR at the Bluejays was on top of their game.Report
In fairness she tweeted (xed?) them about it but they absolutely rose to the occasion.Report
It’d have been very easy to not rise to the occasion and we hear about it all the time.Report
Nikki Haley on February 10, 2024: “He mocked my husband’s military service. If you have something to day, don’t say it behind my back. Get on a debate stage and say it to my face. If you mock the service of a veteran, you don’t deserve a driver’s license let alone being President of the United States.”
Nikki Haley on May 22, 2024: “I will be voting for Donald Trump in November.”Report
Who should she vote for instead?Report
Joe Biden. HIs economic policies are actually closer to the ones she presented then Trump’s. His social policies might not be to her liking, But Ole’ Joe won’t try to force them down her throat either.Report
Biden’s economic policies are really not that close to Haley’s but she should do what the former Lt. Gov of Georgia did and endorse him for his decency.Report
I think it would be easy enough for her to encourage her supporters to simply not vote for the top of the ticket. But Haley has always been kind of a lightweight and not the person you’d envision leading the GOP out of its Trump but. That will take spine.Report
She could endorse voting for libertarians (lol) or simply endorse not voting for Trump and doing straight ticket GOP voting down ballot. Either of those options -might- allow her to skate by and, if Trump loses, be in a position to pick up the pieces of the GOP afterwards.
If she recommended voting Biden she’d be done in right wing politics for good and that’d require spine and principle that she’s never evidenced before. Instead, as is normal for the GOP, she’s going to do what she can to help Trump win while desperately hoping the Dems do her work for her.Report
That’s the thing I don’t get about this, and why it’s hard to take moderate (or establishment or whatever) Republican discontent about the Trumpification of the GOP too seriously. While it would certainly be nice if they’d all vote Democrat, I can appreciate that there are long established loyalties and real policy differences involved. Fair enough. But all the 1/3 or so of them that say he is beyond the pale have to do is not show him for him specifically, probably just this one time, and that would be the end of Trump. And it should be even easier by virtue of the fact that the result of the tank is probably something like Joe freaking Biden, not someone from the Squad or whatever bugabear, clings to the White House and has to deal with a very likely flipped Senate to get anything substantive done.Report
The wealthy who hold their leashes aren’t particularly concerned about the Trump downsides (they either don’t think it’d affect them or don’t think Trump could pull off doing it) and are absolutely slavering for the Trump upsides (the tax cuts that they know with great certainty Trump wants to and can deliver).Report
InMD: all the 1/3 or so of them that say he is beyond the pale have to do is not show him for him specifically, probably just this one time, and that would be the end of Trump.
That’s my plan. That’s also why I think it’s going to be a blow out.Report
From your lips………….Report
Never underestimate the power of partisanship and identity in human cognition and psychology. A lot of them think he is beyond the pale but that doesn’t necessarily make them moderate or old-school liberal Republicans. A lot of them still think Democrats are all radical commies who want to get rid of private kitchens and institute communal dining halls and also introduce radical and mandatory genderqueer lessons in elementary school and their fever fantasies on what that entails borders on the obscene.Report
In other news, Republicans are furiously tying to throw truth down the memory hole:
A Democrat listed Trump’s trials on the House floor. His words were struck from the record.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/22/house-trump-mcgovern-strike-2/
The House was brought to a halt for over an hour on Wednesday after Republicans demanded that the words of Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) be “taken down” from the congressional record after McGovern, during House floor remarks, listed the number of criminal trials former president Donald Trump faces.
Speechcrime, 2024.Report
Hey free speech absolutists, what say you?Report
Congress needs to be better on Free Speech and we should do a better job demanding that Congress respects free speech.
But not hateful speech. Or speech that people might cause microaggressions. Or call for acts that violate treaties that were signed before any of us were born.
But Congress needs to be better on free speech.
Bad stuff will follow if they aren’t.Report
There is no absolute free speech in Congress. That’s why they have closed door meetings when classified info is being discussed, among other reasons–unless you’re arguing that there should not be classified documents/info at all, since it’s paid for by the American public and there, belongs to them, not the gov’t.Report
I’m arguing that sanctioning a guy for mentioning that the current GOP front runner is facing 88 criminal indictments is a free speech problem. Because it means they aren’t allowed to talk about the transgressions of potential leaders, especially when those transgressions are across the aisle.Report
Analogy for you.
A tweet flit across my timeline this morning talking about how one of the Palestinian counterstrikes this morning did some damage to a schoolbus.
The tweet said something about how the Palestinians were attacking children. “Children.”, the tweet ended.
Can you imagine a pro-Israel person asking “Where are the so-called opponents to genocide now that the Palestinians are attacking children?”
I’m not asking you to defend Israel or Palestine here. I’m asking you to imagine someone asking the question.Report
Asking questions is a far cry from demanding – and getting – sanctions against someone who speaks facts in a public setting. Stating the that a Palestinian attack damaged a school bus is the same thing as saying Donald Trump has been indicted 88 times. These are simple facts.
Where your analogy fails is that the questioner doesn’t demand X take down the tweet, and perhaps delete 24 hours of activity from the tweeter.
The House GOP weren’t asking questions. They were removing form the record the historical fact that the GOP presidential nominee is under multiple criminal indictments.Report
I would say that asking questions is also a far cry from attacking a schoolbus.
I would, however, compare asking questions to asking questions.Report
Demanding the removal of speech from a public record and then demanding further sanction against the speaker is not asking questions.Report
I agree. Attacking a schoolbus is not asking questions either.Report
Ok, so then I conclude that free speech is not your concern within the Congress, but a partisan action on a topic unrelated to the Congress’s business, is important enough to make a big deal about. I don’t see it that way. It’s not like this info isn’t being covered elsewhere. It’s not like everyone who is even somewhat remotely aware of politics doesn’t know Trump’s in court. Why is it so damn important that it be in the congressional record.Report
You never read 1984 did you?Report
Talk to me when the republicans in congress pass a law that prevents discuss Trump’s legal troubles in the television news, radio news, in print, etc. This isn’t a 1984 issue.Report
This does make me wonder. How often is something struck from the congressional record?
Is it every day? Once a week? Once a month? Once a year? Hasn’t happened since Nixon?Report
Information control always starts somewhere.Report
Another Alito house, another insurrectionist-treason flag, probably not another spouse to blame: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/us/justice-alito-flag-appeal-to-heaven.html
This says nothing new about his political views but it does tell us about how much impunity he thinks he has and he could tragically be correct.Report
“French Officials Order anti-sex beds from Japan” is a headline I’d never thought I’d see. I mean who knew that if you put young people with hot bodies in a dorm together that sex would happen?
https://nypost.com/2024/05/14/lifestyle/anti-sex-beds-have-arrived-at-paris-olympics-after-horny-athletes-admit-to-orgies/?utm_medium=social&sr_share=facebook&utm_campaign=nypost&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3AaWvVX75ICSMr3GtDXJQJTyuLtGL2Nzin_iG0u_M_nm9sNwqpeB6xKdE_aem_AWv0mVLF6fFDHEZLAbBBOC3_vnUOWPcXv63IaX6kJWL0PxIFFIV10LdP_2ZYrnlNVvHIdnYx-fGAzrJ32_ETHO9JReport
I’m sure it’s a condition on hosting.
“You can’t allow the athletes to hump!”, Cameroon’s government said, winking.
“We’ll put in those anti-sex beds from Japan”, France’s government said, winking.Report
As with most other things in These Modern Times the point is not to actually achieve anything, the point is to make An Official Statement That We Frown Upon This Sort Of Thing so that when some under-occupied crazy person on the internet decides to get mad about it they can point to The Official Statement instead of needing to spend money on image control.Report
And also, that the Olympic committee has their beaks deep in the jam jar of whatever company makes these no-sex beds. when it comes to the IOC the default assumption should always be naked corruption until proven otherwise.Report
Given the physical abilities of the athletes involved, I can’t imagine that they won’t be able to have vigorous and prolific sex in other ways.Report
The IOC is a bunch of dirty old men who are pro-kinky sex? Yes, we knew that already too.Report
Zeynep Tufekci is tweeting about recent revelations uncovered about a cover-up regarding the whole Covid origins thing. The thread starts here but wanders though some interesting territory discussing, among other things, the ability to delete smoking guns after a FOIA but before they’re handed over.
You can’t just delete the smoking guns. You have to delete the emails talking about deleting smoking guns.Report
The contradictory credulousness of the conspiracy minded set is never not amusing to behold. They claim to have a cynical and reality-based view of the world but credulously assume that great masses of people in these administrations and across multiple countries and corporations are willing and capable of colluding to conceal a secret like covid’s alternative origins. It’s actually kind of sweet- they really are romantics at heart.Report
You may really enjoy the chuckle you’ll get from this one, then:
Seems Biden’s HHS has moved to also individually debar Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth, from receiving federal funds in order to “protect the public interest”.
The reasonable, factual positions once derided as conspiracies are increasingly bipartisan and official positions.Report
Yep, still amused.Report
Well, I’ve never been a fan of “what’s the difference between a conspiracy theory and old news? Six months” kind of examples.
(Or “three years”.)Report
The Biden administration also quietly suspended WIV in JUL2023 from all Funding for 10-yrs owing to what it (NIH) perceives to be false reporting on it’s mouse experiments related to COVID.
“There is risk that WIV not only previously violated, but is currently violating, and will continue to violate, protocols of the NIH on biosafety.”
https://www.science.org/content/article/why-the-us-has-banned-funding-for-chinese-lab-at-center-of-pandemic-origin-dispute
Basically this is the correct outcome that most of us who noticed something was ‘off’ about the Lancet ‘conspiracy letter’ signed and orchestrated by Daszak (et al.). It would be nice if we could’ve done a full forensic analysis of all possible origins; but that was not what the Lancet Letter wanted: remember, it claimed *without any evidence of zoonotic origins* that any ‘other’ scenario had to be a conspiracy theory. They were never team science.
At this point the crime scenes are so muddled and tampered with that I doubt we’ll get much more clarity… maybe future historians will uncover ‘smoking guns’ in FOIA-proof communications or somewhere in China after the CCP falls to Sino-Glasnost, or something.
The suspension of WIV and Daszak can be seen as either (or both) the quiet inevitability of the bureaucratic accountability; or the bureaucratic process quietly moving inevitably onwards, disposing of real accountability.
It’s probably in the realm of time, death and historians now.
Edit: added the time duration 10-yrs. Not sure what the process might be after the term expires.Report
I’d like to find it amusing but then I remember that Alex Jones started as a cute little pet for all the Austin hipsters, “look at what Alex is saying, how amusing” and then he amassed a fortune, became a Sandy Hook truther, and the rest is history as they say.
And let’s not start with conspiracy theories like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and where that led to.
Conspiracy theorists are dangerous loons on the body politic. They are not to be indulged or treated lightly.Report
If I recall correctly Jones’ fortune now belongs to his victims.
Given a choice between treating conspiracists as serious threats or as amusing loons I’ll take the latter. The former gives them power they don’t deserve.Report
If they can pry it out of the many ways he has hidden it.Report
It is of little use to him hidden. Every time he tries to access it a collector is going to be there asking for receipts.
He may well be able to deny it to his creditors, but that doesn’t mean he’ll be able to use it himself.Report
Do I have to quote Hannah Arendt again about gullibility and cynicism?
“The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”Report
That’s mean. I would never consider Trump a totalitarian mass leader; he’s more of an entertainer/grifter who’s in way over his head.Report
I wasn’t singling out Trump, his allies, or his followers. Our whole culture has accepted conspiracy thinking, which is driven by a combination of gullibility and cynicism, both of which are essential building blocks for totalitarianism.
I mean, we started this subthread talking about covid. A good 90% of everything written for two years was gullible, cynical, or both. On all sides; expert or layman; left, right, or middle.Report
Not to mention the true cases where our gov’t has out and out lied to the public.Report
Eh, concur in part, dissent in part. The government and the media did give us bad information at times. No denying that. But the intellectually healthy reply is to seek better information. Gullibility and cynicism are both intellectual vices. They provide excuses for not pursuing knowledge.Report
Not that I want to re-litigate the question of Covid again, but it seems pretty obvious, and uninteresting, that no one exactly knew what they were dealing with when Covid, our first global pandemic in a century, rampaged into the scene and the various powers that be threw just about everything they had at the wall to see what would stick. There were definitely some areas of failure on all sides: Trumps general idiocy, the lefts over-long clinging to shutdowns, the rights vaccine idiocy and conspiracism, the bureaucracy’s unwillingness to own up to mistakes and not knowing things. But really we’re just saying the same thing except that I don’t see much in the way of building blocks for totalitarianism. No one, at all, anywhere came out of Covid looking good to everyone.Report
“There were definitely some areas of failure on all sides: Trumps general idiocy…”
Trump instituted a travel ban and called for government payments to support both quarantines and domestic production of COVID-protection gear and vaccines. What else did you think he should do?Report
Probably not encourage his followers to self-treat with bleach or horse dewormer to pick one example.Report
I happened to be watching that press conference live. Incredulous doesn’t even begin to describe my reaction to what I was seeing.Report
But…he didn’t actually encourage anyone to inject bleach. He asked about it. As for ivermectin, it’s a drug used on people.Report
Let’s go to the source:
“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful.”
https://www.wral.com/story/fact-check-biden-says-trump-told-americans-to-inject-bleach-to-treat-covid-19/21351899/
I didn’t address ivermectin. It did make for some funny cartoons, though.Report
“Is there a way of jumping off the roof? It’d be interesting to find out.”
I didn’t just tell anyone to jump off the roof. It may be irresponsible of me to have raised the topic at all, but if someone says that I told anyone to jump off the roof, he’d be making a false statement. A false statement on a subthread talking about cynicism and gullibility.Report
“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”Report
And we’re back to gullibility and cynicism. You and North just tried to push a false story, and assumed the readers would either be gullible to believe it or cynical enough to go along with it. Or you were both gullible enough to have told yourselves that something you knew to be true wasn’t, or cynical enough to tell yourselves that truth doesn’t matter. After that, posting a transcript of the thing that proves you’re wrong and implying that it doesn’t, I guess that was just another step down the path. But the thing is, you can’t make others gullible and cynical. You can only model it.Report
You’ll have to lump Marchmaine in with your gullible or cynical story Pinky. Even if we accept your extremely generous reading of Trumps bleach escapades you, surely, have to admit that having the President on national television desperately speculating about bleaching lungs is… sub optimal? That’s without getting into your feeble dismissal of the horse deworming mess. And that’s just two example. I understand you’re desperate to oppose liberals but to go to the mat for Trump? Why on earth bother? He’s not even remotely conservative.Report
You’re asking me why I would defend the truth if it doesn’t help my allies.
Also, I haven’t seen Marchmaine say anything in support of your false statements. If he does, I’ll call him out for it.Report
Except it’s not truth- it’s just your own charitable spin.Report
“Probably not encourage his followers to self-treat with bleach or horse dewormer to pick one example.”
Assuming that Slade posted the whole thing, he didn’t encourage anyone to inject disinfectant or mention bleach. Ivermectin is a drug commonly used on humans that was used in clinical trials for covid. Those are facts. Would you post the same thing again, knowing this?Report
Ivermectin was found to be useless in treating Covid as was hydroxychloroquine. Trump initially encouraged people to use it and then attacked experts who raised the alarm that those treatments were ineffective which, undeniably, resulted in the deaths of no small number of his most devoted following. That those drugs can be prescribed to humans doesn’t change those facts. It was a terrible idea and a good example of Trumpian idiocy. I wouldn’t change my position on that an iota.
That being said, refreshing my memory on Trumps bleach stream-of-consciousness rambling, I will concede that describing him as encouraging his followers to self-treat with bleach is overdetermined. His national on-air rambling was still idiotic, and thus still meets my original benchmark of an example of Trumpian idiocy, but I’ll grant he wasn’t flat out telling people to try and disinfect their lungs with bleach.
So if I had to post it again I’d reword it to “Probably not to encourage his followers to self-treat with horse dewormer or muse idiotically in national TV about using bleach to clear covid out of lungs.”Report
Ivermectin is a horse dewormer like retrovir is a treatment for feline immunodeficiency virus.Report
It sure as heck wasn’t, and isn’t, an effective (or any form of) treatment for covid. Wait, are you into homeopathy or something?Report
I didn’t say it was. I haven’t said it was. I’ve said that it’s a medicine for humans. The horse thing is ridiculous.Report
It was faster then looking up and typing ivermectin and has no bearing on my core point since it is also used as horse dewormer. *shrugs*Report
You wrote, “Probably not encourage his followers to self-treat with bleach or horse dewormer to pick one example.”
But “encourage”, “bleach”, and “horse” all weren’t part of your main point?Report
Trump encouraged his followers to self-treat with ivermectin, which is also used as horse paste and never backed off that assertion even after actual treatments were found. So, I meant it, Trump did it, and I am fine with having said it in the form I did.
The one point I’ll grant you is that Trump didn’t affirmatively encourage his followers to self-treat with bleach- he just idiotically rambled about the possible uses of it on national TV.Report
Ivermectin was found to have limited use cases, not useless.
It’s an anti-parasite medicine. “Dewormer” is a way to minimize that, I guess.
But a whole bunch of people have parasites of one kind or another (do you spend significant time outside barefoot? guess what!) and there are parasites that reduce immune response as a defense mechanism.
Ivermectin gets rid of parasites. People with parasites that reduced immune response found themselves with better immune response afterwards.
Since Ivermectin has very few negative side effects, it’s fine to take without hammering down whether you actually have parasites first (and, again, there are a *LOT* of people who have low-level parasites hitchhiking in them).
For example, it was given to Joe Rogan when he got the Covid. He made a big deal of this.Report
Why on earth bother telling the truth, Jaybird?Report
The novelty of it?Report
This is kind of a stretch, don’t you think?Report
Which part?
The part that involves most people having some kind of parasites? (Hey, do you have pets that spend time outdoors? Guess what!)
Ivermectin having few side effects?
Joe Rogan being prescribed Ivermectin as part of his Covid treatment?Report
Sure, ivermectin is good for treating parasites- covid is not a parasite which is why I specified that it was useless in treating Covid. Ivermectin might not, in of itself, poison you but taking it instead of getting actual treatment for Covid would not be good for ones near or long term health. Which is why encouraging its use and attacking people saying “Umm that’s not effective as a Covid treatment” was Trumpian idiocy.Report
No, it is not a parasite and I did not claim that it was.
What I did claim is that there are parasites that reduce your own body’s ability to protect itself and Ivermectin is a low-risk way to get rid of parasites.
To flip over to D&D terms for a moment, parasites might give your Constitution Saving Roll a -2 modifier. Ivermectin removes the -2 modifier.
“But it doesn’t add a bonus to your Constitution Saving Roll!”, you may wish to argue.
No. It does not add a bonus.Report
Sure, so it might be incidentally helpful. By that reasoning you could treat covid patients with every drug in the cabinet “because they might happen to have something that those’ll treat”. That doesn’t change that Trump promoting it as a Covid treatment was idiocy.Report
My argument is not that we should treat covid patients with every drug in the cabinet.
My argument is that Ivermectin was found to have limited use cases and that it was not useless.
Also that people like Joe Rogan was prescribed this drug by his doctor. This was not Rogan going into business on his own.
Did you know that Chris Cuomo is taking it now? Or, at least, he’s saying that he’s taking it.
I suppose we could argue that he’s searching for a new audience and is making overtures to an underserved one.Report
I did not call ivermectin blanket useless; I called it useless for covid treatment and, so far, haven’t seen or read anything to suggest it is in any way efficacious when dealing with Covid. That makes it basically a sugar pill or a placebo. That’s harmless in of itself, sure, but if it displaces actual efficacious treatment- which is has in many instances, that is very harmful. It would be the same thing as using ivermectin to treat HIV: ivermectin isn’t going to hurt you, but it’s not going to encumber the HIV and the HIV, unencumbered, will kill you. Pushing it and promoting its use as a treatment in an area where it’s been shown to be ineffective is foolish.
As for Rogan and Cumo, not to be mean, but their getting into ivermectin seems very on brand for them.Report
Rogan got into it because he was prescribed it by his doctor.
Cuomo, if he is to be taken at face value, is in a similar boat. If he isn’t lying about what medical professionals have told him, there are a lot of medical professionals who have fallen for a scam, it seems.Report
For covid? In 2024? I mean they’re kooky and have the right audiences to do so but it seems crazy considering there are actual efficacious treatments around now.Report
You may or may not remember this clip from 2 years ago.
As for Cuomo, it’s part of a bunch of medications he’s taking. It’s part of his regimen. Or so he claims.Report
I’m not surprised I missed it since podcasts and streams are completely outside my orbit/interest/media consumption habit. Sounds like it’s just being consumed because it is countercultural, fashionable on the right and harmless.Report
I hate to keep hammering on this but Rogan says that he took it because a doctor told him to and gave him a prescription for it.Report
I have no doubt at all that he did. There are lot of doctors out there.Report
I’m just glad that we’ve found doctors worth trusting in the middle of a whole bunch of people getting advice from doctors not worth trusting.Report
Yeah the doctors not prescribing a mostly useless regime of drugs for a paycheck and endorsement from a famous right wing celebrity probably are the more trustworthy doctors if y’ask my opinion.
I mean, unless Rogan and Cumo are just riddled with parasites? Have they been hanging out with candidate brainworm?Report
That interpretation is not the interpretation that I got from the (short!) clip where Rogan was talking to Sanjay Gupta on his show about what CNN said about Ivermectin.
I mean, unless Rogan and Cumo are just riddled with parasites?
The wacky thing about being a biological entity is that you can still get parasites even though it is the current year.
Do you have an animal in the house that spends time in the back yard? Do you go outside barefoot at all?
If so, you probably have parasites too. No, maybe not to the point where your organs could show up in a magazine ad for heartworm medicine, but you may, indeed, have *SOME*.
According to the CDC, about 60 million Americans have parasites.
That’s, what? One in 5? One in 6?
For what it’s worth, if someone argued that it’s primarily lower-status people who are likely to have parasites, I guess I’d agree with them.Report
“My argument is that Ivermectin was found to have limited use cases and that it was not useless.”
You’re lying about what North said. Stop. Liar.Report
He said “Ivermectin was found to be useless in treating Covid as was hydroxychloroquine”.
That’s a copy/paste.
I am saying that it was not useless but that it, instead, had a limited use case.Report
He said it was “USELESS IN TREATING COVID.”
Can you point to anything that shows Ivermectin being useful in treating Covid?Report
There are parasites that reduce your own body’s ability to protect itself and Ivermectin is a low-risk way to get rid of parasites.
To flip over to D&D terms for a moment, parasites might give your Constitution Saving Roll a -2 modifier. Ivermectin removes the -2 modifier.
“But it doesn’t add a bonus to your Constitution Saving Roll!”, you may wish to argue.
No. It does not add a bonus.Report
By that logic, Ivermectin is good at fighting every illness.
Well, if you have parasites.
Does everyone have parasites?
Your logic is tortured and you got caught lying about what someone said (again) and are trying to reverse engineer why you were really right all along. Just stop. Why is it so hard for you to admit you’re wrong about something? Or is this just how you get your jollies off trolling? Either way, it’s sad.Report
By that logic, Ivermectin is good at fighting every illness.
That isn’t what I’m arguing. It’d be more accurate to say that it is not useless but, instead, has limited use cases when it comes to fighting illnesses.
Which is how I phrased it the first time.
But, to answer your question, according to the CDC, about 60 million Americans have parasites.
That’s, what? One in 5? One in 6?
And if you spend a good amount of time outside in bare feet (or have a pet that spends a lot of time inside), that increases your risk.Report
Sure Jay, in D&D terms it’s like casting curse poison when you have a disease.
GM: Your cure poison spell is useless in removing the Covid you are afflicted with.
Jay: But cure poison cures the poison status. If I was poisoned and had Covid then cure poison would make me a lot better off and that’d help with Covid!
GM: But you aren’t poisoned. You have Covid and your cure poison spell doesn’t effect your Covid status.
Jay: But characters in D&D frequently get poisoned. There are a good 15% of monster manual encounters that have venomous attacks or poison related abilities.
GM: All true, but you aren’t poisoned right now; you have Covid which is a disease and your cure poison spell doesn’t effect Covid.Report
I’d, instead, compare it to something that removes a negative, if the negative is there. “Remove curse”.
“But I’m not cursed.” Non-cursed Guy says.
“Then the spell doesn’t do anything.” Cleric says.
“I’m cursed,” Cursed Guy says.
“But remove curse doesn’t do anything for diseases!” Non-cursed Guy says.
“What if the curse makes your Constitution rolls worse?” Cursed Guy asks.
“A curse is not a disease and a disease is not a curse.” Non-cursed guy points out.Report
Sure, and all these people might be vitamin deficient, or have lupus, or cancer, by this reasoning people shouldn’t be just taking Ivermectin but entire wheelbarrows of potentially useful drugs that’ll be helpful (if) they have relevant afflictions.
But the core point that Ivermectin doesn’t treat covid remains unchanged.Report
What percentage of the population has a vitamin deficiency, do you think?
What percentage of the population has lupus, do you think?
What percentage of the population has cancer, do you think?Report
“What percentage of the population has a vitamin deficiency, do you think?”
Based on Google AI results (whatever those are):
More than 2 billion people
According to the WHO, more than 2 billion people globally are deficient in key vitamins and minerals, particularly vitamin A, iodine, iron, and zinc. Most of these people live in low-income countries and are often deficient in more than one micronutrient.
In the US
According to a 2014 article, 9 out of 10 Americans are deficient in potassium, 7 out of 10 are deficient in calcium, and 8 out of 10 are deficient in vitamin E. Other common deficiencies include:
Vitamin A: 51% of adults fall short of the recommended dietary allowance (EAR)
Vitamin C: 43% of adults are deficient
Vitamin D: 81% of children and adolescents and 95% of adults are deficient
It’s okay to just say you were wrong about what North said.
To the question: “Is Ivermectin useless in treating Covid?” the answer is objectively, “Yes.” Just admit that and move on. You look really silly right now.Report
That many? Imagine responding to someone hearing that a doctor suggested taking a multivitamin with “that’s just quackery” knowing that that many people have a vitamin deficiency.
To the question: “Is Ivermectin useless in treating Covid?” the answer is objectively, “Yes.” Just admit that and move on. You look really silly right now.
My argument is that it is not useless but has limited use cases.
And you’re arguing against me as if I am saying that everybody should be using the Ivermectin they sell at the pet store. (Though I think it probably would be good for everybody to take it once a year or so… prescribed from their doctor, of course.)Report
To be clear, the efficacy of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment, a still debated topic in medical research — there is some evidence for some benefits, though there are real side effects that can make COVID worse, and in some trials there is no effect at all — has nothing to do with parasite. Ivermectin has anti-viral properties, and has been used to treat viruses for a long time because of that.
You can read about potential causes for the possible effectiveness of Ivermectin here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10787-022-01129-1
See also: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&as_ylo=2023&q=invectermin+covid&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1716654744884&u=%23p%3DAK7CWE_4IjkJ
Or for recent research challenging its effectiveness: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163445324000641
I wonder where the parasite and immune response narrative came from, or if it has, er, anal origins.Report
I’ve always heard that it has to do with stuff like parasites! Huh.Report
That was Scott Alexander’s conclusion, though I think he might’ve backed away from that a bit in his followup post (too lazy to check):
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wantedReport
Aha… so yes, pulled from someone’s ass.
What’s strange is that the reason it was initially used all the way back in 2020 was because its antiviral properties were known, and it had been used successfully with some other deadly viruses in the past. Obviously the culture war nonsense got in the way of much actual factual reporting about the drug, but it’s not like anyone was hiding its past uses.
It’s also worth noting that, whatever its limited effectiveness against COVID, better antivirals have come on the market with clearly demonstrated efficacy with COVID in the last couple years. The only reason to still talk about ivermectin at all is that, because they’re new, they’re expensive, and ivermectin is cheap.Report
Ivermectin has anti-viral properties, and has been used to treat viruses for a long time because of that.
The only FDA-licensed human uses for ivermectin are orally for certain parasitic worms, and topically for lice and rosacea.
That said, licensed physicians may prescribe it for off-label uses and at other (typically higher) dosages.
Relevant, at least IMO, is that we’re four years after the start of the pandemic and no one has been willing to pay for the sorts of trials for safety and efficacy that would convince the FDA to license it for anti-viral use.
Years ago when I was in my mid-40s I was diagnosed with low bone density. After ruling out pretty much all known causes — at least one blood sample went to Paris because that was the only place in the world that could test for some exotic bone cancer — the specialists offered to write me a prescription for the then most-used bone density drugs. They made a point of telling me it was off-label use, because no one had ever been willing to pay for FDA safety and efficacy trials for any group other than elderly females.Report
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”Report
“Is there a way” is a question. “There is a way” is a statement.Report
This is just the internet historian in me wanting to tell a story… please indulge me: Trump’s drug of choice was Hydroxychloroquine.
I remember *very* early (before the great polarization) reading about promising compounds that scientists were exploring. What struck me at the time was the list was a bio-pharma list of things like GS-5734 and about 15 other compounds with one or two that had a name, like HCQ… and HCQ turns out to be the malaria pill and the US has stockpiles of them.
Very shortly thereafter, Trump started talking about how the scientists had a list of possible treatments and he immediately started talking up HCQ as a possible treatment. Which was *true* … at the time.
And, at that time, Trump was desperate for this thing to just go away before it wrecked his economic numbers going into the election. IMHO, he saw the same (or similar list) that I did — saw that we had HCQ ready to go and simply wishcasted (manifested?) HCQ as a ready made way out.
Of course it turns out that HCQ wasn’t effective, but GS-5734 better known as Remdesivir was.
I won’t claim to be a Trump whisperer, but in MAR/APR 2020 I felt I could see the hamster wheels in his brain turning on the hope that this ready-made malaria drug, HCQ, would make this all go away.
I couldn’t find the paper I read that had the list of compounds plus HCQ, but here’s an APR2020 reference of the ‘promising’ treatments for contextual ‘way-back’ memory jogging:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2764727?guestAccessKey=d26e67ea-de1c-43de-91cf-fd5afe0ef099
And that’s how I learned to think like a Trump. Thanks for coming to my TedHistory talk.Report
That is, with much greater detail on the particulars, in line with my own memory of that even and a lot more empathy into Trumps state of mind than I’d want to hazard.
That is wishcast a drug that wasn’t yet proven to work doesn’t because he was desperate to find a magic bullet against Covid doesn’t strike me as at all sympathetic and that he didn’t walk it back when it proved to be harmful instead of helpful and let it rampage off into the rights broad alt-medicine scene strikes me as down right malevolent.Report
I’m not making the claim that the covid response was a prelude to totalitarianism. I’m making the claim that our society displays both gullibility and cynicism, and that Arendt was correct in considering them a necessary condition for totalitarianism.Report
Co-signed unreservedly.Report
Wally Nowinski points out that Mike Schmidt has lost to Nathan Vazquez in Portland. He says:
It happened in San Francisco. It happened in Portland.
We find out if it happens in Oakland later this year.Report
Shoulda stuck to baseball.Report
I’m at the point where I really don’t understand anti-Zionist Jews. Even if you think that Israel’s actions during the Israel-Hamas War were excessive, I really don’t understand what they think would happen to their fellow Jews in a world where the Zionist movement was less successful and Israel never existed. Either they are deluding themselves to believe that but for Israel, things would work out fine for all Jews or they believe that this or that general abstract principle is so important that they are willing to put millions of their fellow Jews in peril in the name of said abstract principle.Report
I don’t think that’s it. I think, like a lot of us non-Jews, they look at what Israel has become as a nation state, how it behaves, and conclude the Zionist approach to her creation and maturation has led to some serious immorality that they don’t support. What they seem to want – as do many of us – is an Israel that doesn’t invite terrorist attacks through its actions.Report
People who use phrases like look at what Israel has become often have very little idea about Israel is like, especially outside the I/P conflict. Like during the Israel-Hamas War, an Arab Israeli woman was made rector of Israel’s third largest university. The top graduates at two of the most prestigious universities in Israel were Israeli Arab Muslim women. Arab Israelis are 21% of the population and are 21% of the doctors, 30% of the pharmacists, etc.Report
I listened to one the other day and my impression was he wanted Israel to exist but not as an ethnostate. Israel grants a right of return to Arabs as well as Jews and becomes a true democracy.
How that doesn’t result in an Islamic Republic he didn’t explain, apparently everyone wants a Western Democracy. The two groups will function peacefully in a democracy if the Jews just allow it.Report
Which is the rub.
There just isn’t much of a constituency within Israel or Gaza for a liberal multi-ethnic democracy.
No matter how fervently we Americans and Europeans want it to be so.Report
It is very hard for liberals and leftists sympathetic to the Palestinians to deal with the fact that the Palestinians have some very different ideas about what they want Palestine to be than they do. Generally Israel supporters, especially if they are Jews, tend to be more aware that many Israeli Jews have very different ideas than they do because the strife between assertive Ultra-Orthodox and Orthodox Jews and less religious Jews is something we are aware of from outside Israel as well. Western Palestinian sympathizers have not much direct contact with the Palestinians and create a Fantasy Palestine in their head.Report
I can’t even imagine how you would go about writing the history text books for such a place. From what I gather, the entire plan is to the let the Palestinian achieve numerical majority and give them complete control over everything and the Jews are just supposed to acquiesce to this.Report
I don’t understand this either. Palestinian leadership never used what can be called ANC rhetoric. Some of them do more dodges when talking to a Western audience but the idea that Palestine is a Muslim and Arab state is something they always made explicit. The people insisting otherwise basically create a Fantasy Palestine in their head and assume that only Jews have agency.Report
All oppressed people are one big united (un)happy family. Intersectionality.
You-a-protester must support Palestinian rights, and the Palestinians will ergo support gay/trans/black/etc rights.Report
Offer not valid for Jews.Report
It just seems so obvious to me that no Zionism and no Israel means that hundreds of thousands of more Jews die in the Holocaust, the survivors get stuck under a fierce anti-Semitic system in the Soviet Bloc, and the Jews of the MENA countries get kicked out anyway that I can’t see how any fellow Jew can define themselves as anti-Zionist. Either they have to be in denial about what no Zionism means or they have to be fine with this.Report
Try to be more open-minded.Report
What does it mean to be a Zionist once Zion has been created?Report
Not sure if it’s paywalled or not but Matt Yglesias had an interesting post yesterday on his substack delving into those kinds of questions.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-failures-of-zionism-and-anti?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&publication_id=159185&post_id=144807712&triedRedirect=trueReport
Just enough of a tease to try to induce you to pay. Boo!
(I never got these single writer subscription things. Why do I want to pay to read one guy’s opinions?)Report
I, also, am too cheap to pay for a bunch of individual substacks but for Yiggy, Linker, Freddie* and some others I’m painfully tempted at times. I wish we could get some special rate to aggregate a handful of substackers (like, into a substack magazine or something *gasp*).
*Thankfully Freddie is such a raging commie that he doesn’t paywall his best stuff- bless his pinko heart!Report
I generally stop paying attention when someone says “Matt Yglesias had an interesting post” or anything to that effect, but this is precisely the sort of topic on which centrists are interesting to read, not because they’re going to say anything insightful (if they were going to say something insightful, they probably wouldn’t be centrists), but because the centrist position on a topic this heated is pretty rare in the discourse, while it is presumably pretty common out in the wild, where the sound of the discourse is like the buzzing of a mosquito in people’s ears. It’s always good to get a sense of what most people think [shudders] out there.
And he does not disappoint (at least in the non-paywalled preview). In fact, he does say something that might lead to an actually interesting conclusion (perhaps he carries it to this conclusion in the paywalled portion; it’s not an original point, but it is, I think, an important one): anyone who supports a two-state solution is, pretty much by definition, a Zionist. Obviously, the harder core Zionists (“From the River to the Sea” has become a common chant among Zionists!, especially in Israel itself) will disagree, but that disagreement gets to the heart of the matter: once you support a two-state solution, all of the debates about the Middle East become intra-Zionist debates about where the borders should be, and the question of the existence of a Jewish state is settled.
I say the conclusion is interesting because there are many people who consider themselves anti-zionists who favor a two-state solution, and there are plenty of people who are zionists who consider the two-state solution anti-zionist (or, in fact, anti-semitic). Right now, at least in Israel, the latter group is winning, too, to the point that a two-state solution is as practically impossible as a one-state solution. Hell, given Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign, and reported desires to move Gazans into Egypt, the least impossible solution right now might be one of the most disturbing: a one-state solution with the complete expulsion of the Palestinians. That solution, at least, has real support among the Israeli ruling coalition (in a practical sense, then, Zionism ranges from ethnonationalism to genocidal ethnonationalism; it’s no wonder a lot of centrists and other two-state solution folks might be less than enthusiastic about being associated with it). It’s probably going too far to say that a label is getting in the way of peace, but in this case, it at least isn’t helping.Report
That trick is also used for “pro-choice”, though.
“I only think that abortion should be used in cases of rape, incest, or when the mother’s life is in danger!” is different than “I support abortion as birth control, for any reason whatsoever, including racist ones, up until the moment of crowning”.
But both are, technically, “pro-choice”.
But they’re also kinda different.Report
He does make some of those points, namely that a two-state solution, as generally understood, is Zionest, that the Palestinians are largely right about being screwed in 1948, and that the Israeli polity itself, not just the elected leadership, has rather predictably evolved to a highly militaristic, ethno-nationalist place.
He also talks a lot about the history of nationalism in the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire and tries to fit the creation is Israel into that context (which I happen to also think is the right way to look at it, not that I will convince many people of that). Where you would probably have the most significant disagreement is where he questions whether Zionism and Anti-Zionism can ever be a productive way to look at the conflict and concludes that it is not. For example he sees the status quo as being much more about 1963 than 1948, and argues that the embrace of anti-Zionism by regional Arab governments, leading them to start a war that they then lost, which in turn resulted in the occupation.
I would also say that it is inaccurate to say his take is common among even centrists, mainly because I am not sure many people generally know much about the history of nationalism in 19th and early 20th century Europe or the particulars about how the big empires came apart and how responsible huge amounts of violence ethnic cleansing went into creating the maps we have today. A big part of his argument is that what happened in 1948 and events leading up to it isn’t that distinguishable from what had been happening all over Europe and the ME from about the 1870s.Report
I think that a lot of reason why Zionism is treated differently from other nationalist movements is that it involved widespread Diaspora communities moving to a location. Now these widespread Diaspora communities were generally not seen as fellow country people where they resided but as strangers because Jews couldn’t be real true French, Germans, Arabs, Iranians, etc; but there was still the ingathering of exiles bit.Report
I think it’s way simpler than that- Israel was created in 1948.Report
I think it’s fair to say that timing wise they ended up just on the other side of a growing belief in the West that things shouldn’t be done this way. But India was partitioned in 1947. Eastern Europe was redrawn in significant ways in 1945. What happened in 1948 was itself part of a larger end of the British mandate over the entire region.
Which isn’t to say there aren’t a whole host of ongoing controversies and conflicts around those things, some of which are more live than others. I think the strongest part of the Yglesias piece is raising the question of whether looking at the conflict in I/P as a matter of Zionism is conducive to creating a better status quo. It’s abundantly clear to me that the answer is no, but of course the belligerent disagree.Report
The 1948 argument only makes sense if Israel was the only example of an ethno-state being created at the time. It wasn’t by a long shot though. There was splitting India up, complete with big population transfers, the year before. Very few people argue that this should be undone. 12 million ethnic Germans being sent to live in East and West Germany from Eastern Europe. Most of these communities were hundreds of years old. The division of Korea, etc.
A lot of this is just ignored and Israel is basically treated as really unique when it was part and practice of the time. So you get a lot of people lambasting Israel as an ethnostate but seemingly fine with a lot of other ethnostates because they are anti-colonial.
One thing that I’ve learned in recent months is that large swathes of the world just fundamentally do not get Jewish identity in the way that they understand other identities. We just come across as fake and artificial rather than as a true culture to them.Report
The partition of Pakistan and India was done internally by the Muslims and Hindu of India and it was a simple binary- two states were made and you lived in one of them.
The transfers in Europe, similarly were of groups of people from one state to another state with powerful forces pushing it and everyone in the shadow of WWII basically looking the other way.
Israel was a brand new state (in modern state terms) and the Israeli’s had a whole bunch of people on their hands that they didn’t want on land that they did want. Israel was also, early on, not in a position diplomatically or militarily to force her neighbors to take those people or to force them off the land without diplomatic consequences the Israeli’s couldn’t abide.
In the 1700’s or 1800’s the answer would have been butchery, slaughter and/or expulsion. That wasn’t going to fly in the mid 1900’s when colonialism was in its death throes. And then it got worse in the 60’s and 80’s when Israel got control of a bunch more land that they wanted with a bunch more people they very much didn’t.Report
There were hundreds of thousands or even millions of Jews that needed a new place to live after World War II and the West wasn’t going to take them in.Report
I’m generally sympathetic to the founding of Israel, Lee, but one can’t pretend that certain mistakes were made- especially once the Israelis started acquiring more and more land that they wanted with people that they didn’t want on it.
And, more to the point, it’s a fait accompli. Israel will never up and vanish into the ether anyone who pretends otherwise is silly. But the Palestinians, likewise, aren’t going to vanish and the Israeli’s have the agency in that matter currently. They’re going to have to decide what to do about it. The decades of can kicking, I fear, are coming to an end.Report
Maybe. Depends on what happens after the war.
We’re kind of over the edge of the universe.
I find it hard to believe Israel helps create a Palestinian state right now. The UN proclaiming them a state means… Hamas is given a state against it’s will? I find it easy to picture the can being kicked down the road than that.
If Israel wins the war then it’s not clear what they set up. Set up PA2 or create a royal family maybe and maybe that could end up a state eventually.
If Israel loses (can Hamas be destroyed?) then we will probably end up with Gaza as a prison camp again.Report
Oh there’s a little kick left in the can. Another ten years, plausibly, 20? I have doubts and the longer it goes the worse it gets. And there’s no way Israel gets normalization with the Saudi’s without sorting something out about Gaza and the West Bank. Not after all this. The Saudis ruling class probably doesn’t give a fig about the Palestinians but they do give a lot of figs about public opinion and their masses aren’t going to put up with the previous deal on offer after all this.
It’s an astonishing thing to me to watch as Bibi is, presumably inadvertently, letting the Palestinian Authority look like the reasonable actor in the region. Though it may be that the PA has been comparably quiet and orderly simply because their leadership is so old and corrupt but at this point old, crooked and peaceable beats the pants off Bibi’s old, corrupt deranged and belligerent.Report
I know that the Palestinians are never going to up and vanish. What I also don’t think will happen is that the creation of a Palestinian state, even though it is necessary, will get the reverse Israel crowd to shut up. And I very much want these people to shut up forever. You might find them amusing but I consider them more insidious and dangerous to my people.
The I/P issue is basically perfect for the Chattering Classes and other Left anti-Semites because it allows them to get their anti-Semitic freak flag high without being too overt about it. Meanwhile we have a very real genocide being committed against Muslims by the PRC and even Muslims are silent about it. But people wail and wail about the Palestinians. I don’t think the reasons for this are that innocent and have a rather easy explanation.Report
They’ll never shut up, the identarian left of course, but since the identarian left currently has no power to effect change or damage on Israel whether they gibber or not is irrelevant. What is relevant is to eliminate the one thing that makes the anti-istrali’s strength grow- the occupation. We’ve watched the identarians strength swell slowly over time, pause and reverse for a decade or so when Sharon pulled out of Gaza and then resume. The writing on the wall is pretty clear. The only question is what the Israeli’s will do about it.Report
I have developed a lot ire towards the chattering classes recently.Report
Considering their poses and your identity that is not at all surprising.Report
There have been at least three very much not Republican, not very Right leaning non-Jews that I’ve known that notice that the Activist class/Chattering Class can get really weird about Jews and all their beliefs about minority rights, etc. do not seem to apply to the Jewish people at all.
This isn’t recent. It has been this way since I was in my twenties. Many years ago, I might have still be in law school and it was definitely way before I was 30, my family went to play that was basically about a relationship breaking between a male reporter and a female reporter because the male reporter wanted to settle down and the female reporter was still into the action. There was this freaking gratuitous line from the male reporter earlier in the play about meeting his wife, the female reporter, in East Jerusalem with an emphasis on the East.
With the White Right anti-Semites or the Black nationalist anti-Semites and the Islamist anti-Semites, they at least have the bravery to come out and say what they mean. The Chattering Class/Activist class anti-Semites are much more insidious and vile because they lack this basic bravery and use the I/P issue to provide cover for them.Report
I don’t think there are a lot of people outside of South Asian who are thinking, “The partition left a million or more dead, and tens of millions displaced, and was a good thing.”Report
You have the funny hats, weird diet customs, and different holidays. You are also mentioned in the Bible more than once and have your own language.
“Fake and artificial” doesn’t seem reasonable.
I think it’s more that you’re the real deal. A different culture that refuses to assimilate. Thus far for thousands of years so that’s going to continue.
We have this weird thing from the left (DI) where they proclaim multiculturalism is good and all cultures are equal but what they really mean is “the same”.
That’s how they jump to “all differences are from racial bias”. Culture has no impact at all because it’s nothing more than different foods for dinner.
Jews disprove a lot of their core assumptions.Report
“The Chattering Classes will never forgive the Jews for being interesting.”Report
Like with other minorities, the Left seems them preserving their culture in the face of persecution as part of the Great Song of Human Liberation (TM). When despised Jews preserve our culture and revive our language in the face of persecution it is seen as nothing. As wypipo doing wypipo things. There is a genuine treating of Jews as different. The minority that is not the real true minority.Report
Interesting. On the left, the history of nationalism, and the creation of nations (individual and generally) has been a hot topic for a while, and if he’s effectively saying that the creation of Israel is not particularly unique as nation creation and building, then I’d agree with him there.
I also don’t think “anti-Zionism” is particularly useful either, mostly because I’m not, and I hope most people who are anti-Zionist are not, anti-Israeli ethnonationalism specifically, but anti-ethnonationalist generally. So, for example, I’m equally opposed to ethnonationalism in Azerbaijan that led to ethnic cleansing in Karabakh as I am to the ethnonationalism in Israel that has led to decades of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide. I do, however, think “Zionism” is a useful name for the ethnonationalism in Israel specifically, so I’ll probably continue to use it in that narrow sense (which, as Yglesias notes, encompasses the two state solution).Report
Funny you mention the Azerbaijan/Armenian situation that just played out, he references that as well.
My read on Yglesias specifically is that he leans nationalism agnostic to nationalism skeptical but is also uninterested in upsetting apple carts where things seem to be operating well enough. I am sure there is an anti nationalist case against, I don’t know, Estonia but it in the larger context of world problems it isn’t something we trouble ourselves about. If you put a gun to my head I’d say I prefer a cosmopolitan republic but the existence of republics rooted in nationalism doesn’t inherently cause a lot of heartburn. There are plenty of them that have been conducive to freedom and human flourishing.
To me the root cause of Palestinian suffering isn’t so much nationalism or even Zionism, it’s totally disenfranchised statelessness.Report
The ultimate cause of their statelessness is the ethnic nationalism of Israel, so I think it makes sense to blame Zionism (as the name for this specific ethnic nationalism).
I don’t know much about Estonian nationalism, but their immigration policy suggests it’s at least not ethnically focused in the way Zionism is. I think all nationalism is bad, but ethno nationalism inevitably leads to very bad things.Report
What would your solution to the Jewish problem be? If Zionism is per se colonialism but Jewish communities in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa would be treated as strangers as best even if the communities were thousands of years old than what should we have done?Report
My general approach to these things is that people should get to live where they want to. I also think that displacing the current residents of Israel, regardless of ethnicity, would be as unjust as displacing the residents of the Palestinian territories (or as unjust as the displacement of Palestinians in the Nakba, to use another related example). I suppose that’s what you’re asking.
What a unified nation state with Palestinian and Israeli citizens would look like, I’m not sure. We’re nowhere near that happening, and so much would have to change for it to happen (or, frankly, for any just two-state solution that isn’t just Israel turning an independent Palestinian state into an open air prison like Gaza is and continues to be, only now the prison guards are destroying the prison and killing the inhabitants), and we’d have to see how things look after those changes to have any idea of what a unified state would look like.
I’ll just add that my own politics are internationlist, in the leftist sense, so you can infer how I see questions of nations from that, if you are familiar at all with leftist thought.Report
Same frustration about the pay wall. I wish I could read the comments at least. I do agree with Yglesias’ point that anti-Zionism got millions of people killed. The anti-Zionists seem to think that the Jews should take a big portion of the 20th century as gigantic hit in the name of anti-colonialism.Report
It means that you believe that Israel should continue to exist as the Jewish State within the green line borders at least. There are still people arguing for Israel to be unwound or for all the Jews to be made to leave the Middle East even if they are Mizrahi Jews in the name of anti-colonialism. Calling one self a Zionist is to announce opposition to this and also that you believe that the Zionist mission was essentially correct.
On my broader point, there are radical and ultra-religious Jews who believe the entire Zionist project was a mistake. I can’t see them as leading to anything but the death of more Jews. Without Zionism, the hundreds of thousands of Jews who migrated to Israel/Palestine between 1881 to 1939 would have died during the Holocaust or had children and grandchildren that died during the Holocaust, the survivors would be stuck under an anti-Semitic Soviet Bloc, and remember that 1 out of 3 Jews lived under Communist control after WWII, and the Mizrahi Jews would still be screwed by the Arab nationalists and Political Islamists. The exodus might happen on a longer time scale but like other non-Muslims, the Jews would be forced out of the Middle East and North Africa even without Israel. It just seems like such a callous way to treat your kith and kin in the name of maintaining your radical credentials.
I can also quite frankly see Jews who pride themselves on fighting the Evangelical theocrats in the United States telling any Jew under Islam to acquiesce more to Islamic theocratic politics in a way that they would not acquiesce to the Evangelicals. All to maintain their radical credentials.Report
The problem is that the “excesses” of the current war change the dynamic.
My support for Israel over Palestine is predicated on the whole “civilization versus barbarism” thing. The culture that chooses books over turning greenhouses into missile silos.
When Israel does stuff like “smashy smashy all of the teacups in an abandoned apartment” or, god help us, burns books themselves, it goes from “fighting back against Hamas” to “putting the Palestinians in their place” and when that dynamic changes, the calls for a Jewish state becomes just a variant of the 14 Words.
You want to be civilized? That’s great. I can support that with one hand pinching my nose.
You want to act like whites did during Jim Crow, smashing the tea cups of negroes for putting on airs? Why in the hell am I expected to support that? Why in the hell are you still supporting it?Report
Interesting to see this move from “What a crazy idea!” to “Hmm,we may have to do this.”
‘Just a scandal’: Jamie Raskin envisions radical overhaul of Supreme Court
https://www.rawstory.com/supreme-court-reform/
“How about we start to talk about having 13 justices on the Supreme Court, one from each circuit, 18-year terms — they still get life tenure because they can go and be on the district bench or the circuit bench,” Raskin said. “Each president gets two appointments to the court. Obviously, the Senate still has to advise and consent, but it will remove some of the toxicity and the poison from the nominations if we know that each president will get two. We can deal with this problem, but the current Supreme Court is just a scandal.”Report
Interesting idea. Now if it only wasn’t nearly Herculean to get there.Report
So we’re pretending that Team Blue cares about ethics and not only Blue judges?
This new focus on ethics will last only as long as it’s connivant.Report
One thing that I think is going on is the whole “alief vs. belief” thing.
A belief is… oh… let’s say it’s a conscious confidence in a proposition being true for this particular discussion.
An alief is an unconscious confidence in a proposition being true.
A fun example is that of the bedpan. Imagine a bedpan, fresh out of the box from the factory. Put this bedpan in an autoclave. Now let the bedpan cool down.
A never-been-used, sanitized bedpan.
Would it be okay to eat a Wendy’s Frosty out of this bedpan?
The belief is “yes, of course. It’s a stainless steel bowl that has been sanitized. It’s fine.”
The alief, however, is “Ew! Gross! You deliberately chose the Wendy’s Frosty because it looks like dookie! No! I wouldn’t want to eat a Wendy’s Frosty out of a bedpan, even if it were fresh out of the box and fresh out of the autoclave!”
I wouldn’t say that the alief is *WRONG*, here. I also wouldn’t say that it’s irrational. It makes sense to have that gut response to the question.
Now watch this. Watch what your brain does:
Here’s a paper from 2011 that discusses Ivermectin as a “wonder drug”. From the paper:
This is a drug that works not only for humans but also for mammals in general. This, of course, includes pets that are mammals and farm animals that are mammals.
It is used to treat ectoparasitic infections in horses.
Ivermectin is horse dewormer.Report
My brain didn’t really have any special reaction to this. Yes, the “horse dewormer” talking point was obviously stupid and/or bad-faith. It was well known at the time that Ivermectin was used widely as an anti-parasite drug in humans—in fact, low rates of reported COVID-19 infection in areas where Ivermectin had seen heavy use was one of the observations driving the hypothesis that Ivermectin might be protective against COVID-19, though my understanding is that that was largely explained by poor reporting, low rates of testing, and possibly less urbanization in those areas.
And it’s not at all surprising that a drug that works in horses also works in humans. The reason we’re able to test drugs in mice is that much of the biological machinery is broadly conserved in mammals. Mice are a bit more closely related to humans than horses, but horses are still close enough for considerable overlap in drug safety and efficacy.
You will note, though, that the strings “virus” and “viral” do not appear anywhere in that paper.Report
The “horse dewormer” thing sure as heck seems to have worked on a bunch of people, though. They respond to the string “ivermectin” with “horse dewormer” in their heads, involuntarily. That’s the connection that exists now.
It’s as offputting as a frosty in a bedpan.Report
Yesterday the NCAA and the Power Five conferences agreed to a tentative settlement in the case over schools paying players directly. $2.7B for damages to current and former players. Mutterings that schools would be allowed a $20M or so annual budget for paying players going forward.Report
Gotta say, if someone asked me “Jay, what reason strikes you as the most likely that the governing Mises Caucus faction of the Libertarian Party would screw up a rebuttal speech at their 2024 convention?”, I’d probably answer something like “Drugs?”
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Gotta love libertarians, and I mean that genuinely. Do you remember the year all the libertarians on the stage couldn’t keep their shirts on?Report
In defense of the guy who stripped nekkid, he was doing that to mock the proceedings.Report
Heheheh yeah gotta love libertarians.Report