Open Mic for the week of 6/24/2024
On this day in 1947, American businessman Kenneth Arnold saw a number of objects “flying like saucers” while piloting a small plane over Mount Rainier in Washington.
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.
Matt Y has a long and interesting read on the problems with Travel Team kid’s sports.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/high-pressure-youth-sports-is-bad/comments#comment-59888413Report
I’ve seen this. I’m not a fan. It was not how I grew up in sports and I’ve heard enough about the weekly grind to make me wonder “how much of it is worth it”. Pretty damn expensive IIRC too.Report
I think it’s kind of a scam with the really unfortunate side effect of draining participation from local boys and girls clubs and the like.Report
It is a big money making scam but travel teams rather than high school teams is where colleges now look for their talent. This makes it not a total scam. For the rec leagues, they can probably be dreadful for the serious athletes.Report
That’s certainly the pitch but I’m not entirely convinced it’s true. My wife’s uncle coaches football for a local public HS and has students recruited occasionally. This is probably just a DC/Baltimore thing but the Catholic school system remains a major source of recruiting locally.
My guess is that where there is real talent they will find it some way or another. The issue is what the hell we are doing to a bunch of 8-13 year olds and the families who (hopefully) love them.Report
It doesn’t matter if the pitch is true or not. It matters if people believe the pitch is true. You need to convince people that the pitch is untrue for it to start.
Lots of publications like the Atlantic and Vox have all sorts of articles on how your kid doesn’t need to get to an Ivory and they can have a perfectly fine education at Direction State. This might be true but parents aren’t going to believe it when they see all the plum entry level jobs go to the kids who went to the Ivies.Report
I think football is an outlier for this matter. There aren’t high school football teams that exist apart from the school.
Your point about how young the kids are and the work load they bear is certainly a good one. Look at all the pitchers in MLB that have undergone Tommy John surgery and fairly young ages. Even kids who are still in high school. https://www.si.com/edge/2015/07/30/examining-tommy-john-surgery-youth-baseball-mlbReport
The high school football kids who are going to be big-time college players go to training camps in the summer, often by position. Where better coaching staffs than they have at home are going to correct their technique, change their exercise programs, hammer on their knowledge of the game.
The game’s too violent to do full-contact stuff at the camps.Report
Bleah, I forgot about that stuff. It really is amazing how high school sports has become a full time occupation.Report
Yea, my son is dying to try tackle football. He currently doubles up on little league and flag football in spring/summer, basketball/swim in winter, and now we have him doing swim team in the summer.
All of this is driven by his demand, and he’d do more if he could. However even with all that we decided to put off tackle for a few more years. The private clubs around here expect 5-6 days a week plus hard volunteer commitments from the parents. That’s way too much for a bunch of friggin 5-8 year olds and IMHO it’s too much for a bunch of 11 and 12 year olds too.Report
It is a collective action problem.
1. Even as a generational population bust causes some colleges to shut down (with more to follow), other colleges and universities can be more selective than ever in their applications process.
1a. In the 1990s, it was not unheard of for MIT to accept a third of all applicants and the University of Chicago to accept up to 70 percent of all applicants. Those days are long gone for various reasons even if other colleges suffer for enrollment.
1b. For every parent like MY and Jessica Grouse who complain that this is a problem, there is probably another parent who is highly competitive and just wants their kid to have the same highly competitive go for the juglar instinct.Report
1b leads to an interesting question on whether it is bad parenting to raise your kid’s cynically.Report
In my experience it’s a few different types. There’s a small number of people who are worked up into a totally neurotic state of anxiety and/or cynicism.
There’s an even smaller number doing some vicarious living. Everyone else is either resigned to it and plays along to the minimum degree needed or lacks the self awareness to think critically about the situation.Report
By cynically, I meant raise your children with a “it’s dog eat dog” world and things like equality, fairness, and the rest are lies we tell to children.Report
I want to say that part of this is due to how US News and World Report’s damn college ranking decided to give extra weight to percentage of applicants rejected.
Oh, a school accepts 70% of applicants? It must be a school of last resort, then!
Ah, this little SLAC has an acceptance rate of 15%? Bellissimo!Report
It is part of the college admissions ratchet which a lot of people think is a problem but is also a collective action problem so no one knows how to solve it.Report
This is the first time I’m hearing about it but it makes a dismal sense that something like this exists. The main purpose is that it gives kids a competitive advantage of getting into elite universities through a sports option. Basically like all those violin and piano musical competitions or even cram schools in East Asian countries. Without these travel team sports, your kid has no chance of getting into a college sports team.Report
Are you not the same LeeEsq that comments at LG&M? Have you been ignoring Denverite’s stories there about his basketball-playing daughter for the last few years? School team. Local club team. Travel in the summer.Report
And it is insane but he also strikes me as a highly competitive type.Report
Why do you think I keep talking about the other blog on both blogs?Report
Well, Sheng Thao’s house was raided by the FBI last week.
She held a press conference about it.
The FBI is in on it, I guess.Report
Stating this was a stupid own goal but a fairly common one.Report
Huh. It seems like there is finally legislation coming out regarding the whole “masking at protests” thing.
The legislation is based on the KKK legislation that has passed in the past.
It’s being criticized as “ableist“, of course.Report
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/us/israel-hamas-war-sf-doctors.html
“The university did respond to a different post by Dr. Marya. In January, she said on X that “the presence of Zionism in U.S. medicine should be examined as a structural impediment to health equity” as she shared another person’s post about being “terrified” for “Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, South Asian and Black patients” being treated by Zionist doctors and nurses.
The university, without naming Dr. Marya or quoting her post, said in a statement that the notion that Zionist doctors are a threat to their patients was both antisemitic and “a tired and familiar racist conspiracy theory.”
In a written response, Dr. Marya said the statement by U.C.S.F. that addressed her post was “a disingenuous attempt to silence perspectives they don’t like” and that she has never felt, in her 22 years on the job, “the kind of repression” that she has since Oct. 7.”
Tell me why I shouldn’t read this like she was just itching to state the Jew instead?Report
Dr. Mayra is making a classic blood libel in a very indirect manner. Well maybe not that indirect. She is completely stating that Jewish doctors are going to intentionally or by neglect harm the patients that she, the great humanitarian that she is, cares about. The Further Let definitely needs to have the Jews in the white oppressor column while at the same time still saying that we must support them because of our goals. If this was from the Right and aimed at African-Americans or Hispanics than the too clever by a half code will be picked up easily but many smart people get very dumb when it comes to anti-Semitism.
You can explain all of this to Dr. Marya and company using their own terminology and they will just raise thier fists in bloody defiance. They hate Jews and will act on that principle.Report
I’ll just say that a lot of anti-genocide people called her out on that tweet at the time, including yours truly:
https://x.com/MixingChris/status/1742410924122656776?t=R8JE2AK2BPb4AED2pqnoGg&s=19
It was a pretty blatantly antisemitic tweet, and it would be much more difficult for people to smear us all as antisemitic if more of us called this sh*t out regularly.Report
A war is not a genocide and I am very unimpressed. This is just one tweet.Report
It could be that some of them just don’t like Jews very much.Report
Undoubtedly true, which both disturbing in itself and harmful to the cause.
Also, “war is not genocide” is about the level of analysis I’ve come to expect here.Report
Heh, a ‘structural impediment to health equity…’ Does that mean the construction was done by Jack Booted Thug Contractors, LLC? What were their reviews like on Angie’s List?
‘They did great work but I can only give them 4 out of 5 stars due to the inflammatory rhetoric used during touch ups.’Report
One would hope that one of these types would have enough self-reflection to realize how what they are saying looks to normal people. Alas, they are all so deep into their cult that they can’t.Report
What Mayra is saying is that only doctors of color can properly treat patients of color. In this case she is explicitly stating that Jewish doctors are going to intentionally mistreat patients of color.Report
I am probably more sympathetic to academics than you regarding academic language but this kind of stuff is the language that makes my eyes roll to.
Basically, I don’t think she likes Jews very much. She doesn’t see us as real minorities and she thinks of Jews as a weird form of white people who are trying to burst into the sacred circle of oppression (TM). Never mind that many Jews are not white.
So she is using Zionist as a too cute by half synonym for Jews because she can always claim plausible deniability.Report
I think people who talk that way aren’t capable of speaking truth or being rational. If there’s evidence of Je- er… excuse me ‘Zionist’ doctors treating people differently based on race or ethnicity she should just provide it. There’s then a million different avenues from federal and state authorities to the plaintiffs bar to do something about it. But there isn’t evidence, because, while it is very hard to prove a negative, what she describes almost certainly isn’t happening and everyone knows it.
Bottom line is people who speak this way have a bad habit of just making sh*t up. In light of that no one should take them seriously.Report
Saying that Dr. Mayra doesn’t like Jews very much is putting it too mildly. She is a stone cold anti-Semite making a variant of the blood libel. She is actively stating that Jewish doctors will deliberately harm the people she cares about. People like her are just the Left versions of Satre’s quote of anti-Semites as trolls. It is the same amount of plausible deniability and motte and bailey arguments.Report
Okay, this one is wacky.
There was a protest outside of a synagogue in LA. The synagogue may have had violence occur. There is footage of the alleged violence.
The rumor was that the synagogue was having a real estate sale of some of the recently abandoned land in Gaza.
Some argued that this was something worth protesting violently, others argued that while it was about buying real estate, it was about buying real estate in Israel proper (Netanya is in the more northern part of Israel, for example, far away from Gaza).
Maybe they have a hidden webpage only available in Hebrew.
But the publicly available stuff seems to indicate that the rumor that the Jews were selling Gaza land in the basement of the synagogue is one of those things that you’d think would inspire folks to remember the last time such rumors were circulated.
(Right-wingers are, of course, pointing out that Jews are being beaten in the streets in Biden’s America. Which is totally unfair.)Report
I heard they were poisoning the water supply down there.Report
Biden and Democratic Party leaders were quick to condemn this protest:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/us/synagogue-protest-los-angeles-biden.htmlReport
The Supreme Court of Israel rules that Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men must serve in the IDF or they get no money for their schools:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-historic-ruling-high-court-says-government-must-begin-drafting-haredi-men-into-idf/#:~:text=The%20court%20ruled%20that%20a,Orthodox%20recruits%20to%20the%20IDF.Report
Oklahoma Supreme Court correctly blocks use of state money for religious schools: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/us/oklahoma-supreme-court-religious-charter-school.htmlReport
The 22 Best Pizzas in the United States: https://www.nytimes.com/article/best-pizza.htmlReport
Whoa there chief – the title is “22 of the Best Pizzas…”, not “The 22 Best Pizzas….”. It’s an interesting roundup, mostly about how the traditional approach has been adapted in various places around the country, but calling just these The Best would be crazy (especially for a NYC paper).Report
Those of you who insist on getting live updates of the NY-16 Primary Election (the one with Jamaal Bowman) can do so here.
Polls close at 7PM, Mountain Time.Report
Jamaal Bowman is winning in the Bronx with a little over 83%! Westchester is too close to call.Report
The WaPo has called it as of ~7:40PM Mountain Time: Latimer is projected to win. An estimated 50.9 percent of votes have been counted.Report
Probably some sound commentary on this, let me go read up on it…Report
I think the take away is that the Democratic party can and sometimes still does, as a constituency, walk itself back from the precipice.
The Squad does not panic me like it does others in spitting distance of my own personal politics but I think it’s fair to say the only one of them with remotely serious chops is AOC. I expect her to be a part of national politics for a long time. But the rest of them? Well they’re either undisciplined clowns that come and go or owe their existence to the peculiarities of a tiny ethnic enclave.Report
Half of the squad got put on the map because they gave the juiciest quotations in response to the river of bullshit that came out of Trump.
The best way to fight antics is with antics!
Well, Trump was replaced with Biden.
And the antics continued.Report
Yea, my big piece of constructive criticism or advice for my own nominal side has been don’t let Trump break your brain. All you have to do to beat MAGA most of the time is be, by comparison, the most normal person in the room, and Trump and his weirdos don’t set that bar particularly high.* For the most part the Democratic establishment does that when it counts. Biden wouldn’t be president otherwise, and there wouldn’t be Democratic Senators in GA or PA, among other places. Where they fail is the seeming reluctance to apply this to fellow travelers in the media, academia, and activist groups that punch way above their weight in visibility and influence.
*I never want to relitigate 2016 again but if you have to add a caveat it’d also be try not to come to the fight with a candidate carrying decades of deserved or undeserved baggage when a bunch of thermostatic trends are working against you, but that’s an exceptional circumstances.Report
If “being normal” were the key to electoral success, would Biden be currently tied?
Would the House be in Republican hands?
Would the Senate be projected to fall to Republicans?
The fact is, the overwhelming number of Democratic candidates are in fact boring and normal, and still Republicans control the majority of statehouses and legislatures.
What evidence are you seeing to support the assertion that Democrats can win “most of the time” by being normal?Report
There’s “Biden” and there’s “Biden’s Administration”.
Biden is pleasantly boring, if a bit, erm, TRUMP IS OLD TOO.
Biden’s administration, however, wanders out into “well, define ‘weird’… and if you can’t, you’re just making stuff up!” territory.Report
Yeah, I’m not sure we know what a Biden Presidency might have been… in fact my contrarian pro-Biden position would be More Biden, less Administration and he’d be leading.
Of course, I honestly do think his age makes him unable to manage his Administration to be such that it reflects what his politics would want it to be.
…And that’s why he’s not leading.Report
If you read the comment you will see where I cited a few recent examples.Report
I’m not saying the Trumpists can win most of the time either.
What I’m saying is that the country is evenly divided between those who want a liberal democracy and those who prefer or are willing to accept an authoritarian regime.
And the people who prefer authoritarianism are not deluded, or unaware, or voting in protest against the nutty progressives.
They aren’t yearning for boring normal governance, but instead they really, really want to go to war against their fellow citizens, their neighbors and coworkers and push them into second class status.
To ignore this is to whistle past the graveyard.Report
I guess I still don’t understand what you’re getting at. National power in America is won and lost at the margins. Our system has evolved in such a way that allows obviously unfit people to win power more often than they should. That sucks at times but who cares? You you go out and win the game as it is. Breaking your wrists in circle jerks and getting annoyed at those that refuse to participate isn’t only futile, it’s embarrassing to all involved.Report
I’m just stating the plain fact that somewhere around 40% of the electorate doesn’t want or care about liberal democracy, and this number can either grow or shrink.
And this number is not a reaction to leftwing extremism, but a reaction to and rejection of democracy itself.
As marginalized people have used the tools of democracy to gain freedom, this illiberal minority has decided they don’t like the results and per David Frum, have decided they would rather abandon liberal democracy than be forced to treat the people they hate as equals.
This is just a plain and simple fact. To assert, as these comments threads often do, that the pro-democracy forces in America can defeat this by “moving to the center” and being normal overlooks the point that the illiberal minority doesn’t want centrism and normalcy- centrism and normalcy is what they hate and reject.Report
My wrist, it aches.Report
If you count the Republicans, that number goes up to 70%.Report
Heh.Report
I think everyone is ready a bit too much into one primary. Bowman’ district was changed and he began stating things which were unpopular with many of his constituents. As CJ notes, he lost a big chunk of his base in redistricting. It is still a D+20 district and it is not about whether the Democrats are going to go back to 1997.
But I guess this wouldn’t be the internet if there wasn’t a ton of armchair speculation that happened to exactly comport with the writer’s priors.Report
Ok, but is it fair if I also note, by virtue of it being the internet, every time I say I see something going right with the Democratic party my most vociferous push back comes from… other Democrats? Because that’s what I find weird.Report
Ha! Fair. I think it is done as defense of liberalism because there are still quarters that want to go back to the Clinton 1990s where liberalism was a dirty word and it was all business and not being too right-wing on social stuff.Report
I’m mildly curious as to what defines the contours of the ‘precipice’ in general and in this case specifically.Report
With Bowman? You can just Google him. But you could start with the apparently crazy spectacle he made of himself at a campaign event over the weekend. There’s the somewhat widely publicized fire alarm incident that got him censured. We’re talking about a person whose personal conduct and nuttiness makes him so clearly beneath the office he aspires to I feel like it’s almost hard to write it in a way strongly enough to convey the reality. Yea a lot of people still voted for him but enough didn’t that he’s gone now. That is healthy.
If you need a comparison of what being unwilling to walk back from the precipice looks like I’d say it’s Boehbert still winning her primary, despite obviously being an embarrassing person beneath the dignity of the office she will probably continue hold.Report
The question in my mind is, if not for October 7 and his responses to that, would he still have lost? Is this about general disapproval from folks in his new territory, or really just the rift over Israel/Palestine?Report
I don’t think it matters. If there’s one thing we can be sure of it’s that there will always be high profile events and opportunities for crazy statements or behavior to strike a nerve that might otherwise fly under the radar.Report
Well, people point out that Bowman was in a lot of trouble before AIPAC started spending money.
As for October 7th… well, way back when, I lived in Westchester County back in the 80’s (Mount Kisco, not Bedford Hills or, heaven forbid, Pound Ridge).
Westchester County voted for Reagan in 80 and 84 and Bush in 88 and then Democratic every election since.
If you want to know what “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” looks like, you could do a lot worse than Westchester County.
Bowman won the Bronx handily.
It was Westchester that did him in.
Had Bowman kept his head down, maybe he could have weathered the storm? But if he was capable of keeping his head down, he’d still be a school principal.Report
Sounds plausible- I confess I didn’t put any time into actually researching possible answers to my question, so thank you for doing that work for me.Report
I lived in the 16th when Bowman was elected and I live in it, at a different address, now. I don’t know if my old address is within the current borders of the 16th, but I do know that a chunk of the Bronx, the source of Bowman’s political strength, was lopped off in the most recent redistricting.
Latimer is quite popular in most of the current 16th. Bowman was, at best, lackluster as a Congressman, and some of his positions — which he would have been utterly ineffective in bringing to fruition — were unpopular in the current 16th. Latimer will almost certainly be more skilled at the job of being a Congressman, and, on votes about things that are within the realm of possibility, not likely to be much different from Bowman. There will, however, be fewer antics and little in the way of symbolic positioning. Given his age, his potential successors are probably already jockeying for position in the not-too-distant future.Report
Hrm. How much of the Bronx?
Like, was this a foregone conclusion way back prior to October of last year?
Was this something that was going to happen no matter what, even if the most interesting thing that Bowman did was show up at rallies with the rest of the squad and nodded along?
There are more than a few articles out there talking about how “this is a blow to progressives” or whatever and if it’s the case that the blow was struck back in 2022 or whenever the redistricting was done, then everybody who begins their post-mortem with October 2023 is going to misread the election entirely.Report
This is what I’m wondering too.
If I google ‘Jamaal Bowman antics’ I get the fire alarm episode and the recent rally where he calls his opponent a supporter of genocide.
I reckon there must be other antics that I’m just tracking not being from NY. But in a simple sense, did his district turn on him for the fire alarm or for being anti-genocide or some other antic.
It sounds snarkier that I mean it… but that’s the essence of the question from someone who *isn’t* obsessed with the squad and their antics.Report
There’s a narrative out there that Bowman didn’t support Biden enough.
He voted against stuff that the Whip had the votes for (I googled… not every single one of these became a law but every single one of them passed the House).
Is that an “antic”?Report
I’ve noticed that the amount of money that, erm, “moderate” lobbying groups put into this election seems to be growing.
Yesterday, I saw $10 million, then $14 million, and today I saw my first $20 million.Report
Pesky, erm, billionaires getting in the way of democracy is what seems to be the emerging narrative.Report
MattY had a good point that it’s easy to find really progressive money. It’s more difficult to find moderate money.
Bowman was unseated by moderate money.Report
Remember all the discussions we had here about how gay rights battles were past, that the good guys had won?
Well, not so fast:
He wanted to throw an Idaho town’s first Pride. Angry residents had other ideas.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/06/25/idaho-pride-lgbtq-threats/
When I read accounts of those living through the rise of fascism in the 1930s, or the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the 1970s, they remind me of our own times, when people would reassure themselves that those silly goosestepping fascists and the old mullahs were just a dying relic in their death throes.
But the future isn’t written and no progress is ever safe because the forces of reaction and intolerance never die away. We can win, but we can also lose.Report
Noam Dworman, who I like, has a pretty good rant on the whole “AIPAC” thing.
My favorite part is how the left used to be so good at hearing dogwhistles but now, somehow, can’t hear a dang thing when it comes to anti-semitism.
Now, where I disagree, is with this part here:
The problem is that it is possible for the Israelis to treat the Gazans like second-class citizens. And I’m not talking about stuff like “it’s unfair that they’re searching ambulances for bomb belts” kind of bullshit arguments. I’m talking about stuff like blocking the importation of coriander or fruit preserves.
And the fact that the Holocaust was so awful does not negate the fact that, in the formula, banning ginger is a negative on one side of the equation.
“But what about the ‘from the river to the sea chants?'”
“Yeah, those are stupid. Ginger should be allowed.”
“What about the Nazi flags.”
“Why in the hell are you allowing Nazi flags to be imported but not ginger?”Report
Eh, yes and no. Dog Whistles are very real and this feels like a cranky old guy complaining about the kids these days and damn it he is old and his “edgy” humor is no longer cool and wah wah whambulance please please Bari Weiss hear my pleas and get me some substack cash. But yes, anyone can do a dog whistle or speak in ways designed to create plausible deniability and it is not just right-wingers that do it.
So yeah, left wingers can do it too and they do but that doesn’t mean dog whistles with plausible deniability by the right are non-existent and it was wrong to call them out.
In short, this has been another attempt by Jaybird to show how everyone is a hypocrite and he is the most correct of the correct.Report
I’m pretty sure that Noam predates Bari by a damn sight. He’s got his own podcast and, indeed, his own comedy club (which, may I point out, still has standing room only despite the comedians he books not being funny in the current year to people who don’t require racial slurs peppered into a joke to even crack a smile).
This isn’t about how “everyone is a hypocrite”.
It’s about Noam Dworman’s rant about the AIPAC accusations and the stuff I liked in there and the stuff I didn’t.Report
There has been a lot of silence about the recent bout of Left anti-Semitism from people who are usually very quick to point out and argue racism in other contexts. You are on the other blog and you noticed how whenever some Pro-Palestinian protestor does something dumb, the usual response is to go look “look look Tom Cotton.” Either out of overall sympathy with the Palestinian cause, not wanting to cause a division, or whatever else and are not coming out and saying it.Report
And now Lebanon is allegedly being bombed.
And Bolivia is having a coup?Report
Re: Bowman:
He apparently insulted his rival for being a “retail politician.” I am not always the most social guy but retail politics are important.Report
Activists types think that their ideas are so inherently correct that people should just vote for them on merit rather than having to go out and convince people. Retail politics seems both dirty and unserious to them. We see in the current I/P conflict. It should be theoretically possible for the Pro-Palestinian activists to make their case to the general public but they can never break out of the jargon and always speak in ways that seem just as incomprehensible to the general public as the Further Right does. Rather than speaking about Israel using excessive use of force in response to Hamas, they just go on and on about Zionism and settler-colonialism or Zionists causing social inequity in US medicine. The idea that they righteous need to moderate themselves is an annoyance to them.
The Further Left’s problems exist because they believe they are more numerous and organized that they actually are. Many of them are really allergic to retail and respectability politics and want people to come to them.Report
The Nation has a great little article called “It’s Time for Progressives to Recommit to Academic Freedom“.
The subhed? “The same justifications we’ve used to restrict conservative speech are being used to silence us on Palestine. We need a different approach.”
Here’s a fun part:
Believe it or not, the article is actually self-aware:
Anyway, if you enjoy schadenfreude, and who doesn’t, you should enjoy this article.Report
I’ll admit I was expecting “obviously our failure was that we didn’t make the ‘NOT FOR USE ON GOOD GUYS’ sticker on the Death Laser visible enough” and what we got was better than that.
But I’m not entirely pleased because the essay doesn’t actually address the issue it raises, the idea that speech codes and publishing practices based in the concept of “harm reduction” are now being exploited by political actors to silence opponents in a way that limits intellectual freedom. Maybe we need to explore whether the speech codes were the best way to solve whatever problem it was we thought they were solving.
Like, in an essay about how the writer never thought the leopards would eat his face I’d have wanted a bit more investigation of why anyone thought the face-eating leopards were ever good to have around, you know? Maybe we need to start from that rather than just saying “oh, well, we need to have exposure to controversial ideas” because then we’ll just have this discussion again in another forty years.Report
Dude, it’s The Nation. The fact that they acknowledged “hey, they’re using our tactics against us… maybe we shouldn’t have normalized this” in the first place is a pleasant surprise.Report
I agree, it’s just that I feel like this is gonna be a “Frog and Toad put the cookies in the box” situation.Report
Guess who doesn’t want to be outdone by Louisiana? Oklahoma!!!Report
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/27/us/oklahoma-public-schools-bible.htmlReport
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with teaching about the Bible in public schools in an academically-responsible way, and it’s a damn shame we don’t. But the reason we don’t is that too many of the self-styled Bible-believers would have heart attacks or riot in the streets if anyone tried to teach an honest, academically responsible course.Report
So, um…
Is anybody watching the debate?Report
I am. It’s… something.Report
What’s the score?
My wife and I watched about 60 seconds near the beginning and couldn’t handle it – Trump on the attack and all over the place, Biden’s age showing. Too depressing to keep going.Report
Imagine that first 60 seconds you saw continuing on for another 59 minutes.Report
I will try hard not to, so that I can get some sleep tonight.Report
Oh Dear.Report
Joe is out of gas. The only thing that Trump can do to lose this, is keep talking.Report
Yeah, my takeaway was that the conspiracy theorists were right (again).
Who are the big factions that are set to capitalize on this?
The Obama Camp, the Clinton Camp, and… who? The Ivy Leaguers who are currently running things and, until recently, were calling people who said that Biden is obviously in decline “conspiracy theorists”?Report
I figured they weren’t wrong so much as grossly overstating and that SOTU level performance was probably sufficient. That was my “reasonable bar.” Man was I off.Report
A couple of ways to play this, I guess.
1. “Biden had an off night. Like you’ve never had an off night. Let’s talk about the real issues. What about Trump? Why are you talking about Biden instead of Trump? You some kind of Trump supporter? Big Trump fan? Think that Trump is a good person who would make a good president?”
2. “Wow, I didn’t know he was *THAT* bad… maybe the people in charge should have Kamala/Newsome ready for November.”
3. “If they put him up there knowing that he was like that, their level of competence is in question. Holy cow, are the people who were in charge of putting him up there the same people making decisions? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”
I’ve seen variants of all three of these on the part of Democratically-sympathetic folks.
I’m not sure that shaming is the best way to get #3s back in line.
We’ll see.Report
I failed to take into account a fourth option:
“headline for tomorrow needs to be: Trump refuses to commit to accepting debate results“Report
I am at #3. Maybe after a few more hours in the cold light of day I can work myself back to #2. But I dunno. The thing that concerns me most is that if they do move Biden aside (which I don’t see how happens without his agreement) I can’t imagine any of the Democrats A level potential candidates wanting to jump on this hand grenade. Why risk their careers on a last minute gambit in a vaguely anti-D environment and potentially fractured coalition?Report
Hey! Trump can still lose this.
Might be the only rational response.
I said in the pre-debate thread that I do think the convention can make some sort of course correction — as long as Joe bows out ‘willingly’ — but the convention is equally likely to make a course mis-direction.
I get that party base wants a ‘basey’ candidate… but I’d find the nearest thing to Joe’s non-baseyness as possible.
But then, my vote isn’t really gettable for the Dems… so do what y’all want.Report
My two most preferred qualifications are (i) be or have been a governor and (ii) be from the midwest or upper south/border state. That usually indicates having defeated an actual live Republican at some point in competitive races and the ability to play a human on TV. But I’m not a bellwether and things that seem obvious to me don’t to others. I’d say Newsome’s odds of getting the nomination are suddenly a lot better.Report
Well, here you go from my comment in the Election thread.
—
As I say, I don’t follow Dem politics… but If I grab a list of popular Dems East of Rockies and West of Blue Ridge — then here are some names that Biden would then hand select and present as the way forward.
Popular Govs (as of 2022, last list I could find)
Net Approval, State Lean, and PARG(?)
KY Andy Beshear D +24 R+27 +51
KS Laura Kelly D +20 R+21 +41
LA John Bel Edwards D +10 R+21 +31
CO Jared Polis D +22 D+6 +16
NV Steve Sisolak D +10 R+3 +13
MN Tim Walz D +11 D+2 +9
MI Gretchen Whitmer D +4 R+2 +6
If one must simply present names…Report
Something I remembered about the Gavmeister: He’s from California.
“Yeah, everybody knows that!!!”
Pardon me. Kamala Harris is also from California.
“EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT TOO! WE WANT THE NEWS, NOT THE WEATHER!”
Um, okay. There are some wacky things in the Constitution about a P and a VP being from the same state.
I’m not saying that it’s an insurmountable problem, of course… but it does strike me as being a non-trivial one.Report
If I were advising the Dem leadership (still waiting for the phone call, any day now), I’d say that at this point they should just take as given that Trump will likely win in November regardless of what direction they go, and focus on what will minimize the damage for all the down-ballot races. Like, maybe they give D candidates the leash to acknowledge Biden’s weakness and to even use that in their campaign, to say how it’s even more important that folks who don’t like Trump make sure to get out and vote for the people who will be in a position to block him.
Similarly, to the extent that they have any control over what Biden himself decides, the decision should be based on whether the state Dem candidates are better off with low-variance Biden or high-variance last minute substitute.Report
“The only thing that Trump can do to lose this, is keep talking.”
Fortunately for Joe, “keep talking” is pretty much the only tool Trump has in the box.Report
True. I was wondering if Trump was going to start ‘bullying’ Joe as the night went on. He made one quip (that I remember) about one incoherent answer Joe made; but then he just went back to his mix of counterfactuals and fantasy and straight-up attacks on Bidens administration (vs. Joe’s personal decline).
If he’d started attacking Joe on the stage, I think the sentiment would have swung in favor of Joe. Instead the debate was mostly just this:
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The thing is…I think he was attacking Biden. Biden’s only really firey moments came when Trump said something directly to or about him. It’s just that between both of them being tired old men, it wasn’t really apparent to the casual viewer what was happening.Report
Sure, he was attacking Joe as President… he said lots of things (some of them true) about how Joe was the worst president in the history of presidents.
But he didn’t turn on an obviously failing Joe in ways he could have (and probably will in the coming days?). Sure, the golf thing was weird, but it was weird in the way saggy old men wagging their tongues in bath towels in a clubhouse would be weird. Not Trump going all in on dementia jokes.Report
The part of this that’s going to go under the radar is that Trump has clearly lost a couple of steps as well, even if not quite as many as Biden. He seemed subdued and rambling himself, the big difference being that his voice still sort of worked.
The whole time I kept thinking this sounds like an exchange between two geriatrics in the corner of a home after they’ve had their pills and are about to be sent back to their rooms for the night.Report
I suppose. He just registered as baseline Trump crazy… just saying *things* and making things up. Hard to say if he would’ve said *better* crazy things or crazy things with better zip?
Maybe the fact that he was mildly disciplined shows decline?… the old Trump, er young Trump, would’ve come up with a new nickname for Biden on the spot!Report
I thought it was absolutely a decline. Maybe it was just lack of crowd or engaged moderator to play off of but there was no spontaneity or humor, just the perfunctory delivery of his usual talking points. I think the closest thing to an honest statement was when he suggested he did not actually want to be there.Report
Fair enough; he certainly doesn’t have that Golden Elevator bedazzle that he once had.Report
“Joe Biden’s horrific debate performance casts his entire candidacy into doubt”
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/06/28/joe-bidens-horrific-debate-performance-casts-his-entire-candidacy-into-doubt
Damn!Report
A surprising number of people are asking “how did we get here” and, guys, you’re the ones who got us here by saying “don’t rock the boat” and “we need someone electable“.
People just don’t want to believe that Hilary Clinton was a rotten candidate. They just don’t want to believe that in 2016 they nominated the only person on the planet who could lose an election to Donald Trump. They insist that there was some kind of evil magic power or racist Republican machinations or the voters were Scared Of Radical Change or something, and that’s why we needed the least-threatening Establishment Candidate available.
Also it broke their hearts that Kamala Harris turned out to be such a mushmouth. They were really depending on her to slide into the office on January 21 2022, and then she turned out to be not suitable for the role and they were out of ideas.Report
HOLY CRAP THEY OVERTURNED CHEVRONReport
I want to say that the debate is now the less important news item of the day.Report
RESISTANCE … this court is doing the real work of protecting us from a future Trump Presidency.Report
To take your mind off the debate…
The Centrists are getting a little spunky and going all MAGA with their own Project 2025…
“The center left tends to win at the ballot box, and then we’re outgunned the other 364 days of the year,” Communications Director Kate deGruyter told me. “And so we have to recognize that there’s an investment required in being able to make sure that the ideas that we see are popular, that are resonant with voters, are actually being carried out.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/06/28/fight-next-biden-administration-00165366Report
Back in 2019, Joe Biden sent out feelers saying that he’d love to have Stacey Abrams as his VP. Stacey Abrams went on record as saying… here’s the first paragraph from that article:
Anyway, I have been thinking about that for the last day or so.
Anyway, here’s a fun story from 2020:
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I wrote about that very thing on this very site at that very time here:. Of course, lot has happened between now and then so fun to see what I was wrong and right about looking back.Report
How’s that for a woulda coulda shoulda?
If she had better advisors… alas.Report
I will say that after Harris tried to knife Biden in the debate (which he successfully no-sold) nobody on the planet expected him to pick her for VP.Report
You’re allowed to knife people in the debate.
Biden made an overture and extended his hand and found a blade in it.
Some things cannot be countenanced.Report
With a few exceptions, presidential candidates “pick” VPs the way most presidents “pick” Supreme Court justices…the people that actually make those calls make sure the candidate picks the “right” person gets the nod after carefully crafted deliberations so the candidate thinks they made the decision.Report