Commenter Archive

Comments by Chris in reply to Jaybird*

On “Final Thoughts Before November Fifth

There is a fair amount of research (see, e.g.).

How does letting them take off on a day that's likely going to be full of anxiety both among their parents and their peers, making it significantly less likely that they'll get anything out of a school day, sound like learned helplessness to you?

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If it looks like moral panic, walks like moral panic, and quacks like moral panic, it's probably moral panic.

This one case, the unreasonableness of which has not been explained, merely stated as obvious, has been used to launch an entire discussion about pampered kids. That's a lot of looking, walking, and quacking for a non-moral panic.

Do I think smart phones, tablets, and streaming media generally are bad for kids? Maybe. These are in many ways societal revolutions, and we're still figuring how to live with them. There's a really good chance we're not doing it quite right, and that this affects kids.

Do I think taking kids' emotional well-being into account in schools has anything to do with this? Absolutely not, and I wish parents didn't have to pay $65k per year to get that.

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It's very weird that we've got a bunch of old farts here complaining in a now long thread about a school taking kids' emotional well-being seriously. And lest I be pilloried for suggesting that the election has anything to do with emotional well-being, I'll remind the old farts that many of them are among the people acting as though this election has existential consequences for the country, in full view of school age children everywhere.

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Coincidentally, this is a school that's well known among the left not because it's a generally progressive institution (though I gather it is), but because 4 or 5 years ago they fired a (Jewish) teacher for pro-BDS tweets.

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This is an anti-vouchers tactic I had not seen before: appealing to the "get off my lawn!" crowd using "kids these days, amirite?!". I'm skeptical, but more power to ya.

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I can promise you that this is not now, nor would it have been 40 years ago, the worst sort of pampering rich kids experience at elite private schools. Does it look silly? Sure. Is it harmful? I can't imagine how, particularly in context.

And besides, why wouldn't kids be distressed? Adults, including many on this site, have been telling everyone who'll listen that our country and system of government are at stake, and that if the wrong person wins, it means disaster. If this is bad for kids, it ain't that school's fault.

Y'all sound like a couple of old men yelling at clouds.

On “Open Mic for the week of 10/28/2024

Biden's been famous for his gaffes for literally decades. I think the most parsimonious explanation is that it was Joe being Joe.

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I'd swear just a couple months ago the every story and meme I saw from conservative media and Facebook was about how gone Biden was mentally. If they actually believed that, the "garbage" comment shouldn't mean much to them, right? In which case, the pouncing part is the story.

On “What If Kamala Wins?

In case I wasn't clear, I'm not worried about conversions -- I've actually seen a lot of those from former OTers -- but about realignment. Maybe this isn't a realignment, but for the reasons I gave above, particularly the potential long-term MAGA control of the GOP, I worry that it is.

On “Open Mic for the week of 10/28/2024

There was a time, years ago, when I would have wondered what the hell was going on in your head to make you think some complete and utter bullsh*t like that, so I'd have engaged, but it's 2024, people are dying, and I'm too angry to care about why people like you are so god awful.

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Yes, it's still a problem.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/texas-abortion-ban-deaths-pregnant-women-sb8-analysis-rcna171631

On “What If Kamala Wins?

I think pretty much all the Berniecrats vote Dem. Some of them even run for office (one of Austin's congressmembers was just here with Bernie and AOC as part of his reelection campaign). But yeah, their influence, to the extent that it was ever real, is waning, and a party of Harrises and Cheneys would probably freeze them out entirely.

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I'm not saying they don't need them to win, because they probably do. I'm just saying that I've heard a lot of liberals say that it's just a temporary coalition, and I don't think that's necessarily true. If I were a liberal, I'd be much more worried.

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My answer would be probably not many, which is one of the biggest criticisms of the Democrats i can imagine.

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I think the Abbott's of the world realized that if they want to continue to let Oracle and Samsung and Space X and their friend with 20 car dealerships make a ton of money in Texas with few regulations (especially environmental ones) and some help from the state's Enterprise Fund, they're going to have to at least look, on the outside, like they're full MAGA. I think this really does create limits on the business side, though at least in the short term, businesses seem to think that those limits are outweighed by the pluses (seriously, Space X could create an uninhabitable wasteland down in South Texas, and Tesla could do so in Central Texas, without an environmental regulator in sight). But yeah, if you want to help people increase their profits from within the GOP right now, you gotta at least wear a MAGA mask, if not embrace it wholeheartedly (it's always difficult to tell, even with Trump, where the mask ends and the real person begins).

There are gonna be a lot of conservatives who want nothing to do with the MAGA mask. Some of them maybe find it distasteful, others have principles (at least one or two, right?), and others may believe, probably correctly, that in the long run MAGA is not great for profits.

Abbott has shown he can shift on a dime, so if MAGA loses control of the party, he'll have no problem shifting right back into being early-Aughts Rick Perry. I think others (pretty much anyone in Florida) may have welded the mask to their faces, to the extent that they have real faces at all.

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Riffing off this, you reminded me of the reason I don't think the Harris-conservative right coalition (the Cheneys, Alberto Gonzalez, etc.) is as benign as a lot of liberals seem to:

Greg Abbott is a very good illustration of what conservativism means in the MAGA-run Republican Party: he was a classic Texas "business" Republican like Perry and Bush before him, a guy who would throw the culture-war obsessed base (now MAGA) a bone or two now and then, but whose primary focus was making Texas as friendly to (big) business as is physically, logically, and metaphysically possible (to the detriment of a whole lot of other state government services, but more on that in a bit). Then the pandemic hit, and the response became a culture war issue for MAGA, which caused them to turn on Abbott (censures and votes of no confidence in county parties, e.g.), who panicked and almost instantaneously reinvented himself as MAGA: he redoubled his previously mostly bone-throwing efforts to make it seem like the border was open and criminals were flowing in by the bazillions; he went all in on abortion; he went full anti-trans; etc., etc. He's still a business Republican to the extent that one can be MAGA and a business Republican (MAGA does put limits on it, of various sorts, but also makes being anti-any environmental protections easier, which, e.g., Space X has been able to take advantage of), but he leads with MAGA, and there's no going back for him or the state Republican Party generally, at least until MAGA loses its stranglehold on the party in Texas and beyond.

The lesson of Abbot and the Texas Republican Party behind him is this: if you are a staunch conservative in the old Texas sense, and you find the MAGAs distasteful, you won't have any meaningful representation in the party for the foreseeable future. You are now basically the GOP equivalent of disgruntled Berniecrats, and like them, you have two main choices, plus a third that isn't really available to left-liberals: you can stick with the GOP, and try to change it from within, knowing that this will be a long and painful struggle; you can start a third party, and resign yourself to irrelevance; or, unlike the Berniecrats, you can join the other party.

It looks like a whole lot of them, and importantly, some with influence and connections, have chosen this last option, and Harris has not only embraced them, but campaigned to capture more of them by openly shifting her rhetoric to the right on issues like immigration. This might of course be temporary, particularly if Trump loses and his influence begins to wane as he gets older and can no longer exercise the same control over the party he has for the last 8 years, but I'd bet a whole lot of non-MAGA conservatives who've committed to voting for Harris have noted the shift in her rhetoric, and are thinking less about how they transition back into the GOP in a year or two than about whether what they're part of is a party realignment, and if so, how they can begin to influence the direction of the Democratic Party from within.

Don't be surprised if, over the next few years, a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party begins in earnest, not between more centrist liberals and the small but vocal liberal left, but between conservatives and centrist liberals, with progressives and former Berniecrats increasingly left out in the cold (though they'll still be blamed for election failures, of course).

On “The Way Through is Donald Trump for President

By your statements here, I'd wager you and they share that last bit in common.

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The Keffiyeh Kidz?

I assume you mean the kids who wear them in the U.S./Europe? I know a bunch of them (I own one, and have for like 25 years). I don't know any of them who think this, though I'm sure you could find one here or there. They probably also think we should leave this country and European Australians should leave theirs, because these people are 19 and have not yet thought about much of anything clearly. But hell, I know a bunch of 19 year olds who have Keffiyehs and don't think this way, so it's not most of them even when they're not fully cooked.

On “What If Trump Wins?

I think this analysis is lacking, for a variety of reasons -- not only are we talking about very different political contexts, but also "post-COVID" is 4 or 5 years, man, that's not a pattern -- but it's undeniable that in Europe and the U.S., the far right is ascendant, and everywhere but the U.S. so is the far left*, should tell us something about how people see the world before them, and how mainstream political parties, including the Republicans and Democrats here, are handling it, which is to say, pretty much universally poorly.

I suppose in that case, the most interesting question is, by historical analogy, are we in the 17th century, the 19th century, or the early 20th century, or something new entirely? And if it's the early 20th century, what can we do? Because we're already failing the "New Categorical Imperative" on a relatively small scale, and the analogy suggests we might soon fail it on a large one.

*Whether the American far left's brief and weak moment is over, or whether, because unlike in Europe there hasn't really been a U.S. far left of any note since the 60s, if not since the 40s, it is merely nascent, is something we'll discover over the coming decade or two, I imagine.

On “The Way Through is Donald Trump for President

Certainly not. I'm just not seeing it from pro-Palestinian groups or individuals, except from some extremists in the region. In the U.S. and Europe, you're much likely to see the reverse, and the reverse is in fact pretty much majority Israeli opinion and pretty close to official state policy at this point as well, if we're to take their politicians, military leaders, and cabinet members seriously.

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Who knew freedom meant genocide?

On “What If Trump Wins?

I don't think you'll convince many people by telling them that they're willfully ignoring things you want them to pay attention to.

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I readily submit that more people are voting for Trump because he's Trump than Harris because she's Harris (and not just because she's a Democrat or not Trump). This has been the same in each of the 3 elections he's been in. It goes without saying that this does not reflect well on the country's electorate, but many things don't.

On “Open Mic for the week of 10/28/2024

As far as I can tell, latinx is pretty much completely gone already.

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