LJ thank you for keeping things going here. I haven't been posting all that much but I appreciate the work you do to keep something on the front page every day.
Thank you!
And many many thanks as well to Michael and Janie and anyone else who made the transition happen.
I have at very best a journeyman's experience with MySql but it was all a few years ago at this point, and when I retired I made a commitment to myself to only get myself engaged with living things. Or at least analog things. I'm sorry I haven't been of greater help in keeping the lights on.
I will promise to deliver non-concise rants when stuff just gets too maddening. Or even when not.
And it's been a minute but it would be great to see old pals like Eric and Slarti jump in now and then. Although I think Slarti may be even deeper down the living thing / analog well than I am, at least in his free time.
But I ain't gonna speak for either of those guys, other than to say it would be great to hear from them here.
My guess is that people who prefer preventable deaths over government assistance have been convinced that resources are so scarce that we can’t afford to have a government that prevents those deaths.
Maybe. But what I take away from all of it is less a concern about scarce resources per se, and more a feeling that folks don't want their money going to help "that person over there". For various definitions of "that person over there".
So less a matter of scarcity, and more a matter of "why should I pay for that guy?".
And to GFTNC's point, I do think all of that is related to folks feeling (correctly or not) that government is helping "that person over there", but not them. So, not that *government* lacks resources, so much as *they* lack resources, and nobody is helping *them*, so why should they support it?
That doesn't really explain the guy who'd throw his sister under the bus, but I do think it applies to a lot of folks. And they're not always wrong.
I do think that a lot of working class people were left behind by the neo-liberal triangulation stuff of the Clinton and (to a lesser degree, but still) Obama administrations. And I also do think that the (D) party of those years was tone-deaf to those folks' concerns.
I guess it was a way to win elections, but a lot of folks got left out in the cold.
He was making a transactional bet. A bad call, all of the "college educated moderate (R)'s in the Philly suburbs" did not suddenly decide to vote (D). Some likely did, many did not, because tax breaks and 401k's.
I find nous @5.56 extremely fascinating and thought-provoking, particularly the comparison with his college God squad and the whole concept of a transactional view of people.
seconded
It’s not that I think deep discussion about our shared issues is not worthwhile, it is that my instinct is to save the lives first
I'm not sure it's always possible to save the lives without engaging in the deeper discussion.
My thinking about where we're at as a country took a turn a while back, based on two events.
The first was during a (R) candidate's debate in 2011. The topic was health insurance, and Wolf Blitzer posed a hypothetical scenario - a healthy 30 year old man declines to buy health insurance, has an accident and falls into a coma, requiring intensive care.
Ron Paul said this was an example of people taking responsibility for themselves - "That's what freedom is all about - taking your own risks". To which Blitzer replied, "So should society just let him die?".
And the room erupted in a chorus of "Yeah!" and applause.
Paul's response to Blitzer was more measured - he felt that this was where charity (not government) should step in. But that was a room full of people who were very enthusiastic about the guy being left to die.
The second was an interview in the NYT with a guy in the upper midwest who was opposed to government involvement in health insurance. The guy's sister had a chronic illness and was being kept alive through a federal health insurance program, I forget if it was Medicare or Medicaid.
The interviewer pointed out that, if the guy's preferences were enacted in policy, his sister would die. The guy said he understood that, and still felt programs like the one keeping his sister alive shouldn't exist.
Long story short, I realized that a large number of people in this country were not operating from the same basic moral or ethical basis as, for instance, me. The differences were not matters of policy, but were much, much deeper and more fundamental.
It more or less gets back to Thatcher's idea that "there is no such thing as society". People sharing a polity have no obligation toward the safety or well being of others.
Root hog or die.
That is the divide that you have to cross if you want to save lives. If you want public policies and actions that get folks fed and housed and gets them access to health care, you have to get past the millions and millions and millions of people in this country who are basically OK with letting their neighbors die as long as it isn't government helping them out.
You might be able to do that a la Ezra Klein, by trying to meet them halfway - "just run some pro-life (D)'s". Or similar. But as Coates calls out, you can't get very far with that without throwing some set of folks under the bus.
So who gets thrown under the bus, and who gets to have their life saved?
In the podcast, Coates calls out the history of the social safety net stuff introduced by the New Deal. The way FDR made that happen was basically to make it available to everybody *but* black people. That was the transaction.
It's good that it happened at all, for most people, but a lot of folks were screwed.
I guess we could continue to try to inch forward, expanding the scope of "who counts" bit by bit. But we're going to continue to bump up against the folks who think the idea of a guy having an accident and dying because he was foolish is an applause line.
You can only get so far without having the deeper conversation. The harder conversation.
To Tony's question, and Michael's reply, yes, there are likely millions who think Kirk was "doing Christianity the right way".
And there are many, likely millions, who see Christianity in it's nationalistic form as falling somewhere in the range from harmfully misguided to plainly idolatrous.
So, no single point of view there.
My own perspective, FWIW, is that Kirk's America is not my America, and I do not hear the voice of Jesus in anything he had to say.
Thanks for sharing this LJ, I had not seen it. I have a lot of thoughts, I'll try to boil them down and be concise.
First, my general impression of the podcast is that Coates is very clear about his positions, but Klein seemed to be struggling to be as clear - to articulate the points he was trying to make. Some of this may be due to the different roles they see themselves in - Klein seems to see himself more as someone who is politically active, trying to find ways to persuade other folks to his point of view. Coates is very clear that he is not a political strategist, he is here to speak truth as he sees it. Those are really different jobs.
I think Klein is correct to say the (D)'s as a party are flailing. My personal take on why they have lost "the heartland" - the "common people" - is that with very few exceptions they've kind of stepped away from the parts of the country, and the demographics, that we normally associate with those folks. I mean, literally - they have failed to fund and support local (D) organizations and infrastructure in lots of places. They've basically written off a lot of the country. That worked for a while, now it doesn't. And hasn't.
Just show up and listen would solve a lot of problems.
He's also correct to say that a lot of folks feel that the institutional (D) party basically doesn't like them. They don't. Don't understand them, aren't interested in them, think they are idiots for voting for (R)'s and don't seem highly motivated to figure out what those folks are about.
There are a lot of places they could be winning, that they likely don't even know exist.
All IMO. And so, enough from me about the (D)'s as a party.
Klein is correct to say that Kirk was "doing politics the right way", if you assume the goal of politics is to amass power. Kirk was an ambitious, even driven, hard working dude, and he built an electoral organization that kicks ass. He was very very good at *politics*. At creating the conditions to win.
What Kirk was absolutely *not* about was engagement and dialogue with his political opposites. After his murder, I felt obliged to at least watch some of his debates and other appearances. Kirk was not there to hear or understand any point of view other than his own, other than as a means of building his own counter-arguments. He was there to repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat his talking points. And he was there to make conservative young people feel like it was cool to be a conservative on campus.
And much of what he had to say was straight-up bigotry. White supremacist sexist bigotry. Full stop.
No amount of "civility" - a sort of observance of debate-team rules - can white-wash that.
Folks say he was "reaching out to the other side". He was not. He was reaching out to folks who agreed with him, or thought they might, and were uncomfortable out it in a campus environment, so that they could feel like they weren't alone.
A thing that folks don't seem to want to say, because it will seem like they're being mean to college conservatives, is that the whole "militant Christian nationalist capitalist western civilization strong men do big things" mythology doesn't stand up well to critical thought. Which is sort of the point, or at least one of the important points, of higher education.
It's meant to teach you to think. Some ideas don't survive critical thought.
I appreciate the good intentions of folks who believe the solution to where we are at is to let the marketplace of ideas play out. The best ideas will win out, right?
But that requires an openness of mind, and a willingness to engage your opposites in good faith and with respect. And that is not on offer.
I'm with Coates when he says there are folks who have crossed a line, and that a fruitful conversation with them is not likely to happen. I have my own lines, which are pretty much summed up in Coates' "not at the expense of my neighbor's humanity".
I won't, as Clinton did, call my political or social opposites "deplorables". But I will say that many of the things they believe and say and so are, in fact, deplorable, and I'm not interested in debating them about it.
Blacks are prowling the streets looking for whites to prey upon.
Blacks have descended into criminality and dysfunction since desegregation.
SCOTUS justice Jackson is intellectually inferior and is taking a white man's place.
Transgender people are mentally ill freaks.
And so on.
No. No to all of that. And no, I'm not going to debate about it with you as if we were discussion "who's better, Beatles or Stones?".
There are conversations I won't have, because I'm not going to give the time of day to that kind of delusional toxic nonsense. Not least because it supports and engenders some of the cruelest policies and actions we've seen in a long time.
I also second Coates when he points out that political violence is absolutely nothing new in our national history. The folks who say "this isn't who we are" are... mistaken.
The Republican party message is a fairy tale about how the good Republican party will save the good people from the existential threat presented by the rest of us.
My sense is that MAGA people are generally full of fear.
They're gonna take my guns. They're letting a lot of brown people in so that white people are outnumbered. Some Mexican is gonna take my job, or, if you're white collar, some South Asian is gonna take my job. They're gonna chop my kid's genitals off. They're gonna let great big guys play on my daughter's soccer team and she's gonna get run over (my (D) House Rep came out with that one).
There are actually some legitimate concerns in all of the above, and there are sensible conversations to have about them. Those conversations are not available because everybody is so freaking hyped up.
And then there are the folks whose point of view basically my life's good, I'm making money, I want to keep it that way, and if it means tasering some brown person mowing somebody's lawn or working in a restaurant kitchen or mopping floors in a hospital, I'm OK with that.
I have a friend who's an academic, a professor of psychology, who has been involved in this project for a few years trying to find ways to "bridge the divide". His approach is to get people to talk to each other, listen to each other, and try to establish some kind of empathetic connection.
My question to him is always, where the hell is that going to happen? And how are you going to scale that to a level that is going to have an actual effect on the situation we find ourselves in?
It's a mess. I have no solution. Find whatever ways are available to you to mitigate whatever harms you can, and do those.
But I don't see a path to persuading committed MAGAs to change their minds. Even if it all falls to shit around them, they'll find a way to blame on somebody, anybody, other than Trump.
He's their champion, their idol, their savior. That's no exaggeration.
I generally do not engage in discussions about politics with Trump supporters. I'm fine with talking with them about pretty much anything else.
There are a couple of people - long time friends - that I have had short political conversations with. In those cases, I haven't really brought up facts etc. I just say "I have no use for Trump, he's an asshole and a crook." Or something to that effect. And the conversation moves on to other topics. They're not really that curious about, or interested in, why I think that, it just places me in one bucket or other in their mind and the topic is done.
Once in a while I'll engage with someone online, usually FB, but that also doesn't get to the point of something like conversation. It's more you stated your position, I've stated mine, and move on.
The thing is, I don't think that many Trump supporters are that invested in arguments from fact or reason. It seems more vibe-y. Trying to persuade someone away from that position is less like engaging in thoughtful discussion of ideas, and more like trying to tell someone they shouldn't support their favorite sports team.
People have to experience the real human cost of this stuff before they'll change their mind. Like, someone they care about getting grabbed by ICE, or getting kicked off of Medicaid. Even then, they may find it difficult to impossible to give up their "team" identity. They'll just blame fate, or the "deep state", or similar.
I really don't know what the way out of all of this is. To some degree, all of the toxic stuff that Trump et al traffic in is stuff that's been part of the American consciousness since day 1. And people love being told they are special, they are the best, anyone who doesn't see that is just picking on them.
I don't think Trump et al have the resources or the wit to make the big agenda - Project 2025 and stuff like it - happen in full. There are too many different agendas going on with these guys, the country is just physically too large and various to lock down, and too many of the folks in the administration are just plain stupid.
But they're gonna break a lot of stuff before they are through, and I have no idea what things will look like when they're done.
So I've kind of arrived at the point of not trying to change anybody's mind about anything, I'm just waiting for this particular fever to run its course and hoping that something worthwhile is left when it's over.
He can't be wrong about everything all the time... :)
Yes, based on his public utterances, he is demonstrably able to do so.
I don't think Vance is wrong in the sense of being mistaken or misinformed. He's an intelligent person, he understands the reality, and he understands what he is saying.
He's lying. Bullshitting, gaslighting, whatever you want to call it. He speaks intentional falsehoods to obscure the truth and mislead people.
He's a liar.
Trump is also, but I think Trump half-believes his own bullshit. By "half believes" I mean I think his thought process is something like "I want this to be true, so I'm going to act like it is true".
Vance seems, to me, profoundly more cynical than that. He knows what he's saying is false and just says it anyway.
most Germans (or Central Europeans in general for that matter) can't grasp the English/US paranoia about national ID cards*.
Can't speak for the UK. In the US folks who object to / are afraid of national ID cards are conservatives who think the government is going to exploit national ID to round them up and do horrible things to them.
Irony is dead. Or, if not dead, laying in a gutter somewhere bleeding.
There are activists on the left bringing books into schools that are, at best, not age-appropriate or shouldn't be in schools at all.
It strikes me that if removing books from a school library doesn't amount to banning books, the presence of a book in a school library doesn't amount to advocacy of whatever point of view it presents. Or a requirement that any given kid read them.
If people don't want kids reading about Heather and her Two Mommies, then mom and dad should sit junior down and explain that they don't want him or her reading it. If they are concerned that their kid is gonna sneak a copy from the library and read it sub rosa, they can talk to the librarian and let them know they don't want their kid checking it out.
Or, you know, pay attention to what your kid is reading.
As opposed to, not only can my kid not have it, but *nobody's* kid can have it. Books that are banned tend to be about (a) sexuality or (b) race. I respect parent's wishes to have some control over how those topics are presented to their kids. Those parents don't have the right to deny *every freaking kid* access to them. I don't listen to Vance and care very little about anything he has to say.
And yet, you have somehow absorbed his talking points and have brought them here to share with all of us.
I blame ChatGPT.
GIGO
Here, as far as I know, hundreds of ordinary people are not being arrested
"ordinary" is carrying a hell of a lot of water in this phrase.
ICE is currently arresting tens of thousands of people a month. Perhaps they are all extraordinary.
The LLM AI stuff is a great tool. I have friends who have used it for stuff like designing the governing board structure for a small-ish non-profit, and for planning a somewhat complex trip to Scandinavia (two single women, less than unlimited budget, various health and mobility issues).
So, a really good hammer for some kinds of nails.
It's also perhaps the pre-eminent example of GIGO.
For sifting through the universe of basic factual information, it's tres handy. Need to find a useful factual result in the context of lots of different constraints? It's outstanding.
For anything involving matters of moral or ethical value - anything that involves answering the question "is this good?" - I'll stick with good old human reasoning and intuition.
Horses for courses, as they say.
If any readers here need some help when you emigrate to England, let me know.
LOL.
Emigrating would mean moving, which would mean packing up all of our stuff. I'm just lazy enough to make that a non-starter. Plus, when I retired I finally got my home studio set up just the way I like it.
Whether due to inertia, some remaining morsel of loyalty to the country of my birth, or just plain old contrariness and stupidity, it looks like I'm riding this crazy roller coaster to the end.
But thank you for your very kind offer!
I just find it harder and harder to have anything to say about any of these people.
They're like a bunch of monkeys in a barrel. "Oh look, those monkeys are out of control, just flinging poo around, bearing their teeth and shrieking!".
Yes, because they're monkeys. In a barrel.
I look for ways to minimize the blast radius of this crazy juvenile bullshit, but it's mostly - almost completely - beyond whatever meager resources I can bring to bear.
I mean, I can call my rep and senators, but they're basically already doing what they can. I can show up for the demonstrations etc. but the folks driving the bus at the moment obviously do not give one single solitary flying f*** about any of that.
I appreciate the efforts of those folks who have some influence over it all, but a lot of the time either their hands are tied too, or the process of containing these knuckleheads through legal or procedural means just takes too long to prevent damage from being done.
I'm just waiting for this crap to be over. We'll see what's left at that point.
If we really, really, really want to keep people like these the hell away from any kind of social or political power going forward, there are going to have to be some serious come to Jesus moments at some point.
And I just don't think we - Americans, collectively - have the stomach for it.
"It'd be too divisive"
"Let's come together now"
"Look forward, not back"
All of that is no small part of how we got here.
Trump et al are gonna come after anyone and anything they don't like, and they're gonna use as much of the full power of the state as they can muster to do it. Because Trump himself is a nasty vindictive piece of work, and the folks he has surrounded himself with are a bunch of loser weirdos who find hurting other people - ruining the lives of other people in no small number of cases - to be a lot of fun.
The rest of the world is basically just working around us at this point. And are looking for ways to make us as irrelevant - as unnecessary for their own security and prosperity - as they can.
Or else figuring out ways to play our leadership for their own advantage.
It's a nightmare. If there wasn't so much damage being done, it'd be comical. And, at moments, it kinda is.
But mostly it's a nightmare.
Good luck to Bolton, he said mean things about Trump and now Trump has an army. And a long memory.
I haven't logged on to a computer since I retired
When I retired one of my goals was to spend as much time as possible around living things.
So far, so good.
Showing a basic respect for people, no matter their station in life, is a pretty good path to take through life. Costs nothing, builds trust and connection. Makes that good serendipity flow. Even if there's nothing in it for you, personally, it's worthwhile.
People respond to being seen and heard.
Congratulations on retiring, Marty!! As my brother-in-law says, you have entered the promised land. :)
My personal take on what we typically call "welfare" programs - food stamps, Medicaid, etc. - is that they are best thought of as insurance.
Everybody pays in, but you generally only get a return if you need it. And needing it generally means you've come into some kind of bad luck. Or maybe done something stupid, but I'll leave it to a better mind than mine to try to define the fine line between whether bad luck and folly.
Most of pay for car insurance, health insurance, liability and fire insurance on our homes if we have them.
If you're lucky, you never get a dime back. But you're a dope if you complain, because sometimes you're not lucky.
And yeah, if sending Jeff Bezos a couple hundred bucks a month for groceries is somehow gonna make folks quite complaining about it all, I can live with that.
As long as he pays in at a rate comparable to his wealth and income. ;)
How the "general welfare" clause's interpretation has changed since the Constitution was written
It's interesting to consider the philosophical differences between, for example, Hamilton and Madison. Or between Jefferson and Adams. Etc.
But sometimes it's even more informative to look at what the early Congresses actually passed as law.
Before the US Code was compiled in 1926, laws passed by Congress were first published as a single document, then compiled into the United States Statutes at Large. They're available online at the Library of Congress (just follow the link). They're not as easily searchable as the US Code - the laws are just listed in chronological order as they were passed - but as casual reading they're really interesting. They give an insight into what the kinds of things that occupied the minds of Congress in the first 150 years of the nation.
A lot of the stuff is clearly in the general interest of the nation at large. And a lot of the stuff is of interest to, at best, only certain regions or industries.
The Second Congress, for example, seemed interested to a remarkable degree in the cod fisheries. Which was obviously of great interest to New England. And, which was a significant export industry at the time. But I'm not sure anyone south of Massachusetts got much out of it.
Required disability insurance for seamen, too. But not farmers, or artisans, or merchants, or anyone else.
I'm sure a general public interest can be construed in there - most foreign trade was conducted by sea - but why just them?
The difference between what people say and what they do can be illuminating.
There's a lot to unpack in this post, it goes in so many directions. Or maybe more accurately, affords so many points of entry and engagement.
Some random thoughts.
The tariff thing is idiotic. Not because tariffs are always or inevitably bad, but because they are being applied to correct a problem (trade imbalance) that is not necessarily a problem in the first place. And as the article calls out, they are being applied without any particular insight into their real effects. And, applied chaotically and unpredictably, which is anathema for business planning.
Shorter me: these guys have no idea WTF they are about. Other than perhaps setting the stage for case-by-case exceptions, shakedowns basically, in exchange for favors.
Which would be in character for the folks involved.
I though this, from Somin, was... odd:
Academics are supposed to discover and promote counterintuitive, nonobvious ideas.
Really? I guess there's a sense in which this could be so - doing actual research and investigation into a subject could lead you to conclusions that are non-obvious to the casual observer. But it seems like that should be a possible (but not necessary) outcome of academic work, rather than its point.
Maybe Somin just like being contrarian.
I first came across the message in Revelation to the Laodicean church in a Sunday sermon when I was a kid. Our minister was exhorting his pretty comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class suburban Long Island Episcopal flock to be a bit more serious in their pursuit of spiritual life.
I'm not sure how all of that was received by the congregation, to be honest. The phrase "OK, but can we please just go to lunch now?" may have crossed a few minds. But for whatever reason I still remember it, 50 odd years later.
And what I still take away from it is what I think of as the moral hazard of privilege. Or, if privilege is too strong or loaded a word, of being comfortable. Of having enough, and not having that be at any particular risk.
I think about that a lot lately. Especially as we see the violence (both threatened and real) and persecution being unleashed on anyone in our country who is "suspiciously brown".
The folks behind this are basically lawless. We can't really rely on the law and the courts to curb what are flagrant abuses of power, because the courts are often deferential to them, and even when they aren't, these guys just don't give a shit.
At some point it may be - likely will be, unless there is some meaningful change in regime - for ordinary people to intervene. In whatever way.
Which will not be without risk. Risk of jail, risk of violence, risk of harrassment in a variety of forms. It's not an idle threat, as anyone old enough to remember e.g. the J Edgar days will recall.
Which puts people who live in some degree of comfort - material sufficiency and safety - in a difficult place. Because they have something to lose.
Cue "Bobbie McGee" here.
Our privilege (those of us that have it, which definitely includes me) can make cowards of us.
And that thought weighs on my mind a lot lately.
I see that I still appear to be in the grip of steroid inspired verbosity, so I'll end there.
This may actually be the salient point.
Could be.
The kinds of grant money that are likely to be at risk are funds that we currently use, and have used in the past, to prepare for the effects of climate change and for general infrastructure, e.g. repairing a bridge in town. There are some smaller grants - six figure - for energy conservation and decarbonization programs.
The climate change stuff is especially relevant because we're a peninsula, with water on three sides. The lower lying areas include the site of the town's electric plant.
We'll muddle through, but it's gonna be a loss.
It's the lawyers that are gonna show up on the "charge us money" tab.
Really, I just brought it all up as an example of class based segregation. A sufficient number of people in town don't want more people coming to town who can't afford single family houses.
Roid Rage
Yeah, I'll be glad to be done with the steroid. It's like pushing the magic "asshole" button.
Haven't followed today's goings on in any detail but I'm assuming it's been just as weird and inexplicable as the Alaska thing. Just in different ways.
These days I find myself wishing I lived in some small, competent, unambitious country. Denmark or the Netherlands, maybe? Ireland? Botswana perhaps.
Go about my business, live my life in peace, and watch the "Great Powers" choke on their own hubris.
Not jaundiced or despairing, really, just so freaking tired of the pointless dick-measuring drama.
Better days.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Ad futurum”
LJ thank you for keeping things going here. I haven't been posting all that much but I appreciate the work you do to keep something on the front page every day.
Thank you!
And many many thanks as well to Michael and Janie and anyone else who made the transition happen.
I have at very best a journeyman's experience with MySql but it was all a few years ago at this point, and when I retired I made a commitment to myself to only get myself engaged with living things. Or at least analog things. I'm sorry I haven't been of greater help in keeping the lights on.
I will promise to deliver non-concise rants when stuff just gets too maddening. Or even when not.
And it's been a minute but it would be great to see old pals like Eric and Slarti jump in now and then. Although I think Slarti may be even deeper down the living thing / analog well than I am, at least in his free time.
But I ain't gonna speak for either of those guys, other than to say it would be great to hear from them here.
Also, too - hi!
On “Ezra Coates DESTROYS Ta-Nehisi Klein!!!”
My guess is that people who prefer preventable deaths over government assistance have been convinced that resources are so scarce that we can’t afford to have a government that prevents those deaths.
Maybe. But what I take away from all of it is less a concern about scarce resources per se, and more a feeling that folks don't want their money going to help "that person over there". For various definitions of "that person over there".
So less a matter of scarcity, and more a matter of "why should I pay for that guy?".
And to GFTNC's point, I do think all of that is related to folks feeling (correctly or not) that government is helping "that person over there", but not them. So, not that *government* lacks resources, so much as *they* lack resources, and nobody is helping *them*, so why should they support it?
That doesn't really explain the guy who'd throw his sister under the bus, but I do think it applies to a lot of folks. And they're not always wrong.
I do think that a lot of working class people were left behind by the neo-liberal triangulation stuff of the Clinton and (to a lesser degree, but still) Obama administrations. And I also do think that the (D) party of those years was tone-deaf to those folks' concerns.
I guess it was a way to win elections, but a lot of folks got left out in the cold.
Don't believe me, let Senator Chuck Schumer break it down for you.
He was making a transactional bet. A bad call, all of the "college educated moderate (R)'s in the Philly suburbs" did not suddenly decide to vote (D). Some likely did, many did not, because tax breaks and 401k's.
Schumer made a bet, and lost. As did we all.
"
I find nous @5.56 extremely fascinating and thought-provoking, particularly the comparison with his college God squad and the whole concept of a transactional view of people.
seconded
It’s not that I think deep discussion about our shared issues is not worthwhile, it is that my instinct is to save the lives first
I'm not sure it's always possible to save the lives without engaging in the deeper discussion.
My thinking about where we're at as a country took a turn a while back, based on two events.
The first was during a (R) candidate's debate in 2011. The topic was health insurance, and Wolf Blitzer posed a hypothetical scenario - a healthy 30 year old man declines to buy health insurance, has an accident and falls into a coma, requiring intensive care.
Ron Paul said this was an example of people taking responsibility for themselves - "That's what freedom is all about - taking your own risks". To which Blitzer replied, "So should society just let him die?".
And the room erupted in a chorus of "Yeah!" and applause.
Paul's response to Blitzer was more measured - he felt that this was where charity (not government) should step in. But that was a room full of people who were very enthusiastic about the guy being left to die.
The second was an interview in the NYT with a guy in the upper midwest who was opposed to government involvement in health insurance. The guy's sister had a chronic illness and was being kept alive through a federal health insurance program, I forget if it was Medicare or Medicaid.
The interviewer pointed out that, if the guy's preferences were enacted in policy, his sister would die. The guy said he understood that, and still felt programs like the one keeping his sister alive shouldn't exist.
Long story short, I realized that a large number of people in this country were not operating from the same basic moral or ethical basis as, for instance, me. The differences were not matters of policy, but were much, much deeper and more fundamental.
It more or less gets back to Thatcher's idea that "there is no such thing as society". People sharing a polity have no obligation toward the safety or well being of others.
Root hog or die.
That is the divide that you have to cross if you want to save lives. If you want public policies and actions that get folks fed and housed and gets them access to health care, you have to get past the millions and millions and millions of people in this country who are basically OK with letting their neighbors die as long as it isn't government helping them out.
You might be able to do that a la Ezra Klein, by trying to meet them halfway - "just run some pro-life (D)'s". Or similar. But as Coates calls out, you can't get very far with that without throwing some set of folks under the bus.
So who gets thrown under the bus, and who gets to have their life saved?
In the podcast, Coates calls out the history of the social safety net stuff introduced by the New Deal. The way FDR made that happen was basically to make it available to everybody *but* black people. That was the transaction.
It's good that it happened at all, for most people, but a lot of folks were screwed.
I guess we could continue to try to inch forward, expanding the scope of "who counts" bit by bit. But we're going to continue to bump up against the folks who think the idea of a guy having an accident and dying because he was foolish is an applause line.
You can only get so far without having the deeper conversation. The harder conversation.
"
To Tony's question, and Michael's reply, yes, there are likely millions who think Kirk was "doing Christianity the right way".
And there are many, likely millions, who see Christianity in it's nationalistic form as falling somewhere in the range from harmfully misguided to plainly idolatrous.
So, no single point of view there.
My own perspective, FWIW, is that Kirk's America is not my America, and I do not hear the voice of Jesus in anything he had to say.
"
Thanks for sharing this LJ, I had not seen it. I have a lot of thoughts, I'll try to boil them down and be concise.
First, my general impression of the podcast is that Coates is very clear about his positions, but Klein seemed to be struggling to be as clear - to articulate the points he was trying to make. Some of this may be due to the different roles they see themselves in - Klein seems to see himself more as someone who is politically active, trying to find ways to persuade other folks to his point of view. Coates is very clear that he is not a political strategist, he is here to speak truth as he sees it. Those are really different jobs.
I think Klein is correct to say the (D)'s as a party are flailing. My personal take on why they have lost "the heartland" - the "common people" - is that with very few exceptions they've kind of stepped away from the parts of the country, and the demographics, that we normally associate with those folks. I mean, literally - they have failed to fund and support local (D) organizations and infrastructure in lots of places. They've basically written off a lot of the country. That worked for a while, now it doesn't. And hasn't.
Just show up and listen would solve a lot of problems.
He's also correct to say that a lot of folks feel that the institutional (D) party basically doesn't like them. They don't. Don't understand them, aren't interested in them, think they are idiots for voting for (R)'s and don't seem highly motivated to figure out what those folks are about.
There are a lot of places they could be winning, that they likely don't even know exist.
All IMO. And so, enough from me about the (D)'s as a party.
Klein is correct to say that Kirk was "doing politics the right way", if you assume the goal of politics is to amass power. Kirk was an ambitious, even driven, hard working dude, and he built an electoral organization that kicks ass. He was very very good at *politics*. At creating the conditions to win.
What Kirk was absolutely *not* about was engagement and dialogue with his political opposites. After his murder, I felt obliged to at least watch some of his debates and other appearances. Kirk was not there to hear or understand any point of view other than his own, other than as a means of building his own counter-arguments. He was there to repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat his talking points. And he was there to make conservative young people feel like it was cool to be a conservative on campus.
And much of what he had to say was straight-up bigotry. White supremacist sexist bigotry. Full stop.
No amount of "civility" - a sort of observance of debate-team rules - can white-wash that.
Folks say he was "reaching out to the other side". He was not. He was reaching out to folks who agreed with him, or thought they might, and were uncomfortable out it in a campus environment, so that they could feel like they weren't alone.
A thing that folks don't seem to want to say, because it will seem like they're being mean to college conservatives, is that the whole "militant Christian nationalist capitalist western civilization strong men do big things" mythology doesn't stand up well to critical thought. Which is sort of the point, or at least one of the important points, of higher education.
It's meant to teach you to think. Some ideas don't survive critical thought.
I appreciate the good intentions of folks who believe the solution to where we are at is to let the marketplace of ideas play out. The best ideas will win out, right?
But that requires an openness of mind, and a willingness to engage your opposites in good faith and with respect. And that is not on offer.
I'm with Coates when he says there are folks who have crossed a line, and that a fruitful conversation with them is not likely to happen. I have my own lines, which are pretty much summed up in Coates' "not at the expense of my neighbor's humanity".
I won't, as Clinton did, call my political or social opposites "deplorables". But I will say that many of the things they believe and say and so are, in fact, deplorable, and I'm not interested in debating them about it.
Blacks are prowling the streets looking for whites to prey upon.
Blacks have descended into criminality and dysfunction since desegregation.
SCOTUS justice Jackson is intellectually inferior and is taking a white man's place.
Transgender people are mentally ill freaks.
And so on.
No. No to all of that. And no, I'm not going to debate about it with you as if we were discussion "who's better, Beatles or Stones?".
There are conversations I won't have, because I'm not going to give the time of day to that kind of delusional toxic nonsense. Not least because it supports and engenders some of the cruelest policies and actions we've seen in a long time.
I also second Coates when he points out that political violence is absolutely nothing new in our national history. The folks who say "this isn't who we are" are... mistaken.
And so, I fail to be concise.
On “Guestpost from Wonkie”
The Republican party message is a fairy tale about how the good Republican party will save the good people from the existential threat presented by the rest of us.
My sense is that MAGA people are generally full of fear.
They're gonna take my guns. They're letting a lot of brown people in so that white people are outnumbered. Some Mexican is gonna take my job, or, if you're white collar, some South Asian is gonna take my job. They're gonna chop my kid's genitals off. They're gonna let great big guys play on my daughter's soccer team and she's gonna get run over (my (D) House Rep came out with that one).
There are actually some legitimate concerns in all of the above, and there are sensible conversations to have about them. Those conversations are not available because everybody is so freaking hyped up.
And then there are the folks whose point of view basically my life's good, I'm making money, I want to keep it that way, and if it means tasering some brown person mowing somebody's lawn or working in a restaurant kitchen or mopping floors in a hospital, I'm OK with that.
I have a friend who's an academic, a professor of psychology, who has been involved in this project for a few years trying to find ways to "bridge the divide". His approach is to get people to talk to each other, listen to each other, and try to establish some kind of empathetic connection.
My question to him is always, where the hell is that going to happen? And how are you going to scale that to a level that is going to have an actual effect on the situation we find ourselves in?
It's a mess. I have no solution. Find whatever ways are available to you to mitigate whatever harms you can, and do those.
But I don't see a path to persuading committed MAGAs to change their minds. Even if it all falls to shit around them, they'll find a way to blame on somebody, anybody, other than Trump.
He's their champion, their idol, their savior. That's no exaggeration.
"
I generally do not engage in discussions about politics with Trump supporters. I'm fine with talking with them about pretty much anything else.
There are a couple of people - long time friends - that I have had short political conversations with. In those cases, I haven't really brought up facts etc. I just say "I have no use for Trump, he's an asshole and a crook." Or something to that effect. And the conversation moves on to other topics. They're not really that curious about, or interested in, why I think that, it just places me in one bucket or other in their mind and the topic is done.
Once in a while I'll engage with someone online, usually FB, but that also doesn't get to the point of something like conversation. It's more you stated your position, I've stated mine, and move on.
The thing is, I don't think that many Trump supporters are that invested in arguments from fact or reason. It seems more vibe-y. Trying to persuade someone away from that position is less like engaging in thoughtful discussion of ideas, and more like trying to tell someone they shouldn't support their favorite sports team.
People have to experience the real human cost of this stuff before they'll change their mind. Like, someone they care about getting grabbed by ICE, or getting kicked off of Medicaid. Even then, they may find it difficult to impossible to give up their "team" identity. They'll just blame fate, or the "deep state", or similar.
I really don't know what the way out of all of this is. To some degree, all of the toxic stuff that Trump et al traffic in is stuff that's been part of the American consciousness since day 1. And people love being told they are special, they are the best, anyone who doesn't see that is just picking on them.
I don't think Trump et al have the resources or the wit to make the big agenda - Project 2025 and stuff like it - happen in full. There are too many different agendas going on with these guys, the country is just physically too large and various to lock down, and too many of the folks in the administration are just plain stupid.
But they're gonna break a lot of stuff before they are through, and I have no idea what things will look like when they're done.
So I've kind of arrived at the point of not trying to change anybody's mind about anything, I'm just waiting for this particular fever to run its course and hoping that something worthwhile is left when it's over.
On “Hyudai, meet ICE”
I wonder what the local people in the area think about this.
"It's Joe Biden's fault!"
On “What to do?”
Woot!!! We made it!!
Huge props to Michael Cain especially, also to wj, LJ, and Janie for making this happen.
Thank you all!!
On “The Schadenfreude Express”
He can't be wrong about everything all the time... :)
Yes, based on his public utterances, he is demonstrably able to do so.
I don't think Vance is wrong in the sense of being mistaken or misinformed. He's an intelligent person, he understands the reality, and he understands what he is saying.
He's lying. Bullshitting, gaslighting, whatever you want to call it. He speaks intentional falsehoods to obscure the truth and mislead people.
He's a liar.
Trump is also, but I think Trump half-believes his own bullshit. By "half believes" I mean I think his thought process is something like "I want this to be true, so I'm going to act like it is true".
Vance seems, to me, profoundly more cynical than that. He knows what he's saying is false and just says it anyway.
"
most Germans (or Central Europeans in general for that matter) can't grasp the English/US paranoia about national ID cards*.
Can't speak for the UK. In the US folks who object to / are afraid of national ID cards are conservatives who think the government is going to exploit national ID to round them up and do horrible things to them.
Irony is dead. Or, if not dead, laying in a gutter somewhere bleeding.
"
There are activists on the left bringing books into schools that are, at best, not age-appropriate or shouldn't be in schools at all.
It strikes me that if removing books from a school library doesn't amount to banning books, the presence of a book in a school library doesn't amount to advocacy of whatever point of view it presents. Or a requirement that any given kid read them.
If people don't want kids reading about Heather and her Two Mommies, then mom and dad should sit junior down and explain that they don't want him or her reading it. If they are concerned that their kid is gonna sneak a copy from the library and read it sub rosa, they can talk to the librarian and let them know they don't want their kid checking it out.
Or, you know, pay attention to what your kid is reading.
As opposed to, not only can my kid not have it, but *nobody's* kid can have it.
Books that are banned tend to be about (a) sexuality or (b) race. I respect parent's wishes to have some control over how those topics are presented to their kids. Those parents don't have the right to deny *every freaking kid* access to them.
I don't listen to Vance and care very little about anything he has to say.
And yet, you have somehow absorbed his talking points and have brought them here to share with all of us.
I blame ChatGPT.
GIGO
"
Here, as far as I know, hundreds of ordinary people are not being arrested
"ordinary" is carrying a hell of a lot of water in this phrase.
ICE is currently arresting tens of thousands of people a month. Perhaps they are all extraordinary.
"
The LLM AI stuff is a great tool. I have friends who have used it for stuff like designing the governing board structure for a small-ish non-profit, and for planning a somewhat complex trip to Scandinavia (two single women, less than unlimited budget, various health and mobility issues).
So, a really good hammer for some kinds of nails.
It's also perhaps the pre-eminent example of GIGO.
For sifting through the universe of basic factual information, it's tres handy. Need to find a useful factual result in the context of lots of different constraints? It's outstanding.
For anything involving matters of moral or ethical value - anything that involves answering the question "is this good?" - I'll stick with good old human reasoning and intuition.
Horses for courses, as they say.
"
"we'll muddle through"
"
If any readers here need some help when you emigrate to England, let me know.
LOL.
Emigrating would mean moving, which would mean packing up all of our stuff. I'm just lazy enough to make that a non-starter. Plus, when I retired I finally got my home studio set up just the way I like it.
Whether due to inertia, some remaining morsel of loyalty to the country of my birth, or just plain old contrariness and stupidity, it looks like I'm riding this crazy roller coaster to the end.
But thank you for your very kind offer!
On “David Brooks in Laodicea”
Just, why not?
because some people are jerks and enjoy throwing their weight around.
for whatever reason.
On “The Schadenfreude Express”
I just find it harder and harder to have anything to say about any of these people.
They're like a bunch of monkeys in a barrel. "Oh look, those monkeys are out of control, just flinging poo around, bearing their teeth and shrieking!".
Yes, because they're monkeys. In a barrel.
I look for ways to minimize the blast radius of this crazy juvenile bullshit, but it's mostly - almost completely - beyond whatever meager resources I can bring to bear.
I mean, I can call my rep and senators, but they're basically already doing what they can. I can show up for the demonstrations etc. but the folks driving the bus at the moment obviously do not give one single solitary flying f*** about any of that.
I appreciate the efforts of those folks who have some influence over it all, but a lot of the time either their hands are tied too, or the process of containing these knuckleheads through legal or procedural means just takes too long to prevent damage from being done.
I'm just waiting for this crap to be over. We'll see what's left at that point.
If we really, really, really want to keep people like these the hell away from any kind of social or political power going forward, there are going to have to be some serious come to Jesus moments at some point.
And I just don't think we - Americans, collectively - have the stomach for it.
"It'd be too divisive"
"Let's come together now"
"Look forward, not back"
All of that is no small part of how we got here.
Trump et al are gonna come after anyone and anything they don't like, and they're gonna use as much of the full power of the state as they can muster to do it. Because Trump himself is a nasty vindictive piece of work, and the folks he has surrounded himself with are a bunch of loser weirdos who find hurting other people - ruining the lives of other people in no small number of cases - to be a lot of fun.
The rest of the world is basically just working around us at this point. And are looking for ways to make us as irrelevant - as unnecessary for their own security and prosperity - as they can.
Or else figuring out ways to play our leadership for their own advantage.
It's a nightmare. If there wasn't so much damage being done, it'd be comical. And, at moments, it kinda is.
But mostly it's a nightmare.
Good luck to Bolton, he said mean things about Trump and now Trump has an army. And a long memory.
On “David Brooks in Laodicea”
I haven't logged on to a computer since I retired
When I retired one of my goals was to spend as much time as possible around living things.
So far, so good.
"
Showing a basic respect for people, no matter their station in life, is a pretty good path to take through life. Costs nothing, builds trust and connection. Makes that good serendipity flow. Even if there's nothing in it for you, personally, it's worthwhile.
People respond to being seen and heard.
Congratulations on retiring, Marty!! As my brother-in-law says, you have entered the promised land. :)
"
My personal take on what we typically call "welfare" programs - food stamps, Medicaid, etc. - is that they are best thought of as insurance.
Everybody pays in, but you generally only get a return if you need it. And needing it generally means you've come into some kind of bad luck. Or maybe done something stupid, but I'll leave it to a better mind than mine to try to define the fine line between whether bad luck and folly.
Most of pay for car insurance, health insurance, liability and fire insurance on our homes if we have them.
If you're lucky, you never get a dime back. But you're a dope if you complain, because sometimes you're not lucky.
And yeah, if sending Jeff Bezos a couple hundred bucks a month for groceries is somehow gonna make folks quite complaining about it all, I can live with that.
As long as he pays in at a rate comparable to his wealth and income. ;)
"
How the "general welfare" clause's interpretation has changed since the Constitution was written
It's interesting to consider the philosophical differences between, for example, Hamilton and Madison. Or between Jefferson and Adams. Etc.
But sometimes it's even more informative to look at what the early Congresses actually passed as law.
Before the US Code was compiled in 1926, laws passed by Congress were first published as a single document, then compiled into the United States Statutes at Large. They're available online at the Library of Congress (just follow the link). They're not as easily searchable as the US Code - the laws are just listed in chronological order as they were passed - but as casual reading they're really interesting. They give an insight into what the kinds of things that occupied the minds of Congress in the first 150 years of the nation.
A lot of the stuff is clearly in the general interest of the nation at large. And a lot of the stuff is of interest to, at best, only certain regions or industries.
The Second Congress, for example, seemed interested to a remarkable degree in the cod fisheries. Which was obviously of great interest to New England. And, which was a significant export industry at the time. But I'm not sure anyone south of Massachusetts got much out of it.
Required disability insurance for seamen, too. But not farmers, or artisans, or merchants, or anyone else.
I'm sure a general public interest can be construed in there - most foreign trade was conducted by sea - but why just them?
The difference between what people say and what they do can be illuminating.
"
There's a lot to unpack in this post, it goes in so many directions. Or maybe more accurately, affords so many points of entry and engagement.
Some random thoughts.
The tariff thing is idiotic. Not because tariffs are always or inevitably bad, but because they are being applied to correct a problem (trade imbalance) that is not necessarily a problem in the first place. And as the article calls out, they are being applied without any particular insight into their real effects. And, applied chaotically and unpredictably, which is anathema for business planning.
Shorter me: these guys have no idea WTF they are about. Other than perhaps setting the stage for case-by-case exceptions, shakedowns basically, in exchange for favors.
Which would be in character for the folks involved.
I though this, from Somin, was... odd:
Really? I guess there's a sense in which this could be so - doing actual research and investigation into a subject could lead you to conclusions that are non-obvious to the casual observer. But it seems like that should be a possible (but not necessary) outcome of academic work, rather than its point.
Maybe Somin just like being contrarian.
I first came across the message in Revelation to the Laodicean church in a Sunday sermon when I was a kid. Our minister was exhorting his pretty comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class suburban Long Island Episcopal flock to be a bit more serious in their pursuit of spiritual life.
I'm not sure how all of that was received by the congregation, to be honest. The phrase "OK, but can we please just go to lunch now?" may have crossed a few minds. But for whatever reason I still remember it, 50 odd years later.
And what I still take away from it is what I think of as the moral hazard of privilege. Or, if privilege is too strong or loaded a word, of being comfortable. Of having enough, and not having that be at any particular risk.
I think about that a lot lately. Especially as we see the violence (both threatened and real) and persecution being unleashed on anyone in our country who is "suspiciously brown".
The folks behind this are basically lawless. We can't really rely on the law and the courts to curb what are flagrant abuses of power, because the courts are often deferential to them, and even when they aren't, these guys just don't give a shit.
At some point it may be - likely will be, unless there is some meaningful change in regime - for ordinary people to intervene. In whatever way.
Which will not be without risk. Risk of jail, risk of violence, risk of harrassment in a variety of forms. It's not an idle threat, as anyone old enough to remember e.g. the J Edgar days will recall.
Which puts people who live in some degree of comfort - material sufficiency and safety - in a difficult place. Because they have something to lose.
Cue "Bobbie McGee" here.
Our privilege (those of us that have it, which definitely includes me) can make cowards of us.
And that thought weighs on my mind a lot lately.
I see that I still appear to be in the grip of steroid inspired verbosity, so I'll end there.
On “Giving Away the Store”
This may actually be the salient point.
Could be.
The kinds of grant money that are likely to be at risk are funds that we currently use, and have used in the past, to prepare for the effects of climate change and for general infrastructure, e.g. repairing a bridge in town. There are some smaller grants - six figure - for energy conservation and decarbonization programs.
The climate change stuff is especially relevant because we're a peninsula, with water on three sides. The lower lying areas include the site of the town's electric plant.
We'll muddle through, but it's gonna be a loss.
It's the lawyers that are gonna show up on the "charge us money" tab.
Really, I just brought it all up as an example of class based segregation. A sufficient number of people in town don't want more people coming to town who can't afford single family houses.
"
Roid Rage
Yeah, I'll be glad to be done with the steroid. It's like pushing the magic "asshole" button.
Haven't followed today's goings on in any detail but I'm assuming it's been just as weird and inexplicable as the Alaska thing. Just in different ways.
These days I find myself wishing I lived in some small, competent, unambitious country. Denmark or the Netherlands, maybe? Ireland? Botswana perhaps.
Go about my business, live my life in peace, and watch the "Great Powers" choke on their own hubris.
Not jaundiced or despairing, really, just so freaking tired of the pointless dick-measuring drama.
Better days.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.