We can afford, as a country, to simply give every person enough food to live on.
Hayek, writing in either the 1920s or 30s, said the US was so fabulously wealthy there was no reason anyone should want for adequate food, shelter, or medical attention. And that clearly the state had a role in providing those.
One of Cain's Laws™ says that modern societies need to establish a floor under outcomes, not just opportunities; not doing so will end badly. How high the floor and how to deliver it are open for discussion; anyone who argues against a floor is arguing for the pitchforks and torches to come out eventually.
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?
Perhaps it was too difficult to assure an adequate number of people willing to be cod fishermen. That kind of insurance may have been seen as necessary to keep a major export industry going strong. No need for the carrot for other jobs.
Means testing requires an administrative state and the collection of a lot of very gameable data. I'm pretty sure it would cost less to mail the check to Bezos than it would to try to exclude him in order to keep the money only in the hands of the needy.
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. ;)
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.
Not to mention that they are being used more to extort foreign policy goals (or, see Brazil, to benefit Trump's personal pals), rather than having anything to do with, you know, actual trade issues. Even if done by someone with a clue, that's a terrible use.
If you are going to give out food stamps, make sure that you cut some for Jeff Bezos.
That's actually not a bad idea. We have a hodgepodge of programs to support poor people, especially children, to attempt to get them enough to eat. They're better than nothing. But expensive to run, overlapping in places, and less than effective.
We can afford, as a country, to simply give every person enough food to live on. Maybe not prime rib every day, maybe not the junk food they love, but enough decent quality food for them to live on. Quite possibly for less money than we now spend, not least because we ditch the overhead of determining eligibility. If you're breathing, you're eligible.
Now most likely people like Bezos and Musk, or you and me for that matter, won't bother to collect the benefit. We can eat basically what we like without it. But still, it's worth doing.
Not that I'm optimistic about getting such a thing enacted. But the fact that it's not politically popular doesn't negate it's merits.
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.
"Academics are supposed to discover and promote counterintuitive, nonobvious ideas."
There's an old trope among (non-academic) lawyers that lawyering amounts to trying to prove that your ideas are NOT original. This may be outdated now, in light of the cavalier attitude toward precedent exhibited by the SCROTUS. (R for Roberts).
I am entirely with lj on this:
Jesus was mad at those who stayed in the middle, and on that point (and probably that point alone) am I Christ-like.
Y'all may have gathered as much from my rant on "deMAGAfication". No steroids involved there, BTW.
Wikipedia tells me this Ilya Somin character is a young (age 52) Jewish immigrant from the old USSR, which surely explains some of his views. But I gather he's not as opposed to Christianist fascism as I am. His lukewarm attitude toward "intuition" is, IMO, nothing but elitist arrogance.
Especially when it comes to justice (as opposed to The Law), intuition is all we have. Even if you intuit a deity whose edicts are not to be questioned or even interpreted, you -- a human being living among other human beings -- rely on "intuition" to define justice, or more specifically INjustice. Intuition is malleable, of course, and reshaping people's intuition is the overarching goal of the Vast Right-Wing Noise Machine.
This coming Saturday, August 23, there is planned a "March for Jesus" in Boston. Dollars to donuts, this is part of the VRWNM campaign to shape public intuition. If I had it in my power, I'd put up a huge billboard of my "What Color Is YOUR Jesus?" meme on the Common, just for the day. It would be interesting to see whether the marchers intuit a Scandinavian White, a Deportable Brown, or an Artificial Orange Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
--TP
PS: I am pleased to see that russell correctly calls it "Revelation" -- no "s".
Well, I suppose it all comes down again to the concept of purity. It would be great if everyone saw and agreed with the analysis of the underlying problem as laid out by russell - don't forget that I always said he should be ROTU.
But since this is unfortunately not the case, I believe the next best thing is to make aspects of the case to the greatest number of people, whether rich or poor, left or right, and hopefully among them some with power to influence the course of policy.
I know next to nothing about David Brooks, but he writes opinion pieces in the NYT, still one of the most influential media outlets in America, particularly I would have thought among the rich and powerful. If it takes such a piece from such a source to get part of the issue across to even a fraction of the currently unconvinced/unaware, this seems to me worthwhile.
Meanwhile, if Brooks is condescending, a narcissist, an adulterer, or the conscienceless discarder of a longtime wife for a younger woman, this seems to me irrelevant to the analysis of the problem of segregation, societal fragmentation and inequality. If we are quoting Jesus on this matter, didn't he also say Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?
How the "general welfare" clause's interpretation has changed since the Constitution was written, and the impacts those changes have had on the country. Evolution of "General Welfare" Clause
How the interpretation of the "general welfare" clause has changed since the Constitution was written, and how those changes have impacted the country. Evolution of "General Welfare" Clause
To piggy back on JanieM's criticism there: It has obviously not occurred to him -- or if it has, he declines to believe it -- that "benefitting someone in some way" might well benefit everyone else too, even if only indirectly. But then, some people don't seem to think that a happier, healthier populace could possibly be good for everyone. (For what definition of "good," he might ask...)
The general sense that I get of him and many other libertarianish folks is that every time they look at a public good, they start trying to convert it into smaller piles of private goods for which they can find deserving owners. It's the oft-quoted Thatcher bit about there being no such thing as society.
The power to spend money for the "general welfare" is a power to spend for purposes that benefit virtually everyone or implement other parts of the Constitution, not a power to spend on anything that Congress concludes might benefit someone in some way. The Supreme Court disagrees, and so do most legal scholars.
It has obviously not occurred to him -- or if it has, he declines to believe it -- that "benefitting someone in some way" might well benefit everyone else too, even if only indirectly. But then, some people don't seem to think that a happier, healthier populace could possibly be good for everyone. (For what definition of "good," he might ask...)
And then of course we get back to my longstanding question of: whose money (water, air, land, wealth of any sort) is it, anyhow? Does it belong to whoever grabs the most, or can the rest of us band together (as a government, perhaps) and insist on a relatively fair distribution?
Russell is a far better man than I in thinking that David Brooks is “nice.” But then again, when I was in my early teens, “nice” was one of the more damning judgments you could make about a person.
I haven’t actually read a full Brooks column for years. The links below provide a good snapshot of why. (AKA life is too short.) From just last night at BJ, where Anne Laurie calls him a “blog favorite chew toy." One about how he plays fast and loose with (or is just plain ignorant about) statistics.
(Innumeracy is endemic among journalists and opinion-havers, but that’s a topic for another time.)
From the archive (since I don’t have a login to the Times), a column he wrote halfway between the year he was divorced from his wife of long standing and the year he married his intern (much gossip about that online, but Wikipedia has only the dates):
https://web.archive.org/web/20150304114417/https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/opinion/david-brooks-leaving-and-cleaving.html
(Sorry about the bare, margin-busting link. I couldn't get the embedded archive link to work right in the comment box in the time I had available to play with it.)
Given that the alleged "paper of record" saw fit to print that moralizing, self-serving drivel, an over-the-top take-down doesn’t come amiss.
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.
The town is likely to lose several million dollars in state money
This may actually be the salient point. Here, it isn't a matter of losing state money (which may be earmarked for stuff they aren't enthusiastic about anyway). Instead, it's fines charged to the town. New Expenses!
The dollar amount may be a wash. But the difference in perception between "stop giving us money (with strings)" and "charge us money" is apparently quite significant.
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.
Maybe you're having a (perfectly understandable) inflammatory reaction to the state of the nation, too.
This. Also, I have known several near and dear who have had Roid Rage - it's quite entertaining when you realise what it is. Anyway, IMO, you have no need whatsoever for more concision. What you say is always worth listening to - your jaundiced and despairing viewpoint is perfectly understandable, though nobody who knows you at all would wish it on you. This too shall pass (we devoutly hope).
Michael - Given the title of the linked piece -- "The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic" -- the author never got to the point I was expecting. What I was looking for was a reconciliation of two facts. On the one side, the author's table showing that A&H generated large amounts of tuition revenue at little expense. On the other, the administration's assertion that A&H departments had relatively few students in their degree programs. He put the conclusion right there in the title, but apparently couldn't bring himself to say it.
I think that what you are noting here is a product of the venue. It's published on the MLA site, so the readers (mostly language and literature faculty) are already oriented towards that conclusion and mostly reading for the findings. Newfield unpacks more of his conclusions when writing for the general public. It seems to me that A&H faculty should (a) have recognized that they were turning into service departments and (b) have been proactive on the question of how to be better service departments (while retaining their historical roles). The goal ought to be that when someone proposes A&H cuts, the non-A&H faculty scream.
Was more true a decade ago than today. Generative AI is convincing a segment of non-A&H faculty that a lot of the service that A&H provide for them can be handled by tech rather than teachers, because they have been using Gen AI to make their own work more readable. The same is true of coding and calculation. The high-ROI STEM fields use AI to parse the code they write to crunch their data, and they use MATLAB to do their calculations...
...relying, of course, on the judgment and understanding they developed while having to learn to write, code, and calculate the old-fashioned way. The high school graduates that come through those service classes are not going to go through that struggle, and therefore not develop that judgment themselves.
Whatever the case, the non-A&H faculty have a lot less solidarity with the A&H faculty than they used to, thanks to two decades of austerity budgets, and especially now as their research grants are being stripped away.
It's a bad scene all around. And the biggest casualties in all this are the teaching mission of the universities and the economic futures of the students who are being forced into ever increasing debt and being given a much degraded version of an education thanks to all of this.
Our lecturer's union is fighting against this trend (being wholly dedicated to the educational mission and having the majority of its members teaching in service departments). Our working conditions are our students' learning conditions. But the regents and the professional management class at the university system level are entirely isolated from the teaching mission side of things and think that this level of precarity gives them more flexibility when dealing with state budget austerity. They don't care about the quality of the student education, only that the quality of that education relative to their rival institutions (you know, the US News rankings, and admissions numbers) remain high enough to hold place or move up.
It's quite sad - moreso when you are in the middle of it and care more about the educational mission than about all of the rest.
The only thing that seems to budge the statewide people is when they start to worry about bad publicity damaging the institutional reputation. But that sort of media attention is also hard to come by. It takes a combination of really bad circumstances and massive coordination efforts to get media attention, and it's really hard to keep that attention for more than a blink with so much shit flooding the zone every single day.
They went nowhere because the Town Council basically said "We don't have funds to pay the fines for non-compliance."
In my case, the no-comply locals are basically taking the "damn the torpedos, full speed ahead" approach.
The town is likely to lose several million dollars in state money. Competitive grants, mostly, for which we will no longer qualify. And we're likely to spend a lot of money - I don't know how much, but it will be a sum measured in legal billable hours - arguing with the state in court about it all.
Where is the money for legal fees gonna come from? :: shrug ::
The legality of the law has already been established at the MA Supreme Court. Precedent has already been set by other towns that have challenged all of this on similar grounds and lost. We don't really have a leg to stand on.
The state isn't really asking a lot, here. They want the town to identify some areas where people can build multi-family housing without pulling a special permit. The areas the town government had identified are areas where there is already multi-family housing, or which are already zoned for mixed use. There is no requirement to actually build anything, we just have to say *if* somebody wants to build multi-family housing in a particular area, someday, they don't have to pull a special permit to do so.
NIMBY strikes again.
They went nowhere because the Town Council basically said "We don't have funds to pay the fines for non-compliance."
In my case, the no-comply locals are basically taking the "damn the torpedos, full speed ahead" approach.
The town is likely to lose several million dollars in state money. Competitive grants, mostly, for which we will no longer qualify. And we're likely to spend a lot of money - I don't know how much, but it will be a sum measured in legal billable hours - arguing with the state in court about it all.
Where is the money for legal fees gonna come from? :: shrug ::
The legality of the law has already been established at the MA Supreme Court. Precedent has already been set by other towns that have challenged all of this on similar grounds and lost. We don't really have a leg to stand on.
The state isn't really asking a lot, here. They want the town to identify some areas where people can build multi-family housing without pulling a special permit. The areas the town government had identified are areas where there is already multi-family housing, or which are already zoned for mixed use. There is no requirement to actually build anything, we just have to say *if* somebody wants to build multi-family housing in a particular area, someday, they don't have to pull a special permit to do so.
NIMBY strikes again.
Re the link in nous's 3:12...
I'm on the author's side, mostly. So I'll get my initial childish response out of the way: if you're going to argue numbers, for pity's sake format the numbers so they're legible. My normal response when given a table that I have to copy-and-paste into a different piece of software to read conveniently is to just stop there.
Given the title of the linked piece -- "The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic" -- the author never got to the point I was expecting. What I was looking for was a reconciliation of two facts. On the one side, the author's table showing that A&H generated large amounts of tuition revenue at little expense. On the other, the administration's assertion that A&H departments had relatively few students in their degree programs. He put the conclusion right there in the title, but apparently couldn't bring himself to say it.
It seems to me that A&H faculty should (a) have recognized that they were turning into service departments and (b) have been proactive on the question of how to be better service departments (while retaining their historical roles). The goal ought to be that when someone proposes A&H cuts, the non-A&H faculty scream.
Long ago when I was a TA at the University of Texas, the state legislature proposed what was basically doing away with us and requiring full-time faculty to do the work. I went down to the Capitol the day they had public hearings. Two faculty members killed the bill. First, the head of the math department testified that with his current staff, the dept would have to drop the services they were providing to the engineering school: calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations classes. Second, the head of the engineering college testified that he would pretty much have to shut down if that happened because his faculty would go elsewhere rather than teach the math classes. Worth noting that the math department already segregated students. Both linear algebra and differential equations were taught in two versions, one for engineering students and one for people outside of engineering.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “David Brooks in Laodicea”
Hungry people don't stay hungry for long - RATM
"
We can afford, as a country, to simply give every person enough food to live on.
Hayek, writing in either the 1920s or 30s, said the US was so fabulously wealthy there was no reason anyone should want for adequate food, shelter, or medical attention. And that clearly the state had a role in providing those.
One of Cain's Laws™ says that modern societies need to establish a floor under outcomes, not just opportunities; not doing so will end badly. How high the floor and how to deliver it are open for discussion; anyone who argues against a floor is arguing for the pitchforks and torches to come out eventually.
"
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?
Perhaps it was too difficult to assure an adequate number of people willing to be cod fishermen. That kind of insurance may have been seen as necessary to keep a major export industry going strong. No need for the carrot for other jobs.
"
Means testing requires an administrative state and the collection of a lot of very gameable data. I'm pretty sure it would cost less to mail the check to Bezos than it would to try to exclude him in order to keep the money only in the hands of the needy.
"
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. ;)
"
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.
Not to mention that they are being used more to extort foreign policy goals (or, see Brazil, to benefit Trump's personal pals), rather than having anything to do with, you know, actual trade issues. Even if done by someone with a clue, that's a terrible use.
"
If you are going to give out food stamps, make sure that you cut some for Jeff Bezos.
That's actually not a bad idea. We have a hodgepodge of programs to support poor people, especially children, to attempt to get them enough to eat. They're better than nothing. But expensive to run, overlapping in places, and less than effective.
We can afford, as a country, to simply give every person enough food to live on. Maybe not prime rib every day, maybe not the junk food they love, but enough decent quality food for them to live on. Quite possibly for less money than we now spend, not least because we ditch the overhead of determining eligibility. If you're breathing, you're eligible.
Now most likely people like Bezos and Musk, or you and me for that matter, won't bother to collect the benefit. We can eat basically what we like without it. But still, it's worth doing.
Not that I'm optimistic about getting such a thing enacted. But the fact that it's not politically popular doesn't negate it's merits.
"
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.
"
"Academics are supposed to discover and promote counterintuitive, nonobvious ideas."
There's an old trope among (non-academic) lawyers that lawyering amounts to trying to prove that your ideas are NOT original. This may be outdated now, in light of the cavalier attitude toward precedent exhibited by the SCROTUS. (R for Roberts).
I am entirely with lj on this:
Y'all may have gathered as much from my rant on "deMAGAfication". No steroids involved there, BTW.
Wikipedia tells me this Ilya Somin character is a young (age 52) Jewish immigrant from the old USSR, which surely explains some of his views. But I gather he's not as opposed to Christianist fascism as I am. His lukewarm attitude toward "intuition" is, IMO, nothing but elitist arrogance.
Especially when it comes to justice (as opposed to The Law), intuition is all we have. Even if you intuit a deity whose edicts are not to be questioned or even interpreted, you -- a human being living among other human beings -- rely on "intuition" to define justice, or more specifically INjustice. Intuition is malleable, of course, and reshaping people's intuition is the overarching goal of the Vast Right-Wing Noise Machine.
This coming Saturday, August 23, there is planned a "March for Jesus" in Boston. Dollars to donuts, this is part of the VRWNM campaign to shape public intuition. If I had it in my power, I'd put up a huge billboard of my "What Color Is YOUR Jesus?" meme on the Common, just for the day. It would be interesting to see whether the marchers intuit a Scandinavian White, a Deportable Brown, or an Artificial Orange Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
--TP
PS: I am pleased to see that russell correctly calls it "Revelation" -- no "s".
"
Well, I suppose it all comes down again to the concept of purity. It would be great if everyone saw and agreed with the analysis of the underlying problem as laid out by russell - don't forget that I always said he should be ROTU.
But since this is unfortunately not the case, I believe the next best thing is to make aspects of the case to the greatest number of people, whether rich or poor, left or right, and hopefully among them some with power to influence the course of policy.
I know next to nothing about David Brooks, but he writes opinion pieces in the NYT, still one of the most influential media outlets in America, particularly I would have thought among the rich and powerful. If it takes such a piece from such a source to get part of the issue across to even a fraction of the currently unconvinced/unaware, this seems to me worthwhile.
Meanwhile, if Brooks is condescending, a narcissist, an adulterer, or the conscienceless discarder of a longtime wife for a younger woman, this seems to me irrelevant to the analysis of the problem of segregation, societal fragmentation and inequality. If we are quoting Jesus on this matter, didn't he also say Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?
"
How the "general welfare" clause's interpretation has changed since the Constitution was written, and the impacts those changes have had on the country.
Evolution of "General Welfare" Clause
"
How the interpretation of the "general welfare" clause has changed since the Constitution was written, and how those changes have impacted the country.
Evolution of "General Welfare" Clause
"
To piggy back on JanieM's criticism there: It has obviously not occurred to him -- or if it has, he declines to believe it -- that "benefitting someone in some way" might well benefit everyone else too, even if only indirectly. But then, some people don't seem to think that a happier, healthier populace could possibly be good for everyone. (For what definition of "good," he might ask...)
The general sense that I get of him and many other libertarianish folks is that every time they look at a public good, they start trying to convert it into smaller piles of private goods for which they can find deserving owners. It's the oft-quoted Thatcher bit about there being no such thing as society.
"
And as to this passage that lj quoted:
It has obviously not occurred to him -- or if it has, he declines to believe it -- that "benefitting someone in some way" might well benefit everyone else too, even if only indirectly. But then, some people don't seem to think that a happier, healthier populace could possibly be good for everyone. (For what definition of "good," he might ask...)
And then of course we get back to my longstanding question of: whose money (water, air, land, wealth of any sort) is it, anyhow? Does it belong to whoever grabs the most, or can the rest of us band together (as a government, perhaps) and insist on a relatively fair distribution?
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Okay, I'll see what I can do about the archive link. Ugh.
(Fixed, I think.)
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Russell is a far better man than I in thinking that David Brooks is “nice.” But then again, when I was in my early teens, “nice” was one of the more damning judgments you could make about a person.
I haven’t actually read a full Brooks column for years. The links below provide a good snapshot of why. (AKA life is too short.)
From just last night at BJ, where Anne Laurie calls him a “blog favorite chew toy."
One about how he plays fast and loose with (or is just plain ignorant about) statistics.
(Innumeracy is endemic among journalists and opinion-havers, but that’s a topic for another time.)
From the archive (since I don’t have a login to the Times), a column he wrote halfway between the year he was divorced from his wife of long standing and the year he married his intern (much gossip about that online, but Wikipedia has only the dates):
https://web.archive.org/web/20150304114417/https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/opinion/david-brooks-leaving-and-cleaving.html
(Sorry about the bare, margin-busting link. I couldn't get the embedded archive link to work right in the comment box in the time I had available to play with it.)
Given that the alleged "paper of record" saw fit to print that moralizing, self-serving drivel, an over-the-top take-down doesn’t come amiss.
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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.
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The town is likely to lose several million dollars in state money
This may actually be the salient point. Here, it isn't a matter of losing state money (which may be earmarked for stuff they aren't enthusiastic about anyway). Instead, it's fines charged to the town. New Expenses!
The dollar amount may be a wash. But the difference in perception between "stop giving us money (with strings)" and "charge us money" is apparently quite significant.
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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.
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Maybe you're having a (perfectly understandable) inflammatory reaction to the state of the nation, too.
This. Also, I have known several near and dear who have had Roid Rage - it's quite entertaining when you realise what it is. Anyway, IMO, you have no need whatsoever for more concision. What you say is always worth listening to - your jaundiced and despairing viewpoint is perfectly understandable, though nobody who knows you at all would wish it on you. This too shall pass (we devoutly hope).
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Michael - Given the title of the linked piece -- "The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic" -- the author never got to the point I was expecting. What I was looking for was a reconciliation of two facts. On the one side, the author's table showing that A&H generated large amounts of tuition revenue at little expense. On the other, the administration's assertion that A&H departments had relatively few students in their degree programs. He put the conclusion right there in the title, but apparently couldn't bring himself to say it.
I think that what you are noting here is a product of the venue. It's published on the MLA site, so the readers (mostly language and literature faculty) are already oriented towards that conclusion and mostly reading for the findings. Newfield unpacks more of his conclusions when writing for the general public.
It seems to me that A&H faculty should (a) have recognized that they were turning into service departments and (b) have been proactive on the question of how to be better service departments (while retaining their historical roles). The goal ought to be that when someone proposes A&H cuts, the non-A&H faculty scream.
Was more true a decade ago than today. Generative AI is convincing a segment of non-A&H faculty that a lot of the service that A&H provide for them can be handled by tech rather than teachers, because they have been using Gen AI to make their own work more readable. The same is true of coding and calculation. The high-ROI STEM fields use AI to parse the code they write to crunch their data, and they use MATLAB to do their calculations...
...relying, of course, on the judgment and understanding they developed while having to learn to write, code, and calculate the old-fashioned way. The high school graduates that come through those service classes are not going to go through that struggle, and therefore not develop that judgment themselves.
Whatever the case, the non-A&H faculty have a lot less solidarity with the A&H faculty than they used to, thanks to two decades of austerity budgets, and especially now as their research grants are being stripped away.
It's a bad scene all around. And the biggest casualties in all this are the teaching mission of the universities and the economic futures of the students who are being forced into ever increasing debt and being given a much degraded version of an education thanks to all of this.
Our lecturer's union is fighting against this trend (being wholly dedicated to the educational mission and having the majority of its members teaching in service departments). Our working conditions are our students' learning conditions. But the regents and the professional management class at the university system level are entirely isolated from the teaching mission side of things and think that this level of precarity gives them more flexibility when dealing with state budget austerity. They don't care about the quality of the student education, only that the quality of that education relative to their rival institutions (you know, the US News rankings, and admissions numbers) remain high enough to hold place or move up.
It's quite sad - moreso when you are in the middle of it and care more about the educational mission than about all of the rest.
The only thing that seems to budge the statewide people is when they start to worry about bad publicity damaging the institutional reputation. But that sort of media attention is also hard to come by. It takes a combination of really bad circumstances and massive coordination efforts to get media attention, and it's really hard to keep that attention for more than a blink with so much shit flooding the zone every single day.
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They went nowhere because the Town Council basically said "We don't have funds to pay the fines for non-compliance."
In my case, the no-comply locals are basically taking the "damn the torpedos, full speed ahead" approach.
The town is likely to lose several million dollars in state money. Competitive grants, mostly, for which we will no longer qualify. And we're likely to spend a lot of money - I don't know how much, but it will be a sum measured in legal billable hours - arguing with the state in court about it all.
Where is the money for legal fees gonna come from? :: shrug ::
The legality of the law has already been established at the MA Supreme Court. Precedent has already been set by other towns that have challenged all of this on similar grounds and lost. We don't really have a leg to stand on.
The state isn't really asking a lot, here. They want the town to identify some areas where people can build multi-family housing without pulling a special permit. The areas the town government had identified are areas where there is already multi-family housing, or which are already zoned for mixed use. There is no requirement to actually build anything, we just have to say *if* somebody wants to build multi-family housing in a particular area, someday, they don't have to pull a special permit to do so.
NIMBY strikes again.
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They went nowhere because the Town Council basically said "We don't have funds to pay the fines for non-compliance."
In my case, the no-comply locals are basically taking the "damn the torpedos, full speed ahead" approach.
The town is likely to lose several million dollars in state money. Competitive grants, mostly, for which we will no longer qualify. And we're likely to spend a lot of money - I don't know how much, but it will be a sum measured in legal billable hours - arguing with the state in court about it all.
Where is the money for legal fees gonna come from? :: shrug ::
The legality of the law has already been established at the MA Supreme Court. Precedent has already been set by other towns that have challenged all of this on similar grounds and lost. We don't really have a leg to stand on.
The state isn't really asking a lot, here. They want the town to identify some areas where people can build multi-family housing without pulling a special permit. The areas the town government had identified are areas where there is already multi-family housing, or which are already zoned for mixed use. There is no requirement to actually build anything, we just have to say *if* somebody wants to build multi-family housing in a particular area, someday, they don't have to pull a special permit to do so.
NIMBY strikes again.
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Re the link in nous's 3:12...
I'm on the author's side, mostly. So I'll get my initial childish response out of the way: if you're going to argue numbers, for pity's sake format the numbers so they're legible. My normal response when given a table that I have to copy-and-paste into a different piece of software to read conveniently is to just stop there.
Given the title of the linked piece -- "The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic" -- the author never got to the point I was expecting. What I was looking for was a reconciliation of two facts. On the one side, the author's table showing that A&H generated large amounts of tuition revenue at little expense. On the other, the administration's assertion that A&H departments had relatively few students in their degree programs. He put the conclusion right there in the title, but apparently couldn't bring himself to say it.
It seems to me that A&H faculty should (a) have recognized that they were turning into service departments and (b) have been proactive on the question of how to be better service departments (while retaining their historical roles). The goal ought to be that when someone proposes A&H cuts, the non-A&H faculty scream.
Long ago when I was a TA at the University of Texas, the state legislature proposed what was basically doing away with us and requiring full-time faculty to do the work. I went down to the Capitol the day they had public hearings. Two faculty members killed the bill. First, the head of the math department testified that with his current staff, the dept would have to drop the services they were providing to the engineering school: calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations classes. Second, the head of the engineering college testified that he would pretty much have to shut down if that happened because his faculty would go elsewhere rather than teach the math classes. Worth noting that the math department already segregated students. Both linear algebra and differential equations were taught in two versions, one for engineering students and one for people outside of engineering.
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