The AIDS thing was pretty nice though.
Reading something by this guy the other day made me wonder if he wasn't k**m*t, the Obamacare apologist.
Remember when Vox was going to transform the media?
Bush was right on AIDS, and if Medicare part D had been adequately funded he'd have been right on that, too. Still, two botched wars, turning a surplus into a deficit, and the biggest crash since 1929, all while acting like a giant clown and alienating potential allies... it's a little hard to forgive. Also torture. If he'd basically been FDR on all other points except torture I'd still have a hard time with him.
"I'm a utilitarian" does not mean that you take the number of lives saved and subtract their body count and check if the result is positive.
Right. You have to weight by age and quality of life adjusted years.
His work on AIDS and especially in Africa is my go-to example of something he did that I could legitimately support (so I'm not deranged in hating him!) That said it is kind of amusing in a sad way how little credit he got for it. The only people who thought it was a good thing to do were the people directly (and very, very) opposed to him and almost everything else he did, and the people who supported/defended him mostly thought that kind of thing was a bad idea.
7 seems about right. Anyway, I'm very glad to read that it worked. I had sort of forgotten about it.
Cards on the table: I'm a utilitarian twat.
Oh good, another onetime teenage blogger who recently graduated from Harvard after studying philosophy. Quite the hivemind they're assembling over there.
Why why why the fuck is anyone reading that site? Have people not had their fill of twenty something Ivy league alums with no life experience saying stupid shit about a wide range of subjects?
He also did ok on homelessness, mainly by getting a bit luckier on who he delegated too.
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/29/opinion/frum-less-homelessness/index.html
I think that's about it.
I wonder how the push to expand home ownership worked?
Why why why the fuck is anyone reading that site? Have people not had their fill of twenty something Ivy league alums with no life experience saying stupid shit about a wide range of subjects?
Why no, now that you ask, I haven't. I'm ready for more. Much much more. Bring on the long reads you over-privileged tyro scum!
9: It seems like a lot of people were done no favors by the moral philosophy class they took in college.
There's another site I read occasionally where the posters and commenters are a fairly intelligent bunch overall. They are, however, overly fond of applying undergrad moral philosophy categories to things, and when they do they immediately start sounding like precocious 12 year olds.
Ivy league alums with no life experience
You know whose blogging I completely love right now? That Mayhew guy at Balloon Juice. I didn't think I cared that much about the mechanics of health insurance, but the right blogger will make anything interesting. I used to say that Ezra had made his name as a healthcare blogger, but he hadn't put in his time in the healthcare industry, so he didn't have anything but synthesis to offer. This guy is the opposite of that. Love his work.
17: Second that; Mayhew also has interesting things to say about being a soccer referee
The obvious difference is that the AIDS work could have happened without him, but there is no way the Iraq war could have happened without him.
Why why why the fuck is anyone reading that site?
The historical map posts are a lot of fun.
That is all I read.
Dubya, Dick Cheney, John Yoo, and the members of Godsmack are tied up in the road, and a runaway Google car is barreling down the road at them. You are standing next to a button that will change the robots.txt file for the road and divert the car down an alley. However, Terry Shiavo is in the alley.
Do you press the button, or go read Vox for 10 more minutes?
Bush tried to turn us into a one party state via the politicization of the attorney general. Also, 9/11. No reason he should get a pass on that.
Wait, why would I read Vox instead of sticking around to see how things turned out?
At least he didn't use the attorney general to try to enforce firearms laws or voting rules.
I was reflecting the other day that the entire liberal blog project has been a gigantic failure. Everyone turned out to be either boring partisan hacks (Kos, Talking Points Memo), glib, trend-following "contrarians" who have revealed themselves to be college debate style bullshitters primarily interested in showing off their not that smart smarts (Yglesias, DSquared, to some extent Ezra) or just plain mentally ill. Kevin Drum and Brad DeLong are the only people I can think of who've stayed consistent over the years -- Atrios, too, and he's usually right, but he pulls it off by basically saying nothing. What a gigantic waste of my fucking life reading this crap -- at the end of the day, for all its flaws, you'd have been far better off reading the NY Times and the LA Times and putting the internet down.
It was all pretty good at pointing out obviously stupid things that Bush II was doing, though. I'll give it that.
I guess LGM has also remained impressively itself over the years.
28.2 is the answer to 28.1. Blogs are (were) good in the opposition.
28: This seems like an odd way to judge the success or failure of the liberal blog project. I would think the question would be -- did it have an effect on political discourse? Not whether the original practitioners turned out to be sellouts, or loons.
The counter-factual being presented is that Presidents Gore or Kerry would have done nothing for HIV/AIDS in Africa. I'm not buying that. Bush is getting credit for being President at a time when medical technology finally made progress there possible.
but there is no way the Iraq war could have happened without him
Are you trying to goad dsquared into coming back?
Are you trying to goad dsquared into coming back?
If that's the goal, we need a post about how the Iraq war was all the fault of the bankers.
32 This. There's only one legitimate argument, it seems to me: like Nixon to China, having a Republican helped because the loons in that party were somewhat restrained.
My favorite counterfactual along these lines is Dukakis wins in 88 and so Republican loons are baying for invasion when the wall came down, and we end up losing the Cold War.
the biggest crash since 1929
Bush gets too much blame for this. It was the culmination of a long series of bipartisan policy decisions. He gets too little blame for 9/11, as they chose to ignore the warnings of the Clinton administration (and the successful pre-2000 attacks) and take the focus off Al Qaeda.
What a gigantic waste of my fucking life reading this crap
Well, it wouldn't have so bad, except that it led you to a certain eclectic web-magazine...
Why why why the fuck is anyone reading that site?
I feel like increasingly "sites", in the sense of places with an integrated editorial mission and recognizable standards of quality control, barely exist. What we mostly have are self-editing writers independently contracted by brands for varying durations of time. The brands don't really tell you much about what you're going to get. Of course, you can find ample confirmation that "x dumb article proves y site is still dumb", but that's because the vast majority of everything on the internet is dumb in the way characteristic of written things produced to meet a quota/deadline and spark social engagement/flaming at the tempo of the news cycle.
Agree with 36. And 39. And 37, for that matter. Everybody wins.
The counter-factual being presented is that Presidents Gore or Kerry would have done nothing for HIV/AIDS in Africa.
Right. We need to apply sabremetrics here. What is Bush's KAR.*
*Kills Above Replacement
self-editing writers
I have noticed that Yglesias doesn't have the ridiculous typos that made his previous blogs look like they were written by a non-native speaker, so at least Vox seems to have copy editing of some sort.
42: But I miss the typos. They gave the illusion of a distinctive style.
28 A one liner on Twitter is generally completely sufficient for nearly all of it. Where it isn't, 5 one liners on Twitter are.
the entire liberal blog project has been a gigantic failure.
hey!
Everybody is right about everything on this thread, except Roberto in 28, who is only 95% right.
What a gigantic waste of my fucking life reading this crap -- at the end of the day, for all its flaws, you'd have been far better off reading the NY Times and the LA Times and putting the internet down.
Nah. The NYT, which is far-and-away the best newspaper in the country, nonetheless gave us WMD alarmism and still sets an agenda that fails to include diverse voices.
And some of the NYT's biggest successes are Internet successes.
I may be a special case because of my generally sheltered life, but I think I'd be considerably dumber were it not for the liberal Internet.
Also, because of the internet, I get to read a fantastic article from the LA times one day and another from the Orlando whatever the next. So no one publication is hitting it out of the park, but my reading queue is roughly a million times more informed than it would be without my internetwork of smarties feeding me smartstuff.
Also, because of the internet, I get to read a fantastic article from the LA times one day and another from the Orlando whatever the next. So no one publication is hitting it out of the park, but my reading queue is roughly a million times more informed than it would be without my internetwork of smarties feeding me smartstuff.
fails to include diverse voices
I don't know what you're talking about, they have upper middle class people from Brooklyn and the super wealthy who have places in the Hamptons, with the occasional Russian oligarch point of view. How much more diverse do you need, commie?
I will say that one thing reading liberal blogs (I guess mostly LGM) changed my mind about was the importance of unions. There were some reps who had preliminary organizing conversations with the grad students when I was in school and I was all snotty about how they didn't understand the real nature of our role, which now I feel was pretty dickish.
That is, my response was dickish- our role as grad students may or may not have been dick-like as well.
36: Agreed that he does not have all the blame, but people were screaming about a bubble years before there was a crash and Bush did nothing about it. Also agreed about 9/11. From day 1 they were trying to find a way to invade Iraq.
but people were screaming about a bubble years before there was a crash and Bush did nothing about it.
I'll endorse 36 in its entirety. Clinton had considerable culpability for the regulatory environment that led to the crash - Bush's culpability is largely limited to his failure to undo Clinton's mistakes. I think Bush's response to the crash , flawed as it was, was one of the few non-failures of his presidency. In order of importance, Clinton's fuckups included:
1. The failure to regulate off-exchange markets for derivatives appropriately.
2. Glass-Steagall repeal.
3. The renomination of Greenspan
All of these can be summarized as: Letting people like Larry Summers anywhere the fuck near economic policy.
54: I got a little carried away in letting Bush off the hook. Let me say rather that his response to the economic crisis was nowhere near as bad as his performance to that point would lead you to expect.
Agree with 54, though Larry Summers seems to have gotten a lot better recently. Basically my theory is that the entire elite world in the US, Democrat and Republican, went insane on finance and economics issues between about 1980 and 2008, and we're still sorting through the wreckage with no real end in sight.
Larry Summers seems to have gotten a lot better recently no longer be in a policy making position.
Lots of people miraculously sound like reasonable intelligent people once they're no longer on the inside. Why didn't you do all these brilliant things when you were in charge.
It turns out that screaming about a bubble (land prices in the San Joaquin Valley) is remarkably ineffective. I keep mentioning that they're based on blatantly unsustainable resource extraction and yet nothing changes! I even get the mentions on the Twitter and nothing changes. Baffling.
I think the problem is that bubble mostly means 'you can make an awful lot of money as long as you manage to be standing in front of the chair when the music ends'. Since they tend to inflate the costs of whatever is involved independently of what it's worth telling people that something is a bubble is just saying 'this is a really amazing investment until suddenly in the future it won't be'. And a lot of people tend to think of that as appealing because they think they're savvy enough to get out at the right time, or they're just generally optimistic in a 'bad things can't happen to me' way, or whatever. I mean, that or they just don't understand or have really good incentives sitting behind not hearing you or something, which probably covers a pretty massive percentage of them.
Vox is only a failure in comparison to its ambitions. Ezra, in his Juicebox Mafia days, was a terrific media critic, but he's merely a pretty decent media mogul.
Without having read the linked piece, I still have to point out that Bush's AIDS initiatives also required grantees to pledge, in writing, that their organizations promoted the abstinence-only party line.
That was also the era of the Millennium Development Goals, which had a pretty strong HIV/AIDS component. Its not like W's America was the only country actively providing foreign aid in this space.
No way am I going to click through and read an article that I know in advance is going to skyrocket my blood pressure.
I pretty much agree with everyone in this thread (comity!). Especially this Have people not had their fill of twenty something Ivy league alums with no life experience saying stupid shit about a wide range of subjects? oh my word YES. One of the reasons I love Twitter is because it connects me with other people who are smart in totally different ways, and/or have truly different experiences of the world.
On Bush and AIDS...argh. I'm glad he did it, I don't think it needed a Republican to do it, I wish he'd done more for HIV here in the US, and JRo is right on the abstinence thing. Oh, and I will remain furious until the day I die that when Gwen Ifill asked a debate question about AIDS and African-Americans, Cheney answered about Africans. And he got NO mainstream blowback for it.
Edwards didn't cover himself in glory on that debate question either, to be sure. Humiliating.
A whole lot of more or less powerless people are a whole lot better informed than in the past. That's good, as far as it goes. Which isn't nearly as far as many of us thought it might, say 10 or 12 years ago.
The powerful are still catered to my a media that tells them what they want to hear. I think basically 3 stories a week in the NYT are worth reading. Virtually none of their domestic US political coverage is in that set; in fact, I think the NYT is a huge net negative for domestic US politics.
Wasn't one of the big things that held up significant spending by the US on HIV/AIDS internationally the blocking presence of Jesse Helms?