This post pretty much describes me during and immediately after the primaries. The volume of complaints I was hearing about these guys was massively disproportionate to actual sightings in the wild. Eventually, I just put it down to the fact that I mostly ignore twitter. And I guess that was the explanation in the end.
As usual, "fuck twitter" is the moral of the story.
Absolutely agree with 1.last. And I'm rather fond of Kevin Drum's Twitter origin myth:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/08/twitter-makes-total-sense-understand-properly
Reading the OP reminded me of COINTELPRO. Similar tactics and tragically similar results even if the technologies are different.
I used to read Twitter on the bus and during periods of brief waiting. Now I use that time to read long-form journalism catch pokemon.
I read a thing I won't bother finding, pointing out that almost none of the founders or early employees of Twitter are still on speaking terms. Cursed from the ground up.
All that really needs to be said for the intellectual depth of Twitter is that it is Donald Trump's messaging platform of choice.
Also relevant: it turns out the recent heartstrings-pulling wave of missing girls in DC is entirely a phenomenon of Twitter.
FWIW, I also found the Maddow segment on Russian Twitter bots interesting (though, of course, video). Linked here: http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_15930.html#1948352
Twitter the company seems to be incapable of making Twitter the service better, except to the extent that it stopped crashing all the time after the first few years. It's entirely possible to be on twitter a lot and avoid 95% of this crap, but Twitter the company could probably also get rid of a huge amount of the crap by making some changes to how the service works.
If Twitter weren't obsessed with growth and monetization, they could charge one or two bucks a month to use it, and all the journalists and scientists and geeks would still be there, but it would cut down enormously on abuse, and also get rid of a lot of the "innovations" that are about advertising instead of users.
But yeah, I read that story and had roughly the same reaction: only on Twitter, and only because Twitter is the lazy journalist's first and last source, could this happen.
10: Yeah, there's an amount I would pay for a better twitter, maybe even more than $2/month. But I doubt many people would sign up for that without having been there for a while and without having found a relatively sane and tolerable niche to stay in.
I wonder if the recent interface change will drive people away for real. I see people looking for alternatives, but there aren't really services that are like twitter, but without the bad stuff. Just services that are different.
The great @darth on Twitter monetization.
This is also very much worth reading, and reminds me intensely of our own dear Bob McManus. A weird combination of radical scepticism and heroic credulity.
I do think design has a big impact on moderation. I hang out on a weightlifting forum, which you would expect to be an absolute hellmouth of meathead idiocy, that runs on Discourse and that's actually startlingly nice even though the moderation isn't particularly heavy. (That said I don't bother with the long-running off-topic politics thread. Perhaps there's something to be said for maintaining a deliberate public cloaca of a thread?)
I'm also on a dancer forum that's patrolled by spike-collared, goose-stepping, thread-brutalising moderator goons and that's OK...most of the time, and then it spirals into a massive outbreak of drama.
only because Twitter is the lazy journalist's first and last source
Christ this is true. So many articles now (especially in the Guardian, it seems) that boil down to "Person says silly thing on Twitter, other people angry". Except they always use a slightly less damning headline like
Fury as law firm boasts of 'great win' over parents of vulnerable children
Not the oignon: fury as France changes 2,000 spellings and drops some accents
KLM sombrero tweet mocking Mexico's World Cup exit to Holland causes fury
Mark Textor apologises for tweets that spark fury in Indonesian media
New Yorker deletes 'insensitive' Hillsborough tweet after online outrage
and the type specimen:
Stephen Fry uses Twitter to voice fury over newspaper article
(Yes, incidentally, the Graun does seem to restrict use of the word "fury" to mean solely "pointless internet squabble".)
Perhaps there's something to be said for maintaining a deliberate public cloaca of a thread?
A hiking site I read has a section like that. They actually call it "Chaff".
only on Twitter, and only because Twitter is the lazy journalist's first and last source, could this happen.
I was going to add, "also the lazy president", but that would have been slander since he also watches cable news.
Slander or libel? I'm not sure how blog comments count.
Twitter was great for that brief period at the beginning when it sort of functioned as time-delayed, word-limited, group messaging for geeks who *actually knew each other.* It started sucking the moment anybody thought that following a commercial account or celebrity would be a good idea, which instantly made it a lowest-possible-cost/effort broadcast medium which could naturally never be anything but shit.
The thing that strikes me about the Drum link in 2 is why anybody ever thought that Twitter could be a way to have conversations about things. The whole positive effect of the word limit was to discourage "conversations" and instead make tweets serve as little postcards from a particular time, event, state of mind, etc., to be shared with friends and *not fucking discussed at length because that's what meatspace is for.* Like FB without the evil, maybe.
I realise the ship has probably sailed on any better version of Twitter getting a foothold, but I like this guy's approach even if it amounts to pining for the good ol' blog days: http://micro.blog/about
a deliberate public cloaca of a thread?
This has definitely inspired me to start using 'cloaca' in this sense more often.
Were you using it often in other senses before?
20.1: basically a Facebook status update without the rest of Facebook. (Just like Google was originally Yahoo without anything except the search function.)
Adrian Chen, who wrote a good NYT investigation of Russian trolls in 2015, is skeptical:
https://twitter.com/AdrianChen/status/848590120651542529
Also, there was an analysis of twitter at about the time of new Hampshire primary:
1.16% of comments about Clinton included sexist slurs. 14.7 percent of those came from those backing Sanders.
21: Mostly in the sense of "a fish's hoo-ha."
22: Exactly so.
25.2 ISTM that the standard anti-Sanders Movement story is that the tenor and tone changed as March 2016 ended, and the possibility of getting the nomination dropped to zero. That's my view, anyway. The people who wanted to be delegates after the June Montana and California primaries were living in a different political universe than the people who wanted to be delegates in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Enh, there were both one-off, obvious astroturfers and persistent trolls. Not all of the gamergate shitheels went right wing. Obviously, this was a minority of Sanders support, even after the phase shift Charlie mentioned, but it was vocal. And of course there are still people asininely re-litigating the primary on both sides. But all that's just my impression and I don't have anything quantitative.
Yeah, a lot of it is Twitter sucks. But Twitter is pretty great, too. I've been exposed to a lot of opinions and perspectives I wouldn't be otherwise. Attempts to make a better Twitter (or to make Twitter better) seem to not work, the latter because the people at Twitter Inc. seemed to have entirely lucked into a winning idea, don't really use it, and don't understand what makes it good.
But all that's just my impression and I don't have anything quantitative.
I really don't know at all, I'm purely speculating. But it wouldn't surprise me if (a) there was a fair amount of astroturf, and (b) the astroturf was much nastier/more sexist than the actual die hard Sanders supporters, but was pretty effective at making people attribute sexist vitriol to the actual Sanders supporters.
I'm completely working off my prejudices here, though.
21: When playing D&D. The famous Cloaca of Invisibility, for example.
Used to get past the Sphincter when you can't answer the riddle.
14: I've been idly wondering if beyond a certain point, skepticism is too hard and too much work, and people just resort to paranoia.
It's sort of a weird strategy, though. Surely over-the-top sexism and nastiness, mostly targeting women, will move them into the Sanders camp, thus nefariously weakening the greatest perceived threat to Russia.
25 strikes me as the kind of Twitter hot take here that is part of the problem. The story broke yesterday as something that was presented under oath by a high ranking official to a Senate investigative committee. But within a few hours we get the response PICS OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN.
And maybe it did happen and maybe it didn't - we will find out in due course. But, you know.... maybe give a little time for the evidence to come to light and be presented and evaluated before getting all debunky?
I realized the debunky hot take draws all teh precious clicks, but we don't actually learn anything. It just degenerates into a fight between This Happened and Fake News.
33: I think there's a general principle that hostile negativity drives down turnout -- not that you'd pull Clinton voters to Sanders by calling her a murderous harridan, but that you'd dampen enthusiasm for being involved with the electoral process at all.
It's sort of a weird strategy, though. Surely over-the-top sexism and nastiness, mostly targeting women, will move them into the Sanders camp, thus nefariously weakening the greatest perceived threat to Russia.
I don't think the effort was to convince anyone to move into the Sanders camp, but rather to make everyone on the left pissed off at each other. Certainly some of the WikiLeaks were pointed in that direction as well.
36 is right. Trump pulled in assholes who never voted before, but the constant attacks on Clinton kept many of her voters at home.
It's weird, though. This particular hostility was largely targeted towards women. I didn't get any of it directly. Most of the women I know were energized by the idea of their vote being a--presumably victorious--strike against sexism. At least no one I know had their enthusiasm dampened, and if anything it became more critical to them that they vote.
But yeah, it surely contributed to inter-left sniping. But it certainly wasn't monocausal there.
I'm talking specifically about over-the-top sexist attacks on Twitter, not about more general Clintons-are-evil attacks. But I'm sure I'm in my own bubble.
25: I have witnessed the Russian troll army with my own eyes many times. It used to be very common for any Guardian article having to do with Russia or Ukraine to be besieged with comments spouting the party line, with a wide variance in quality. There was a particular pattern: a very high volume of comments right after publication, then it tapered off to a more normal rate in under an hour. At a certain point they branched out to Trump / Hillary stories
. They were allowed some creativity, which was in general a good tactic, because it meant you didn't get 500 comments saying exactly the same thing. But it meant you also got comments like Jimmy_Miller67 or somebody saying "People are foolish to trust Hillary! She takes bribe money from WALL STREET and supports interfering with other countries Olympic teams!" Or nominal Trump supporters denouncing the government of Ukraine as fascists. Like I said, high variance.
40.last: It really is a nice bubble.
Another thing -- are there really that many outright "Auschwitz was Awesome!", Nazi -- Trump supporters? On Twitter it seems like those make up maybe 20% of Trump's supporters.
42: I think I'd rather live in the bubble where all evil is caused by Russian interference instead of the innate shittiness that lurks within us all (with a little help from our Russian friends). I suspect it has higher production values and better chase scenes.
43: The alt-right is getting larger, but surely it's nowhere near that yet. Twitter does amplify extreme positions.
Eh, does the guardian really publish as much crap as Ajay says? I can't say i notice it. Certainly not as news.
I like twitter for all it's faults. Film twitter is great and it's also how I met Chani.
36, 37: Yes. And it was pretty clear that part of the overall Trump strategy was to depress Hilary/Dem turnout (and discussed in several articles that I would find too depressing to look up ...).I should look a the overall data, but I do recall it being reported in Michigan that the number of people who voted and did not choose a Presidential candidate was twice as large as 2012 in Michigan--much greater than the margin.
Fuck everything.
Mostly feeling uncomplicated sympathy and hopeful concern towards the vast majority of Russians today, I admit. Even the dumb trolls, because I'm a saint.
28: But Twitter is pretty great, too.
I agree with dal here. I like it as an interface to interesting stuff on the web. Helps me waste time on the internet much more efficiently. I think my best follow to that end has been @GreatDismal (William Gibson).
And this was the best tweet on the recent Twitter changes.
"The new Twitter avatars are a close up of the last thing a eucalyptus leaf sees."
34
Here is the testimony:
General alexander: i would take it a step higher, senator. I think what they were trying to do is drive a wedge within the democratic party between the clinton group and the sanders group and then within our nation between republicans and democrats. And i think what that does is it drives us further apart. It's in their best interest. We see that elsewhere. I'm not sure i can zone it down to a specific precinct but we expect them to create divisions within a framework and destroy our unity. You can see we're actually if you look back over the last year, we didn't need a lot of help in some of those areas. So now the question is, and where i think you have the opportunity, is how do we build that
--
Most of the women I know were energized by the idea of their vote being a--presumably victorious--strike against sexism. At least no one I know had their enthusiasm dampened, and if anything it became more critical to them that they vote.
Again, I'm talking about people I don't know. But you have to remember that you don't lose anything by steeling the resolve of someone who was going to vote anyway, if you can drive an unlikely voter away from the polls. Women who are talking to you about how their feelings about sexism affect their vote are probably sure voters. Women who have more of self-conception as moderates, though, might have been turned off by all the negativity. Also, men have the vote, and could have been turned off by the ugliness but not energized by the felt need to oppose sexism.
And i think what that does is it drives us further apart. It's in their best interest.
It also messes perfectly with Karl Rove's 51% strategy.
I dunno. You can bump people on the fence into voting, too, by increasing the apparent importance of the election. but yeah, that's probably not the takeaway most had. As for the effect on men, that was what was weird about it to me. I saw much more sexist anti-Clinton nonsense directed towards women than men. I mean, that isn't weird if it's just sexism, but it's a weird strategy if your goal is a complicated plan to convince men to not vote for Clinton.
I'm not saying that some of it wasn't astroturfing, I just think there was real turf there, too. Which is probably an awful way to construct a football field.
men have the vote
Dare to dream of alternative 19th Amendments.
Just for a century or so, for historical balance.
Until we can figure out what's going on.
but it's a weird strategy if your goal is a complicated plan to convince men to not vote for Clinton.
Assuming there were bots, I'm not sure the goal was to convince anyone to vote or not vote for anything. I suspect it was more to stir up inter-faction fighting and generally just poison the environment on the theory that some people will be so put off they'll just say "fuck it" and start ignoring politics. Certainly there are sites I stopped visiting because I got so sick of non-stop feuding by Clinton and Sanders partisans.
You can bump people on the fence into voting, too, by increasing the apparent importance of the election
Yeah, my poorly argued and supported point is that the specific behavior in question wasn't, as near as I can tell, usually bots. Bots* are usually pretty easy to distinguish, nora reed's (or whomever made arguetron) experiments notwithstanding. I'm assuming we're still talking specifically about the existence of misogynistic apparent Sanders supporters on Twitter.
* and poorly-paid second language speakers who don't have the time to get in anything deeper than a driveby, for that matter.
You can bump people on the fence into voting, too, by increasing the apparent importance of the election
If our former First Lady couldn't accomplish this with considerable effort, I doubt a bunch of twitter eggs could make a material difference in that direction.
I'm having kind of an interesting experience re-living last year as we have our biennial county Dem elections, in which I'm playing a significant administrative role.
Anyway, if I never have to hear "Bernie would've won" or "he already lost" ever again, the world would be a better place.
Anyway, "the nuclear option" is going to happen but it isn't going to be called that much because after everything that has happened over the years, it doesn't seem very nuclear.
Of course, I've always thought of it as the "Nukular Option".
The tweet in 51 is very funny, and funnier when looking at the avatar at the same time.
65
same, except that Bernie would have won.
71: That's really interesting. If you read the article, it's all about women feeling (very plausibly) that the strength and enthusiasm of Obama's support and the opposition to Clinton in '08 was about sexism even though mostly people weren't saying anything explicitly sexist. Which is a contrast to what was going on last year -- either Obama voters got more sexist in a hostile way when they were supporting Bernie, or the hostile Bernie-bros were different people than the Obama voters.
It's funny, I felt way more enthusiastic about Obama in 08 than I did about Clinton, and I really resented the narrative that Clinton had politely waited her turn and now was owed the nomination.
In 2016, I felt slightly more pro-Sanders but I also felt like Clinton had politely waited her turn and now was somwhat owed the nomination. (At least when it came to talk about Biden throwing his hat in the rink and such.) And also I was reasonably pro-Clinton.
I don't remember applying for membership in the establishment, but here I am.
or the hostile Bernie-bros were different people than the Obama voters.
I'd lean towards that. Being a persistent, drive-by jackass on the internet is a young man's game and people who just turned 26 couldn't vote in 2008. Nevermind all the opportunities in the past eight years for a disaffected non-voter to develop a hate of the system.
But maybe your former hypothesis, too: it feels like American society in general has become more openly bigoted (if not actually more bigoted) in the last few years.
I think plausibly you were reacting to Obama being a much more attractive candidate than either Sanders or Biden. Biden, adorable as his Onion-based person is, is a right-wing Democrat who's in hock to the financial industry, and even though I voted for Sanders, he's a very, very unlikely presidential candidate.
So, in '08, resenting the idea that it was 'her turn' at the expense of a stronger candidate, and in '16, resenting the idea that it's never going to be her turn, even when the only alternatives are really weak, seems perfectly consistent to me.
75: I'm actually still clinging, despite your first hand impression to the contrary, to the hope that the hostility was largely astroturf -- that in the absence of paid players, the Bernie voters wouldn't have come off any nastier than the '08 Obama voters.
Oh, man, can you imagine the media circus the current Biden family weirdness would have been?
Researchers find violence in video games caused by violence in real life rather than the other way around.
My State Senator died yesterday, so now there will be a primary, and I'll actually have to think about who to vote for. He seemed to have been a good guy.
Oh, man, can you imagine the media circus the current Biden family weirdness would have been?
We would be blessed to have that as our national scandal.
Agree with 85, but you have to admit, la famille Biden is pretty weird.
So Joe Biden's widowed daughter-in-law Hallie (widow of Joe's son Beau Biden) now has a thing with her brother-in-law, Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden, who is currently estranged from his wife but not yet divorced, and who is reputed to be a bit of cokehead? Yeah, totally normal, for anyone who has a subscription to Cosmopolitan magazine.
|| I just watched Game Change. Pretty eerie in 2017, I have to say. |>
I watched Get Out last night and I highly recommend it.
Let he who is not a bit of a cokehead and hooking up with their sister-in-law cast the first stone.
I would never hook up with my sister-in-law.
Hell, I don't even have a sister-in-law anymore.
I thought 89 was to 88 and maybe I do need to go see this movie.
that in the absence of paid players, the Bernie voters wouldn't have come off any nastier than the '08 Obama voters.
My guess is no (and I, too, voted for Bernie). Since the election, the asshole Bernie vote (always a small minority) has come even further out of the closet and intensified their tale that the problem with Democrats is that they are too sensitive to racism and sexism and whatnot, and they need to understand the legitimate economic gripes of white people -- and how those gripes caused them to vote for an alleged billionaire and a party committed to redistributing wealth upward.
That's the evil beauty of it, though. Pumping more energy into the berniebro vs hilbot twitter war didn't just make for general mayhem, it enduringly shaped the conflict.
caused them to vote for an alleged billionaire and a party committed to redistributing wealth upward.
This is part of why the whole Bernie Bro discourse is so confusing. Who are we talking about? My initial impression was that it was a term for a group of dudebro-ish leftists. But someone who ultimately pulled the lever for Trump can't be considered a leftist of any stripe, if the term is to have any meaning at all.
96 is right.
I don't mean to be all "No True Leftist", but any reasonable definition of BernieBro has to encompass the shitty misogynists, very few of whom would be on board with large parts of lefty canon wrt gender. I'm not seeing "BernieBro" as a subset of "leftists'.
Yet another demonstration of the utter uselessness of left/right taxonomy.
This is part of why the whole Bernie Bro discourse is so confusing. Who are we talking about?
Well, right. There are definitely leftist Bernie voters who have what I think of as very questionable political ideas on class as separable from 'identity politics', and attribute any electoral problems the Democrats have to paying too much attention to minorities, gays, and women. And I think those guys are generally mistaken, and sometimes mistaken for really bad reasons, but lots of them are redeemable. But I'd be really surprised to see those guys specifically harassing women on Twitter, mostly. (Again, any political position is going to have a few loons, but I wouldn't expect those guys to be any worse than anyone else.) Call them the Jacobin left.
Throwing vicious trolls who claim to be Bernie supporters into the mix made the Jacobin left look like Gamergaters.
I had been under the impression that at least at first "Bernie Bros" - as distinct from simply "misogynist trolls" - referred specifically to the people LB is calling the Jacobin Left in 100.
Maybe I was mistaken about that.
It's getting to where you can hardly call for the extermination of the white race without people making a big political deal over it.
101: That's basically the folks I was talking about in 95. It's possible that I may be veering off on a tangent because of my extreme lack of sympathy for the Jacobin Left. I kinda think the JL and Gamergate really do have some common threads.
Some common threads, maybe. But I really don't think of JL types as any likelier than anyone else to be dishing out sexist harassment. Dismissive of any strain of left politics that's not purely about economics, sure, and often jerky about it, but I don't think that's on a continuum with GamerGate style behavior.
This Is Just To Say
I ATE YOUR FUCKING
PLUMS, YO.
Watchu gonna
Do 'bout it?
NADA
That's right
That's right
I thought so
Some common threads, maybe. But I really don't think of JL types as any likelier than anyone else to be dishing out sexist harassment. Dismissive of any strain of left politics that's not purely about economics, sure, and often jerky about it, but I don't think that's on a continuum with GamerGate style behavior.
This makes me think about something like the Neera Tanden / Matt Bruenig fight.
Note, for example, this section of the article.
Bruenig's tweets at Tanden and his general approach to Twitter do not strike me as representing the kind of harassment that Taub is talking about. But part of the unpleasantness of how Twitter works is that harassment tends to operate on a continuum. Often a well-known Twitter user with a strong point of view and a decent-size following will tweet something critical of another user, and this act will unleash a torrent of critical tweets from anonymous or pseudonymous trolls, many of whom will be bona fide harassers.
...
In addition to all of this, there is the specific allegation that back in January Bruenig helped orchestrate one particular instance of harassment against Motherboard writer Sarah Jeong (some say the tweets Jeong quotes there are out of context; you can read more context here and judge for yourself) who had incurred the wrath of a circle of writers affiliated with the magazine Jacobin way back in June 2014 over something fundamentally unrelated.
The feminist writer Sady Doyle sent an email to Demos before Bruenig's firing that, while ungenerous in its accounting of Bruenig's motives and leaping to assumptions about his relationship to other tweeters, offers a window into the spillover consequences of aggressive Twitter behavior.
That story should be taught in Media Law for Journalists class as a fine example of how to write something libellous without getting sued or fired.
How can you fire the guy who created The Simpsons?
I agree with 100 and 101. About 80% of the men I know belong to the Jacobin left, and while they can definitely be a bit blind to their privilege and mainsplainy (Marxsplainy?), they're nowhere near misogynist troll territory, and they'd rather cut their arm off than vote Trump.
A term that has to incorporate actual members of the group, plus racist, misogynist, possibly paid trolls pretending to be members of the group, seems like kind of a useless term.
107
That exchange wasn't particularly pleasant, but I'm not sure how it constitutes harassment, particularly since it's not one sided. Also, I'm not sure how it's sexist to call someone ageist and against welfare? (Untrue and unfair, sure).
I used to read Sady Doyle's blog but I found her to be an abusive bully,* and I had to stop. I hardly think she has a leg to stand on when talking about harassment or insults on the internet.
*Picking fights with people elsewhere on the internet and then insulting them at length in her blog, routinely calling people names in the comments, telling non-trollish commenters to Shut the Fuck Up, stuff like that. If anyone complained about being sweared at in the comments, she'd claim "tone policing."
To follow-up, my point in 107 isn't to litigate that particular story (though I'm also curious for the longer version of Alex's comment) but to use it as an example of the facts that:
1) It's not difficult to find examples of online animosity between the JL and the Clinton crowds.
2) The line between friendly political debate and unfriendly animosity is blurry.
In addition I'd speculate that:
3) It makes sense that throwing a bunch of trolls into the mix would tend to raise the temperature of existing disputes and make everybody crankier.
4) I personally think that a big difference between the tone of arguments in 2008 and 2016 is the evolving use of social media, and that twitter & facebook make those disputes worse than they otherwise would have been -- but that's largely unfounded opinion. I don't use either facebook/twitter myself so I mostly pay attention when it becomes the basis for a story like that one.
113 posted without seeing 112.
Personally I have a positive impression of Sady Doyle, but that's based on reading a dozen or so posts which may not be representative.
113
I think I agree with you on pretty much all points. In 2008 blogs were big but twitter wasn't so much, and even if people can be assholes on blogs, they're generally more nuanced assholes, and the circulation is a fraction of what twitter can reach.
Self-righteousness and an absolute belief in one's own correctness usually makes people assholes. The Jacobin Left has that in spades, as does the feminist-o-sphere. When these two groups line up on opposite sides of an argument, you get something pretty unpleasant who might otherwise be sympathetic to either side, even without the addition of trolls.
115.1: I'm not a twitter user, so I'm not really familiar with how it works, but it appears to be much more difficult to simply walk away from an argument on twitter, as compared to blogs.
115.2 is one of the better summaries of the 2016 primary that I've read.
The vox piece explains the critical difference between blog comments and twitter comments -- to paraphrase for those who didn't click through, blog comments are basically opt-in, while twitter comments are opt-out. And it's a whole lot more difficult to have a public profile and opt out from every random account that tweets at you.
I'm annoyed by the JL, because, imo, their primary achievements are (a) electing Republicans and (b) tone normalizing hostile fake Bernebots.
IRL, what gets me is the confusion between an effort to move the Overton window (by which measure the BS campaign as an almost unqualified success) and to elect *now*candidates with whom no more than 30% of the electorate agrees with enough to support. Moving the window is an obvious precursor to electing people, but folks who lose track of how the passage of time works, or get caught up in an unjustified cult of personality, end up frustrated and bitter. Usually at the Democratic hierarchy which was supposed to, what, do a better job of convincing people than the candidates did/could.
Bruenig is a troll. This got linked here the other day, and there is no content in it that isn't trolling.
I suppose it's probably frivolous of me to compare Bruenig-types to the Gamergaters, whose most salient attribute was a kind of harassment that Bruenig doesn't engage in. But he's got a long history of trolling the concerns of women and minorities.
Check this out:
The liberal bent of these authors ensures that they would not wish (or be indifferent towards) gender-based oppression on the women who supported Trump. They also would not wish (or be indifferent towards) race-based oppression on the people of color who supported Trump. The only thing they feel comfortable doing is wishing (or being indifferent towards) class-based oppression on rednecks. I wonder why that is.
So maybe one ought not draw parallels to Gamergate, but surely this is no different than the National Review proving that modern-day Democrats are the real racists because they fought for the Confederacy and opposed civil rights for 100 years.
I agree with 118.last.
Gamergaters did (do, even) have actual thoughts, opinions, and even shitty ideology. They're not just trolling, even if it's sexist nonsense that blends into MRAs and Trumpism and what have you.
Since we're mostly talking only about phenomena on Twitter, who here actually uses it? I follow a few Unfoggetarians there but not many.
118.2
What's sort of sad is H Clinton was a successful example of the left pushing mainstream candidates further left than they might otherwise have been or campaigned. Inequality as a mainstream talking point comes out of Occupy Wallstreet.
But, IIRC, Millennials voted for Clinton in expected or higher rates in the general election. Actual Bernie supporters went for Clinton, so I'm not sure how they can be blamed for electing Republicans, when they went out and voted for Democrats.
IIRC, white men shifting from Obama to Trump in a few key states is what changed the election, but that seems like something that is hard to trace back directly to Bernie Bros, or even pro-Bernie misogynist trolls, though tracing out causal links is pretty impossible to do.
111: That's depressing. I hate the Jacobin left so much.
119.2
I have issues with the blurb you quote, but noting that class intersects with race and gender in ways that people can be blind to seems to be pretty far off from "they're the REAL Nazis!" types stuff of the NR.
119.1 That's a pretty troll-y article. I wonder if part of the problem is our term troll. It seems go from being unserious in a contrarian sort of way (e.g. Slatepitches), all the way to people shouting death threats. Some sort of granularity might be useful.
Actual Bernie supporters went for Clinton
I think we need to be clear here that nobody (in this thread) is criticizing actual Bernie supporters as a group. For one thing, a Bernie supporter who didn't vote for Hillary ceased to be a Bernie supporter.
124
Oh, sure. I guess I would classify the vast a majority of the Jacobin Left as people who went for Clinton in the end, and a smaller group as third party supporters who were never going to vote for the Democrat.*
I think there are two things going on. You have:
1. Bruenig types, who are obnoxious actual Bernie Bro trolls. They're only a tiny fraction of Bernie supporters, but they have an outsized presence on social media.
2. Misogynist Trolls. These people were never actual Bernie supporters, but pretended to be for maximum chaos. Maybe they're paid by the Russians, maybe they're Gamergaters who got bored, maybe they're standard MRA and Stormfront types. These people can overwhelm social media and force people out or shut down the conversation.
Groups 1 & 2 are different. 1 is the obnoxious part of the Jacobin Left, and 2 is hostile to leftism as a whole.
*A Green who would consider voting for Bernie but not any other Democrat is in a different category than someone who claimed they'd vote for any Democrat but Hillary.
IIRC, white men shifting from Obama to Trump in a few key states is what changed the election
The best analysis that I've seen is that it was white voters without a college degree* who shifted more or less everywhere but a few key states had more people fitting that description.
* Note that non-white voters without a college degree were also more likely to switch to Trump.
If I was dealing with a situation of an ever tightening job market and competing in an area with low barriers to entry like semi-skilled labor I'd be very tempted to vote for Trump just due to the fact that he promises to reduce competition for the jobs I'm qualified for. He may be horrible on a host of axes, but I'd rather be employed and living in a country ruled by a nut than unemployed and living in a country ruled by a patsy for Goldman Sachs.
Moving the Overton window only works if you a) open it to the left, i.e. talk up left/liberal policies and b) close it to the far right. Most of the Jacobin left does fine on a, but insists on firebombing the section of the window immediately to their right instead of b.
119
liberals in that quote are people like Frank Rich (whose article is mentioned in the previous paragraph) who are explicitly hostile to poor whites (but not women or black people) and believe that they should suffer through lack of government services
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/03/frank-rich-no-sympathy-for-the-hillbilly.html
127- You're argument somewhat resembles Chris Arnade's volatility argument. They both seem somewhat rational, but they're both ultimately flawed. They both assume limits that aren't there on how much damage Trump can potentially do.
Inequality as a mainstream talking point comes out of Occupy Wallstreet.
Huh? I remember it talked about forever by mainstream Democrats, granted with milquetoast solutions. (Gore, 2000 DNC acceptance: "Together, let's make sure that our prosperity enriches not just the few, but all working families... so often powerful forces and powerful interests stand in your way and the odds seem stacked against you..."
Did you mean "the 99%", maybe?
121.2:
But, IIRC, Millennials voted for Clinton in expected or higher rates in the general election.
I don't have any particular point, but I don't believe this to be true, especially in swing states.
127: If you weren't an idiot, which you, personally, aren't, you shouldn't be tempted unless you were (a) in an area with a significant immigrant population and (b) looking for jobs where you were directly competing with recent immigrants. That doesn't describe a large part of the electorate.
129: If you read the article, Rich isn't hostile to poor whites in a policy sense. From the article:
This is a separate matter from the substantive question of whether the party is overdue in addressing the needs of the 21st-century middle class, or what remains of it. The answer to that is yes, as a matter of morality, policy, and politics. Americans below the top of the heap, with or without college degrees and regardless of race, have been ill served by the axis of Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, and the Davos-class donor base that during Bill Clinton's presidency helped grease the skids for the 2008 economic collapse and allowed the culprits to escape from the wreckage unscathed during Barack Obama's.
He's pissed off at the voting behavior of Trump voters, and advocating giving up on appealing to them as a voting block because he doesn't think it will work. But he's still advocating for a Democratic party that serves their interests.
128 -- Right, you have to end up with a coalition big enough to win election. And the first step towards that is wanting to have a coalition big enough to win election.
121 -- I'm only about half impressed with people who spent a year saying Clinton is no damned good, and then, at the end, theatrically holding their noses. Fine, glad they voted for her. With the stakes at issue her, though, the effect on turnout of the constant drumbeat kept turnout a lt lower than t should have been. Neither the policy differences on the one side nor the downside risk on the other remotely justified the anti-Clinton wave I was seeing through the election.
"Moving the Overton window only works if you a) open it to the left, i.e. talk up left/liberal policies and b) close it to the far right. Most of the Jacobin left does fine on a, but insists on firebombing the section of the window immediately to their right instead of b."
The Tea party got a decent chunk of political power by attacking republicans and the same thing should work on the democratic side.
119: Bullshit. The only person in that category is Frank Rich, and even there his desire for them to suffer isn't really attached to any calls for changes in policy. (He doesn't call for the Democrats to help the Republicans destroy the ACA, for example.)
The Rich article is very bad:
"If, as polls tell us, many voters who vilify Obamacare haven't yet figured out that it's another name for the Affordable Care Act that's benefiting them -- or if they do know and still want the Trump alternative -- then let them reap the consequences for voting against their own interests. "
137: Yeah, exactly. Or, depending on how you define that category, I'm in it.
I wish poor rural whites well. I want policy to be made so that it improves their lives. But for the subset of poor rural whites who think that voting for Trump is a reasonable way to serve their interests, I think they're either stupid or evil, and I don't think there's any point in trying to appeal them on the basis of the same thinking that led them to Trump. We're going to have to either write them off, or convince them to be either less stupid or less evil.
I'll admit that I have a hard time sympathizing with Trump supporting farmers who are worried about having a workforce.
133: I think it's true if you don't adjust for race, and not true if you do.
139 -- or, to take a page from Putin, convince them that voting is useless.
138: What bad thing do you think Rich is advocating there? He's unsympathetic to people who have demonstrably cut off their own noses to spite their faces. But he's not talking about shaping policy to favor women and minorities at the expense of white men. He's just angry, and saying that what happens to Trump voters -- that Rich has no power to stop or change -- serves them right.
Honestly, Rich didn't go far enough. If you voted for Trump, rich or poor, black or white, man or woman, you deserve to die in a ditch and your corpse eaten by maggots.
I am maybe no longer with you there.
136.2 -- Pandering to the prejudices of people who vote regularly doesn't give much of a roadmap for building a movement of people who vote only rarely.
144: I was with up to "die in a ditch", but you lost me with the maggots. Because I'm a moderate.
144 is the kind of Straight Talk that the Democrats need to win back the working-class white Trump voters.
Right, you have to end up with a coalition big enough to win election. And the first step towards that is wanting to have a coalition big enough to win election.
Yes. At several points during the primaries I found myself saying, "if your coalition doesn't include people who disagree about important issues then it isn't large enough to win elections."
I do realize that can become a bit of a shibboleth, however. Personally I don't have any insight into voters who are center-left. I believe they are out there, I believe that politicians are not entirely crazy in how they decide to prioritize issues, but I certainly don't know what will play in Peoria.
But, "high-Broderism" was a thing for long enough* that I understand the backlash and people who have no interest in what potentially mythical people in Peoria care about.
* Though, given how young much of the JL is, I wonder if David Broder is a meaningful point of reference for most of them.
129: Except, of course, that's the opposite of what Rich says. (Hint: the refusal to use actual quotes is what the poker players call a "tell.")
Rich says that the Trump voters who chose white identity politics over their economic interests are not amenable to appeals to their economic interests.
That makes it all the more a fool's errand for Democrats to fudge or abandon their own values to cater to the white-identity politics of the hard-core, often self-sabotaging Trump voters who helped drive the country into a ditch on Election Day. They will stick with him even though the numbers say that they will take a bigger financial hit than Clinton voters under the Republican health-care plan.
Rich is explicitly against the Republican health-care plan and other efforts to screw the white working class. Bruenig, on the other hand, preaches empathy for people who oppose the interests of the white working class.
He's a troll. Nothing more.
I'm not sure impotent hatred from an enemy is the motivator you think it is. Fear would be better. I hope peep and Walt own guns and encourage other liberals to do the same.
151: Everyone should be happy I don't own a gun, and I thought even a simple cabin boy might be able to tell that 148 was not meant to be taken seriously.
127: I'd rather be employed and living in a country ruled by a nut than unemployed and living in a country ruled by a patsy for Goldman Sachs.
You know, despite the colossal growth of the Trumpology industry leading up to the election, its failure to correctly predict that he would appoint a bunch of billionaires and/or Goldman guys to the cabinet was pretty epic. I mostly let this roll off me, but the "Hillary is in the pocket of the investment banks" line got under my skin. Trump got to lie about all kinds of shit, but he even got away with "my opponent loves money more than I do"? Fake populism is the only real populism!
Neither here nor there at this point, of course. I'm just venting.
152- I'm not surprised you don't want it taken seriously. I wouldn't be surprised if 144 wasn't meant altogether seriously. I've seen a lot of similar comments here probably equally 'ha ha, only serious' comments (eliminationist) like that on unfogged. I think you should consider that you may be held to account for the things you say even if you aren't altogether serious about them.
Structural change is what we need, but I don't know how to get it. Something as simple as making election days be holidays would dramatically change outcomes. If we didn't have an antiquated electoral college system, we would have a Democrat in the WH.
154: When I start worrying about that I'll stop commenting.
145: I always go too far. What's a compromise position? Maiming? Set on fire, but put out quickly?
I think my problem with "You can't criticize Trump voters" is that it's so fucking condescending, like you need to go to Harvard or have read the Grundisse to know better than to vote for Trump. You're an adult -- you probably hold down a job, you probably can operate a motor vehicle. Trump was a transparent fraud. If you voted for him, it's on you.
154: They are welcome to try, my friend. They are welcome to try.
158: Your time is coming, now that white people have risen up and recognized their class interests.
Good:
"Rich is explicitly against the Republican health-care plan and other efforts to screw the white working class."
Better:
Opponents of single payer are moral monsters on par with AHCA proponents
157: Right. Anger is a respectful response.
134.1: For a semi-skilled worker migrants are exactly who they are competing against. There are 11 million undocumented immigrants and a bunch more here legally. You don't need to be in an area with a whole bunch of them in order to feel the pressure. Depressing wages in one area tends to depress them in others.
153: People projected all kinds of hopes onto him. For the low-information majority he does not seem anywhere near as pernicious as he does from a position of an political junkie. Since it's low information voters who decide elections we got the clown.
For the low-information majority he does not seem anywhere near as pernicious as he does from a position of an political junkie.
You don't need to be a political junkie to figure out that Trump is a billionaire. That's his whole persona. Worrying that the fairly rich candidate may be too chummy with seriously rich people, so why not avoid the problem by directly voting for the seriously rich guy isn't an understandable low-information mistake, it's just idiotic.
160: Do you think that Paul Waldman, who Bruenig cites, is opposed to single-payer? The quote Bruenig supplies indicates the opposite.
At what point is it appropriate to call Bruenig a liar? I mean, he doesn't actually claim that Waldman opposes single-payer, and he provides evidence that Waldman supports it. But why is Waldman featured so prominently in a story with that headline?
Answer: Bruenig is a troll.
"You can't criticize Trump voters" is not my position. "Gloating over poor Trump voters losing services is bad" is my position.
163: This is true even if you leave out the overt racism and sexism. Judge purely as a class warrior, Hillary is obviously wildly superior to Trump.
"At what point is it appropriate to call Bruenig a liar? I mean, he doesn't actually claim that Waldman opposes single-payer, and he provides evidence that Waldman supports it. But why is Waldman featured so prominently in a story with that headline?"
Waldman is featured because his tweet is bad.
165: It's not gloating. You gloat over things that you are actively happy about. Rich is pissed off at Trump voters because they're hurting other people as well as themselves, and he's being spitefully unsympathetic about their suffering, given that it's self-inflicted.
Spite is bad, and if Rich were a better, saintlier person, he wouldn't be spiteful. But if Rich could control what happens politically, he would make Trump voters better off than they are. He doesn't want them to suffer, he's angry at them for stupidly causing their own suffering. It's really not gloating.
My question:
At what point is it appropriate to call Bruenig a liar?
Your answer:
Waldman is featured because his tweet is bad.
I think I probably disagree with the thrust of Waldman's tweet, but that doesn't justify Bruenig's misrepresentation.
165: Assume you did nothing to bring it about, why?
163: I think you think more rigorously than the average low information voter, LB. It seemed obvious to me too, using pretty much the same heuristic.
"Assume you did nothing to bring it about, why?"
Because it is bad when people suffer and moral means testing is garbage.
171: At that point, they're not low-information, if the implication is that not everyone can be expected to be a political junky and if you aren't, how could you know better? They're completely irrational.
I still think that it's society's job to take care of them and watch out for them. And we need their votes, so if there's some way to woo them that doesn't involve selling out anything important, I'm all for it. But there's no reason to treat their concerns (as opposed to their genuine interests) respectfully, because their concerns are senseless. (Note here that I am speaking with contempt of Trump voters who thought that voting for Trump was the way to avoid plutocrats running the country. Members of the white working class who aren't that kind of idiot? I'm not calling them idiots.)
172: Do you think Rich advocates policies that would hurt those people? I don't think he does. He's angry, but he's not gloating. He wants better for them than they demonstrably want for themselves.
Won't somebody think of the children? Unless that's implicit in 172.
Fuck the children. Do they vote Democratic? No? Then they're useless parasites.
Also, they leave dirty socks everywhere.
176: I suppose when Child Protective Services comes after you, you're going to say you were just kidding, but roger knows better.
They're not even dirty socks. Just worn for a few minutes and left on the floor. And then you yell that they need to put on socks before going out and they get another pair out of the drawer.
172: It's moral means testing to gloat when somebody shoots somebody else in the face, and gets hit in the ricochet? They weren't being lazy, or drinking beer all night, or eating their weight in pound cake. They deliberately voted to hurt others, and are now complaining that they got hurt as well. My sympathy for people who use ballot box to bully others is limited.
178: you will be held to account for that, LB. HELD TO ACCOUNT. There'll be an account and he's the man to hold you to it.
154: Sanctimony is a helluva drug.
And fretting about the Frank Rich article strikes me as a variant of the same species of trollery as that dumbass Bruenig piece. Here, let me try: Isn't it dehumanizing the poor white Trump voters to think they don't deserve the consequences of their choices?
172
If you want to redistribute, stories about the undeserving poor are bad and reactionary. Those stories were rampant in the 80s-90s and then they gutted welfare.
169
I don't know what to say. The tweet was bad since it implied that single payer was not urgent.
180: it feels good to gloat, but I'm really only interested in leverage points to change the system. If there's evidence that anger is useful, great; let's use it! But the problem is systemic. Seat belts, airbags, and crumple zones have done more to make our roads safer than road rage at the idiot drivers everywhere.
Do I need to stop joking about the elimination of the white race?
Our current healthcare system preferentially kills poor people in red states:
https://www.usnews.com/cmsmedia/3a/cc/efcaccb5418c934e7e87d14de6ca/141027-dataedmap-graphic.jpg
The blame goes to our shitty supreme court and shitty red state governments (and shitty constitution), but maybe we could have had single payer in democratic party platform. maybe we can fight to make things better.
184: Single payer isn't urgent; or, more precisely, there is nothing urgently to be done to bring single payer about. (Except for people who work in left-wing thinktanks, or whoever the hell drafts speculative legislation. You guys, keep drafting -- if it becomes politically possible, we want legislation ready to go.)
It's important. It would be immensely preferable to the ACÁ. But it's not urgent because we can't possibly get there from here at least until the Democrats take Congress back. Calling something that's currently impossible 'urgent' is meaningless.
"Isn't it dehumanizing the poor white Trump voters to think they don't deserve the consequences of their choices? "
I guess Rich thinks so:
"Liberals looking for a way to empathize with conservatives should endorse the core conservative belief in the importance of personal responsibility"
But, in fact, reactionary rhetoric is bad and will not lead to good things.
181 is interesting. I'm tempted to set up an instance.
I don't know what to say. The tweet was bad since it implied that single payer was not urgent.
I have to admit, when you posted 160 I took it as a clever bit of sarcasm. But, since you seem to be serious, the problem is that it ignores the the fact that action and inaction are not symmetrical.
It's like saying that me not going out and saving the life of somebody that's in danger is precisely morally equivalent to me killing somebody right now. The difference is that killing somebody takes effort and, to avoid it, all I have to do is nothing. Whereas saving somebody or making positive changes takes effort.*
Similarly, part of what's so appalling about the AHCA is that it's so much worse than the "do nothing" option, whereas there's no simple path to single-payer.
Here's Frowner last week:
It's not so much that people on the left yearn for this all to be the Democrats' fault; it's that they yearn for it to be the Democrats' fault because the Democrats are stupid and greedy and hypocritical, and not just the ones at the top, either. I mean, broadly speaking I think that a lot of this is the Democrats' fault, but the biggest reason for that is that the Democrats face difficult problems. I think that in general Democratic answers to problems of inequality are wrong, but there's not exactly a shining track record of left success on this score either, so I tend to assume that with the exception of the very wealthy and powerful, most Democrats are genuinely trying to solve hard problems while avoiding creating other problems.
* I acknowledge the effective altruism argument that there are some fairly low-effort actions which would make a meaningful difference, but that gets into arguing over the metaphor which is beyond the point.
Those stories were rampant in the 80s-90s and then they gutted welfare.
Causal link: ironclad.
What the hell sort of accent did LB just put over the final A in ACA?
"Those stories were rampant in the 80s-90s and then they gutted welfare.
Causal link: ironclad."
The name of the welfare reform bill was the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act"
Single payer isn't urgent; or, more precisely, there is nothing urgently to be done to bring single payer about.
People are canvassing and making phone calls right now to try to get the CA Legislature to pass single payer, which has been proposed by an influential member (albeit with a big post-it note for how much taxation is required).
190: Let me know. I'm @Minivet@mastadon.xyz.
I'm building the thing on my server now.
Actually.... it looks like the build just crashed. Looks like I need to clear out some space.
Alright, 6.723 GB of crusty old docker images cleared out, and its building again.
163--Yeah, this is frustrating.
You try to (jacobin) articulate a critique of the Democratic Party's structural relationship to finance capital (/jacobin) and when it got translated into the terms of mainstream American political discourse it comes as "Corrupt Hillary!" And the actual capitalist pig, the guy from a business that is completely dependent on said form of capital, is POTUS.
Now, how much of that is due to the complete forgetting of anything left of liberalism in American political discourse since the New Deal era, and how much of it is due to Bernie being a shitty leftist, and how much of it is due to the pre-xisting Conniving Hillary template being available due to 20 yrs of Republican bullshit....
Trump conspiracy tweetstorms are the infowars of the left:
http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/trump-conspiracy-tweetstorms-are-the-infowars-of-the-le-1793957969
Not sure what to think of that article, but it is on topic.
196: This is fair -- there's a bill that's passed the NYS Assembly and is stuck in the state Senate as well, and those should happen. But at the state level, they're not going to do a damn thing for red-state Trump voters. To help those idiots, we have to fight past their committed resistance to take back Congress. As decent people, we're responsible for fighting them tooth and nail in order to get them health care despite everything they can do to stop us, of course. But it's going to be a challenge, and it's not happening this year.
202: My iPhone keeps on trying to autocomplete things in Spanish. I don't know why.
You have children playing a prank on you.
204: that's why we need to build a Wall.
I have my phone set for Spanish and English and when I tried to type something in French today it had a tantrum, trying to autocorrect no matter how many times I deleted what it has done.
Oops, I've been misspelling Mastodon.
203: I think giving seamless, tax-funded health coverage to all 4.5m Californian Trump voters would be excellent proof of concept, among other things. (Was "this year" an expressed minimum somewhere?)
At least some Trump supporters are already on board.
I'm screwing around on someone else's Mastodon server right now - @spike@social.targaryen.house - but I can figure out how to find @Minivet@mastadon.xyz.
Meanwhile, build is done, SMTP server and various certs configured, I'm going to fire this sucker up.
Damn, got to do the thing for the S3 bucket.
I don't quite understand the concept of federation yet. It seems like when I look at the followers of someone popular on the biggest (now-closed) instance, only a minority are also from that instance or others than my own, implying possibly you don't necessarily see everyone on other instances just because the connection exists?
I guess it's also possible most of that person's followers joined after the initial surge and after @mastodon.social closed.
186- Too bad it wasn't 187. Hey you are probably just as funny as Limbaugh when he jokes about how he doesn't want to kill all liberals, some should stay alive in zoos to show people how not to be.
I'm not holding anyone to account. But if some right-winger lurked in some of the threads where people call for the death of white people (or Republicans) it would be kind of understandable if he thought it justified extreme action on his part and his friend's parts. It certainly contributes to an atmosphere.
I was having dinner in the whitest part of Lincoln when I wrote that. Do you think Limbaugh goes to dinner in liberal restaurants?
You can now get warmed olives here. The trick is to remember that the pit can be really hot.
217: Is it true that, as Wikipedia tells me, nearby Beatrice is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable? That was a name in Lee's family and I've wondered if it pops up elsewhere but today is the first time I've seen that happen.
Yes.
Also, Papillon is pronounced as anti-French as possible.
It's probably not necessary I mention I'm white, is it?
217- I always prefer liberal restaurants, the portions are so large. I'd bet Limbaugh feels the same way.
This Mastodon really looks like it's about to take off.
I can't see your color on the internet.
In a dog it is too dark to see color.
My pseud was deliberately picked to invoke something large, white, and rural.
We have no more beer or scotch. Only wine.
226 Or she because we can't see your genitals on the internet either unless Anthony Seiner has your Snapchat handle.
You've been emphatic about this for a while now, but it really doesn't have as much to do with your eliminationist fantasy.
You've also joked about dead Republicans: are you a Republican?
230 Weiner! C'mon autocorrect work with me here
231 Roger if you're going to continue in this vein you're going to have to come up with some good anime recommendations for added value.
But maybe I've been too hard on Moby who I generally like. In illustrating a point of comparison with Limbaugh I wasn't claiming they are on the same moral plane. Just as I wouldn't be if I said both were large and white.
Both do like to tell genocidal jokes.
If the comparison stings some, maybe it should.
Alright, I got this thing running on my server! I don't have SSL working on it just yet, so the Federation thing might not be working. But y'all can sign up and poke around and kick the tires: be.vrb.al.
I don't think I've been joking about dead Republicans. Of course I've been one in the past. (Republican, not dead.) There were no Democrats where I grew up, except my mom. I'm not shouting at the current crop of Republicans because they're some kind of untouchable other I can't comprehend.
I'm shouting at them because they went off the rails fucknuts, not by liberal standards, but by the standards they would have used in say 1990.
"White people: Let's just be friends."
So, have folks read the Posner concurrence in Hively? It's worth your time.
Roger, it's obviously none of my business but I thought you were a white revert. Is that not the case?
Every time I start to read about something Bruenig-related I give up because he doesn't seem worth knowing about, and yet he's forced people to know who he is anyway.
The idea being that Islam best represents the primordial state of knowledge of God's unity that later cultural a accretions have occluded ergo one reverts to that primordial state in converting.
Huh. That makes perfect sense in terms of Islamic theology as I understand it but I hadn't encountered the term before.
Can I revert to Zoroastrianism instead? They have that cool bird-god thingy.
I don't want to revert to paganism because the oak tree death match thing sounds like a drag.
Maybe I'll revert more when I'm older, to save on end-of-life expenses.
247 It's contemporary insider lingo.
Reverts of course.
Among Anglo-American Muslims.
Almost all global religions think you revert to them the way that Plato thought you revert to a knowledge of mathematics; it's just that Islam is the most explicit. But Americans believe that foreigners revert to believing in the constitution once their exposed to it. What we believe is so much more natural and obvious that everyone else would believe it if they hadn't been misled by their parents|school|satan himself. This is certainly how crusading stheists think about atheism.
Christianity both does and doesn't. There's a very strong strain that seems to deny you're reverting -- the necessity of conversion; God reaching down from his throne to pierce the veil, and so forth -- but on examination this turns out to deny that you can revert of your own free will. You need grace. God has to want you to remember or to recognise him. But once you do, you realise he was there all along.
[note unmistakable signs of Nworb stuck in an essay in another window]
Almost all global religions think you revert to them the way that Plato thought you revert to a knowledge of mathematics; it's just that Islam is the most explicit.
I guess. Maybe I'm being misled by the non-proselytizing nature of Judaism here. AFAIK there's nothing remotely like this in Jewish theology, which in its modern form is notable for its skepticism toward conversion. Jews are the chosen people, and admission of others is grudgingly accepted but not really encouraged. There's definitely no sense that all people are inherently Jewish and just need to come back. This particularism is I guess distinctive among Abrahamic faiths.
(I personally am not thrilled about this exclusionary attitude within my religion, but it's definitely a thing.)
Fair enough. But then I don't think of Judaism as a world religion precisely because it doesn't (any longer) proselytise. There are Jews all over the world, sure, but that's geographical spread, not ideological ambition.
Hmmm. Does anyone know enough about Mormonism to prove that I'm wrong about them, too?
Right, fair enough.
Mormons proselytize like crazy, and have had remarkable success in areas you wouldn't necessarily expect, like the south Pacific. Not sure how that factors into your analysis.
Reverts of course. Among Anglo-American Muslims.
Some kind of mutiny of reverts?
Similarly, IIRC, "pervert" was the Anglican term for an Anglican who converts to Catholicism.
If the comparison stings some, maybe it should.
FOR I AM THE FLAIL OF THE LORD SENT TO CHASTISE YOU.
254 It's much more explicit in Islam and is the concept denoted by the term fitrah, primordial human nature, as it is found in hadith and obliquely (but not directly IIRC) in the Qur'an. Something like in the hadith, "Every child is born in a state of fitrah, then their parents turn them into a Christian, a New, or a Zoroastrian."
"a New?" Autocorrect is anti-Semitic, I knew it!
Nonsense, autocorrect has nothing but the greatest respect for Newish people and the traditions of Nudaism.
Am now stuck on the origins of Nudaism. Presumably some sort of 20th century Californian offshoot of the Reform tradition.
262, 263 Hollywood Nudaists? I told you autocorrect is anti-Semitic!
I had a girlfriend who was Hindu. (And she was actually from India; she wasn't some California religious tourist or something.) She explained that everybody was already Hindu, even atheists. I found this charming, though I suppose many atheists would hate it. (I had another friend from India who considered himself Hindu and said that properly understood Hinduism implied atheism.)
Will The Donald be the president who passes single payer? I think the chances are not completely zero, especially if he continues to piss off his own party. He'd have to do it with Democratic votes and maybe a couple of Republican defections, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.
268: by Iraqi Jews, I believe, if mediaeval suppositions about the location of the Garden of Eden are correct.
267- Single payer would be nice, but so far it looks like Trump isn't very interested in doing anything unless he is well bribed.
Or, I suppose, Iraqi Muslims, if 260 is correct?
This Be The Hadith
Philip al-Larkin
They convert you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to but they do...
You can't call somebody a nudist if they weren't wearing clothes to start with.
he doesn't seem worth knowing about, and yet he's forced people to know who he is anyway.
That's a pretty good working definition of "troll."
This is thoughtful: https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/4/full_interview_noam_chomsky_on_democracy?autostart=true
You can't call somebody a nudist if they weren't wearing clothes to start with.
Aren't you confusing them with strippers?
Also, Chomsky is ill-informed. The US has BMD on Russia's borders; nope. Iran doesn't have ballistic missiles; yes it does. "Maybe the Russians tried to interfere in the election. That's not a major issue"; idiot. "No one publicly advocates" public-option health care; yes they do. And so on.
That's slightly off topic but I felt he should be CALLED TO ACCOUNT!
Thanks for the QC there, ajay.
Tweet from John Dingell:
So the Senate is crumbling, some kid is our shadow Sec. of State, and Trump is still in his bathrobe tweeting lies? Am I understanding this?
The senate has insufficiently crumbled since it still exists
Re upthread: RTCB makes no sense. He (?) seems to hold that saying true but nasty things about Republicans is counterproductive, on grounds not specified but something like:
(1) It'll make them angrier and aggravate the situation. (No it won't: Rs don't hear what Ds say, they hear what their bubble says Ds say; what is actually said makes no difference to them.)
(2) It'll stop them ever voting Democrat again. (That ship has sailed: as has been amply demonstrated, Rs vote R no matter what.)
(3) It'll make you a target for violence. (Potentially true.)
Even granting (3), what is the alternative? RTCB seems to me to advocate some kind of quietism;* for which, what is the logic? The squadristi will leave the good, obedient, Muslims/immigrants/liberals alone? Pull the other one. Run away? There's nowhere to go. Germany looks ok for the moment, but then so did the US 6 months ago.
*In a very loose sense of the word.
281 -- In fairness, it is simply true that in a society it is neither diplomatic nor necessary that everything that can be said actually be said.
282: Sure, but I think 281.2 covers that in the relevant sense. (That is political discourse, not face-to-face interaction.) And I think recognizing the nature of one's opponents is necessary for success.
Right, but there's usually an explicable reason why not. It will hurt the feelings of people who don't deserve it covers a lot of ground, but I don't really see it as applicable here.
I thought RTCB was arguing against lowering the tone of debate.
To take an extreme example, I remember people on the left talking about the fact that Palin had done an add putting Gabby Giffords in the crosshairs prior to her getting shot.
Comedian Frank Conniff tweeted: "Hey, Sarah Palin, hows that hatey, killy, reloady, crosshairsy thing working out for ya?"
On a conservative site, a couple weeks ago, I saw something talking about the Daily Show putting Steven Miller's head on a pike. And using that to argue that both sides do it, and that, by implication, the crosshairs had was just a normal part of political rhetoric.
Note: I have mixed feelings about that argument. On one hand, I think it's good to avoid normalizing violent rhetoric. On the other hand, that ship has sailed, and don't think any one person has much effect positive or negative -- and the internet makes it easy for anybody to nut-pick examples of somebody on the other side saying something extreme.
281
I don't see where RTCB says any of that. He was just busting on people for making eliminatist jokes/exaggerations.
So, just that it's a category of joke that's morally wrong to ever make? Or if not that, why bust on people?
266: Hinduism doesn't deny the existence of other gods, so it seems a lot more reasonable coming from them than from Christians or Muslims. (Insert discussion of difference between henotheism and monotheism here.)
267: I read that Vox article yesterday and found it frustrating. It relies way too much on taking what these people say at face value. It also seems overly credulous to take for granted that the national socialists were socialist in any meaningful sense, after we spent so much time mocking right-wingers for making that argument over the past 10 years. I'll be vaguely interested in seeing what kind of single-payer system VDARE would support. My guess: when they have to actually make tough choices about details, nothing.
288: I'm thinking mostly of previous threads, not this one.
286 last: These are the people who convinced a majority (?) of their supporters that the Clintons have had people murdered. They'll manufacture whatever they want.
As a category, making jokes about the elimination of a race or your political opponents is bad. I guess there is some sort of "white people are the worst" exception but I have never been fully on board with it.
Sure, I'm not going to disagree with that as a general statement.
I do think that anyone, even if they take that principle seriously, thinking that 144 in this thread is really worth getting sanctimonious about, is an idiot, but different people have different rankings of what's important.
As a category, making jokes about the elimination of a race or your political opponents is bad
Even if they're really funny?
That's the exception that lets me feel good about telling the "This isn't about the hunting, is it?" joke.
The only thing about Trump voters that needs to be eliminated is the portion of their vote that counts for more than mine.
"when they have to actually make tough choices about details"
You give everybody Medicare and pay for it with taxes. There really is not any tough choices involved.
A chunk of the alt-right guys are in favor of single payer because it is a good idea and because it would be a good way for Trump to go MAGA. It isn't going to happen, but that is what they want.
You give everybody Medicare and pay for it with taxes. There really is not any tough choices involved.
Simples!
Some might say that massive increase in taxation is going to involve some tough choices, certainly for people who think of themselves as being on the right.
298: Hey, I'm very much for single-payer, but there are absolutely tough choices involved. You need to figure out what to do with the 500,000+ people employed in the health insurance industry (they can't all become bureaucrats or care coordinators); how much to satisfy organized interests like doctors, hospitals, drug and device companies, even nurses, when they make tons of hard-to-refuse demands that push up the price tag for everybody; there will be strong budgetary temptations to add copayments and deductibles which will piss off activists; pricing decisions will effectively have to make a decision on what provider salaries morally ought to be; etc., etc.
The tough choice for Trump voters is whether to support something that helps them that also helps people who in their ideal world would either not exist or be explicitly marked as not deserving of the help they want for themselves.
"I do think that anyone, even if they take that principle seriously, thinking that 144 in this thread is really worth getting sanctimonious about, is an idiot, but different people have different rankings of what's important."
144 isn't worth more than an eye roll to me, but it is a bad comment and I see why it would work somebody up.
The slight brutishness of 144 is made good by the outstanding dryness it birthed in 145.
298: Like other people said, that's really not simple. My own first thought about this was, "OK, that drives up the income tax rate by 17 percent. The left shrugs and says it's worth it. The center tries to reduce it to 13 percent by means-testing, particularly for birth control, gender reassignment surgery, and psychiatry. Right-wingers refuse to accept any plan that isn't revenue-neutral and are sure that can be achieved by excluding black and brown people grandfather clauses cutting waste, fraud, and abuse."
"Some might say that massive increase in taxation is going to involve some tough choices, certainly for people who think of themselves as being on the right."
Alt-right dudes have different beliefs than standard republicans
ISTR working out that you could cover the entire US population at an NHS level of per-capita spending for the same total sum that the US government spends on Medicare and Medicaid right now.
I don't see where RTCB says any of that.
I was thinking of 216. But, in general, I shouldn't speak for RTCB because we have fairly different perspectives.
But I mistakenly thought that 288 was directed towards my comment. Never mind.
I was sitting around a table the other day with my poker buddies, and one of them wanted to talk smack about Trump.
This was only our second game since the election and the first time Trump came up. I'm guessing three of the seven players around the table were Trump voters.
My friend's anti-Trump tone was abusive, and I suggested that he needed to drop it, which he did.
I am in general agreement with the people who Bruenig says want to be personally abusive to Trump voters, except I and those folks don't want to be personally abusive to Trump voters. I agree with the folks who Bruenig says want to take away healthcare from poor white people, except, of course, like them, I don't want to take away healthcare from poor white people.
The thing about the let's-be-nice-to-Trump-voters crowd is that they, personally, have absolutely no interest in reaching out to Trump voters. Bruenig's intended audience is liberals, and to the extent that it's not, it's troglodytes who want to be able to say "Even this liberal thinks liberals are too touchy about sexism."
As lemmy points out above, when Bruenig talks about people who oppose single-payer, he isn't talking about people who oppose single-payer. He's talking about people who, in lemmy's words, "impl[y] that single payer was not urgent."
What lemmy doesn't add is that Bruenig is lying about that, too. Waldman is a consistent, vocal supporter of single-payer, and his tweet was about political strategy.
Bruenig's only interest in Trump voters is to twist statistics about them to suggest that they are, in the main, motivated by a concern about the issues of women and minorities. His goal is to troll liberals.
Milt Friedman thought open borders are incompatible with the welfare state and thus we need to trim the welfare state. The Alt-right is OK-ish with the welfare state but wants to trim immigration.
306: The best way to implement single-payer in the US is to use a time machine and go back to 1948.
311: And kill all the white babies.
Kill whitey. With kindness. insufficiently Christmas-y Starbucks cups.
FIFY
My son, in an effort to comfort me about the future, told me that things would work out once old white men like me were dead. That cracked me up, but I suppose my white-person sensibilities aren't sufficiently attuned to eliminationist rhetoric.
First they came for the white people, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't white because I was already in a FEMA Walmart concentration camp.
I don't use eliminationist rhetoric. What's wrong with you people? Take that back. I'll kill you! I'll kill you all!
311 is right, but if ajay has worked out how to do the trick for the equivalent of current expenditure, could he let Sen. Warren see his workings?
315: My father and I have that conversation all the time. "Once your kind are all dead or too decrepit to vote, things will improve immensely." I mean, not him specifically, he votes fine. But his ilk.
319: AIMAMHB I have explicitly granted my family clearance in advance to kill me as part of any broad effort to rid the world of my demographic ilk.
There's an ilk in every cohort it seems.
321
But in Northern Europe they're called something else.
||
In the absence of another live political thread, how significant is it that Bannon has been kicked off the NSC, and what if anything does it signify?
|>
Paying NHS rates means, for starters, giving all specialist physicians a 50% pay cut.
323: On the face of it, a lot. It means McMaster has substantially outmaneuvered Bannon. And not just in that Bannon is off the NSC: also added, the CIA director and UN ambassador (organizations Trump despises) and also the HSC being placed under McMaster. It means there'll likely be a layer of sane people in between Trump and and the agencies that would execute his most dangerous policies.
And yet Nye Bevan famously said that he had secured the consultants' cooperation in setting up the NHS by "stuffing their mouths with gold". And doctors' pay has hardly been static in Britain since the 40s. How do American doctors justify their existence?
326: I don't know what a medical education costs in the UK, but doctors are treated oddly here: after paying for undergraduate college, you have to pay for four years of very expensive graduate school. Then you have at least three or four years, and for specialists more than that, of very low pay and bad working conditions while the interest on your loans accrues. By the time you start making ludicrous amounts of money, you're in at least your early thirties, and it's going to take quite a few years to pay your staggering level of debt down.
This doesn't mean that they deserve the amount of money they make now, but I think it goes a ways towards explaining why it feels justified to them.
Maybe I'm being misled by the non-proselytizing nature of Judaism here. AFAIK there's nothing remotely like this in Jewish theology, which in its modern form is notable for its skepticism toward conversion.
You're absolutely right, but even in Judaism there's a quasi-parallel in the Noahide laws. It's not that everyone's inherently Jewish, but everyone should at least acknowledge that Jewish thought is correct and play within a watered-down version of Jewish rules. I'm not sure how much that's actually a concern in modern Jewish though, though--I've seen bumper stickers promoting them around here, but that might just be due to our (unusually?) large Chabad presence.
I've seen bumper stickers promoting them
"everyone should at least acknowledge that Jewish thought is correct and play within a watered-down version of Jewish rules" seems like a lot to fit on a bumper sticker.
Hebrew has a character for that.
We started stuffing doctors' mouths with gold via Medicare in the 70's, when the program paid almost literally whatever rates they billed; later, once rate schedules were in place, they were allowed to push up their service volumes drastically to keep gaming it. So we keep level-setting anew.
How do American doctors justify their existence?
1) Prescribing painkillers
2) Plastic surgery
328. Medical education is a 5 or 6 year undergraduate degree here. Most doctors outside research institutions do not in fact have doctorates, they're MB. I've never quite understood the American way by which you do an undergrad degree in archaeology or Persian literature before starting your medical training. So, anyway, the cost to UK medical students is the same annually as any other degree, but it goes on longer. In your "intern" years you work 24/7 for peanuts, so I suppose the big money kicks in around 30.
323: is this the fabled Deep State finally kicking in? It seems huge, but I'm a terrible Kremlinologist.
America doesn't have a Deep State. I think it's one of the numerous White House factions winning a victory, which might well prove ephemeral. It is still promising in that it suggests it's possible for adults to achieve something inside the administration. Of course now McMaster will get fired tomorrow.
I am actually thinking it may be more along these lines (Barrett had a decades-long read on Trump):
"A guy like Steve Bannon ... I think that's a guy Trump uses up quickly. That'll be a body he steps over." --- Wayne Barrett
Re: the old white guy stuff above, nice work from Alex Pareene:
If you want to understand intra-GOP warfare, the decision-making process of our president, the implosion of the Republican healthcare plan, and the rest of the politics of the Trump era, you don't need to know about Russian espionage tactics, the state of the white working class, or even the beliefs of the "alt-right." You pretty much just need to be in semi-regular contact with a white, reasonably comfortable, male retiree. We are now ruled by men who think and act very much like that ordinary man you might know, and if you want to know why they believe so many strange and terrible things, you can basically blame the fact that a large and lucrative industry is dedicated to lying to them.
338: What did Trump get out of "using up" Bannon? He hasn't even had consistent positive coverage from Breitbart.
281- Maybe this ship has sailed but I wasn't saying what you think I was saying.
I don't think I'm trying to raise the level of the discourse either.
I do think God will hold us accountable for what we say, but I didn't want to bring Allah into it because I knew that would get only sneers.
I also think genocidal talk is counterproductive given that we aren't capable of carrying it out, and they are. Sure they may work themselves up to it anyway but we don't have to help.
309
Bruenig was attacking Waldman who was attacking Sanders. I don't think what Bruenig did was out of line.
Waldman thinks it was about timing. He does not want "medicare for all"/single payer. He wants the french system
http://theweek.com/articles/688629/what-democrats-health-care-now
I think calling "they deserve to die in a ditch and be eaten by maggots" "genocidal talk" is very, very silly of you in context. If you have religious reasons not to talk that way, I applaud your decision to live by whatever set of moral rules seems good to you. But the specific comment you're wringing your hands over is not having any tendency to work the right up into a genocidal frenzy, and worrying that it might is ridiculous of you.
I can admire someone for wanting to do what they think is morally right, even if I don't have the same moral standards. Telling people not to kid around because it'll make their political opponents dangerously angry, on the other hand, is not only silly in this case, but contemptibly craven in general.
He does not want "medicare for all"/single payer. He wants the french system
The second sentence does not imply the first. Here is what he says in that article:
Democrats need to begin an internal debate that will decide the next phase of reform. . . . Democrats had spent 15 years since Bill Clinton's failed reform effort figuring out what they'd do the next time they had the chance, and when the time came, they had settled on the basics, even if it wasn't perfectly satisfying to everyone. ... So what should that plan be? If I were making the policy, we'd move toward something like the hybrid system they use in France ... Getting from where we are now to a system like that would be complex and require a long period of transition. ... [Bernie Sanders is] introducing a new version [of single-payer], to which I say: That's great, let's talk about it. ... Democrats believed all along that health care is a right. It will take some time -- perhaps years -- for them to settle on a program that they want to enact.
He isn't saying that a French style system is either the ideal system absent constraints; just that he thinks it's the best goal given our current political and policy situation, and that he views that statement as just an opening for a broader discussion.
343- When you call your political opponents enemies and show your contempt for them every chance you get, you are certainly encouraging violence.
I wonder that you can't see that. Are you autistic?
Suddenly, I'm re-evaluating the last four decades. Possibly that explains everything! Thanks, Rtcb! I think we've both learned something about ourselves.
Saying that your political enemies "deserve to die in a ditch and be eaten by maggots" raises a red flag to me. It is certainly the type of rhetoric associated with genocides. Highly unlikely that whites/republicans will suffer from genocide in 21st century US, but it is still bad. It is also unlikely that repubs will see such rhetoric and start shooting.
Suddenly, I'm re-evaluating the last four decades. Possibly that explains everything!
She admitted it! Lisa's going to marry a carrot!
Bruenig is autistic. He is still right on the merits.
344
Not looking forward to a conversation with Waldman on healthcare. Single payer is the way to go and dems need to get behind it.
Still at it.
What are the vexillographic features associated with concern-trolling, I wonder? I think I might see one of those flags raising.
I didn't realise that we had to trade bob for another one. No one told me that was part of the deal.
Be fair. He hasn't said a thing about anime yet.
hmm,..
I don't like anime.
Posted by: roger the cabin boy | Link to this comment | 04- 4-17 8:56 PM
Are you sure you aren't like autistic or something?
I guess you say that is a thing about him rather than a thing about anime.
Maybe I'm autistic.
353: You know who else dehumanized others in pursuit of his goals, leading to millions dead?
Gendo Ikari in Shinseiki Evangelion. Which you might call Neon Genesis Evangelion because you are an ignorant American who can't appreciate it in the original Japanese, like I can. In a mere 26 episodes Hideki Anno summarizes and in fact eclipses all Western thought.
Not sure if I'm doing this right.
No, I think that's pretty good.
A little more on the anime, and then we need a casually tossed off political reading list.
I often think of Bongo from Life in Hell, thinking, "me? artistic?"
342: Bruenig was attacking Waldman who was attacking Sanders. I don't think what Bruenig did was out of line.
In the end, you have to make a decision whether or not you're interested in facts. I think bullshitting is almost always out of line, and the relevant thing about Waldman's criticism of Sanders was whether it was true or not.
But yeah, if you don't think bullshit is out of line, and if you think anything goes when you're discussing politics, then sure, yeah, you're not going to have a problem with Bruenig or anyone else who you deem to be on your side.
This is why people support Trump, too.
In a mere 26 episodes Hideki Anno summarizes and in fact eclipses all Western thought.
Relevant questionable content comic.
359
Is this the paragraph that is bullshit?
"For Waldman, the change from Obamacare to single-payer health care is akin to remodeling your kitchen: a mostly cosmetic change that is better, but not strictly necessary. This too seems to be a widespread liberal sentiment, especially during the primary campaign of 2016 where single-payer was widely rejected by the conservative wing of the Democratic party and voted down (in favor of Obamacare) when it was proposed for the Democratic party platform."
Waldman made a stupid kitchen remodel analogy:
https://twitter.com/paulwaldman1/status/841132003823104007
the "now is not the time for" is about timing but the "kitchen remodel" is about importance. Breunig did not attack him for the timing part just the "kitchen remodel" part. Is it really that slanderous that Breunig thought that Waldman did not think that a Obamacare to single payer transition was important given that most democratic pols have not come out for single payer? Clinton thinks it will never ever happen. They do not have support for it in the democratic platform.
Wait, Waldmann is a villain because he prefers the French system to single-payer? Am I understanding that right?
The missing step is the implicit claim that any system other than single payer is equivalently flawed. If Waldman has a positive thing to say about any alternative to single-payer, then he affirmatively advocates that everyone who is currently uninsured should stay that way, and nothing should improve.
I think this is bullshit, but you need it to make the argument make sense.
It is also, of course, bullshit to conflate a discussion of "Best system that seems as if it might be politically achievable in the foreseeable future" with "Best system if we could wave a wand." If someone's making arguments that expressly include political expediency, writing them off as being opposed to the ideal, but more politically difficult, solutions is screwy unless you have a reason to specifically think that to be the case.
"... This too seems to be a widespread liberal sentiment, especially during the primary campaign of 2016 where single-payer was widely rejected by the conservative wing of the Democratic party and voted down (in favor of Obamacare) when it was proposed for the Democratic party platform."
We're probably not going to agree on this topic. But it looks to me like where that paragraph differs from Waldman is in assuming that the vote for the 2016 party platform was an important decision point. Whereas Waldman would say that vote was just the very tip of the iceberg of 15 years of debate and that the reasons why people were opposed weren't just based on ideology (liberal vs conservative democrats) but also whatever ways that people had adjusted their priorities based on that process of building a policy coalition.
I don't pretend to be an expert on that process but I will strongly recommend The Climate War as by far the best book that I've read about that process of coalition building for major legislation -- it's about a different issue, but for me it's one of my reference points for thinking about the process.
I think the paragraph that we're arguing is bullshit but at the very least it's an example of people talking past each other -- in that Bruig is interested in a very different question than Waldman is, but he pretends that they're both addressing the same debate.
LB keeps pwning me with pithier statements, but I think the recommendation for The Climate War adds value.
Fundamentally, I don't think it's productive of Bruenig to treat Waldman as a political enemy (whereas I do think it's productive, because realistic, to treat Trump voters as political enemies). They both want to move policy in the same direction from the current status quo -- while they have disagreements about tactics, they're, based on stated policy preferences, natural allies at this point.
There is no accounting for the narcissism of small differences.
Bruenig was talking about the tweet which came out before Waldman's article. The tweet is very bad.
Is it really that slanderous that Breunig thought that Waldman did not think that a Obamacare to single payer transition was important given that most democratic pols have not come out for single payer?
All I'm saying is that I have a preference that policy discussions be grounded in reality.
You say previously that Waldman "attacked" Sanders, so it's okay for Bruenig to attack Waldman. I get it.
Now you say that what Bruenig did wasn't even really bad because it wasn't really an attack -- he was, after all, falsely attributing to Waldman of a view that is quite respectable in Democratic circles. Again: I get it.
You and Bruenig have no interest in evaluating conduct according to its truth-value. You have other concerns. We just disagree there.
the "now is not the time for" is about timing but the "kitchen remodel" is about importance.
Bruenig ignored the entire point of Waldman's tweet, which was explicitly about timing, in order to imply that Waldman was against a policy he actually favored.
Bruenig:
Opponents of single payer are moral monsters on par with AHCA proponents
He holds up Waldman as his key example of moral monstrosity for his supposed opposition to single-payer. That is absolute, stone bullshit, as I think we now agree.
Maybe absolute bullshit is not a bad thing. As you say, there are other reasons to hold a position besides truth. But me, I'm going to make a good-faith effort to try to figure out the truth.
... the tweet which came out before Waldman's article. The tweet is very bad.
Just for clarification are you asserting that:
1) The tweet is bad when read without the article for context, but not-so-bad once you've read the article.
2) The tweet is bad even after reading the article.
3) The tweet and article are different enough in presentation that the article doesn't impact the badness of the tweet one way or the other.
A 140 character tweet was flippant? Shocking.
What's so bad about saying that when someone's threatening to destroy a system that's working on some level, the immediate priority should be to prevent the destruction, rather than focusing on how the system should be improved? That's all the 'kitchen' tweet said. The analogy was flippantly dlsrespectful, but that's in the nature of the medium.
If you want to write Waldman off as a political enemy on that basis, you're not interested in working with anyone who isn't absolutely identical to you already.
371: We seem to have come back to the title of the original post.
I guess this is the politics thread, so: Our municipal election was yesterday, and we picked up another seat on the Assembly, in a suburban district that has historically been pretty conservative. So that's nice.
Keep up the good work teo; skull fuck the fuck out of those fucking Republican fuckwads.
More detail on the election results. It was a big night for the Dems.
375: Thanks, although I wasn't very involved this time. There was a lot of weird infighting on the progressive side over a couple of the races, including my own district's Assembly race, that turned me off a bit.
I'm volunteering as anger translator. For some reason this stupid unmasking/Susan Rice bullshit (and the media's response to it ... *cough* NYTimes* *cough* ...) has raised my level of ire to new heights. Plenty of other bigger outrages, but holy fuck a small glimpse of what it will be like if these bastards figure out how to competently take the reins of power.
*Who are rounding into their role as Paper of Record of the Autocracy.
Analogy Ban Good
140 Characters Bad
367: I think this is a fundamental error. In fact, as Bruenig understands, he and Waldman aren't on the same side. Waldman wants stuff like better healthcare, up to and including single-payer. Bruenig wants to sanctimoniously bash liberals.
It's the same with the liberals who want to win over Trump voters, and who think that can be done by showing Trump voters that Trump is an ignorant, racist, sexist, elitist con-man who doesn't have their best interests at heart. Bruenig can't find common ground with those liberals because no common ground exists. He isn't on the same side.
The error that you make here is similar to the one that well-meaning Jacobin Leftists make about Trump voters: you are refusing to take Bruenig at his word. Unlike a lot of Trump voters, though, Bruenig has spent plenty of time considering his position. He knows which side he's on. Additional information is not going to help him.
378.last: They did change their original headline of "Trump Says Susan Rice May Have a Committed Crime" to "Trump Suggests Rice Committed Crime, Citing No Evidence." So they're still a bit torn... but
1) Peter Baker had an awful "both sides" write-up on it yesterday and
2) The article said the NYTimes asked Trump if she had committed a crime rather than him volunteering, so what the fuck did they expect in return and why ask that.
The whole thing just following such well-worn channels of fuckwittedness in several regards.
Also depressing me is how well we are all playing our own little roles in the ongoing tragedy.
Maybe Bruenig was wrong and failed to properly look into waldman's heart instead of responding to the clear implications of his bad tweet.
Ben "the ACA is a more centrist approach" Cardin needs to lose his job though:
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/29/15056672/single-payer-democrats-medicare
Lots of resistance to single payer from Dem pols given that 80% of Dems and 60% of all voters support it.
These dems pols need to be attacked from the left until they change their position.
380: I agree with you, but was being fuzzy-headed and mealymouthed about it. That is, what I should have said should have started with "If Bruenig were actually interested in improving the health care system..." and ended with "...so it looks as if working toward improving health care isn't really his goal in attacking Waldman."
Without casting aspersions on anyone in particular, let me just remark that I think certain comments in this thread were unwisely engaged, and it is my hope that the majority of us can agree to avoid such engagements going forward, howsoever provocative we may find such comments to be. Discretion is the better part of sitting out an insanely long dry spell on the front page. I still think you all would do a good job tearing/teasing apart the latest White Mortality findings.
387: The consensus is that there's a real effect. Case and Deaton may be overselling it, but at the very least mortality is no longer dropping for middle-aged white people, particularly white women. This trend stands in contrast to all other groups in the US, and stands in contrast to the trends in Europe.
There probably is a useful post to be made there -- I remember reading something suggesting that the white mortality effect is exaggerated, but I can't think where.
389: Yes, the graphs were misleading crap due to scales. Relative rates were directionally correct but they really were fucked in how they depicted things like white vs. black rates (widely different y-axis scales on the same graph).
380
Please point out what word I am not taking Breunig on. Breunig means what he says.
To get a better health care system we are going to need to attack the people who are blocking it and can be persuaded to change their minds. That includes lots of dem pols.
In 2010 if every democrat pol supported single payer health care we would have single payer healthcare rather than ACA. That might not have been practicable, but the blame is on a handful of horrible democrats. I guess. nobody knows because it wasn't tried.
384
"it looks as if working toward improving health care isn't really his goal in attacking Waldman"
I don't understand that. The title of the article is "Opponents of single payer are moral monsters on par with AHCA proponents". Calling opponents of single payer a moral monster is an effective way to move toward improvements in healthcare. Nobody wants to be a moral monster. To the extent Waldman does support single payer, he is not a moral monster, just a bad tweeter. But a lot of people think the ACA is nearly as good single payer, but it is not. As the article points out.
Calling opponents of single payer a moral monster is an effective way to move toward improvements in healthcare.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Slate had a nice article from some statisticians about this recently: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/03/is_white_mortality_rising_not_really.html
Here's an earlier blog post on the error made in the original paper (basically, the average 45-54 year old is older now than the average 45-54 year old was in 1989), and an explanation of why the results are still important and interesting despite this error. http://andrewgelman.com/2015/11/06/correcting-rising-morbidity-and-mortality-in-midlife-among-white-non-hispanic-americans-in-the-21st-century-to-account-for-bias-in/
Here is a perfect opportunity to pause and reflect on unwise engagement.
Or even pause endlessly and reflect on unwise engagement.
391: Dude, where do you think you get the moral authority to call Waldmann a moral monster? It doesn't have the effect of making me think Waldmann is a moral monster -- it makes me think you are a lunatic.
My policy preferences are right around Sanders' 2016 campaign proposals (give or take a detail here or there), which is why I voted for him. But the behavior of Sanders supporters have been so purity trolly that in 2020 I'm wondering if I should vote for a centrist because at this point centrists seem like they are interested in policy, while the left is devoted to ineffectual preening.
Speaking of ineffectual preening on the left, can I just say that I am so embarrassed by previous impulses to defend Jeremy Corbyn that I am tempted to think up a new pseud and start over, just as the British left might want to consider doing with Labour?
396
I said Waldman was probably not a moral monster. Opponents of single payer are moral monsters and Waldman does not oppose single payer.
" But the behavior of Sanders supporters have been so purity trolly that in 2020 I'm wondering if I should vote for a centrist because at this point centrists seem like they are interested in policy, while the left is devoted to ineffectual preening."
I am willing to denounce Bruenig in 2020 to get you to not vote for Cory Booker but I am going to need to see a jpg of your filled out absentee ballot.
388, 393: in particular, I'm skeptical of (but curious about) their "despair" hypothesis. The effect does seem to be a real one. The paper seemed deliberately very hedgy, and at one point coyly referred to some bit of didactic fiction by Charles Murray without apparently endorsing it, and was full of other puzzlements.
The "despair" hypothesis seems plausible to me given the post soviet decline in life expectancy which seems pretty despair driven.
It might also be worthwhile (if tangential) to point out the people claiming #whitegenocide and #savethewhiterace are not the same people who are concerned about a potential mortality increase among working class whites.
The second hashtag should really be #whitemotivation
396--Yeah, but remember, the real Sanders supporters are mostly people like you, and the purity trolly bros are mostly Soviet bots (is #brobot a hashtag yet?)
404: Right. I'm a Sanders supporter.
341 last, 345: Covered by 281.1.
Second 343. (And most of what LB says in this subthread.)
341.3: Yes, I'm sneering. As you correctly anticipated this, you might not be autistic.
339: Interesting. My dad is almost that guy, and I can see how he gets his terrible opinions. But I think even he would be running the administration better than Trump is. The level of incompetence is really remarkable.
I got 18 out of 50 here. Does that mean I can call for genocide or not?
407 Same here. My dad is a typical retired engineer white guy. But he was part of a team that put a man on the fucking moon.
I don't know exactly why but this unmasking/Susan Rice is just utterly dispiriting and enraging. All the bad old media behavior added Trump hatefulness. Racist sexist motherfuckers everywhere in all media.
407, 409: Although I do like this tweet from James Austin Johnson:
"Fox news has done to our grandparents what our grandparents thought violent video games would do to us"
This is good as hell though:
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/04/04/california-bill-to-eliminate-money-bail-clears-first-hurdle/
In the rubble of civilization, following devastating wars and catastrophic natural disasters, the last man on earth, a Republican, obsessively searches what remains of the traces of human civilization for one piece of evidence to pin on an Obama administration official, desperately hoping that for one moment, before his life drains from his body, he can feel that sense of greatness that he is sure he once felt, in that dimly remembered time before a non-white man held the office of President of the United States.
Last man is a Republican, there's an appreciation for his inner emotions: I deem comment 415 empathetic and not eliminationist and therefore meeting the highest standards of contemporary political discourse. No one who reads can fail to be persuaded of the urgent necessity of single-payer health insurance.
desperately hoping that for one moment, before his life drains from his body, he can feel that sense of greatness that he is sure he once felt
He throws bird at snake.
To be actually serious, has anyone here read Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in their Own Land? I just started it and it seems like it's going to be maddening but also maybe worth reading anyway.
418: yes. I didn't much like it and didn't find it particularly worth reading. But I'm an awful person who finds deeply empathetic ethnography sort of cloying.
Hmm, maybe I'll strategically let the renewal limit run out while I have other books in that batch* I want to read. The intro wasn't encouraging, more like your standard Trump country feature article than what I was expecting.
*Checked out the same day, also not finished. Public libraries really make you return things even when no one else requests them, unlike those indulgent academic libraries.
This is good as hell though:
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/04/04/california-bill-to-eliminate-money-bail-clears-first-hurdle/
Is Nancy Isenberg's White Trash book any good? I keep seeing it in airport bookstores and it looks intriguing.
Books on white people open thread!
422: I didn't like it. The writing is glib and unpolished, the research is thin, and the tone is voyeuristic. I thought Strangers in Their Own Land, though annoying in a lot of ways, was a MUCH better book that White Trash.
Both were worlds better than Hillbilly Elegy, though, which infuriated me so much that I couldn't finish it.
Well, well, well, it looks like there's still someone who reads a lot commenting here. Are you some kind of professor?
||
Teo, I'm enjoying God's War a lot. Thanks for that.
|>
On white people who absolutely baffle and infuriate me, even though I am one (a white person, I mean), I recommend the fiction of Ron Rash. It's empathetic, but also critical, and not at all cloying. Also, Rash is just a great storyteller.
I especially like his short story collection, Nothing Gold Can Stay. And here's where I might say something about how his stories are as fierce and unyielding, but oddly beautiful, as the Appalachian landscape in which they are set, but I guess I'll leave that to the critics.
398 "Opponents of single payer are moral monsters and Waldman does not oppose single payer."
Germany, to take an example right outside my window, has universal coverage but not single payer. Switzerland has universal coverage but not single payer. France has universal coverage but not single payer. Japan has universal coverage but not single payer.
There sure are a lot of moral monsters out there in the world.
Oh, well, you perfesser types think you can prove anything with your fancy "examples" and "evidence".
Came here to make Doug's point. The difference between all those systems and single payer is almost invisible to the sick person using them
There seems to be an emerging consensus that at least the German and French systems deliver better care overall than the NHS, which is the poster child for single payer. Now that is in large part due to the fact that successive Tory governments have deliberately starved the NHS of resources for ideological reasons, that the Labour governments of 1997-2010 didn't do enough to prioritise it because Tony Blair MP is an anagram of "I am Tory plan B", and because large numbers on non-British staff in the NHS are running for the doors because their patients thought it wise to vote for Brexit. Bur the fact remains that the French and German systems provide excellent results.
To 318:
US federal government healthcare spending:
Medicare: $646.2 billion
Medicaid: $545.1 billion
Veterans' Administration: $182.3 billion
Department of Defense: $38.5 billion
Total: $1,414.1 billion.
US population: 318.9 million.
Which means that the US federal government spends $4,428 per head per year on health care.
The NHS budget is £117.2 billion a year. Divided by the UK population, and converted into US dollars using the purchasing power parity exchange rate (which seems fair since we're talking largely about services purchased in country rather than imported goods?), this equates to $4,015 per person. http://www.nhsconfed.org/resources/key-statistics-on-the-nhs
Caveats:
1) is it fair to use PPP?
2) is it fair to allocate the entire VA budget to "healthcare"?
the Labour governments of 1997-2010 didn't do enough to prioritise it because Tony Blair MP is an anagram of "I am Tory plan B"
Yes, that son of a bitch Blair brutally doubled NHS spending in real terms and callously oversaw the annihilation of its budget from 5.5% to 8.5% of national income. He might as well have been throwing premature babies out onto the streets.
Going all the way back to 109, I was referring to this:
https://twitter.com/sadydoyle/status/733851743964925952
"I've been dealing with Bruenig and his followers for some time [snip, par break]...Bruenig did not send all these tweets himself, obviously."
That sounds as if, perhaps, among all the others there were a few he might not have done. Maybe even just one. If you read it closely, though, it turns out to mean something more like "Bruenig sent precisely none of these tweets himself, and may not even have known of their existence". Literally none of the numerous examples quoted in the previous paragraph are actually attributed to him.
But by God, we're going to imply the shit out of that, happy in the knowledge that we haven't actually asserted it, and therefore they don't like it/but/they can't do you for it!
Universal non-single payer systems are not morally aborant under the logic of Brunig's article. They are by no means optimal though especially the German system which is what I fear we will get since it leaves such a big role for insurance companies. It seemed super complicated last time I checked in 2008. Still way better than us system.
Single payer also does redistribution better and are easier to sell to the public. I like the the British system as a way to keep total costs down but most people want something more like the Canadian system that has better health outcomes
430 plus Waldman wants the French system which is enough to avoid moral monstertude
436
It all goes back to jacobinghazi which is way to hard for me to figure out
429: I like my women like I like my Appalachian landscape -- fierce and unyielding, but oddly beautiful.
I like my women like I like my Appalachian landscapes -- covered in Rhododendron and with most commercially exploitable coal removed.
438, 439: Continuing with the dead-horse beating, are you getting a feel for why people are calling Bruenig a troll? The picking unnecessarily divisive fights with people who, on actually looking at what they're advocating, are mostly on the same side?
This thread has definitely convinced me that Bruenig is a troll.
... created by the collision of continental plates and.discussed in a constant barrage of editorial pieces.
I like my women the way I like my Appalachian landscapes: steep and verdant.
Continuing with the dead-horse beating
Shame! Remember, LB, you will be held accountable for the things you write here!
II like my women like I like my Appalachian landscapes -- with their tops removed for easy access.
That's really mostly West Virginia.
I like my women like I like my Appalachian landscapes - providing grudging and barely adequate support to a coterie of aggressive bitter ginger racists.
It's not really very noticeably full of red heads.
444- Bruenig is kinda trollish, but people on the left get accused of picking divisive fights when it is often the establishment dems driving a wedge. The fight for DNC being an excellent example as Bruenig points out. https://medium.com/@MattBruenig/be-clear-about-what-happened-to-keith-ellison-78e31bad6f76
Sometime arguments have merit even when the proponent is being a jerk.
Sometime arguments have merit even when the proponent is being a jerk.
This, I can wholeheartedly agree with in the abstract. Dishonesty is a much, much bigger problem than rudeness.
"Continuing with the dead-horse beating, are you getting a feel for why people are calling Bruenig a troll? The picking unnecessarily divisive fights with people who, on actually looking at what they're advocating, are mostly on the same side?"
For me the timeline is:
primaries-
Sanders proposes "medicare for all"
Clinton says single payer will never happen
"Paul Waldman: Sanders, Clinton are both right on health care "
general election-
dems refuse to put single payer in platform
post-election-
dems put sanders as point man to defend ACA
Saunders runs a series of pro ACA protests in January and debates Cruz defending ACA and promoting Medicaid for All
pro-ACA protesters go to town hall meetings putting pressure on moderate repubs
Republicans propose horrible healthcare law
March 12-
Sanders tweets:
"Never lose sight of the fact that our ultimate goal is not just playing defense. Our goal is a Medicare-for-all, single payer system."
Waldman responds:
"Like saying "Never lose sight of the fact that our goal is to remodel the kitchen" when there are arsonists pouring gasoline on your porch."
Bruenig states:
"For Waldman, the change from Obamacare to single-payer health care is akin to remodeling your kitchen: a mostly cosmetic change that is better, but not strictly necessary. This too seems to be a widespread liberal sentiment, especially during the primary campaign of 2016 where single-payer was widely rejected by the conservative wing of the Democratic party and voted down (in favor of Obamacare) when it was proposed for the Democratic party platform.
But in reality, the choice between single-payer and Obamacare is on par with the choice between Obamacare and AHCA. That is, a decision to favor AHCA over Obamacare is at least as horrific as the decision to favor Obamacare over single-payer."
March 23 Ryan plan fails
House "medicare for all" bill gets 80 sponsors progressives pressuring the 160 other house dems with calls
------
my conclusion:
Sanders tweet was very good
Walman's tweet was very bad
Breunigs attack on Waldman was perfectly valid -
don't compare single payer to a kitchen remodel
single payer is very popular (40% of trump voters want it) and needs to be fought for
putting pressure on dems to get single payer is the only way to get single payer
455's formatting gave me a bit of a start.
Plus, if there is a don't attack people generally on your side rule why does not it apply to Waldman v Sanders?
it is a clear "don't start none won't be none" violation
But sadly attacking democratic politicians that are generally on your side is what it is going to take
should wishy-washy journalists be attacked? maybe?
Doyle vs. Bruenig is interesting to me because it tests the limits of my commitment to epistemic rationality.
Doyle is a nasty, dishonest troll who doesn't play fair. She's tendentious and gratuitously insulting. As Buttercup says in 112, Doyle is a bully.
She also cracks me up. And (from what I've seen) she aims the bulk of her nastiness at people like Bruenig and deBoer, who have no grounds to complain. She is infinitely more clever than they are.
Yeah, sure, in the end, I have to come down on the side of intellectual honesty, personal decency and fair play. Even if Waldman were a bad person, that wouldn't justify Bruenig's treatment of him. I suppose if Zombie Huey Long rises up to smite Trump in the next election, I'm going to have to do a lot of tut-tutting about how dangerous and wrong and awful this is. But I won't feel sorry for Trump.
"For [Author],[interpretation of author's work]" is a standard thing to say and you don't need to ring up jk rowling or anything.
Brunig never said Waldman did not support single payer only that his "kitchen remodel" metaphor indicated that that he did not consider it very important.
411 - although apparently violent video games do end up turning people into Nazis after all.
and not considering it very important does not make you a moral monster, just wrong because it is very important. being against single payer (or universal healthcare to be accurate) makes you a moral monster because the distinction is very important .
459: Exactly. Bruenig wrote an item talking about people who are moral monsters because they oppose single-payer, cited Waldman as his only specific example, misused a tweet where Waldman makes clear he favors universal healthcare, and deliberately misconstrued the point of Waldman's tweet by only addressing one part of it.
But Bruenig never directly stated that Waldman was a moral monster, so the rest is okay because part of Waldman's tweet - taken out of context - suggested a lack of sufficient enthusiasm.
Nah. Lord knows I struggle with it sometimes, but in the end, I'm going to have to go with epistemic rationality.
The distinction is very important, but it's not bright-line. The ACA is far from ideal. But it's a framework that's perfectly capable of being tweaked into something that's as close an approximation to universal health care as the French or German system if we could get Congress behind the tweaking.
Calm down, tweaker.
Anyway, I've been engaged in this argument mostly because I'm avoiding a terrifyingly impending deadline. Bruenig, Waldman, and what anyone says on twitter ever are all wildly unimportant.
But generally, misrepresenting people's positions in the interests of starting fights over doctrinal purity is a bad idea.
only that his "kitchen remodel" metaphor indicated that that he did not consider it very important
I know I should stay out of this, but I have a deadline too, and so am impelled.
I think this is a deliberate misreading of Waldman. The critical context here is that (a) while our side does not currently have the votes/juice to get to universal care, (b) our side does have the votes/juice to prevent the ACA from being gutted.
Contrary to repeated contentions, yelling at moderate Dems over the next 60-90 days does not change (a). But (b) is only true if we make it so, by words and actions, including over the next 60-90 days.
Saying that (a) and (b) are both true at this moment is in no fucking way whatsoever saying that universal care is no better than the ACA, or that universal care is not a worthy objective over the longer term.
Waldman's tweet says we should concentrate on winning the battle we can win.
LB, I have come to regard the inexhaustibility of both your patience and ability to keep finding new constructive angles to argue in these situations as a superpower.
I don't have that one, but it's true that nigh-miraculous levels of (misdirected) productivity can spring from avoidance behaviours. We can only try to harness this power for good.
because on a moral monster sits back while the flawed ACA is repealed without enactment of universal care.
Who is less moral -- a moral monster, or an immoral monster?
466
Waldman was attacking sanders whose postion was that the defense of the ACA is consistent with and lays the groundwork for fighting for single payer.
"Never lose sight of the fact that our ultimate goal is not just playing defense. Our goal is a Medicare-for-all, single payer system."
This strategy was signed off on by the dem leadership who picked sanders to lead the defense of the ACA, they thought sanders could rally the base to defend ACA and he did.
I think you need to break 'attacking' up into smaller, more focused categories. Waldman's tweet was questioning the appropriateness of Sanders' focus in the moment. Kind of petty, and flippantly snippy, as Twitter tends to be. But not misrepresenting anything about Sanders' positions, and 'attacking' on a point limited to tactics.
As tweets go, not a great idea, but really not an important attack.
"Paul Waldman: Sanders, Clinton are both right on health care "
I was curious where that came from and, as far as I can tell, it refers to This article in which he says, "So who's right about this? To a degree, they both are." but ultimately is critical of the Clinton campaign taking what he considers an odd line of attack against the Sanders proposal.
In any case, the basic divide between the two is that Sanders wants to remake the health insurance system, while Clinton wants to build incrementally on the ACA. But in the context of a Democratic primary, her attack on single-payer insurance is a little strange.
So why would Clinton be attacking single-payer in the way she is -- on the cost issue before, and now on this state issue -- when there's a less risky way to frame her objections to Sanders' idea? Maybe she sincerely thinks that single-payer would be disastrous, though I have trouble believing that ... Or maybe she wants to signal to general election voters that while she's been staking out liberal positions on lots of issues, she's no crazy lefty.
So I don't think that supports the idea that Waldman is hostile towards advocacy of single-payer.
and not considering it very important does not make you a moral monster, just wrong because it is very important. being against single payer (or universal healthcare to be accurate) makes you a moral monster because the distinction is very important .
What about considering it important but not currently possible? Or thinking that it's important but thinking that the ACA + Public Option is a better route towards single-payer than Medicare for all? Or thinking that it's important but hoping that the next big political fight will be on a different issue -- carbon tax, for example or minimum wage?
single payer is very popular (40% of trump voters want it)
Not to repeat myself too much, but The Climate War has a number of good examples of the problems of building consensus around a specific policy even when people say that they support that policy idea in the abstract.
472
well the implication is something like that Sanders is a moral monster that "sits back while the flawed ACA is repealed". The porch is on fire and he is looking through brochures from the contractor.
In fact, Sanders is the point person to defend ACA and has consistently done so
This strategy was signed off on by the dem leadership who picked sanders to lead the defense of the ACA
Out of curiosity, do you have a source for this? I believe you, Sanders has certainly been a visible leader, but I'm curious how the Dem leadership has framed it.
471: Oh yeah. As it happens (and as I suggested previously), I agree with Sanders and disagree with Waldman.
But so what? The Sanders/Waldman disagreement is, from the point of view of epistemic rationality, unrelated to Bruenig's falsehoods regarding Waldman. Look at the linked material in 160: "Opponents of single payer are moral monsters on par with AHCA proponents." As we've already established, Waldman doesn't oppose UHC and his disagreement with Sanders is over tactics.
Of course, rationality isn't the only game in town, and from another point of view, Waldman's disagreement with Sanders justifies Bruenig's bullshit. Waldman "attacked" Sanders, so you can say anything you want to about him. You expressed that view here, and I've already rebutted it:
Bruenig was attacking Waldman who was attacking Sanders. I don't think what Bruenig did was out of line.
Really, we've reached our irreducible difference here. I support reason and factuality as best as I'm able, but I certainly understand that there are other ways to evaluate the world.
473 suggests that I may have misunderstood Waldman, who I thought was more-or-less adopting the Clinton critique of Sanders on healthcare.
suggests that I may have misunderstood Waldman, who I thought was more-or-less adopting the Clinton critique of Sanders on healthcare.
Oh, I suspect that is Waldman's leaning, but I also think he's more open to an actual debate than lemmy caution would suggest.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/
"Our First Stand," the catchall theme for the protests, represents one of the the earliest protests by an opposition party against an incoming president. Brainstormed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Democratic leaders in Congress, each rally introduced crowds to men and women who had faced death or bankruptcy before the ACA went into effect, then challenged Republicans to listen to their stories. Rattled during the ACA's passage by tea party protests and raucous congressional town hall meetings, Democrats were flipping the script.
"The immediate goal of the rallies is to show Republicans that the majority of people are against repealing the Affordable Care Act," Sanders said in an interview this week.
---
he basically did a bunch of rally's in early January to rev up the base
here is where I got the headline "Paul Waldman: Sanders, Clinton are both right on health care"
I just thought that it was funny
My model is that there are:
1-pro-single payer dems
2-"conversation" dems (like corey booker) who will bend with the wind or maybe prefer doing nothing; and
3-anti-single payer dems
If we get a thin majority again like in 2010 we need some discipline in the dem party to get single payer through. Maybe get some dems primaried out or just fear being primaried out.
or maybe have a massive wave of dems elected and be more chill?
In pre-revolutionary situation, party discipline chills you.
476
here is the form of Brunig's argument:
title: murderers are moral monsters
this bad tweet from A says that "murder is impolite" [except that the "bad tweet from A" is a metaphor somehow]
this is an incorrect belief, murder is not just impolite it is very bad. murders are moral monsters
----
everybody: "A is not a moral monster. this article says he is against murder. This article is so unfair"
481: Of course, you only get to the "murder is impolite" analogy by ignoring half the tweet (and by violating the analogy ban).
I mean, it's really a neat trick to take part of a fucking tweet out of context, but Bruenig is a talented troll.
If we're going to pursue this stupid analogy, then what Waldman tweeted was more akin to: "Under some circumstances, killing someone is necessary."
And yes, for the record, I am also on a deadline.
If we get a thin majority again like in 2010 we need some discipline in the dem party to get single payer through.
I think this gets to a point of disagreement. To me, what you're saying sounds like Green Lanternism -- if we just want this enough we can ignore all practical difficulty.
I am generally sympathetic to Waldman when he says that an important part of the process of arriving at the ACA was the 10 years of discussion, within Democratic policy circles, after the failure of the original Clinton effort and that the resulting consensus was a compromise and wasn't anybodies ideal, but did make it easier to stay focused on passing legislation based on that consensus.
I think there are too many people, with too many different agendas for "party discipline" to be simple answer for how to pass single-payer, and that the fight isn't just putting pressure on people, and it isn't just enforcing party discipline, it's also having the conversation, making the case for the benefits of single-payer, listening to people's concerns and building comfort.
Now, I also understand that you or I as voters are mostly outside of those conversations and I can totally understand why you think the best role you can play is to put whatever pressure you can on Democrats who aren't sure about single-payer. I'm not trying to tell you that you're wrong about that.
I'm just saying that I think Waldman sees himself as involved in a different project and that his way of seeing it makes a lot of sense as well.
here is Waldman's bad tweet:
"Like saying "Never lose sight of the fact that our goal is to remodel the kitchen" when there are arsonists pouring gasoline on your porch."
don't remodel kitchen=have old kitchen
don't deal with arsonists= house burns down
Bruenig says that some squishy proponents of single payer (those in favor of single payer (kitchen remodel) like Waldman) don't seem to realize that single payer will save the same number of lives versus ACA as ACA will save versus Ryan's plan.
I guess Waldman could say he was talking about urgency only. Don't you realize (point person of the defense of ACA) that ACA needs to be defended?
"conversations" is a trigger word for me because of all the calls for "conversations on race" which basically means "do nothing about race issues"
I don't want conversations about health care. I want single payer.
Waldman needs to get the hell out of the way. He is in favor of single payer but he feels the need to pissily tweet at Sanders for some reason. Bruenig thinks that maybe he doesn't know how serious things are. Who knows?
I think "single payer" as shorthand for "universal coverage" is leading you astray there -- like, we talked through this above, that there's nothing wrong with the French system in terms of the people it covers, despite the fact that it's not single payer.
Whether to pursue universal coverage through Medicare-for-all or through expanding and tweaking the ACA into something more like a French/German plan is a tactical, not a moral, decision, and reacting to a tweet that questions a focus on single payer as if it were underrating the importance of universal coverage seems very mistaken to me.
"If we're going to pursue this stupid analogy, then what Waldman tweeted was more akin to: "Under some circumstances, killing someone is necessary.""
Maybe, but who could object to that? I can't think of a good analogy to the analogy. I just wanted to point out that Bruenig's point does not turn on Waldman being anti-single payer( pro murder).
It does depend on reading a whole lot into the implications of a tweet, rather than relying on longer-form works by the same writer.
Waldman needs to get the hell out of the way. He is in favor of single payer but he feels the need to pissily tweet at Sanders for some reason. Bruenig thinks that maybe he doesn't know how serious things are. Who knows?
Personally I don't care that much about the tweet at all, and I'd agree that it was a bit pissy and probably ill-advised. But I do object to (a) the implication that anybody who is in favor of single-payer but makes a pissy tweet is "in the way" and (b) the idea that if Waldman's motives are unknowable that's justification for Bruenig to read them in the most unchartible way possible.*
* But, again, I don't care about the tweet. Even if you think the tweet is bad the other object to Bruenig 's article is -- why bother calling a bunch of people moral monsters and taking as your starting point one tweet. Surely if he wanted to he could have found a more substantive example but, clearly, he wanted to do a quick drive-by, and wasn't interested in litigating the various arguments within the Democratic party about Health Care. On one hand, he's allowed to write something quick and off-the-cuff. On the other hand, he's clearly playing the provocateur and people are reacting to that.
I just wanted to point out that Bruenig's point does not turn on Waldman being anti-single payer( pro murder).
I get that. You can't defend what Bruenig is doing here. You wish he were doing something different. And, hey, presto! All you have to do to get your wish is to assert that it's so!
It's Bruenig's method, and it works perfectly well.
But when I want to know what Bruenig is up to, I'm going to consult him, not you. In the Trump era, that's old-fashioned, but I still hold out hope that we can make America great again.
"I think "single payer" as shorthand for "universal coverage" is leading you astray there -- like, we talked through this above, that there's nothing wrong with the French system in terms of the people it covers, despite the fact that it's not single payer.
Whether to pursue universal coverage through Medicare-for-all or through expanding and tweaking the ACA into something more like a French/German plan is a tactical, not a moral, decision, and reacting to a tweet that questions a focus on single payer as if it were underrating the importance of universal coverage seems very mistaken to me."
Waldman also uses single payer as a short hand for universal care and lumps the French system (that he prefers) as a radical change not obtainable by tweaks from the ACA:
"Sanders supports single-payer insurance, which would mean scrapping our current system and remaking it along the lines of one of the variations of health insurance we see in every other industrialized country. It's sometimes called "Medicare for all." But it could be anything from a purely socialized plan like they have in Great Britain, where both insurance and health care itself are largely owned and operated by the government (not likely), to one of the hybrid systems in place somewhere like France, where there's a basic government plan that covers everyone, then most people buy supplemental private insurance that gives them whatever extra benefits they want (which is somewhat analogous to Medicare and supplemental Medigap plans)."
The German/French system is suboptimal but much better than US system.
I am not underrating universal plans in saving lives nor stating that waldman's preferred plan will kill people. It would save many lives.
Waldman did use rhetoric that indicates that he himself does not know or internalize how many lives will be saved. This would perhaps explain why dems are so tepid on single payer. It is a kitchen remodel. But it isn't. It kills the same number of lives as the porch fire would. And now, the porch fire is out.
Waldman did use rhetoric that indicates that he himself does not know or internalize how many lives will be saved.
We have gotten into a realm where the argument doesn't have much of anyplace to go other than saying no, no he didn't.
491
"I get that. You can't defend what Bruenig is doing here. You wish he were doing something different. And, hey, presto! All you have to do to get your wish is to assert that it's so!"
here is what Bruenig says:
"For Waldman, the change from Obamacare to single-payer health care is akin to remodeling your kitchen: a mostly cosmetic change that is better, but not strictly necessary. "
Breunig thinks the remodeled kitchen comment shows that:
1)Waldman thinks single payer is better
2)Waldman thinks single payer is not necessary (it would be good to have)
Bruenig could be wrong but that is the implication of Waldman's metaphor
that's justification for Bruenig to read them in the most unchartible way possible.
The liberals' failure of my lifetime is their inability to appreciate the extent of the possible. The right doesn't have that problem, and now we have Donald Trump.
In fact, Waldman's tweet could have been read considerably less charitably. It could have been read to favor gassing the Jews; it could have been read as favoring disenfranchising women; it could have been read as declaring martial law.
Once you liberate yourself from the facts, you can do anything you want.
Waldman's tweet (mildly) praised the utility of universal healthcare. Bruenig wasn't implying that Waldman was a moral monster for opposing universal healthcare. He says it straight-fucking-out. He starts by telling us his premise: That single-payer and Obamacare were the two available choices:
What if the choice was between Obamacare and single-payer health insurance? How would the moral situation change?
Of course, that's phrased as a counterfactual -- because it would be ridiculous to say that such a choice was available.
Then he places Waldman squarely into that counterfactual world - a world that Waldman says he would prefer, even as he acknowledges that we don't live there.
Bruenig goes on to make clear that it doesn't matter whether Waldman supports universal healthcare. What matters is, well -- nothing matters.
For Waldman, the change from Obamacare to single-payer health care is akin to remodeling your kitchen: a mostly cosmetic change that is better, but not strictly necessary. This too seems to be a widespread liberal sentiment, especially during the primary campaign of 2016 where single-payer was widely rejected by the conservative wing of the Democratic party and voted down (in favor of Obamacare) when it was proposed for the Democratic party platform.
So Bruenig asserts that Waldman's support of single-payer and conservative Democrats' opposition is identical. (And it actually might be in some cases! Many of those Democrats probably want UHC, but thought that the best way to get it was to work first to preserve Obamacare. I disagree, but it's not a stupid view -- and in any event, it's their view. Bruenig shouldn't be allowed to contradict people when the subject is their own opinions.)
If you are not bound by truth, you can do whatever you want. There's a power in that. Rationalist liberals who are constrained by facts are constrained and modern liberals are only too happy to lend the liars a hand by trying to fit their lies into some rational narrative.
This is what Trump understands.
"In fact, Waldman's tweet could have been read considerably less charitably. It could have been read to favor gassing the Jews; it could have been read as favoring disenfranchising women; it could have been read as declaring martial law."
not sure that that is true. The charitable reading is that he did not fully appreciate the implication of the kitchen remodel part and that that section should be ignored. But, the kitchen remodel part makes the slam make sense. "Senator sanders do something to save the ACA"/ "the porch is on fire " He is doing something. He has been riling up the base to defend the ACA since early January. you need to make the ultimate goal part look bad and that is done by talking about kitchen remodels. But why make the ultimate goal part look bad?- a rational reason would be as Breunig describes.
The defense of Waldman is that he did not think it through but instead posted a pissy tweet at Sander's for god knows what reason that does not really make sense when you analyze it.
This is as confusing as the wolf cub/puppy thing now.
The defense of Waldman is that he ... posted a pissy tweet at Sander's for god knows what reason that does not really make sense when you analyze it.
Right, that might not sound like a great defense but when the alternative is just calling him a moral monster . . . I think Hanlon's Razor applies in this case.
I realize that the way things have ended up there are three of use arguing with lemmy caution, and we all may have separate perspectives but, just speaking for myself, I agree that the tweet in question doesn't seem like well thought-out commentary on the health care debate but, thankfully, he's written other things which do feel more thought-out and I'm inclined to engage with them.
I also don't think the tweet is as bad as you make it out to be, but even if it is, so what? I'm just not quite sure what's at stake in the argument over the tweet by itself.
The defense of Waldman is that he did not think it through but instead posted a pissy tweet at Sander's for god knows what reason that does not really make sense when you analyze it.
Wait, I thought the uncharitable reading was that he posted a pissy tweet that doesn't make sense but that exposed Waldman as not truly feeling the importance of the suffering of the uninsured, whereas the charitable reading was that the tweet was a pissy commentary on Sanders' sense of political tactics that doesn't say much of anything about Waldman's beliefs on the substance of the issues.
Given that we're all agreed that Waldman is an advocate of universal coverage, what's the uncharitable reading that does 'make sense'?
Looking at the wikipedia entry for Hanlon's Razer it includes a line from Goethe which seems rather appropriate for this discussion.
... misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.
499: I think what's at stake is whether the tweet was bad enough to justify Bruenig writing a piece calling people who are soft on universal health care moral monsters and citing Waldman as his only example. If the tweet isn't that bad, then Bruenig looks like a troll.
I have gotten wrapped up in the argument because of deadlines, and I honestly don't have that much of a holistic sense of either Waldman's or Bruenig's body of work, so mostly I'm bullshitting.
But Waldman's tweet, while pissy, isn't the sort of thing that would leave me confused about the substance of anything at all, whereas Bruenig's piece referencing it would. Comparing the two, I'd rather read the former.
I think what's at stake is whether the tweet was bad enough to justify Bruenig writing a piece calling people who are soft on universal health care moral monsters and citing Waldman as his only example. If the tweet isn't that bad, then Bruenig looks like a troll.
That makes sense as a description of the argument.
I guess my position is that it's never worth writing a piece calling somebody a moral monster based on a single tweet. Either use the tweet as an example and combine it with something more substantive. If the person doesn't have any more substantive work, then don't use them as an example.
Obviously that's not how life works, there are various examples of people being called moral monsters based just on tweets but, by and large, I don't think that's a great approach.
500 years from now, this conversation will be preserved for an analysis of the debates of the early 21st century tweet hermeneutics.
It's possible for everyone to be wrong here. Waldman's tweet was pissy and wrong in a bad faith sort of way,* and Bruenig is a troll.
*It might seem innocuous, but there's a history of undermining social movements through a form of concern trolling that erases the very real work they do. Sort of: "Why doesn't social movement Z they do X instead of Y," where social movement Z are the main or only people actually doing X, in addition to advocating for Y.
You're all fucking moral monsters because Don Rickles is dead and Donald Trump is President and you're sitting around wasting time on this picayune annoying nonsense. Get out and do something with your fucking selves.
Wow, I was pleased to see your name in the sidebar, but that is astonishingly rude. Now I'm no longer pleased.
I'm just not quite sure what's at stake in the argument over the tweet by itself.
The tweet is where the big issues are. Political strategy (the subject of Waldman's tweet) is a big issue. Healthcare policy (what Bruenig wants to talk about) is also a big issue.
But for human beings, epistemology is a bigger issue, and that's what the conversation about the tweet is about.
How do we know the things we know? Must we expend effort to determine the truth, or can we just decide what we know, and then reason backward from there? You really can't have a productive conversation at all (as we've seen here) until you establish some epistemic ground rules.
Lemmy has throughout advocated a position that factuality isn't the important consideration here. Look at 487. After I tightened up his analogy to make it more, well, analogous, lemmy conceded that my interpretation might be right.
Maybe, but who could object to that?
It doesn't matter whether my description is more accurate. It doesn't serve lemmy's goal of objecting to Waldman, so it's not relevant.
A conventional logician will tell you that lemmy is "begging the question" -- assuming the result he wants to achieve. That logician is going to call this a "fallacy."
Looked at one way, that's true. But the older I get, the more I realize that the things I call fallacies are really techniques. I have a different set of techniques, but are my techniques better?
That's the Big Issue. What is the proper role of factuality in discerning the truth?
Halford! I was pretty sure lk in 387 was criticizing me, but the criticism was too indirect and insufficiently insulting to be really satisfying. As one would expect, you did much better.
Well done and welcome back! Don't be a stranger.
I'm surprised Halford was able to hold that in for 500 comments. I wouldn't have lasted half that long.
This better not be somebody's joke.
Bruenig's post is a serious one.
Not having universal health care is killing people
killing people to the same extent as it would be if we scrapped the ACA
Waldman's tweet compares universal healthcare to a kitchen remodel (versus the porch fire of scrapping the ACA) - this is bad
This may not be what Waldman believes but it is the clear implication of the tweet
it would also explain why preported proponents of single payer don't seem to fight very hard for it
they fail to understand the stakes involved
---
I don't know the more charitable view of Waldman's tweet- I don't see it at all; I was trying to understand it
what does the kitchen remodel mean in the charitable view?
you just have to x it out?
---
508
ok lets use your example W's text is now "Under some circumstances, killing someone is necessary"?
here is the new form of Brunig's argument:
title: murderers are moral monsters
this bad tweet from A says that "Under some circumstances, killing someone is necessary"
[now bruenig has to argue that this is wrong when is a conventional belief of all ethical systems that I know of such that murder is defied to exclude killing in certain circumstances]
I guess we are going to war with Syria against Assad who is aligned with Russia and Iran
Should end up well
513: As much as I hate Assad, this can't possibly end well. Goddammit.
Seconding 506, though. Good to see you again.
I think that maybe the rational case supports Bruenig being careless with his words, but it seems an uncharitable reading to claim based on this evidence that he is dishonest.
I'm pleased to see Halford back if only to scold. Meanwhile I'm about to fly to Dubai again to see Chani and New Order.
513 us a hell of a thing. A situation largely brought in by this crew of rank amateurs in D.C. I'm thinking of Tillerson's previous statement that removal of Assad was no longer an administration goal. Language matters and strategic ambiguity can be your friend. Surely there are FSOs who could have told him that if only he'd deign to look his staff in the eye and, you know, talk to them.
I think I get most of my exercise walking quickly through airport terminals.
Halford! Also, he's right you know.
Further, I'm impressed that Chani got the headliner slot over New Order:-) Hooky must be spitting tacks over that one.
I think I get most of my exercise walking quickly through airport terminals.
The West Wing fitness plan. Also building upper body strength by carrying around policy documents of gradually increasing weight.
Single-payer health plans would probably be too light compared to those for universal coverage through the insurance market.
Well, we can't have that. That would mean that all the moral monsters would be all toned and muscly and the heroes of purity would be skinny and weak.
They compensate with their haloes.
Trump warned Russia in advance of his strike, and they warned the Syrians. Cruse missiles cost about 1.5 million each. So I think Trump got the cable news networks to talk about his seriousness and resolve by putting on a taxpayer funded $90 million fireworks display.
497
This is as confusing as the wolf cub/puppy thing now.
I'm surprised you managed to stick with it that long; the first 80 percent of the thread was almost complete gibberish to me. However, somewhere between 450 and 490 I think I found the real problem. See what 487 said about Waldman's tweet:
I can't think of a good analogy to the analogy.
Those things are banned around here for a reason.
Re: Syria, Cassandane's first reaction was "Well, here comes World War III." My response was, "That can't happen, Trump is too friendly with the Russians."
I didn't read most of this.
And I still want confirmation that it was really Halford above. At first I thought it was a spoof but then the internet confirmed Don Rickles was really dead.
I totally think that was Halford. The Unfoggetariat is clever, but someone would have to be really motivated to match his style that precisely.
It would be good if we had a party that was against foreign wars:
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/850124602886037505
It wasn't even like Sanders was good on this. The war creep is just crazy.
This California cabernet is awful. I blame Halford.
Cyrus! I was thinking of you.
IIRC you're in DC. I was there for a quick visit last week and the highlight of my trip was the exhibit "For The Love Of His People: Photography of Horace Poolaw" at the museum of the American Indian, and I've been wanting to recommend it to anybody who'd there.
I didn't know anything about it when I went. I had just gone to the museum for lunch and decided that, while I was there, I should look at the exhibits, and it floored me. Great photographs, interesting subject matter and the exhibit itself felt like it was put together with care and attention.
I'm not generally a visual person and painting/photography generally don't do much for me, but I thought it was really good.
536.2: That was my favorite exhibit in that museum when I visited a few months ago.
Ooohh, 536 looks good, thanks.
506: Swing Left seems like a good pick to me-- I'm getting a minimal amount of focused email about get-out-the-vote activities in a nearby swing district. I can't do the ones next weekend, but I will be able to help later. Also, nice too see you, and "picayune" is a word hardly anyone uses.
536.2: That was my favorite exhibit in that museum when I visited a few months ago.
It certainly shines by comparison with the exhibit across the hall on the Great Inca Road -- which was an interesting thing to learn about, but the exhibit itself was kind of lousy. Poorly organized and not very informative.
But, teasing aside, I was really impressed with it.
So the band is staying in my hotel and another friend we were meeting for the concert at the hotel bar tells me I just missed them by 5 minutes. He was chatting with them.
536: Thanks, I'll add it to my to-do list. (And for the record I'm far from the only DC-area resident who might be interested.) I'm not much of a museum-goer but I get out to them now and then. And it'll only be easier in a couple weeks. Cassandane, Atossa, and my mother are all going to visit Cassandane's parents and I'll have the house to myself. I'll mostly spend this time playing one game or another but hopefully will get some work and/or edifying experiences done.
Awesome show. I haven't danced like that in a ver
And I came set long time. And I came away with the a set list and one of Bernard Sumner's guitar picks his roadie threw out into the crowd after the show.
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Any interest in a Philadelphia meet up this weekend? I've already been in touch with J, Robot but I thought there might be others around too. (Maybe Witt?) I'll actually be in town until Wednesday morning but have seders to go to do Monday and Tuesday evenings are out. Sorry for the short notice.
|>
Wow 544 came out all kinds of messed up.
Update: I have now spent much more time on Mastodon than I ever did on Ello or Diaspora.
Oh wow, lucky I came into this thread. Yes, a Philadelphia meetup would be fun. I'm actually off on Monday so am available Sat/Sun/Mon at various times. Let me know what works for you.
543: We're spending spring break in Columbus, OH this week (and I totally stood up peep because my friend turned out to be unable to watch the kids) and Selah has been reminiscing about DC last year and specifically what a great daddy you are to Atossa. She was lecturing my other friends who have an adorable baby, whose stay-at-home dad is also great but could apparently stand to learn a thing or two from you.
Somehow not having the majesty of a major city is making it much easier to go for the idea that we just swim in the hotel pool and watch cable tv much of the day. We made it to the conservatory but I suspect we'll miss both the zoo and the science museum, though I'll try to drive back for the latter soon. Being uncultured is just so much easier.
Way to point out Columbus is stupid dull.
Hey, but I can complain about my ex! She decided last year that it was impossible to take all three children on vacation and then she stopped having parenting time with one of them anyway, but the same held true for two. I agreed (all of this in mediation) that it was fine I GUESS for her to take one child at a time on vacation as long as she made an effort to make things fair, which she never does, to avoid hurt feelings. So she took Mara to NYC for a long weekend, the end. Now she wants to take Selah somewhere for 3-4 days while the older girls are at Girl Scout camp this summer to make up for not doing it last year but then not do any additional vacation this year. Next year she might be up for a vacation with both of them because doing individual vacations is too expensive, especially if she has to pay to bring a friend to help her out. But she's completely committed to parenting and needs lots of affirmations about what a great job she does!
(I'm writing this because I'm feeling a little like a crummy parent myself and it's useful to have a reminder that hey, I'm totally not the worst. And because argh, I do not like her at all.)
549: Tentative plan is Eastern State Penitentiary at 1 on Sunday followed by Barcade. You're welcome to join any part.
Thanks! I'll see what shakes out -- I'm waiting to hear about seeing my sobrinos.
552: ugh, Lee. Wish I could join you this year, though!
554: It would be awesome if you could meet up for any part of Sunday afternoon with me, teo, and Mr. Robot. Unless I've forgotten something, I believe AWB is the only of my imaginary internet friends to meet him.
Are you guys still sticking with the above plan? I'm heading downtown now and will meet you wherever you are when I get there.
I'm chilling outside Eastern State, enjoying the gorgeous weather. Red dress, black boots.
I probably should have worn sunblock.
Also, holy gentrification. I haven't been to this neighborhood in a while.
TWO Trump shirts. What is happening on my city? I'm not even in the Republican wards.
I proooobably should've been a bit more organized about this.
Taken out of context 557 was surprising.
I am a wimp. The sun is defeating me. Going to amble in the direction of Barcade.
Bah. This GPS has me walking all around Robin Hood's barn. I can't recognize anything around here now that it's so hipsterized. Guess it was not meant to be. I'll plan better next time there's a meetup.
My plan is working, but too late to help.
Oh no! We switched at the last minute to Barcade first, then Eastern State. Sorry Witt!
Nah, it's my fault for being disorganized and not having anyone's contact info. At least I got a nice walk and done people-watching, although I'm quite sorry to have missed you all. Next time!
Yes, next time. I'll be back in early June for my sister's wedding.
