One quick question for US legal types on the blog: has Biden rescinded a Trump executive order that (I think) established export controls on Covid vaccine production?
When I was a kid, my brother and I caught a bunch of frogs. We wanted to start raising frogs as pets, so we put them in a bucket of with water in the garage. They were all dead by the next morning. You don't need to bother to heat up the water is what I'm saying.
I'm probably more inclined towards the KD side of things. Not necessarily because the problems in question aren't objectively bad, but because I've concluded that nonstop progressive catastrophizing about absolutely everything is not only unhealthy but genuinely counterproductive.
I've significantly changed my media consumption habits during the last few years to cut down on the amount of that stuff I'm exposed to.
I do feel like there's a lot of cultural momentum towards instilling anxiety disorders in everyone. My natural state is languid to the point of nearly being liquid, but it didn't use to seem as unusual as it has in the past 5-10 years.
OR, I use to be a languid-liquid 20-something, which is not that unusual, and then as people sort themselves into parents and non-parents, the parents clench up with anxiety and rigidity, and I see a whole lot more parents now.
Although my kids are finally old enough that peer parents aren't at their peak-nervous-wreck-ness anymore. Which is nice.
When I emailed Heebie I didn't include enough links but a perfect example of when I appreciate Kevin Drum is something like his series of posts that vaccination rollout is basically FINE. Here's one:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2021/01/another-look-at-vaccinations/
That's a good counter to the stream of anecdotes and hot takes about how terribly it's going.
Also he's numerate so you can trust (and understand) his plots of data, which often cut right to the gist of things.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2021/01/chart-of-the-day-gdp-was-up-4-in-the-4th-quarter/
I need to stop looking at twitter because I can't not doom-scroll and it doesn't help me personally and doesn't motivate me to do stuff (as mentioned in 4.1).
5: While the happiness polling data says that the years your kids are adolescents and teens are the hardest, I would say the freeing up of your own time and attention for other things is a huge positive. And I only have two (teens). And you start to see possible adult trajectories for them, so that brings in some angst, but also some satisfaction and feeling that it's all a bit more out of your hands. It's a different, easier nervous-wreckednessness is what I'm saying.
Honestly, it's easier to watch them suffer minor consequences for their own actions when they are teens.
6: I saw a program about this with Americans, Germans and someone from a Spanish-speaking country. The Spanish-speaking country said that the rich countries were terrible at vaccination. We've built up our medical system so much but let the public health system languish. It's actually kind of odd that people expect to get vaccines from an individual healthcare provider and not from a public health clinic.
I have some affection for Kevin Drum after having read him for close to twenty years. I don't think he is as good as he used to be though. He has never been altogether on the side of the working class, but lately he's had some just dumb takes. I like his optimism, but I think it comes from a very privileged space. His life has been very good, and as a fairly conservative dem his political priorities are mostly pretty well addressed.
Many things are undoubtedly going well (or at least better), so I try to be optimistic. The problem I keep hitting is that we have an electoral system that fosters having only two parties, a population that tends toward the conservative, and the more conservative of the two parties has been non-functional in terms of governing ability for over a decade and has had an internal struggle for its soul that was won by people who are either fascist or white supremacist. "Democrats keep winning" is both necessary in the short run and impossible in the long run. At some point, the Republican Party either wins (not just an election or two, but the ability to change enough rules for some combination of Jim Crow 2.0 and American Franco-ism) or it falls apart/is eclipsed by another conservative party. And, I suspect the latter will happen in some form or another, but it is far from certain and it is not pleasant to picture spending the rest of my life, so far as politics is concerned, doing little but holding a wall against barbarians.
My God, what a deluded fellow.
Trump was very nearly re-elected, and might well have won but for the pandemic: (a) which he really fucked up, when it could/should have been The Pivot and (b) which led to temporary voter access measures led to huge turnout, which undoubtedly helped us in a few key states. Trumpism is alive and well, and either he or his picked candidate will be a genuine contender in 2024.
McConnell & Co will do everything they can to ensure that Biden is a "failure" and even the mainstream press will spread that message, because, well, otherwise their lives are boring.
Inequality is going to get worse.
Armed loons are roaming the countryside.
I am very nervous that the Democrats won't ram through a comprehensive John Lewis Voting Reform thing in the immediate future.
14 I would guess that this is exactly the kind of bill Sen. Manchin and others are afraid would be career ending. Not because it would change things in WV per se, but because it would empower Black voters in Detroit, Atlanta, and Philadelphia.
Heebie, you nailed it when you describe him as sometimes not choosing the right metric. KD is an excellent analyzer of data, presenter of data. Put the right data in, and you get lovely, crisp, compelling presentations. Also, GIGO, as they say.
I mean, he had that one post where he said "GOPUS Delenda Est", for pete's sake. He was a big public proponent of the lead-crime hypothesis. So he's not mendacious and he's not an idiot: sometimes he actually sees the right data-stream. But too often, he sees something that doesn't actually represent what's happening. I read once that one of the things that modern "enhanced oil recovery" techniques do, is to make that slowly-declining oilfield curve more of a steep cliff: so instead of a slow decline, you keep daily production high for much longer, but then it falls off really fast. I can see KD looking at the daily production numbers and ignoring that we're getting them by injecting mass quantities of steam, and writing his post about how the oil field is fine, just fine, really, FINE.
Sigh. His post you reference was a classic of that genre. Looking at the con-lib divide, and saying we both need to find ways to stop fearing each other. As if women can stop fearing that conservatives will take away their bodily autonomy, and it'll all be fine, really, FINE. He pretends that the problem is the fear, instead of what -motivates- the fear.
Sigh. He just doesn't seem to have understood that you have to interrogate the data you're receiving, seek out other data-sources, and especially, you have to be humble about fields where you're not an expert.
It's not his fault if he misses stuff. Lots of lead in the air when he was growing up.
That is, I don't think he's afraid of 2k checks, or of expanding Medicare (dropping the age, for example). But something the big city blue people want that isn't going to benefit his constituents? There's no way to avoid the full weight of sadopopulism on that one.
I'm more optimistic about politics than any time this millennium but that's mostly due to the Democrats no longer being dominated by complacent moderates like Drum.
Kevin specifically is a comfortable, white, male, retired-ish professional who has not seen a crisis he could not downplay. That's like 20% of his entire schtick. Props for his advocacy on lead-crime, it was very good, but I could never escape the feeling that 80-90 years prior, he'd likely have been among the folk averring that lead pollution wasn't really a big deal.
More generally, there are at least two things that escape the "the trends are good, don't panic" crowd. First: it's classic cherry-picking; they focus on the good trends and ignore the bad ones. Second: it's my sense that when things go bad, they go bad disruptively quickly. At every point but during a, um, sharp correction, let's call it, the trends might be positive, but that doesn't mean the overall change is positive.
Kevin specifically is a comfortable, white, male, retired-ish professional...
I think just this part of your sentence is another factor of his diminished relevance in itself: in the left internetsphere, we've collectively realized such voices are extremely well represented, and we have more interest in people who either (a) are not from that background or (b) add some value beyond it, some specific perspective or outlook. Drum has precious little of the latter, just traditional common sense, which was valuable in the glory days of the blogosphere, but we need more now.
(Personally, when I unsubscribed from his RSS feed it was because of his extremely callous statements on homelessness, but afterwards, I was surprised how little he showed up on my radar.)
21: In the early aughts, it was semi respectable to link to Instapundit. Min comparison, Drum was a saint.
I forgot, did Drum keep clear from Insty, or was he in the "let's have lines of dialogue" school?
No reaction to the Capitol attack is an overreaction until people start getting sentenced to life, maybe not even then. It was the first failure of peaceful transfers of power since the Civil War, the first attack on the Capitol since 1812, and about a dozen other negative superlatives. Call me overzealous about this but I'd think less of Drum or anyone else for suggesting it.
Drum seems like a relic of the blissfully sane and decorous post-9/11 America, when partisanship was lower and the blogosphere was just getting started. He's not totally wrong that in some ways things are better, but he should recognize that in some ways they really aren't.
I generally hate to medicalize people's writing, but I think chemo has messed him up a lot. Before chemo, I was very impressed with him as a very dull, white, middle-aged, temperamentally conservative writer who managed to almost completely avoid the giant flaws his demographics would suggest through sheer logic and good sense. Since chemo, he's drifted much closer to the kind of obliviousness that you'd expect from an ex-marketing guy from Orange County: still not terrible for that category of person, but nothing like as much better than expected as he used to be.
Because the flip in my perception of his writing tracked when he's been on chemo pretty accurately, I'm not holding it against him, but I'm not enjoying reading him much anymore.
I stopped reading Drum a long time ago, but I thought his post is pretty good. His second point is incredibly wrong, of course, but it's because of his sixth and seventh points, so it's not like he's missed the underlying trend. He just underrates its importance.
25 seems right, sadly. He was always measured, but not always moderate. Now he seems slightly out of touch, though I still love the guy.
The bit about conspiracy theories being a grand American tradition misses the mark badly. Sure, the Birchers had some nutty beliefs about fluoride and communist infiltration, but was it anywhere near as bad as Q and belief in false flag crisis actors? Maybe it's as widespread as ever, but it seems to have become more central and tolerated in what used to pass for polite company.
The bit about "liberals just need to convince conservatives to let them govern" doesn't even pretend to address the obvious, glaring problem that our political systems do not facilitate that, full stop.
28: Was it his blog you were guest host on? That was one of the greatest weeks in history of blogs.
Not counting the Civil War, here's probably the closest to Q-level paranoia-to-violence we got, from The Politics of Unreason:
The hysteria which seized many Protestants reached its height in the summer of 1893 with the widespread acceptance of the belief that the Pope had written a letter ordering Catholics to "exterminate all heretics found within the jurisdiction of the United States of America." ...In Toledo, the mayor had the National Guard on duty for a week in September to protect Protestants against this monstrous Catholic mass murder plot. "The Toledo Blade stated that thousands of people had believed in the authenticity of the papal letter and had expected an attempt to exterminate all heretics to begin on September 5." ...When the outbreak predicted by the [American Protective Association] did not occur, this did not upset those who had distributed the forged papal letter. "It was now described as an example of Jesuit trickery to get Protestants off guard so that an attack at a later time could be more successful."
But that was pretty fucking bad too. We're probably lucky it didn't turn into an anti-Catholic pogrom.
I don't really have anything to add that hasn't been said already. I am constitutionally doom-and-gloomy, but Drum is one of a handful that I still read regularly. Though mostly because he doesn't post much (and half of that is cat/landscape pictures or the coronavirus by country charts) so it's easy to drop in and get 3 days worth quickly.
Was it his blog you were guest host on?
Yes. We hadn't quite vetted the market research on that one.
Facebook has broken me. I briefly looked for the laugh reaction button on 33.
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Coup in Myanmar? Maybe no question mark at this point. Wow.
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Can someone link to ogged guest-blogging for Drum? I came to blogs late enough to have missed that and also to have missed Drum being consistently good.
I can't remember what Drum's blog was called back then.
I think it was when he was at the Washington monthly. That would have been between 2094 and 2008.
37: Political Animal. There are new bloggers, but it's still the same name.
That's right. I remember him as a Washington Monthly person.
Calpundit, right? I dropped him pretty early, I think.
Here are his posts: https://washingtonmonthly.com/people/ogged/ The funny thing was how much the commenters hated him, if I remember right.
Kevin Drum hasn't changed his worldview much the 90s, but also suffers from clinical depression and wrote once that he have to resist irrational complete despair at politics. I think part of his sunny optimism is an inability to calibrate, to distinguish between irrational and rational pessimism. Or more simply what he needs to tell himself to not want to die.
People would rather believe in secret Jewish space lasers than in the scientific consensus on climate change. This isn't just a fringe thing, with Trump's blessing that congresswoman is untouchable.
The President knows he's going to be acquitted -- so what's the best candidate for an argument he'll forever say was vindicated?
Just fine!
Oh my god, I didn't even realize those were still online, and hadn't read them since I wrote them. I read a few and thought "why the fuck would anyone care what I think about the treatment of Slobodan Fucking Milosevic or anything at all?" What a bunch of bullshit! Anyway, it was a funny time, like a clown.
Now I have to go read them to see if you were pro and anti Milosevic.
I think it's pretty redundant to say people would rather believe crazy conspiracy theories than global warming crazy conspiracy theories were designed to be fun to believe and global warming is very depressing
Oh thank god. Such a weight off my mind.
42: Yes. I was used to ogged's tone already, but they completely didn't get it. It was funny because of the culture clash.
I just looked at one of ogged's political animal posts and saw a link to Kotsko's blog, but Kotsko's blog post is gone. Now, I want to know what Kotsko's had to say about the topic.
46: Oh my god do I feel that way about everything I ever posted. I miss the era when blogging was a thing, but it feels as if it was a ten year window in which normal modesty and humility didn't apply somehow.
ten year window in which normal modesty and humility didn't apply
We certainly talked about dicks a lot.
Drum still makes good points sometimes. I was wondering the other day whether I should feel good that Trump had dismissed his apparently competent legal team for the Senate impeachment trial because they wouldn't mount a completely unworkable defence based on the idea that the election had been stolen. Drum points out that there is no way they're going to convict him not matter how farcical the defence argument, so it's in Trump's interest to turn it into a propaganda circus aimed at his base. Now that it's been explained to me, this seems not just plausible but obvious. Is there some reason why this is wrong?
I don't think it's wrong. It's also kind of horrifying if you think about how obvious the crime he's not going to get convicted of and what it means going forward.
54: I had the same reaction. That hadn't occurred to me, but it's obviously correct. I've read Drum since forever (but post Cal-Pundit). He's misguided sometimes (as with his "This is fine" post), but he's a smart guy who is working in good faith to try to come up with the right answer.
55: They are all but announcing that they plan to do it again.
55-57: Thanks - that's both reassuring (to see that my reaction to Drum's analysis seems sound) and depressing. It really is some next-level nullification when the people that the guy you're refusing to convict tried to get lynched are right there with you on the jury.
This reaction annoys the hell out of me when other people do it, so I apologize in advance. but I'm surprised Drum's analysis seems insightful rather than obvious. Of course Trump doesn't need to put on a real legal defense, of course the Republican senators will vote according to their sense of party advantage rather than on the basis of what Trump is demonstrated to have done, of course the while thing will be as much of a circus as he can make it.
In his post:
Second, and most important, we need to mount some kind of broad, aggressive battle against Fox News.
then:
In general, we need to do everything we can to reduce the fear that conservatives have of liberal rule.
Umm, Kevin, you kind of have to pick one or the other. Fox News is not going to go down quietly, and a fight to cancel/destroy it is going to light conservatives' hair on fire, mitigated only by the increasing tendency of them to think Fox News is going squishy.
"Kevin specifically is a comfortable, white, male, retired-ish professional" ... who has been fighting cancer for several years now, and as LB points out in 25, his chemo has had bad effects on his writing. I'd at least remove "comfortable" from that characterization.
I think comfortable works if you think of it economically. The way he writes about his lifestyle, he's got no money worries. Which makes it commendable that he's as interested in economic inequality as he is, but that class of worry isn't personal for him.
Drum:
Much of the distress over politics is due to the fact that the country has been stuck in a 50-50 pattern for so long. This kind of endless trench warfare irritates everyone. But it's not a sign of instability. It's just a sign that neither party has done a very good job of building a large and durable majority. It's also a sign that few people are terrifically unhappy over our current situation.
Why should an even split among parties suggest people aren't terrifically unhappy? The important statistic here is that election turnout was huge -- both in the general election and the Georgia special election. People are fearful that we are facing a significant degradation of democracy (or, alternately, they fear the triumph of robust democracy). Either way, people's fears are entirely reasonable. People are deeply divided about the proper direction of the country, and nobody should feel confident about how it's going to turn out.
59: No worries - I'm happy to cop to having been naive here. I guess I had been assuming, without really thinking about it, that it would be at least a little dangerous for Trump not to have competent lawyers and to not give the Senate something a bit further from spacelasers-started-the-fires to work with (e.g unconstitutionality of impeaching a President once he's left office). Maybe the relatively sane behaviour of even Trump-appointed judges after the election subconsciously influenced me. But the Drum post reminded me that it's really nothing like a court.
While the focus on Fox as the main driver of this madness isn't wrong, "doing something" about Fox News is a hand-wavey fantasy, like "doing something" about McDonald's to achieve better health. The difference is going to have to come on a personal level, from the ground up. Obviously the math is different for different people and not everybody can just delete relationships, but making a real difference for most people probably starts with telling your Trumper relatives they are no longer welcome in your house or around your kids. I know that's a harsh and difficult lift, but as long as voters keep rewarding this type of behavior from elected Republicans, they will keep performing it. And the voters will keep rewarding it as long as there is no personal cost for it.
I don't think my family values my company that highly.
I think they might like my sisters.
Biden. There's not a Republican left in close family members.
My one sister is experiencing career set backs because of it.
64: I admit that I've been a little shocked at all the stories about Qanon cultists that choose the cult over their family and friends. My understanding of cults was that they worked because they were an actual community -- but choosing some videos crackpots expounding theories and people you chat with online about them online, over actual family? Well, obviously some families suck, but these people seemed to have family that really cared.
59: Maybe it seems obvious to you because you are a genius?
It also occurred to me, but I'm comfortable with the implications of my first paragraph. We're lucky that Trump is a physical coward, because he has the instincts of someone to overthrow the US government, but lacks the physical courage for it. If he had pressed his advantage on 1/6, there's no knowing how far he would have gotten. Our only hope is that his behavior is so farcical that the Republicans change their mind.
None of the Republicans are going to change their minds. They were momentarily legitimately scared and toyed with the idea that being grownups might align with their self-interest, but then the adrenaline receded and they decided being shitheads aligns better with their self-interest.
Umm, Kevin, you kind of have to pick one or the other. Fox News is not going to go down quietly, and a fight to cancel/destroy it is going to light conservatives' hair on fire, mitigated only by the increasing tendency of them to think Fox News is going squishy.
I don't see that as either/or. Fox is constantly pumping fear and rage into our society and has been for decades. Changing that may make them temporarily worse, but if it could be done effectively, the longterm outcome after the battle would be less fear and rage.
72: There's a question here about whether the capitol insurrection was a one-off, or whether radical fundamentalist terrorism in the US is going to go on an upswing like what happened in the middle east over the past 50 years. Republican elected leaders have clearly decided it's a one-off, but if it turns out to be more frequent, or if far-right terrorists succeed in killing Republican elected officials, you might see more follow-through of what we saw that week.
Maybe it seems obvious to you because you are a genius?
There's not actually any contradiction between 59 and 54/56. OofM and I acknowledge that we missed something that in retrospect we find obvious.
This error on our part does make me a little more sympathetic to the nitwits in the media. As 63 points out, when you're in a legal situation, the default assumption is that you benefit from having competent legal representation. But no, that sort of competence isn't what's in play here. I apparently still am conditioned to expect some kind of minimal respect for norms.
I may have mentioned this, but on Inauguration Day, I swear to you I saw different media congratulating America on yet another peaceful transfer of power. It reminds me of how people said GW Bush kept us safe from terrorist attacks.
Not that we can shouldn't do what we can, but I think the Atlantic article on the Third Republic following the Dreyfus Affair is the most likely pattern of the future. Cleavages will persist, bitter as ever, until something bigger happens to make them less relevant.
Great. I'll go look up what happened to end the Third Republic now.
it feels as if it was a ten year window in which normal modesty and humility didn't apply somehow.
Wait, what ?!? When did this change, and why wasn't I informed?
Delurking again.
I occasionally have a practical suggestion: since Trump plans to make a circus of the trial, the Democrats (Schumer / Harris) should take command of the sound system so Trump can never shout over anyone. If people see him ranting futilely with a feeble sound, he will look pitiful, but if his voice comes booming out, he'll be able to get into people's heads. Of course, Fox will amplify him, but at least make them do the work. (This should not be decided in conference with the Republicans).
I expect to see brushfire terrorism from here. The fakers will be sweated out but the others will get serious. Portland here is stereotypically liberal, but there are stereotypically Trump Nazi towns within 50 miles or so. We've been deraling with Proud Boy types for decades.
If Biden manages to deal with the economic and other problems effectively I think we'll muddle through, but if things get worse I don't know what to think. I've always though that Obama's failure / refusal to deal with the 2008 crash was what got us where we are.
[All of the above is just my guess. I am not a prophet].
76: I think de-platforming (talk radio and tv and cable and internet) along the lines of the Fairness Doctrine would actually accomplish quite a lot. It would be a big deal if people had to work more to get radicalized. The less-than-fully committed might get other hobbies.
take command of the sound system so Trump can never shout over anyone
He was never going to be there in person.
Republican elected leaders have clearly decided it's a one-off
That's the least bad interpretation. I think it's far more likely that Republican elected leaders have decided their interests are better served by working to further the goals of the insurrectionists, and that Democrats being increasingly afraid for their own personal safety is a good thing.
The chilling effects on civic participation downstream, particularly in red states, simply cannot be overstated.
I am willing to bet that he will try to be there in person, perhaps to defend himself. But the same would hold for his two showboat lawyers, don't let them do an OJ trial.
Does Trump have any specified rights of due process? What does "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" mean. It seems to me that this isn't another legal trial with the standard rigamarole, but is governed only by the Constitution, the few precedents there are, and the will of the Senate.
In any case, Trump will probably walk, but his propaganda victory can be blunted, and 50 Republicans Senators can be forced to declare themselves.
77You do that. I'll look up cleavages.
84 I think the whole 'people being forced to declare themselves' thing is worth less than a bucket of warm piss. Everyone who would learn anything from a vote in Congress -- whether it's over Trump, M4A, and whatever other kamikaze run someone using that phrase is promoting -- already knows the answer. For everyone else it's just noise.
I do want to push back on the use of the word 'circus' here. Trump wants a spectacle that discredits the serious people and their system, yes. That's a circus. But he also has a 'legitimate' goal: if you know you're going to be acquitted, you want the acquittal to be as all-encompassing as it can be. He wants to be able to say, at the end, that the system endorsed his position that (a) he didn't do anything wrong and (b) his followers didn't either. Well, not in kind, but only in degree: they were right to step up in defense of democracy against the Biden coup, even if some declassee people were wrong to hurt the police officers.
85 I could say something about French cleavage, but maybe I should do some more research first.
About this "one off" idea - haven't we seen a lot of political violence in the last few years from Republicans and other haters?
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he typically sold around 80 sparrows at 500 kyats per head each day to those looking to make merit by releasing the captive birds. In predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, it is a traditional belief that one can gain merit by releasing caged birds.|>
I am willing to bet that he will try to be there in person, perhaps to defend himself. But the same would hold for his two showboat lawyers, don't let them do an OJ trial.
I wasn't trying to prognosticate - he's let it be known he doesn't plan to attend. He could change his mind, certainly.
Does Trump have any specified rights of due process? What does "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" mean. It seems to me that this isn't another legal trial with the standard rigamarole, but is governed only by the Constitution, the few precedents there are, and the will of the Senate.
I agree, there could be some pseudo-legal aspects a lawyer could help with like making sure the procedures the Senate laid out are held to where it benefits Trump, but given the facts of the matter, in this case lawyers would mostly be there for form's sake. (If it were another president and the charges less self-evidently true, it might be different.)
I miss the era when blogging was a thing, but it feels as if it was a ten year window in which normal modesty and humility didn't apply somehow.
I've been thinking recently (prompted mostly by the Twitter discourse over COVID messaging and public health authorities) that there's a been a real shift from the blog era to the social media era in how credentials and subject-matter expertise are perceived and presented online.
One of the big things about blogging was that it was a completely open medium where anyone could say anything, and the attention economy was focused almost entirely on the content of people's ideas. Most bloggers were pseudonymous, and while some had real expertise in certain fields that didn't really play in to how much attention or respect their ideas got. E.g., atrios is an economist, but that didn't earn him any particular credit beyond the strength of his arguments, while Drum had no particular expertise in most things but got a lot of credit for his clear thinking and argumentation. (He was also unusual in that era for blogging under his real name.)
These days, though, with social media being the focus of most discourse and most people on most platforms using their real names, there's much more value placed on credentials and expertise, and when generalist blogger-types push back against expert messaging (as has happened several times on various COVID-related topics) there's an immediate circling-the-wagons response from the experts that gets followed by a lot of ordinary people who seem to take their cues from the experts. Part of this of course is a reaction to the Trump-era denigration of expertise in general, but there was plenty of that in the Bush era too. It's an interesting change.
I lack expertise, strength of argument, clear thinking, AND credentials, but I win at blogging, by attrition.
And deleting double comments before anyone can see them.
I may hardly post on the front page any more, but you'll pry my right to fix my double-comments from my cold dead hands.