I waited a while, debating if I should alter someone else's post, and then decided it had been 20 minutes and with great power, comes great responsibility.
I gather I fucked something up with the formatting. Thanks, Heebie!
This seems misplaced. The Democratic coalition is a majority of one asshole in the Senate. Without that asshole, the majority vs. filibuster debate is pointless. The presidential election was decided by a bit over hundred thousand voters who are very conservative but less willing to tolerate the decline of America to keep their taxes lower. Things are bad not because the Democrats won't undo the filibuster. Things are bad because we don't have the votes to make things less bad.
I wasn't really thinking of the specifics here, but of the form of the exchange: if we don't do X, bad thing Y will happen. Meanwhile, lots of Y.
I think a lot of it is about ginning up emotion to motivate change versus ginning up depression and/or defensiveness to motivate complacency.
True story: I wrote "gunning up" and stared at it for a good long while.
4: At this particular moment, yeah, but avoiding the filibuster issue means if the asshole count drops below the margin at any time in the next ten years, we can't undo anything before the ratchet tightens. It's also limited how much we've accomplished in the past when the filibuster was the limiter (2009-10 for legislation in general, 2011-16 for appointments).
Also this phenomenon is not limited to the filibuster - also gerrymandering, campaign spending violations, etc., etc.
Clear filibuster, full gerrymandering, already losing.
I think about phenomena related to the OP and 5 a lot. I'd put this well-reasoned piece by Jamelle Bouie in roughly the same category: An attempt to recognize how far things have slid without really reckoning with how far down the slope we are.
Bouie calmly and factually discusses the impending demise of American democracy in a fashion that would be unthinkable in the NYT news columns. And, of course, that's one big reason why it's happening, which Bouie can't acknowledge.
Even a smart guy like Ezra Klein can lose the thread because a.) it's really tough to stare this thing straight in the face and b.) journalists instinctively shy away from certain kinds of truths. What is going on in Michigan (to pick one random example) should be top-of-the-front-page, top-of-the-newscast news repeatedly.
Not to be an idiot, but what's going on in Michigan?
I think it's more the openly threatening armed militias.
Lotsa stuff going on in Michigan, but the particular thing I was thinking about was the replacement of democracy-supporting Republicans with people who have explicitly opposed honest vote-counting in the state, and who will be in a position to do something about it.
Note that, per my link, even the Guardian can't talk about opposition to democracy, and instead talks about the embrace of conspiracy theories by these Republicans.
I love Michigan, but I'm glad I moved away. The place just gets shittier and shittier. The economy always sucks, Republicans took over the legislature, the Gateway asshole became governor, they passed right-to-work laws. I thought Trump had no chance at the presidency, but took for granted that he would win the Michigan primary. Only the college football teams are respectable now, just as you'd expect from a state that's come to resemble Alabama.
20: So now that we're losers in football, maybe there's a chance for the Democrats in Ohio?
The OP left out Donald Fucking Trump's middle name.
23: Are you saying that was disrespectful?
22: Looking great for us so far! https://twitter.com/jpelzer/status/1466846846391832584
Devin Nunes is retiring from Congress to devote his full effort to autoerotic asphyxiation.
The Nunes Safety Collar could save dozens of lives over the next 86 centuries.
And this is independent of global trends of increasing prosperity and health
Prompts me to suggest that we might want to consider a book group for next September when Brad DeLong's book Slouching Towards Utopia is slated to com out.
Twitter thread where he describes it.
First two sentences:
What I call the "long twentieth century" started with the watershed-boundary crossing events of around 1870--the triple emergence of globalization, the industrial research lab, and the modern corporation--which ushered in changes that began to pull the world out of the dire poverty that had been humanity's lot for the previous ten thousand year.s What I call the "long twentieth century" ended in 2010, with the world's leading economic edge, the countries of the North Atlantic, still reeling from the Great Recession that had begun in 2008, and thereafter unable to resume economic growth at anything near the average pace that had been the rule since 1870.
His periodization:
2010-? 21st Century
1870-2010: Long 20th Century
1770-1870: Industrial Revolution Century
1500-1770: Imperial-Commercial Age
800-1500: Medieval Era
200-800: Late Antiquity
-1000-200: Iron Age Efflorescences
-3000--1000: Literate Age
-8000--3000 Early Agrarian Age
-68000--8000: Gatherer-Hunter Age
?-68000: Before Human Behavioral Modernity
I assume he chose long 20th century in contrast to the "short 20th century which I believe is generally accorded to be 1814 until the fall of communism in Russia.
Has he considered bookends for the names? After Human Behavioral Modernity.
Boring, boring, GCU, ROU, aftershave, perfume, disease, bookshop, irritating cafe, irritating restaurant, GSV.
I would guess it's a riff on "long 19th century", between the French and Russian revolutions.
Ah was not aware of that usage. He did discuss the contrast with the short 20th century takes.
Also odd that he chooses 2010 rather than Sept. 11, 2001. I mean, sure, he's an economist and all, but it's a political periodization and there's your endpoint.
I'd plump for the short 20th century, myself: August 1914 to autumn 1989.
I think it should be from 1917 through 2016 because that's the year WWI was fully globalized to the year Trump was elected. Also, Zsa Zsa Gabor's lifetime.
Recency bias, one and all. Whatever happened in the past 10 years ended an era.
I endorse 35. Hobsbawm's the historian.
Although now that I look at it he did call it the Short Twentieth Century in a book published... 1994.
That's closer to Eva Gabor's lifetime.
I read a draft of Delong's book, and I think it's an excellent idea for a reading group. The one worry I have, is that at the point I read it, two things about it are pretty weak:
1. the connection to Polyani's work. This is important, and I get some bit of the connection, but it's not as well-explained as it could be.
2. his analysis of the years 2000-2021, and esp 2016-2021, feels too much like a play-by-play, and not of an analysis. But I get that (as Zhou Enlai said) "it's too soon to tell."
Notwithstanding the above, I felt the book really changed the way I look at human progress and history. Delong is that rare believer in markets and capitalism, who also fully embraces the problems with these two institutions, and unabashedly puts those problems in the foreground, not treating them as red-headed stepchildren. And since he's an economist, he can connect all of this to economics and governance, which is also great.
Notwithstanding the above, I felt the book really changed the way I look at human progress and history. Delong is that rare believer in markets and capitalism, who also fully embraces the problems with these two institutions, and unabashedly puts those problems in the foreground, not treating them as red-headed stepchildren. And since he's an economist, he can connect all of this to economics and governance, which is also great.
That's a good recommendation. I'd be in for a book group.
Looking forward to this from DeLong.
On a more general but maybe related topic,
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think ("For Dummies in 31 days!!" would make the title even better) is recommended here https://fivebooks.com/best-books/critical-thinking-nigel-warburton/
I liked the discussion of the recommended books there a lot. Slow-to-change framing leading to predictable mistakes is defintely something I have noticed elsewhere.
I just got back from the local meeting about renewing the mask mandate. Boy howdy are some people just working off of a totally different and completely batshit set of facts. There are benefits and drawbacks to a mask mandate but THIS PLANDEMIC IS BUILT ON LIES doesn't really provide anything helpful to work with.
The Republican Party has gone so far from sanity even David Brooks has noticed and written a whole essay about switching parties.
He had to explain it to Edmund Burke.
46: Were any of them wearing Stars of David or carrying guns?
In related new, our Assembly did indeed rescind the mask mandate.
47 et seq.: Friends still don't let friends read David Brooks.
I'm out of practice because I haven't read the NYT editorial pages since 2016 and wasn't aware he switched.
Today at B-J, somebody mentioned an SF short story: Ralph Williams' "Business as Usual, During Alterations", Astounding July 1958.
Shockingly prescient, but also topical given the interest in Delong's upcoming book.
From the B-J comment:
There was a science-fiction short story where the aliens were testing us, so scattered a few million matter duplicators around the planet with the warning "each use is a chip at the foundations of your society". Much of the story was set in a department store, and how they adjusted to the machine. No cash purchases, for one....
Playing with some new periodizations for the Before Times:
2035: High Information Age
2002: Global Manufacturing Age
1969: Mass Consumption Age
1936: Mass Production Age
1903: Industrial Age
1870: Steampower Age
1605: Imperial-Commercial Age
135: High Classical Antiquity (ancient, asiatic, feudal)
-1300: Late Bronze-Literacy Age
-4000: Early Agrarian Age
-15000: Mesolithic Era
with each "mode of production" marking a rough doubling of the technology level. If you believe that "the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist", then the list above are what you would like to mark and reference: not any of this "asian-ancient-feudal-capitalist-socialist" stuff. I do take the point that back in the Before Times smaller quantitative changes in the level of productivity had larger qualitative effects on how societies were run--that smaller changes in the forces- and relations-of-production carried with them bigger effects on the superstructure, at least in the long run. If, before 1500 we move to dividing history up into "modes of production" by marking an age difference as a roughly √2-ing in our valuation of the stock of deployed-and-diffused "technology":
1125: High Mediæval Age (feudal, asiatic)
135: High Classical Antiquity (ancient, asiatic)
-450: Early Classical Antiquity (bronze, axial)
-1300: Late Bronze-Literacy Age
-2400: Early Bronze-Literacy Age
-4000: Early Agrarian Age
-6000: Early Neolithic Age
-15000: Mesolithic Era
-30000: Upper Paleolithic Era
Playing with some new periodizations for the Before Times:
2035: High Information Age
2002: Global Manufacturing Age
1969: Mass Consumption Age
1936: Mass Production Age
1903: Industrial Age
1870: Steampower Age
1605: Imperial-Commercial Age
135: High Classical Antiquity (ancient, asiatic, feudal)
-1300: Late Bronze-Literacy Age
-4000: Early Agrarian Age
-15000: Mesolithic Era
with each "mode of production" marking a rough doubling of the technology level. If you believe that "the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist", then the list above are what you would like to mark and reference: not any of this "asian-ancient-feudal-capitalist-socialist" stuff. I do take the point that back in the Before Times smaller quantitative changes in the level of productivity had larger qualitative effects on how societies were run--that smaller changes in the forces- and relations-of-production carried with them bigger effects on the superstructure, at least in the long run. If, before 1500 we move to dividing history up into "modes of production" by marking an age difference as a roughly √2-ing in our valuation of the stock of deployed-and-diffused "technology":
1125: High Mediæval Age (feudal, asiatic)
135: High Classical Antiquity (ancient, asiatic)
-450: Early Classical Antiquity (bronze, axial)
-1300: Late Bronze-Literacy Age
-2400: Early Bronze-Literacy Age
-4000: Early Agrarian Age
-6000: Early Neolithic Age
-15000: Mesolithic Era
-30000: Upper Paleolithic Era
I was told this wasn't going to be on the test.