People seem to like to be told that they are right and have been right all along.
I will say again the three things I have learned from working on immigration over the past umpteen years:
1) You can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into.
2) You can't have a brain-level conversation with someone who is reacting with their heart or their gut.
3) Humans are social animals, and we are wired for story.
Under a functioning national government, we would regulate big tech and big media such that at least the biggest funnels of misinformation would be harder for Joe/Josephina Ordinary to access. We would also fund dis/misinformation scholars to better understand the phenomenon and how to combat it. Sadly, we are doing the exact opposite, especially on the latter point.
In the absence of effective governance, what we have left is to create alternative, compelling stories. You can't fact-check your way out of this stuff; you have to give people an easy-to-digest different STORY, and it has to grab them by the emotions.
Shorter me: FUND ARTISTS. And sociologists, applied anthropologists, and communications specialists.
I think the stories that come up in the next few years as compelling and that counter misinformation are going to be about various horrors that are simply too big to white wash.
1) You can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into.
2) You can't have a brain-level conversation with someone who is reacting with their heart or their gut.
3) Humans are social animals, and we are wired for story.
All three of these are good, but the first two really make me think that somewhere along the way post-Enlightenment, "reason" itself got tossed out as a value for being inauthentic or unemotional or making a less compelling story (per #3).
Obviously "reason" can be hijacked and taken towards all sorts of odious conclusions if it's not paired with good judgement/morals/etc, but denigrating reason doesn't work that well, either.
2: I would much prefer to be wrong, very much as I would prefer to have been wrong in my expectations after attending last Tuesday's lunchtime talk by a former Trump Administration official who called the election a choice between "erratic" (guess) and "feckless."
Shorter me: FUND ARTISTS. And sociologists, applied anthropologists, and communications specialists.
I can be convinced, but am skeptical that this would be effective. The main advantage of misinformers is that they're not constrained; they can say whatever is convenient in the moment, without regard for truth or consistency.
The prose here is a bit much, but a couple of points I think are really important.
That brand is truth. It's evidence. It's journalism. It's science. It's the Enlightenment. A niche concept you'll find behind a paywall at the New York Times. You have a subscription? Enjoy your clean, hygienic, fact-checked news. Then come with me into the information sewers, where we will wade through the shit everyone else consumes.
You can produce all the compelling truth you want, but if you're doing it in a place that people outside the group don't see, or don't believe, it doesn't matter.
Because this, now, isn't politics in any sense we understand it. The young men who came out for Trump were voting for protein powder and deadlifting as much as they were for a 78-year-old convicted felon. They were voting for bitcoin and weighted squats. For YouTube shorts and Twitch streams. For podcast bros and crypto bros and tech bros and the bro of bros: Elon Musk. Social media is mainstream media now. It's where the majority of the world gets its news.
7: Yeah, over in the other realm without clouds, someone claimed that some people voted for Trump because they hate what Disney is doing with the Star Wars and Marvel franchises. What was Kamala supposed to do against that???
Its all because Bud Lite sent that trans person a woke beer.
7: Yeah, this piece by Charlie Warzel in the Atlantic is along similar lines -- I was going to send it to my parents as a version of my vague ideas about the media with slightly more evidence. He doesn't have a prognosis or a solution, and neither do I.
(I've seen a few cases of the word "solve" used as a noun to mean solution. I don't know if you all can imagine how much despair this makes me feel. I think I mentioned this before, but my guess is that "solution" came to mean "product" in the software world, so they needed a new word to mean "solution." There is no hope.)
I don't think it's a fight that can't be fought primarily *inside* social networks themselves: it's a context where bad faith actors have significant advantages, and any persuasion technique deployed to improve information quality can be deployed otherwise as well.
I don't know of a coherent framework for a solution, but I suspect at least part of it involves leveraging other contexts and institutions to raise the bar of what information quality is demanded (i.e. of what counts as a source). But two things that make me second-order pessimistic are (1) how this bar has _lowered_ in professional contexts (e.g. "knowing a technology" now is more or less "I read a Medium post about it") , and (2) how the enthusiastic acceptance of Large Language Models as "reasoning" machines and information sources is lowering _even more_ informational standards in companies and governments. "The AI told me" is being added to "I read it on Twitter."
Still, I guess the response is the same in every context. I don't feel optimistic about any of this, to be honest, nor I have any sort of plan. But what else can we do?
Are you...both a real person and first-time commenter?
3 is very good.
Under a functioning national government, we would regulate big tech and big media such that at least the biggest funnels of misinformation would be harder for Joe/Josephina Ordinary to access.
Here's my half-worked out idea that I'm mulling over currently. I think misinformation -- in the sense of literal false stories -- is only part of the problem and possibly not the largest part.
I've been mulling over a recent post from DSquared, in which he sees the problem as being that the channels that carry information from the general public to decision makers aren't functioning so people respond with greater and greater fury to try to get their message across.
I think that's a partial description. The problem is that there are many channels that exist to carry information -- and facebook and twitter are potentially really useful ways for politicians to communicate -- but they don't work because they are overwhelmed. They carry SO MANY messages that it becomes impractical to identify which are meaningful.
Part of what happens is that everyone learns that messages that the forum rewards messages with a high emotional valance, and it swamps the information about "how strongly to people feel about this." For any issue it is likely that the first voices that you find will be people who feel EXTREMELY STRONGLY about the issue and they may or may not be representative but it's hard to tell.
I have no idea what to do about this. I don't have a solution to offer, but I think one of the goals should be not only reducing false stories but figuring out what it would take for social media to be a useful source of information about, "here are things that people have a strong opinion about, and here are other issues where people don't feel strongly and are somewhat confused/conflicted."
I think humans are really wired to be attentive to signals of, "oh, gosh, this person is really upset" and social media hijacks that to some extent.
You can yell at your US Senator about how unfair it is that your wife left you until the cows come home. Or refuse to come home because you're yelling. No matter, your fury isn't going to lead to action.
I supposed this is ban-worthy.
Assign a bunch of Vulcan cosplayers to moderate out the slightest traces of emotion.
So, Witt, and anybody doing the work now, what can we as citizens do to resist and fight? I'm not willing to assent to fascism and want to do something small to fight it now. That includes in my own State, where Trump did better than before.
In my experience cows are not scared off by general yelling. You need to yell and wave your arms specifically at the cow to make them move, and even then it's not like they react quickly.
Related, this is why you never hide in a hedgerow if it's surrounding a field full of cows. Cows are curious about people and you'll wake up in the morning to find yourself at the focus of a semi-circle of cows looking at you with interest, which rather gives away your position. Pick the hedge round the field full of sheep. Sheep will just stay away from you.
re: 13
I think the dsquared substack is excellent, and I think it's a good diagnosis of what's happening with populism and it explains the appeal of populist politicians and the kinds of messages that people are sending when they vote for them. But it's not a diagnosis of elite dysfunction (and I don't think he intended it as such) and i think elite dysfunction is a massive problem here.
It's not necessarily that there are too many channels that exist to carry information and so politicians and elites don't know what information to attend to or what is going. We aren't talking about an information attenuation or simplification problem.
Politicians don't care.
Our MPs and Congress people know perfectly well that younger people and people on lower incomes are fucked, that healthcare, housing and social care, and immigration, and law and order and the rights of those without advantage are fucked. But they aren't going to do anything about it. They aren't going to do anything about it because they are entirely captured by the interests of the moneyed classes, of which they are members themselves or from whom they are desperate to curry favour. They are either stupid, malicious, bought, or all three. At best they think that they are doing their best within a system that has coopted them.
My own feeling is that the only way they are going to care is if they are scared.
John Oliver is the most prominent lefty version of this already isn't he? I don't know that gaming social media is much of an answer-- being the loudest in an amnesiac illiterate environment is going to have a pretty short half-life. The amnesia and refusal to engage with the written paragraph or anything that's longer form is the problem, I don't know how to fix it any more than Neil Postman did.
Myself, I see anti-immigrant sentiment as fear of change. It would be helpful to have examples of competently managed change outside of for-profit companies to make stories from-- there are some examples, but they're thin on the ground. Visible unfairness or incompetence are a pretty compelling story even without rhetorical flourishes or cherry picking, and unfortunately US procedural liberalism provides a lot of examples.
re: 18
I don't mean this in some kind of sophomoric "let's rise up and defeat the fascist olds, man", sense of scared. They aren't going to be scared about some students protesting.
Things like trade unions and genuinely left wing political parties, and the existence of avenues for advancement for those without social and financial advantage were the mechanisms that kept politicians at least partly in check. It takes a lot of people working together, often in ways that are quite mundane and basic.
However, I suspect the tools that worked before to build a somewhat more equitable world and grind back fascism in the past, probably aren't going to work now.
16: Some rumination on the most effective avenues of resistance this time. Basically: federalism.
I agree that broken systems (and the people in the upper layers ofc) that run things are a big problem, and find I find DD's diagnosis pretty convincing. Also the broken ladder up for people under the top layer, including insane housing costs.
You can yell at your US Senator about how unfair it is that your wife left you until the cows come home. Or refuse to come home because you're yelling.
That's true; but is that something that would change over time, or does that just describe a dynamic that's always been part of politics -- I can definitely think of Bloom County cartoons from the 80s that make jokes like that.
There seems to be some tentative correlation between social media elevating pissant complaints and parties being turfed out of power. From FDR to Obama, incumbent presidents were presumed to have a strong advantage to win unless the economy was in the crapper. Since Obama, no party has kept the White House for more than four years, regardless of economic conditions.
I kind of think it's been normalized in a way it wasn't before. Reaganism had a lot of anti-change to it, but it had a much higher ratio of vulcans to hooligans than Trumpism -- to use the formulation from the other thread -- and media was a completely different animal.
I admit this doesn't explain how the Tories won two post-Brexit elections in a row (or did not lose power in them).
Shorter me: FUND ARTISTS. And sociologists, applied anthropologists, and communications specialists.
These are the elites that you hear so much about, and the morons resent them and won't listen to them. (But I do take your point about stories.)
I think the first step is acknowledging the problem -- and the problem is not exactly racism or sexism or whatever. Those are byproducts of the actual problem, which the OP and Flip described neatly.
Us Enlightenment-oriented folks understand the numerous advantages of factuality, but we often fail to appreciate the benefits of story-telling. Ogged gets it in 7:
The main advantage of misinformers is that they're not constrained; they can say whatever is convenient in the moment
I'm afraid the actual answer in history has been that the people with the full toolset -- the people who can say and do anything -- prosper until they butt their heads against reality. Think Hitler and Stalingrad.
When I think of the prospective horrors cited by Moby@4, I think of brutal border camps and the deaths of pregnant women. I don't think that's enough to turn the tide. A mismanaged pandemic was not enough. What will be so horrifying that people will respond by turning to factuality? I don't know, but I think it's going to be pretty bad. The bottom is not in sight.
There are few silver linings atm, but I do think that a large share of those voting Trump are genuinely going to be outraged if and when the Elian Gonzalez-style photos start coming out, thinking they voted for stability and prosperity only (yes, culpably dopey to think so, but still), and the administration could lose a lot of support very quickly. Similar if anything resembling the tariff plan is passed.
On the border camps, given that deporting a bunch of people is going to be very difficult, I think the idea will be to discourage immigration/encourage people to leave by committing horrors.
There seems to be some tentative correlation between social media elevating pissant complaints and parties being turfed out of power. From FDR to Obama, incumbent presidents were presumed to have a strong advantage to win unless the economy was in the crapper. Since Obama, no party has kept the White House for more than four years, regardless of economic conditions.
You are basing this conclusion on the results of two US presidential elections, both of which were extremely close!
Meanwhile there has been no change in House re-election rates, and Senate re-election rates are higher than they have ever been https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-rates
On 13 and 18, and whether/to what degree politicians are movable, one recent study provides some depressing indicators. Politicians from 11 countries tended to think that "voters are unfair in their retrospective assessments of politicians' performance, identity oriented rather than policy oriented, retrospective, egocentric, single-issue-focused, leader oriented, relatively uninformed, and oriented to the short term." That is, they're "democratic realists" in the Achen and Bartels sense. Brennan is also drawing on a lot of this work, hence his view that most of the electorate are on the hobbit/hooligan sides. But it looks like the pols surveyed agree with him (although, interestingly, voters themselves don't). Presumably this matters for what sorts of things politicians are willing to treat as "signals" from the electorate.
Paper here, all the usual social sci caveats apply: Politicians' Theories of Voting Behavior
29 I'm not very optimistic about this, and more to the point, I don't think it will matter. Immigration enforcement is a very high priority in Trump's core, and those people will 100% blame the immigrants themselves for whatever happens to them. Pregnant women have been denied care, and "pro-life" assholes just think God is punishing them for having sex.
33: I agree there are not a lot of reasons to be optimistic overall, but I'm highlighting the scraps.
Pregnant women have been denied care, and "pro-life" assholes just think God is punishing them for having sex.
I disagree here too - the electorate was pro-abortion, but they were hoodwinked into thinking Trump was an opinionless sludge on the matter. When abortion was also on the ballot, it won by large margins!
How much did it matter that Roe was overturned while Biden was President? I think it made a huge difference.
And I think 30 is correct. That was the point of the child separation thing. Which may not have worked out exactly, but, just like Vietnam, the revanchists think it's because they didn't pursue victory/maintain resolve.
There's probably something in TFA about this: I was at a GWB speech to the AJC early in the second term, and was taken aback by his emphatic the only was we can lose in Iraq is losing our resolve, and I WILL NOT LOSE MY RESOLVE. The switch from we to I was unforgettable. I don't know if I'd already seen Downfall at this point, but the inability to understand that resolve is necessary but not sufficient seems to escape authoritarians of various types, and their fanboys.
Anyway, I expect the immigration parts to Trumpism to be handled in a manner designed to show resolve, notwithstanding objections from anyone.
34 Abortion won among voters. Does Mike Johnson give a shit? Rick Scott? They do not. Neither do any of the Republican governors.
34: If popular opinion means absolutely nothing because GOP will ride roughshod over whatever the public thinks, we're all 100% screwed so we might as well close all our windows. I think it behooves us to take as working assumption that there is something we can do.
More than one country has gone semi-authoritarian and recovered from it. It's not all or nothing!
Did having abortion the ballot separately convince a lot of women that they could have their Trump and their reproductive freedom too? I haven't seen data on this, but I've wondered.
In fact, they understand themselves to be answerable to the pro-life movement, which put them where they are.
I don't see evidence that politicians are particularly motivated by fear -- that they can be scared into changing their positions. I think it's more like greed: they reward the people who put them in, and look for ways to punish the people who did not.
I'd be interested in examples of fear of voters or a significant of opposition voters actually motivating any politicians.
Whether I/P qualifies depends, I suppose, on whether the politicians is actually abandoning their core position, or whether they're happy to cater to the people who they feel indebted to because they already believe in that system.
This has been a problem with the follow the money school from the beginning. The NRA isn't bribing politicians that hate guns to vote the other way. It's making sure that politicians who love guns win all the seats.
40: My understanding is that yes, it did work that way.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that's a safe bet.
We should all be reading more French philosophy.
44 is my actual answer to the question in the OP and I'm totally serious. It's a postmodern world, in the specific philosophical sense of the term. For all that the right rejects and mocks postmodernism, they have an intuitive understanding of how to operate within it that the left generally lacks.
40 This has to be true in Montana. Tester made a big deal about Sheehy's anti-abortion statements, but it's evident that a bunch of people voted for the abortion protection constitutional amendment and the explicitly pro-life candidate.
A lot of voters are newly here from other places, and have no broader understanding of things like who these people are, and what the state of abortion law is here. Some probably voted for the young guy because age equals bad.
If you had to summarize it in 144 characters?
I was hoping 46 referred back to 17, but alas.
I'd be interested in examples of fear of voters or a significant of opposition voters actually motivating any politicians.
GOP abandonment of Social Security cuts in 2005, and ACA cuts in 2017, both with trifectas.
More broadly, popular sentiment can encourage more passive resistance by less overtly political actors like bureaucrats at both federal and state level. And even rigged elections can be lost if opposition grows enough.
All three of these are good, but the first two really make me think that somewhere along the way post-Enlightenment, "reason" itself got tossed out as a value for being inauthentic or unemotional or making a less compelling story (per #3).
Obviously "reason" can be hijacked and taken towards all sorts of odious conclusions if it's not paired with good judgement/morals/etc, but denigrating reason doesn't work that well, either.
To be clear, reason/accurate information are still VERY important and valuable. They just aren't helpful (IME) at the persuasion stage of the conversation, or for most people most of the time. You need them later, behind the scenes, for the boring-but-necessary policy design and implementation with a small subset of actors.
Here's an example. Back in the early 2000s, when the Dreamers started organizing, they did NOT lead with the logistical realities of the broken US immigration system. They did not explain that many undocumented people come to the US because US-based multinational corporations buy up farmland in Latin America and push their families off the land. They did not explain legal paperwork and visa restrictions.
They told powerful, compelling personal stories of having grown up in the US, playing on sports teams with US-born kids, graduating from American high schools, going to prom...etc. They made people feel how emotionally devastating it was to grow up feeling American in all but passport, and then have that yanked away as a teenager.
Once they grabbed public attention, *then* a small subset of Dreamers did sit down with journalists and lawyers and congresspeople to talk about the nitty-gritty of what good legislation would look like. But they did NOT ever bother trying to explain that to Joe Public.
38.1 The problem is that the Supreme Court is a lot more like a ratchet than a pendulum. In our lifetimes, we're not going to see Heller, Citizens United, or Dobbs overruled. Nor the immunity decision. I knows there an effort to fix the latter by amendment, as there have been on CU, but because the hurdle to amending is so high, these are more or less just energy/resource sinks. And I get it, people need to feel like they are doing *something.*
What *something* actually means is preventing Republicans from winning presidential elections -- in 2000, 2016, 2024. And henceforth. We have to take a house of Congress in 2026, and the Senate would be a really good idea.
52.2: I agree absolutely. Not sure where I was saying a tide of popular sentiment would change Supreme Court decisions. Congressional decisions, more conceivable. Congressional and Presidential elections, better.
7: I can be convinced, but am skeptical that this would be effective. The main advantage of misinformers is that they're not constrained; they can say whatever is convenient in the moment, without regard for truth or consistency. et seq:
To be clear, I'm mostly talking about giving little $5,000 grants to grungy teenagers and broke grad students on TikTok, DFH activists on WhatsApp, rando photographers on Instagram. I'm talking about paying people who are already passionate about something, and already fluent in the language of ordinary people and social media, to be able to produce the kind of content that will never run in the NYT or ABC or even Fox.
I know there are people like this because I know them personally IRL. They subsist on gig work and cobbling together multiple crappy jobs. If you gave them real money, they are better and smarter at creating compelling content than bitcoin bros or antivaxxers.
What they don't have is the $ to support themselves to have TIME to make the content and to boost/push it out there to get an initial snowball going.
(Then we do run into the problem of algorithmic black holes and one-way ratchets to hardcore RW content. Right now, I can watch a dumb 10-minute low-impact cardio video on YouTube and within three clicks of "suggested content" I'm watching deeply anti-social, often Nazi-adjacent crap. The equivalent ratchet of moving people instead toward innocuous or pro-social content simply doesn't exist among major social media companies right now. That problem only gets solved by antitrust litigation and meaningful regulation, neither of which were even on the table under Biden, sooooooo.)
50 I don't think the individual GOP politicians abandoned either. In both cases, the advocates within the GOP coalition didn't make the sale. Repealing the ACA is still very much on the agenda, but I'm not sure there are 50 votes for it. Maybe now. SS privatization was driven by Wall Street not GOP politicians, and was a minority position even when proposed. Wall Street has trouble getting ideologues on this elected because ordinary people aren't sold on it. And the 2008 collapse didn't help at all.
In neither case do I think politicians changed position.
55: Abandoned as in they stopped pushing it for the rest of that Presidency. I don't give a shit about their inmost policy hearts.
52 was me, in case that wasn't glaringly obvious.
Charley at 14: You can yell at your US Senator about how unfair it is that your wife left you until the cows come home. Or refuse to come home because you're yelling. No matter, your fury isn't going to lead to action.
Depressingly, it is exactly those guys and exactly that fury that is leading to recent pressure to roll back no-fault divorce at the state level. And a number of the Project 2025 authors also want to roll it back.
So while those men's rage might not lead to US senators taking action, it is unfortunately encouraging state senators to do so. HUGE SIGH.
If you had to summarize it in 144 characters?
The key insight of postmodernism is that people's perception of reality is dependent on their perspectives and sets of assumptions that aren't susceptible to empirical proof, and aren't necessarily shared universally. There is not, therefore, an "objective reality" that everyone perceives the same way and can agree on. This shades into the idea that there isn't any objective reality at all, which is the sort of thing that gets philosophers mocked (and not just by the right) but isn't necessarily entailed by the theory. The practical implication is rather that you can't start from the assumption of a shared perception of reality, and I think we're seeing the accuracy of it everywhere these days.
As for what to do about it, I think Witt's storytelling approach is the right way to go. It's about connecting with those perceptions and assumptions (and shaping them, to some extent) on an emotional rather than a rational level.
Bg at 16: I think ttaM has it right in 20 and 21. I would add that picking one thing to work on, that you already feel motivated about and comfortable doing, trumps (ha) everything else.
As the saying goes, "Don't ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive." It's also the only way to sustain activity over the long term without burning out.
So if you like taking/teaching street medic classes about how to care for people in emergency situations, do that. If you feel inspired to drive locally to transport women for abortion care, do that. If you have a spare room and are willing to house an asylum-seeker, do that. If you don't want to organize anything yourself, but can take a stack of index cards home and type them into a GoogleForm to help with coordination, do that.
Figure out who YOU like to hang out with, and ask those people what they're doing. There is a ton of activism that can be done that is meaningful even if your comfort zone is narrow. My normie Democrat family members will likely never want to accompany me into a "bad" section of the city to do hands-on work with DFHs, but they will give me $50 for supplies if I ask, they will send their teenagers over to help pack boxes at my house, etc.
42 is this the most overdetermined result in a presidential election ever or at least in living memory?
59: I knew that. I was just making sure you knew that. Good job.
teo at 45: For all that the right rejects and mocks postmodernism, they have an intuitive understanding of how to operate within it that the left generally lacks.
Completely agree. And co-sign teo at 59, too.
The problem is that there are many channels that exist to carry information -- and facebook and twitter are potentially really useful ways for politicians to communicate -- but they don't work because they are overwhelmed. They carry SO MANY messages that it becomes impractical to identify which are meaningful.
I'm running into this problem on the smallest scale. I need to inform the parents at my kid's school when Bike Bus week is. But they get so many messages; each week we get email, text, text to inform parents that there is an email, website, grade level Facebook page, electronic newsletter, and robocall. The parents tell me they don't pay much attention to any of it. The thing that I have found effective? I have gone back to large signs on the fence near the gates. Paper signs, that I letter by hand. We have looped all the way back around to physical bulletins.
The equivalent ratchet of moving people instead toward innocuous or pro-social content simply doesn't exist among major social media companies right now.
I read some novel where the apocalypse was averted by this technique. Going back through my library reading list... there it is. _The Future_, by Naomi Alderman who also wrote _The Power_. Man, I do not remember reading a whole lot of the books on that list.
22 and 16: Sherry found this guide to resistance this time. Daniel Hunter's 10 things to do if Trump wins.
52: I live in MA. We are losing some Latino voters here, but they are not where I live. I suppose we could work on our legislative priorities, but God, our legislature kind of sucks. And it is so hard to know what they are doing that we actually passed an initiative to allow the auditor to audit them. Old boys club full of lawyers and landlords, several NDAs signed with victims of harassment.
Again, I think resistance matters. In the same way that it mattered in the 30's.
61:I suppose I'm concerned about the rule of law, and the deportations and how to protest that as well as the fact that somebody who committed violence is going to return to the office of the President.
My personal policy interests are not attainable right now - likely not even at the state level, but basically bolstering the care economy so that working and middle class peop,e can afford childcare and elder care.
But right now, I just want to find a way to fight authoritarianism.
Sherry found this guide to resistance this time. Daniel Hunter's 10 things to do if Trump wins.
That's a helpful link; thank you.
The link in 67 is indeed quite good.
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Leana Wen, former Public Health Commissioner for Baltimore, and Washington Post columnist, just did an Opinion piece in the Post "RFK Jr's views on fluoride aren't as crazy as you think". And so it begins.
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Dems could do this now
https://x.com/_ericblanc/status/1856334510490583551?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
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73: YES
I will write to my peeps who are probably already on board.
73: YES
I will write to my peeps who are probably already on board. New Yorkers, please contact your Senators, especially Schumer.
Today I had lunch with my state legislator friend. She says that Right to Work is basically a lock to pass in New Hampshire this year.
Previous years there had been some Republican holdouts, but they all their support withdrawn by Americans for Prosperity in this last election, so its not likely that many will make that decision again.
AFP loves fucking with the NH legislature because its a small state which can be tinkered with on the cheap.
The article linked in 22 seemed promising until I got to this bit:
"One final note on this point: it will be critical for blue jurisdictions to get their law enforcement agencies on board with the plan to resist."
How would that even be possible?
Well, law enforcement agencies aren't only police. That is, there are plenty of left-of-center attorneys general, and a fair number of progressive prosecutors.
The University of Washington has a department dedicated to misinformation studies. See eg. http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/
Also, speaking of UW, Rory is GETTING MARRIED!!
82: She lives in Seattle. Look, I needed a segue, so I stretched...
Amazing, Di! Why were we not consulted?
87: She was afraid the lurkers wouldn't support the marriage?
87: She was afraid the lurkers wouldn't support the marriage?
If that's not an indicator of time passing, I don't know what is. Yay Rory and congratulations Di!
They decided a few days ago and this is happening in a month. They've low-key been talking about marriage for awhile, but kept putting it off until they could afford to go alll out. Then they decided fuck that, let's get married in the woods with our mutual ex-boyfriend officiating. Kids these days...
We missed our chance for an L. & Rory wedding, but congratulations!
92: maybe for the second marriage...
Kidding. Totally kidding.
81 we poached a guy from another university who specializes in this for Gulf related stuff and is kind of a rock star in these parts.
Causing a huge stock market crash is the only way to make them care, AFAICT.
54: Right now, I can watch a dumb 10-minute low-impact cardio video on YouTube and within three clicks of "suggested content" I'm watching deeply anti-social, often Nazi-adjacent crap.
YouTube -- one of the original don't-read-the-comments sites -- apparently put a lot of resources into cleaning up their comments. And lo! They are startlingly wholesome these days, at least the parts of it that I see. Music videos, which used to attract shitposters and flame wars and general displays of human stupidity are now full of accolades and stories of how the poster and their mother/father/great-uncle/favorite-ancestral-tentacled-entity used to bond over this song and now they're dead but it brings back such happy memories.
Anyway, I wonder whether Nazi-adjacent content is all that lucrative for YouTube, or whether an algorithm that wasn't in a Nazi strange attractor (in the mathematical sense) might not make far more money.
Very little about the mainstream media in this thread and almost certainly rightly so. I do think there are (or probably more correctly *were*) things they could do to help, but not seeing them doing it. I do hope places like Pro Publica thrive; I should probably add them to donation list.
It's hard to disentangle chickens and eggs but the collapse of MSM as a "trusted source" has certainly gone hand in hand with the rise of so many other channels.
Shear disruption of information delivery systems from technological advancement is probably at the root of it. And still getting sorted.
From someone whose name I forget on Bluesky:
Me at the start of an epoch-changing revolution in human communication: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!
Me in the middle of an epoch-changing revolution in human communication: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.
Because I must, a quick timeline of key events in MSM capitulating and dooming themselves to irrelevancy. (They were probably doomed anyway.)
Just one facet of the creation of today's mis/disinformation space.
1990s: Gingrich Rs adopt scorched earth messaging.
1990s: Whitewater/ Clinton Derangement Syndrome bleeds into (sometimes led by) MSM. (Fox was barely a thing at the time, NYT did the majority all on their lonesome, just them and the loons.)
1990s: Rise of Foix. Fox is best viewed as Information Terrorism. Much of their programming is straight news loss leaders but even that they control a narrative with what they cover and what they do not.
early 2000s: Iraq war runup. MSNBC fires Donahue. Everyone but Knight-Ridder all in. Gannet buys Knight-Ridder.
Obama era: Tea party. Both NYT and WaPo have short-lived specific initiatives where they look to specifically cover issues of right-wing concern (biggest driver was Black Panthers at Philly voting site outrage). Actual truthful critical coverage of the astroturfing and lies might have been a useful thing, but of course they actually meant giving them credence. Short-lived because this soon just became embedded in their everyday coverage. mission accomplished!
And on until today.
Even when Fox was full on undermining public health in the early Biden days they could not be bothered to even cover it as a story.
But, you know, somewhere in there they pivoted to video.
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Pom Poko is great! Samurai raccoons! Sumo raccoons! Raccoons with giant nutsacks!
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Odds are very good that I lose my career this year. Insidehighered has the story, but our enrollments overall are up, and my program's up 28%.
But one university read a land acknowledgement and the faculty at the other signed an open letter criticizing the decision to call the cops on all seven pro-Palestine protestors, and our university allows a queer history class to count for the civics requirement. So we need to be punished, with a 10% cut and --- this is what kills me --- a forced internal reallocation where the universities can earn the cut back by cutting "low-performing programs". The definition of low-performing is whatever allows them to cut our program. My program is housed in the social sciences college so colleagues are already telling me how sorry they are so we're the sacrifice.
Of course none of this will touch anyone who is the alleged problem. Or any of the useless dead weight as long as they're in programs that are big enough to avoid scrutiny. And the state wants people to learn the classics but is firing the only people who do anything close. And what my colleagues aren't seeing yet is that they can do this every year and killing us is an automatic 7% loss of students for the college. Lots of people are telling me how much I'm valued but I think that just means they'll be sad for three moments instead of one. Our university president is decent but he's the sort of person who always overcommits to state directives to prove what a team player he is, so he's the wrong man for this moment, as far as I'm concerned. We might survive a 5% cut but I feel like we're the first to go and the program is gone regardless.
I stood a decent chance of being dean in two years (or realistically, losing it in a national search to someone with less experience and skills and then being asked to help him learn the ropes and being told I'm really valued.). It's kind of bizarre but maybe they can ask some of the dead weight to run the place.
I don't know what I tell the kids. It's hard not to think that life insurance would solve their problems.
Raccoons in the brutal logic of post-industrial capitalism!
105: Oh, I'm so sorry. Even rich private universities are pulling this garbage.
"Being told I'm really valued" without getting the job or money of tangible whatever feels like so much of what's wrong and frustrating in so many places.
105: That's so awful. Bureaucrats in indifferent and corrupt systems are going to do so much damage to people. I'm sorry you've been caught up in this.
Raccoon bollocks!
Seriously, I've only been able to watch that once. The ending with the raccoon sarariman just kills me.
102: I think another big Obama moment was when he tried to impose some accountability on Fox News. Here's one example. Major news organizations rose up and united behind the idea that Fox News was just like them.
105: oh fuck. That's super shitty.
It's hard not to think that life insurance would solve their problems.
Are you genuinely super fucking depressed right now? This feels like a different category of red flag than the rest of the (awful) situation.
I hope that sounds compassionate and not rude. Just worried!
Also here's my shit of the day:
My dad fell and smashed his face over the weekend. He's in the hospital. They put a pacemaker in yesterday and they're fixing his nose today. (The pacemaker is actually unrelated, but the doctor is taking the opportunity to get it in.)
My brothers have been fantastic. One brother is there now, I was going to go this weekend, and then the other brother next week, staying through Thanksgiving when we were already going to be there. Great.
Except I left my fucking driver's license in Tyler TX, five hours away, last weekend when I took a bunch of students to a conference. I've exhausted all avenues and can't figure out a way to fly this weekend. And also my credit card was used for a bunch of fraudulent purchases, and also at some point in the past week, I lost my main pair of sandals. And also, it's still fucking sandal weather here for the foreseeable future and I'd just like to wear a goddamn cardigan eventually.
Seconding heebie's worries in a compassionate imaginary-friend kind of way!
And also traveling two weekends in a row is stressful for me, and this weekend is Ace's first play and Rascal's birthday, so I felt conflicted about going.
But now 2nd brother is going to extend his trip to cover for me, and I feel guilty about that. I also don't think it's terribly necessary? My mom is fine, I think she'll actually do well with someone to take care of, and my dad is lucid and mobile. But maybe I'm underestimating everything? Argh.
I'm having trouble compartmentalizing enough to get my actual job done.
Cala, that's awful, and I'm also sorry that your cry for help/sympathy/justice was met by people (PEOPLE) unable to CHILL and REFLECT that tanuki ARE NOT RACCOONS. LORD. The last person you should consider taking this fury out on is yourself.
Heebie, I think this is one of these things that feels immensely important in the moment, and then (if everyone is truly okay) just isn't a big thing six months from now. Just make sure your brothers know you'll cover for them in the next crisis. I hope the pacemaker works out for your dad -- my dad got one this summer and I think it's been life-changing. Recovery from the operation does involve self-discipline, so if your mom likes to take care of people, she can fuss over whatever he does with his shoulder for the next few weeks.
For those who like Emily Oster: she has a column in The NY Times talking about how we should be more nuanced on the benefits of pasteurization and fluoride in the water to regain trust in public health.
I mean, I like raw milk cheese, but I would never drink raw milk and think people how do it should be cautioned that it's a really risky choice. But fluoride in the levels it's found in US public water supplies is pretty much a no brainer. Engaging in a discussion of this is basically opening the anti science floodgates and undermining public health. Under Trump, I'. Sure we can look forward to more listeria.
I don't love Oster, but I agree with that general principal. D.A.R.E-style absolutism in PSAs can backfire! More accurate messaging is better than paternalism, in general.
122: I appreciate this. thanks.
How has it been life-changing for your dad? Like increased energy?
Cala, seconding the check-in for you the human being. Do you have local support (therapist, etc.) who can help you navigate this horrendous situation?
Heebie, not in any way telling you when you should travel, but I have MANY times seen UMC white people get through airport security without a photo ID. It just takes an extra 30-60 min because they have to call a supervisor. Something to keep in mind if/when you truly need to travel w/out ID.
Also, I'm assuming you don't have a passport you could use instead? Asking only because I know when I'm stressed about someone else's health situation I forget even very simple work-arounds for other problems.
Yeah, my passport expired in May 23, so it's over a year out of date. I do appreciate your point, though.
but I have MANY times seen UMC white people get through airport security without a photo ID. It just takes an extra 30-60 min because they have to call a supervisor. Something to keep in mind if/when you truly need to travel w/out ID.
This is wild. I know you weren't telling me that I should feel obligated to try this! But my immediate reaction is how wildly stressful to buy a ticket, make all the family arrangements, pack, get to the airport, and the whole time just be trusting that my privilege would get me through.
The passport can prove your identity at the airport just fine even if it's expired. It just can't be used to travel *out of the country.*
But in reality, I co-sign 122. There will be lots of other times and ways for you to show your love for your father. Let your brothers step up. Think of it as one small blow against the patriarchy!
Also!! Just to complain: I left my license at the front desk when I checked in. They didn't bother to, like, call my fucking room and let me know. Just chucked it in the lost and found.
I realized it was missing on Monday and called. They said it happens all the time, can I swing by and pick it up? Otherwise they're out of options! I offered to send a SASE, and they said that would work. But they absolutely would not drop it in the fucking mail like an adult.
(Also this hotel was super skeezy, and I say this as someone who takes a perverse delight in skeezy hotels. Meaning there was a guy laying down outside of my door when I walked up, using his jacket as a blanket, trying to catch some zz's. He told me that he'd gotten kicked out of the room next door, and please don't call management. Photo documentation here. Also the peephole was stuffed with toilet paper, like any classy joint.)
129: The TSA websites say as long as it's only 1 year out of date. (Again, I'm sure white UMC get through with more all the time!)
125: But on fluoride the evidence is really clear. And not fluoridating water puts the onus on parents to go to a dentist and get a prescription for fluoride tablets which means that you are harming lower income kids with worse dental care.
Also measles is a terrible illness which robs your body of Immunity, so we should absolutely be absolutist about its benefits, except for those for whom an attenuated vaccine is unsafe and who rely on herd immunity.
Oh yes, I do agree. I don't really know how to best message things.
129: I appreciate it. This is helping me feel less awful about not going.
105: Very sorry, Cala. Good thoughts.
99:
YouTube -- one of the original don't-read-the-comments sites -- apparently put a lot of resources into cleaning up their comments. And lo! They are startlingly wholesome these days, at least the parts of it that I see.
Meanwhile, the content itself...
My area of Utah doesn't have fluoridated water, so the kids get supplements. If course, if we all decide fluoride is bad and/or get rid of the ACA ,then those supplements won't be free but my kids mostly forget to take them anyway.
I am in rough shape but my ideation stopped at doing the math.
Heebie, bring the passport and go to the airport. Lots of people lose wallets while traveling -- it's not so much privilege as not wanting to reenact The Terminal.
Ours is not fluoridated, either. It use to be, and then the wise voters it out, circa 2010.
I am so sorry things are going like that, Cala. My instinct is to say that everything will work out because you're terrific and people will recognize that and find a place for you, but I know that's not reliably true and saying it is unhelpful.
126: Increased capacity for exercise, yeah -- no need to wait for his heart to speed up, just generally better physical regulation. I should check in with him about it again because I am terrible at calling my parents.
Remember to inform ALL your financial institutions if one is hacked/scammed! Can't tell you how frustrating it is to find some fraudulent transactions, call the client and hear "oh yeah, we had some fraud at our bank a few weeks ago... do you think that might be related?"
That really sucks Cala. I know from experience how it feels to have a workplace you loved go down.
Oof, sorry to hear that Cala; that sounds incredibly frustrating -- particularly the contrast between doing well at your normally understood job responsibilities, and then getting scapegoated for something else.
And for the love of Ganesha, change passwords, sign up for two factor authentication and sign up for push notifications.
Thanks. I think people will try if they can but it's an environment where everyone is circling the wagons.
It's so weird teaching right now.
Sorry to hear things are so rough, Cala.
Remember to inform ALL your financial institutions if one is hacked/scammed! Can't tell you how frustrating it is to find some fraudulent transactions, call the client and hear "oh yeah, we had some fraud at our bank a few weeks ago... do you think that might be related?"
Wait. My discover card gets used fraudulently, and I should notify Bank of America? or E-trade? What would they do?
Oh man, so sorry both Cala and Heebie that things are so insane right now. Wish I had good advice or good resources, but I do have a few good vibes these days that I am sending your way.
Cala - if the worst happened, do you think you would try to find an academic or teaching position elsewher. Independent high schools would probably hire you. But I totally get that might be of no interest. Or do you think you would change careers?
No one will hire me. Philosophy is small and threatened everywhere. I'm good at admin stuff but those jobs are more common but also don't draw from the ranks of the unemployed (must be something wrong, right?)
I don't know where I go from here.
149: A place like Rowland Hall might if you were willing to teach high school students. Again, I totally appreciate that you might not.
I'm sure there are companies that would hire you; it would just be a total career change.
Upside: can you imagine the careerist lawyer who just lost out to Gaetz?
Cala, I think I can say that if you've spent decades in the academic humanities, your sense of professional self-worth is probably really, really far from where it accurately belongs and fixing that is critical for the next stage. There are just not that many careers in the world where you can accomplish so much and believe that it amounts to nothing. On some level, of course I hope you can stay in academia, but it's just so damn toxic in so many ways and your comments are bringing that back vividly. heart emoji
I tried to make that sound less condescending and I failed, because I suck at everything I do.
It's been a rough couple of years. I'm also weirdly close to having a textbook contract. This is good but also insane to be trying to think about now.
Insane because of the professional turmoil, or because of the historical moment? (I mean, why choose?)
105
Ugh I'm so sorry. Hopefully those around you will have a moment of sanity and spinefulness(?) (whatever is the opposite of spinelessness) and step up. Or maybe you can get the media to cover it as cutting the study of Western civ/dead white men and your admin will be shamed into doing the right thing. Anyways I agree with LK that you have lots of talents and there will be options even if at this moment it doesn't seem like it. But overall yeah it sucks.
I felt way worse before the election but now that the worst has come to happen I'm leaning into the dark absurdist comedy of it all. Matt Gaetz as AG? Marco Rubio as SoS? Tulsi Gabbard as CIA director? Elon AND some other douchebag as head of government efficiency? Sure why the fuck not? I suppose at this point our main hope is that our government is run by totally incompetent clowns who end up shooting their own dicks.
(whatever is the opposite of spinelessness)
Backbone!
Gaetz is to prosecute on DJT's whims, but judges will need to sign off also, not sure I see how they can say prosecute the Obamas for treason. Gabbard will test whether any response to bad ideas is possible. She's a test balloon to identify noncompliant legislators? There must be internal dynamics from the security establishment.
FBI runs counterintelligence, so Gaetz matters also I guess. Maybe Gabbard is a move to destroy NATO, no more intelligence sharing possible?
I'm seeing an optometrist tomorrow.