The truth that climate change is (a) real, (b) likely to be unpleasant, and (c) not the apocalypse might be the most politically incorrect fact in politics. All three of these are strongly supported, but if you say that all in one sentence, every partisan of every stripe will stare at you as if you have 3 heads.
This thing you don't need to believe that climate change is literary apocalyptic to feel urgency about stopping it. A college environmental science professor of mine described it as "global climate destabilization" (while making clear that humans will be able to adapt to it), and that has been enough to make me feel a sense urgency about it for a decade now. I don't like hot weather, and I don't want more extreme heat, extreme weather patterns, or unpredictable seasons. That should be motivation enough.
Also, adapting to it - or taking action to cut your energy usage - will save you money. You don’t even have to look at the moral side of it. It makes financial sense.
I agree with this 100%. I think fires burning down suburban houses in California and last summer with its 120 degree days in places like Portland has also helped build urgency among normies in that respect. Now if only we can get a few 120 degree days in summer 2022 or 2024 for the swing voters in PA and the upper midwest...
It won't be apocalyptic but it could be as bad as WW2 was (but spread over a much longer period of time). So more than just some extreme weather in the US and seasonal shifts.
If you don't think Trump is an asset then you need to google what an asset is. It just means the Russians have a dossier on him and believe he can be manipulated. The guy is one of the most easily manipulated people imaginable. You think the Russians are too dumb to be aware of this?
I would disagree with the idea that Trump was easily manipulated because of a “dossier”—seems more like he genuinely admired Putin and authoritarians in general. You could say he was an “asset” under the definition “a thing of value”—having him in place made things better for Putin without a doubt.
I did not say that he was easily manipulated "because of a dossier." I said that he was easily manipulated him and they almost certainly had a dossier on him. That they would have believed he could be manipulated and would have had notes about it.
People claiming Trump is a Russian asset are usually going a little farther than just claiming he's an easily manipulated dupe that Russia finds useful. It suggests a formal relationship between him and Russian intelligence that there really is no proof of.
Those dumb liberals can't possibly mean the true thing that they are actually saying. They must actually have some secret meaning that's obviously wrong. Uh-huh, that's it.
One quibble—how can you be so sure the rise in violent crime was not in any way caused by the pandemic? If the George Floyd murder had happened in, say, 2017 that the protests would not have been smaller? If people were working and doing all the usual things they used to do on summer nights that there would have been just as many people in the streets?
I'm mostly pushing back against the claim the pandemic is the sole cause of the increase in crime, which hasn't really been seen at all in other countries despite them also dealing with the same pandemic.
I wouldn't argue against the idea that the pandemic was a contributing factor, and I would totally agree that the pandemic caused the protests to become much bigger than the likely would have been without.
The pandemic was probably a substantial factor; this study (http://maximmassenkoff.com/papers/victimization_rate.pdf) shows that, while total crime went down, the number of people put and about went down even more, such that your rate of victimization per street hour went up.
The Trump campaign itself reluctantly published emails where one of its leaders (DTjr) responds to an offer from what appears to be Kremlin intelligence by coordinating the timing for the Kremlin to act.
As I recall he "just tweeted it out", so maybe they weren't even reluctant about it.
Also, Trump unprompted likes to mention in speeches that he trusts Putin more than the CIA.
And, you know, his campaign manager worked for him for free so he could sell their targeting data to a GRU agent. Then obstructed justice and got pardoned, so he didn't have to explain why he did it.
I agree that people on the left equate "single-payer" and "universal coverage." It is possible to have universal coverage without having single-payer (for example, I live in Israel, where all citizens are covered by one of four HMOs, so it's technically a four-payer system, not a single payer system). However it IS true that every country in the developed world has some form of universal coverage, while the US is truly an outlier in the share of its population that lacks health coverage.
yes that is true, but of course, that has nothing to do with what i said
i am making fun of the bernard brothers for believing that sanders' healthcare plan is moderate and reasonable from a global perspective and not, instead, a proposal for the world's most generous universal healthcare system
Oh, Bernie’s plan is to essentially turn all US healthcare into the VA but with really generous bennies and no cost share. I personally think that’s a ticket to serious frustration and overuse but...
Also US medicine is so centralized that it's absolutely government-controlled. Medicare decides how many residency slots there are in every specialty in any given year. So literally the exact number of people entering each specialty in any given year is 100% decided by the government. If the number of grocery stores was a top down dictate from a grocery store czar in Washington, food prices would be out of control too.
We have all the disadvantages of central planning and excessive regulation, and literally the only things that the government doesn't do in our healthcare system are (a) help poor people get care and (b) take responsibility and admit when problems in our healthcare system are the fault of bad government rules.
You’d have to find some support for more doctors driving down overall healthcare spending. From what I’ve read that’s not the case. Doctor wages might decline but with easier access overall spending would increase.
Oh it is definitely not happening. I have zero hope for a rational healthcare system in the US and my betting money is that healthcare politics end up like the politics of college, where the right does nothing to change the system because they like that rich people do well and that poor people can't afford it, while the left does nothing because most of the well-paid employeers are in their donor base.
What I think is interesting about that list is that each item is rooted in truth, but rendered false by stripping away nuance to force it into a good/bad binary (e.g., posted on Twitter). A lot of the cheeky examples below are things that are entirely made up by reverse-engineering an ideological viewpoint.
yes, i agree my list is far better than everyone else's lists (this is no doubt due to my uniquely incisive analysis etc etc)
but more seriously: I think the problem is that normal people who don't pay money to subscribe to political blogs, even the very educated and typically intelligent people someone who subs to slow boring might be friends with, now have a wide array of specific policy opinions that are essentially all one line statements they picked up from twitter or tiktok or whatever and which they were convinced were the Ideologically Pure Statements (which is more or less the same process by which misinformation spreads on the right)
that is to say, yes, obviously there is a kernel of truth in (for example) the US healthcare point, but the idea that Medicare for All is thus a moderate policy designed to bring the US in line with the rest of the world is a) somewhere on the spectrum from misinformation to outright lie and b) is the way that the vast majority of young progressives have internalized the conversation, not the more nuanced version of the conversation that people replying to me are determined to have
I had to sit and think a bit about how I formed opinions when I was in my 20's, like my implacable opposition to the invasion of Iraq, and it occurs to me that it was mostly from reading really dry books. Yet, even back then, in the pre-Twitter, pre-YouTube days, there were plenty of 9/11 truthers picking apart single frames of video of the Pentagon and talking endlessly about thermite. They, too, seemed to have derived their opinions from reading a lot (of what, I am still uncertain). But they lived in forums and the comments of slashdot.org, where their ravings were sheltered from normies. Now the news is basically just a string of very short forum posts—tweets. No one even takes the time to workshop coherent conspiracy theories. They just (re)tweet crazy between a bunch of emoji that make no sense to me.
PS I lived in Western Europe for 12 years and can confirm that almost no one on the Anglo Internet has a clue how healthcare actually works on the continent, let alone the rest of the world.
Nonsense. I notice that you do not cite any evidence or education to justify your claims.
1) There is substantial scientific evidence that human beings and their ecosystem have objective limits for life. I will give you cites dependent on your retraction.
2) Only nuclear power produces ultra-hazardous nuclear waste for which there is no known treatment process. Because of that, we still do not have life cycle costs for any nuclear plant. On a cost basis, a nuclear plant cannot compete with solar.
3) Most developed countries have much better inclusive national health care systems. Some are single payer, many are not. There is substantial research into comparing national health systems of which you seem unaware.
4) I do not know the source of Elon Musk's wealth, but I do know that he is almost without equal in raising capital from Wall Street. Trump inherited his capital and is and was an incompetent businessman.
5) This is so vague that it is hard to respond to. Let us reframe the question. The Democratic Administration and Party have policy positions and legislative priorities. Reasonable people - see, e.g. the article we are commenting on - while you cannot name a Republican policy position because they do not have one. No thoughtful person will deny that "dark money" has some influence on politics and that this is not good for large scale democratic politics.
6) The last point makes no sense. I have never seen this argument made. As Matt tirelessly argues, the US has a substantial housing shortage. One of the important issues in addressing the housing problem is NIMBYism, as Matt often points out. This is expressed in opposition to "multi-family homes" i.e. apartments.
this is an excellent imitation of what one of these ppl would say
in particular i think you do an excellent job asserting that i'm wrong by saying something unrelated to what i said, but implying through omission that it constitutes a dunk
What is missing from some much of the "Climate Change is existential!" discourse is that many years prior, there was a much less publicized, but still very public, discourse between Climate Writers and Climate Activist in which they were trying to literally find ways to make Climate Change news more compelling...and the decision they landed on was to sell Climate Change news as existential and make "everything" about Climate Change...no matter how tertiary or secondary, or incremental the impact might be. Basically, they made a conscious decision to oversell the doom and gloom.
Straight out of that Discourse, we got "The Uninhabitable Earth" from David Wallace Wells...which is so ironic now because David Wallace Wells has not pivoted again to rebrand himself as a "Climate Optimist" guy who now just does stories on how we are closer to a solution now that we have ever been, etc.
I'm fairly agnostic about long-term climate impact. Seems difficult to project, to me. The good news is that fossil fuels are fading because we just have better tech now.
I agree with your claim, 'make "everything" about Climate Change'. I've been watching a nature doc on Disney+ (hostile planet). It focuses on animals that endure extreme conditions. Quite good. The narrator incessantly attributes any recent, unpleasant weather to climate change, whether it be more rain, less rain, etc. it's all climate change. Also, the cute animals are universally negatively impacted by these changes, while the not cute animals are *thriving* due to climate change, which is causing even more problems for the cute animals.
For instance, there is a segment on climate change leading to increased jellyfish populations. Jellyfish aren't cute. There is no suggestion that there could possibly be any populations of cute animals that are benefitting from a changing climate.
C’mon, it’s extremely easy to find out that Musk grew up rich and extremely privileged. That’s not to say he’s a total marketing of the self as a rich guy scammer like Trump is, but Musk even admits that he couldn’t have founded his first company without family money.
I agree that other things are bad-faith shibboleths that the Left should jettison, but normie and right-wing worship of Musk, Gates, Bezos; et. al js corrosive to our country’s social fabric.
There is certainly a lot of fake info out there about Musk's family wealth, sure. He grew upper middle class in South Africa. He was not 'rich' and the mine story is literally fake. His first company, Zip2, was backed by angel investors
Agree on all of these except nuclear power, which seems legitimately complicated. Is there something I could read that explains how nuclear as it's currently deployed doesn't have a much higher catastrophic/black swan risk than other forms of energy production? I assume there's still meltdown risk (from a terrorist attack, etc.) that could, say, render a whole area unlivable for a some period?
Doesn't mean it's the "most dangerous", but seems like a viable case to make, vs. "misinformation."
It’s of course impossible to quantify black swan risk, but we know, for example, that coal ash is considerably more radioactive than nuclear fuel waste.
But in general I would say that the major catastrophic risk for nuclear power plants is an uncontrolled release of radiation. And it's not even clear that this extremely unlikely event would actually be substantially worse than what we just accept from burning fossil fuels (even putting aside global warming, just the health effects of the pollution are quite bad). So with respect to nuclear vs fossil fuels, I think the case for nuclear as the safer option is quite strong.
Now of course when it comes to nuclear vs wind/solar/hydro/etc it is more complicated but at least at the current margin it is not really an option to replace all fossil fuel based power generation with renewables so it is sort of an academic point.
I agree with you that most of this is misinformation, but your young lefty friends are correct that American politics is primarily determined by the agenda-setting power of billionaires -- not just buying votes, but think tanks, media ownership, etc.
The U.S health insurance system is truly an outlier among developed countries though, no?
And climate change resulting in human extinction seems unlikely but I suppose if we literally burn all the coal and oil in the ground it could probably happen
both of your statements are true and yet they are distinct from the statements commonly believed by young progressives by a wide margin
in particular about climate change, your example reflects what people once thought of as the "worst case" scenario, which is to say not only that we wouldn't tame our carbon emissions but that the growth in our emissions would continue to accelerate according to historic trends (which actually might have caused the apocalypse). but we know now that that definitely isn't happening. i think part of the reason people don't want to admit that is that the natural gas industry did a lot of the heavy lifting but also because people like to think in terms of binaries -- e.g., we Completed Penance and now the apocalypse has been averted, vs climate change being a spectrum of outcomes and we definitely won't get the best case scenario but we also definitely won't get the worst case scenario (barring any dramatic changes in the near future)
I think with the climate change thing, its similar to a lot of other stuff. Mainstream progressive thought has become "to fix this [thing] we need to fix every injustice" and that isn't true and is especially not true with climate change which needs technological solutions at this point.
However, for the healthcare thing, America is a lot richer than most developed countries. I'm curious to see if the plan put forth by Bernie is actually more generous than you would expect if you just ran a model predicting healthcare system generosity as a function of gdp per capita amongst the developed world.
Your statement says it is not true that "crime is explained by poverty"
The link you provide says:
"Although it’s clear that poverty predicts homicide quite independently of black, it’s also clear that black predicts independently of the poverty."
Therefore, crime _IS_ (at least partially) explained by poverty (within racial group)
The article mostly seems to say that the racial crime gap cannot be _solely_ explained by poverty (it is larger than the poverty gap)
There's still a big difference there - if you think poverty has _no_ bearing on crime then that changes the policy prescriptions from poverty having _some_ bearing on crime.
(But it's also different from "all racial crime differences are explained by poverty)
That's my take on skimming through that - am I wrong?
I think most conservatives think of crime as being an effect of race, judging by conversations I've had with them (they're smart enough to keep that as subtext, but they clearly believe it). But even that blog post notes that segregation status is important, as is native vs immigrant status (the relevant variable there being longstanding exposure to American racism). As a lefty, I interpret that data essentially as "racism has led to really bad societal effects, which are concentrated among its victims".
Crime is mostly committed by young men. Young men seek status (think lion prides). Young men who have the resources and ability to seek status by lawful means largely do. Those who don’t are much more likely to commit crimes to gain status. Glen Loury argues that human development is key. That makes sense to me. For those who are capable of performing well in the 2022 economy then our society should be working to provide them opportunity. For those who don’t have the natural abilities that are coveted in 2022, social scientists and policy makers need to imagine new ways to give young people value, meaning, and status in our society. This seems to be the problem that needs solving for our future. This is true for all people.
Your post is riven with sexism and ageism against young men. Have you accounted for 40 million other variables that might explain why young men statistically commit a disproportionate volume of crime, or are you going to blithely assume it is just ‘in their nature’?
I don’t think you’re using riven correctly. I admit I had to look it up.
I acknowledge there may be many factors. 40 million seems like a lot, though. With that said, I think their nature accounts for a good portion of it. I will not avoid truth just to also avoid being tagged with an “ism”.
I know my proclivity to run afoul of the law diminished with age. This is consistent with the enormous amount of data on this issue.
Surely it's possible to condition on income or occupation, though, isn't it? E.g., do an Asian-American janitor's kids end up earning higher incomes than a white janitor's kids?
(I honestly don't know whether people have looked at this, but this question always comes to mind when selective immigration is brought up.)
It's harder than it seems - a lot of the poorer Asian immigrants (Vietnamese, Hmong, etc) came as refugees and refugees often have to take jobs like janitor even though back in their home country they may have had better jobs - you see this also with some of the Syrian refugees in Europe in the last decade. They wouldn't have left if not for the war, and aren't the same as economic migrants or regular working-class Americans of any race.
One similar trend I really supported early in the Trump years that I now think is actively dystopian is ‘fact checking.’
Trump lies so much that it made sense to me to clearly lay out the lack of basis for his claims. But the industry has just become labeling conservative claims either False (if they are wrong) or Mostly False (if they are right because they should have contextualized them more evenly). On the other hand progressive claims are either True (if they are right) or Mostly True (if they are wrong but the vibes are good. It’s embarrassing to read as someone with basic reading comprehension and just feeds the Ben Shapiro machine. Orgs should get rid of that function if they aren’t willing to reconceptualize it.
True: “I agree with this and any factual inaccuracies were worded deniably”
Mostly true: “I agree with this but they should change the sentence in paragraph five to be less explicitly and obviously false.”
Mostly false: “I disagree with this but cannot find any explicit inaccuracies.”
False: “I disagree with this and look at the numbers that were off by 1.4% here and 0.8% here.” through “Oh my God, this whole speech was actually lies”
Makes the categories more intelligible but also completely useless when you understand what they mean.
Or “misleading” —true but the person who’s saying it is one of the bad guys/true but it justifies people doing stuff the left thinks people shouldn’t do.
I agree with everything you've said, though another version of this that also happens is a kind of "both sides-ism" where the fact checking goes something like this:
FALSE: Trump claimed all immigrants are terrorists, without evidence.
ALSO FALSE: Hillary Clinton claims her health care proposal will result in a 5% decrease in spending for the average American, however this depends on a number of factors and, according to some estimates, is on the optimistic side of the range of possible outcomes.
fact-checking is handy as a way to help people rate sources to learn who is giving them factual information. With Trump that broke down quickly because he was obviously lying so much. The rational thing individually was to stop listening to him - but collectively that was a problem because a bunch of people WERE listening to him despite the lies (or BECAUSE of the lies maybe)
"Fact Checking" culture within the Media is basically the 2000 - 2010 era equivalent of "feeding the trolls" on a message board or forum...
The folks doing all the feeding *think* they are doing proverbial God's work and protecting everyone...in reality...all they are doing is incrementally getting on everyone's nerves and dragging on a conversation that most everyone else who is reachable already agrees needs to die...
I'm all in favor of fact-checking if that's what it actually is. Unfortunately, it's become politicized itself to the point that many fact-checkers are basically dismissing anything as misinformation if it isn't fashionable for their political affinity group to believe.
And there needs to be more distinguishing between Bullshitting and Lying (or whatever word the Media, mostly afraid of labling things as "Lie" wants to call it)...there is almost NO attempt to convey that a significant portion of Republicans are engaging in Bullshittery as a tactic.
Could it be said that this whole “misinformation” thing is actually misinformation?
I continually see articles that make it seem as if misinformation creation and distribution is a sophisticated and large industry, when after digging in it seems like 3 babies in a trench coat who shit post on Facebook.
There are still people who are completely bought in to the idea that the 2016 presidential election was the result of Russian misinformation on social media. That despite the fact that the two major political candidates outspent the Russians by two orders of magnitude.
I count this as corporate misinformation, because Facebook pretty obviously wanted people to hear how easy it might be to control elections by paying Facebook for ads...
That seems to be about right for social media ads buys. And it’s not like the Russians were buying a lot of airtime on TV, which is still the expensive way to reach voters.
The Democratic coalition is “smarter” than the current GOP one, but that certainly doesn’t seem to produce any more realistic discourse a lot of the time.
The topic currently sitting at the top of the thread is religion and patriotism; Democratic dislike of both, especially the latter, seems to have become so poisonous that a decent chunk of the coalition, disproportionately focused on the well-educated, genuinely believes that the US is both a horrible place to live for anyone up to the 95th percentile, and that we’re the most brutal empire to ever exist.
I’m not sure how to characterize those beliefs except “misinformation.”
And they have the additional benefit of being wildly unpopular, in addition to being false.
And that’s without getting into to the various mostly-wrong-but-with-a-glimmer-of-truth beliefs surrounding racism, racial history, and gender identity, all of which we’re supposed to hold as well-educated folk.
"The topic currently sitting at the top of the thread is religion and patriotism; Democratic dislike of both"
I pay pretty close attention to this stuff, and I don't see many Democrats/progressives saying negative things about religion as such at all -- substantially less than around 2004.
You do see criticism of particular religious institutions or beliefs, not religion as such, but even that is less common. It's not common to read people saying "the Texas abortion law is about pushing a few people's religious values on everyone else" -- progressives just don't seem to think about religion much at all.
True. I think much of the vitriol that was reserved for religion two decades ago has now been transferred to patriotism instead.
Patriotism is more relevant to most voters and will remain so for much longer, so that is probably a major reason why the left has found itself isolated from its working-class roots.
Twenty years ago, progressives were quite cynical about patriotism, for the understandable reason that we kept getting "why do you hate America"-d, and seeing it invoked to justify the war in Iraq.
Patriotism isn't about judging individual people based on where they were born, it's not the same as racism. You're thinking of something more like xenophobia.
And if you don't think that for a country of immigrants and people as diverse as Americans it's important to work extra hard on forging and sustaining a shared, common identity and sense of community I don't think you've thought very deeply about how democratic polities function and survive - or don't.
A shared identity contributes to higher societal trust and support of law for the greater good, like willingness to pay taxes. Paying mandatory taxes into the treasury of a political entity for a community you are a part of and have a stake in is not the same as being forced to pay taxes that are going to be sent off somewhere else and used for the benefit of people and a community you have no connection to. It's not very complicated, but the democratic legitimacy and sustainability of the whole enterprise, in the real world, depends on and is underpinned by the existence a shared sense of community, ie, a shared identity.
You're right there is an element of treating some people differently than others that's inherent in having laws that differ from one jurisdiction to the next. But if you're going to say it's akin to racism to, for example, restrict government benefits or rights offered by a given municipality, state or nation to the people who live in, pay taxes to and abide by the laws of that jurisdiction, you're really off in lala land.
“Patriotism means “America First,” or putting Americans before non-Americans. This seems to me like judging people’s value based on where they are born”
That’s fair. I mean, I hope, for example, Ukraine is able to stave off Russia’s war, but that doesn’t mean am willing to go fight on their side. But I would be if the US was attacked.
It depends on whether you want to view your country as something closer to an HOA or something closer to a family.
I prefer the latter because I think it's good for us to have emotional connections to our country, and I certainly do, and much in the same way that if I had to pick between my uncle dying or a stranger dying, it's not a contest, if I have to pick between an American dying (even one I've never met) or a foreigner, I'm picking the American.
This just sounds weird to me. I think of patriotism like family. Most people are going to love their family more than others even if they would agree that other families are just fine. Same with countries. Its perfectly find to love your country and think its the "best" even if you acknowledge that other countries are perfectly fine places. The fact that I love my family and think its the best and you love your family and think they are the best are normal - not some form of racism.
A healthy sense of patriotism is the manifestation of imagined community which knits us together and allows us to pursue a common project of democratic governance rather than allowing power to accrue to those who already have power.
I am aware of your views on the matter of nation-states, and that you believe markets and liberal rights are an adequate substitute to patriotism, and I categorically reject that entire bunch of pablum.
You really do not need to beat the drum any further; nothing you could possibly say will convince me that your argument has any merit.
Genghis Khan is more responsible for the relative prosperity of Western Europe (and by extension America) than anything that happened in the age of imperialism.
I’m sure misinformation is a problem at at least some scale, but trusting the Misinformation Experts to determine the scale of that problem means surrendering my sense of true and false to people I would struggle to trust to tell me the time of day.
I see it like the censorship debate on the right. Is it a real problem in some sense? Yes, although I can still think one is a bigger problem than the other. Is it actively getting worse? Eh, I'd like to see more evidence, which is to say any evidence, from the Cassandras.
I'll use this piece as a chance to comment on my personal hobbyhorse, the increasingly widespread belief among Democrats that they only lose elections due to gerrymandering or other unfair Republican tactics. You could call it the Small Lie. How many Democrats know that Republicans won the House in 2010, 2014 and 2016 because they actually won a raw majority of total votes cast- about 51% in all three cases? How many Democrats know that according to political scientists the US actually has one of the fairer representative systems, as measured by the spread between votes cast & representatives seated? (Canada is over twice as bad!)
How many Democrats know that Republicans run the Wisconsin state legislature because they consistently win a raw majority of votes cast, year in and year out? I downloaded their 2020 electoral results and was pretty surprised to find that. I hear a lot of bleating about Wisconsin and how unfair it is there.
In general I think Dems not being honest with themselves about how popular Republicans are nationally is a low-key version of the Big Lie. Every electoral loss is due to gerrymandering, etc. (If you're concerned about Trump not conceding the election, try asking a Bernie supporter why he lost the primary twice. It wuz all a conspiracy, rigged, etc. etc.)
The problem is Dems forget they lose whenever the run someone that got the job because "it's their turn", with Biden being the only exception due to the breathtaking incompetence of Trump. There is a reason Clinton (outsider), Obama (not much time in Washington, outsider-ish) win and people for whom "it's their turn" (Romney, McCain, Dole, Hillary, Kerry, Gore) always lose.
Republicans learned that lesson now, hence, how they will always go with "movement" candidates going forward.
If you're reading this and you have young, lefty friends, consider how many of them believe the following false things:
* Climate change will result in human extinction
* Nuclear power is the most dangerous form of energy production
* Every country in the developed world has a single payer healthcare system like Canada's
* Elon Musk's wealth started as inherited money from his father's blood mines in South Africa
* American politics is primarily determined by the buying and selling of votes in Congress by billionaires
* Building new apartments raises rents
If so, your friends are victims of misinformation. Free them from the lies!
The truth that climate change is (a) real, (b) likely to be unpleasant, and (c) not the apocalypse might be the most politically incorrect fact in politics. All three of these are strongly supported, but if you say that all in one sentence, every partisan of every stripe will stare at you as if you have 3 heads.
This thing you don't need to believe that climate change is literary apocalyptic to feel urgency about stopping it. A college environmental science professor of mine described it as "global climate destabilization" (while making clear that humans will be able to adapt to it), and that has been enough to make me feel a sense urgency about it for a decade now. I don't like hot weather, and I don't want more extreme heat, extreme weather patterns, or unpredictable seasons. That should be motivation enough.
Also, adapting to it - or taking action to cut your energy usage - will save you money. You don’t even have to look at the moral side of it. It makes financial sense.
I agree with this 100%. I think fires burning down suburban houses in California and last summer with its 120 degree days in places like Portland has also helped build urgency among normies in that respect. Now if only we can get a few 120 degree days in summer 2022 or 2024 for the swing voters in PA and the upper midwest...
It won't be apocalyptic but it could be as bad as WW2 was (but spread over a much longer period of time). So more than just some extreme weather in the US and seasonal shifts.
*Stacy Abrams won the Georgia governor election
*Hillary Clinton only lost the 2016 election due to black voter suppression in Milwaukee
*The Riots of 2020 where mostly the result of right-wing agitators
*The rise in violent crime is the result of the pandemic
* Senator Manchin mostly votes with Republicans
* Bernie Sanders would have won West Virginia in the general election if the DNC didn't steal the election for Hillary
* Sending kids to school during the pandemic is basically sending them to their deaths
* Most African Americans want less cops in their communities
* Trump supporters are behind the wave of anti-asian hate crimes
* Republicans only opposed the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson because she was a black woman
* Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are widely disliked by most Americans
* Student loan forgiveness is a form of progressive income redistribution
* Men are much more likely to be anti-choice than women
* Trump is a Russian intelligence asset
* Unrestricted abortion access in the norm in other developed countries
If you don't think Trump is an asset then you need to google what an asset is. It just means the Russians have a dossier on him and believe he can be manipulated. The guy is one of the most easily manipulated people imaginable. You think the Russians are too dumb to be aware of this?
I would disagree with the idea that Trump was easily manipulated because of a “dossier”—seems more like he genuinely admired Putin and authoritarians in general. You could say he was an “asset” under the definition “a thing of value”—having him in place made things better for Putin without a doubt.
I did not say that he was easily manipulated "because of a dossier." I said that he was easily manipulated him and they almost certainly had a dossier on him. That they would have believed he could be manipulated and would have had notes about it.
People claiming Trump is a Russian asset are usually going a little farther than just claiming he's an easily manipulated dupe that Russia finds useful. It suggests a formal relationship between him and Russian intelligence that there really is no proof of.
Those dumb liberals can't possibly mean the true thing that they are actually saying. They must actually have some secret meaning that's obviously wrong. Uh-huh, that's it.
One quibble—how can you be so sure the rise in violent crime was not in any way caused by the pandemic? If the George Floyd murder had happened in, say, 2017 that the protests would not have been smaller? If people were working and doing all the usual things they used to do on summer nights that there would have been just as many people in the streets?
I'm mostly pushing back against the claim the pandemic is the sole cause of the increase in crime, which hasn't really been seen at all in other countries despite them also dealing with the same pandemic.
I wouldn't argue against the idea that the pandemic was a contributing factor, and I would totally agree that the pandemic caused the protests to become much bigger than the likely would have been without.
The pandemic was probably a substantial factor; this study (http://maximmassenkoff.com/papers/victimization_rate.pdf) shows that, while total crime went down, the number of people put and about went down even more, such that your rate of victimization per street hour went up.
The Trump campaign itself reluctantly published emails where one of its leaders (DTjr) responds to an offer from what appears to be Kremlin intelligence by coordinating the timing for the Kremlin to act.
As I recall he "just tweeted it out", so maybe they weren't even reluctant about it.
Also, Trump unprompted likes to mention in speeches that he trusts Putin more than the CIA.
And, you know, his campaign manager worked for him for free so he could sell their targeting data to a GRU agent. Then obstructed justice and got pardoned, so he didn't have to explain why he did it.
I agree that people on the left equate "single-payer" and "universal coverage." It is possible to have universal coverage without having single-payer (for example, I live in Israel, where all citizens are covered by one of four HMOs, so it's technically a four-payer system, not a single payer system). However it IS true that every country in the developed world has some form of universal coverage, while the US is truly an outlier in the share of its population that lacks health coverage.
yes that is true, but of course, that has nothing to do with what i said
i am making fun of the bernard brothers for believing that sanders' healthcare plan is moderate and reasonable from a global perspective and not, instead, a proposal for the world's most generous universal healthcare system
Oh, Bernie’s plan is to essentially turn all US healthcare into the VA but with really generous bennies and no cost share. I personally think that’s a ticket to serious frustration and overuse but...
Also US medicine is so centralized that it's absolutely government-controlled. Medicare decides how many residency slots there are in every specialty in any given year. So literally the exact number of people entering each specialty in any given year is 100% decided by the government. If the number of grocery stores was a top down dictate from a grocery store czar in Washington, food prices would be out of control too.
We have all the disadvantages of central planning and excessive regulation, and literally the only things that the government doesn't do in our healthcare system are (a) help poor people get care and (b) take responsibility and admit when problems in our healthcare system are the fault of bad government rules.
The residency limits are ridiculous. I would think that politicians would all be in favor of more physicians, but apparently they don't.
You’d have to find some support for more doctors driving down overall healthcare spending. From what I’ve read that’s not the case. Doctor wages might decline but with easier access overall spending would increase.
Oh it is definitely not happening. I have zero hope for a rational healthcare system in the US and my betting money is that healthcare politics end up like the politics of college, where the right does nothing to change the system because they like that rich people do well and that poor people can't afford it, while the left does nothing because most of the well-paid employeers are in their donor base.
What I think is interesting about that list is that each item is rooted in truth, but rendered false by stripping away nuance to force it into a good/bad binary (e.g., posted on Twitter). A lot of the cheeky examples below are things that are entirely made up by reverse-engineering an ideological viewpoint.
yes, i agree my list is far better than everyone else's lists (this is no doubt due to my uniquely incisive analysis etc etc)
but more seriously: I think the problem is that normal people who don't pay money to subscribe to political blogs, even the very educated and typically intelligent people someone who subs to slow boring might be friends with, now have a wide array of specific policy opinions that are essentially all one line statements they picked up from twitter or tiktok or whatever and which they were convinced were the Ideologically Pure Statements (which is more or less the same process by which misinformation spreads on the right)
that is to say, yes, obviously there is a kernel of truth in (for example) the US healthcare point, but the idea that Medicare for All is thus a moderate policy designed to bring the US in line with the rest of the world is a) somewhere on the spectrum from misinformation to outright lie and b) is the way that the vast majority of young progressives have internalized the conversation, not the more nuanced version of the conversation that people replying to me are determined to have
I had to sit and think a bit about how I formed opinions when I was in my 20's, like my implacable opposition to the invasion of Iraq, and it occurs to me that it was mostly from reading really dry books. Yet, even back then, in the pre-Twitter, pre-YouTube days, there were plenty of 9/11 truthers picking apart single frames of video of the Pentagon and talking endlessly about thermite. They, too, seemed to have derived their opinions from reading a lot (of what, I am still uncertain). But they lived in forums and the comments of slashdot.org, where their ravings were sheltered from normies. Now the news is basically just a string of very short forum posts—tweets. No one even takes the time to workshop coherent conspiracy theories. They just (re)tweet crazy between a bunch of emoji that make no sense to me.
PS I lived in Western Europe for 12 years and can confirm that almost no one on the Anglo Internet has a clue how healthcare actually works on the continent, let alone the rest of the world.
Nonsense. I notice that you do not cite any evidence or education to justify your claims.
1) There is substantial scientific evidence that human beings and their ecosystem have objective limits for life. I will give you cites dependent on your retraction.
2) Only nuclear power produces ultra-hazardous nuclear waste for which there is no known treatment process. Because of that, we still do not have life cycle costs for any nuclear plant. On a cost basis, a nuclear plant cannot compete with solar.
3) Most developed countries have much better inclusive national health care systems. Some are single payer, many are not. There is substantial research into comparing national health systems of which you seem unaware.
4) I do not know the source of Elon Musk's wealth, but I do know that he is almost without equal in raising capital from Wall Street. Trump inherited his capital and is and was an incompetent businessman.
5) This is so vague that it is hard to respond to. Let us reframe the question. The Democratic Administration and Party have policy positions and legislative priorities. Reasonable people - see, e.g. the article we are commenting on - while you cannot name a Republican policy position because they do not have one. No thoughtful person will deny that "dark money" has some influence on politics and that this is not good for large scale democratic politics.
6) The last point makes no sense. I have never seen this argument made. As Matt tirelessly argues, the US has a substantial housing shortage. One of the important issues in addressing the housing problem is NIMBYism, as Matt often points out. This is expressed in opposition to "multi-family homes" i.e. apartments.
this is an excellent imitation of what one of these ppl would say
in particular i think you do an excellent job asserting that i'm wrong by saying something unrelated to what i said, but implying through omission that it constitutes a dunk
great work
What is missing from some much of the "Climate Change is existential!" discourse is that many years prior, there was a much less publicized, but still very public, discourse between Climate Writers and Climate Activist in which they were trying to literally find ways to make Climate Change news more compelling...and the decision they landed on was to sell Climate Change news as existential and make "everything" about Climate Change...no matter how tertiary or secondary, or incremental the impact might be. Basically, they made a conscious decision to oversell the doom and gloom.
Straight out of that Discourse, we got "The Uninhabitable Earth" from David Wallace Wells...which is so ironic now because David Wallace Wells has not pivoted again to rebrand himself as a "Climate Optimist" guy who now just does stories on how we are closer to a solution now that we have ever been, etc.
I'm fairly agnostic about long-term climate impact. Seems difficult to project, to me. The good news is that fossil fuels are fading because we just have better tech now.
I agree with your claim, 'make "everything" about Climate Change'. I've been watching a nature doc on Disney+ (hostile planet). It focuses on animals that endure extreme conditions. Quite good. The narrator incessantly attributes any recent, unpleasant weather to climate change, whether it be more rain, less rain, etc. it's all climate change. Also, the cute animals are universally negatively impacted by these changes, while the not cute animals are *thriving* due to climate change, which is causing even more problems for the cute animals.
For instance, there is a segment on climate change leading to increased jellyfish populations. Jellyfish aren't cute. There is no suggestion that there could possibly be any populations of cute animals that are benefitting from a changing climate.
C’mon, it’s extremely easy to find out that Musk grew up rich and extremely privileged. That’s not to say he’s a total marketing of the self as a rich guy scammer like Trump is, but Musk even admits that he couldn’t have founded his first company without family money.
I agree that other things are bad-faith shibboleths that the Left should jettison, but normie and right-wing worship of Musk, Gates, Bezos; et. al js corrosive to our country’s social fabric.
There is certainly a lot of fake info out there about Musk's family wealth, sure. He grew upper middle class in South Africa. He was not 'rich' and the mine story is literally fake. His first company, Zip2, was backed by angel investors
Agree on all of these except nuclear power, which seems legitimately complicated. Is there something I could read that explains how nuclear as it's currently deployed doesn't have a much higher catastrophic/black swan risk than other forms of energy production? I assume there's still meltdown risk (from a terrorist attack, etc.) that could, say, render a whole area unlivable for a some period?
Doesn't mean it's the "most dangerous", but seems like a viable case to make, vs. "misinformation."
It’s of course impossible to quantify black swan risk, but we know, for example, that coal ash is considerably more radioactive than nuclear fuel waste.
From a nuclear advocacy group but I think it is basically correct: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/safety-of-nuclear-power-reactors.aspx
But in general I would say that the major catastrophic risk for nuclear power plants is an uncontrolled release of radiation. And it's not even clear that this extremely unlikely event would actually be substantially worse than what we just accept from burning fossil fuels (even putting aside global warming, just the health effects of the pollution are quite bad). So with respect to nuclear vs fossil fuels, I think the case for nuclear as the safer option is quite strong.
Now of course when it comes to nuclear vs wind/solar/hydro/etc it is more complicated but at least at the current margin it is not really an option to replace all fossil fuel based power generation with renewables so it is sort of an academic point.
I agree with you that most of this is misinformation, but your young lefty friends are correct that American politics is primarily determined by the agenda-setting power of billionaires -- not just buying votes, but think tanks, media ownership, etc.
Climate change will result in human extinction (eventually, unless something else gets us first).
The U.S health insurance system is truly an outlier among developed countries though, no?
And climate change resulting in human extinction seems unlikely but I suppose if we literally burn all the coal and oil in the ground it could probably happen
both of your statements are true and yet they are distinct from the statements commonly believed by young progressives by a wide margin
in particular about climate change, your example reflects what people once thought of as the "worst case" scenario, which is to say not only that we wouldn't tame our carbon emissions but that the growth in our emissions would continue to accelerate according to historic trends (which actually might have caused the apocalypse). but we know now that that definitely isn't happening. i think part of the reason people don't want to admit that is that the natural gas industry did a lot of the heavy lifting but also because people like to think in terms of binaries -- e.g., we Completed Penance and now the apocalypse has been averted, vs climate change being a spectrum of outcomes and we definitely won't get the best case scenario but we also definitely won't get the worst case scenario (barring any dramatic changes in the near future)
I think with the climate change thing, its similar to a lot of other stuff. Mainstream progressive thought has become "to fix this [thing] we need to fix every injustice" and that isn't true and is especially not true with climate change which needs technological solutions at this point.
However, for the healthcare thing, America is a lot richer than most developed countries. I'm curious to see if the plan put forth by Bernie is actually more generous than you would expect if you just ran a model predicting healthcare system generosity as a function of gdp per capita amongst the developed world.
I'm going to just leave this link here and you can make up your own mind: https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/i-talked-to-elon-musk-about-journalism
"Partly true"
Your statement says it is not true that "crime is explained by poverty"
The link you provide says:
"Although it’s clear that poverty predicts homicide quite independently of black, it’s also clear that black predicts independently of the poverty."
Therefore, crime _IS_ (at least partially) explained by poverty (within racial group)
The article mostly seems to say that the racial crime gap cannot be _solely_ explained by poverty (it is larger than the poverty gap)
There's still a big difference there - if you think poverty has _no_ bearing on crime then that changes the policy prescriptions from poverty having _some_ bearing on crime.
(But it's also different from "all racial crime differences are explained by poverty)
That's my take on skimming through that - am I wrong?
I think most conservatives think of crime as being an effect of race, judging by conversations I've had with them (they're smart enough to keep that as subtext, but they clearly believe it). But even that blog post notes that segregation status is important, as is native vs immigrant status (the relevant variable there being longstanding exposure to American racism). As a lefty, I interpret that data essentially as "racism has led to really bad societal effects, which are concentrated among its victims".
Crime is mostly committed by young men. Young men seek status (think lion prides). Young men who have the resources and ability to seek status by lawful means largely do. Those who don’t are much more likely to commit crimes to gain status. Glen Loury argues that human development is key. That makes sense to me. For those who are capable of performing well in the 2022 economy then our society should be working to provide them opportunity. For those who don’t have the natural abilities that are coveted in 2022, social scientists and policy makers need to imagine new ways to give young people value, meaning, and status in our society. This seems to be the problem that needs solving for our future. This is true for all people.
Your post is riven with sexism and ageism against young men. Have you accounted for 40 million other variables that might explain why young men statistically commit a disproportionate volume of crime, or are you going to blithely assume it is just ‘in their nature’?
I don’t think you’re using riven correctly. I admit I had to look it up.
I acknowledge there may be many factors. 40 million seems like a lot, though. With that said, I think their nature accounts for a good portion of it. I will not avoid truth just to also avoid being tagged with an “ism”.
I know my proclivity to run afoul of the law diminished with age. This is consistent with the enormous amount of data on this issue.
Yes, it was. Young men are obviously very violent, which stems largely from biological urges.
No, I really do think young men commit much more crime. And I really do think, in part, it is an expression of their gender & age.
I think these are 2014 stats,
Males constituted 98.9% of those arrested for forcible rape[55]
Males constituted 87.9% of those arrested for robbery[55]
Males constituted 85.0% of those arrested for burglary[55]
Males constituted 83.0% of those arrested for arson.[55]
Males constituted 81.7% of those arrested for vandalism.[55]
Males constituted 81.5% of those arrested for motor-vehicle theft.[55]
Males constituted 79.7% of those arrested for offenses against family and children.[55]
Males constituted 77.8% of those arrested for aggravated assault[55]
Surely it's possible to condition on income or occupation, though, isn't it? E.g., do an Asian-American janitor's kids end up earning higher incomes than a white janitor's kids?
(I honestly don't know whether people have looked at this, but this question always comes to mind when selective immigration is brought up.)
It's harder than it seems - a lot of the poorer Asian immigrants (Vietnamese, Hmong, etc) came as refugees and refugees often have to take jobs like janitor even though back in their home country they may have had better jobs - you see this also with some of the Syrian refugees in Europe in the last decade. They wouldn't have left if not for the war, and aren't the same as economic migrants or regular working-class Americans of any race.
Landlords is not an inclusive term, you should consider using "property owners" instead.
Sapir-Whorf as a fetish.
One similar trend I really supported early in the Trump years that I now think is actively dystopian is ‘fact checking.’
Trump lies so much that it made sense to me to clearly lay out the lack of basis for his claims. But the industry has just become labeling conservative claims either False (if they are wrong) or Mostly False (if they are right because they should have contextualized them more evenly). On the other hand progressive claims are either True (if they are right) or Mostly True (if they are wrong but the vibes are good. It’s embarrassing to read as someone with basic reading comprehension and just feeds the Ben Shapiro machine. Orgs should get rid of that function if they aren’t willing to reconceptualize it.
True: “I agree with this and any factual inaccuracies were worded deniably”
Mostly true: “I agree with this but they should change the sentence in paragraph five to be less explicitly and obviously false.”
Mostly false: “I disagree with this but cannot find any explicit inaccuracies.”
False: “I disagree with this and look at the numbers that were off by 1.4% here and 0.8% here.” through “Oh my God, this whole speech was actually lies”
Makes the categories more intelligible but also completely useless when you understand what they mean.
Truthiness, as Stephen Colbert put it when he was still doing comedy.
Or “misleading” —true but the person who’s saying it is one of the bad guys/true but it justifies people doing stuff the left thinks people shouldn’t do.
I agree with everything you've said, though another version of this that also happens is a kind of "both sides-ism" where the fact checking goes something like this:
FALSE: Trump claimed all immigrants are terrorists, without evidence.
ALSO FALSE: Hillary Clinton claims her health care proposal will result in a 5% decrease in spending for the average American, however this depends on a number of factors and, according to some estimates, is on the optimistic side of the range of possible outcomes.
fact-checking is handy as a way to help people rate sources to learn who is giving them factual information. With Trump that broke down quickly because he was obviously lying so much. The rational thing individually was to stop listening to him - but collectively that was a problem because a bunch of people WERE listening to him despite the lies (or BECAUSE of the lies maybe)
"Fact Checking" culture within the Media is basically the 2000 - 2010 era equivalent of "feeding the trolls" on a message board or forum...
The folks doing all the feeding *think* they are doing proverbial God's work and protecting everyone...in reality...all they are doing is incrementally getting on everyone's nerves and dragging on a conversation that most everyone else who is reachable already agrees needs to die...
I'm all in favor of fact-checking if that's what it actually is. Unfortunately, it's become politicized itself to the point that many fact-checkers are basically dismissing anything as misinformation if it isn't fashionable for their political affinity group to believe.
hmm, I haven't been finding this - but maybe I'm only checking more blatant falsehoods? What's an example that bothered you?
More people in charge of the Media need to read and reckon with Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
And there needs to be more distinguishing between Bullshitting and Lying (or whatever word the Media, mostly afraid of labling things as "Lie" wants to call it)...there is almost NO attempt to convey that a significant portion of Republicans are engaging in Bullshittery as a tactic.
I'd like to see a good fact check of this subthread.
Could it be said that this whole “misinformation” thing is actually misinformation?
I continually see articles that make it seem as if misinformation creation and distribution is a sophisticated and large industry, when after digging in it seems like 3 babies in a trench coat who shit post on Facebook.
There are still people who are completely bought in to the idea that the 2016 presidential election was the result of Russian misinformation on social media. That despite the fact that the two major political candidates outspent the Russians by two orders of magnitude.
I count this as corporate misinformation, because Facebook pretty obviously wanted people to hear how easy it might be to control elections by paying Facebook for ads...
only 2?
That seems to be about right for social media ads buys. And it’s not like the Russians were buying a lot of airtime on TV, which is still the expensive way to reach voters.
got it - I wasn't thinking only social media
The Democratic coalition is “smarter” than the current GOP one, but that certainly doesn’t seem to produce any more realistic discourse a lot of the time.
The topic currently sitting at the top of the thread is religion and patriotism; Democratic dislike of both, especially the latter, seems to have become so poisonous that a decent chunk of the coalition, disproportionately focused on the well-educated, genuinely believes that the US is both a horrible place to live for anyone up to the 95th percentile, and that we’re the most brutal empire to ever exist.
I’m not sure how to characterize those beliefs except “misinformation.”
And they have the additional benefit of being wildly unpopular, in addition to being false.
And that’s without getting into to the various mostly-wrong-but-with-a-glimmer-of-truth beliefs surrounding racism, racial history, and gender identity, all of which we’re supposed to hold as well-educated folk.
Maybe less stone-throwing, ya?
"The topic currently sitting at the top of the thread is religion and patriotism; Democratic dislike of both"
I pay pretty close attention to this stuff, and I don't see many Democrats/progressives saying negative things about religion as such at all -- substantially less than around 2004.
You do see criticism of particular religious institutions or beliefs, not religion as such, but even that is less common. It's not common to read people saying "the Texas abortion law is about pushing a few people's religious values on everyone else" -- progressives just don't seem to think about religion much at all.
True. I think much of the vitriol that was reserved for religion two decades ago has now been transferred to patriotism instead.
Patriotism is more relevant to most voters and will remain so for much longer, so that is probably a major reason why the left has found itself isolated from its working-class roots.
I dunno...
Twenty years ago, progressives were quite cynical about patriotism, for the understandable reason that we kept getting "why do you hate America"-d, and seeing it invoked to justify the war in Iraq.
Patriotism isn't about judging individual people based on where they were born, it's not the same as racism. You're thinking of something more like xenophobia.
And if you don't think that for a country of immigrants and people as diverse as Americans it's important to work extra hard on forging and sustaining a shared, common identity and sense of community I don't think you've thought very deeply about how democratic polities function and survive - or don't.
A shared identity contributes to higher societal trust and support of law for the greater good, like willingness to pay taxes. Paying mandatory taxes into the treasury of a political entity for a community you are a part of and have a stake in is not the same as being forced to pay taxes that are going to be sent off somewhere else and used for the benefit of people and a community you have no connection to. It's not very complicated, but the democratic legitimacy and sustainability of the whole enterprise, in the real world, depends on and is underpinned by the existence a shared sense of community, ie, a shared identity.
You're right there is an element of treating some people differently than others that's inherent in having laws that differ from one jurisdiction to the next. But if you're going to say it's akin to racism to, for example, restrict government benefits or rights offered by a given municipality, state or nation to the people who live in, pay taxes to and abide by the laws of that jurisdiction, you're really off in lala land.
“Patriotism means “America First,” or putting Americans before non-Americans. This seems to me like judging people’s value based on where they are born”
That’s fair. I mean, I hope, for example, Ukraine is able to stave off Russia’s war, but that doesn’t mean am willing to go fight on their side. But I would be if the US was attacked.
It depends on whether you want to view your country as something closer to an HOA or something closer to a family.
I prefer the latter because I think it's good for us to have emotional connections to our country, and I certainly do, and much in the same way that if I had to pick between my uncle dying or a stranger dying, it's not a contest, if I have to pick between an American dying (even one I've never met) or a foreigner, I'm picking the American.
This just sounds weird to me. I think of patriotism like family. Most people are going to love their family more than others even if they would agree that other families are just fine. Same with countries. Its perfectly find to love your country and think its the "best" even if you acknowledge that other countries are perfectly fine places. The fact that I love my family and think its the best and you love your family and think they are the best are normal - not some form of racism.
A healthy sense of patriotism is the manifestation of imagined community which knits us together and allows us to pursue a common project of democratic governance rather than allowing power to accrue to those who already have power.
I am aware of your views on the matter of nation-states, and that you believe markets and liberal rights are an adequate substitute to patriotism, and I categorically reject that entire bunch of pablum.
You really do not need to beat the drum any further; nothing you could possibly say will convince me that your argument has any merit.
[COMPLETE NON SEQUITUR]
[TOTAL FAILURE TO RESPOND TO OPPOSING ARGUMENT]
["DO THE WORK!"]
[DECLARATION OF VICTORY]
Got it.
Genghis Khan is more responsible for the relative prosperity of Western Europe (and by extension America) than anything that happened in the age of imperialism.
I’m sure misinformation is a problem at at least some scale, but trusting the Misinformation Experts to determine the scale of that problem means surrendering my sense of true and false to people I would struggle to trust to tell me the time of day.
I see it like the censorship debate on the right. Is it a real problem in some sense? Yes, although I can still think one is a bigger problem than the other. Is it actively getting worse? Eh, I'd like to see more evidence, which is to say any evidence, from the Cassandras.
I'll use this piece as a chance to comment on my personal hobbyhorse, the increasingly widespread belief among Democrats that they only lose elections due to gerrymandering or other unfair Republican tactics. You could call it the Small Lie. How many Democrats know that Republicans won the House in 2010, 2014 and 2016 because they actually won a raw majority of total votes cast- about 51% in all three cases? How many Democrats know that according to political scientists the US actually has one of the fairer representative systems, as measured by the spread between votes cast & representatives seated? (Canada is over twice as bad!)
How many Democrats know that Republicans run the Wisconsin state legislature because they consistently win a raw majority of votes cast, year in and year out? I downloaded their 2020 electoral results and was pretty surprised to find that. I hear a lot of bleating about Wisconsin and how unfair it is there.
In general I think Dems not being honest with themselves about how popular Republicans are nationally is a low-key version of the Big Lie. Every electoral loss is due to gerrymandering, etc. (If you're concerned about Trump not conceding the election, try asking a Bernie supporter why he lost the primary twice. It wuz all a conspiracy, rigged, etc. etc.)
What was the last Presidential election that most Democrats truly think they lost? 1988?
2004? I think a lot of Dems have issues with 2000 and 2016, but I think it's a lot harder to argue that we didn't lose in 2004.
I'd bet a majority of Democrats would agree with 2004, although you still run into claims about Diebold machines in Ohio and things like that.
The problem is Dems forget they lose whenever the run someone that got the job because "it's their turn", with Biden being the only exception due to the breathtaking incompetence of Trump. There is a reason Clinton (outsider), Obama (not much time in Washington, outsider-ish) win and people for whom "it's their turn" (Romney, McCain, Dole, Hillary, Kerry, Gore) always lose.
Republicans learned that lesson now, hence, how they will always go with "movement" candidates going forward.