Mamdani was the only NYC mayoral candidate who understood how the primary electorate's concerns would change after six months of Trump.
He could have blown it. He stopped saying "defund the police" years ago, and when he introduced his new plan (cutting some NYPD expenses but not the number of cops, and adding "public safety" jobs), he was polling low enough that nobody seriously went after him.
But he also pioneered a line I'm now seeing with more moderate Democrats, that Trump's trying to turn police into deportation agents instead of letting them just solve crimes. Obviously, you need Trump in office for that to work. You need a thermostatic shift where voters stop being angry about their tax dollars funding a mini-Ellis Island at the Roosevelt Hotel, and start being angry that Trump is deporting people who aren't burdens on the city, with the "migrant crisis" long over.
Mamdani knew that shift could happen before June 24, and Cuomo ran an Adams-style 2021 campaign about crime and social cohesion. It's hard not to conclude that a more disciplined, less crooked incumbent than Adams could have run on the last two years of progress, and against Trump, and won the primary.
I think this is an underrated point in electoral politics writ large -- timing counts for a lot. Not in some vague macro sense about political eras, either -- the literal month an election (and its proximity to or distance from some other high-profile election) is held can make all the difference. All other things equal, a special election to the House in, say, February of this year looks a lot different than this primary, the difference being the amount of time Trump's policies and rhetoric have to take root.
All this to say -- Mamdani DID run a charismatic campaign, he DID face an unpopular establishment figure... and he also just got lucky, too!
It's one of those interesting things that we aren't seeing much of right now just because of how toxic the environment is for incumbents. I can't think of many places where a snap election would help a governing party, but I can think of several places (the UK and Hungary both come to mind) where an election held today would almost certainly have earth-shattering electoral consequences.
You want to talk about timing mattering, I think it's pretty likely Harris would've won, if the election had been held two weeks after the convention. The last couple months gave time for her too-risk-averse campaign, and a tidal wave of ads, to bring her back down in the key swing states.
I was a bit surprised by the answer about Zohran/Cuomo. Basically, it pivoted from "charisma/likeability is important" to "issue positions/previous outcomes are the primary determinants of electoral outcomes" (which is the usual theory of elections on Slow Boring).
The reasoning seems somewhat post hoc to me -- this is definitely not how I would've updated my beliefs after this election. Matt starts from "after it became a two person race, Cuomo lost, but any of the other candidates would've beaten Zohran."
But the big puzzle for Matt's theory of elections is: if issue positions are the primary determinants of outcomes, why didn't any of the other candidates emerge as front-runners in the first place? These candidates were more boring, but I'd guess that their issue positions were much closer to those of the NYC median voter. I'd bet that Zohran edged them out *despite* his issue positions, not because of them.
I think Matt somewhat underrates the value of charisma and likability in winning elections. He’s right that issue positions are very important. But if Obama was against Iraq and was not the greatest public speaker in a generation I don’t think he would’ve beaten Clinton in 2008.
It's interesting, because Mamdani exemplifies much of what Matt says he looks for in candidates. He said yes to a LOT of nontraditional media, speaking extemporaneously for long periods of time, taking bold heterodox views. (Obviously not a moderate, but it’s NYC.)
He talked to the Bulwark, Odd Lots, Derek Thompson, the Breakfast Club, some Pakistani news media in Urdu, gave a political sermon with excellent cadence in front of Al Sharpton and Spike Lee, walked 12 miles across Manhattan, did IG videos with a bunch of nyc social media micro-influencers, etc.
And through all the social media content, he flawlessly spoke the “native language” in every one. And he seemed to relish it, with genuine comfort around people who disagreed with him!
1) there seems to be a strong consensus among SB commenters that Mamdani, so far, is an excellent politician with mostly bad policy positions.
2)I think charisma (as well as deep city connections in the case of Cuomo) is part of the secret sauce of “relevance”, which is a bar that candidates must clear before anyone even hears about their policy ideas, with the exception of ideas that are unusual enough to garner outsized media coverage.
Where exactly a candidate falls on the specific issues relevant to i.e. policing is not something that becomes important to voters at all until this bar is cleared- but will absolutely be important once candidates are taking a central role in a high-salience election.
He does, but Matt seems mostly focused on candidates who will help win swing races at the federal level, and how they can increase Democrats odds of holding power again. For politicians in deep blue areas like NYC, Matt seems like he cares more about them actually passing policies that make the city have a better economic growth and housing so people don't point to those areas like they currently do with San Francisco and say "see, that's why you can't let Democrats run things."
Kamala moderated substantially from her 2020 run and even endorsed dumb populist shit like no taxes on tips. Matt is vastly underrating the non-policy components.
NYC is unique (I think) in having such a high percentage of renters, and such a high percentage of renters whose rent is controlled by the city government. And the affordability crisis is particularly acute here.
So promising people free stuff (no rent increases), though a horrendous idea for slightly abstruse reasons, gets a whole lot of votes. I think Mamdani's other positions pale in comparison.
I think this is a consequence of non-universal rent control. There are a lot of people who feel that their chances of renting a rent-controlled apartment are comparable to their chances of getting a mortgage to buy a condo apartment.
So talking about rent control codes as "not for me", which is why alternative language is needed: so people paying market-priced rents understand the policy as being to help them.
Rent control and rent stabilization are different things. There are lots of rent stabilized apartments. Mamdani's campaign was of course misleading but it is true that people have a decent shot at eventually getting a rent stabilized apartment if they try for long enough and if they're willing to prioritize rent stabilization above other things (like how nice the apartment or building is or location).
AIUI Rent stabilization is actually not *quite* the same thing as rent control in NYC. Rent stabilization is about limiting the amount of per-year increase to an amount determined by a board. Rent control is not subject to any nominal increase at all (but is way less common than rent stabilization). At a high level one could justifiably treat them as part of the same reference class but there is actually an underlying difference that isn't purely euphemistic.
Sure, but the actual distinction between "rent-controlled" and "rent-stabilized" apartments is real, as in, there are both types of apartment subject to meaningfully different regulatory schemes on how their rents are treated within in the same city. There is actually an underlying need to disambiguate the two schemes in NYC (because there are both rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments), which suggests to me that the distinction is not primarily euphemistic. NYC still has "rent-controlled" apartments, just a lot of fewer of them.
It's an interesting question - does everyone realize that Mamdani was only talking about rent-stabilized apartments and that many renters (50%?) are unaffected by rent-stabilization decisions (they're not directly affected, that is; they may be indirectly affected in a negative way, as you imply).
Rent control is always one of those things that sounds really popular until it's actually implemented, and then it creates extra conflict between the lucky ducks who got it, and the unlucky ducks who are now either paying through the nose, stuck with tons of roommates, or just have to flat out move out of town. I really wish this was something people would have learned their lesson on by now, but it's a zombie that never seems to die.
Free buses are less well known in this regard, but we'll see if they get a "be careful what you wish for" moment if/when service goes down due to less revenue.
Was there more buildable land in St. Paul than NYC before the 80% rise in housing starts? An additional note re if the Horribly Bad Bill passes aren’t we looking at interest rates increasing to 8%? This doesn’t seem to me to be a great environment for more housing starts unless there are local government fiddles like the “Middle Dollar” rent controlled Apartments in DC. ????
Rent control doesn't have to be for just some lucky ducks: you can impose it on all rents. Of course, that means that there ceases to be a market in rents, which means that you can't piggy-back on the market to set prices and you have to have a rent control board that sets all rents. Of course, you have a similar board already that sets property tax valuation, so you could just set the rent as a fixed percentage of the property tax valuation.
Aside, one proposal I've seen for places without rent control is to do the reverse: set the property tax valuation as a multiple of the rent, so any rent increase automatically increases the property tax. Obviously that doesn't work for owner occupiers, but it would give a much broader market base for valuations that relying solely on actual property transactions (especially as many property transfers are not market transactions - not just inheritances, but also discounted-price sales within families, buying out an ex in a divorce etc)
Sure, and we can slap controls on how much people have to pay for cell phones or Oreo cookies. At the end of the day, you’ll end up with fewer cell phones and Oreo cookies.
Interesting idea... in a sense a rental building's value should be based on the rent collected from it, unless the building could be more valuable were it redeveloped. It runs contrary to the theory of a land value tax.
I don’t know; I still think there’s a puzzle here for the “issue positions” view of the world. Let me lay out some salient questions.
If we grant that Mamdani was actually close to the most popular bundle of issue positions, then why didn’t we see a big fight on the left end of the candidate spectrum (instead of a fight with the most right-wing candidate)? No matter where the median voter is, if issue positions are primarily driving outcomes, we shouldn’t have seen these two emerge as the leading candidates.
Matt doesn’t even seem to think Mamdani’s issue positions were that popular. Why does he think one of the other candidates would’ve trounced Mamdani 1-on-1? How does this make sense given that we have RCV, so that anyone actually *could’ve* ranked all candidates above Mamdani?
I know Matt does not really buy Ezra Klein's interpretation of the election that it all has to do with short-form video, but I think it all has to do with short-form video. Traditional social media is not nearly as important as it used to be, and legacy media basically doesn't matter at all. Brad Lander wasn't a serious presence on short-form video, so he was never going to succeed as the insurgent candidate.
"... I think it all has to do with short-form video...."
This is fascinating to me, because I know nothing about it. "Short-form video" is a generic reference to Tik-Tok and similar platforms? Totally alien to me -- I never hear this mentioned by Walter Cronkite on the nightly CBS broadcast I watch.
But I do have some vague sense that it is increasingly important, and that it may well have played a role in Trump's 2024 victory, as well as in China's ongoing attack on democracy. It's an enemy I need to know more about.
I don't use it too much myself, but my wife does and I know that Zohran was an absolutely dominant presence on it. Not just in NYC but across the country (we live in Florida!!) He (maybe having to do with his background as the son of a filmmaker) had these really really funny clips, like ones where he just interviews random guys in the subway and asks them about politics, and so totally apolitical people would share them for pure entertainment value, not just for political reasons. And the algorithm for those platforms is much better at serving content that is relevant to a particular person, so for example an Urdu or Hindi-speaking person living in NYC would get Zohran's Hindi/Urdu language ads that had Bollywood references and things in them.
In general I think it would make sense for future Dem campaigns to take some of the enormous pile of money that goes toward buying ads on television (which fewer and fewer people actually watch) and hire a team dedicated purely to making short clips that are entertaining first, political second.
Young people like short videos. Young people (in NYC) tilt progressive. Young people like young charismatic candidates.
In a highly unusual, very hard to repeat situation, tons of young people came out to vote for Mamdani. Young people being young people, the odds are really great that they won't come out to vote in other elections.
In the meantime, Democrats should not abandon the means of communicating with people who are more likely to vote consistently. That most definitely includes television ads.
I think you are overreading what I said if you took away that we should "abandon" television ads. The amount of money that goes into television ads presently is extreme and there's just no way the marginal returns are that high. Half of Americans don't even have cable service at all anymore, and among those who do not all of them actually watch it very often (I technically have it because it's bundled with my internet, I use it a couple times a year for sports).
Also, while it's true that short-form video is most popular among young people, 30% of TikTok's users are over 35, and 15% are over 55! If your mental model of it is the same as the model of social media ca. 2010 it's completely off-base, many older people now use smartphones every day and engage with short-form video.
I listened Ezra Klein interview Chris Hayes, and Hayes' theory was that it wasn't the format per se, but that Mamdani really capitalized on the algorithm. He used video in such a way that his videos would show up in people's feeds who had never even heard of him before. In fact, that was how Hayes himself learned that Mamdani was running. Before that, Hayes had very little idea of who Mamdani was.
yeah he does, which is a bit of a silly name IMO. obviously the videos *are* vertical (unlike youtube/twitch/etc. from the previous generation of long-form video content) which is downstream of them being smartphone-first and that does matter but their verticality is not the most salient component of them, the most salient components are extreme microtargeting, short duration, and that they bring the 'infinite scroll' from Twitter/Reddit/etc. to video.
No doubt. It just made me laugh listening to him - that kind of élite media tic is so dumb and funny, like he just unearthed this new concept to the world. I like Ezra, but dude call it “short-form video” like everyone else!
"if issue positions are the primary determinants of outcomes, why didn't any of the other candidates emerge as front-runners in the first place?"
This question seems to flatten the analysis of election outcomes substantially and assumes a far more simplistic world of electoral politics than reality. Candidates aren't all starting from the same position. Cuomo didn't become the front runner because he showed up out of nowhere and seized the mantle, or because all the candidates started at zero on day one of the campaigns and he got off to a hot start due to his position taking and charismatic persuasion. He was the front runner because of his history and name recognition, including a family history that goes back literally decades in NYC. Once Cuomo sucked up the oxygen, it becomes difficult for someone else to break through, and that's despite the fact that Cuomo's positions and personality weren't very appealing given his recent scandals/age/etc..
There's also the fact that Cuomo is petty and likes to take revenge. Too many moderates seemed afraid of him, but nobody was willing to be the first to lead an anti-Cuomo campaign to endorse a different moderate.
I feel like in deep blue areas like NYC, those who are the most concerned with candidates' policies also happen to be the most leftwing.
There isn't a moderate/neoliberal technocrat option because the median voter isn't attracted to technocracy and the ideological voter is much further left.
(Maybe this is half-baked or too post hoc, but I feel like there's some truth there)
'There isn't a moderate/neoliberal technocrat option because the median voter isn't attracted to technocracy and the ideological voter is much further left.'
The problem with this theory is the result's of the previous Dem primary race, in which a non-progressive edged out a technocrat and the more progressive candidate finished third.
You mean the NYC that voted for Bloomberg for three terms, that very nearly chose Garcia last time, and that has probably the highest concentration of people knowledgeable about finance and economics in the world?
Issue positions matter in a big picture vibes kind of way not in a solutions white paper kind of way. The median voter is looking for someone to acknowledge and validate first and foremost. This the trick that all good politicians like Clinton, Trump and Mamdani are able to pull off.
Incumbent politicians or those closely tied to the existing structure are unable to acknowledge and validate because doing so means admitting the problem happened on their watch. So they naturally appear "out of touch".
Absolutely agree. Matt’s boiling it down to policy when I don’t think it was policy that made a difference, but absolutely charisma and social change. I highly doubt the landfall for Obama was because of his policy on Iraq. He wanted universal healthcare! And he was much more charismatic and likable than Hillary!
Hilary was to the left of Obama on health care, she supported an individual mandate and he didn't. This was literally the only difference between them on health care policy.
As someone who doesn't even live in the state, why are people so excited about Zohran in the first place? "Leftist wins Dem primary" is slightly unexpected, but not that often, it recently happened in Chicago and Oakland, and I don't see everyone super excited about Brandon Johnson and Barbara Lee. Is it because he's young and handsome and active on social media?
I think what he's saying is that if Cuomo had not run, and the same coalition of insiders that rallied around Cuomo had instead rallied around somebody like Brad Lander or Tish James, that candidate probably could have won.
I didn't follow the race closely enough to have a strong opinion on whether this is true, but it at least doesn't seem crazy. Honestly even _with_ Cuomo in the race, if the insiders had instead elevated Lander and told Cuomo to pound sand, Lander might've won.
The reason Lander didn't emerge as the "moderate lane" frontrunner is that a bunch of media and political figures, and people with money, anointed Cuomo. As for why they did that, a lot of it seems to have been the same kind of spinelessness that's led to Repubs caving to Trump on everything. They all know he sucks, but none of them is willing to be the first to say so.
Also it’s not hard to imagine a universe of technological abundance existing alongside large groups of impoverished people who don’t get to share in it. In fact that’s what the real world is like. If we can have a world where a futuristic AI-powered Silicon Valley coexists with subsistence farmers in Africa living in mud huts, why is it hard to imagine a universe of a shimmering Coruscant existing alongside impoverished Tatooine?
Perhaps the Empire overinvests in military products and the security services and underinvests in civilian products. It's an exaggerated USSR. So the civilian economy uses excess labor, repairs its old tech instead of replacing it, and bumbles along. The economy is depressed and suffers from inflation and new products don't get made.
You basically need a type of post-scarcity space communism to get something like that built. If Star Wars came out a few decades later, people would have been asking how all of the steel got sourced, where the shipyard was and how that didn't get attacked by angry tax payers, etc. (Not that this would necessarily lead to better storytelling.) There was an episode of Star Trek where the crew encountered a dead Dyson's Sphere to kick off the episode's plot and it took decades for people to go, "wait, who built the Dyson's Sphere?"
<guy who brings up Andor in every Star Wars conversation>: “You need to watch Andor".
Literally though "how do we get the materials to build the Death Star" is the primary plot driver in season 2, and (part of) who's assembling it is the big reveal at the end of season 1.
What gets me about this in Star Wars is that so many of the poor people don't seem to be living on their ancestral homeworld. They somehow got the money to travel at faster-than-light speeds to either live in a new slum or become a subsistence farmer on a desert planet.
<guy who brings up Andor in every Star Wars conversation>: “this is why Andor is so good”
It really is though. It’s a universe where social elites are throwing lavish dinner parties while people live in cramped apartments 1,000 floors below, or are just holding on working menial labor jobs in far-flung regions.
The inequality in SW illustrates two things. A Republic that wasn’t serving the people and was bogged down in procedural votes; leaving an opening for a Sith Empire.
Secondly an Empire that has the power to improve the people’s lot but instead at every opportunity uses human labor when AI and technology could get the job done.
Yes, exactly. Many currently existing states on our Earth have either bad political institutions that kill incentives to save and invest, and so are perpetually capital poor, or they just have high inequality. I think you see some evidence of both of those being potential problems in various parts of the Star Wars universe.
Even droids with near AGI aren’t necessarily a cure-all. If they’re expensive to make, annoying to organize, and they depreciate quickly, they could end up looking like just another kind of capital which can be both scarce and poorly distributed.
It's worth remembering that Star Wars is essentially a Manichean universe, where warring religious factions with supernatural powers have been causing periodic disasters for tens of thousands of years. The universe is full of examples of technologies that ancient civilizations had, which no one remembers how to build and use, and which remain lost for ridiculous lengths of time. Often, it seems like the very idea of particular kinds of tech progress get philosophically tainted and culturally suppressed.
For those asking about sourcing steel for the Death Star: First, by weight, it's about 600k times the current annual steel production of Earth, and the Republic had on the order of a million planets. It would be hard but far from impossible to do with normal procurement processes. But in a larger sense: Consider that we know from KOTOR 2 that the Rakata built the Star Forge, and had access to starlifting and element transmutation, five thousand years before the founding of the Old Republic, *and* left it behind and intact enough to restart and use 25k yrs later. But, it was built as a Dark Side tool and no one ever developed a non-intrinsically-evil version of it. The Sith also had Dark Side rituals that extend the lifespan, but no one ever scaled up that, or the Jedi healing techniques beyond a few thousand Jedi knights, and no one ever developed effective force-neutral life-extending medical tech. The one clear instance we have of a Jedi knight trying to learn about non-Jedi, non-Sith philosophies and techniques regarding the Force is Jacen Solo, and it corrupts him into becoming a Sith and taking over the New Republic.
What I both hate and love about this quote is that it is timeless.
It is always true. I love that.
It also always implies that the past was different, and more evenly distributed. I hate that.
Pretty much the entirety of human history there were haves and have-nots. The differentiating factors were different in both pre- and post-agricultural societies, but the divisions were still there.
I think the big issue is that Tattooine seems to have a bunch of the modern technology that would be better to use than human labor for lots of things!
As soon as AGI unlocks unlimited abundance here on earth, our AI overlords will immediately conscript all of humanity and consume all of the excess trillions building a dyson sphere during the next century.
Israel actually challenges a lot of progressive assumptions. A good example is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book talks about how visiting there made him reconsider his support for reparations when he had previously held up the German reparations to Israel as a positive example. Israel is the ultimate woke fantasy in sone ways—a historically oppressed group turns the tables and gets its land back, and manages to get everyone who opposes this branded as racist and cancelled. The fact that this resulted in another group becoming even more oppressed causes even hardcore progressives to question this fantasy and understand that the solution to white ethnonationalism is not non-white ethnonationalism but instead non-racial democracy. Zohran Mamdani’s dad actually wrote a good book about this, “Neither Settler Nor Native.”
And federal politics is controlled by the Senate, gerrymandering, and a Supreme Court chosen by partisan procedural hardball, all of which take it further from real voter preference than city politics.
Yeah, visiting Israel was transformative for me in realizing just how weird the American concept of race is. In the US, we're obsessed with skin color, but we can at least say that we're all American and we can bond over our shared love of hamburgers and baseball.
Meanwhile, in Israel, people's skin color isn't that different, but it's extremely difficult to form those bonds of empathy and camaraderie with people who speak a different language, to say nothing of religious differences and historical grievances. And so the main thing that can bring people together is their belief in everyone's shared humanity, which unfortunately humans find pretty easy to forget and ignore.
Anyway, if you try to view the world through a US lens, a lot of it won't make any sense.
If you showed the typical American photos of 50 Israeli Jews and 50 Palestinian Arabs broadly representative of their societies they'd have a hard time accurately sorting them by ethnicity.
Narcissism of small differences (see the Sneetches). Its prevalent in many of the ethno-religious hot spots (Northern Ireland, former Yugoslavia, Russia/Ukraine, Rwanda, India/Pakistan etc.) Even the Swedes and the Norwegians have beef from back in the day.
I'd argue that the Middle East makes a great case for dividing populations along ethnic/sectarian lines. A multi-ethnic democracy in the Middle East isn't utopia -- it's Lebanon or Iraq. (Even Turkey has had significant tensions with its Kurdish minority.)
You could look to Europe as well. It was extremely unstable until it had undergone enough gruesome wars to sufficiently homogenize all of its countries.
Israel's problems have very little to do with the ethnic nature of its democracy. Israeli Arabs, by and large, are doing much better than their brethren elsewhere in the region. The issues stem entirely from a nearly century-long *war* where neither side wants to concede. Putting all of these people together in a "democracy" would lead to civil war. (They'd be in the same army fighting Iran? Really?)
On the other hand, if both sides agreed to borders for two ethnically homogenous states, there wouldn't be any basis for further conflict. (This, of course, is difficult to imagine given that the Palestinians' demand is "no Jewish state" rather than "we want a state," but bear with me for the sake of argument.)
I don’t think so. The Ottoman Empire ruled over a prosperous (for its time) and cosmopolitan empire for hundreds of years, but when it started copying Western nationalism towards its end, the result was the genocide of the Armenians and other groups (as well as genocide of Turks from the Balkans) and the mess the Middle East is in today.
A lot of these ethnic lines are artificial and strong only because they have reinforced by historical grievances that were created precisely by ethnonationalism in the first place and can only be erased with time and the abandonment of ethnonationalism.
There's a very good book on this: Holy Lands Reviving Pluralism in the Middle East by Nicholas Pelham. I would caution though, that this embrace of pluralism and cosmopolitanism is not compatible with Palestinian nationalism as currently expressed. Current Palestinian nationalism is hostile to ethnic and religious minorities and is eliminationist in its rhetoric.
I'll grant you that if nationalism had never existed, it would be easier to have multi-ethnic empires or even democracies.
But I don't think you can put the toothpaste back in the tube. Given the fact that people have now formed attachments on the basis of nationality, I'm skeptical that forcing people into multi-ethnic democracies will mitigate (rather than exacerbate) nationalistic sentiment.
Nationalism always existed, there were plenty of Serbian, Druze and Bulgarian revolts in the period 1500-1750 long before modern nationalist concepts were developed.
The Ottoman Empire wasn't prosperous after about 1780s,it was about as viable as the Ancien Regime in France. It was saved by the British in 1799, 1840 and 1854 and ironically by the Russians in 1833.
Inevitably this line of thinking always ends with whitewashing the Ottoman Empire and other Islamic empires. I recommend reading Jews and Arabs by Memmi.
So the multinational, multi-ethnic, multi linguistic empire is not the aberration. It was a very common form of political organization. The Ottoman, Byzantine, Roman, various Persian Empires, Muslim Empires, etc… would meet that definition. But they weren’t democracies. The population didn’t have much of an expectation of a say in government, and the interaction of state and subject was limited. It was often not pleasant. It’s also inaccurate to say that the Ottomans fell because they embraced nationalism. The Ottoman Empire was falling behind its European peers for nearly 2 centuries by the time of the First World War. Nationalism didn’t help, in that a lot of its subject peoples wanted out, but it failed to adapt as Europe industrialized and changed. The Young Turks and the Armenian genocide are better understood as a last gasp and radicalization brought on by war.
Important and true argument that often gets overlooked. Multiethnic states tend to be much poorer and more unstable. Yes there are some weird counter examples such as Switzerland but in the main. If Middle Eastern states could become more ethnically and religiously homogenous without violence it would be a good thing.
There is no historical basis for assuming that ME states can become more ethnically and religiously homogeneous without violence. Turkey has ethnically cleansed or brutally repressed its ethnic and religious minorities. Same thing with Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria. The most diverse country in the region is Iran, ironically.
I do try to avoid posting about Israel too much but the above is pretty outrageous.
"Everyone who opposes [Israel] branded as racist and cancelled." - not true.
"[Israel] resulted in another group becoming even more oppressed" - Arabs have agency. Partition plans have been drawn up by global powers for generations. The most notable, in 1948, instead saw Arabs declare a "war of extermination". In the 90s and 00s, peace negotiations were repeatedly set back by suicide bombing campaigns. Today Hamas is putting out press releases about the need for Palestine to be cleaned of Zionist filth.
"The solution to white ethnonationalism is not non-white ethnonationalism" - there is *a lot* more than ethnicity going on in this conflict. Israel is a democracy with the living standards of a rich Western nation, ~$50k/year. The Arab societies around it are generally authoritarian and have income levels that are ~75-80% lower. It's hard to know how Palestinian society would function if it wasn't occupied, but they voted twice to call themselves South Syria and to annex themselves into Jordan, so it seems reasonable to assume it'd be similar. We do know Hamas governs by execution and torture of critics, and that the Palestinian Authority has had exactly one leadership transition since 1969 (on the death of the prior leader).
Then there's the matter of language, alphabet and religion. I'm aware of a couple of bilingual countries in the world but not countries that run two (very different) alphabets and religious calendars.
Sorry, “everyone” was hyperbole, but it’s nonetheless true that the majority of cancellation in the US in recent years happens to critics of Israel: https://rajivsethi.substack.com/p/under-fire. Coates, who was a pro-Israel progressive before he visited Israel, got called an extremist and anti-Semite on national TV for writing a book about his personal experiences in the West Bank and how that led him to reject ethnocracy. Rumeysa Okturk was detained for weeks and may be deported for writing a calm anodyne op-ed supporting a boycott of Israel when no one would’ve cared if she wrote the same op-ed supporting the boycott of any other country.
The partition plans caused inevitable fighting over land, and indeed Israel did expand beyond the 1947 UN partition borders and conquered 60% of the territory that had been assigned to the Arab state, ethnically cleansing most of the population there, decades before Hamas. It would’ve been better for the British to maintain order until a non-racial democracy could be established in its place instead of doing a haphazard withdrawal that set the stage for ethnic conflict (something of a theme of the decolonization process, as Mamdani’s book talks about).
What language would this country have spoken. What alphabet. Would food regulation be kosher or halal?
There were multiple similar situations in this timeframe. In no other case that I'm aware of did a multi-ethnic society result (unless you count being occupied by the Red Army). The Raj was partitioned. Germans were moved from all over Europe to (a newly shrunk) Germany. Greeks were moved from Anatolia while Turks were moved from the Balkans. Italians from Yugoslavia.
Britain had up to 100,000 troops (it varied over time) trying to keep the peace in Palestine, and it wasn't working. And that was *with* a promise of partition as an effort at deconfliction.
This is a Britain that was so poor it was rationing food, clothes and gasoline. It's quite something to suggest the problem was the Brits didn't spend enough trying to keep the peace.
> got called an extremist and anti-Semite on national TV for writing a book about his personal experiences in the West Bank and how that led him to reject ethnocracy.
Holy moly this is tendentious. He got called an anti-semite for what the book said, not the simple fact that he wrote it. Come on.
Matt should really do more to tie his answer about where Rs should moderate to his answer about waste in Social Security, because this is precisely where the bipartisan federal governance catastrophe lies. The reason healthcare for poor people is getting thrown to the wolves is because both parties refuse to constrain transfers to wealthy retirees.
That's not why though. You're implying they had to make some kind of judgement call between competing priorities. But it's the opposite, they ballooned the deficit at the same time. They're cutting Medicaid because they want to.
The Rs are in fact bad and not serious about the budget. We have a "cut taxes" party and a "more spending" party. It's an impending disaster. We need TWO "fund the government" parties. Even better we need a fund the government amendment because representative democracy ain't gonna fix this shit.
"...The reason healthcare for poor people is getting thrown to the wolves is because both parties refuse to constrain transfers to wealthy retirees...."
Really? I would have thought there were many better explanations for why Medicaid is targeted in the current bill: Republican dislike of federal support for healthcare; desire to cut taxes; dislike of the poor; etc..
My guess is that even if Social Security were run differently, this bill would still target Medicaid.
They spent a long time trying to reform social security first. It would be better for all of us if they had succeeded. The newly dominant populist, zero sum warfare dynamic is directly tied up in the ever shrinking share of the federal budget available for discretionary spending. Cutting the share of the budget dedicated to SS/Medicare/Debt Service is the only way to maintain support for anti-poverty funding.
It's always been obvious that the strategy on SS was to "reform it" into a means-tested program for the poor, and then politically exterminate it (the same way they just did for big chunks of Medicaid) by telling their voters that, since they aren't poor, cuts to the program won't affect voters' lives.
No, it is not the _only_ way. One could raise the revenues going to social insurance. We need to have a conversation about how large a _fully funded_ social insurance system we should have
"It would be better for all of us if they had succeeded."
Obviously false, if you want to say things like "all of us". I think you mean literally "some of us". I'm also skeptical that you could do this in a way that is actually fair (note: I do not mean equitable, I mean fair).
So what's a "wealthy" retiree? Is it measured by how much one earned over their lifetime? Or how many assets one has at retirement?
So we're going to punish people that lived frugally, saved a lot in stocks and bonds in order to retire wealthy?
Are we going to punish people that had high earnings but didn't save enough? Or are we going to bail out people that had high earnings, but didn't save enough? it's moral hazard and unfairness all around.
Social security is already progressive in the sense that higher earners get back a much smaller fraction of what they pay in (look up social security bend points—up to a certain amount of lifelong earnings you get 90% of your average contributions, then 30% after that point, then 10%).
It also has an upcoming problem funding itself alone—there’s no huge pool of money there to pull from.
If you stopped making social security means”universal” and kept social security’s tax alone, that’s an additional 6% (or 12 if you figure in employer contributions too) tax on the people making under whatever the current cap is. 6% is a pretty big chunk of most people’s effective tax rate.
We probably do give too much money to wealthy retirees, but for decades and for some time to come, Social Security was/is/will be independently and fully funded by Social Security taxes, and that has zero impact on healthcare for poor people getting thrown to the wolves.
The reason for that is because of the existence of the Republican party, full stop.
If wealthy retirees get "too much" from SS then maybe marginal tax rates are just too low.
SS is not in my view just about reducing elder poverty; it's that
a) a national system can provide annuities at lower cost than individuals could purchase them and
b) we believe that people are "myopic" about saving "enough" (as much as they wish they had in retrospect) for post labor force participation life.
If we had a simple superannuation scheme, we woud need in addition a quasi-forced saving program even on top of making the "income tax" into a progressive consumption tax.
>SS is not in my view just about reducing elder poverty
Are you saying that in your view it shouldn't be just about reducing elder poverty? Because descriptively, that seems like it's only function.
The vast majority of SSA spending has never been an investment in Treasuries, it's been in direct transfers from the young to the old. I think during peak investment years when the baby boomers were all still working, only ~5% of payroll tax receipts went into the trust fund. And basically nothing does now.
Social security was specifically created to reduce elder poverty, and get old people out of the workforce, freeing up jobs for younger people during the depression. Elder poverty was a major issue before social security…since the beginning of time. The idea of retirement as a stage in life, when healthy people would be able to choose to stop working, not forced by health reasons or infirmity, for normal people is very much a 20th century development.
What is maddening about the current system, however, is that the cohort receiving benefits is the wealthiest generation in human history. If one were designing a universal system of social security for a modern country, I don’t think anyone would structure it like the existing social security system.
The “trust fund” really isn’t a trust fund. Money comes in, benefits get paid out. Anything left over purchased special purpose treasuries that were created and only issued for social security funds. There is no liquid market for them and they don’t trade. It wasn’t an issue for the first 50 years or so of the program, because the money coming in covered benefits going out. Government accounting is very different
I’m saying that reducing elder poverty should not be the only reason for transferring consumption to people after their labor market years. I’m in favor of making the transfers to some extent a substitute for saving and investment that most people probably woud not do, that is higher for those who earned higher incomes. The extremes are a flat rate and a state run pension scheme with individual account that pay according to amounts earned + voluntarily deposited amounts.
A totally different issue is what kind of taxes should be levied to fund those transfers. I favor a consumption VAT. One might want to set the level to accumulate surpluses in decades of high income/benefit ratio and vice versa, but I think it is simpler just to adjust rates periodically
More generally, Democrats should offer constructive counter proposals to make entitlements and poverty assistance more efficient. For example, why not expand the ACA to cover the poor and the elderly and eliminate the Medicare and Medicaid bureaucracies?
There's not a good way to do this politically - there's zero constituency for 'make government more efficient on aggregate' (too complicated), and specific proposals that have the effect of increasing the SS payments for poorer elderly will get demagogued by the other side as confiscatory. This is why Biden and other dems pledged to protect the middle class by holding harmless any household that earns $400k or less. Obv the real money's held by the top 10%, but dems peddle the myth that a truly fair tax on Bezos is enough, because it's politically convenient to do so. Many of us in the top 10% (doctors, lawyers, corporate upper middle management) wouldn't be thrilled at a dem platform that taxes the rich (us), so dems keep the details hazy and enact unfunded progressive bills whenever they get power.
It's early in the morning and my brain isn't working. You're either (1) agreeing with Matt that means-testing is good policy. Or (2) you're pointing out that means-tested policies make for fat and easy political targets by tax-cut-crazed GOP politicians, which (I would argue) makes them incredibly bad policy. The problem is I can't tell which.
Some taxes are better, some taxes are worse, what's bad is unfunded spending and the budget being distorted by past unfunded expenditures. The Rs certainly don't have a coherent position on funding the government.
If you listen to business lobbyists, their case for tax cuts has never been about Social Security. It's always been on paper about incentives for business creation and R&D, while being essentially about having more money in donors' pockets.
I actually think corporate taxes could be lower, but the incident tax burden on people like me (top 5-7%) should at minimum be increased to cover the lower corporate tax rate, and probably increased over all.
If we keep the "income" tax, capital gains should be indexed before being taxed. In a consumption tax the source of the consumption funding does not matter.
"In unmoderated forums, obnoxious behavior inevitably crowds out everything else. If you moderate in a serious way, you’re not going to make everyone happy all the time with your choices but you’ll come up with a product that’s better than one where you refuse to choose."
This, obviously, has been a contentious issue over the past few days.
My take is that while I think it's good to set a very high bar for preemptively casting certain discourse as beyond the pale, I also don't fetishize free speech - particularly in a private forum like this - in the way that some do. Back-and-forths on irreconciliable issues that literally run off my computer screen because they're so nested don't bring us closer to an understanding of anything; they just piss everyone off and serve the purpose of satisfying one's need to yell at a stranger on the Internet.
Hah! Talk about survivorship bias. We know the truth, Ben -- thousands of your victims could refute your claim to leniency, if you had not rendered them permanently mute. The Pol Pot of moderators, standing astride the mass graves of silenced voices while mocking the dead with your claims to mercy. You don't fool us.
Genuinely curious amid all of the self-congratulation on SB's moderation, but did you warn or otherwise sanction Bronz Zoo Cobra for his clearly expressed support for, if not encouragement of, ethnic cleansing and potentially annihilation for Palestinians? (apologies if something happened and I missed it)
If I said that Israeli Jews deserved to be expelled and/or exterminated for crimes committed over the past 75 years by their government (which was/is certainly more authentically representative of Israeli Jews than Hamas is of Gazans), I would expect a warning if not a ban (sidenote, is there a link to an SB specific comment policy? If so, I couldn't find it)
I should note that I sometimes agree with BZC's comments on a variety of issues (though not about the acceptability of Diddy's treatment of women), but I was surprised to see how openly he doubled down over what Palestinians as a group "deserve", without the usual caveats of only referring to terrorists, Hamas, etc
I will also respectfully tip my cap to California Josh, who, although I frequently disagree with his comments, was forthright (along with several other pro-Israel commenters) in calling out BZC for his hateful rhetoric: "Earlier this week you argued that every Palestinian deserves death. You're something like 3 standard deviations outside the mean for morals"
ETA: Presumably BZC's only issue with Israel's continuous and wanton killing of Palestinian civilians while dispensing aid in the most dangerous and humiliating way possible is that they are giving aid at all, instead of committing to the "let Gaza starve" policy?
I mean yesterday I was arguing with another commenter who said that Jamal Khashoggi's murder wasn't worth being upset about because "there are no good guys in the Middle East" and even those who outwardly are calling for reform don't share our values—"it's all a front." Some people here are happy to bite that bullet.
I appreciate the amount of work you put into it, but I also have to say, when it comes to bans, predictability and consistency are way more important than frequency.
Having said this, I agree that SB commenters are the best. Even other Substacks that I really like - notably Notes from the Middleground and Singal-Minded - have comments sections that include a lot of "emotionally validate me!"-type demands.
I’m glad that Nate has turned on the setting where only paid subscribers can comment because it prevents me from getting into flame wars that I would be tempted to.
Text of Singal-Minded: "It is important to make sure we are making policy based on sound science. Here is why the text of this paper in The Lancet does not match the statistical results table, which suggests politics superseding data."
Comments on Singal-Minded: "If I ever meet a trans person, Imma eat them."
Part of the reason I dropped Singal's Substack from my list of subscriptions.
Like it or not, the quality of the comments says something about the owner of the Substack. Even if that person doesn't agree with many/most of the comments, letting it become a cesspool, like the examples cited here, indicates something about the person's values.
And weirdly, I find the SB comments, even those I disagree with, more interesting than Matt's posts (which are fine to be sure). It's a great comment section and every single commenter is someone I value.*
* Except for one. "Dysphemistic treadmill delenda est." (Oh, I kid, I kid.. . . or do I?)
Anil's website used to have a really good, well-moderated comments section. When he decided he no longer had the time to moderate it properly, he turned it off, because he knew it would fill up with assholes if he didn't moderate it.
Again - Matt regularly, even in his most 'the Left is dumb and wrong' moments still posts anodyne posts like "raising taxes on rich people is good" or "Social Security is cool" that chases off the weirdest anti-woke people who spiral based on their heterodox opinions on specific cultural issues.
This is something Singal (because he's not that type of writer), Silver (because he's a South Park Republican (mostly laudatory)), or ironically Freddie DeBoer (because he's a Marxist) does.
Want a reasonable comment section? Actually moderate but also say nice things about Democrat's.
I think this is part of why Reddit has remained a generally positive and useful place, and even why some of the very old school forums are hanging on. Moderation is necessary. Unmoderated forums are very much like public spaces that are totally unpoliced, quickly trashed. Give me lightly moderated places of discussion or give me death!
I mean some of us like stuff that's not just politics. Unmoderated spaces turn into trash even if you're talking about World of Warcraft builds or photos of cats.
Reddit moderation used to consist almost entirely of "keep your posts on topic guys". That was good. In most subs it got way more ideological and language police-y over time in ways that made almost any attempt at discussing anything with an ideological valence uninteresting.
I mean the stuff I use Reddit for just isn't very ideological. But pretty strict rules prevent r/Taylorswift from becoming a creepy collection of sexualized photos the way many others are. It's not off topic per se to post sexy pics of her it just descends into being porn adjacent once you stop actively looking to be welcoming and enforcing rules that are basically arbitrary.
"...found my new lawn mower purusing r/lawnmowers."
On the one hand, that's exactly the kind of reddit that I would expect a lawnmower to peruse.
On the other hand, if I found my new lawn mower was loafing around perusing Reddits, I would tell it to get to work mowing my damned lawn. I didn't buy a lawnmower just so that it could waste time on the web.
IME those types of communities do sometimes attract a few groupthink attractor-states (and in part this is due to the understandable problem that even on r/lawnmowers, most people will have had experience with, like, 3 lawnmowers, tops), but honestly it's a tradeoff I'm pretty okay with -- often my actual goal is "reduce the search space to three choices and pick one of them based on the goals I'm trying to satisfice."
r/aviation is IMO the absolute gold standard of "populated and commented-on by people with experience and competency on a topic that's of interest to a generalist audience."
What possible hyperpartisan bubble could there be on r/The Wiggles, about an Australian childrens band or r/multilingual parenting which is about raising children who speak multiple languages fluently?
If you think everything on Reddit is hyperpartisan that says more about your lack of interests than about Reddit.
Is this some joke about the Wiggles I'm missing? Because I would be almost shocked if a "multilingual parenting" subreddit wasn't descending into circular firing squads of racism accusations on a regular basis.
Why would anyone “update their mental model” based on an unsourced assertion from an internet stranger? And even if you believe it to be true, it could simply mean that you miss or ignore the stuff Dave is talking about. Every person has a slightly different experience with internet communities. You could both be correct based on what you actually see and engage with.
State and city specific reddits have a habit of becoming political echo chambers. The ones I've seen have been very left leaning but I'm sure there are right leaning ones too. Just annoying to have to wade through endless political circlejerks to find out about the best sushi spots or what its like to live in New Haven.
While true, this doesn't really do much to disprove my claim that the OP's problem is their interests and not reddit. "I happen to live here" is not an interest-based Reddit.
There is no real hyperpartisanship on r/CookbookLovers or r/functionalprint or r/amaro or r/toddlers or r/nanny or r/nolawns or r/omad or r/coloring or r/skincareaddiction or r/financialindependence or r/stayathomedaddit or ....
If your subreddit doesn't have an actual topic then, no surprise, rage-bait political click bait will become what is upvoted unless you happen to have some extremely committed and heavy-handed moderators.
But that doesn't mean Reddit is useless and has politics in every subreddit.
/r/Texas was interesting - very much a “gay married hemp farmers need their guns” kind of space, even though the majority of the participants probably live in the suburbs of Houston or Dallas.
I hate how much algorithms allow every non-political part of the internet to become political in the Trump era. My personal favorite example is that on the first day of Covid lockdowns, I was looking for any site that wasn't 100% Covid coverage, so I went to Bored Panda for the first time in years since that should be frivolous enough to not be about Covid. The first two pages of the site that day were 100% Covid. You're a clickbait amuse bouche of a site, stay in your lane!
I use my city subreddit to try to challenge people on ethics around dehumanizing the homeless, shelters under the freeway etc. Sometimes I get voted up, sometimes down so I'm probably not having any impact at all and the thumbs are pretty much random. But it keeps me thinking and gives me an outlet...
Posting in some subreddits (like the "gender critical" ones) would get you automatically banned from other subreddits (like ones devoted to unrelated interests and not politics, even ones you never posted in). That is an example of hyperpartisanship. I would get it if you turned every niche interest into a politics debate; they would want to moderate that because that is annoying. But it was more like, "if you hold this political position, you cannot have a generic discussion about the Wiggles."
Reddit has always consisted of bubbles--that's its main strength--but what I find more distressing are subs where the subject has nothing to do with ideology of politics, but have nonetheless taken an aggressively woke turn. The bans on linking to tweets in some subs are the most annoying--just admit that Elon's got us there, and now that he's not even doing anything with the White House before, relent on this.
I don't think there's anything irritable about our good friend DT, nor am I aware of any indigestion problems--DT just recognizes the value of using words that get to the point, even if they seem harsh at first glance.
My son's friend got temporarily banned from the flag joke subreddit because he posted something that could be deemed offensive about a country's flag. I kind of love that there is a place on the internet for such nerds and that someone could be banned for a joke that the vast majority of people wouldn't even understand.
C'mon Dave, you can argue that Reddit is worse now than you used to find it without this kind of objectively inaccurate hyperbole. Reddit is enormous and covers a huge swath of materials. Gaming, movies, sports, etc., are all non-obscure areas where Reddit can be a great place to interact with others.
This whole thread is just a bizarre rabbit hole of caricatures. It's akin to saying that the grocery store is full of terrible food and disgusting poison because it changed it's supplier for some of your favorite foods. Acting like Reddit was ever even predominantly politics (let alone exclusively) says more about what you used Reddit for than what Reddit ever actually was or currently is.
The anecdotal nature of some subreddits is interesting and is what I learn there is perhaps even valid. r/Teachers has a lot to say about the current state of education, and r/fednews has stories from the entire federal government about DOGE and the psychological impact on employees of an intentional campaign to destroy the morale of the people people who keep the U.S. running. Journalists post contact information there so they can report on what's going on.
Reddit is extremely partisan. Most of it is very left-wing, and some corners of it are very right wing.
What's annoying is the mods are also partisan. It is very common for someone to post something extremely left-wing in a forum about, say, economics or Star Trek, and if you respond with a disagreement, YOU get banned for being political.
As an example, I responded to someone once in a subreddit about retirement savings that claimed that 75% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck, and therefor cannot afford to put money in a 401k or IRA, and I responded that this was obvious nonsense (like literally 30 seconds of googling will tell you more than half of Americans own stocks), and got my post deleted for being political.
I think the ability to downvote when needed is quite helpful on Reddit. Speaking personally, the subs i frequent seem to be in pretty good shape compared to any other social media platform (or comments section, present company excluded).
I think Reddit is fascinating here because it actually shows both sides. One of my hobbies is being obsessed with pop music and if you go to the subreddits for Ariana Grande or Sabrina Carpenter they're deeply creepy places. Shout out to r/ariheads and r/sabrinacarpenterfans. Not all pop stars are like this sometimes the name one gets a good moderator (r/Taylorswift r/Carlyraejepsen and r/oliviarodrigo are all great) and they keep the creeps away. It's kind of totally luck and if you want a Taylor creep reddit they certainly exist but I think you know what you're getting into if you goto taylorswiftlegs. They've buried the random button, they've taken porn and I think gore out of all. They're working hard so you don't accidentally end up in that part of Reddit.
But jokes aside -- there are lots of good Reddits! And lots of good sub-reddits! It is still a great resource for many things, even if parts of it are no longer functional.
(I hope this doesn't come across as too antagonistic, but here it goes.)
"Back-and-forths on irreconcilable issues that literally run off my computer screen because they're so nested don't bring us closer to an understanding of anything"
I understand that the discussions about trans issues aren't to your taste, but it's ironic reading that statement in light of Matt's answer above, which included this: "a lot of the lengthier comment threads are people really digging into these things in a serious way. I think that reflects really well on our readers." Perhaps you'd disagree with the comments on trans issues are conducted "in a serious way". But I defy you to find someone commenting on Slow Boring, on any issue, more thoughtfully engaged, respectful, and articulate than Jean, who writes deep in those threads.
The moderators tolerate a high degree of incivility and endless, repetitive discussion about almost every topic, but not this one. Why? I don't think it's a mystery, but most explanations aren't credible. It's because trans issues divide the coalition, and people that take *some* heterodox positions on it, like Matt and the commentariat, are at risk of being pushed into irrelevance on the left.
I think you are missing the obvious other reason that trans issues generally require more moderation: they attract a lot of people mostly interested in personally attacking the subjects of the discussion, often in intentionally offensive, dehumanizing ways.
I think it quite clearly does require more moderation than most topics here, not because of the majority of commenters, but because of some especially emotionally angry responses. In other forums, other issues are more likely triggers.
All Matt asked is that people use the preferred pronouns of a subject of a post and not deadname them. I’m not especially wrapped up in the pronoun stuff myself, but the fact that people were upset at that objectivity clear and simple request that does nothing to inhibit substantive discussion illustrates the point. Very “hit dog will holler.”
I realize that plenty of people think that's the case, but I think that impression is caused by selection, confirmation, and availability biases, plus the way that people tend to believe something that's frequently asserted, even if it isn't substantiated.
There's also the fact that proponents of that theory aren't always going to recognize other kinds of dehumanizing speech. If we're talking about how often commenters are "personally attacking the subjects of the discussion, often in intentionally offensive, dehumanizing ways", the number one subjects would be Republicans and number two would be (far) leftists.
How does selection bias (or even availability bias) in any way relate to an observation that a discussion has become contentious? Are you actually claiming, without even knowing where I stand on the trans issue that I am so tied to a position so as to be unable to clearly identify declining civility?
I admit that part of what's going on here is my conflict-adverse nature. I'm actually fairly critical of the trans activist stance myself, so my objection is not really directed at a particular side per se and it's more aesthetic than it is substantive.
I don't, admittedly, have a super principled position I can muster here at the moment. All I can say is that I wish the pronoun issue were not as heated as it were (and I maintain that it's a very parochial issue specific only to the English language, and everyone should chill on that basis if nothing else), and I think there are far more substantive discussions to be had about trans issues.
>>>I maintain that it's a very parochial issue specific only to the English language<<<
Uh, pretty sure that English is not the only language with gendered pronouns. French, German, Spanish, Russian, Italian, and I'm sure various others would like to have a word.
This comment just reinforces my belief that what SB *really* needs is more linguistics content.
What other language has *all* of its grammatical gender *only* in its third-person pronouns?
In French, for instance, attempts to create a non-gendered third person pronoun immediately run aground because there is literally no way to un-gender verb and adjective agreements. They're feminine or masculine, and that's it. Je suis pas aussi idiot [masculin] que tu le penses!
My point is that we can only have these bitter disputes over pronouns in the first place because English uniquely confines all of its grammatical gender to six words - and then we convince ourselves that the status of those words is the most important aspect of the trans debate.
Responding to you on a purely linguistic level (technically correct: the best kind of correct!) AIUI English doesn't really use grammatical gender in the more general sense of that term (beyond a tiny handful of enumerable exceptions like sometimes calling ships and other vehicles "she" by convention), instead using natural gender.
French et al. bucket objects into one of two arbitrary noun classes (German uses three, I think some Aboriginal Australian languages use something like five - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anindilyakwa_language) and then-also arbitrarily-decides to map the concept of "masculine" and "feminine" onto the noun classes instead of just calling them "class1" and "class 2." Abstractly I kind of feel like they're the ones who seem obsessed here....
The distinction between natural and grammatical gender is one that I'd forgotten! You are correct, English pronouns are not grammatically gendered as such. In other languages things get messy when they overlap and use non-arbitrary pronouns to refer to arbitrary objects, though.
English also got animacy thrown into the mix (but only in the singular), which further screws things up and denies the language a viable gender-neutral pronoun that can be applied to humans.
English does make an animacy distinction as well, which is clearer as singular “they” gets more entrenched. No one uses singular “they” for inanimate objects, though animals and small enough children can sometimes take the inanimate “it” pronouns as well as the animate “he/she/they” pronouns.
There are some attempts at gender-neutral writing, with the emphasis on writing, because none of them are pronounceable: it’s pretty common in academic circles to write something like “mon projet va embaucher un.e chercheur.euse.” There are some attempts to do things like use “ae” to cover é and ée, for example. Interestingly, I always thought the former example had nothing to do with trans issues and was meant to be a more classic feminist move to include women - both “chercheur” and “chercheuse” are gendered! “ae” as an adjective ending is more of a truly gender-neutral move.
In spoken French, this is not possible - you can try to say “iel” instead of “il” or “elle,” and there’s a “celleux” that can sort of replace “ceux” and “celle,” but it quickly becomes unworkable because there are just too many gender markers all over the place. Note too that these issues of language are seen somewhat less as issues of identity and more as literal language issues: the introduction of these attempts is resisted less as an assault on people’s free speech and more as an assault on the French language (as well as Anglo-American cultural imperialism).
There’s several different aspects of the issue. English speakers have seen pairs like actor/actress and aviator/aviatrix and mainly moved towards using the formerly masculine term genetically for all people, while Spanish has seen the few terms that *aren’t* differentiated by gender get feminine forms to help emphasize that women can be judges and doctors too. In French and German there are conventions in writing where you use a weird punctuation mark to separate the feminine ending the way that English briefly used “s/he”. In German there are also several generic words for a person, which have different grammatical gender: “der Mensch”, “die Person”, and I think others, and there are various conventions in place about which one people should prefer to use generically. Spanish famously had the “Latinx” ending briefly, but I think native speakers are now much more often using “-e” as a gender neutral ending for words that would otherwise have “-a” or “-o”.
So many people don't understand that the First Amendment does not apply to speech in private forums, and it would make things completely unworkable if it did. I say this even while I personally would have a pretty high bar over what content moderate out on communities where I'm a moderator.
On the other hand, a lot of people miss that the principles underlying the First Amendment aren’t just legal protections. Openness to dissent, epistemic humility, resistance to ideological gatekeeping are all norms that matter in any forum organized around truth-seeking. The reasons to protect speech in the public square don’t vanish in private ones, they just compete with other priorities.
Of course, Slow Boring isn’t a neutral epistemic space, it’s a partisan project, albeit thoughtful and relatively pluralistic. Part of my discomfort with this episode is wrestling with that dual role: is the goal to build a coalition, or to test ideas? I think Matt genuinely values both, but they pull in different directions. The more it leans toward consensus-building, the more we see disagreement treated as noise rather than signal.
I think speech advocates weren't prepared for how fast and how far the cultural consensus could shift. For a few decades, the First Amendment wasn’t just a legal doctrine, it was a Schelling point that conjured the patient, detailed arguments made by Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Fredrick Douglass (among others). That model no longer enjoys default allegiance, but what replaced it is just a jumble of intuitions: safety over liberty, identity over universality, vibes over process. That's fine in a private club. But in any space that hopes to be more than a mirror of its in-group, it’s a problem. When speech becomes conditional on belonging, inquiry becomes conditional on loyalty.
I agree with this. There's still observations along the lines of the freedom to speak does not include the freedom to be heard, nor to be given any private venue of one's choosing, and certainly not to be free from criticism--that of course is free speech confronting other free speech.
I see the ebb and flow of everyone’s posts. Stressful news weeks leads to a lot more hardened positions and back and forth.
I think this sub does a good job of recognizing that. Holding the regular commentator accountable in the moment. While being pretty forgiving and welcoming when the rhetoric calms down.
With forums that operate as a niche in a free market - whether "private" or "public" doesn't really matter - I think market competition has solidly proven that a strong moderation position that isn't massively strong is necessary. Go too far, and you either end up with no comments at all or you end up with a cultish circle-jerk and everyone performatively dunking on the person who only agrees with the headline blogger 99% of the time (the most famous of these from the Old Blogosphere was Shakesville, though that was hardly the worst). But if you aren't vigorous enough in shutting down obnoxious behaviour, it quickly crowds out everyone else, and no serious discussion can take place. All the newspaper comments sections that led to the aphorism "Never Read The Comments" are the most obvious example.
Social media has the basic problem that this is very hard to do without the blog/forum itself having a position. There are statements that are uncontroversial on some forums and which provoke a hornets' nest of argument on others - but if you pick a different statement, then it's uncontroversial on the latter forums, but starts a huge argument on the former. There are a number of issues where it is not possible to have a forum where both sides of the issue can speak freely without provoking a major controversy. Reddit makes this work by having lots of subreddits and letting each subreddit have its own rules, so there can be a pro-Israel subreddit and a pro-Palestine one.
But if you're Facebook or X, you cannot have a moderation rule that will allow someone to say "Death to the IDF" without controversy and someone else to say "Mavet la’Aravim" [Death to the Arabs, in Hebrew] equally uncontroversially. You have four choices:
Pick One Side
Pick The Other Side
Ban The Entire Topic
Become a Bearpit
The danger of the last is that the "Back-and-forths on irreconciliable issues that literally run off my computer screen because they're so nested" drive readers away. Social media can sometimes make that work for the people who want nothing to do with it by identifying people who don't want that sort of thing and downranking it so they don't see it, meaning that only the participants and the enthusiastic bystanders see it. This works for everyone except the people who want to discuss their position among other people who agree with (or at least accept) it, because they get dragged into the bearpit rather than being able to have a conversation with likeminded people. Facebook's solution to that is groups; X has never had a solution; if you don't talk about politics at all, and avoid all political posts, X works fine, if you want to get into an argument about politics every time you post, it also works fine. If you want to talk politics without an argument, it doesn't.
Perhaps I should say that rather than any forum having a position, I should say that it has an Overton window and the moderation enforces that Overton window. There are positions that the moderators won't allow you to take. And some of those are positions that are inside the Overton window on a different, equally well-moderated forum and are inside the Overton window of the general public discourse.
Moderated comments are the only way to go -- have you ever read the unmoderated comments on Mediaite or the Daily Mail (or even the Washington Post)? -- it is a brutal, disheartening experience. The best comment section ever remains Ta-Nehisi Coates Atlantic blog, where he curated "the Hive." I have never learned more or thought more about significant matters than I did in the blogs heyday. Alas . . .
I genuinely find this fascinating how much conservatives have turned on the idea of moderation over essentially politics. They feel like their side is always going to lose but like compare Facebook to Twitter on porn. And even that's not truly an unmoderated space.
I like suspect they've never really had the full bore of the internet dumped on their head because they have more normal social lives and don't know what they're asking for.
Twitter also has the opposite problem. I created a private account just to view porn, and then around October of last year started getting right-wing influencers mixed in!l, because it started defaulting to the “for you” instead of “followed”.
The weird thing for me is this idea that the Internet is this place where unrestricted free speech is allowed everything was never true. Like, I was on a (much smaller) political board in the mid-2000s. While there was lots of things said there you wouldn't say in 2024, there were still moderators, and people of all ideologies from the two Commies to the weirdo right-wingers who'd be Trump officials today all agreed the administrators had the right to ban people - sure people complained but the idea that you didn't believe in free speech if you put rules on the 'front door' wasn't something even the weirdo libertarians said.
Why are we even talking about "place[s] where unrestricted free speech is allowed"? The disagreements we're discussing concern specific moderation decisions, not the idea of moderation.
Every single defense of those decisions I've read in these threads retreated to generalizations and strawmen like "this place would turn into a cesspool without any moderation". I agree, and no one's asking for that.
I'm on record arguing for *more* moderation. In particular, I think tone-policed spaces make for much better discussions. For example, you write some good comments here, but I think your posts on the Motte are, on average, way better. The moderation policy there puts pressure on you to substantiate your positions instead of dunking, labelling, or straw-manning. (The Motte could use more moderation too, but that's a different conversation.)
Bad Star Wars take by Matt! The planets shown in the OT are:
- Tatooine, a desert run by criminals and subject to random attacks by migratory Sand People. Luke still grew up well-fed and clothed and in a house with many rooms, despite not being from a rich family
- Various ships and space stations
- A rebellion military base in the middle of nowhere
- Another rebel base, on the equivalent of Antarctica
- A swamp that nobody lives in
- Bespin, which is genuinely nice (especially in comparison to any real-world offshore drilling rig)
- Endor, another planet where basically nobody lives and there are uncontacted tribes
All of this is in a galaxy with a recent civil war, active rebel groups, and a fascist government.
Star Wars is objectively much richer than analogous real-world locations with similar governments!
In the expanded universe we get to see places like Naboo/Ghorman as well, which also seem like places with extremely high quality of life for citizens. I'm sure Alderaan was also nice before, uh.
The thing that I don't understand is what's supposed to happen when a kid refuses? We can't even deter violence very well with habitual offenders with detention and suspension threats.
Like I teach at a school that's not terribly effected by horrible discipline problems writ large but last two years kids have pushed or kicked their teachers. Nothing terribly bad happened to them (in or out of school suspension) but like life moves on. But then they want that teacher who's just been kicked by her student to daily forcibly remove his device? To need to escalate it and show the empress has no clothes.
I will write the referral and take the slings and arrows from their parents but this seems like a policy designed to encourage scofflaws.
Not expelling students has spectacularly backfired. I get that schools don’t want the bad stats, but the expulsion isn’t for the target kid, it’s the messaging for everyone else. When kids used to disappear (and I don’t mean in the current scary ICE climate), most students learned to not test authority too much. Something happened in the 2010s where adults forgot how to adult.
I genuinely don't have a strong disagreement but I've been teaching for fifteen years and never had a student expelled. Like annoying the parents with out of school suspensions hasn't worked I mean is explosion paired with foster care or some sort of away disciplinary school or what?
As a teacher who's also a foster parent I mean it's not like my phone isn't buzzing all the time to ask me if I want to take one more kid. I know of a family who ended up in one but that was after the kid was Baker Acted (Involuntary suicide detention) and it's not free in most cases.
Again I'm not really opposed to the idea I'm just not sure what then happens to this 8 year old.
I’m ~10 years away from having to worry about this with my kid, but it seems like a lot of phone-having is enabled by parents. Is there a way to switch punishment from confiscating the phone to sending the student home? Right now it seems like it’s a problem where parents are at odds with teachers.
I recognize of course that there are reasons why you wouldn’t want to send a student home unless completely necessary, but it also feels like this is a problem that’s been dumped on teachers.
At least there should be an enforced school mode for anyone stepping into the school. Emergency services. Calculator. Note taker. That’s it. No enforcement needed.
We've had a ban in place in our district since last year. It's been mixed (works at the elementary and middle schools, but not at the high school), basically due to lack of enforcement. It should be easy, see a phone out during the day, take it away. But many teachers are not interested in playing phone cop (I don't necessarily blame them with the behavior of students and parents). Also, the high school kids all have their own Macs which pretty much allows them to use their phones even if they are tucked away in their bag.
I will say that the Yonder pouches are an absolute waste. We spent something like $65k on them and they were cast aside within a few months. What a scam.
Similarly in my middle school, the away-for-the-day enforcement worked (and we also wasted money on Yondr pouches). But the students’ digital addiction habits have gotten so bad that they carry the same behaviors to their student Chromebooks: copying and pasting SIMPLE answers instead of writing, AI-generated paragraphs and essays, gaming, emails instead texts to friends, etc. I’m going back MOSTLY to paper this year not because *I* want to, but I really think I need to rescue the thinking, reading, and learning that is literally disappearing.
I have noticed this in 3rd grade. I really scaled down Chromebook time starting in 2023-24 and it's been very successful. And when I do have them on the things I'm ruthless with the go guardian using the only on approved websites lists and just having it up on my laptop in small group work.
It's not a panacea because kids can still be annoying and the school requires more Chromebook usage than I'd like but I keep it to no more than a small percentage of class time.
If you're comfortable talking about it, what does the school require Chromebooks for in third grade? Does it make sense to even be using computers in-class when students are too young to be writing multipage essays or using Excel?
The biggest thing, the thing that makes all other considerations quite small is the state wants digital tests. Now that actually has a meaningful benefit of getting to teach reading till 5/8 or so instead of taking a pass fail test on 4/1 so we get results back in time to offer summer school. Also while it doesn't affect 3rd grade where students aren't asked to write for the state at all the writing test is on the computer in 4th grade.
The other big one is costs. I know that sounds weird but at my last school we switched from a pencil and paper math curriculum to an electronic one--this particular curriculum I'll defend quite vigorously it was something like a 80,000 savings and we saw a similar savings in science though that curriculum sucked but they all do. The cost savings at the state level may be even more pertinent to the politics. Like those 4th grade writing test only like 10 percent even get a human grader now those are the ones that are used to train the AI that grades most of them.
The first thing really makes all the other things go and then once you've digitized there's a lot of things you can do that aren't worthless. It's not like it has literally zero benefits to have access to technology. If not for testing I'd say a computer station (like 5 computers hardwired to the wall somewhere) or checkout carts for special projects would be a good thing to have.
Your last paragraph was how it was in my kids' school prior to COVID. Some parents complained that we didn't have one-on-one Chromebooks like richer districts did, but boy do I miss those days of computer carts for specific uses.
One of my teacher friends mentioned that her public school has essentially no printing budget for classes because they “can just do it on the chromebooks.” Have you run into that issue at all?
We're on the edge of the precipice of raising a generation that has basically let their brains atrophy during the main developmental years with AI chatbots and TikTok that risks being a major fall in human capital, yet our entire political system simply does not care.
You have to have something more formal and stronger than a mandate that phones stay in bags or lockers during class. Otherwise, teachers will either spend too much time enforcing the rules or ignore phone use. Many teachers are extremely reluctant or will not confiscate phones because they don't want to be accused of damaging these $300-$1300 personal devices. And I definitely don't blame them.
Surely this is a tech company and federal government issue. There needs to be a way to make phones unworkable when they go through the school door. Only able to phone for emergencies, that kind of thing. Then there’s no need to enforce.
Arkansas, where I live, is using special pouches from a company called Yondr that disable the device. I don’t have kids in school so don’t know how to effective it is
New York as well. Parents seem very split on it - either vociferously opposing or supporting it. A local district banned them a couple of years ago, and the teachers love it. They say the difference is like night and day.
“ Dems and the center-left have broadly taken the position that the targets of potential hate speech get to determine its valence and intent, not the users of said speech.
But here we have a so called far left guy saying the valence of “Globalize the intifada” is not to be determined decisively by the targets of this chant”
This is an excellent point. I’d guess they would rationalize it by saying Jews are the powerful actors, just as they often claim a POC can’t be racist.
It's hard not to look at the images from Gaza and not consider Israeli Jews as the oppressors and Middle Eastern Muslims as the oppressed. It's also hard to not look at Israel as a small country beset on all sides by a region that would love to destroy them because it's a Jewish state. So you have both sides thinking they're the victim and thinking that only evil people could disagree with that.
Israel obviously has more power, it’s won every war it’s been in, has expanded its territory, and has inflicted dozens of times more casualties than its taken, and has much more political influence in the West. Size means nothing—the entire last 500 years of world history is about small Western with superior technology and state capacity ruling over much larger numbers of more backwards non-Western people. If anything, a small minority ruling over a much larger group is more oppressive than vice versa because it goes against the concept of democracy. You can make a reasonable argument that it’s good for Israel to have more power because Muslims with that much power would act even worse, but denying that Israel is the more powerful party just seems completely delusional.
iran has 10x the popullation, 70x the territory, vast oil/gas reserves, a well-educated population.and defensible borders. asserting that all of this somehow doesn't matter (especially in a long, drawn out conflict) is bizarre.
Lebanon was an antiterrorist campaign that turned into a quagmire, not unlike recent US experiences. Israel hasn’t fought a traditional interstate war since 1973.
I am not sure why Israel winning wars is of international concern. Are they supposed to take one for the team and lose once in a while? Also, do the people (cough cough Nasser) who started the wars have any agency here?
How is Israel oppressing Muslims in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, or Turkey? Or any of the other Muslim countries in the ME that are not Palestine?
I think it's kind of like "all lives matter." In literal English, there's obviously nothing wrong with the phrase. But it's commonly understood to be an argument against the Black Lives Matter movement, which sought to draw attention to the disproportionate number of Black people killed by police, so people generally don't say it. I'm curious what Mamdani would say about "all lives matter." Constitutionally protected, sure, but would he appear at a rally with an "all lives matter" leader?
We don't know what their share of crimes committed is.
We know what their share of crimes for which people are convicted is, but there are plenty of possible explanations for the conviction:commission ratio varying by race.
Not making a substantive argument about the specific merits of BLM. Just noting that Black Lives Matter as a phrase has an important meaning to people in the movement and All Lives Matter as a phrase is understood as disparaging that meaning.
No, I think people on the left would rationalize it by saying the Intifadas were an uprising against a country and countries aren’t the same as ethnic groups. Neither the First nor Second Intifadas featured attacks on Jewish people outside Israel for being Jewish. No one would interpret “globalize Sinn Fein” as a racist attack on British people.
For my part, I am made deeply uncomfortable by anyone who thinks about the Intifada and thinks it's defensible to have the idea "You know what? We should do *that* again, just *bigger*."
I want to drive those people from the public square and persecute them.
I'm confused as to what you're saying here. What do you interpret the word "globalize" to mean? Your argument hinges on the fact that the intifadas were limited to attacks within Israel and that therefore they weren't intended as assaults on Jewish people but were instead an uprising against a particular country. Fair enough. But if that's the case, what purpose does the word globalize serve? Are you saying that the word means people from all across the world should rush to Israel to engage in violent conflict within Israel's borders? Or are you saying that they would limit the attacks specifically to Israeli citizens and institutions all around the world? If so, I think that betrays a shocking naiveté about how often people conflate being Jewish with Israel. The "we're just criticizing Israel" people all too often move right onto to attacking anyone who is Jewish as being analogous to Israeli.
"...I'm confused as to what you're saying here...."
Because the threading on Substack sucks, I cannot tell whom you are responding to. So, on the off-chance that you are referring to me, I'll try to say what I *think* the obfuscators would say.
"Glob the Int" means that all oppressed peoples around the globe should shake off whatever oppression they are locally subject to, in the way that the Palestinians are shaking off the oppression of the Jewish colonialist apartheid blah blah blah. So, the Uighurs will globalize the intifada by fighting the Chinese Communist Party; the Kurds will globalize the intifada by fighting the Turkish govt (and the Iranian govt and the...); the Ukrainians will globalize the intifada by resisting Russian aggression; black Americans will globalize the intifada by fighting racism in the US; and so on. Wherever there is oppression around the globe, the oppressed can take inspiration from the brave struggles of the heroic Palestinian martyrs.
This is bullshit, of course, but it's the kind of bullshit that appeals to American undergrads, which is the whole point. It's analogous to the bait and switch over the word "jihad" -- "oh, it only means struggle, so you know it refers to my personal struggle for meaning in life."
I was responding to Nikuraga, but appreciate your response nonetheless!
And I agree. It's a motte-and-bailey where they say it in contexts that CLEARLY mean violent attacks against Israel (and, by extension, Jews), and then when called on it they just say "no no no, we just mean that oppressed people should resist so that oppression stops".
This was not part of the Intifadas. It didn’t even happen at the same time as the Intifadas (the First Intifada ended in 1993, the Second began in 2000, this bombing was in 1994).
I think many people would absolutely hear "Globalize Sinn Fein" as a call for worldwide terrorist attacks again Britain, British people, anyone perceived to be allied with Britain, and anyone unfortunate enough to be standing next to the aforementioned groups.
Good point - that's an important distinction and one I should have noticed. That said, “now” is an operative part of your comment. “Globalize Sinn Fein” (like “Global the Intifada”) is ambiguous enough that it's either a call for terrorism or a call for non-violent national liberation, which is the problem with these sorts of slogans.
If the militant Palestinians think of Israel only as a country, and not as an ethnic group, what is the conflict about? More to the point, why does it have such regional, and worldwide, importance when, as an example, the Armenian ethnic cleansing does not? The religion of the Jews is what is the big story. It’s the fact that islam is being successfully challenged right there in their holiest of lands.
I do. And I’ve posted here before that the peculiar thing about that conflict is that everyone in the world believes in the two-state solution except for two groups - The Palestinians and the Israelis. Both of those believe that ethnic cleansing of the other guys is the only solution.
I'm really waiting for you to care about any other people who have suffered ethnic cleansing. Like, say, the Armenians or the Circassians or the Crimean Tatars.
Yes. Das P also used the term "dogwhistle," and that offers another way to press the issue: Please give us your general theory of what a "dogwhistle" is. Why does this theory not categorize "globalize the intifada" as a dogwhistle?
I don’t think it’s a dog whistle. I think it’s plainly a call for anti-semitic policies and pogroms. I think there are such things as figurative dog whistles, but the term is overused.
A first pass at a general theory of dogwhistles might say something like:
"The expression "D" functions as a dogwhistle if it is used by a group G to assert P to audience A, while allowing G to retain the ability to deny that they have asserted P, on the grounds that D is understood by audiences outside of A as not involving an assertion that P."
I think "Globalize the Intifada" is a dogwhistle for "we want pogroms!" because it allows the groups who say it to claim that they have not said "we want pogroms!", on the grounds that some audiences hear it only as meaning, "reject oppression" (or whatever anodyne thing they claim it means).
Your view is that "Globalize the Intifada!" is a plain call for "anti-semitic policies and pogroms." But there is a reason that the kids don't shout, "we want pogroms!" That would not give them the ability to deny that they called for pogroms. Saying "Globalize the Intifada!" does give them that ability, however implausible you find the denial.
This brought back the uncomfortable feelings I used to get in Geometry class, lol. But you’re right. My assertion that it’s not a dog whistle comes down to believing that it’s obviously a call for violence. Yet there are plenty pretending it’s not.
I think most things that are called “dog whistles” really are pretty obviously what their opponents say, and are just using a fig leaf of deniability, rather than the original claim that they were intenddd to be invisible to everyone but the target audience. If anything, I think the target audience is often the one that is *least* aware of what it is saying, and just treats it as a meaningless catchphrase.
Sorry -- just edited that to make it clearer. At first I was using it in two different ways, which was very bad of me -- first as a variable ranging over the names of different groups of people, and second as an abbreviation of laziness for the word "Globalize". I went back and spelled out "Globalize" wherever it occurred, so as to eliminate the ambiguity.
I do not think that Mamdani wants pogroms. In fact, I do not think that Mamdani is anti-semitic at all.
But I do think that some parts of the Gaza movement were playing on the ignorance of the American kids in order to get them to say things that meant something different to different audiences.
Take the chant, "from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free". For committed enemies of Israel, this is clearly a call for the eradication of the state of Israel. For students on the Columbia campus? They don't even know what the river is, or which sea they are referring to. They just think freedom sounds nice.
So, the genuinely anti-Israel leaders can use it to assert "Israel must be eradicated!", and they are understood as saying that by their audience of fellow eliminationists, while they can plausibly deny that they are calling for the eradication of Israel.
"Israeli politicians have also used the phrase to describe the entire area, although more rarely. In 2020, right-wing lawmaker Gideon Saar, an ally-turned-rival of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said, “Between the Jordan River and the sea there won’t be another independent state,” meaning a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Religious Zionist politician Uri Ariel said in 2014, “Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea there will be only one state, which is Israel.”
Netanyahu, who also opposes Palestinian statehood, has favored the phrase “west of the Jordan,” which refers to the same territory."
ETA: I suppose that it's not technically hypocritical if one doesn't believe in equal moral worth for both Israelis and Palestinians, but I do and I would hope that most Americans would as well (or at least a growing number of Democrats).
The second intifada included explicit targeting of civilians and suicide bombing by the Palestinian national movement. Why is it obvious that "globalize the intifada" doesn't mean suicide bombings around the globe? It doesn't seem obvious to me.
"...Why is it obvious that "globalize the intifada" doesn't mean suicide bombings around the globe?...."
Just to be clear: I'm not trying to defend calls to "globalize the intifada" or calls for suicide bombings. I am trying to defend Das P's claim that it is a dogwhistle.
Here's a short version: "globalize the intifada" is a dogwhistle for "we want suicide bombings" if some people (eliminationist hardliners) can say and hear it as a call for suicide bombings, but the people who say it can obfuscate and deny that they are calling for suicide bombings. That's the whole point of dog-whistles: obfuscation and deniability. Additional reason to think it is a dogwhistle if you can get people (sc. dumb kids) to say "globalize the intifada" who would be unwilling to say "we want suicide bombings."
Now, once you (James L) are clued in to how the dogwhistle works, then it no longer sounds like a dogwhistle to you. But so long as it provides deniability and obfuscation, and so long as people who would not say the plain meaning are willing to say the obscuring phrase, it's a dogwhistle.
There are three big reasons for lower waste at the federal level:
- the federal government spends most of its money writing checks (to doctors, seniors, states, schools, etc) and much of the rest is high prestige work that people want to do well (the FBI, the NPS, and the CDC are all like this). The kind of mundane service provision that is the regular source of waste and corruption (eg trash collection or road building) is a tiny fraction of the federal budget.
- the federal level has a genuine party system that structures competition in a meaningful way, and usually a less Byzantine political process, compared to states and local governments
- there's a lot more attention paid to the federal government than to state and local government, particularly on issues beyond "what is literally happening to me".
Makes me want to start every political conversation with a Republican with, "Why are you guys so obsessed with cutting taxes?"
Rich donors, sure whatever, but that can't explain everything. Why does it rank so far in their internal priorities? Why do they breathe, eat, and dream tax cuts instead of the more exciting stuff? I want to understand the internal Republican experience here.
Also, as a kind of rich person, I know that raising my income 10% will raise my happiness by at best 1%. Meanwhile, Boston Logan just spent $750 million to upgrade the international terminal so I can experience luxury dining on my way to Europe. That's the kind of thing the rich people caucus should be obsessed with. Or maybe rich people should be trying to pass congestion pricing so they can drive wherever they want whenever they want. I don't want more money, I want more time!
It is partly zombie-Reaganism. Reagan did solve a major tax problem by chaining marginal income tax brackets to inflation. Before that, everyone was getting a yearly tax increase that wasn't voted on. It is also probably true that some 80s tax rates were to the right of the peak of the Laffer Curve, and by lowering some tax rates government revenues increases somewhat. But then Republicans became convinced that lower taxes always increasing revenue.
Aren't automatic tax hikes kind of what need though given our political economy? Imagine how much better we would be now if Republicans/Democrats could spend all their time "cutting" taxes and effective rates were still slightly higher than they are now.
The point of inflation is that it lets you fix problems caused by things being nominally sticky. It lets you lower wages without anyone having to make the cut, and it lets you raise taxes without anyone having to vote for the increase. Indexing wages and tax brackets to inflation means that now someone has to explicitly make the hard cases, rather than letting all explicit decisions be popular.
This matches my life experience. I also think there's a large percentage of folks to whom taxes "feel" fundamentally like theft.
I have a hard time relating to Leftists who get incredibly angry that some percentage of people have enormous wealth. I agree wealth inequality is bad on the merits, but I'm not angry *just* because somebody has more wealth than I do.
In the same vein, there's a large percentage of people who feel slighted by any money coming from their paycheck, not for any policy reason, but because they just don't like seeing the subtraction.
We're getting to the era where many Republicans weren't born when Reagan was president. What makes this one thing a zombie when so many other issues from the 80s have faded?
Inertia. Same reason modern Democrats keep calling for a New Deal even though the vast, vast majority of them weren't alive during the Roosevelt administration.
You have to be more specific, "cutting taxes for rich people". If the GOP was gutting health care for poor people in order to substantially cut taxes on the middle class it would still be a bad idea but not nearly as politically toxic.
Attributing the high quality of the comments here to moderation seems somewhat misfounded. (No offense, mods!) There are comments sections out there with substantially more aggressive moderation than I see on SB that still have nowhere near the caliber of discourse here. I think the pay-to-comment model and the blog's subject matter do more to regulate the commentariat.
Why not both? Pay-to-comment + subject matter(within the scope of politics - I've seen good comments in some hobby venues where they weren't discussing more controversial things at all) increases the chances of constructive comments (driving at a good speed, safely, on a highway) and the moderators add guardrails just to try and keep it that way.
Look I’m no Florida lover but the economy is based on far more than leisure and tourism. Miami has a huge amount of international finance as it’s the launch point for companies doing business in Latin America and also has a big Spanish television industry. Also obviously there’s agriculture.
I think Matt is understating the depth of elite Democratic support for the Iraq War, and overstating how toxic it has since been, just a little bit. It’s true that most Democrats in Congress voted against it, but the majority of *Senate* Democrats (from whom you’d expect to see 2004 or 2008 presidential contenders) were in favor, including every Democrat who was in the Senate in 2002 who became a presidential or vice presidential candidate or a party leader over the next 20 years — Biden, Clinton, Daschle, John Edwards, John Kerry, Harry Reid, Schumer. I think it’s probably true that support for the Iraq war was more toxic in 2008 than in cycles before or since, but given that it prevented none of those people from being the Democratic standard-bearer in the Senate or (the race for) the White House it seems like we’re fitting to a single datapoint here.
In general elite political support for disastrous wars has been a big driver of political change in the US post-ww2 (and just generally in the world at all times). Vietnam led to the destruction of the postwar Democratic establishment (Matt Stoller's essay about how we should go back to Patman's version of the party doesn't mention Vietnam). Iraq led to the partial overthrow of the Democratic establishment, and the complete destruction of the Republican one.
But my point is it didn’t really lead to the partial overthrow of the Democratic establishment—a guy who voted for the AUMF was the President literally this year. It led, plausibly, to one woman losing one primary, and in policy terms it made presidents of both parties less interested in boots-on-the-ground military actions, but how many Democratic politicians actually lost their job because they screwed up Iraq? Seems like fewer than kept failing upwards.
I agree that the establishment has maintained a lot of their influence but this is very obviously one of the background reasons why that same establishment is incredibly toxic among their own base.
I'm not sure I agree that this place has a lot of moderation. That's neither criticism nor praise, and (as we saw last week) obviously the moderation isn't zero, which is correct. However, for a forum where we are regularly discussing material that is typically very heavy and is notorious for getting people worked up and clashing with each other, I'm pleasantly surprised by the relatively much more peaceful discourse here than in other places that discuss this material, hence why I'm happy to be here. If I had to guess why, I think that deep down we share on some level Matt's trait of not letting emotions get the best of us when we discuss these issues.
Yeah, nothing against the people doing the moderation, but I’ve seen places with much more active moderation be much worse. There’s a selection effect with the commenters that keeps it like this.
Good moderation doesn’t have to be very active. If you just nip the few worst buds, you prevent a lot more than if you have to be constantly pruning weeds.
Beyond the moral questions of healthcare, it is quite funny to me that the only legitimate mass healthcare program Republicans believe in is one that FDR and Congress put into place as a temporary fiscal relief measure during WWII: employer-sponsored health insurance. Like, of all the different methods of paying for healthcare, that is the one you pick?
Mamdani was the only NYC mayoral candidate who understood how the primary electorate's concerns would change after six months of Trump.
He could have blown it. He stopped saying "defund the police" years ago, and when he introduced his new plan (cutting some NYPD expenses but not the number of cops, and adding "public safety" jobs), he was polling low enough that nobody seriously went after him.
But he also pioneered a line I'm now seeing with more moderate Democrats, that Trump's trying to turn police into deportation agents instead of letting them just solve crimes. Obviously, you need Trump in office for that to work. You need a thermostatic shift where voters stop being angry about their tax dollars funding a mini-Ellis Island at the Roosevelt Hotel, and start being angry that Trump is deporting people who aren't burdens on the city, with the "migrant crisis" long over.
Mamdani knew that shift could happen before June 24, and Cuomo ran an Adams-style 2021 campaign about crime and social cohesion. It's hard not to conclude that a more disciplined, less crooked incumbent than Adams could have run on the last two years of progress, and against Trump, and won the primary.
I think this is an underrated point in electoral politics writ large -- timing counts for a lot. Not in some vague macro sense about political eras, either -- the literal month an election (and its proximity to or distance from some other high-profile election) is held can make all the difference. All other things equal, a special election to the House in, say, February of this year looks a lot different than this primary, the difference being the amount of time Trump's policies and rhetoric have to take root.
All this to say -- Mamdani DID run a charismatic campaign, he DID face an unpopular establishment figure... and he also just got lucky, too!
yes, the optionality that leaders in parliamentary systems have to call an election at a time of their own choosing seems crazy to me.
It's one of those interesting things that we aren't seeing much of right now just because of how toxic the environment is for incumbents. I can't think of many places where a snap election would help a governing party, but I can think of several places (the UK and Hungary both come to mind) where an election held today would almost certainly have earth-shattering electoral consequences.
canada seems like a good example where carney took advantage of anti trump sentiment at its height
Can I just say that a "principled defense of free speech" that only applies to people who agree with you is not a principled defense of free speech?
Thank you.
what does this have to do with calling early election? confused...
You want to talk about timing mattering, I think it's pretty likely Harris would've won, if the election had been held two weeks after the convention. The last couple months gave time for her too-risk-averse campaign, and a tidal wave of ads, to bring her back down in the key swing states.
I was a bit surprised by the answer about Zohran/Cuomo. Basically, it pivoted from "charisma/likeability is important" to "issue positions/previous outcomes are the primary determinants of electoral outcomes" (which is the usual theory of elections on Slow Boring).
The reasoning seems somewhat post hoc to me -- this is definitely not how I would've updated my beliefs after this election. Matt starts from "after it became a two person race, Cuomo lost, but any of the other candidates would've beaten Zohran."
But the big puzzle for Matt's theory of elections is: if issue positions are the primary determinants of outcomes, why didn't any of the other candidates emerge as front-runners in the first place? These candidates were more boring, but I'd guess that their issue positions were much closer to those of the NYC median voter. I'd bet that Zohran edged them out *despite* his issue positions, not because of them.
I think Matt somewhat underrates the value of charisma and likability in winning elections. He’s right that issue positions are very important. But if Obama was against Iraq and was not the greatest public speaker in a generation I don’t think he would’ve beaten Clinton in 2008.
It's interesting, because Mamdani exemplifies much of what Matt says he looks for in candidates. He said yes to a LOT of nontraditional media, speaking extemporaneously for long periods of time, taking bold heterodox views. (Obviously not a moderate, but it’s NYC.)
He talked to the Bulwark, Odd Lots, Derek Thompson, the Breakfast Club, some Pakistani news media in Urdu, gave a political sermon with excellent cadence in front of Al Sharpton and Spike Lee, walked 12 miles across Manhattan, did IG videos with a bunch of nyc social media micro-influencers, etc.
And through all the social media content, he flawlessly spoke the “native language” in every one. And he seemed to relish it, with genuine comfort around people who disagreed with him!
1) there seems to be a strong consensus among SB commenters that Mamdani, so far, is an excellent politician with mostly bad policy positions.
2)I think charisma (as well as deep city connections in the case of Cuomo) is part of the secret sauce of “relevance”, which is a bar that candidates must clear before anyone even hears about their policy ideas, with the exception of ideas that are unusual enough to garner outsized media coverage.
Where exactly a candidate falls on the specific issues relevant to i.e. policing is not something that becomes important to voters at all until this bar is cleared- but will absolutely be important once candidates are taking a central role in a high-salience election.
I'm German, and he even popped up on my feed all if the sudden. First from some Bulwark podcast, then on Subway Takes lol
I agree and I think Mamdani is a great example of popularism
He does, but Matt seems mostly focused on candidates who will help win swing races at the federal level, and how they can increase Democrats odds of holding power again. For politicians in deep blue areas like NYC, Matt seems like he cares more about them actually passing policies that make the city have a better economic growth and housing so people don't point to those areas like they currently do with San Francisco and say "see, that's why you can't let Democrats run things."
Obama won Indiana. Charisma works everywhere.
Obama also came out against gay marriage. Policies matter everywhere.
Kamala moderated substantially from her 2020 run and even endorsed dumb populist shit like no taxes on tips. Matt is vastly underrating the non-policy components.
Agree but I also think a charismatic Obama that voted for the war probably doesn’t win either!
Totally agree.
Yes. Good point. Even with the Iraq advantage that was an *extremely* close primary.
NYC is unique (I think) in having such a high percentage of renters, and such a high percentage of renters whose rent is controlled by the city government. And the affordability crisis is particularly acute here.
So promising people free stuff (no rent increases), though a horrendous idea for slightly abstruse reasons, gets a whole lot of votes. I think Mamdani's other positions pale in comparison.
Yes freeze the rent is stupid policy, but made for great commercials
It is entertaining how many euphemisms people can come up with for rent control. First it was rent stabilization, and now it's rent freezing.
I think this is a consequence of non-universal rent control. There are a lot of people who feel that their chances of renting a rent-controlled apartment are comparable to their chances of getting a mortgage to buy a condo apartment.
So talking about rent control codes as "not for me", which is why alternative language is needed: so people paying market-priced rents understand the policy as being to help them.
Rent control and rent stabilization are different things. There are lots of rent stabilized apartments. Mamdani's campaign was of course misleading but it is true that people have a decent shot at eventually getting a rent stabilized apartment if they try for long enough and if they're willing to prioritize rent stabilization above other things (like how nice the apartment or building is or location).
AIUI Rent stabilization is actually not *quite* the same thing as rent control in NYC. Rent stabilization is about limiting the amount of per-year increase to an amount determined by a board. Rent control is not subject to any nominal increase at all (but is way less common than rent stabilization). At a high level one could justifiably treat them as part of the same reference class but there is actually an underlying difference that isn't purely euphemistic.
Ed.: see here - https://hcr.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2024/01/fact-sheet-01-01-2024_0.pdf
If one is limiting the rate of increase, that's a control on what rent one can charge.
Sure, but the actual distinction between "rent-controlled" and "rent-stabilized" apartments is real, as in, there are both types of apartment subject to meaningfully different regulatory schemes on how their rents are treated within in the same city. There is actually an underlying need to disambiguate the two schemes in NYC (because there are both rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments), which suggests to me that the distinction is not primarily euphemistic. NYC still has "rent-controlled" apartments, just a lot of fewer of them.
How many of renters in non-stabilized units think their rent will be frozen, instead of increased higher than it would be otherwise? 5%? Maybe?
It's an interesting question - does everyone realize that Mamdani was only talking about rent-stabilized apartments and that many renters (50%?) are unaffected by rent-stabilization decisions (they're not directly affected, that is; they may be indirectly affected in a negative way, as you imply).
Municipal elections are different and nyc voters are pretty left wing. Free busses, rent stabilization, and a really high minimum wage are popular!
Rent control is always one of those things that sounds really popular until it's actually implemented, and then it creates extra conflict between the lucky ducks who got it, and the unlucky ducks who are now either paying through the nose, stuck with tons of roommates, or just have to flat out move out of town. I really wish this was something people would have learned their lesson on by now, but it's a zombie that never seems to die.
Free buses are less well known in this regard, but we'll see if they get a "be careful what you wish for" moment if/when service goes down due to less revenue.
Agree. It's not like when St. Paul walked back their rent control law there were massive protests in the streets.
It led to 80% led housing starts!
Was there more buildable land in St. Paul than NYC before the 80% rise in housing starts? An additional note re if the Horribly Bad Bill passes aren’t we looking at interest rates increasing to 8%? This doesn’t seem to me to be a great environment for more housing starts unless there are local government fiddles like the “Middle Dollar” rent controlled Apartments in DC. ????
I should look up the places in the country that still have rent control just out of curiosity.
There are different forms of rent control. Some of them just prevent giant spikes but allow plenty of leeway for normal cost-based increases.
Sure, but all are causing market distortion that result in differing levels of shortages.
It's like Republicans campaigning on free tax cuts. Of course people like free stuff. Doesn't mean it's good policy!
Rent control doesn't have to be for just some lucky ducks: you can impose it on all rents. Of course, that means that there ceases to be a market in rents, which means that you can't piggy-back on the market to set prices and you have to have a rent control board that sets all rents. Of course, you have a similar board already that sets property tax valuation, so you could just set the rent as a fixed percentage of the property tax valuation.
Aside, one proposal I've seen for places without rent control is to do the reverse: set the property tax valuation as a multiple of the rent, so any rent increase automatically increases the property tax. Obviously that doesn't work for owner occupiers, but it would give a much broader market base for valuations that relying solely on actual property transactions (especially as many property transfers are not market transactions - not just inheritances, but also discounted-price sales within families, buying out an ex in a divorce etc)
There are still ducks that are lucky and unlucky based upon who can and can't get any of the constricted supply of housing.
That assumes that rent control constricts supply of housing - a position on which I agree with you but, critically: they don’t.
They of course ignore many consequences when they propose this policy.
Sure, and we can slap controls on how much people have to pay for cell phones or Oreo cookies. At the end of the day, you’ll end up with fewer cell phones and Oreo cookies.
Interesting idea... in a sense a rental building's value should be based on the rent collected from it, unless the building could be more valuable were it redeveloped. It runs contrary to the theory of a land value tax.
Free buses can be pretty great so long as you know they're not actually "free".
I don’t know; I still think there’s a puzzle here for the “issue positions” view of the world. Let me lay out some salient questions.
If we grant that Mamdani was actually close to the most popular bundle of issue positions, then why didn’t we see a big fight on the left end of the candidate spectrum (instead of a fight with the most right-wing candidate)? No matter where the median voter is, if issue positions are primarily driving outcomes, we shouldn’t have seen these two emerge as the leading candidates.
Matt doesn’t even seem to think Mamdani’s issue positions were that popular. Why does he think one of the other candidates would’ve trounced Mamdani 1-on-1? How does this make sense given that we have RCV, so that anyone actually *could’ve* ranked all candidates above Mamdani?
I know Matt does not really buy Ezra Klein's interpretation of the election that it all has to do with short-form video, but I think it all has to do with short-form video. Traditional social media is not nearly as important as it used to be, and legacy media basically doesn't matter at all. Brad Lander wasn't a serious presence on short-form video, so he was never going to succeed as the insurgent candidate.
"... I think it all has to do with short-form video...."
This is fascinating to me, because I know nothing about it. "Short-form video" is a generic reference to Tik-Tok and similar platforms? Totally alien to me -- I never hear this mentioned by Walter Cronkite on the nightly CBS broadcast I watch.
But I do have some vague sense that it is increasingly important, and that it may well have played a role in Trump's 2024 victory, as well as in China's ongoing attack on democracy. It's an enemy I need to know more about.
I don't use it too much myself, but my wife does and I know that Zohran was an absolutely dominant presence on it. Not just in NYC but across the country (we live in Florida!!) He (maybe having to do with his background as the son of a filmmaker) had these really really funny clips, like ones where he just interviews random guys in the subway and asks them about politics, and so totally apolitical people would share them for pure entertainment value, not just for political reasons. And the algorithm for those platforms is much better at serving content that is relevant to a particular person, so for example an Urdu or Hindi-speaking person living in NYC would get Zohran's Hindi/Urdu language ads that had Bollywood references and things in them.
In general I think it would make sense for future Dem campaigns to take some of the enormous pile of money that goes toward buying ads on television (which fewer and fewer people actually watch) and hire a team dedicated purely to making short clips that are entertaining first, political second.
Young people like short videos. Young people (in NYC) tilt progressive. Young people like young charismatic candidates.
In a highly unusual, very hard to repeat situation, tons of young people came out to vote for Mamdani. Young people being young people, the odds are really great that they won't come out to vote in other elections.
In the meantime, Democrats should not abandon the means of communicating with people who are more likely to vote consistently. That most definitely includes television ads.
I think you are overreading what I said if you took away that we should "abandon" television ads. The amount of money that goes into television ads presently is extreme and there's just no way the marginal returns are that high. Half of Americans don't even have cable service at all anymore, and among those who do not all of them actually watch it very often (I technically have it because it's bundled with my internet, I use it a couple times a year for sports).
Also, while it's true that short-form video is most popular among young people, 30% of TikTok's users are over 35, and 15% are over 55! If your mental model of it is the same as the model of social media ca. 2010 it's completely off-base, many older people now use smartphones every day and engage with short-form video.
"...and 15% are over 55! If...."
Okay, so if I want to watch these "short-form videos," do I need to get a new TV? Does the screen need to be shorter?
Meh, if Uncle Walter doesn't mention it, I don't trust it.
In fact, I haven't heard him mention much in 15 - 16 years now, which is why I'm so mistrustful. He's really the man I trust the most in this country.
I listened Ezra Klein interview Chris Hayes, and Hayes' theory was that it wasn't the format per se, but that Mamdani really capitalized on the algorithm. He used video in such a way that his videos would show up in people's feeds who had never even heard of him before. In fact, that was how Hayes himself learned that Mamdani was running. Before that, Hayes had very little idea of who Mamdani was.
I believe Ezra calls it “vertical video” for some reason
yeah he does, which is a bit of a silly name IMO. obviously the videos *are* vertical (unlike youtube/twitch/etc. from the previous generation of long-form video content) which is downstream of them being smartphone-first and that does matter but their verticality is not the most salient component of them, the most salient components are extreme microtargeting, short duration, and that they bring the 'infinite scroll' from Twitter/Reddit/etc. to video.
No doubt. It just made me laugh listening to him - that kind of élite media tic is so dumb and funny, like he just unearthed this new concept to the world. I like Ezra, but dude call it “short-form video” like everyone else!
Kamala is brat
"if issue positions are the primary determinants of outcomes, why didn't any of the other candidates emerge as front-runners in the first place?"
This question seems to flatten the analysis of election outcomes substantially and assumes a far more simplistic world of electoral politics than reality. Candidates aren't all starting from the same position. Cuomo didn't become the front runner because he showed up out of nowhere and seized the mantle, or because all the candidates started at zero on day one of the campaigns and he got off to a hot start due to his position taking and charismatic persuasion. He was the front runner because of his history and name recognition, including a family history that goes back literally decades in NYC. Once Cuomo sucked up the oxygen, it becomes difficult for someone else to break through, and that's despite the fact that Cuomo's positions and personality weren't very appealing given his recent scandals/age/etc..
There's also the fact that Cuomo is petty and likes to take revenge. Too many moderates seemed afraid of him, but nobody was willing to be the first to lead an anti-Cuomo campaign to endorse a different moderate.
I feel like in deep blue areas like NYC, those who are the most concerned with candidates' policies also happen to be the most leftwing.
There isn't a moderate/neoliberal technocrat option because the median voter isn't attracted to technocracy and the ideological voter is much further left.
(Maybe this is half-baked or too post hoc, but I feel like there's some truth there)
'There isn't a moderate/neoliberal technocrat option because the median voter isn't attracted to technocracy and the ideological voter is much further left.'
The problem with this theory is the result's of the previous Dem primary race, in which a non-progressive edged out a technocrat and the more progressive candidate finished third.
But there's definitely a lane for the technocrat because she almost won in 2021! It was very close!
Yes, I agree.
You mean the NYC that voted for Bloomberg for three terms, that very nearly chose Garcia last time, and that has probably the highest concentration of people knowledgeable about finance and economics in the world?
Both matter. As some others here have pointed out, Zohran's biggest issues are in the "dumb but popular" quadrant of the political spectrum.
Issue positions matter in a big picture vibes kind of way not in a solutions white paper kind of way. The median voter is looking for someone to acknowledge and validate first and foremost. This the trick that all good politicians like Clinton, Trump and Mamdani are able to pull off.
Incumbent politicians or those closely tied to the existing structure are unable to acknowledge and validate because doing so means admitting the problem happened on their watch. So they naturally appear "out of touch".
Absolutely agree. Matt’s boiling it down to policy when I don’t think it was policy that made a difference, but absolutely charisma and social change. I highly doubt the landfall for Obama was because of his policy on Iraq. He wanted universal healthcare! And he was much more charismatic and likable than Hillary!
Hilary was to the left of Obama on health care, she supported an individual mandate and he didn't. This was literally the only difference between them on health care policy.
Bernie got fewer votes, that’s why he lost.
> he was kicked out of the running.
I have no idea what you are referring to here.
As someone who doesn't even live in the state, why are people so excited about Zohran in the first place? "Leftist wins Dem primary" is slightly unexpected, but not that often, it recently happened in Chicago and Oakland, and I don't see everyone super excited about Brandon Johnson and Barbara Lee. Is it because he's young and handsome and active on social media?
I think what he's saying is that if Cuomo had not run, and the same coalition of insiders that rallied around Cuomo had instead rallied around somebody like Brad Lander or Tish James, that candidate probably could have won.
I didn't follow the race closely enough to have a strong opinion on whether this is true, but it at least doesn't seem crazy. Honestly even _with_ Cuomo in the race, if the insiders had instead elevated Lander and told Cuomo to pound sand, Lander might've won.
The reason Lander didn't emerge as the "moderate lane" frontrunner is that a bunch of media and political figures, and people with money, anointed Cuomo. As for why they did that, a lot of it seems to have been the same kind of spinelessness that's led to Repubs caving to Trump on everything. They all know he sucks, but none of them is willing to be the first to say so.
Also it’s not hard to imagine a universe of technological abundance existing alongside large groups of impoverished people who don’t get to share in it. In fact that’s what the real world is like. If we can have a world where a futuristic AI-powered Silicon Valley coexists with subsistence farmers in Africa living in mud huts, why is it hard to imagine a universe of a shimmering Coruscant existing alongside impoverished Tatooine?
Perhaps the Empire overinvests in military products and the security services and underinvests in civilian products. It's an exaggerated USSR. So the civilian economy uses excess labor, repairs its old tech instead of replacing it, and bumbles along. The economy is depressed and suffers from inflation and new products don't get made.
The cost of building a Death Star is astronomical. I imagine the galactic economy was extremely impoverished.
You basically need a type of post-scarcity space communism to get something like that built. If Star Wars came out a few decades later, people would have been asking how all of the steel got sourced, where the shipyard was and how that didn't get attacked by angry tax payers, etc. (Not that this would necessarily lead to better storytelling.) There was an episode of Star Trek where the crew encountered a dead Dyson's Sphere to kick off the episode's plot and it took decades for people to go, "wait, who built the Dyson's Sphere?"
<guy who brings up Andor in every Star Wars conversation>: “You need to watch Andor".
Literally though "how do we get the materials to build the Death Star" is the primary plot driver in season 2, and (part of) who's assembling it is the big reveal at the end of season 1.
"<guy who brings up Andor in every Star Wars conversation>: “You need to watch Andor"."
I mean.... you're not wrong.
Guessing it's not Wookiee slave labour in the new incarnation.
Close!
Are you saying the Death Star could only be built in a post-scarcity economy?
Probably. That would definitely be true of Starkiller Base.
Bajillions of credits for Death Stars, not one fractional credit for target practice!
What gets me about this in Star Wars is that so many of the poor people don't seem to be living on their ancestral homeworld. They somehow got the money to travel at faster-than-light speeds to either live in a new slum or become a subsistence farmer on a desert planet.
I mean we've got Venezuelans doing menial labor jobs and living ten to a room here in the US. There's always a worse situation.
Yes this exactly 😂
<guy who brings up Andor in every Star Wars conversation>: “this is why Andor is so good”
It really is though. It’s a universe where social elites are throwing lavish dinner parties while people live in cramped apartments 1,000 floors below, or are just holding on working menial labor jobs in far-flung regions.
The inequality in SW illustrates two things. A Republic that wasn’t serving the people and was bogged down in procedural votes; leaving an opening for a Sith Empire.
Secondly an Empire that has the power to improve the people’s lot but instead at every opportunity uses human labor when AI and technology could get the job done.
Yes, exactly. Many currently existing states on our Earth have either bad political institutions that kill incentives to save and invest, and so are perpetually capital poor, or they just have high inequality. I think you see some evidence of both of those being potential problems in various parts of the Star Wars universe.
Even droids with near AGI aren’t necessarily a cure-all. If they’re expensive to make, annoying to organize, and they depreciate quickly, they could end up looking like just another kind of capital which can be both scarce and poorly distributed.
It's worth remembering that Star Wars is essentially a Manichean universe, where warring religious factions with supernatural powers have been causing periodic disasters for tens of thousands of years. The universe is full of examples of technologies that ancient civilizations had, which no one remembers how to build and use, and which remain lost for ridiculous lengths of time. Often, it seems like the very idea of particular kinds of tech progress get philosophically tainted and culturally suppressed.
For those asking about sourcing steel for the Death Star: First, by weight, it's about 600k times the current annual steel production of Earth, and the Republic had on the order of a million planets. It would be hard but far from impossible to do with normal procurement processes. But in a larger sense: Consider that we know from KOTOR 2 that the Rakata built the Star Forge, and had access to starlifting and element transmutation, five thousand years before the founding of the Old Republic, *and* left it behind and intact enough to restart and use 25k yrs later. But, it was built as a Dark Side tool and no one ever developed a non-intrinsically-evil version of it. The Sith also had Dark Side rituals that extend the lifespan, but no one ever scaled up that, or the Jedi healing techniques beyond a few thousand Jedi knights, and no one ever developed effective force-neutral life-extending medical tech. The one clear instance we have of a Jedi knight trying to learn about non-Jedi, non-Sith philosophies and techniques regarding the Force is Jacen Solo, and it corrupts him into becoming a Sith and taking over the New Republic.
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
William Gibson, 1993
What I both hate and love about this quote is that it is timeless.
It is always true. I love that.
It also always implies that the past was different, and more evenly distributed. I hate that.
Pretty much the entirety of human history there were haves and have-nots. The differentiating factors were different in both pre- and post-agricultural societies, but the divisions were still there.
Matthew 26:11.
I think the big issue is that Tattooine seems to have a bunch of the modern technology that would be better to use than human labor for lots of things!
As soon as AGI unlocks unlimited abundance here on earth, our AI overlords will immediately conscript all of humanity and consume all of the excess trillions building a dyson sphere during the next century.
And thus, the re-industrialization of the heartland, and we all become the factory workers we so desire to be.
The children yearn for the hyperdrive assembly lines!
I'm just thrilled that Matt answered my question and I love all the follow-up comments :)
Israel actually challenges a lot of progressive assumptions. A good example is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book talks about how visiting there made him reconsider his support for reparations when he had previously held up the German reparations to Israel as a positive example. Israel is the ultimate woke fantasy in sone ways—a historically oppressed group turns the tables and gets its land back, and manages to get everyone who opposes this branded as racist and cancelled. The fact that this resulted in another group becoming even more oppressed causes even hardcore progressives to question this fantasy and understand that the solution to white ethnonationalism is not non-white ethnonationalism but instead non-racial democracy. Zohran Mamdani’s dad actually wrote a good book about this, “Neither Settler Nor Native.”
And federal politics is controlled by the Senate, gerrymandering, and a Supreme Court chosen by partisan procedural hardball, all of which take it further from real voter preference than city politics.
Yeah, visiting Israel was transformative for me in realizing just how weird the American concept of race is. In the US, we're obsessed with skin color, but we can at least say that we're all American and we can bond over our shared love of hamburgers and baseball.
Meanwhile, in Israel, people's skin color isn't that different, but it's extremely difficult to form those bonds of empathy and camaraderie with people who speak a different language, to say nothing of religious differences and historical grievances. And so the main thing that can bring people together is their belief in everyone's shared humanity, which unfortunately humans find pretty easy to forget and ignore.
Anyway, if you try to view the world through a US lens, a lot of it won't make any sense.
If you showed the typical American photos of 50 Israeli Jews and 50 Palestinian Arabs broadly representative of their societies they'd have a hard time accurately sorting them by ethnicity.
Ethnoguessr is apparently really trending right now
Narcissism of small differences (see the Sneetches). Its prevalent in many of the ethno-religious hot spots (Northern Ireland, former Yugoslavia, Russia/Ukraine, Rwanda, India/Pakistan etc.) Even the Swedes and the Norwegians have beef from back in the day.
My Grandma is a Swede who has beef with the Finns
I'd argue that the Middle East makes a great case for dividing populations along ethnic/sectarian lines. A multi-ethnic democracy in the Middle East isn't utopia -- it's Lebanon or Iraq. (Even Turkey has had significant tensions with its Kurdish minority.)
You could look to Europe as well. It was extremely unstable until it had undergone enough gruesome wars to sufficiently homogenize all of its countries.
Israel's problems have very little to do with the ethnic nature of its democracy. Israeli Arabs, by and large, are doing much better than their brethren elsewhere in the region. The issues stem entirely from a nearly century-long *war* where neither side wants to concede. Putting all of these people together in a "democracy" would lead to civil war. (They'd be in the same army fighting Iran? Really?)
On the other hand, if both sides agreed to borders for two ethnically homogenous states, there wouldn't be any basis for further conflict. (This, of course, is difficult to imagine given that the Palestinians' demand is "no Jewish state" rather than "we want a state," but bear with me for the sake of argument.)
I don’t think so. The Ottoman Empire ruled over a prosperous (for its time) and cosmopolitan empire for hundreds of years, but when it started copying Western nationalism towards its end, the result was the genocide of the Armenians and other groups (as well as genocide of Turks from the Balkans) and the mess the Middle East is in today.
A lot of these ethnic lines are artificial and strong only because they have reinforced by historical grievances that were created precisely by ethnonationalism in the first place and can only be erased with time and the abandonment of ethnonationalism.
There's a very good book on this: Holy Lands Reviving Pluralism in the Middle East by Nicholas Pelham. I would caution though, that this embrace of pluralism and cosmopolitanism is not compatible with Palestinian nationalism as currently expressed. Current Palestinian nationalism is hostile to ethnic and religious minorities and is eliminationist in its rhetoric.
I'll grant you that if nationalism had never existed, it would be easier to have multi-ethnic empires or even democracies.
But I don't think you can put the toothpaste back in the tube. Given the fact that people have now formed attachments on the basis of nationality, I'm skeptical that forcing people into multi-ethnic democracies will mitigate (rather than exacerbate) nationalistic sentiment.
Nationalism always existed, there were plenty of Serbian, Druze and Bulgarian revolts in the period 1500-1750 long before modern nationalist concepts were developed.
this flips the causation. turkey copied western nationalism once the ottoman empire fell apart, not the other way around.
The Ottoman Empire wasn't prosperous after about 1780s,it was about as viable as the Ancien Regime in France. It was saved by the British in 1799, 1840 and 1854 and ironically by the Russians in 1833.
The Ottoman Empire was not in any sense a viable modern governance model.
Inevitably this line of thinking always ends with whitewashing the Ottoman Empire and other Islamic empires. I recommend reading Jews and Arabs by Memmi.
So the multinational, multi-ethnic, multi linguistic empire is not the aberration. It was a very common form of political organization. The Ottoman, Byzantine, Roman, various Persian Empires, Muslim Empires, etc… would meet that definition. But they weren’t democracies. The population didn’t have much of an expectation of a say in government, and the interaction of state and subject was limited. It was often not pleasant. It’s also inaccurate to say that the Ottomans fell because they embraced nationalism. The Ottoman Empire was falling behind its European peers for nearly 2 centuries by the time of the First World War. Nationalism didn’t help, in that a lot of its subject peoples wanted out, but it failed to adapt as Europe industrialized and changed. The Young Turks and the Armenian genocide are better understood as a last gasp and radicalization brought on by war.
Important and true argument that often gets overlooked. Multiethnic states tend to be much poorer and more unstable. Yes there are some weird counter examples such as Switzerland but in the main. If Middle Eastern states could become more ethnically and religiously homogenous without violence it would be a good thing.
There is no historical basis for assuming that ME states can become more ethnically and religiously homogeneous without violence. Turkey has ethnically cleansed or brutally repressed its ethnic and religious minorities. Same thing with Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria. The most diverse country in the region is Iran, ironically.
I do try to avoid posting about Israel too much but the above is pretty outrageous.
"Everyone who opposes [Israel] branded as racist and cancelled." - not true.
"[Israel] resulted in another group becoming even more oppressed" - Arabs have agency. Partition plans have been drawn up by global powers for generations. The most notable, in 1948, instead saw Arabs declare a "war of extermination". In the 90s and 00s, peace negotiations were repeatedly set back by suicide bombing campaigns. Today Hamas is putting out press releases about the need for Palestine to be cleaned of Zionist filth.
"The solution to white ethnonationalism is not non-white ethnonationalism" - there is *a lot* more than ethnicity going on in this conflict. Israel is a democracy with the living standards of a rich Western nation, ~$50k/year. The Arab societies around it are generally authoritarian and have income levels that are ~75-80% lower. It's hard to know how Palestinian society would function if it wasn't occupied, but they voted twice to call themselves South Syria and to annex themselves into Jordan, so it seems reasonable to assume it'd be similar. We do know Hamas governs by execution and torture of critics, and that the Palestinian Authority has had exactly one leadership transition since 1969 (on the death of the prior leader).
Then there's the matter of language, alphabet and religion. I'm aware of a couple of bilingual countries in the world but not countries that run two (very different) alphabets and religious calendars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azzam_Pasha_quotation
https://en.royanews.tv/news/60934
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Arab_Congress
Sorry, “everyone” was hyperbole, but it’s nonetheless true that the majority of cancellation in the US in recent years happens to critics of Israel: https://rajivsethi.substack.com/p/under-fire. Coates, who was a pro-Israel progressive before he visited Israel, got called an extremist and anti-Semite on national TV for writing a book about his personal experiences in the West Bank and how that led him to reject ethnocracy. Rumeysa Okturk was detained for weeks and may be deported for writing a calm anodyne op-ed supporting a boycott of Israel when no one would’ve cared if she wrote the same op-ed supporting the boycott of any other country.
The partition plans caused inevitable fighting over land, and indeed Israel did expand beyond the 1947 UN partition borders and conquered 60% of the territory that had been assigned to the Arab state, ethnically cleansing most of the population there, decades before Hamas. It would’ve been better for the British to maintain order until a non-racial democracy could be established in its place instead of doing a haphazard withdrawal that set the stage for ethnic conflict (something of a theme of the decolonization process, as Mamdani’s book talks about).
What language would this country have spoken. What alphabet. Would food regulation be kosher or halal?
There were multiple similar situations in this timeframe. In no other case that I'm aware of did a multi-ethnic society result (unless you count being occupied by the Red Army). The Raj was partitioned. Germans were moved from all over Europe to (a newly shrunk) Germany. Greeks were moved from Anatolia while Turks were moved from the Balkans. Italians from Yugoslavia.
Britain had up to 100,000 troops (it varied over time) trying to keep the peace in Palestine, and it wasn't working. And that was *with* a promise of partition as an effort at deconfliction.
This is a Britain that was so poor it was rationing food, clothes and gasoline. It's quite something to suggest the problem was the Brits didn't spend enough trying to keep the peace.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1947-02-18/debates/4f8bc0e9-f2d5-4267-8d07-10707986db6e/PalestineConference(GovernmentPolicy)
In what universe was Coates pro-Israel before his trip?
> got called an extremist and anti-Semite on national TV for writing a book about his personal experiences in the West Bank and how that led him to reject ethnocracy.
Holy moly this is tendentious. He got called an anti-semite for what the book said, not the simple fact that he wrote it. Come on.
The problem is a non racial democracy doesn't work in Israel given the position of many Palestinians that there should be no Isreal, and often no Jews
Matt should really do more to tie his answer about where Rs should moderate to his answer about waste in Social Security, because this is precisely where the bipartisan federal governance catastrophe lies. The reason healthcare for poor people is getting thrown to the wolves is because both parties refuse to constrain transfers to wealthy retirees.
That's not why though. You're implying they had to make some kind of judgement call between competing priorities. But it's the opposite, they ballooned the deficit at the same time. They're cutting Medicaid because they want to.
The Rs are in fact bad and not serious about the budget. We have a "cut taxes" party and a "more spending" party. It's an impending disaster. We need TWO "fund the government" parties. Even better we need a fund the government amendment because representative democracy ain't gonna fix this shit.
Err ... Clinton was responsible.
"...The reason healthcare for poor people is getting thrown to the wolves is because both parties refuse to constrain transfers to wealthy retirees...."
Really? I would have thought there were many better explanations for why Medicaid is targeted in the current bill: Republican dislike of federal support for healthcare; desire to cut taxes; dislike of the poor; etc..
My guess is that even if Social Security were run differently, this bill would still target Medicaid.
They spent a long time trying to reform social security first. It would be better for all of us if they had succeeded. The newly dominant populist, zero sum warfare dynamic is directly tied up in the ever shrinking share of the federal budget available for discretionary spending. Cutting the share of the budget dedicated to SS/Medicare/Debt Service is the only way to maintain support for anti-poverty funding.
It's always been obvious that the strategy on SS was to "reform it" into a means-tested program for the poor, and then politically exterminate it (the same way they just did for big chunks of Medicaid) by telling their voters that, since they aren't poor, cuts to the program won't affect voters' lives.
No, it is not the _only_ way. One could raise the revenues going to social insurance. We need to have a conversation about how large a _fully funded_ social insurance system we should have
"It would be better for all of us if they had succeeded."
Obviously false, if you want to say things like "all of us". I think you mean literally "some of us". I'm also skeptical that you could do this in a way that is actually fair (note: I do not mean equitable, I mean fair).
So what's a "wealthy" retiree? Is it measured by how much one earned over their lifetime? Or how many assets one has at retirement?
So we're going to punish people that lived frugally, saved a lot in stocks and bonds in order to retire wealthy?
Are we going to punish people that had high earnings but didn't save enough? Or are we going to bail out people that had high earnings, but didn't save enough? it's moral hazard and unfairness all around.
You forgot political inability to target Medicare.
Social security is already progressive in the sense that higher earners get back a much smaller fraction of what they pay in (look up social security bend points—up to a certain amount of lifelong earnings you get 90% of your average contributions, then 30% after that point, then 10%).
It also has an upcoming problem funding itself alone—there’s no huge pool of money there to pull from.
If you stopped making social security means”universal” and kept social security’s tax alone, that’s an additional 6% (or 12 if you figure in employer contributions too) tax on the people making under whatever the current cap is. 6% is a pretty big chunk of most people’s effective tax rate.
We probably do give too much money to wealthy retirees, but for decades and for some time to come, Social Security was/is/will be independently and fully funded by Social Security taxes, and that has zero impact on healthcare for poor people getting thrown to the wolves.
The reason for that is because of the existence of the Republican party, full stop.
If wealthy retirees get "too much" from SS then maybe marginal tax rates are just too low.
SS is not in my view just about reducing elder poverty; it's that
a) a national system can provide annuities at lower cost than individuals could purchase them and
b) we believe that people are "myopic" about saving "enough" (as much as they wish they had in retrospect) for post labor force participation life.
If we had a simple superannuation scheme, we woud need in addition a quasi-forced saving program even on top of making the "income tax" into a progressive consumption tax.
>SS is not in my view just about reducing elder poverty
Are you saying that in your view it shouldn't be just about reducing elder poverty? Because descriptively, that seems like it's only function.
The vast majority of SSA spending has never been an investment in Treasuries, it's been in direct transfers from the young to the old. I think during peak investment years when the baby boomers were all still working, only ~5% of payroll tax receipts went into the trust fund. And basically nothing does now.
Social security was specifically created to reduce elder poverty, and get old people out of the workforce, freeing up jobs for younger people during the depression. Elder poverty was a major issue before social security…since the beginning of time. The idea of retirement as a stage in life, when healthy people would be able to choose to stop working, not forced by health reasons or infirmity, for normal people is very much a 20th century development.
What is maddening about the current system, however, is that the cohort receiving benefits is the wealthiest generation in human history. If one were designing a universal system of social security for a modern country, I don’t think anyone would structure it like the existing social security system.
The “trust fund” really isn’t a trust fund. Money comes in, benefits get paid out. Anything left over purchased special purpose treasuries that were created and only issued for social security funds. There is no liquid market for them and they don’t trade. It wasn’t an issue for the first 50 years or so of the program, because the money coming in covered benefits going out. Government accounting is very different
Do you have a source for the 5% number? ChatGPT says the peak was 28% in 2006.
ChatGPT Answer:
Using 2006 as a peak example:
- SS tax revenue (payroll + benefit taxation): ~$637B
- Excess of income over cost (i.e., added to trust fund): ~$183B
- Ratio: $183B / $637B ≈ 28.7%
Two different issues.
I’m saying that reducing elder poverty should not be the only reason for transferring consumption to people after their labor market years. I’m in favor of making the transfers to some extent a substitute for saving and investment that most people probably woud not do, that is higher for those who earned higher incomes. The extremes are a flat rate and a state run pension scheme with individual account that pay according to amounts earned + voluntarily deposited amounts.
A totally different issue is what kind of taxes should be levied to fund those transfers. I favor a consumption VAT. One might want to set the level to accumulate surpluses in decades of high income/benefit ratio and vice versa, but I think it is simpler just to adjust rates periodically
‘
More generally, Democrats should offer constructive counter proposals to make entitlements and poverty assistance more efficient. For example, why not expand the ACA to cover the poor and the elderly and eliminate the Medicare and Medicaid bureaucracies?
There's not a good way to do this politically - there's zero constituency for 'make government more efficient on aggregate' (too complicated), and specific proposals that have the effect of increasing the SS payments for poorer elderly will get demagogued by the other side as confiscatory. This is why Biden and other dems pledged to protect the middle class by holding harmless any household that earns $400k or less. Obv the real money's held by the top 10%, but dems peddle the myth that a truly fair tax on Bezos is enough, because it's politically convenient to do so. Many of us in the top 10% (doctors, lawyers, corporate upper middle management) wouldn't be thrilled at a dem platform that taxes the rich (us), so dems keep the details hazy and enact unfunded progressive bills whenever they get power.
It's early in the morning and my brain isn't working. You're either (1) agreeing with Matt that means-testing is good policy. Or (2) you're pointing out that means-tested policies make for fat and easy political targets by tax-cut-crazed GOP politicians, which (I would argue) makes them incredibly bad policy. The problem is I can't tell which.
Means testing retirement entitlements is good and necessary to maintain available funds for anti-poverty programs.
The same anti-poverty programs that are being slashed to bits in exchange for tax cuts aimed at the wealthy.
Yep, since we won't restrain the bad spending we're left in hyperpartisan fights about the "ideological" spending instead.
Examples of where benefits *are* means-tested do not seem to suggest that Republicans would give up regressive tax cuts?
Some taxes are better, some taxes are worse, what's bad is unfunded spending and the budget being distorted by past unfunded expenditures. The Rs certainly don't have a coherent position on funding the government.
If you listen to business lobbyists, their case for tax cuts has never been about Social Security. It's always been on paper about incentives for business creation and R&D, while being essentially about having more money in donors' pockets.
I actually think corporate taxes could be lower, but the incident tax burden on people like me (top 5-7%) should at minimum be increased to cover the lower corporate tax rate, and probably increased over all.
The corporate tax rate should be 0% and income and capital gains taxes should increase. Tax the owners of capital, not the managers of capital.
If we keep the "income" tax, capital gains should be indexed before being taxed. In a consumption tax the source of the consumption funding does not matter.
Not "lower" zero. All made up with a progressive consumption tax
I'm fine with 0, but lower is still an improvement.
“…transfers to wealthy retirees…”
I think you can take out the retirees portion and it would be accurate.
"In unmoderated forums, obnoxious behavior inevitably crowds out everything else. If you moderate in a serious way, you’re not going to make everyone happy all the time with your choices but you’ll come up with a product that’s better than one where you refuse to choose."
This, obviously, has been a contentious issue over the past few days.
My take is that while I think it's good to set a very high bar for preemptively casting certain discourse as beyond the pale, I also don't fetishize free speech - particularly in a private forum like this - in the way that some do. Back-and-forths on irreconciliable issues that literally run off my computer screen because they're so nested don't bring us closer to an understanding of anything; they just piss everyone off and serve the purpose of satisfying one's need to yell at a stranger on the Internet.
I also really do rarely ban people. I drop warnings periodically and had to ban a few last week. But overall you’re adults and you know the rules.
I also do read every comment!
"...I also really do rarely ban people..."
Hah! Talk about survivorship bias. We know the truth, Ben -- thousands of your victims could refute your claim to leniency, if you had not rendered them permanently mute. The Pol Pot of moderators, standing astride the mass graves of silenced voices while mocking the dead with your claims to mercy. You don't fool us.
Careful, or you, yourself, will join them.
Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system!
“Help, help, I’m being repressed!”
Reading every comment on an internet forum is an exhausting task, thanks for taking it on.
I take it the bans last week came from the specific directive from Matt?
> Reading every comment on an internet forum is an exhausting task
And yet some of us pay $60/year for the privilege!
Oh I definitely don't read every comment, some subthreads I will be very happy to collapse and just keep them hidden.
Genuinely curious amid all of the self-congratulation on SB's moderation, but did you warn or otherwise sanction Bronz Zoo Cobra for his clearly expressed support for, if not encouragement of, ethnic cleansing and potentially annihilation for Palestinians? (apologies if something happened and I missed it)
https://www.slowboring.com/p/friday-thread-4a7/comment/130074407
If I said that Israeli Jews deserved to be expelled and/or exterminated for crimes committed over the past 75 years by their government (which was/is certainly more authentically representative of Israeli Jews than Hamas is of Gazans), I would expect a warning if not a ban (sidenote, is there a link to an SB specific comment policy? If so, I couldn't find it)
I should note that I sometimes agree with BZC's comments on a variety of issues (though not about the acceptability of Diddy's treatment of women), but I was surprised to see how openly he doubled down over what Palestinians as a group "deserve", without the usual caveats of only referring to terrorists, Hamas, etc
I will also respectfully tip my cap to California Josh, who, although I frequently disagree with his comments, was forthright (along with several other pro-Israel commenters) in calling out BZC for his hateful rhetoric: "Earlier this week you argued that every Palestinian deserves death. You're something like 3 standard deviations outside the mean for morals"
https://www.slowboring.com/p/tuesday-thread-ff9/comment/131206533
ETA: Presumably BZC's only issue with Israel's continuous and wanton killing of Palestinian civilians while dispensing aid in the most dangerous and humiliating way possible is that they are giving aid at all, instead of committing to the "let Gaza starve" policy?
https://archive.ph/37RtH
I mean yesterday I was arguing with another commenter who said that Jamal Khashoggi's murder wasn't worth being upset about because "there are no good guys in the Middle East" and even those who outwardly are calling for reform don't share our values—"it's all a front." Some people here are happy to bite that bullet.
I appreciate the amount of work you put into it, but I also have to say, when it comes to bans, predictability and consistency are way more important than frequency.
Junior Senpai! Your moderation is eminently judicious and enlightened!
Having said this, I agree that SB commenters are the best. Even other Substacks that I really like - notably Notes from the Middleground and Singal-Minded - have comments sections that include a lot of "emotionally validate me!"-type demands.
Silver Bulletin as well is a cesspool more often than not despite Nate being a pretty evenhanded writer
I’m glad that Nate has turned on the setting where only paid subscribers can comment because it prevents me from getting into flame wars that I would be tempted to.
Text of Singal-Minded: "It is important to make sure we are making policy based on sound science. Here is why the text of this paper in The Lancet does not match the statistical results table, which suggests politics superseding data."
Comments on Singal-Minded: "If I ever meet a trans person, Imma eat them."
Part of the reason I dropped Singal's Substack from my list of subscriptions.
Like it or not, the quality of the comments says something about the owner of the Substack. Even if that person doesn't agree with many/most of the comments, letting it become a cesspool, like the examples cited here, indicates something about the person's values.
And weirdly, I find the SB comments, even those I disagree with, more interesting than Matt's posts (which are fine to be sure). It's a great comment section and every single commenter is someone I value.*
* Except for one. "Dysphemistic treadmill delenda est." (Oh, I kid, I kid.. . . or do I?)
I'm a great believer in the thesis of Anil Dash's blog post from many years ago: "If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault" https://www.anildash.com/2011/07/20/if_your_websites_full_of_assholes_its_your_fault-2/
Anil's website used to have a really good, well-moderated comments section. When he decided he no longer had the time to moderate it properly, he turned it off, because he knew it would fill up with assholes if he didn't moderate it.
"...* Except for one...."
Aww, thanks, Marc. You make me feel special.
Again - Matt regularly, even in his most 'the Left is dumb and wrong' moments still posts anodyne posts like "raising taxes on rich people is good" or "Social Security is cool" that chases off the weirdest anti-woke people who spiral based on their heterodox opinions on specific cultural issues.
This is something Singal (because he's not that type of writer), Silver (because he's a South Park Republican (mostly laudatory)), or ironically Freddie DeBoer (because he's a Marxist) does.
Want a reasonable comment section? Actually moderate but also say nice things about Democrat's.
I think this is part of why Reddit has remained a generally positive and useful place, and even why some of the very old school forums are hanging on. Moderation is necessary. Unmoderated forums are very much like public spaces that are totally unpoliced, quickly trashed. Give me lightly moderated places of discussion or give me death!
Reddit has remained useful? I feel like it turned entirely into hyperpartisan bubbles years ago in any remotely ideological sub.
I mean some of us like stuff that's not just politics. Unmoderated spaces turn into trash even if you're talking about World of Warcraft builds or photos of cats.
Reddit moderation used to consist almost entirely of "keep your posts on topic guys". That was good. In most subs it got way more ideological and language police-y over time in ways that made almost any attempt at discussing anything with an ideological valence uninteresting.
I mean the stuff I use Reddit for just isn't very ideological. But pretty strict rules prevent r/Taylorswift from becoming a creepy collection of sexualized photos the way many others are. It's not off topic per se to post sexy pics of her it just descends into being porn adjacent once you stop actively looking to be welcoming and enforcing rules that are basically arbitrary.
Many non-political sub-reddits are quite useful. I found my new lawn mower perusing r/lawnmowers.
"...found my new lawn mower purusing r/lawnmowers."
On the one hand, that's exactly the kind of reddit that I would expect a lawnmower to peruse.
On the other hand, if I found my new lawn mower was loafing around perusing Reddits, I would tell it to get to work mowing my damned lawn. I didn't buy a lawnmower just so that it could waste time on the web.
As opposed to treadmills, who often get too neglected in their activity due to people not using them as much as they thought they would.
"...often get too neglected in their activity...."
Many treadmills have a second career as clothes-hangers.
Poor treadmills --- sad, lonely, undusted, reduced to menial tasks like oversized clothes hangers and collectors of hidden dust bunnies.
I...that strikes me as the kind of online community that seems ridiculous, until you need a lawn mower and it's indispensable.
IME those types of communities do sometimes attract a few groupthink attractor-states (and in part this is due to the understandable problem that even on r/lawnmowers, most people will have had experience with, like, 3 lawnmowers, tops), but honestly it's a tradeoff I'm pretty okay with -- often my actual goal is "reduce the search space to three choices and pick one of them based on the goals I'm trying to satisfice."
Meanwhile, when I ask for help on r/lawnmowers that I'm currently trapped under my lawnmower, everyone just laughs at me.
r/aviation is IMO the absolute gold standard of "populated and commented-on by people with experience and competency on a topic that's of interest to a generalist audience."
r/ApplianceRepair is fantastic!
What possible hyperpartisan bubble could there be on r/The Wiggles, about an Australian childrens band or r/multilingual parenting which is about raising children who speak multiple languages fluently?
If you think everything on Reddit is hyperpartisan that says more about your lack of interests than about Reddit.
Is this some joke about the Wiggles I'm missing? Because I would be almost shocked if a "multilingual parenting" subreddit wasn't descending into circular firing squads of racism accusations on a regular basis.
Since that has literally never happened on that subreddit and I've been there for years.
I wonder if you will realise your mental model is very wrong and update or just continue to double down and change nothing?
Why would anyone “update their mental model” based on an unsourced assertion from an internet stranger? And even if you believe it to be true, it could simply mean that you miss or ignore the stuff Dave is talking about. Every person has a slightly different experience with internet communities. You could both be correct based on what you actually see and engage with.
State and city specific reddits have a habit of becoming political echo chambers. The ones I've seen have been very left leaning but I'm sure there are right leaning ones too. Just annoying to have to wade through endless political circlejerks to find out about the best sushi spots or what its like to live in New Haven.
While true, this doesn't really do much to disprove my claim that the OP's problem is their interests and not reddit. "I happen to live here" is not an interest-based Reddit.
There is no real hyperpartisanship on r/CookbookLovers or r/functionalprint or r/amaro or r/toddlers or r/nanny or r/nolawns or r/omad or r/coloring or r/skincareaddiction or r/financialindependence or r/stayathomedaddit or ....
If your subreddit doesn't have an actual topic then, no surprise, rage-bait political click bait will become what is upvoted unless you happen to have some extremely committed and heavy-handed moderators.
But that doesn't mean Reddit is useless and has politics in every subreddit.
/r/Texas was interesting - very much a “gay married hemp farmers need their guns” kind of space, even though the majority of the participants probably live in the suburbs of Houston or Dallas.
"...very much a “gay married hemp farmers need their guns” kind of space...."
Is that a *kind* of space? Sounds like a very sparsely populated kind -- maybe it's the only member of its genus?
I hate how much algorithms allow every non-political part of the internet to become political in the Trump era. My personal favorite example is that on the first day of Covid lockdowns, I was looking for any site that wasn't 100% Covid coverage, so I went to Bored Panda for the first time in years since that should be frivolous enough to not be about Covid. The first two pages of the site that day were 100% Covid. You're a clickbait amuse bouche of a site, stay in your lane!
I use my city subreddit to try to challenge people on ethics around dehumanizing the homeless, shelters under the freeway etc. Sometimes I get voted up, sometimes down so I'm probably not having any impact at all and the thumbs are pretty much random. But it keeps me thinking and gives me an outlet...
IME , it’s the worst of both worlds: far left posturing on most topics, far right posturing for NextDoor crime blotter news.
Posting in some subreddits (like the "gender critical" ones) would get you automatically banned from other subreddits (like ones devoted to unrelated interests and not politics, even ones you never posted in). That is an example of hyperpartisanship. I would get it if you turned every niche interest into a politics debate; they would want to moderate that because that is annoying. But it was more like, "if you hold this political position, you cannot have a generic discussion about the Wiggles."
Reddit has always consisted of bubbles--that's its main strength--but what I find more distressing are subs where the subject has nothing to do with ideology of politics, but have nonetheless taken an aggressively woke turn. The bans on linking to tweets in some subs are the most annoying--just admit that Elon's got us there, and now that he's not even doing anything with the White House before, relent on this.
When has discussing anything partisan on the internet ever been useful?
"...When has discussing anything partisan on the internet ever been useful?..."
I take this to be a sly joke on all of us here at SB, and I approve.
Speaking of a high class commentariat, always a pleasure, dyspeptic treadmill
But I still miss The Estate of Bob Saget
I don't think there's anything irritable about our good friend DT, nor am I aware of any indigestion problems--DT just recognizes the value of using words that get to the point, even if they seem harsh at first glance.
(yes, I know autocorrect likely got you)
"...still miss The Estate..."
Me too, Casey. And thanks for the shout-out.
Reddit comments were in fact interesting once upon a time, now it's only good for pockets of obscure technical expertise.
"...obscure technical expertise...."
Though that itself is a really good thing! I use Reddit to pursue several obscure hobbies, and it is a great resource for that sort of thing.
Obscure technical expertise is the best kind
My son's friend got temporarily banned from the flag joke subreddit because he posted something that could be deemed offensive about a country's flag. I kind of love that there is a place on the internet for such nerds and that someone could be banned for a joke that the vast majority of people wouldn't even understand.
C'mon Dave, you can argue that Reddit is worse now than you used to find it without this kind of objectively inaccurate hyperbole. Reddit is enormous and covers a huge swath of materials. Gaming, movies, sports, etc., are all non-obscure areas where Reddit can be a great place to interact with others.
This whole thread is just a bizarre rabbit hole of caricatures. It's akin to saying that the grocery store is full of terrible food and disgusting poison because it changed it's supplier for some of your favorite foods. Acting like Reddit was ever even predominantly politics (let alone exclusively) says more about what you used Reddit for than what Reddit ever actually was or currently is.
There are some great niche subreddits focused on specific topics, ex: r/woodstoving and many local subreddits.
The anecdotal nature of some subreddits is interesting and is what I learn there is perhaps even valid. r/Teachers has a lot to say about the current state of education, and r/fednews has stories from the entire federal government about DOGE and the psychological impact on employees of an intentional campaign to destroy the morale of the people people who keep the U.S. running. Journalists post contact information there so they can report on what's going on.
my personal favorite is r/BreadStapledToTrees
Reddit is extremely partisan. Most of it is very left-wing, and some corners of it are very right wing.
What's annoying is the mods are also partisan. It is very common for someone to post something extremely left-wing in a forum about, say, economics or Star Trek, and if you respond with a disagreement, YOU get banned for being political.
As an example, I responded to someone once in a subreddit about retirement savings that claimed that 75% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck, and therefor cannot afford to put money in a 401k or IRA, and I responded that this was obvious nonsense (like literally 30 seconds of googling will tell you more than half of Americans own stocks), and got my post deleted for being political.
I think the ability to downvote when needed is quite helpful on Reddit. Speaking personally, the subs i frequent seem to be in pretty good shape compared to any other social media platform (or comments section, present company excluded).
Reddit is no longer a useful place and hasn't been in a couple years
Get off the goon subreddits
Instructions unclear: I got off on the goon subreddits
Excellent work
I think Reddit is fascinating here because it actually shows both sides. One of my hobbies is being obsessed with pop music and if you go to the subreddits for Ariana Grande or Sabrina Carpenter they're deeply creepy places. Shout out to r/ariheads and r/sabrinacarpenterfans. Not all pop stars are like this sometimes the name one gets a good moderator (r/Taylorswift r/Carlyraejepsen and r/oliviarodrigo are all great) and they keep the creeps away. It's kind of totally luck and if you want a Taylor creep reddit they certainly exist but I think you know what you're getting into if you goto taylorswiftlegs. They've buried the random button, they've taken porn and I think gore out of all. They're working hard so you don't accidentally end up in that part of Reddit.
"I accidentally ended up in that part of reddit" sounds like the beginning of a horror story.
"... the beginning of a horror story...."
Don't go down into the sub-reddit!
But jokes aside -- there are lots of good Reddits! And lots of good sub-reddits! It is still a great resource for many things, even if parts of it are no longer functional.
Isn't that basically the plot of Scream 5?
(I hope this doesn't come across as too antagonistic, but here it goes.)
"Back-and-forths on irreconcilable issues that literally run off my computer screen because they're so nested don't bring us closer to an understanding of anything"
I understand that the discussions about trans issues aren't to your taste, but it's ironic reading that statement in light of Matt's answer above, which included this: "a lot of the lengthier comment threads are people really digging into these things in a serious way. I think that reflects really well on our readers." Perhaps you'd disagree with the comments on trans issues are conducted "in a serious way". But I defy you to find someone commenting on Slow Boring, on any issue, more thoughtfully engaged, respectful, and articulate than Jean, who writes deep in those threads.
The moderators tolerate a high degree of incivility and endless, repetitive discussion about almost every topic, but not this one. Why? I don't think it's a mystery, but most explanations aren't credible. It's because trans issues divide the coalition, and people that take *some* heterodox positions on it, like Matt and the commentariat, are at risk of being pushed into irrelevance on the left.
I think you are missing the obvious other reason that trans issues generally require more moderation: they attract a lot of people mostly interested in personally attacking the subjects of the discussion, often in intentionally offensive, dehumanizing ways.
I don't think that position would survive a fair-minded and rigorous analysis of the Slow Boring comments.
Note they didn’t say a majority of the participants are doing that. But it seems quite clear to me that some participants are, even here.
No, but Stonky said they require more moderation.
More than what? I think that has to be "more than other topics". I am extremely skeptical.
I think it quite clearly does require more moderation than most topics here, not because of the majority of commenters, but because of some especially emotionally angry responses. In other forums, other issues are more likely triggers.
All Matt asked is that people use the preferred pronouns of a subject of a post and not deadname them. I’m not especially wrapped up in the pronoun stuff myself, but the fact that people were upset at that objectivity clear and simple request that does nothing to inhibit substantive discussion illustrates the point. Very “hit dog will holler.”
"Trans issue" discussions do seem to become contentious (here) more frequently than many other topics.
I realize that plenty of people think that's the case, but I think that impression is caused by selection, confirmation, and availability biases, plus the way that people tend to believe something that's frequently asserted, even if it isn't substantiated.
There's also the fact that proponents of that theory aren't always going to recognize other kinds of dehumanizing speech. If we're talking about how often commenters are "personally attacking the subjects of the discussion, often in intentionally offensive, dehumanizing ways", the number one subjects would be Republicans and number two would be (far) leftists.
How does selection bias (or even availability bias) in any way relate to an observation that a discussion has become contentious? Are you actually claiming, without even knowing where I stand on the trans issue that I am so tied to a position so as to be unable to clearly identify declining civility?
“…often in intentionally offensive, dehumanizing ways”
As Truman put it, “I never gave anyone Hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was Hell.”
I don't find this antagonistic!
I admit that part of what's going on here is my conflict-adverse nature. I'm actually fairly critical of the trans activist stance myself, so my objection is not really directed at a particular side per se and it's more aesthetic than it is substantive.
I don't, admittedly, have a super principled position I can muster here at the moment. All I can say is that I wish the pronoun issue were not as heated as it were (and I maintain that it's a very parochial issue specific only to the English language, and everyone should chill on that basis if nothing else), and I think there are far more substantive discussions to be had about trans issues.
>>>I maintain that it's a very parochial issue specific only to the English language<<<
Uh, pretty sure that English is not the only language with gendered pronouns. French, German, Spanish, Russian, Italian, and I'm sure various others would like to have a word.
This comment just reinforces my belief that what SB *really* needs is more linguistics content.
What other language has *all* of its grammatical gender *only* in its third-person pronouns?
In French, for instance, attempts to create a non-gendered third person pronoun immediately run aground because there is literally no way to un-gender verb and adjective agreements. They're feminine or masculine, and that's it. Je suis pas aussi idiot [masculin] que tu le penses!
My point is that we can only have these bitter disputes over pronouns in the first place because English uniquely confines all of its grammatical gender to six words - and then we convince ourselves that the status of those words is the most important aspect of the trans debate.
Responding to you on a purely linguistic level (technically correct: the best kind of correct!) AIUI English doesn't really use grammatical gender in the more general sense of that term (beyond a tiny handful of enumerable exceptions like sometimes calling ships and other vehicles "she" by convention), instead using natural gender.
French et al. bucket objects into one of two arbitrary noun classes (German uses three, I think some Aboriginal Australian languages use something like five - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anindilyakwa_language) and then-also arbitrarily-decides to map the concept of "masculine" and "feminine" onto the noun classes instead of just calling them "class1" and "class 2." Abstractly I kind of feel like they're the ones who seem obsessed here....
The distinction between natural and grammatical gender is one that I'd forgotten! You are correct, English pronouns are not grammatically gendered as such. In other languages things get messy when they overlap and use non-arbitrary pronouns to refer to arbitrary objects, though.
English also got animacy thrown into the mix (but only in the singular), which further screws things up and denies the language a viable gender-neutral pronoun that can be applied to humans.
"...instead using natural gender."
Ethics Gradient is canceled!!
English does make an animacy distinction as well, which is clearer as singular “they” gets more entrenched. No one uses singular “they” for inanimate objects, though animals and small enough children can sometimes take the inanimate “it” pronouns as well as the animate “he/she/they” pronouns.
So what have French people (the ones who care, anyway) actually done to solve this? (I’m genuinely curious because I don’t know!)
There are some attempts at gender-neutral writing, with the emphasis on writing, because none of them are pronounceable: it’s pretty common in academic circles to write something like “mon projet va embaucher un.e chercheur.euse.” There are some attempts to do things like use “ae” to cover é and ée, for example. Interestingly, I always thought the former example had nothing to do with trans issues and was meant to be a more classic feminist move to include women - both “chercheur” and “chercheuse” are gendered! “ae” as an adjective ending is more of a truly gender-neutral move.
In spoken French, this is not possible - you can try to say “iel” instead of “il” or “elle,” and there’s a “celleux” that can sort of replace “ceux” and “celle,” but it quickly becomes unworkable because there are just too many gender markers all over the place. Note too that these issues of language are seen somewhat less as issues of identity and more as literal language issues: the introduction of these attempts is resisted less as an assault on people’s free speech and more as an assault on the French language (as well as Anglo-American cultural imperialism).
There’s several different aspects of the issue. English speakers have seen pairs like actor/actress and aviator/aviatrix and mainly moved towards using the formerly masculine term genetically for all people, while Spanish has seen the few terms that *aren’t* differentiated by gender get feminine forms to help emphasize that women can be judges and doctors too. In French and German there are conventions in writing where you use a weird punctuation mark to separate the feminine ending the way that English briefly used “s/he”. In German there are also several generic words for a person, which have different grammatical gender: “der Mensch”, “die Person”, and I think others, and there are various conventions in place about which one people should prefer to use generically. Spanish famously had the “Latinx” ending briefly, but I think native speakers are now much more often using “-e” as a gender neutral ending for words that would otherwise have “-a” or “-o”.
So many people don't understand that the First Amendment does not apply to speech in private forums, and it would make things completely unworkable if it did. I say this even while I personally would have a pretty high bar over what content moderate out on communities where I'm a moderator.
True.
On the other hand, a lot of people miss that the principles underlying the First Amendment aren’t just legal protections. Openness to dissent, epistemic humility, resistance to ideological gatekeeping are all norms that matter in any forum organized around truth-seeking. The reasons to protect speech in the public square don’t vanish in private ones, they just compete with other priorities.
Of course, Slow Boring isn’t a neutral epistemic space, it’s a partisan project, albeit thoughtful and relatively pluralistic. Part of my discomfort with this episode is wrestling with that dual role: is the goal to build a coalition, or to test ideas? I think Matt genuinely values both, but they pull in different directions. The more it leans toward consensus-building, the more we see disagreement treated as noise rather than signal.
I think speech advocates weren't prepared for how fast and how far the cultural consensus could shift. For a few decades, the First Amendment wasn’t just a legal doctrine, it was a Schelling point that conjured the patient, detailed arguments made by Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Fredrick Douglass (among others). That model no longer enjoys default allegiance, but what replaced it is just a jumble of intuitions: safety over liberty, identity over universality, vibes over process. That's fine in a private club. But in any space that hopes to be more than a mirror of its in-group, it’s a problem. When speech becomes conditional on belonging, inquiry becomes conditional on loyalty.
I agree with this. There's still observations along the lines of the freedom to speak does not include the freedom to be heard, nor to be given any private venue of one's choosing, and certainly not to be free from criticism--that of course is free speech confronting other free speech.
“….contentious issues….”
I see the ebb and flow of everyone’s posts. Stressful news weeks leads to a lot more hardened positions and back and forth.
I think this sub does a good job of recognizing that. Holding the regular commentator accountable in the moment. While being pretty forgiving and welcoming when the rhetoric calms down.
Yeah, I guess I do see people who were at each others’ throats one day joking around the next, which is cool.
With forums that operate as a niche in a free market - whether "private" or "public" doesn't really matter - I think market competition has solidly proven that a strong moderation position that isn't massively strong is necessary. Go too far, and you either end up with no comments at all or you end up with a cultish circle-jerk and everyone performatively dunking on the person who only agrees with the headline blogger 99% of the time (the most famous of these from the Old Blogosphere was Shakesville, though that was hardly the worst). But if you aren't vigorous enough in shutting down obnoxious behaviour, it quickly crowds out everyone else, and no serious discussion can take place. All the newspaper comments sections that led to the aphorism "Never Read The Comments" are the most obvious example.
Social media has the basic problem that this is very hard to do without the blog/forum itself having a position. There are statements that are uncontroversial on some forums and which provoke a hornets' nest of argument on others - but if you pick a different statement, then it's uncontroversial on the latter forums, but starts a huge argument on the former. There are a number of issues where it is not possible to have a forum where both sides of the issue can speak freely without provoking a major controversy. Reddit makes this work by having lots of subreddits and letting each subreddit have its own rules, so there can be a pro-Israel subreddit and a pro-Palestine one.
But if you're Facebook or X, you cannot have a moderation rule that will allow someone to say "Death to the IDF" without controversy and someone else to say "Mavet la’Aravim" [Death to the Arabs, in Hebrew] equally uncontroversially. You have four choices:
Pick One Side
Pick The Other Side
Ban The Entire Topic
Become a Bearpit
The danger of the last is that the "Back-and-forths on irreconciliable issues that literally run off my computer screen because they're so nested" drive readers away. Social media can sometimes make that work for the people who want nothing to do with it by identifying people who don't want that sort of thing and downranking it so they don't see it, meaning that only the participants and the enthusiastic bystanders see it. This works for everyone except the people who want to discuss their position among other people who agree with (or at least accept) it, because they get dragged into the bearpit rather than being able to have a conversation with likeminded people. Facebook's solution to that is groups; X has never had a solution; if you don't talk about politics at all, and avoid all political posts, X works fine, if you want to get into an argument about politics every time you post, it also works fine. If you want to talk politics without an argument, it doesn't.
Perhaps I should say that rather than any forum having a position, I should say that it has an Overton window and the moderation enforces that Overton window. There are positions that the moderators won't allow you to take. And some of those are positions that are inside the Overton window on a different, equally well-moderated forum and are inside the Overton window of the general public discourse.
Moderated comments are the only way to go -- have you ever read the unmoderated comments on Mediaite or the Daily Mail (or even the Washington Post)? -- it is a brutal, disheartening experience. The best comment section ever remains Ta-Nehisi Coates Atlantic blog, where he curated "the Hive." I have never learned more or thought more about significant matters than I did in the blogs heyday. Alas . . .
I genuinely find this fascinating how much conservatives have turned on the idea of moderation over essentially politics. They feel like their side is always going to lose but like compare Facebook to Twitter on porn. And even that's not truly an unmoderated space.
I like suspect they've never really had the full bore of the internet dumped on their head because they have more normal social lives and don't know what they're asking for.
Twitter also has the opposite problem. I created a private account just to view porn, and then around October of last year started getting right-wing influencers mixed in!l, because it started defaulting to the “for you” instead of “followed”.
I have a private twitter account for sharing video game screenshots titled i am a ps4 that got the same treatment.
The weird thing for me is this idea that the Internet is this place where unrestricted free speech is allowed everything was never true. Like, I was on a (much smaller) political board in the mid-2000s. While there was lots of things said there you wouldn't say in 2024, there were still moderators, and people of all ideologies from the two Commies to the weirdo right-wingers who'd be Trump officials today all agreed the administrators had the right to ban people - sure people complained but the idea that you didn't believe in free speech if you put rules on the 'front door' wasn't something even the weirdo libertarians said.
Why are we even talking about "place[s] where unrestricted free speech is allowed"? The disagreements we're discussing concern specific moderation decisions, not the idea of moderation.
Every single defense of those decisions I've read in these threads retreated to generalizations and strawmen like "this place would turn into a cesspool without any moderation". I agree, and no one's asking for that.
I'm on record arguing for *more* moderation. In particular, I think tone-policed spaces make for much better discussions. For example, you write some good comments here, but I think your posts on the Motte are, on average, way better. The moderation policy there puts pressure on you to substantiate your positions instead of dunking, labelling, or straw-manning. (The Motte could use more moderation too, but that's a different conversation.)
Bad Star Wars take by Matt! The planets shown in the OT are:
- Tatooine, a desert run by criminals and subject to random attacks by migratory Sand People. Luke still grew up well-fed and clothed and in a house with many rooms, despite not being from a rich family
- Various ships and space stations
- A rebellion military base in the middle of nowhere
- Another rebel base, on the equivalent of Antarctica
- A swamp that nobody lives in
- Bespin, which is genuinely nice (especially in comparison to any real-world offshore drilling rig)
- Endor, another planet where basically nobody lives and there are uncontacted tribes
All of this is in a galaxy with a recent civil war, active rebel groups, and a fascist government.
Star Wars is objectively much richer than analogous real-world locations with similar governments!
In the expanded universe we get to see places like Naboo/Ghorman as well, which also seem like places with extremely high quality of life for citizens. I'm sure Alderaan was also nice before, uh.
North Carolina (where I live) just banned cell phones in class. enforcement will be the key but it seems like an obvious idea to try.
The thing that I don't understand is what's supposed to happen when a kid refuses? We can't even deter violence very well with habitual offenders with detention and suspension threats.
Like I teach at a school that's not terribly effected by horrible discipline problems writ large but last two years kids have pushed or kicked their teachers. Nothing terribly bad happened to them (in or out of school suspension) but like life moves on. But then they want that teacher who's just been kicked by her student to daily forcibly remove his device? To need to escalate it and show the empress has no clothes.
I will write the referral and take the slings and arrows from their parents but this seems like a policy designed to encourage scofflaws.
Not expelling students has spectacularly backfired. I get that schools don’t want the bad stats, but the expulsion isn’t for the target kid, it’s the messaging for everyone else. When kids used to disappear (and I don’t mean in the current scary ICE climate), most students learned to not test authority too much. Something happened in the 2010s where adults forgot how to adult.
I genuinely don't have a strong disagreement but I've been teaching for fifteen years and never had a student expelled. Like annoying the parents with out of school suspensions hasn't worked I mean is explosion paired with foster care or some sort of away disciplinary school or what?
As a teacher who's also a foster parent I mean it's not like my phone isn't buzzing all the time to ask me if I want to take one more kid. I know of a family who ended up in one but that was after the kid was Baker Acted (Involuntary suicide detention) and it's not free in most cases.
Again I'm not really opposed to the idea I'm just not sure what then happens to this 8 year old.
I’m ~10 years away from having to worry about this with my kid, but it seems like a lot of phone-having is enabled by parents. Is there a way to switch punishment from confiscating the phone to sending the student home? Right now it seems like it’s a problem where parents are at odds with teachers.
I recognize of course that there are reasons why you wouldn’t want to send a student home unless completely necessary, but it also feels like this is a problem that’s been dumped on teachers.
This and extreme truancy both seem downstream of a complete abandonment of real consequences for both kids and parents.
Smartphones should be banned for anyone under 16 everywhere, also outside of schools. We want our kids IQ points and mental health back.
At least there should be an enforced school mode for anyone stepping into the school. Emergency services. Calculator. Note taker. That’s it. No enforcement needed.
We've had a ban in place in our district since last year. It's been mixed (works at the elementary and middle schools, but not at the high school), basically due to lack of enforcement. It should be easy, see a phone out during the day, take it away. But many teachers are not interested in playing phone cop (I don't necessarily blame them with the behavior of students and parents). Also, the high school kids all have their own Macs which pretty much allows them to use their phones even if they are tucked away in their bag.
I will say that the Yonder pouches are an absolute waste. We spent something like $65k on them and they were cast aside within a few months. What a scam.
Similarly in my middle school, the away-for-the-day enforcement worked (and we also wasted money on Yondr pouches). But the students’ digital addiction habits have gotten so bad that they carry the same behaviors to their student Chromebooks: copying and pasting SIMPLE answers instead of writing, AI-generated paragraphs and essays, gaming, emails instead texts to friends, etc. I’m going back MOSTLY to paper this year not because *I* want to, but I really think I need to rescue the thinking, reading, and learning that is literally disappearing.
I have noticed this in 3rd grade. I really scaled down Chromebook time starting in 2023-24 and it's been very successful. And when I do have them on the things I'm ruthless with the go guardian using the only on approved websites lists and just having it up on my laptop in small group work.
It's not a panacea because kids can still be annoying and the school requires more Chromebook usage than I'd like but I keep it to no more than a small percentage of class time.
If you're comfortable talking about it, what does the school require Chromebooks for in third grade? Does it make sense to even be using computers in-class when students are too young to be writing multipage essays or using Excel?
The biggest thing, the thing that makes all other considerations quite small is the state wants digital tests. Now that actually has a meaningful benefit of getting to teach reading till 5/8 or so instead of taking a pass fail test on 4/1 so we get results back in time to offer summer school. Also while it doesn't affect 3rd grade where students aren't asked to write for the state at all the writing test is on the computer in 4th grade.
The other big one is costs. I know that sounds weird but at my last school we switched from a pencil and paper math curriculum to an electronic one--this particular curriculum I'll defend quite vigorously it was something like a 80,000 savings and we saw a similar savings in science though that curriculum sucked but they all do. The cost savings at the state level may be even more pertinent to the politics. Like those 4th grade writing test only like 10 percent even get a human grader now those are the ones that are used to train the AI that grades most of them.
The first thing really makes all the other things go and then once you've digitized there's a lot of things you can do that aren't worthless. It's not like it has literally zero benefits to have access to technology. If not for testing I'd say a computer station (like 5 computers hardwired to the wall somewhere) or checkout carts for special projects would be a good thing to have.
Your last paragraph was how it was in my kids' school prior to COVID. Some parents complained that we didn't have one-on-one Chromebooks like richer districts did, but boy do I miss those days of computer carts for specific uses.
One of my teacher friends mentioned that her public school has essentially no printing budget for classes because they “can just do it on the chromebooks.” Have you run into that issue at all?
We're on the edge of the precipice of raising a generation that has basically let their brains atrophy during the main developmental years with AI chatbots and TikTok that risks being a major fall in human capital, yet our entire political system simply does not care.
I knew those techy pouches were a scam to begin with, when one could just buy or build a non-techy pouch wall for just a few bucks each.
Or even just mandate that phones stay in bags or lockers during class.
You have to have something more formal and stronger than a mandate that phones stay in bags or lockers during class. Otherwise, teachers will either spend too much time enforcing the rules or ignore phone use. Many teachers are extremely reluctant or will not confiscate phones because they don't want to be accused of damaging these $300-$1300 personal devices. And I definitely don't blame them.
Doesn’t solve the enforcement issue.
Fair.
Yep, lots of cheap ways to do it.
Surely this is a tech company and federal government issue. There needs to be a way to make phones unworkable when they go through the school door. Only able to phone for emergencies, that kind of thing. Then there’s no need to enforce.
Arkansas, where I live, is using special pouches from a company called Yondr that disable the device. I don’t have kids in school so don’t know how to effective it is
https://www.overyondr.com/phone-free-schoolsSchools
Yondr pouches can work, but it’s really enforcement that’s important. I don’t care if my middle school kids HAVE a phone as long as I never see it.
Total scam and waste of money. They don't disable anything, its just a pouch with a magnet that locks the phone in there. Very easy to defeat too.
New York as well. Parents seem very split on it - either vociferously opposing or supporting it. A local district banned them a couple of years ago, and the teachers love it. They say the difference is like night and day.
MA just banned them too
Also texas
“ Dems and the center-left have broadly taken the position that the targets of potential hate speech get to determine its valence and intent, not the users of said speech.
But here we have a so called far left guy saying the valence of “Globalize the intifada” is not to be determined decisively by the targets of this chant”
This is an excellent point. I’d guess they would rationalize it by saying Jews are the powerful actors, just as they often claim a POC can’t be racist.
The "who has power" question is a great example of a scissor (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/):
It's hard not to look at the images from Gaza and not consider Israeli Jews as the oppressors and Middle Eastern Muslims as the oppressed. It's also hard to not look at Israel as a small country beset on all sides by a region that would love to destroy them because it's a Jewish state. So you have both sides thinking they're the victim and thinking that only evil people could disagree with that.
Israel obviously has more power, it’s won every war it’s been in, has expanded its territory, and has inflicted dozens of times more casualties than its taken, and has much more political influence in the West. Size means nothing—the entire last 500 years of world history is about small Western with superior technology and state capacity ruling over much larger numbers of more backwards non-Western people. If anything, a small minority ruling over a much larger group is more oppressive than vice versa because it goes against the concept of democracy. You can make a reasonable argument that it’s good for Israel to have more power because Muslims with that much power would act even worse, but denying that Israel is the more powerful party just seems completely delusional.
iran has 10x the popullation, 70x the territory, vast oil/gas reserves, a well-educated population.and defensible borders. asserting that all of this somehow doesn't matter (especially in a long, drawn out conflict) is bizarre.
Power over whom though? Palestinians? Yeah hard to argue against that. Power over Middle Eastern Muslims? That's also very hard to argue.
On the issue of other countries behaving worse I give you Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.
Yemen! Lebanon! Egypt!
Israel is not more powerful than the Arab World. It is powerful enough to avoid getting destroyed. Those are different things.
Right, the invasion of Lebanon (a very weak Arab state) in the 80s went badly. Invading...Turkey? Saudi Arabia? Egypt? would be insane
Lebanon was an antiterrorist campaign that turned into a quagmire, not unlike recent US experiences. Israel hasn’t fought a traditional interstate war since 1973.
I am not sure why Israel winning wars is of international concern. Are they supposed to take one for the team and lose once in a while? Also, do the people (cough cough Nasser) who started the wars have any agency here?
What “much larger group” is Israel ruling over? Your comment here is a non-sequitur.
How is Israel oppressing Muslims in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, or Turkey? Or any of the other Muslim countries in the ME that are not Palestine?
I think it's kind of like "all lives matter." In literal English, there's obviously nothing wrong with the phrase. But it's commonly understood to be an argument against the Black Lives Matter movement, which sought to draw attention to the disproportionate number of Black people killed by police, so people generally don't say it. I'm curious what Mamdani would say about "all lives matter." Constitutionally protected, sure, but would he appear at a rally with an "all lives matter" leader?
Disproportionate to their share of the population, not their share of crimes committed and contact with police. But it’s a good analogy you used.
We don't know what their share of crimes committed is.
We know what their share of crimes for which people are convicted is, but there are plenty of possible explanations for the conviction:commission ratio varying by race.
Yep, pretty murky. Hardly enough clear data to burn and destroy private property.
Not making a substantive argument about the specific merits of BLM. Just noting that Black Lives Matter as a phrase has an important meaning to people in the movement and All Lives Matter as a phrase is understood as disparaging that meaning.
I agree with that and argued such many times. I also think the merits of BLM are little to none.
No, I think people on the left would rationalize it by saying the Intifadas were an uprising against a country and countries aren’t the same as ethnic groups. Neither the First nor Second Intifadas featured attacks on Jewish people outside Israel for being Jewish. No one would interpret “globalize Sinn Fein” as a racist attack on British people.
For my part, I am made deeply uncomfortable by anyone who thinks about the Intifada and thinks it's defensible to have the idea "You know what? We should do *that* again, just *bigger*."
I want to drive those people from the public square and persecute them.
I'm confused as to what you're saying here. What do you interpret the word "globalize" to mean? Your argument hinges on the fact that the intifadas were limited to attacks within Israel and that therefore they weren't intended as assaults on Jewish people but were instead an uprising against a particular country. Fair enough. But if that's the case, what purpose does the word globalize serve? Are you saying that the word means people from all across the world should rush to Israel to engage in violent conflict within Israel's borders? Or are you saying that they would limit the attacks specifically to Israeli citizens and institutions all around the world? If so, I think that betrays a shocking naiveté about how often people conflate being Jewish with Israel. The "we're just criticizing Israel" people all too often move right onto to attacking anyone who is Jewish as being analogous to Israeli.
"...I'm confused as to what you're saying here...."
Because the threading on Substack sucks, I cannot tell whom you are responding to. So, on the off-chance that you are referring to me, I'll try to say what I *think* the obfuscators would say.
"Glob the Int" means that all oppressed peoples around the globe should shake off whatever oppression they are locally subject to, in the way that the Palestinians are shaking off the oppression of the Jewish colonialist apartheid blah blah blah. So, the Uighurs will globalize the intifada by fighting the Chinese Communist Party; the Kurds will globalize the intifada by fighting the Turkish govt (and the Iranian govt and the...); the Ukrainians will globalize the intifada by resisting Russian aggression; black Americans will globalize the intifada by fighting racism in the US; and so on. Wherever there is oppression around the globe, the oppressed can take inspiration from the brave struggles of the heroic Palestinian martyrs.
This is bullshit, of course, but it's the kind of bullshit that appeals to American undergrads, which is the whole point. It's analogous to the bait and switch over the word "jihad" -- "oh, it only means struggle, so you know it refers to my personal struggle for meaning in life."
I was responding to Nikuraga, but appreciate your response nonetheless!
And I agree. It's a motte-and-bailey where they say it in contexts that CLEARLY mean violent attacks against Israel (and, by extension, Jews), and then when called on it they just say "no no no, we just mean that oppressed people should resist so that oppression stops".
As you say, this is bullshit of course.
I'm reading "Glob the Int" as declaring an integer to be accessible on a global scope of the program.
"...declaring an integer to be accessible on a global scope...."
"Glob the Boolean!"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMIA_bombing
This was not part of the Intifadas. It didn’t even happen at the same time as the Intifadas (the First Intifada ended in 1993, the Second began in 2000, this bombing was in 1994).
How can you be so sure? The most likely culprits were Hezbollah who were rejectionists against Oslo.
I think many people would absolutely hear "Globalize Sinn Fein" as a call for worldwide terrorist attacks again Britain, British people, anyone perceived to be allied with Britain, and anyone unfortunate enough to be standing next to the aforementioned groups.
Sinn Féin is a democratic non-violent political party (now). I think you mean "Globalise the IRA".
Good point - that's an important distinction and one I should have noticed. That said, “now” is an operative part of your comment. “Globalize Sinn Fein” (like “Global the Intifada”) is ambiguous enough that it's either a call for terrorism or a call for non-violent national liberation, which is the problem with these sorts of slogans.
If the militant Palestinians think of Israel only as a country, and not as an ethnic group, what is the conflict about? More to the point, why does it have such regional, and worldwide, importance when, as an example, the Armenian ethnic cleansing does not? The religion of the Jews is what is the big story. It’s the fact that islam is being successfully challenged right there in their holiest of lands.
So you do agree that what Israel aims for and does is ethnic cleansing? That’s a good start for seeing the issue with a bit more nuance and clarity.
I do. And I’ve posted here before that the peculiar thing about that conflict is that everyone in the world believes in the two-state solution except for two groups - The Palestinians and the Israelis. Both of those believe that ethnic cleansing of the other guys is the only solution.
I'm really waiting for you to care about any other people who have suffered ethnic cleansing. Like, say, the Armenians or the Circassians or the Crimean Tatars.
Except for those on the left who claim Israel is a Jewish ethnostate.
"...This is an excellent point...."
Yes. Das P also used the term "dogwhistle," and that offers another way to press the issue: Please give us your general theory of what a "dogwhistle" is. Why does this theory not categorize "globalize the intifada" as a dogwhistle?
I don’t think it’s a dog whistle. I think it’s plainly a call for anti-semitic policies and pogroms. I think there are such things as figurative dog whistles, but the term is overused.
"...I don’t think it’s a dog whistle...."
A first pass at a general theory of dogwhistles might say something like:
"The expression "D" functions as a dogwhistle if it is used by a group G to assert P to audience A, while allowing G to retain the ability to deny that they have asserted P, on the grounds that D is understood by audiences outside of A as not involving an assertion that P."
I think "Globalize the Intifada" is a dogwhistle for "we want pogroms!" because it allows the groups who say it to claim that they have not said "we want pogroms!", on the grounds that some audiences hear it only as meaning, "reject oppression" (or whatever anodyne thing they claim it means).
Your view is that "Globalize the Intifada!" is a plain call for "anti-semitic policies and pogroms." But there is a reason that the kids don't shout, "we want pogroms!" That would not give them the ability to deny that they called for pogroms. Saying "Globalize the Intifada!" does give them that ability, however implausible you find the denial.
This brought back the uncomfortable feelings I used to get in Geometry class, lol. But you’re right. My assertion that it’s not a dog whistle comes down to believing that it’s obviously a call for violence. Yet there are plenty pretending it’s not.
I think most things that are called “dog whistles” really are pretty obviously what their opponents say, and are just using a fig leaf of deniability, rather than the original claim that they were intenddd to be invisible to everyone but the target audience. If anything, I think the target audience is often the one that is *least* aware of what it is saying, and just treats it as a meaningless catchphrase.
Wait, what's "G" again?
"..what's "G" again?"
Sorry -- just edited that to make it clearer. At first I was using it in two different ways, which was very bad of me -- first as a variable ranging over the names of different groups of people, and second as an abbreviation of laziness for the word "Globalize". I went back and spelled out "Globalize" wherever it occurred, so as to eliminate the ambiguity.
Jeez I was just joking!
It’s obviously not a call to violence from Mamdani. Don’t be silly.
I do not think that Mamdani wants pogroms. In fact, I do not think that Mamdani is anti-semitic at all.
But I do think that some parts of the Gaza movement were playing on the ignorance of the American kids in order to get them to say things that meant something different to different audiences.
Take the chant, "from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free". For committed enemies of Israel, this is clearly a call for the eradication of the state of Israel. For students on the Columbia campus? They don't even know what the river is, or which sea they are referring to. They just think freedom sounds nice.
So, the genuinely anti-Israel leaders can use it to assert "Israel must be eradicated!", and they are understood as saying that by their audience of fellow eliminationists, while they can plausibly deny that they are calling for the eradication of Israel.
While I probably wouldn't use the phrase myself, I think it's also hypocritical to assert that it's illegitimate for Palestinians to do so when the political party of the current Israeli Prime Minister has used an essentially identical phrase in their manifesto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_river_to_the_sea#Similar_sayings_by_the_Israeli_right).
"Israeli politicians have also used the phrase to describe the entire area, although more rarely. In 2020, right-wing lawmaker Gideon Saar, an ally-turned-rival of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said, “Between the Jordan River and the sea there won’t be another independent state,” meaning a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Religious Zionist politician Uri Ariel said in 2014, “Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea there will be only one state, which is Israel.”
Netanyahu, who also opposes Palestinian statehood, has favored the phrase “west of the Jordan,” which refers to the same territory."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/from-the-river-to-the-sea-the-slogan-that-led-to-rashida-tlaibs-censure-explained/
ETA: I suppose that it's not technically hypocritical if one doesn't believe in equal moral worth for both Israelis and Palestinians, but I do and I would hope that most Americans would as well (or at least a growing number of Democrats).
The second intifada included explicit targeting of civilians and suicide bombing by the Palestinian national movement. Why is it obvious that "globalize the intifada" doesn't mean suicide bombings around the globe? It doesn't seem obvious to me.
"...Why is it obvious that "globalize the intifada" doesn't mean suicide bombings around the globe?...."
Just to be clear: I'm not trying to defend calls to "globalize the intifada" or calls for suicide bombings. I am trying to defend Das P's claim that it is a dogwhistle.
Here's a short version: "globalize the intifada" is a dogwhistle for "we want suicide bombings" if some people (eliminationist hardliners) can say and hear it as a call for suicide bombings, but the people who say it can obfuscate and deny that they are calling for suicide bombings. That's the whole point of dog-whistles: obfuscation and deniability. Additional reason to think it is a dogwhistle if you can get people (sc. dumb kids) to say "globalize the intifada" who would be unwilling to say "we want suicide bombings."
Now, once you (James L) are clued in to how the dogwhistle works, then it no longer sounds like a dogwhistle to you. But so long as it provides deniability and obfuscation, and so long as people who would not say the plain meaning are willing to say the obscuring phrase, it's a dogwhistle.
I agree with this. I just don’t think it is “obvious” that it is not a dog whistle.
I mean, I don't think you have to go that far. If we're accepting argument by definition, then All Lives Matter is fine, right?
There are three big reasons for lower waste at the federal level:
- the federal government spends most of its money writing checks (to doctors, seniors, states, schools, etc) and much of the rest is high prestige work that people want to do well (the FBI, the NPS, and the CDC are all like this). The kind of mundane service provision that is the regular source of waste and corruption (eg trash collection or road building) is a tiny fraction of the federal budget.
- the federal level has a genuine party system that structures competition in a meaningful way, and usually a less Byzantine political process, compared to states and local governments
- there's a lot more attention paid to the federal government than to state and local government, particularly on issues beyond "what is literally happening to me".
Makes me want to start every political conversation with a Republican with, "Why are you guys so obsessed with cutting taxes?"
Rich donors, sure whatever, but that can't explain everything. Why does it rank so far in their internal priorities? Why do they breathe, eat, and dream tax cuts instead of the more exciting stuff? I want to understand the internal Republican experience here.
Also, as a kind of rich person, I know that raising my income 10% will raise my happiness by at best 1%. Meanwhile, Boston Logan just spent $750 million to upgrade the international terminal so I can experience luxury dining on my way to Europe. That's the kind of thing the rich people caucus should be obsessed with. Or maybe rich people should be trying to pass congestion pricing so they can drive wherever they want whenever they want. I don't want more money, I want more time!
It is partly zombie-Reaganism. Reagan did solve a major tax problem by chaining marginal income tax brackets to inflation. Before that, everyone was getting a yearly tax increase that wasn't voted on. It is also probably true that some 80s tax rates were to the right of the peak of the Laffer Curve, and by lowering some tax rates government revenues increases somewhat. But then Republicans became convinced that lower taxes always increasing revenue.
Aren't automatic tax hikes kind of what need though given our political economy? Imagine how much better we would be now if Republicans/Democrats could spend all their time "cutting" taxes and effective rates were still slightly higher than they are now.
If tax brackets are not chained to inflation, households get pushed into higher marginal tax brackets even without higher real incomes.
I understand, but I'm saying this is actually desirable given our ability to cut but not raise taxes.
The point of inflation is that it lets you fix problems caused by things being nominally sticky. It lets you lower wages without anyone having to make the cut, and it lets you raise taxes without anyone having to vote for the increase. Indexing wages and tax brackets to inflation means that now someone has to explicitly make the hard cases, rather than letting all explicit decisions be popular.
Being pro-inflation is never a winning position
It’s not popular, but it’s good. And it’s less unpopular than wage cuts and tax hikes. There’s a reason the Fed targets 2% inflation rather than 0%.
This matches my life experience. I also think there's a large percentage of folks to whom taxes "feel" fundamentally like theft.
I have a hard time relating to Leftists who get incredibly angry that some percentage of people have enormous wealth. I agree wealth inequality is bad on the merits, but I'm not angry *just* because somebody has more wealth than I do.
In the same vein, there's a large percentage of people who feel slighted by any money coming from their paycheck, not for any policy reason, but because they just don't like seeing the subtraction.
We're getting to the era where many Republicans weren't born when Reagan was president. What makes this one thing a zombie when so many other issues from the 80s have faded?
Inertia. Same reason modern Democrats keep calling for a New Deal even though the vast, vast majority of them weren't alive during the Roosevelt administration.
Republicans believe that taxation is theft, so they are morally against it
You have to be more specific, "cutting taxes for rich people". If the GOP was gutting health care for poor people in order to substantially cut taxes on the middle class it would still be a bad idea but not nearly as politically toxic.
Attributing the high quality of the comments here to moderation seems somewhat misfounded. (No offense, mods!) There are comments sections out there with substantially more aggressive moderation than I see on SB that still have nowhere near the caliber of discourse here. I think the pay-to-comment model and the blog's subject matter do more to regulate the commentariat.
Yes I thought this was a very strange take. I've like never had a comment removed on here and rarely see moderation
Why not both? Pay-to-comment + subject matter(within the scope of politics - I've seen good comments in some hobby venues where they weren't discussing more controversial things at all) increases the chances of constructive comments (driving at a good speed, safely, on a highway) and the moderators add guardrails just to try and keep it that way.
"Why not both?"
That's why I said it's somewhat misfounded, not wrong. It contributes, but is secondary to the filtering effect of the other items.
Look I’m no Florida lover but the economy is based on far more than leisure and tourism. Miami has a huge amount of international finance as it’s the launch point for companies doing business in Latin America and also has a big Spanish television industry. Also obviously there’s agriculture.
It’s definitely the center of certain financial industries in America, like Medicare and insurance fraud
That's one way to diversify your portfolio.
AND it’s recession-proof!
Lots of money laundering too. I've seen Scarface.
I think Matt is understating the depth of elite Democratic support for the Iraq War, and overstating how toxic it has since been, just a little bit. It’s true that most Democrats in Congress voted against it, but the majority of *Senate* Democrats (from whom you’d expect to see 2004 or 2008 presidential contenders) were in favor, including every Democrat who was in the Senate in 2002 who became a presidential or vice presidential candidate or a party leader over the next 20 years — Biden, Clinton, Daschle, John Edwards, John Kerry, Harry Reid, Schumer. I think it’s probably true that support for the Iraq war was more toxic in 2008 than in cycles before or since, but given that it prevented none of those people from being the Democratic standard-bearer in the Senate or (the race for) the White House it seems like we’re fitting to a single datapoint here.
In general elite political support for disastrous wars has been a big driver of political change in the US post-ww2 (and just generally in the world at all times). Vietnam led to the destruction of the postwar Democratic establishment (Matt Stoller's essay about how we should go back to Patman's version of the party doesn't mention Vietnam). Iraq led to the partial overthrow of the Democratic establishment, and the complete destruction of the Republican one.
But my point is it didn’t really lead to the partial overthrow of the Democratic establishment—a guy who voted for the AUMF was the President literally this year. It led, plausibly, to one woman losing one primary, and in policy terms it made presidents of both parties less interested in boots-on-the-ground military actions, but how many Democratic politicians actually lost their job because they screwed up Iraq? Seems like fewer than kept failing upwards.
I agree that the establishment has maintained a lot of their influence but this is very obviously one of the background reasons why that same establishment is incredibly toxic among their own base.
I'm not sure I agree that this place has a lot of moderation. That's neither criticism nor praise, and (as we saw last week) obviously the moderation isn't zero, which is correct. However, for a forum where we are regularly discussing material that is typically very heavy and is notorious for getting people worked up and clashing with each other, I'm pleasantly surprised by the relatively much more peaceful discourse here than in other places that discuss this material, hence why I'm happy to be here. If I had to guess why, I think that deep down we share on some level Matt's trait of not letting emotions get the best of us when we discuss these issues.
Yeah, nothing against the people doing the moderation, but I’ve seen places with much more active moderation be much worse. There’s a selection effect with the commenters that keeps it like this.
Good moderation doesn’t have to be very active. If you just nip the few worst buds, you prevent a lot more than if you have to be constantly pruning weeds.
Beyond the moral questions of healthcare, it is quite funny to me that the only legitimate mass healthcare program Republicans believe in is one that FDR and Congress put into place as a temporary fiscal relief measure during WWII: employer-sponsored health insurance. Like, of all the different methods of paying for healthcare, that is the one you pick?
It is also supported by Democrats despite literally giving powers over healthcare to private sector bosses.
Yeah, Dems really screwed themselves with that one.