Definitely Massachusetts. When the Commonwealth took down the Tsarnaev Brothers, it looked like the Battle of Stalingrad. Liberals are happy to have a well-armed *state* (they quite sensibly have reservations about a well-armed populace).
Yes!!! I've been thinking about the banality of evil thing a lot lately because I was just watching Andor, and the character Syril came to mind as a perfect example of the banality of evil. Does art imitate life or life imitate art?
Exactly. What concessions has she squeezed out of Trump lately? Maybe there is a lot of stuff behind the scenes, but seeing such an influential senator just coast from election to election...the End of the Republic will start with the line "Susan Collins really liked the job of being a senator"
It’s a toss up between her and McConnell. She may just be as naive and foolish as she appears. McConnell knew without question who he was putting in charge, knew the dangers, understood the level of evil he was enabling, and didn’t care or actively thought it was good.
McConnell doing all these things is what I expect from McConnell. The mystery is his late-career regrets. I can't for a second believe that he came to regret the evil he did; it's not like this was something he did in his youth. The best explanation I can come up with is "pleading to the future", trying to salvage some small shred of his reputation for posterity.
Why? Isn't she just the Joe Manchin of the right, conveniently taking bullets for the entire partisan gridlock. I guess she's occupying a senate seat that could conceivably be solid D someday, but for that I blame the voters of Maine.
She will be assured by the nominee that he will be transparent and above board in all his work, and will publish nothing but the highest and most accurate data possible.
Then she’ll be “concerned” at some of the things she’s seeing after he takes over.
She massively benefits from representing a state that skews older. Older voters--be they naive or principled--still take those comments at face value. A younger electorate wouldn't be so trusting.
If you think Collins winning would *support* your claim you’ve clearly misunderstood Justin’s point. Susan Collins has extremely negative VAR for democrats because she wins elections as a moderate republican that would otherwise be won by a democrat. She has positive VAR *for republicans* but it’s obviously nonsense to tell someone who opposes republicans “you should like this politician because of how great she is for republicans!”.
“Her replacement is a moderate democrat” refers to what would happen if she wasn’t around, that’s the whole point of “value above replacement”, it’s not a prediction of who will win if she is around.
The only meaningful vote in opposition to Trump or her party that she has ever cast was protecting Obamacare, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she thought McCain was going the other way, and would have voted differently if she had known. I’m not sure she is above replacement value for a Republican.
I think this McEntarfer/Antoni saga pretty clearly illustrates that even if the "establishment" acts in a way that is scrupulously nonpartisan, have perfect credentials and act with perfect integrity, you're still going to get crosswise with MAGA. I would like to see this take revisited in light of this BLS situation. https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-crisis-of-expertise-is-about
The first administration I followed closely was GWB, and I clearly remember its complete distain for expertise, academia, and bureaucrats. I don't think many of them really believed it.
I think the counterpoint is that Joe Trumpstan has no opinion about the Bureau of Labor Statistics or its commissioner. This is just about one man's fleeting whim.
The job isn't to not get crosswise with MAGA who are gonna vote Rep anyway, it's not to get crosswise with swing voters. COVID policy did that. Slow Boring comment threads use to have plenty of such people. Climate change policy did that a little bit too, there were folks here who were not happy that the IRA didn't prioritise inflation more relative to climate change.
I disagree. From an electoral perspective, if different organizations want to help Democrats, it would be good if they behaved in a way that was politically optimal. BUT for experts to have legitimacy you can't have a majority of either party undermining experts in that field, even if all swing voters are aligned with consensus.
For example the consensus around vaccines is already breaking down despite very low support for anti-vax views among swing voters.
And even if all swing voters are opposed to Trump on this BLS thing, its legitimacy is forever degraded if a controlling faction of one party is committed to undermining it.
“For example the consensus around vaccines is already breaking down despite very low support for anti-vax views among swing voters.”
I’m predicting that in 10-15 years or so going to the U.S. from Europe will require a prophylactic vaccine regimen akin to what you’d need to go to Sub-Saharan Africa.
That's true. But I don't think that contradicts Matt's thesis? Which I took to be that academics hurt their own priorities by being insufficiently aware of their own biases, thereby alienating some voters and helping MAGA into power? Plus also reducing public faith in science and hence adherence to its recommendations, and occasionally genuinely contributing to mistakes in research.
My experience is that people have always had trouble with science, mostly the statistics. Indefinite probabilities are really unsatisfying and uncomfortable, but that's the best empiricism can offer. Republicans simply exploited this unease by offering absolutes. People prefer the confidence.
Most media also do a poor job of reporting on science. Even before the science v. YouTube wackjob division. You’re right that statistics is often the weakest element due to complexity and avoidance thereof, ineffective explanations in the lay press, and ease with which they may be manipulated.
This is a question I’ve had, not having lived in the U.S. during Covid. What “Covid policy”? Was there one beyond the initial state-imposed stay-at-home orders? My understanding is that “lockdowns” as such did not exist in the U.S. beyond those stay-at-home orders, and everything else was a hodge-podge of local mandates and private voluntary restrictions.
Like, whenever an American uses the term “lockdown,” I just mentally substitute “restrictions imposed by a mix of governmental and non-governmental actors, largely at very local scales” which is what they mean.
I don't have time to write a good post on the topic, but "covid policies" in this sense are often used to stand in for the fact that most of the people clamoring for more stringent covid measures (and often succeeding) were Democrats or leftists. Mask mandates, vaccine mandates, school closures, other public closures, etc.
Yeah, but that was intensely localized. There was no coordinated set of policies because U.S. education is extremely localized in its administration.
I get that *culturally* the case for school closures was heavily identified with Democrats and Democratic proxies (e.g. teachers’ unions), and the nationalization of politics means that nothing is local discursively speaking. But I still don’t get the notion that there was a coherent “Covid policy” as such, much less “lockdowns.”
I try to put this sort of thing in historical context with mantras like “mass democracy has always been about vibes, there is no golden age of civic engagement and informed populaces, today is not qualitatively different in those terms.”
Except as Matt has pointed out, in many cases, the places where schools stayed closed longer (ie. urban minority schools in blue areas), the parents were actually on the side of schools being closed for longer.
It was localized, but the law of large numbers means the most people affected lived in Democrat-run cities. And Republicans like Ron Desantis made a big show of keeping schools open, so it made a strong contrast.
Ron DeSantis’s 15 minutes of fame was based almost entirely on his opening of Florida’s beaches (the closing of which was also a local decision, btw)). I was “trapped” down there during that time. Hard maybe for the rest of the country to realize how important those beaches are to Floridians and what a hero it made DeSantis in their minds to re-open them against federal recommendations. Ron’s problem was mistaking that local adulation for broad national appeal. Got to lol at that one.
The "policy" a person might complain about was more like elite signaling. A whole bunch of things were closed or restricted for a long time, and some of those would have been no matter what the NYT or politicians were saying. But, an awful lot of them would have been reopened or been more reasonable if elite signaling had been different.
Granted. I think the counter factual is hard to prove, but it’s reasonable enough.
But I do hope that when the historiography of this period is written, there’s a distinction drawn between policies and elite signaling. It’s fair enough if the public engages in sloppy thinking; it’s bad if people whose job it is to be precise about these things do too.
Seems to me federal “policy” as issued by Fauci et al, was made up almost exclusively of recommendations. With the exception of some international travel restrictions and vaccine mandates for federal workers most mandates were just as you say, locally imposed and enforced. That’s what I remember, anyway.
I'm interested in this comment but thoroughly confused by it. What sorts of people did SB comment threads used to have? What did Covid and climate and change policy do?
It truly was jarring to see many people--including plenty who I'd have read as having egalitarian priors--get so angry at prices rising and what they deemed as lower quality of service as a consequence of wage compression. People are selfish, an ongoing series.
"Wage compression — where income gains were faster for people at the bottom than at the top — is something almost everyone favors in theory but while it was happening few would acknowledge it and even fewer seemed happy about it."
The Trump-Biden fully employment economy was maybe the closest American policy got to my personal political-economic preferences. And people fucking hateeeeddd it. Especially people who I thought benefited the most. And definitely the internet "leftists."
It was illuminating, and a little sad, and pretty funny. My preferences haven't changed, but I think you gotta be real about what Americans actually want.
One thing I remember thinking to myself when I listened to the Revolutions podcast's French Revolution season was "man, it seems like every one of these crazy spasms of popular anger was fueled by the price of [sugar/flour/other items from the baking aisle] going up?" I'm sure there were genuine economic problems in 1700s France and to be fair, people back then didn't have the benefit of being able to point to more sophisticated economic statistics. Nevertheless, it sure seems like the entire analysis people in the street were using before deciding whether or not to call for chopping off people's heads was just "rising prices bad."
Likewise, whenever you read "man on the street" articles written by Western journalists visiting developing countries, someone interviewed in it inevitably says some variation of the same thing (prices going up so we're all poorer).
Whenever we are back to a higher unemployment economy with lots of unemployed lower skill workers, I'm going to go at people pretty hard whenever they complain about it.
We've been running something of a false economy for some time now ($37 trillion debt as we speak). Biden didn't hold back when it came to spending and helped prop up the economy while creating an inflationary environment. So inflation was one big negative. Immigration was another failing of Biden in the eyes of many Americans. Not to mention the gender swamp and other far left idiosyncrasies that weren't popular, so that's maybe why Biden wasn't appreciated.
One of the issues was that job switchers got the lion’s share of the wage gains: https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker. You had to be a little proactive and shop around for a new job if you really wanted to take advantage of the Biden economy. And it was fantastic for people getting a new job, but bosses didn’t always just automatically give you raises for staying put. A lot of people are change-averse and this probably rubbed them the wrong way.
Also, if I get a better job, obviously it's because of how awesome I am, not the tight labor market. If the price of the stuff I pay for goes up, it's because of the economy, not my own failure to be a conscientious consumer.
I mean, there genuinely is a sense in which you’re much more likely to be the marginal hire than the marginal purchaser. So while market dynamics will generally dictate going wages as well as prices, your individual skills and characteristics affect getting a job offer in a much more direct way than your decision to buy Jif instead of store brand peanut butter affects prices.
Hopefully the Biden years gave more people appreciation of luck when they realize—hey I was equally awesome in 2018 as 2022 but it was way easier to get a job in 2022!
I liked this because I LOL'ed, but wasn't a bigger contributing factor to the rising cost of burrito taxis the drying up of venture capital subsidies for the service?
The American middle class is much, much larger than the poor class, so any economic policy or outcome that helps the poor at the expense of the middle class will have a greater electoral effect than policies in the opposite direction.
But what do you do about people who *are * middle class by any objective measure, but feel poor/precarious and get mightily pissed off when you point out that America is actually a wealthy country? How do you appeal to them?
Some combination of tax cuts, low inflation, low interest rates, decent raises at work, and at least making them feel their cultural views are respectable even if you disagree with them. Plus making sure they have affordable health care and some retirement security
I agree with this. The problem is that I've met Americans who make $40k a year and Americans who make $250k a year think they are all middle class, and they seem to only want the things you describe above for only themselves and no one else in an "out group" that they don't like. I've come to accept that the real American dream is having more than other people and we have to accept that people will say that they want lots of things, but in practice they only want those things for people like themselves or in their social group. At least that is what the active voters seem to want...
The problem in our culture is not envy (it’s a deep part of human nature to team up against would-be alphas and why we have relatively egalitarian social structures) but this weird downward-directed resentment against people who are objectively worse off than us (minorities and foreigners of various kinds) starting to get a little slice of the pie. It combines all of the bad effects of envy but none of the pro-egalitarian good effects.
You’re right, but how do you actually implement it? Saying “we need more housing” is [Pitch Meeting Guy voice] super easy, barely an inconvenience! And then you propose to build more housing *in a specific location* and local NIMBYs cry out as one, “NOOOOO don’t build it here, we don’t want construction noise/extra traffic/the Wrong Kind of People moving in/our property value to go down!”
What percentage of people who were mad at inflation knew anything about the wage compression that was happening? Most people, probably had a story in their head that the wealthy were profiting and making people like themselves and poorer worse off.
Twitter may have plenty of flaws, but it is good at aggregating bad takes, and cataloguing people who call out those takes as bad, and this Antoni guy seems to be a great example of that.
Yup - he's another psuedo intellectual that is contrarian, but gets celebrated because Twitter rewards this type of behavior and intellectual dishonesty...
Social media is the mob. None of the arguments are retained only the sentiments. That's why low quality information is so effective. It scales easier. Every second liberals are not leveraging their own botnets, they're losing ground.
Based on the jokes that get the most likes/upvotes/shares, neither can anyone else. LLMs are great at classifying user sentiment and engagement has always been easy to measure. You could simply train your own ML model on these metrics.
This is so true. That's why I don't argue with anyone who voted for Trump 3x in a row. Clearly they don't have any real integrity, red lines or standards. No matter what they say, they view politics as a team sport, and will support and go with whatever the orange leader in their party says, no matter how cringe or unconstitutional it is. They don't care about anything at all, except winning and attaining power right now.
I mean, if I met some guy who worked the jackhammer on the highway voted for Trump 3x, but also voted for Romney & McCain, that's just a Republican who has the normal terrible views of Republicans.
If you meet any college-educated people who are consistent Republican voters, those are among the actual worst humans in the world.
Some of them care about right-wing policy issues more than ethics and norms. While I disagree with it vehemently, it's a form of integrity - commitment to policy
First off we have secured funding for the Yale Youth Poll for next year which I am very excited and grateful for.
Second off we have finished the postmortem report for our poll on the NYC mayoral primary, which as you may know we got wrong. Excited to share that too.
Apparently (ed: *Ben*) Shapiro is talking himself into tolerating “alternating soft authoritarianism” between the parties, under the assumption that Dems will at some point inherit the new “powers” Trump is forging.
Coming from a member of the “but my precious filibuster” set, this makes me ever more furious with Shapiro and his ilk. They always said that abolishing the filibuster would grant too much power to whichever party had the majority, and there would be massive swings in policy as a result. And now they’re talking themselves into it?!? THESE MOTHERFUCKERS.
The two parties will always exchange procedural positions upon a change of power, but never substantive ones. This is a law. I propose we call it "Joseph's Law."
I think the right did a WAY better and more committed job of exploiting it from a systemic perspective, though.
The right saw the filibuster as a way of making sure ruralist/Southern-ist culture would always have a permanent veto over reasonable systemic changes towards more democracy, ESPECIALLY since the betrayal of the Civil Rights Act.
The left always saw the filibuster as a means of protecting Roe, not a means of protecting their own political power.
And the center left always saw the filibuster as a way to keep the normies from being permanently scared of ever electing a leftist majority that might do a French Revolution, because normies are irrationally afraid of leftist revolutions even though rightist regimes and rightism in general (including monarchy and feudalism!) have inflicted far more harm on humanity and subjugated the vast majority of humanity.
(Also, y’know, leftist revolutions tend to get at their worst when they consolidate and *become* the right.)
As we see in America, voters are more afraid of a leftist majority and revolution than they would be under an authoritarian government or right wing rule.
I for one was always quite clear that the point of expanding SCOTUS was to correct the wrong of our party being cheated two seats.
I also much prefer to randomly empanel SCOTUS, than simply to expand it — random empanelment would basically permanently solve the tit-for-tat issue AND establish a deterrent against extreme decisions while incentivizing consensus.
It’s not hypocritical to be open about my partisan intentions, especially when I’m holding pretty consistently to them.
A lot of the Trump admin’s recent adventures with economic policy remind me of Nixon’s approach to dealing with Fed chair Arthur Burns. Nixon successfully pressured Burns to cut rates and expand the money supply to juice the economy even though inflation was accelerating. The consequence— especially when coupled with a major supply shock (the OPEC embargo)— caused inflation to go over 12% while the term premium blew out— causing the economy to stagnate as Fed policy failed to contain the rise of long-end rates.
Now, we’re already in a period with simultaneous inflation acceleration and employment roll-over— and the president is relentlessly pressuring our central banker to cut while installing loyalist toadies at the Fed and (surpassing even Nixon here) trying to replace the statistical agency heads with politically-motivated feckless incompetents.
They're anti-anti-Trump in orientation so it's conceivable--but not likely--that this represents broad enough concern with incompetence to sway a critical number of Republican senators.
If you're the party in power, wouldn't you want to know whether your economic policies are working? It's only perhaps the biggest determinant of election success...
Nah, the original slogan holds true and advertisers have known about it for a while. Trucks include all the cushy, luxury features like surround sound systems and heated seats because it's what customers want (what they think). But they still advertise themselves as tough, working man's vehicles because that fits their customers' self-conception (what they THINK they think).
Trump just doesn't think like that, about anything. Remember "I like the numbers where they are"? Anyway, he can't run again and he's not able to care as much about the midterms as he should.
Correction, he isn't allowed to run again. He can run again provided no one that matters stands in his way. Squeaking out the midterms via gerrymandering/ICE raids on polling places/military invasions of cities would be in service of this goal.
Trump doesn't want objective, realistic numbers. He wants to tell his followers, and everyone else, what reality is. That's why it's important for him to destroy the reliability of the BLS.
I'm pretty sure China still collects economic information and makes it available to party members internally. It simply stopped publicly reporting the numbers.
More and more, there are two issues on which I think we must throw people under a bus, for the sake of getting elected and quietly passing laws to mitigate the consequences of being thrown under a bus.
The immigration thing just drives me nuts on the politics. It's about the most positive sum interaction on the merits that I and others are just way out of line in accepting as such.
My guess it’s the people who froth over the idea of JK Rowling existing and declaring any people tangentially associated with her must be chastised…. That is my round about way of labeling the issue without stating it.
She said some insensitive things in response to a real abuse of things in England and then got tarred and feathers, which convinced her that these people are mean and crazy and made her turn more against trans people. People literally act like she kills children ffs.
I refrain from commenting on JK Rowling beyond recounting my experience of working in a bookstore when I was at university and all the Harry Potter books were coming out.
I'll comment on the fact that the shift in left-wing perceptions of JKR is everything wrong with the left in the last 10 years in a nutshell. I don't want a derail on trans policy or whatever but "how do we handle disagreement" is a core part of Slow Boring and it was totally botched here.
Here was a single mom, not from an affluent background, hardcore Labour Party supporter, and she becomes the most successful in the world at something. Probably the biggest British working-class success since Paul McCartney and she's everything the Labour Party and mainstream left is about!
As far as I'm aware, her views on economic policy matters haven't really changed but now she is a pariah. It's remarkable.
The inability of the UK’s two major parties to control immigration is incredible to me. Like, how many times does the electorate have to say they want something done about it? Now the prospect of PM Nigel Farage looms?!
> EU net migration subsequently turned negative following the introduction of the post-Brexit immigration system in 2021, which greatly reduced opportunities for EU citizens to move to the UK. Take-up of work visas among EU citizens in the post-Brexit immigration system in 2021 and 2022 was relatively low, as explained in the Migration Observatory briefing, Work visas and migrant workers in the UK.
>
> Net migration of EU citizens in 2024 was estimated at -96,000. More detail on how EU net migration has changed following the Brexit referendum and COVID-19 pandemic can be found in the Migration Observatory briefing EU Migration to and from the UK.
I’m on the move so apologies for a brief, citation-free response, but my understanding is, the drop in EU migration notwithstanding, immigration levels increased even under Conservatives bc of the new wave of migrants.
It seems to be the case that Brexit reflected dissatisfaction with EU border policy, but current dissatisfaction is with the new migration surge.
"The culture wars have come for air-conditioning, at least in France.
In July, as a heat wave broiled much of Europe, feelings about air-conditioning suddenly became a political litmus test.
Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader in France, declared that she would deploy a “major air-conditioning equipment plan” around the country if her nationalist party eventually came to power. Marine Tondelier, the head of France’s Green party, scoffed at Ms. Le Pen’s idea and, instead, suggested solutions to warming temperatures that included “greening” cities and making buildings more energy efficient.
An opinion essay in Le Figaro, a conservative newspaper, defended air-conditioning because “making our fellow citizens sweat limits learning, reduces working hours and clogs up hospitals.” Libération, a left-wing daily, countered such arguments, writing that the technology was “an environmental aberration that must be overcome” because it blows hot air onto streets and guzzles up precious energy.
“Is air-conditioning a far-right thing?” one talk show asked provocatively, reflecting how divisive the issue had become."
Clean and so well designed that they have enough spare clean energy to export to every neighbour for a tidy profit. Its not like the UK where we have an insufficient power grid, the French have cheap, clean and plentiful electricity!
If I were to make a case against air conditioning it's that it's essentially moral hazard in a can: it's much easier for Texans to ignore life-threatening heat waves if they get to sit inside and say "fuck you, I got mine." The healthy response to secular anthropogenic temperature rise, which affects all organisms and the entire biosphere, should not be "find ways to ignore it," which is what AC fundamentally enables.
I do not expect this position ever to be a political winner or wise to pursue, but I don't think it's necessarily wrong.
This isn't a cure, it's a band-aid that discourages political support for a solution by further externalizing the consequences of the initial pollution. It's not like the Great Barrier Reef has access to A/C.
What do they find especially evil? I’m guessing something something energy something climate change.
I admit that I also have pretty deep reservations about AI, but for the reason that no one will learn to read or write again beyond the bare minimum needed to prompt a chatbot.
Maybe that’s hyperbole. Or not. Eh, feels true enough, anyway.
If you're asking me about the AI issue, it's a bunch of things. Yes, something something climate change. Also, all the water will be used up and we'll all die. Also, they tend to consider themselves "creatives," and AI will eat their jobs. Also, it's wrong all the time. Also, tech bros are bad and billionaires shouldn't exist. And stuff.
Whenever I feel abashed trying to explain America's fascination with guns to Europeans, I take comfort from remembering that they have absolutely idiotic positions on some things as well.
Obviously it’s not material at the planetary level, but I’m pretty convinced AC contributes to the heat island effect in Manhattan. Quick googling seems to suggest it’s a thing.
On the contrary, the EU and its mainstream parties follow religiously what our technocrats tell us to do on energy. The problem is that our technocrats are bad!
I know people like to frame this in the racial/immigration framework, and I don't believe the popularity/rise of the Right can be separated from that issue.
But it all feels very "anti-EU Europe" doesn't it? People scoff at the notion of sovereignty (especially here in globalist lib-ville), but if the supra-national bureaucracy of the EU can't deliver for at least a voting pluraity in each member nation, you'll get some of this stuff going on.
Also, practically all ills of the West are entirely Angela Merkel's fault.
Eh, the vast majority of people have very literal and unnuanced understandings of borders and territory and are vaguely suspicious of foreigners. In that sense it doesn’t matter what the EU does or doesn’t do for voters in member states - which turns out to be much more than most people realize, e.g. British farmers who fucked around and found out.
As long as we live in a nation-state dominated world, transnational cooperation will be an elite project. One of the reasons it was able to advance as far as it did in Europe is because there was a shared memory of ruinous war. But that’s fading fast and most people see no benefit to cross-border cooperation, so I predict we’ll see the EU rolled back and withered away over time.
Yeah, I don't think I disagree at all. It's just that by the nature of the elite project being in tension with the more populist, and let's face it, democratic energies of the nation-state level politics, the onus falls on the EU to tame those passions or prove itself valuable to the average voter/moron.
To me, the Hobbesian nation-state is the most underrated political technology in history. I think the loftiest globalist liberals (not an insult) think they can shadowbox it to death or submission or something? But I dunno, it's undefeated, you confront it or it'll rear up like it's doing now.
In pretty much every Western country (Australia, Canada, New Zealand seem to be excepted so far), populist right and socialist left have support from about 1/3 of the voters. And 2/3 are still good with establishment-oriented parties of some flavor, from green to social democratic to liberal or conservative.
In some countries that gets you a majority (UK). In some countries that gets you into a coalition (Netherlands). In some countries that locks you out (Germany).
But it doesn't actually vary too much outside of those countries above...I imagine this is because they have minimal uncontrolled immigration, instead mostly taking in legal immigrants with a strong emphasis on not-that-poor ones.
The US is also at about 1/3. That's the core Trump base.
Immigration is currently polling as the #1 issue in Britain (despite the economy being awful). During the election it was #3. Most immigration is legal but maybe 50,000/year is not (300k/year US equivalent) and it gets *huge* attention.
Yep, makes sense, and immigration always gets a lot more attention when the left is in power. We'll see if Reform can sustain this level of support over a 4 year timespan. They are still very amateur hour in terms of personnel.
He has served on the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. The problem with previous heads of BLS is they were either leashing prosperity or not actively unleashing it.
The committee was set up by luminaries such at Steve Moore and Arthur Laffer. Once prosperity has been fully unleashed report after report can only show unceasing prosperity.
God I can't wait to hear about Susan Collins's grave concerns about her own vote to confirm this guy
She's up for reelection next, it's Lisa Murkowski's job to keep taking bullets for her.
Can't Massachusetts annex Maine and end this whole farce?
EDIT: If Trump giving Alaska to Putin is what it takes to get rid of Murkowski and Sullivan, it'd probably be worth it.
As I understand it, only if we also kick Missouri out of the Union.
So…..win-win?
As someone said yesterday... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN7wH37Fe80
Vermont needs to annex Maine man, not MA!!! They need more Bernies and less Collinsese
"Can't Massachusetts annex Maine..?"
Which state do you believe is better armed?
I am assured by Fox News that the underclass of Boston is so brimming with weaponry that we might need to call in the National Guard.
Where’s Fox’s story on that?
Definitely Massachusetts. When the Commonwealth took down the Tsarnaev Brothers, it looked like the Battle of Stalingrad. Liberals are happy to have a well-armed *state* (they quite sensibly have reservations about a well-armed populace).
Fortunately for the citizens of Massachusetts, we have the Second Amendment.
Yikes, I hear they have robust support of bullet delivering devices there....😏
I'm starting to think Collins will go down in history as uniquely villainous
Kind of a banality of evil thing?
Yes!!! I've been thinking about the banality of evil thing a lot lately because I was just watching Andor, and the character Syril came to mind as a perfect example of the banality of evil. Does art imitate life or life imitate art?
Exactly. What concessions has she squeezed out of Trump lately? Maybe there is a lot of stuff behind the scenes, but seeing such an influential senator just coast from election to election...the End of the Republic will start with the line "Susan Collins really liked the job of being a senator"
It’s a toss up between her and McConnell. She may just be as naive and foolish as she appears. McConnell knew without question who he was putting in charge, knew the dangers, understood the level of evil he was enabling, and didn’t care or actively thought it was good.
McConnell doing all these things is what I expect from McConnell. The mystery is his late-career regrets. I can't for a second believe that he came to regret the evil he did; it's not like this was something he did in his youth. The best explanation I can come up with is "pleading to the future", trying to salvage some small shred of his reputation for posterity.
Why? Isn't she just the Joe Manchin of the right, conveniently taking bullets for the entire partisan gridlock. I guess she's occupying a senate seat that could conceivably be solid D someday, but for that I blame the voters of Maine.
Starting?
Do you think she'll furrow her brows?
She will be assured by the nominee that he will be transparent and above board in all his work, and will publish nothing but the highest and most accurate data possible.
Then she’ll be “concerned” at some of the things she’s seeing after he takes over.
She massively benefits from representing a state that skews older. Older voters--be they naive or principled--still take those comments at face value. A younger electorate wouldn't be so trusting.
Aren’t we supposed to like Susan Collins though because her value above replacement is high?
No, her replacement is a moderate democrat
I don’t think that’s true though. She was +8 in 2020. I mean, I guess we will find out soon enough.
if only maine had regular partisan statewide elections so that we could test this hypothesis!
Indeed. I will lay down a prediction now, which is that Collins has a 70% chance of winning.
If you think Collins winning would *support* your claim you’ve clearly misunderstood Justin’s point. Susan Collins has extremely negative VAR for democrats because she wins elections as a moderate republican that would otherwise be won by a democrat. She has positive VAR *for republicans* but it’s obviously nonsense to tell someone who opposes republicans “you should like this politician because of how great she is for republicans!”.
“Her replacement is a moderate democrat” refers to what would happen if she wasn’t around, that’s the whole point of “value above replacement”, it’s not a prediction of who will win if she is around.
Her VORP is high for *Republicans*.
The only meaningful vote in opposition to Trump or her party that she has ever cast was protecting Obamacare, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she thought McCain was going the other way, and would have voted differently if she had known. I’m not sure she is above replacement value for a Republican.
It's kind of weird RFK isn't taking more shit after an antivaxxer tried to murder a bunch of CDC employees.
After several hours of reflection, I've decided it makes perfect sense. No one cares about public health until a bunch of people start dying.
My spouse works at CDC. Trust me the employees noticed no one cares at all
I think this McEntarfer/Antoni saga pretty clearly illustrates that even if the "establishment" acts in a way that is scrupulously nonpartisan, have perfect credentials and act with perfect integrity, you're still going to get crosswise with MAGA. I would like to see this take revisited in light of this BLS situation. https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-crisis-of-expertise-is-about
The first administration I followed closely was GWB, and I clearly remember its complete distain for expertise, academia, and bureaucrats. I don't think many of them really believed it.
Now the chickens come home to roost.
I think the counterpoint is that Joe Trumpstan has no opinion about the Bureau of Labor Statistics or its commissioner. This is just about one man's fleeting whim.
It is, but I’m not sure that undermines the top level comment. Cult of personality dictator autocrat gonna autocrat.
True, but I don't think Matt's point is disproved or implicated at all. This isn't a clash of values but that doesn't mean other disputes aren't.
The job isn't to not get crosswise with MAGA who are gonna vote Rep anyway, it's not to get crosswise with swing voters. COVID policy did that. Slow Boring comment threads use to have plenty of such people. Climate change policy did that a little bit too, there were folks here who were not happy that the IRA didn't prioritise inflation more relative to climate change.
I disagree. From an electoral perspective, if different organizations want to help Democrats, it would be good if they behaved in a way that was politically optimal. BUT for experts to have legitimacy you can't have a majority of either party undermining experts in that field, even if all swing voters are aligned with consensus.
For example the consensus around vaccines is already breaking down despite very low support for anti-vax views among swing voters.
And even if all swing voters are opposed to Trump on this BLS thing, its legitimacy is forever degraded if a controlling faction of one party is committed to undermining it.
“For example the consensus around vaccines is already breaking down despite very low support for anti-vax views among swing voters.”
I’m predicting that in 10-15 years or so going to the U.S. from Europe will require a prophylactic vaccine regimen akin to what you’d need to go to Sub-Saharan Africa.
That's true. But I don't think that contradicts Matt's thesis? Which I took to be that academics hurt their own priorities by being insufficiently aware of their own biases, thereby alienating some voters and helping MAGA into power? Plus also reducing public faith in science and hence adherence to its recommendations, and occasionally genuinely contributing to mistakes in research.
My experience is that people have always had trouble with science, mostly the statistics. Indefinite probabilities are really unsatisfying and uncomfortable, but that's the best empiricism can offer. Republicans simply exploited this unease by offering absolutes. People prefer the confidence.
Most media also do a poor job of reporting on science. Even before the science v. YouTube wackjob division. You’re right that statistics is often the weakest element due to complexity and avoidance thereof, ineffective explanations in the lay press, and ease with which they may be manipulated.
Think that's the audience driving reporting more so than reporting misinforming the audience.
This is a question I’ve had, not having lived in the U.S. during Covid. What “Covid policy”? Was there one beyond the initial state-imposed stay-at-home orders? My understanding is that “lockdowns” as such did not exist in the U.S. beyond those stay-at-home orders, and everything else was a hodge-podge of local mandates and private voluntary restrictions.
Like, whenever an American uses the term “lockdown,” I just mentally substitute “restrictions imposed by a mix of governmental and non-governmental actors, largely at very local scales” which is what they mean.
I don't have time to write a good post on the topic, but "covid policies" in this sense are often used to stand in for the fact that most of the people clamoring for more stringent covid measures (and often succeeding) were Democrats or leftists. Mask mandates, vaccine mandates, school closures, other public closures, etc.
Schools stayed closed much longer than most parents wanted.
Yeah, but that was intensely localized. There was no coordinated set of policies because U.S. education is extremely localized in its administration.
I get that *culturally* the case for school closures was heavily identified with Democrats and Democratic proxies (e.g. teachers’ unions), and the nationalization of politics means that nothing is local discursively speaking. But I still don’t get the notion that there was a coherent “Covid policy” as such, much less “lockdowns.”
There wasn't. But the vibes of that era were left-coded, and that's all the low-info voter needs to form an opinion. And here we are.
I try to put this sort of thing in historical context with mantras like “mass democracy has always been about vibes, there is no golden age of civic engagement and informed populaces, today is not qualitatively different in those terms.”
It doesn’t help.
I think it played a big role in Glenn Youngkon getting elected
Except as Matt has pointed out, in many cases, the places where schools stayed closed longer (ie. urban minority schools in blue areas), the parents were actually on the side of schools being closed for longer.
It was localized, but the law of large numbers means the most people affected lived in Democrat-run cities. And Republicans like Ron Desantis made a big show of keeping schools open, so it made a strong contrast.
Ron DeSantis’s 15 minutes of fame was based almost entirely on his opening of Florida’s beaches (the closing of which was also a local decision, btw)). I was “trapped” down there during that time. Hard maybe for the rest of the country to realize how important those beaches are to Floridians and what a hero it made DeSantis in their minds to re-open them against federal recommendations. Ron’s problem was mistaking that local adulation for broad national appeal. Got to lol at that one.
The "policy" a person might complain about was more like elite signaling. A whole bunch of things were closed or restricted for a long time, and some of those would have been no matter what the NYT or politicians were saying. But, an awful lot of them would have been reopened or been more reasonable if elite signaling had been different.
Granted. I think the counter factual is hard to prove, but it’s reasonable enough.
But I do hope that when the historiography of this period is written, there’s a distinction drawn between policies and elite signaling. It’s fair enough if the public engages in sloppy thinking; it’s bad if people whose job it is to be precise about these things do too.
I lived in the U.S. during COVID and i I too wonder this.
Seems to me federal “policy” as issued by Fauci et al, was made up almost exclusively of recommendations. With the exception of some international travel restrictions and vaccine mandates for federal workers most mandates were just as you say, locally imposed and enforced. That’s what I remember, anyway.
I'm interested in this comment but thoroughly confused by it. What sorts of people did SB comment threads used to have? What did Covid and climate and change policy do?
I took Binya to be saying they alienated swing voters.
Great point.
It truly was jarring to see many people--including plenty who I'd have read as having egalitarian priors--get so angry at prices rising and what they deemed as lower quality of service as a consequence of wage compression. People are selfish, an ongoing series.
https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1955236210969833596
"Wage compression — where income gains were faster for people at the bottom than at the top — is something almost everyone favors in theory but while it was happening few would acknowledge it and even fewer seemed happy about it."
The Trump-Biden fully employment economy was maybe the closest American policy got to my personal political-economic preferences. And people fucking hateeeeddd it. Especially people who I thought benefited the most. And definitely the internet "leftists."
It was illuminating, and a little sad, and pretty funny. My preferences haven't changed, but I think you gotta be real about what Americans actually want.
One thing I remember thinking to myself when I listened to the Revolutions podcast's French Revolution season was "man, it seems like every one of these crazy spasms of popular anger was fueled by the price of [sugar/flour/other items from the baking aisle] going up?" I'm sure there were genuine economic problems in 1700s France and to be fair, people back then didn't have the benefit of being able to point to more sophisticated economic statistics. Nevertheless, it sure seems like the entire analysis people in the street were using before deciding whether or not to call for chopping off people's heads was just "rising prices bad."
Likewise, whenever you read "man on the street" articles written by Western journalists visiting developing countries, someone interviewed in it inevitably says some variation of the same thing (prices going up so we're all poorer).
Whenever we are back to a higher unemployment economy with lots of unemployed lower skill workers, I'm going to go at people pretty hard whenever they complain about it.
We've been running something of a false economy for some time now ($37 trillion debt as we speak). Biden didn't hold back when it came to spending and helped prop up the economy while creating an inflationary environment. So inflation was one big negative. Immigration was another failing of Biden in the eyes of many Americans. Not to mention the gender swamp and other far left idiosyncrasies that weren't popular, so that's maybe why Biden wasn't appreciated.
^ Did we find Antoni’s anon Substack account?
Moral weakness.
One of the issues was that job switchers got the lion’s share of the wage gains: https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker. You had to be a little proactive and shop around for a new job if you really wanted to take advantage of the Biden economy. And it was fantastic for people getting a new job, but bosses didn’t always just automatically give you raises for staying put. A lot of people are change-averse and this probably rubbed them the wrong way.
Also, if I get a better job, obviously it's because of how awesome I am, not the tight labor market. If the price of the stuff I pay for goes up, it's because of the economy, not my own failure to be a conscientious consumer.
I mean, there genuinely is a sense in which you’re much more likely to be the marginal hire than the marginal purchaser. So while market dynamics will generally dictate going wages as well as prices, your individual skills and characteristics affect getting a job offer in a much more direct way than your decision to buy Jif instead of store brand peanut butter affects prices.
Hopefully the Biden years gave more people appreciation of luck when they realize—hey I was equally awesome in 2018 as 2022 but it was way easier to get a job in 2022!
An important point
Laziness is a moral failing.
Is this the "the economy is terrible because my burrito taxi is more expensive" discourse?
I liked this because I LOL'ed, but wasn't a bigger contributing factor to the rising cost of burrito taxis the drying up of venture capital subsidies for the service?
Yes, the Millennial lifestyle subsidy from the ZIRP days
Which in turn ended partly because of full employment. So it's all related.
"...but wasn't a bigger contributing factor to the rising cost of burrito taxis the drying up of venture capital subsidies..?"
If so, it wasn't the rising cost, it was the rising price.
Yup.
The American middle class is much, much larger than the poor class, so any economic policy or outcome that helps the poor at the expense of the middle class will have a greater electoral effect than policies in the opposite direction.
But what do you do about people who *are * middle class by any objective measure, but feel poor/precarious and get mightily pissed off when you point out that America is actually a wealthy country? How do you appeal to them?
Some combination of tax cuts, low inflation, low interest rates, decent raises at work, and at least making them feel their cultural views are respectable even if you disagree with them. Plus making sure they have affordable health care and some retirement security
I agree with this. The problem is that I've met Americans who make $40k a year and Americans who make $250k a year think they are all middle class, and they seem to only want the things you describe above for only themselves and no one else in an "out group" that they don't like. I've come to accept that the real American dream is having more than other people and we have to accept that people will say that they want lots of things, but in practice they only want those things for people like themselves or in their social group. At least that is what the active voters seem to want...
Honestly, the best approach here is not very political and instead more cultural: try to get people to become less envious.
Yeah, good luck with that.
I think an orator on Obama's skill level could make progress on it, but unfortunately we have a major deficit of those currently.
I don't. I think envy is pretty hardwired. There's a reason it's one of the seven deadly sins.
Many people are saying that Donald Trump is the finest public speaker in American history!
The problem in our culture is not envy (it’s a deep part of human nature to team up against would-be alphas and why we have relatively egalitarian social structures) but this weird downward-directed resentment against people who are objectively worse off than us (minorities and foreigners of various kinds) starting to get a little slice of the pie. It combines all of the bad effects of envy but none of the pro-egalitarian good effects.
I wish I knew how!
Earn like an American and spend like a European … that’s how you eventually get nice things.
Think about why they feel poor and what we can do about it. Housing, healthcare, education.
Let them vote Republican for a few election cycles, and see how they enjoy the experience. And hope to goodness that the rest of us can survive it...
I think a big part of the answer is abundance. I mean housing is a huge part of the problem
You’re right, but how do you actually implement it? Saying “we need more housing” is [Pitch Meeting Guy voice] super easy, barely an inconvenience! And then you propose to build more housing *in a specific location* and local NIMBYs cry out as one, “NOOOOO don’t build it here, we don’t want construction noise/extra traffic/the Wrong Kind of People moving in/our property value to go down!”
Tell them materialism is a sin.
What percentage of people who were mad at inflation knew anything about the wage compression that was happening? Most people, probably had a story in their head that the wealthy were profiting and making people like themselves and poorer worse off.
Or that's what they conveniently told themselves.
Funny how quickly the discourse went from:
"No on wants to work anymore!!!!"
To: "The immigrants got all the jobs!!!!"
Wages going up is great, prices going up is bad - it’s not rocket science
Twitter may have plenty of flaws, but it is good at aggregating bad takes, and cataloguing people who call out those takes as bad, and this Antoni guy seems to be a great example of that.
It's one of the better ways to follow breaking news story, also long as you are media literate.
And also know which accounts to follow, and to view them only in lists. Steer clear of the siren song of the algorithmic timeline.
Yup - he's another psuedo intellectual that is contrarian, but gets celebrated because Twitter rewards this type of behavior and intellectual dishonesty...
>>cataloguing people who call out those takes as bad, and this Antoni guy seems to be a great example of that.>>
I’m not sure I understand this. Isn’t calling out a bad take as bad a good thing?
(Not trying to make an argument here, I’m just trying to make sure I parse your statement correctly.)
It was objectively hilarious - shame it sucks for the country
Social media is the mob. None of the arguments are retained only the sentiments. That's why low quality information is so effective. It scales easier. Every second liberals are not leveraging their own botnets, they're losing ground.
Liberal botnets still couldn't meme.
Based on the jokes that get the most likes/upvotes/shares, neither can anyone else. LLMs are great at classifying user sentiment and engagement has always been easy to measure. You could simply train your own ML model on these metrics.
Republicans are so morally debased. At this does is tell the public to take any positive news as a lie and any negative news as an understatement.
This is so true. That's why I don't argue with anyone who voted for Trump 3x in a row. Clearly they don't have any real integrity, red lines or standards. No matter what they say, they view politics as a team sport, and will support and go with whatever the orange leader in their party says, no matter how cringe or unconstitutional it is. They don't care about anything at all, except winning and attaining power right now.
I mean, if I met some guy who worked the jackhammer on the highway voted for Trump 3x, but also voted for Romney & McCain, that's just a Republican who has the normal terrible views of Republicans.
If you meet any college-educated people who are consistent Republican voters, those are among the actual worst humans in the world.
Some of them care about right-wing policy issues more than ethics and norms. While I disagree with it vehemently, it's a form of integrity - commitment to policy
Some news from me:
First off we have secured funding for the Yale Youth Poll for next year which I am very excited and grateful for.
Second off we have finished the postmortem report for our poll on the NYC mayoral primary, which as you may know we got wrong. Excited to share that too.
Shouldn't you have graduated by now? 🤨
Yes but I took a gap year
Great news! Thanks for sharing!
Apparently (ed: *Ben*) Shapiro is talking himself into tolerating “alternating soft authoritarianism” between the parties, under the assumption that Dems will at some point inherit the new “powers” Trump is forging.
Coming from a member of the “but my precious filibuster” set, this makes me ever more furious with Shapiro and his ilk. They always said that abolishing the filibuster would grant too much power to whichever party had the majority, and there would be massive swings in policy as a result. And now they’re talking themselves into it?!? THESE MOTHERFUCKERS.
The two parties will always exchange procedural positions upon a change of power, but never substantive ones. This is a law. I propose we call it "Joseph's Law."
I think the right did a WAY better and more committed job of exploiting it from a systemic perspective, though.
The right saw the filibuster as a way of making sure ruralist/Southern-ist culture would always have a permanent veto over reasonable systemic changes towards more democracy, ESPECIALLY since the betrayal of the Civil Rights Act.
The left always saw the filibuster as a means of protecting Roe, not a means of protecting their own political power.
And the center left always saw the filibuster as a way to keep the normies from being permanently scared of ever electing a leftist majority that might do a French Revolution, because normies are irrationally afraid of leftist revolutions even though rightist regimes and rightism in general (including monarchy and feudalism!) have inflicted far more harm on humanity and subjugated the vast majority of humanity.
(Also, y’know, leftist revolutions tend to get at their worst when they consolidate and *become* the right.)
As we see in America, voters are more afraid of a leftist majority and revolution than they would be under an authoritarian government or right wing rule.
Strange how no one is still advocating for adding seats to the Supreme Court, right?
That’s a pretty facile interpretation.
I for one was always quite clear that the point of expanding SCOTUS was to correct the wrong of our party being cheated two seats.
I also much prefer to randomly empanel SCOTUS, than simply to expand it — random empanelment would basically permanently solve the tit-for-tat issue AND establish a deterrent against extreme decisions while incentivizing consensus.
It’s not hypocritical to be open about my partisan intentions, especially when I’m holding pretty consistently to them.
Shapiro who? There's a lot of Shapiro's in US politics. I'm guessing not Josh Shapiro?
The shithead right winger.
Thank you for clarifying because I presumed you meant the Pennsylvania governor.
Fair!
Don’t worry, he’ll change his mind again when Dems are in power!
Dems don't have the guts.
Pres Newsom would go scorched earth but y'all aren't going to vote for him like you should
Will he at least get rid of the filibuster or just let it be a strong executive?
Whichever one ends up being the more cynical option that helps keep Dems locked out of power.
A lot of the Trump admin’s recent adventures with economic policy remind me of Nixon’s approach to dealing with Fed chair Arthur Burns. Nixon successfully pressured Burns to cut rates and expand the money supply to juice the economy even though inflation was accelerating. The consequence— especially when coupled with a major supply shock (the OPEC embargo)— caused inflation to go over 12% while the term premium blew out— causing the economy to stagnate as Fed policy failed to contain the rise of long-end rates.
Now, we’re already in a period with simultaneous inflation acceleration and employment roll-over— and the president is relentlessly pressuring our central banker to cut while installing loyalist toadies at the Fed and (surpassing even Nixon here) trying to replace the statistical agency heads with politically-motivated feckless incompetents.
I am once again asking for a "this is correct and/or informative but actually disheartening" button rather than merely "like."
FWIW, National Review had a very tough morning column about Antoni: https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/trump-wants-a-bureau-of-maga-statistics/"
They're anti-anti-Trump in orientation so it's conceivable--but not likely--that this represents broad enough concern with incompetence to sway a critical number of Republican senators.
Whenever I see a "@realSomeonesName" account, I'm always curious: who owns the "unreal" account? What's their life like?
In this case it seems to be owned by a dinosaur, which I am frankly OK with.
https://xcancel.com/EjAntoni
You think that's air your breathing? lol
_great_ reference
If you're the party in power, wouldn't you want to know whether your economic policies are working? It's only perhaps the biggest determinant of election success...
Not if you believe that you can convince voters not to believe their own lived reality
I am now reminded of two things I learned from Mary Thomas, my instructor in AP US Government and Politics in the 11th grade (2003).
Mary Thomas's First Law: "Polls are notoriously inaccurate."
Mary Thomas's Second Law: "Perception is stronger than reality."
To which I added Joseph's Corollary: "What you THINK is not as important as what you THINK you think."
It is more important to *look* mahvelous than to *be* mahvelous.
But does Trump have American teeth in a Spanish mouth?
I'd restate that: There are things you know, and things you believe. It is important to know the difference.
Nah, the original slogan holds true and advertisers have known about it for a while. Trucks include all the cushy, luxury features like surround sound systems and heated seats because it's what customers want (what they think). But they still advertise themselves as tough, working man's vehicles because that fits their customers' self-conception (what they THINK they think).
Lot of laws and corollaries today, Joseph. I thought that was supposed to be Moses's role.
Anyway, you took undue credit for the earlier "Joseph's Law" you proposed. It had already been posited by fellow SB commenter, Cole Johnson.
Surely you're aware of Cole's Law?
[Ducks]
:-)
Trump just doesn't think like that, about anything. Remember "I like the numbers where they are"? Anyway, he can't run again and he's not able to care as much about the midterms as he should.
Correction, he isn't allowed to run again. He can run again provided no one that matters stands in his way. Squeaking out the midterms via gerrymandering/ICE raids on polling places/military invasions of cities would be in service of this goal.
Trump doesn't want objective, realistic numbers. He wants to tell his followers, and everyone else, what reality is. That's why it's important for him to destroy the reliability of the BLS.
Works for China?
I'm pretty sure China still collects economic information and makes it available to party members internally. It simply stopped publicly reporting the numbers.
Seems bad. I fear we in the US may just be early instead of exceptional. And really, Netanyahu beat Trump to it several years prior.
https://x.com/patrickc/status/1955246810718503080
"Opinion polling for the next election:
UK: Reform leading by 7pp
France: RN leading by 10pp
Germany: AfD leading by 2pp
Italy: FdI leading by 7pp
Netherlands: PVV leading by 1pp
Switzerland: SVP leading by 12pp
Austria: FPÖ leading by 13pp"
To quote The Atlantic editor who wrote the headline for David Frum's article: "If liberals won't enforce borders, fascists will."
More and more, there are two issues on which I think we must throw people under a bus, for the sake of getting elected and quietly passing laws to mitigate the consequences of being thrown under a bus.
The immigration thing just drives me nuts on the politics. It's about the most positive sum interaction on the merits that I and others are just way out of line in accepting as such.
One issue is presumably illegal immigration; what in your opinion is the other? You said there are two issues.
My guess it’s the people who froth over the idea of JK Rowling existing and declaring any people tangentially associated with her must be chastised…. That is my round about way of labeling the issue without stating it.
As a Millennial, I'll just write that I genuinely like Harry Potter, both the books and the movies, and I am glad JK Rowling exists.
Eh. Elder millennial, so am pretty indifferent to Harry Potter. But I think minor generational positioning probably makes a difference here.
Greta-Thunberg-How-Dare-You-?!?.GIF
The Strike series is loads better but it's like HP; I'm growing into my middle age with Strike the way I went through HP in my youth.
Casual Vacancy is just loads of fucked up...
She said some insensitive things in response to a real abuse of things in England and then got tarred and feathers, which convinced her that these people are mean and crazy and made her turn more against trans people. People literally act like she kills children ffs.
You can say trans here, Joseph, this isn’t Freddie deBoer’s Substack 😉
I refrain from commenting on JK Rowling beyond recounting my experience of working in a bookstore when I was at university and all the Harry Potter books were coming out.
I'll comment on the fact that the shift in left-wing perceptions of JKR is everything wrong with the left in the last 10 years in a nutshell. I don't want a derail on trans policy or whatever but "how do we handle disagreement" is a core part of Slow Boring and it was totally botched here.
Here was a single mom, not from an affluent background, hardcore Labour Party supporter, and she becomes the most successful in the world at something. Probably the biggest British working-class success since Paul McCartney and she's everything the Labour Party and mainstream left is about!
As far as I'm aware, her views on economic policy matters haven't really changed but now she is a pariah. It's remarkable.
I diplomatically choose not to incite that particular war this evening.
Fair enough.
So brave.
I think there a healthy middle ground between “outsourcing your morals to popular opinion” and assassinating world leaders who don’t share your views.
I do too. Most of the time. But what good are beliefs if you never act to defend them?
There are actions you could take besides killing elected officials!
I tend towards those ones since they're much more accessible.
The inability of the UK’s two major parties to control immigration is incredible to me. Like, how many times does the electorate have to say they want something done about it? Now the prospect of PM Nigel Farage looms?!
I thought the UK wanted to leave Europe. And they did. More Europeans left the UK than entered it last year. What more do people want?
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/long-term-international-migration-flows-to-and-from-the-uk/
> EU net migration subsequently turned negative following the introduction of the post-Brexit immigration system in 2021, which greatly reduced opportunities for EU citizens to move to the UK. Take-up of work visas among EU citizens in the post-Brexit immigration system in 2021 and 2022 was relatively low, as explained in the Migration Observatory briefing, Work visas and migrant workers in the UK.
>
> Net migration of EU citizens in 2024 was estimated at -96,000. More detail on how EU net migration has changed following the Brexit referendum and COVID-19 pandemic can be found in the Migration Observatory briefing EU Migration to and from the UK.
The EU citizens aren't the most disliked immigrants, this is pretty misleading.
Overall net migration increased quite substantial post-COVID though and, perhaps particularly importantly, the pattern of migration changed so that far more migrants were spread around the country instead of being overwhelmingly clustered in London: https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/comment/the-nature-of-the-post-brexit-migration-change-is-different-to-what-many-expected/
I’m on the move so apologies for a brief, citation-free response, but my understanding is, the drop in EU migration notwithstanding, immigration levels increased even under Conservatives bc of the new wave of migrants.
It seems to be the case that Brexit reflected dissatisfaction with EU border policy, but current dissatisfaction is with the new migration surge.
It's a simple as "I heard 2 brown people speaking a weird language yesterday and didn't like it". Stock, not flow
Are you sure it isn't the rape gangs?
I just discovered this song recently and it's my favorite: https://open.spotify.com/track/2lkdFIdaPI2L3s7jzldKse?si=66dbb822fa734846
In defense of Marine Le Pen (these are words that I don't love having to write), I copy from the NYT here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/world/europe/heat-waves-france-air-conditioning.html
"The culture wars have come for air-conditioning, at least in France.
In July, as a heat wave broiled much of Europe, feelings about air-conditioning suddenly became a political litmus test.
Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader in France, declared that she would deploy a “major air-conditioning equipment plan” around the country if her nationalist party eventually came to power. Marine Tondelier, the head of France’s Green party, scoffed at Ms. Le Pen’s idea and, instead, suggested solutions to warming temperatures that included “greening” cities and making buildings more energy efficient.
An opinion essay in Le Figaro, a conservative newspaper, defended air-conditioning because “making our fellow citizens sweat limits learning, reduces working hours and clogs up hospitals.” Libération, a left-wing daily, countered such arguments, writing that the technology was “an environmental aberration that must be overcome” because it blows hot air onto streets and guzzles up precious energy.
“Is air-conditioning a far-right thing?” one talk show asked provocatively, reflecting how divisive the issue had become."
It's exceptionally dumb to oppose AC in France given how much cleaner their energy grid is.
Fascist!
"...from my cold, air conditioned hands!"
Clean and so well designed that they have enough spare clean energy to export to every neighbour for a tidy profit. Its not like the UK where we have an insufficient power grid, the French have cheap, clean and plentiful electricity!
God, I hope this doesn't become a thing in the U.S. I'm already up the river with my leftier friends because I don't think AI is an unmitigated evil.
Won't happen. The US is simply much hotter than Europe
If I were to make a case against air conditioning it's that it's essentially moral hazard in a can: it's much easier for Texans to ignore life-threatening heat waves if they get to sit inside and say "fuck you, I got mine." The healthy response to secular anthropogenic temperature rise, which affects all organisms and the entire biosphere, should not be "find ways to ignore it," which is what AC fundamentally enables.
I do not expect this position ever to be a political winner or wise to pursue, but I don't think it's necessarily wrong.
I don't know, I kind of like technological solutions to problems.
This isn't a cure, it's a band-aid that discourages political support for a solution by further externalizing the consequences of the initial pollution. It's not like the Great Barrier Reef has access to A/C.
Fair.
What do they find especially evil? I’m guessing something something energy something climate change.
I admit that I also have pretty deep reservations about AI, but for the reason that no one will learn to read or write again beyond the bare minimum needed to prompt a chatbot.
Maybe that’s hyperbole. Or not. Eh, feels true enough, anyway.
If you're asking me about the AI issue, it's a bunch of things. Yes, something something climate change. Also, all the water will be used up and we'll all die. Also, they tend to consider themselves "creatives," and AI will eat their jobs. Also, it's wrong all the time. Also, tech bros are bad and billionaires shouldn't exist. And stuff.
Ah HA! It just so happens that people in my Facebook feed got into it this morning. Here's an example of the anti-AI argument:
"But large language models, as currently constructed, are almost entirely made up of other peoples' blood, and if you get that on you-
...well, the TV informs me that you should still be able to sleep at night, if you buy a mattress from MattressFirm."
Whenever I feel abashed trying to explain America's fascination with guns to Europeans, I take comfort from remembering that they have absolutely idiotic positions on some things as well.
That people believe AC directly increases air temperature in any meaningful way is just mind-boggling.
Obviously it’s not material at the planetary level, but I’m pretty convinced AC contributes to the heat island effect in Manhattan. Quick googling seems to suggest it’s a thing.
Europe's mainstream parties seem anti-technocratic on several issues energy being a fairly obvious one.
Which is weird given that Europe has far more of a reputation for technocratic governance than the United States does.
On the contrary, the EU and its mainstream parties follow religiously what our technocrats tell us to do on energy. The problem is that our technocrats are bad!
Excuse me while I find a wall to pound my head against.
I cracked a joke about this earlier today not knowing about this article and no one here knew what I was talking about f about
Ahead of your time.
The nuclear reactor broke down due to large jellyfish getting trapped inside.
I know people like to frame this in the racial/immigration framework, and I don't believe the popularity/rise of the Right can be separated from that issue.
But it all feels very "anti-EU Europe" doesn't it? People scoff at the notion of sovereignty (especially here in globalist lib-ville), but if the supra-national bureaucracy of the EU can't deliver for at least a voting pluraity in each member nation, you'll get some of this stuff going on.
Also, practically all ills of the West are entirely Angela Merkel's fault.
Eh, the vast majority of people have very literal and unnuanced understandings of borders and territory and are vaguely suspicious of foreigners. In that sense it doesn’t matter what the EU does or doesn’t do for voters in member states - which turns out to be much more than most people realize, e.g. British farmers who fucked around and found out.
As long as we live in a nation-state dominated world, transnational cooperation will be an elite project. One of the reasons it was able to advance as far as it did in Europe is because there was a shared memory of ruinous war. But that’s fading fast and most people see no benefit to cross-border cooperation, so I predict we’ll see the EU rolled back and withered away over time.
Yeah, I don't think I disagree at all. It's just that by the nature of the elite project being in tension with the more populist, and let's face it, democratic energies of the nation-state level politics, the onus falls on the EU to tame those passions or prove itself valuable to the average voter/moron.
To me, the Hobbesian nation-state is the most underrated political technology in history. I think the loftiest globalist liberals (not an insult) think they can shadowbox it to death or submission or something? But I dunno, it's undefeated, you confront it or it'll rear up like it's doing now.
Merkel didn't cause the pandemic and the inflation that followed.
In pretty much every Western country (Australia, Canada, New Zealand seem to be excepted so far), populist right and socialist left have support from about 1/3 of the voters. And 2/3 are still good with establishment-oriented parties of some flavor, from green to social democratic to liberal or conservative.
In some countries that gets you a majority (UK). In some countries that gets you into a coalition (Netherlands). In some countries that locks you out (Germany).
But it doesn't actually vary too much outside of those countries above...I imagine this is because they have minimal uncontrolled immigration, instead mostly taking in legal immigrants with a strong emphasis on not-that-poor ones.
The US is also at about 1/3. That's the core Trump base.
It's, like, remarkably consistent that about 1/3 of voters vote for outsider parties in Western Europe.
Austria: 31%
Germany: 35%
UK: 30%
Denmark: 37%
Sweden: 27%
Norway: 34%
Finland: 22% (I think they also have low immigration)
Spain: 28%
Portugal: 28%
Belgium: 24%
Netherlands: 34%
Greece: 41%
Italy: 56% is a big outlier right now
France's mainstream left and socialist left merged, so like the US, it's hard to break the numbers out
Immigration is currently polling as the #1 issue in Britain (despite the economy being awful). During the election it was #3. Most immigration is legal but maybe 50,000/year is not (300k/year US equivalent) and it gets *huge* attention.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/trackers/the-most-important-issues-facing-the-country
"Immigration is currently polling as the #1 issue in Britain (despite the economy being awful)"
Despite?
Sounds like Britain needs to vote to get the hell out of the EU.
Yep, makes sense, and immigration always gets a lot more attention when the left is in power. We'll see if Reform can sustain this level of support over a 4 year timespan. They are still very amateur hour in terms of personnel.
The concern over E. J. Antony is misplaced.
He has served on the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. The problem with previous heads of BLS is they were either leashing prosperity or not actively unleashing it.
The committee was set up by luminaries such at Steve Moore and Arthur Laffer. Once prosperity has been fully unleashed report after report can only show unceasing prosperity.
So you’re saying he’s going to get confirmed.
Only if he double pinky promises to stop sniffing glue Tuesday through Thursday though.
We on Team Lib and Team Free Trade tried to warn you! https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/us/trump-plant-closure-montana.html