Quick report on my way to Ashville to join @WCKitchen teams, from a @WaffleHouse in Abingdon, picking up sandwiches for any hungry first responder I may find in the way! Proud of the teams responding in many states from Florida to North Carolina plus our response in Acapulco..???? pic.twitter.com/toGiNcdOQ4
— Chef José Andrés ??????? (@chefjoseandres) September 30, 2024
Wow. President Biden just released this AMAZING video honoring President Jimmy Carter and his lifetime of public service. President Carter is about to turn 100 years old. What a lovely gesture. pic.twitter.com/aQJpqOzQnG
— Harry Sisson (@harryjsisson) September 29, 2024
BREAKING: Watch Jimmy Carter’s grandson explain how Jimmy Carter’s last wish is to vote for Kamala Harris. Retweet so all Americans see this wholesome video. pic.twitter.com/SQ3Qd9H0Zn
— Kamala’s Wins (@harris_wins) September 28, 2024
Tonight’s Las Vegas rally: VP Kamala Harris paused to address the devastation from Hurricane Helene.
She highlighted the Biden-Harris administration's efforts to support communities impacted by the climate disaster, focusing on immediate federal response—emergency aid and… pic.twitter.com/uwVimGWre3
— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline) September 30, 2024
.@DouglasEmhoff shares what he told @GwenWalz the first time they met: “I said, ‘I know exactly how you're feeling, and just how Jill was there for me and said ‘don't worry, I've got your back,’ I’ve got your back… I'm going to get you through this thing.’” pic.twitter.com/H5ww4sgk1j
— Inside with Jen Psaki (@InsideWithPsaki) September 29, 2024
During my seventh meeting with President Zelenskyy, I made clear: President Biden and I will continue to stand with the Ukrainian people and work to ensure Ukraine remains a free, democratic, and independent nation. pic.twitter.com/9kTxxgDHJD
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) September 29, 2024
Meanwhile…
On The Road – Albatrossity – Photo Walkabout August 2024 – 4
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
narya
@rikyrah: Good morning!
Scamp Dog
I like the cartoon at the end. Luckovich is the best!
Scout211
FTFNYT editorial board has endorsed Kamala Harris.
Web archive version: The Only Patriotic Choice for President
I did not see that one coming.
ETA: Also too, The New Yorker
Baud
@Scout211: They endorsed Hillary too. Not doing so would be too obvious for their liberal
markssubscribers.Chief Oshkosh
@Scout211: Actually, it’s a shitty endorsement and fuck them.
Biden and Harris saved this country from Donny’s utterly fucked up time in office. They continue to have to fight all the fucked-in-the-head Republican “policies” and actions. Biden and Harris identified root causes and addressed problems and substantially BETTERED this country and continue to do so every fucking day of the week and twice on Sunday. All of that and the best TFNYT can come up with is “Hep! Hep! Save us from da bad man!” Really? Fuck you, Putz. The Gray Lady needs to be retired and go to some farm upstate to play with the other failed media masters
ETA: Yeah, and what Baud said.
Matt McIrvin
@Scout211: What these conventional-big-media outlets usually do is endorse the Democratic candidate and spend most of their time tearing them down. It was the same with the Washington Post’s neocon-leaning editorial page through the War on Terror/Iraq years.
Another Scott
@Scout211: @Baud:
Their “editorial board” has nothing to do with the operation of the paper, their political reporting, their choice of topics, their choice of sources, their slanted headlines, etc., of course. It’s a beard for Sulzberger and the rest of his minions. It’s a bouquet of flowers from a wife beater.
“We obviously can’t be plutocrat-enabling monsters – look at what our vaunted Editorial Board said!!11”
Of course, the editorial is better than the alternative, but…
Grr…,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: This gives them plausible deniability to act as Republican watercarriers.
jonas
I agree with all those points — and it’s just the tip of the iceberg, really. Now if only their own paper would actually do serious reporting on those concerns rather than navel-gazing think-pieces about whether Harris’s plan for this or that is “detailed” enough or whether she’s spent enough time on sit-downs with legacy media.
sab
@Scamp Dog: I especially like the placement of that gun tattoo on the elephant’s ear.
narya
I finally cancelled my FTFNYFT subscription about two months ago, and I’ve been checking in with myself to see what I miss. I absolutely do not miss the politics coverage–that set my teeth on edge every single day. I also sort-of miss the coverage of things like the devastation from Helene, but I’ve realized that, because I came to mistrust all of their political reporting, I didn’t entirely trust their other reporting either. IOW, I miss what the FTFNYFT thought it was, and I still want a replacement, but I do not miss the constant irritation of their political coverage and their anti-trans BS. I also canceled WaPo, and don’t miss that at all. I have been enjoying the Philadelphia Inquirer, but that’s because I grew up/used to live around there; the national coverage is pretty slim. Talking Points Memo is also pretty good. Open to other sources for in-depth, national reporting as well as “lifestyle” features . . .
RandomMonster
@Scamp Dog: The GOP may be trying to put all those under wraps, unfortunately they only seem to find Klan robes to do the job.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Yeah its their sleight of hand so they can continue the pretense of being “liberal”.
Another Scott
@narya: I skim lots of news sources. APNews.com covers pretty much everything, of course.
For reporting on Helene’s aftermath in NC, some place like NCNewsline.com (part of the States Newsroom group) might be good.
There’s too much going on in the world for one newspaper (no matter how good it is) to cover it all, IMHO. Look around! And always be a thoughtful reader.
Cheers,
Scott.
The Audacity of Krope
Someone should tell the editor-in-chief.
schrodingers_cat
@narya: Stopped patronizing them during HRC’s campaign for President. They were my homepage for over 20 years before that.
They were completely on the immigrant bashing bandwagon of the Orange Man. Infact that campaign opened my eyes to the racism and misogyny in this country that just was lurking under the surface even in liberal spaces
Soprano2
@Chief Oshkosh: I agree that it’s a shitty endorsement. It’s not “we think she’s the best person for the job and you should vote for her”, it’s “we think the Republican candidate is so horrible that even though we’d like to endorse a Republican we can’t endorse this one, so we’re endorsing Harris instead”. That’s really what I thought when I read that excerpt, they desperately want the Republicans to be in the presidency again but even the editorial board has to admit that TCFG is manifestly unfit to hold that office again.
Tony G
@Another Scott: Well … it’s better than the asshole Pope saying that “both candidates are equally evil”. Fuck the Catholic Church.
Scout211
FYI, I posted that Kamala Harris endorsement in a good news thread because despite the FTFNYT political coverage being so skewed, there are still a significant number of normies who read the paper and may find the editorial helpful in making their decision or at least confirming their decision.
I get what everyone here is saying but IMHO, it’s still something good and something positive, particularly for normies out there. We need all the votes we can get.
Kay
@narya:
I haven’t found a real national alternative.
I worry a little bit about “our side” denigrating all media. The Right does that and look where they ended up – delusional and believing all sorts of nonsense.
I also worry about those on our side who insist social media will replace real, on the ground fact reporting. Go look at social media on the flooding in NC, TN and GA. It’s a bunch of lies about how “no” media is covering the floods and “no one” in the government is coming to aid them. These are lies. The floods are front page news on every news site and the federal government is pushing TONS of aid in there.
No one loathes the NYTimes like I do but I really, really don’t want us relying exclusively on Talking Points Memo or Twitter for news. That way is madness.
Kay
@Scout211:
Agree. I don’t think normies are on board for “all media is discredited”. This is not a majority view – “media” is not a topic that gets this much attention outside of political junkies like us.
narya
@Another Scott: @Kay: Yeah, I’ve been poking around a bit, and, thanks to the front-pagers here (and the people I follow on Bluesky) I find links to stuff–I don’t feel like I’m missing any big stories.
TBone
@Scout211: 💜✌️
schrodingers_cat
FWIW there are plenty of journalists who do good work. Following beat reporters directly is the thing to do. For example Scott McFarlane, who is now with CBS has done good reporting about Jan6 trials
Being aware that the NYT and their editorial practices that are skewed against Ds is accepting reality pretending that their coverage does not affect us negatively is being in a bubble of wishful thinking.
Another Scott
@Tony G:
I’m willing to cut Francis some slack on that. He’s stuck in an ancient system and only has so much room to maneuver even if he would want to say something different.
AlJazeera.com:
Pictures of him with Biden make it clear that he gets along well with him, and he slapped down a reactionary in the church that tried to punish Biden.
I think Francis’s comments were to counter those who were saying “I refuse to vote for the lesser evil, sit the election out, evil is evil, etc.” There was that exact sentiment boosted on mastodon’s “explore” page this morning. [ groucho-roll-eyes.gif ]
People have to think and make a choice.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Betty Cracker
I read the NYT endorsement this morning and was also put off by the crap about Harris’s alleged “lack of details” and avoidance of outlets like the Times. The veep’s decision to get her message out via local media and non-traditional outlets is a rational response to political reporting celebrities’ failure to adapt when confronted by a lying, authoritarian demagogue.
Jesus, they’ve had nearly a decade to adjust. They haven’t. They never will. The Harris team did adjust, which speaks well of their ability to process new information and make strategic shifts as necessary.
Kay
@narya:
Good. I used to love the WSJ even after Murdoch bought it but then Trump came along and now it’s all low quality garbage.
But a curated Twitter or Tik Tok feed is not a replacement. I am watching social media turn lies about the flooding into “truth” as we speak. A week from now the “truth” is going to be that no media covered the floods and the areas got no aid. None of that is true, but if you get your news from Twitter or Tik Tok that’s what you’re being fed.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@schrodingers_cat: Following good reporters directly makes a ton of sense. Thanks for the suggestion.
Soprano2
@Kay: I agree about Twitter, but TPM has real reporters who do real reporting. They’re not a press org like the NYT, but they’re not like Twitter either.
schrodingers_cat
@Dorothy A. Winsor: That’s what I do on Twitter, follow beat reporters and electeds directly. So I get news without the filter of opinion writers and talking heads. I can form my own opinions thankyou very much.
Also party functionaries like Jaime Harrison, Kamala Harris etc, so I know what’s going on with the campaign without MSM filters. I do that for Indian politics as well.
Kay
The NYTimes doesn’t have to rah rah Joe Biden. I’m not looking for a cheering section. I don’t care that they’re ideologically Right wing or a newspaper for well off people. They could still do good work – the WSJ is Right wing but they did excellent work for years (not any more- another Trump casualty)
To me, their biggest failure was propagandizing people into believing that the best economy in 35 years is a bad economy.
That’s nuts. I find it disorienting and a little scary that they were able to sell this lie so easily. If they could sell that they could sell any lie.
Scout211
Oliver Willis has a good response to all those “we need details” criticisms of Harris at his Oliver Willis Explains.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Agree. I’ve subscribed for years. But it’s a partisan political outlet. I wouldn’t go there for facts on weather events.
We cannot go up our own asses. The Right has done that and look where they are – they’re all fucking delusional cult members.
There’s no national, high quality straight news outlet in the US at this time but that doesn’t mean we don’t need one – we do.
Mokum
@narya: i like the daily reports of Heather Cox Richardson. She also has a podcast but I cannot listen to podcasts. Might be great if you like that sort of thing.
Soprano2
@Kay: I’m wondering what these people who think 4% unemployment with a booming job market are going to think about the economy when we have 8% +unemployment. (Can no one remember the Great Recession? It wasn’t that long ago!) All the press leaned into the idea that higher prices = bad economy, rather than higher prices = how the market works when we have a pandemic that breaks the supply chain and causes lots of random shortages. Because of course the first one is shorter and easier to write about, and is popular because that’s how people feel anyway. It’s like the thing with schools – people like their own school, but because “everyone” tells them that the schools are bad, they think those other schools out there must be bad.
ETA – I get particularly angry when they use commodities to illustrate higher prices, because the prices of that stuff goes up and down due to factors outside of inflation, like millions of chickens being killed due to bird flu or droughts that cause farmers to flood the market with cattle they can’t afford to feed.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: The Republican candidate for senate is running an immigrant-bashing campaign when he is himself an immigrant. It’s very weird.
MinuteMan
@Baud:
eclare
@Scout211:
This is so true. I guess Obama mentioned policy plans, but what I remember most is “hope and change,” “yes we can,” and “fired up! ready to go!”
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: TBone linked the interview with Biden on The View. I found it more engaging and detail-oriented than anything I’ve seen on CNN or MSNBC (I don’t watch them, I mean clips linked here). What happened to asking someone a question and just letting them answer it? How else are you going to be informed? I’m not interested in their snarky gotchas, as with Dana Bash.
Jeffro
@Kay:
well Twitter, yeah… ;)
Baud
@Scout211: To be honest, I find that excerpt just as condescending as the media’s demand for details
ETA: In the writing style, not the ideas.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: There always has to be a swipe at Clinton.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Small business starts are way up and have been for years now. The small business advisor practice in our little law office is busier than it has even been. So since 1993.
But media has managed to convince huge swathes of the US public that this is a terrible economy and no one in the US has any hope for the future. It’s NUTS what they’ve done. People who are OPENING SMALL BUSINESSES will tell me we’re “in a recession”. Their beliefs don’t even track their actions!
Soprano2
@Kay: I agree, that’s one reason I still listen to news on NPR even though sometimes they drive me crazy. I think it’s the best outlet to find coverage of all kinds of things. I wonder if these outlets were ever better, or did we just think they were better because we didn’t know some of the things we know now?
Matt McIrvin
@Kay:
A large fraction of the US population want cheap goods and cheap labor, and this requires a suffering underclass. A too-good economy is literally bad for them, because their preference is to have slaves.
I think the failing here is really in the people, not the media.
Baud
@zhena gogolia: Right. But the way he talks down to Harris is also off-putting.
Jeffro
I’m concerned about this too – very much.
If nearly half the country’s voters are ok with malicious, moronic fascism when the economy is booming? ugh. It makes me very nervous for any bad times that come (as they surely will).
It’s why we desperately need a media that provides actual facts and perspective. And better educated citizens, too.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: Agreed. The people love Reaganism. Our economic model is not the popular one.
Soprano2
@eclare: No voters actually want detailed policy plans. That criticism is a way of saying “this candidate is a lightweight that we think isn’t serious enough for the job”. I agree with Willis, they need to ignore the calls for more policy and keep doing what they’re doing. People who actually want policy details can read their web site.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I cannot imagine what the reporting will be like with a real bad economy. People are going to be jumping off buildings.
It’s like they’ve broken the frame. They’re going to have to start calling a mild recession The Great Depression for consistency.
Don’t fucking tell me you’re taking your third cruise since the pandemic and you can’t afford eggs! That’s not true! It’s nonsensical. They cannot be spending like they are if they aren’t making any money. That cannot happen.
Soprano2
@zhena gogolia: I know a lot of people here don’t like him, but Jon Stewart did a pretty good interview last week with Christine LeGarde. It was probably 20-25 minutes long, and got relatively deep into stuff about inflation and how best to deal with that. He asked her questions and let her answer them. I hate the “gotcha” interviews where it’s obvious they’re trying to create a sound bite they can talk about.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: I think part of what’s going here is that the news media have, in class consciousness, mechanics and social circles, gotten close to the tech industry, and tech industry, which Americans by now expect to be the hottest sector of the economy, is NOT and really has been in something like a mini-recession. It’s specific to them, though.
I will say, the slump this year felt not nearly as bad as the one early last year, and just anecdotally I’m starting to see things like people moving jobs and recruiters pinging people, which to me is a sign that it’s not as bad.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I also think NPR has become more valuable since the decline in quality of for- profit news. Their abortion reporting is excellent, for example. They actually treat it like a real subject with real consequences.
Soprano2
@Kay: I think the reason they were able to convince people is because prices are higher, and they went up so fast that it’s not that hard to remember what things cost just a few years ago (I myself was appalled the other day to realize that a bag of cat litter that used to cost me $4.50 now costs over $7 – that was 3 years ago I was paying the lower price. Things like that do make people feel like things are worse than they used to be). Plus, we got used to inflation being 1-2% – it’s been like that for a long time, so people began to believe that was normal and would last forever. One thing that makes me mad is that we’ve managed inflation better than almost any other country in the world, and the press never talks about that.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: To be fair we haven’t really had high inflation since the 1970s, so when we see anything that looks remotely like it we freak out because we’re not accustomed to it.
I remember a libertarian friend of mine claiming that ARRA during the Great Recession was starting to cause hyperinflation, because he saw the price of something or other going up (I forget what it even was). Predicted that within a few years Paul Krugman was going to be calling for wage and price controls.
schrodingers_cat
@sab: Each demographic has some pick-mes.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: My take is that too much of the economics reporting is informed by “experts” with giant axes to grind and those who are stuck in their “freshwater/saltwater school of economics” training who refuse to adjust their thinking in the face of new evidence. The conventional wisdom is really hard to break out of (even Obama talked about the federal budget as being like the family budget…), but the conventional wisdom is too often wrong these days.
“Marketplace” on the radio was in that mode for years, but they’ve gotten much better since the housing crash and the pandemic. (They can still do better.)
Every month people being told that a recession was coming any day now!! puts people on edge. Conflating the stock market with the economy as a whole doesn’t inform people. Rarely if ever giving historical context doesn’t inform people.
So, no I don’t blame the hoi poloi on this. US economics reporting needs to be much, much better.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: I’m not going to be “fair.” There’s always something imperfect about the economy, and it’s not as if inflation just happened out of nothing — people didn’t forget the pandemic. And people can see their own wages, which have been going up. If people won’t give us a transition period to switch from a trickle-down economy, then they’re hooked on Reaganism, and Dems should move on to focus on something more popular with voters.
Chief Oshkosh
@Scout211: Yes, and I went full flamethrower on a good-news thread. Sorry about that!
TBone
Once again too late, Kyle Rittenhouse’s bodyguard speaks up about Kyle’s behavior and “character.” Trigger warning:
https://digbysblog.net/2024/09/29/cryin-kyle-was-looking-for-trouble/
Chief Oshkosh
@Kay: Luckily, nobody is saying that, so ya got that goin’ for ya.
Chris
@Scout211:
Oh, I saw it coming. They do this every election cycle; the last time they didn’t endorse the Democrat was, I believe, back in the Eisenhower years.
It just never actually gets reflected in their actual coverage. You get an entire year of back to back “HILLARY’S EMAILS ARE HISTORY’S GREATEST SCANDAL!!!” front page headlines. Then at the end of the campaign season (though never so close to the end that last-minute voters might actually notice), you get a Hillary Clinton endorsement on the past page.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
It will never not be funny to me that they spent from 2016 to 2020 meeping about the SADNESS of the rust belt and it’s now been fucking BOOMING for 4 years and it has been completely forgotten.
Have they been to Detroit lately? Detroit has traffic jams again – a combination of a manufacturing rebound and a deliberate city policy of welcoming immigrants. Cover THAT.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Blog father didn’t agree with me when I said that O-W’s title sounds mansplainy. We are arguing about it on Twitter right now.
Another Scott
@Soprano2:
Downstairs I related a Saturday visit with a retired colleague and his wife. Brilliant, sharp, funny, well-informed people. But WaPo subscribers and trapped in normie politics.
There are people like that out there. They think they want details (but not to the extent that they do their own research, of course).
It’s a tough problem – figuring out ways to get a big enough majority to get things done, when the universe of voters includes those normies heavily affected by malevolent actors who serve the plutocrats….
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat: Based on what was excerpted above, I agree with you, with the possible caveat that I think our political culture rewards people who condescend to Democrats generally (whether from the right, center, or left), although I’m sure Dem women get it worse.
TBone
Donold has xitted out a famous painting and
blasphemedcalled out to St. Michael the Archangel for assistance this morning. 🙄Rose Judson
Good morning. Thoughts with those of you who have family affected by Helene; the devastation is just shocking. I have two colleagues in the Asheville area. We’ve heard from one, but not the other. Hoping she is safe and well.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay:
I don’t know, I think it’s more that the signals are reversed. When the next Great Recession comes it’s all going to be “buck up and tighten your belt, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, it’s time to balance the budget”.
(Gasoline will be CHEAP.)
gene108
@Scout211:
I disagree with this part of Oliver’s critique.
Republicans get the majority of the largest voting block in the country to vote for them, white people.
They have billionaires with ideological axes to grind willing to throw millions towards Republican causes.
They have their own dedicated media outlets like The Washington Times, whatever Bill Buckley’s magazine’s called, before getting to NewsMax, Fox News, etc.
I’m surprised Democrats win as much as they do given the structural advantages Republicans have.
Chief Oshkosh
@zhena gogolia: I agree. It was refreshing to watch and hear adults interacting. It’s now become a cliche, but this is similar to what occurs with late-night comedy hosts – actual questions, thoughtful, fairly fulsome answers.
Apparently this is unpossible for that actual news media.
Starfish
@Mokum: Heather Cox Richardson’s writing is informed by reading the news. Some podcasters are as well. The 1.5 hour podcast rambles are not for me. The 20-30 minute podcasts not interrupted by too many commercials for MeUndies are pretty good.
msb
God bless everyone trying to help in the wake of Helene. One benefit for WCK staff: the people in charge won’t murder them.
As to info sources, I’m a Talking Points Memo subscriber and have read The Guardian for years, though their ’24 US election coverage is only good in comparison with US elite media.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
Also, the MEDIA market collapsed. Their own industry contracted. Local news collapsed. The NYTimes has to sell puzzles and product reviews and fancy wedding reviews just to make a profit.
But come on. How self centered are these people? Outside of media and tech this is VERY good economy and it’s a very good economy for people who have not benefitted from the economy since the 1990s.
Omnes Omnibus
@TBone: Yesterday was St Michael’s Day in the Western Christian churches.
Baud
@gene108: I glossed over that part. I agree with you. We actually overachieve given the headwinds (including the headwinds that come from the mouths of the Internet savvy).
Captain C
@Scout211:
This is why we keep sanewashing him, covering for him, and generally crapping on
DemoncrapsDemocrats. — The FTFNYTKay
@Baud:
I don’t go along with that. Our economic ideas are better. Chasing whatever is “popular” is not a political Party with a platform and real beliefs – it’s marketing. Why bother having a Democratic Party if both parties push trickle down? Liberal economics are like 80% of our platform.
We can take our ball and go home in a snit about voters not loving us enough but that means we are going home. Leaving the field.
SatanicPanic
@Kay:
QFT. Spending all our time talking amongst ourselves leads to us being unable to talk to anyone else. It’s how too online people get blindsided by reality so often.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: I’ve said before, some of the “Democrats are chumps” lefties I follow are specifically Bay Area techie lefties, and I think they have some tunnel vision where they think the economic indicators are lying to everyone and the rotten state of Bay Area tech industry is the facts on the ground.
(Even being in tech industry but on the opposite coast, I think, makes it seem a bit less rotten to me.)
Chief Oshkosh
@Soprano2: They were better before rightwing oligarchs became their sugar daddies.
People like the Koch brothers basically bought out any media outlets that were middle or left-leaning. For those that wouldn’t play, the Kochs and others created competitors or more heavily funded existing competitors. A lot of this started way back in the last century.
Captain C
@Scout211: Their subscription numbers must be in worse shape than they admit.
Kay
@msb:
I’m not sure I can deal with the Guardian. They have a kind of breathless “the world is on fire!” approach that bugs me.
I’m a newspaper lover without a good national newspaper to love. Right now I pay for the WaPo but it sort of sucks.
Danielx
@Chief Oshkosh:
Actually, it’s a shitty endorsement and fuck them.
Hear hear!
Baud
@Kay: We’re a political party, not an advocacy group or a think tank, and we have to follow the people. If the people reject our ideas, we have to adapt. Maybe the people won’t reject our ideas, however, and we can keep moving in the direction I’d like to see u move in.
Chris
@Another Scott:
I mean, there’s something refreshing about reading an output from the Catholic Church that actually reflects Catholic teachings, which is what we’ve largely seen from Francis. The far more common norm, and the one the American high clergy and all the in-your-face professional Catholics would dearly love to return to, is “both sides do it, but liberals are worse” – you vaguely pay lip service to the idea that no political party is perfect, but in practice treat abortion and gay marriage as the only two things that matter, and either do a whole lot of dancing around the other issues (“oh sure, we should help the poor, but we should do that as individuals, not through big government welfare services!”) or just don’t talk about it at all. Or just straight lie about it. (I still remember the priest at one of the local churches who told the congregation when the ACA was about to pass that everyone should oppose it because it includes money for abortion – even after that had explicitly been written out of the ACA).
The simple fact of speaking of anti-immigrant politics and abortion in the same sentence, and then declining to say which of them is worse and which of them you should prioritize, is a huge change from what you normally hear from the RCC.
Jeffro
It’s been somewhat heartening to see some coverage of trump’s latest insanity: “let the police conduct The Purge for an hour”
(Politico link here)
trump’s own campaign had to try and “sane-wash” him since for once the snooze media didn’t. Progress!
he’s nuts and encourages violence at every turn
Chris
@Kay:
That’s not their biggest failure, it’s their biggest success.
Sure Lurkalot
@Matt McIrvin:
Punch drunk on it. Right before they complain that the cheap goods break or don’t work and the low wages are their own or their kids’.
I wish the Harris/Walz campaigning on the dignity of work would get more play. I wish companies would spend more effort on their core businesses and products rather than figure out ways to slice and dice every metric of possible profit so their product becomes a priced down shell you have to add on to so it works as intended.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
They still repeat over and over that manufacturing is “over” and this is simply not true. It’s not even true in California! California makes more tangible STUFF than other state. It’s like they’re stuck in 2002.
They also all repeat that no one without a college degree makes any money and this is ALSO not true. It hasn’t been true FOR YEARS.
TBone
@Jeffro: 👍 hoping for widespread condemnation
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: The Guardian’s US political coverage is very slanted toward DSA/horseshoe-curious leftism, in my experience. And they’ve sometimes got that wrong-end-of-the-telescope thing you see in British media where they don’t really get how decentralized US government is and that what some podunk town did is not what “the Americans” did.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Most people, including many journalists are innumerate, economics is covered terribly in the political media. This is not just a right wing problem. Remember how lionized Matt Taibbi was during the 2008 great recession on blogs like this one. His numbers never added up but it didn’t matter.
RaflW
@Soprano2: Blech. None of the GOP clowns who ran against Trump this cycle we worth a shit either. And I include one-time press heartthrob Nikki Haley, who has shown herself to be so morally vapid in capitulating to him that she has beclowned herself (plus she took some really dumb positions while campaigning).
The GOP of the news industry’s imaginings is not the party actually out there being itself. We just can’t function as a country very well if the press continues to hold nostalgic crushes for a party that hasn’t existed since before Obama took office (at least).
TBone
@Omnes Omnibus: thank you for that info, my hubby is named Michael for that reason and I should have known about it.
I guess the ball gargling thunder twat was too busy with grievance and revenge fantasy yesterday to ask for help on the correct day.
On my way to vet with yowling howling outraged cat doesn’t help my thought processes.
Kay
@Chris:
It really kills the incentive for political actors to deliver on the economy though. If they’re going to portray the Biden economy as a failure then “success” is meaningless.
I know Democrats have to say “people are hurting” because that is sort of our brand but jesus fucking christ – don’t fall for your own bullshit. This is a good economy! If you can’t make money now something else is going on with you. It’s really and truly not Joe Biden’s fault.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: FWIW Guardian’s coverage of Indian politics is pretty terrible too. Their supercilious upper crust tankie politics is hard to take.
Chief Oshkosh
@Kay: Another (tiny) example is the incredible popularity of Buc-ees. These places are HUGE, with seemingly acres and acres of shelves and shelves of absolute crap. And they are absolutely stuffed to the gills with “salt of the earth” people who buy metric fuck tons of that absolute crap – at highway prices! There is an awful lot of spending going on. Where’s the money coming from if the economy is so bad?
Aside: Admittedly the bathrooms are spacious and clean and there are lost of gas pumps. However, most of the Bus-ees I’ve visited have passed the critical mass point of convenience/inconvenience because there’s simply too much traffic to get in and out easily.
SatanicPanic
@Chris: I don’t think it’s a tough thing to convince people the economy is bad when housing is so unaffordable. And burritos went from $8 to $13 in three years. Things are turning around but I don’t think people who are upset about things are entirely wrong.
Another Scott
@Captain C: Their parent company annual report talked about the goal of increasing worldwide subscriptions (of all kinds) by 50% by this year IIRC. I’d be very surprised if they make those numbers, but it shows what’s driving their work product. They need “engagement” and clicks.
Don’t feed the beast.
Cheers,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@Jeffro: Ooh, he’s Schrödinger’s Asshole again: it’s always “just a joke” when it gets pushback.
Sounds more like “The Red Hour” from that old Star Trek episode with the society controlled by an evil computer named Landru. (As opposed to all the societies controlled by evil computers that had different names.) Though I think the people who made The Purge acknowledged it as an influence.
Bupalos
@Scout211: The board goes out of it’s way to explain that it probably understands the ways it’s toxic for democracy and for Harris for this to be framed in overwhelmingly in terms of Trump’s negatives and unfitness, and the idea that there is simply no choice. And then goes ahead and does it. In the headline, in the organizational priority, and in the summation.
It’s essentially a backhanded endorsement that has no considered intention to actually help.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
This is my own observation based on spending a lot more time in Europe the last five years but Europeans have trouble with the SCALE of the US. You cannot really compare a country the size of Germany with the United States. The US is unwieldy in a way smaller countries will never be.
I just got back from Copenhagen (again) and we had dinner with a Norwegian city planner. He said Copenhagen is getting 1000 new residents a month. They’re building housing like crazy because the COUNTRY has a housing policy and plan that includes 20% of new housing to low income residents. It’s fabulous but Denmark is half the size of Ohio. That would be a LOT harder in the US.
We’re HUGE.
frosty
OMG Balloon-Juice is my main source of news!!!
Matt McIrvin
@SatanicPanic: The pattern for decades has been that consumer goods are cheap (so the CPI doesn’t inflate much) but things that don’t get cheaper because of technology and international trade, like housing and education and health care and any skilled professional services, get more and more expensive. (Baumol’s cost disease.)
What was new was that the COVID supply chain disruptions actually made consumer goods prices spike up, and that was really disturbing to people because it hadn’t happened in a very long time.
I think the reason AI made investors so crazy was that they thought they’d finally cracked the increasing cost of professional services. They haven’t, but the delusion will take a while to clear.
Chris
@Kay:
I see no reason to believe the Sulzbergers or anyone else with a big media mouthpiece wants politicians to deliver on the economy, or be incentivized to do so.
zhena gogolia
@frosty: Me too, don’t tell anyone.
Kay
@Chief Oshkosh:
They spent like drunken sailors during Bush II but I knew what that was – cheap credit. They were borrowing. Hence the crash.
But credit isn’t cheap anymore! They’re buying with actual money. Which means they have it, even after their 4 dollar egg purchase.
TBone
@frosty: 😊 frequently a source of “heard it here first!”
Bupalos
@Kay: agree with your point but TPM is a pretty bad poster child, unless you just mean obviously they don’t and won’t have the kind of reporting resources to provide local coverage. That is a partisan shop, but a profoundly ethical one.
TBone
@Kay: 💜 because it is hard does not mean impossible.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
No worries. They’ll make more.
UncleEbeneezer
@gene108: The presumption that Dems only have themselves to blame, is one that slips out all the time in Willis’ writing.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: Though it goes the other way too–I vaguely think of European countries as the size of US states, but that’s not a great analogy because the few big ones are really bigger economies than even the big states.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: The big problem holding the US back is lack of consensus on how to move forward, even on basic things.
frosty
@frosty: Damn, edit window closed before I was done!
Current daily reads: TPM, Guardian, Heather Cox Richardson. I’m contemplating the LA Times and the Philly Inquirer but I don’t know how much money I want to spend every month. It used to be just one subscription to the Baltimore Sun back when it was paper and before the Tribune Company ruined it.
News took less time, too. Pick up a copy from a seat on the commuter train as I got off, read it on the DC Metro, and that was it for the day. No TV news at night, either. Now? At least 3 or 4 hours a day!
Baud
@frosty: I’ve heard good things about the Baltimore Banner from folks here, although I haven’t spent much time with it myself.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: The problem with our politics is that a majority of white people (men and women) want to preserve their structural advantage even if it means sacrificing the general good
As they are the biggest and the most powerful demographic group most institutions from the Supreme Court to the NYT cater to them and their party, the Republican party
Sure Lurkalot
Mark Zandi of Moody’s on the economy.
Why does he hesitate to present facts?
The media’s downward spiral is just the logical conclusion of its turn to be infotainment, 4 decades ago. Add in the concept of a 24/7 news cycle and you almost have to make shit up to stay relevant.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat: 100%.
I’m not a reductionist, but that is by far the biggest hurdle. It’s one thing for people to be conservative. It’s another for them to be unreachable — and unable to enforce basic norms — because they are paranoid about their social status.
eclare
@Matt McIrvin:
I still remember a college friend from New Jersey suggesting that we go to Florida for the weekend. We were in ATL. I explained it would be a five hour drive, minimum. She had no idea how big Georgia is.
schrodingers_cat
@eclare: Even people in India which is a big as country itself have trouble figuring our continental dimensions. I was asked as to why I don’t meet my best friend (from elementary school to highschool) in San Diego often.
frosty
@Mokum: I like her daily reports too, but they’re a little grim sometimes. Like today. Some mornings I don’t want to see the freight train coming down the tracks at me while I’m looking down admiring the flowers.
RaflW
@Jeffro: “President Trump has always been the law and order President” Speich-meister Cheung said, right before G-d smote him for such outrageous lying.
mrstealyourcostcosample
@UncleEbeneezer: Agreed. This is why I really really dislike Oliver’s take.
No force in history has taken down white supremacy / colonization. It’s the strongest animating force in Western politics, and has been for two hundred years. The Democratic Party has been the most effective political counterweight to white supremacy in the last century and have accomplished things once thought impossible (thanks Obama! thanks Joe!)
…but the idea that you can TALK white people out of this shit with the right political messaging? shiiiiiit.
every white person understands the value of being on the R team (or at least not on the race-traitor D team)
Omnes Omnibus
@eclare: Brussels-Paris is a similar drive time to Madison-Minneapolis. Shorter train ride though.
SatanicPanic
@Matt McIrvin: right, there are reasons for inflation but the way people feel about inflation is a problem. No one loves being confronted with higher prices. And no one is really doing much about housing costs, because the solutions tend to be unpopular.
Chris
@eclare:
Of course, my answer to that would’ve been: “yes, and?” (I did the five hour drive between Miami and St. Augustine quite a few times in my last year of graduate school, when I was living in one place but still had to go to the other for thesis-related stuff at least once a month).
My roommate lived in London for a few years. One of the things she found most baffling was the number of people who say things like “oh, I wish I saw [relative/friend] more often, but they live an hour’s drive away!” which means only seeing them every few months at best. Over here, an hour’s drive is what it takes to go to our closest friends’ home a couple suburbs over on a bad day. We do that at least once a week.
Kay
@Bupalos:
Youre expecting too much of them! They cover politics and policy. They’re not a replacement for a national news source.
And, Dear GOD either is Twitter.
The Right did this. They decided 20 years ago that everyone was “biased” against them and look where they ended up – a cult.
Bupalos
@schrodingers_cat: That is obviously true, that those with social or economic privilege seek to preserve it. But that has always been true. To the extent that we’re seeing a real break in American politics, it has to do with some truly new global forces lubricating mechanisms and fault lines that have operated in America for a long time without such destabilization.
Austria just elevated a pretty straight-up Nazi party. It’s hit places from India to Brazil to the Netherlands.
Soprano2
@Kay: Kay, I think it’s as simple as the devastation of the Rust Belt involved white people, and the resurgence of places like Detroit doesn’t involve them so much, so to the the major press orgs it’s a non-story. I don’t know how long it’s going to take for the press to realize that everything is not about white people anymore, but they aren’t there yet.
BR
@Kay:
I read LA Times, Pro Publica, TPM, Bellingcat, Lawfare, and misc tech news (Wired, etc.) and feel like that covers things quite well. I have never felt underinformed without NYT and WaPo.
Baud
My 2 cents: You can stay reasonably informed about national news by looking at AP and Reuters headlines and selecting the articles that you want to read. They’ll still have irritating takes now and then, but AP in particular is much better than what’s-his-face was there during the Obama years.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: …Also, Europeans often imagine they understand US politics better than people in the US do, because we R dum dums.
They don’t.
Eolirin
@Kay: Housing and higher education and day care costs are legitimately huge drags on middle class families. They’re still out of line with income gains. So we can focus and message on fixing those things and it’ll make tangible and positive impacts on people’s lives.
We can also continue to improve anti poverty measures like putting back the COVID era boosts to the earned income tax and child tax credits. Those things are all really popular and easy to campaign on.
Eolirin
@Kay: China has worked it out. We could too if we wanted to. But we’d need the red states to get on board, and that’s the bigger problem.
DougL
I’m perpetually angry about Democratic messaging but have to be slapped upside the head now and again with the truth of your analysis. We’re playing on a very unlevel field but still manage to win. It’s because some of us work their butts off to overcome the systemic disadvantages we face.
@gene108:
Bupalos
In the politically operative case in the United States I’m not sure it makes that much sense to call it “paranoia” or limit the fear to “social status.” The political radicalization of rural and exurban whites proceeded apace with the opioid epidemic, spiraling inequality, brain-drain, and a decade-long destabilization of educational and social institutions. A lot of the things that come out of a culture soaked in this kind of decline goes a ways past thoughts of the social ethnic pecking order, as it’s often presented here.
Matt McIrvin
@eclare: My daughter thinks of the sizes of states in New England terms–from where I live, you can easily visit any of 5 nearby states as a day trip, though in some cases it might be easier to stay overnight. Virginia and New York are unimaginably huge to her, but now she’s in college in a bigger state so she needs to get used to it.
Matt McIrvin
(Come to think of it, I grew up in kind of a similar situation since while Virginia is big, DC, Maryland and Delaware aren’t, PA was just the other side of Maryland and Harper’s Ferry, WV wasn’t that far away.)
UncleEbeneezer
@mrstealyourcostcosample: Well said. And the reason Republicans are so freaked out is because we are living through the early stages of the greatest existential threat to the reign of White Supremacy in America. Demographic change of the electorate and the increasingly progressive views of young voters doesn’t bode well for the GOP. Obama being elected twice, Biden winning over Trump and now Kamala hopefully knocking him out for good are a really big deal. Throughout this time period we’ve seen more attention to erasing racial inequalities, promoting women’s rights, LGBTQ rights etc., and those things are getting more and more popular with each election cycle. White Supremacy doesn’t get as many guaranteed votes as it used to. And their fantasy candidates to win the future are people like…J.D. Vance, lol.
Eolirin
@Bupalos: Those aren’t new forces, it’s the consequences of a few decades of Russian global meddling to destabilize western democracies finally hitting a tipping point. Without the financing and signal boosting and organizational aid from Russian oligarchs and intelligence services we don’t get here.
The US right wing and our home grown billionaire fascists are the second largest force pushing in this direction, but they wouldn’t have been able to succeed without Russian involvement. They’ve been making common cause for several decades now.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
A stupendous amount of American politics consists of hearing half the people in them explain that the things that in most European countries have been up and running for three quarters of a century are in fact impossible and/or a commie plot. For the average Frenchman or German, listening to American politics is basically like being a General Motors high-wage unionized worker circa 1960 listening to Radio Moscow deny that people like them can exist.
Since they know that the United States, unlike the Soviet Union, is not a dictatorship that censors information about the world to prevent its people from learning what things are actually like outside their borders, this, not entirely unreasonably, has spent decades feeding the stereotype that Americans must be either not very bright, or not very educated.
Ksmiami
@Kay: Complete insanity. Agreed and it is entirely the fault of the MSM. All of the financial papers have been pretty upbeat during Biden’s term.
Bupalos
@Eolirin: I think that significantly inflated Russia’s importance. Of course they do that, and of course new media technology makes that somewhat more effective. But it’s a rounding error on the massive global disruptions our societies are trying to digest- climate change, spiraling inequality, and socially disruptive technologies.
This is a destabilized age, a shocking realization coming out of an extraordinary bubble of peace and prosperity. To put it in historical terms, it’s perfectly normal for things to be crazy right now and for the next generation at least.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: And then a whole lot of brown-skinned (or just East European) immigrants come into their country, their local yahoos start freaking out about sharing their wonderful social-democratic safety net with these unfathomable aliens, and they start to get an inkling of why we’re this way.
Eolirin
@Chris: We’re definitely not very educated. More than half the electorate doesn’t seem to grasp how their own government works.
I’ve been getting inundated by political ads on YouTube for Pat Ryan’s opponent to the House of Representatives going on about how she’s going to get rid of NY’s cashless bail and make sure the NYPD gets more funding, both of which are state level issues.
And don’t get me started on how few people seem to realize that congress and not the president is responsible for creating laws.
lowtechcyclist
@Scamp Dog:
I want that cartoon on a t-shirt – I’d wear it all the time around here, in my red-leaning exurb!
Jeffro
Cheung is using the wingnut definition of “law and order”, which is, “the law for thee but not for me”. And by ‘the law’, they mean the business end of a nightstick.
Or how does that other saying go, again? (Wilhoit’s law):
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
frosty
Yes. I’ve gotten to the point that I just roll my eyes at these headlines and read a different article.
Melancholy Jaques
@Baud:
Apart from his blog-standard tone, I think Willis’s overall point is well taken. The political media mocked Al Gore for knowing things. Hillary was over prepared.
The political media have apparently determined that “Harris doesn’t give enough details” is one of the stories they are going to pound without regard to how many details she gives.
But I disagree with Willis on Harris’s economic speech and visit to the border. These are necessary parts of a campaign. If it weren’t for the compressed cycle she’s in, Harris would have already taken care of these policy points. She still needs to do them. I think she actually needs a more detailed expression of what she would do with immigration, but it might be a waste of time.
Matt McIrvin
@Melancholy Jaques: “Harris hasn’t given us enough details that we can bash her for being a boring wonk! She needs to stick to the script.”
Jeffro
@Matt McIrvin: Virginia is just big enough that for state conferences it still makes sense to drive vs flying, and you can still meet in-person, but you’re still driving for hours.
(waaaaah, poor me, I know. but still!)
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Oh Lord, yes. The thing is, though, that only convicts them of being hypocrites (the most overrated sin in politics), not wrong.
I’ve also never bought the whole “the reason Europe has a safety net is that they don’t have our racial problems” argument. There are plenty of ethnic and racial divisions in Europe that could have been exploited just as easily as American issues surrounding black people (and in fact were, as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are one long procession of traditional elites trying their own proto-Southern-Strategies to try and discredit liberal and then socialist movements). If I had to guess, I’d say the reason the safety nets are stronger in Europe than they are in the United States is simply that by 1945 the entire continent had been completely wrecked and needed to be rebuilt, and since the popularity and credibility of the right wing was pretty much at its lowest point ever, what got built was largely liberal democracies with a strong orientation towards giving the people what they want.
If you really want to stick it to Europeans, though, remind them that getting back off the ground required not only a ton of American aid, but the support of an American government that at the time was still run by New Dealers who largely approved of everything that was being done.
Eolirin
@Bupalos: That destablization has been actively aided and abetted by Russian action, including deliberately creating refugee and migrant crises and actively assisting in blocking climate change action.
This predates social media. Russians have been backing the NRA, helping to drive up gun violence in the US, funding evangelical churches and pushing white supremacist and Christian nationalist sentiment, for a lot longer than Twitter has been around.
The alliance of global oligarchs, most heavily driven by forces in the US and Russia is directly responsible for worsening every challenge we face, not counting the ones they are directly responsible for creating. The things on your list are consequences of policy choices, not things that magically appeared like the tide coming in. They’ve had a hand in all of them.
trollhattan
Remind me what month it’s supposed to be, starting tomorrow? This ain’t October by my definition.
93, 100, 100, 97, 96, 93.
frosty
@Baud: I have a Baltimore Banner subscription but I only read it a few times a week, usually to check up on the Orioles. There’s just not that much news in Maryland!
They had really good coverage of the Key Bridge collapse.
ETA They don’t cover national news.
Suzanne
@Bupalos:
I sometimes have sympathy about this. In fact, I usually do.
Rural life is just…. increasingly not possible.
Jeffro
seen on Twitter: Randy Rainbow’s version of “Blank Space” omg LOLOLOLOL
Chris
@Suzanne:
Rural life the way they want it certainly isn’t possible.
OId Man Shadow
Choosing hope leaves you open for disappointment when you discover that people are shittier than you thought.
Be pessimistic and cynical and then you’ll always be pleasantly surprised if things work out well.
SatanicPanic
@Matt McIrvin: Exactly. They’re not better or more educated than us, they just happened to be much more ethnically homogenous than we were. There’s a reason why Europe went on an austerity kick in 2009 when we did the opposite. You don’t hear these countries doing big expansions of their social safety nets now.
Eolirin
You’re confusing hope with optimism. Being pessimistic and cynical is how you stop putting in the work, and then you lose for sure.
Hope is necessary, even in absence of feeling like there’s going to be a good outcome. What’s the point otherwise?
TBone
A happy ending to vet visit, stool sample testing came back AOK and Noah will get liquid medication for the next 5 days. Was worried because he had cancer a few years ago but that surgery was apparently VERY successful, no amputation necessary. All’s well that ends well and hubby’s arm wound has finally stopped bleeding and formed a scab after 5 days too. 😊
Grateful!
TBone
@Eolirin: 💜😊😍
Omnes Omnibus
@OId Man Shadow:
But it’s a shitty way to live and virtually guarantees that nothing good will happen.
Sure Lurkalot
@Eolirin:
The metric that housing costs should be around 25% of your take home has been blown out of the water so it’s no wonder that any bump in consumer goods (a numerator to the what’s left after housing denominator) causes stress and gets overemphasized.
Unfortunately, the development of affordable housing requires subsidies and public support and our mechanisms are outdated. Tax credit financing is not as effective when our tax rates for billionaires are too low and tax havens abound.
Eolirin
@SatanicPanic: I think they probably are more educated than us, on average. They have better public funding of education than we do.
SatanicPanic
@OId Man Shadow:
Is this true though? I feel like most pessimists I know tend to discount any good news
Eolirin
@Sure Lurkalot: It also has consequences on housing values for existing home owners. Who then get very mad about that. Nevermind the property assest managers. So you’ve got to deal with the fallout of decreasing the income and wealth of a bunch of people in order to fix the problem for the people currently excluded.
It’s politically very hard.
Another Scott
@TBone: 👍
Hang in there, all the TBones!
Cheers,
Scott.
Melancholy Jaques
@Matt McIrvin:
Exactly. I guess the good news is that it shows they don’t really have a real negative story to pound.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Its savvy to pretend not to care and diss hope. When things go wrong, you can do the I-told-you-so dance.
SatanicPanic
@Eolirin: On average they might know math or science better by the time they leave high school. But the way the right wing has been slowly taking over suggests they aren’t educated in a way that matters.
KatKapCC
@Scout211: Would be nice if the rest of their news coverage aligned with this view.
frosty
@Jeffro: Fun fact: a quarter of the 2000-mile Appalachian Trail goes through Virginia. It goes along the entire northwest boundary.
TBone
Hopeful Spirit Animal Lina Khan 60 Minutes interview:
https://youtu.be/ebQtWZH3TW4
😍
OId Man Shadow
@SatanicPanic: I don’t know about others, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how VP Harris has taken over the campaign so far.
Even as I retain a massive amount of disgust and disdain towards American voters.
TBone
@Another Scott: aww thank you, muah! 😘
KSinMA
@Another Scott: I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Melancholy Jaques
@OId Man Shadow:
Like the Randy Quaid character in Major League II. You’re not going to get invited to the really good parties with that attitude.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
Optimism is a paradox in that it may very well not be rewarded, in fact it all too often isn’t rewarded, but you have to have some version of it in order to have any chance of things improving. A “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” kind of thing.
I was saying something like this back when Biden was consistently trailing Trump in the polls but still seemed confident about the election: any presidential candidate that’s behind in the polls has to believe that he can still turn them around, otherwise he’s just guaranteeing that he never will.
Society-wide pessimism is basically a formula for Russia, a society where political nihilism and apathy are so widespread and deep-seated that it’s pretty much guaranteed nothing’ll get better.
Belafon
@OId Man Shadow:
Choosing hope
leaves you open for disappointment when you discover that people are shittier than you thoughtmeans you will get up when you are knocked down.Be pessimistic and cynical
and then you’ll always be pleasantly surprised if things work out wellmeans you will always find a reason not to continue working.Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: Despite what some people say, it is a dirty little secret that every plan has an element of hope in it. You can’t plan for every eventuality. At some point, you have to hope that you have done enough and that the plan will work. You hope that all the things that can go wrong won’t or that you’ll be able to handle it if they do. Etc.
lowtechcyclist
@Scout211:
Given that their day-to-day coverage treats the two candidates as being more or less equally valid choices, while sanewashing everything Trump says and going after Harris’ supposed failure to provide detailed policies*, this FTFNYT endorsement means next to nothing.
*There are two legit ways the FTFNYT could go on policy: (1) treat Project 2025 as Trump’s policy handbook and compare its prescriptions with what we know about Harris’ likely policies, or (2) accept Trump’s disavowal of P2025 and note that whatever shortcomings they may see in what Harris has put forward, her policy prescriptions are already a thousand times more detailed than anything Trump has provided.
Needless to say, they’re doing neither. They just pretend as if Trump must have provided some policies, and we can assume they’re basically OK because Republican, and then treat Harris’ policy proposals as lacking because Democrat.
Belafon
@Belafon: Note my framing. Hope and pessimism are about your choices, not others and the rest of the world.
Eolirin
@SatanicPanic: I think it’s more than that. We’ve got a very large part of the country that doesn’t understand very basic facts about how the world works in a way that I think would be very foreign to most European countries. I suspect, on average, and per capita, there are fewer people who believe that dinosaurs were around at the same time as humans, that the world is only a few thousand years old, and that don’t have even a rudimentary grasp of the structure of their government.
The US education system is wildly variant, but a significant part of the country is actively misinformed about a ton of shit just as part of their basic education. We’ve got infrastructure in place that literally makes our kids less informed than not teaching them anything would in parts of the country.
As a result, we don’t even get to the factual correctness about basic features of the world stage in this country on consistent basis. There are communities that are heavily home schooled where the dinosaur stuff is literally taught to their kids. We’ve got states that barely have a functional education system for anyone that can’t afford to send their kids to a private Christian school, where they’ll be given a heavily distorted version of history and science.
The issue with right wing groups and policy isn’t an issue of education, per se, it’s an issue of bigotry, and that’s a values problem, not directly an education problem. We could do more to try to teach empathy and core emotional intelligence skills, and that could help. That’s definitely an area that pretty much every society is failing at addressing. But it’s teaching a value, it’s not about facts. We fail at both, and very badly.
Though, we’re a big country, and parts of us are at or even beyond European standards. It’s just the parts that go in the other direction, hoo boy, do they go hard in the other direction.
Jackie
@Kay:
Gotta laugh at TCFG campaigning about the cost of basic groceries and gas, then in his next breath hawking Trump $100T watches, sneakers and the like – and his “poverty stricken” MAGATS are buying these with their credit cards. 🤦🏼♀️
Matt McIrvin
I’m reflexively pessimistic as an emotional defense mechanism. When I was a kid, I hated any kind of surprise–even good, fun surprises startled and overwhelmed me easily–the possibility of hearing a popping balloon filled me with dread, and disappointment was like a physical punch in the gut. And then I got relentlessly physically bullied, got lots of literal punches in the gut, in early adolescence, I think in part because once bullies realize you have a powerful, uncontrollable startle reflex they’re going to play with it for laughs every chance they get. All this led to an outlook that’s mostly about trying to detect threats as far down the line as possible, and thinking about violence a lot. A lot.
It’s not a happy way to live. But letting go of it feels unsafe. And we’re in a truly terrifying political time where the possibility that men with guns might just come and kill everyone is real.
So it’s very hard to alter my outlook
(The startle reflex isn’t quite as strong as it used to be. But I have a friend who still has it as an adult–she has a hard time with things like people setting off confetti cannons at parties.)
Steve LaBonne
@Eolirin:
And that’s why the Electoral College and the Senate are huge obstacles to sane politics.
lowtechcyclist
@Omnes Omnibus:
THIS.
What is a plan if not a way to try to make things turn out better rather than worse? Maybe your plan will fail, but if you weren’t hoping for something better than failure, you wouldn’t bother to make a plan.
If you’ve given up hope, you don’t need to plan. Why bother?
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: I was never as bad as you, but I used to be more pessimistic. It’s still a hard habit to break because people have disappointed me a lot, but I’ve come to realize outlook is subjective, and it is wrong to present one’s outlook as justified by objective reality using selective evidence.
TBone
@Chris: 🎯
Without hope, I would be dead drunk in a gutter somewhere, still addicted to opioids, or just plain dead.
Hope is life in TBone Town.
My mother was a pessimistic optimist!
Eolirin
@Chris: You don’t need optimism to be hopeful. Optimism can frequently blind you to the need to deal with contingency even.
Stuff very frequently doesn’t work out, and you need to be able to deal with that. Getting delusional about how everything will turn out okay isn’t helpful either.
Things don’t magically turn out okay. We have to put in the work to make them turn out okay. So I think effort is really the core thing to center life around, not outcomes.
And that’s why you really can’t get by without hope. It’s really just believing there’s a point to the effort you’re putting in.
Baud
@Steve LaBonne: True, but the biggest barrier is the Senate filibuster, which is a much easier thing to reform than the EC or the Senate composition.
SatanicPanic
@Eolirin: Bigotry is an educational issue though. It relies on lack of critical thinking skills and lack of historical knowledge.
Eolirin
@Jackie: I think the watches are a money laundering/illegal campaign contribution scheme.
OId Man Shadow
@lowtechcyclist: Pessimism can include the possibility of saying, “Sure, let’s do it… we’re probably going to die horribly, but what the fuck? Let’s take as many of them with us as we can.” :
I don’t know if that would be considered hope or spite
I’m not a pessimist who’s going to self-immolate on a pyre, but I’ll follow you out the inner gate of Helm’s Deep expecting that it’s not going to end with a miracle.
TBone
@Eolirin: 🎯
Eolirin
@SatanicPanic: It’s a lot deeper than that, since it’s rooted in instinctive human impulses to tribalism. I don’t think you can educate it away by focusing on facts like history, or even with critical thinking skills. It’s too emotional. You can’t think your way out of it.
You need to teach empathy, tolerance and acceptance of differences, and those all start with an understanding of emotional qualities, like how to handle fear and anger. No one really teaches those things as core educational concepts, at least not at societal scales.
Ruckus
@Scout211:
The New Yorker.
WOW.
Everyone.
If you haven’t read it – do so.
UncleEbeneezer
@Chris: You can’t win without some measure of belief that holds true even when things are going poorly. Indeed, though it may sound like only a cliche, the greatest athletes in the world point to that more than anything else, when asked to explain their success. It doesn’t guarantee success, but you really can’t have elite-level success without it. And there are myriad examples of supremely talented players who never reach the upper echelons of their sport because they lack it. In my sport, tennis, all the GOATs (Serena, Venus, Nadal, Djokovic, Federer, Sampras, Chrissy, Martina, Laver, Borg etc.) all had it in spades. And there are countless also-rans like Nick Kyrgios who have all the talent/game but often let their anger or despair get the best of them in big matches.
Baud
Apparently a bunch of jackals have occupied the official Kamala Harris reddit thread.
Chief Oshkosh
OK, sure, dimwit. Let’s start at the top of that rough hour with special sentencing for those convicted for 34 felonies. One whack of the nightstick for each felony seems about right.
TBone
Samuel Ullman
cmorenc
@Soprano2:
Actually, the approach the FTNYT editorial board took in the Harris endorsement is exactly tuned correctly to reach any still-gettable voters – which is: irrespective of any reservations you may have about voting for Harris – either because of disagreement over issues or insufficient familiarity or whatever – what IS certain is that Trump does have an established track record and personal nature that is so disastrously disqualifying that Harris is the vastly sounder choice despite any imperfections she may have.
Baud
@Ruckus:
Glad they got rid of Nuzzi.
SatanicPanic
@Eolirin: Critical thinking can inoculate people from some of the more ridiculous conspiracy theorizing that leads people to believe weird shit about Jews, for instance.
I guess I question the value of being more educated if they’re going to fall down the same dumb rabbit holes and exhibit the same prejudices we do. In the end you get austerity politics and anti-immigrant policy.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
I think the real issue that everything is so unevenly distributed. I mean, people don’t call this the “Second Gilded Age” for nothing. A lot of people never fully recovered from 2008 and then COVID hit in 2020, followed by a burst of high inflation for a few years where everything went up including housing. Wages had already been in stagnation for decades and while they went up, they didn’t go up nearly enough. It’s as simple as this: people feel poorer.
The economy is great if you bought your house 20-30+ years ago, have/had a well-paying job and were able to save/invest. Most of the rest of the world is in even worse shape than we are.
I have a real hard time believing it was soley the media that convinced people the economy wasn’t that great. It was mainly their own lived experiences that did it
OId Man Shadow
@Chief Oshkosh: He wants death squads set loose on anyone he thinks looks like a drug dealer, gang member, drug user, illegal alien, communist, or traitor.
The news media has, by and large, ignored this.
And 70+ million Americans will vote for this.
Matt McIrvin
@OId Man Shadow: “We must do without hope… At least we may yet be avenged. Let us gird ourselves and weep no more!” –Aragorn
(One of the more badass bits of dialogue from Tolkien.)
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Nope, it’s the media. People have always had difficulties. They were still mostly able to recognize a good economy. Now it’s partisan, except for a substantial number of Dems who are mental slaves to legacy media.
ETA: Three years of reporting “The rescission is coming” had nothing to do with people’s lived experiences.
Another Scott
@Eolirin: Dunno.
One can find people in whatever category everywhere on the planet.
With the understanding that “all generalizations are false”, I wonder if too many Americans weren’t disillusioned early enough in life and their disillusionment came so late in life that they never recovered.
The Germans had Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The Greeks had Aesop’s Fables. I don’t think most people over there believe those stories are somehow “real”. The Americans have “honest Abe” and “cannot tell a lie GW”. My best friend’s kids looked forward to Santa coming well into their teens… :-/
Being idealistic is good and important, but so is understanding that stories are not reality. Not finding that out until it’s too late is damaging. :-(
All people are good and bad. Figuring out how to make things incrementally better is important, figuring out how to get along with people not like us and people we don’t like is important, and it doesn’t happen on its own – people have to do the work.
People hate change and want things to be simple and easy the way it was (for most, but far from all) when they were kids. Change is scary, but change comes whether one likes it or not. Life is change…
[/soapbox]
Cheers,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): The Hack Gap plays a role. Liberals feel the need to acknowledge the persistence and deepening of structural inequities even when the economy is booming. Conservatives interpret “is the economy good?” to mean “does our party control the Presidency?” Combine those two things and no Democratic leader is ever going to get a break on the economy.
Jackie
O/T MAGA are eating their own, thanks to TCFG and Vance’s lies. This REPUBLICAN business owner lives in Springfield, OH:
Obviously, he’s a RINO. AND he didn’t own weapons until now!
Soprano2
I think for some of them this is a way of saying “She’s an under qualified minority female who we think shouldn’t be able to be president” without saying it that way.
TBone
@OId Man Shadow: there is a GREAT post up about this at LGM today. Because people feel some sorta way about that site (me included), I didn’t link earlier but I’ma do it now.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/09/one-really-violent-day
Baud
@Jackie:
Welcome to the club. The white Republican base hates Democrats because they see white Democrats as race traitors.
Chris
@Baud:
What really got me circa 2022 election time was the sheer number of people who when polled would say that they personally were doing fine, but believed the economy as a whole was doing awfully.
I have a really hard time parsing that as anything other than “I have no actual evidence that the economy’s bad, as shown when I’m asked how I personally am doing, but the media’s been screaming about recession and inflation, so I assume things overall are pretty bad.”
Sure Lurkalot
@Eolirin: Increasing numbers of unhoused in cities and suburbs also affect property values.
One of my first jobs was with an apartment owner whose portfolio was primarily B+ and affordable housing complexes in good locations with good management and upkeep. The affordable complexes have long ago aged out of their restrictions and are market rate. Same real estate with a few more bells and whistles.
There are boatloads of complexes in my city with many units under 500 sf that go for $2,000/month. In the before times, those units might be priced more affordably in a mixed market scheme.
In our mountain towns, workers who cook and serve food, teach and care for kids, clean hotel rooms and collect trash have to drive 50 miles or so each way for what…so that real estate values of the wealthier are preserved? It’s ridiculously perverse.
SatanicPanic
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I agree. Most people know how much a hamburger costs. Liberals get stuck on economic indicators being good and then are confused that people are saying the economy is bad. When people say the economy is bad they’re not talking about GDP, they’re talking about whether or not they feel like they feel rich or poor.
Baud
@Chris:
Lived experiences are irrelevant to natural serfs.
TBone
@Another Scott: I had a leather bound, illustrated, gold leaf edged full volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales (and Aesop’s Fables at kindergarten) at age 4. Grandma who gifted the Brothers Grimm didn’t give me a paperback bible till age 11 !
Here’s a great contrast:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathless_(novel)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Death_of_Koschei_the_Deathless&wprov=rarw1
Belafon
@Jackie: How can he be a true Republican if he’s not afraid of immigrants or that some Democrat might break into his house and tell him about the benefits of socialism? /sarc
Belafon
@SatanicPanic: Which is why Harris was smart to answer “We are going to provide help with buying a house, having a child, and going after price gouging” when asked about the economy.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud:
Not saying this is incorrect, but I’ve never understood it. Why do people care about that so much? I barely know anyone else is out there or how they’re doing, much less to envy them or their “status.” What a thing to worry about. Oh well. Sucks to be them. Wish their resultant behavior didn’t affect me.
Sister Golden Bear
@Matt McIrvin: The Guardian has also been extremely transphobic in their coverage of trans people. It’s contributed to the anti-trans moral panic in Britain that’s caused NHS to essentially block all trans healthcare, including threatening parents to seize their trans children if they sought private trans healthcare.
Fuck ’em
Sure Lurkalot
@lowtechcyclist:
Worse than that, they posit that his plan to round up and deport millions of immigrants is every policy…it’s his housing policy, his inflation policy, his crime policy as well as his immigration policy. He could burp and that would be his grocery price policy.
SatanicPanic
@Belafon: Yes, exactly. I know there was a lot of support online for Biden to go on TV and tout how great the economy is, but Harris’ tack makes more sense.
Suzanne
@Chris:
It’s less and less possible all the time, around the world. There’s fewer people needed for food production and resource extraction, and more people needed for services and manufacturing and transportation. That pattern leads to urbanization.
I cite this all the time, but it’s because it’s so important….. approximately 15 years ago, for the first time in human history, more people lived in cities than in rural areas. That’s a direct result of a specialization economy.
So, it is a way of life that is not going to be available to everyone who wants it. We could have at least had remote work, which wouldn’t bring back the need for as much agriculture or resource extraction labor….. but would have increased demand for services in smaller cities and towns. But it’s considered gauche or something?
Soprano2
@Suzanne: And yet we still see it lionized with gauzy idealism in movies and on TV. There’s rarely anything about rural areas or small towns that shows what the reality is like.
Matt McIrvin
@Belafon: Reminds me of that town-hall debate in 1992 where a woman asked Bill Clinton, in deeply worried terms, if he’d been personally affected by “the deficit” and what he was going to do about it… and he responded by talking about jobs, not the deficit at all, because he knew that was what she meant. (There had been a lot of publicity in that election cycle about how the budget deficit was somehow wrecking or would wreck the economy, so for many people, those were synonyms.)
TBone
@Soprano2: here’s a rare gem
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County,_USA
Suzanne
@Soprano2: Oh, I know.
Mr. Suzanne’s mom (my MIL) inherited her father’s farm when he passed. He ran that farm for some decades. Last ten years or so, he was basically doing it to keep busy, he just broke even on it. My MIL wants the same lifestyle, and so she also does about the same. But she makes all her actual living money by being a landlord, she owns some properties…. in the city.
I get why people like that, if they can have it. Lots of space, less sitting in traffic, more time to make your day your own. But, like, everyone wants that.
UncleEbeneezer
@TBone: Does it end with a call to ditch our current candidate? I kid…
Chris
@Suzanne:
Remote work falls afoul of management’s need to assert dominance over its employees, which is why it’s remained far less practiced than it ought to.
But even without that, from the point of view of the people driving the “small towns” conversation, revitalization of small towns through remote work is a bad idea for the same reason as revitalization of small towns through immigration – it means other people move in. They don’t want that. They want a small town that’s for no one but them, except, somehow, sustainable.
TBone
@UncleEbeneezer: 😉
Scout211
Governor Newsom has signed some really good new bills that I am happy about, like banning mandatory attendance at anti-union meetings.
But he has vetoed several that I was hoping for, like requiring vehicles to have speed warning alerts installed on them. So many speeders here!
But this one is sweet:
Baud
@Scout211:
That is a nice one.
Matt McIrvin
@SatanicPanic:
I sometimes despair of any formula like this–“critical thinking”, “civics education”–helping with this stuff because as soon as it turns into a formula, it becomes empty. I literally had a “critical thinking” unit and a class called Civics in school, and I don’t see much evidence that it’s made my generation into more intelligent voters. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s outfit is called “LessWrong” and purports to value critical thinking highly, and it just leads them to believe that the essence of proper moral reasoning revolves around bizarre paranoid fantasies about humanity becoming the pets of artificial intelligence gods.
artem1s
@Another Scott:
No slack. The reference to “the lady” is a straight up dog whistle. Women have no place and no autonomy in the Catholic Church. They are barely considered humans. It’s clear that he’s fine with Biden making his own choices, but not ‘a lady’.
Chris
@Soprano2:
Does Sons of Anarchy count? I only saw one season, but “people aren’t crazy about the gang ruling this small town, but they tolerate it because it keeps out the riffraff and the developers” seemed unusually on-target. But of course it’s not at all clear that this is supposed to say bad things about either the Sons or the town of Charming, so… (Apparently SOA was the most popular show among self-described conservative viewers for years).
catclub
@SatanicPanic:
I disagree. When you ask people how they are doing the answers are … well we are going to disney world but its so expensive. This is dramatically different from 1) I am out of work or2) I am worried about keeping my job.
A pollster that asks ‘do you feel rich’ probably has an axe to grind. A pollster that asks if you are doing better or worse than last year may get some useful information.
Eolirin
@SatanicPanic: It does help with that yes, but it doesn’t necessarily help with people hating Jews. It just forces the people hating Jews to come up with better arguments for why they should be hated.
You have to teach love to get out of that trap. We could and should be doing more of that.
But yeah, it’s not a cure all to social problems. I think it still matters. I think the bigger the educational gaps the more space there is for really bad decision making, even if there will still be bad decision making on certain topics.
Ksmiami
@Eolirin: Red State, Dead State… I’m at a point where they should be written off like the bad businesses they claim to hate.
Belafon
@Suzanne: You know what would allow people to have a little bit of both? High speed rail.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah, knowing how to address what’s really bothering someone when they don’t actually express it is a great skill for a politician (and people in relationships in general). Biden was good at that (when he talked about respect and dignity). Harris and Walz are good at that.
Someone made the point that folks in the heartland (caveat – all generalizations are false) aren’t mostly driven in politics by fear of socialism or sticking it to the libs or keeping out foreigners or whatever. They’re driven by their towns shrinking and dying and their kids (and grandkids) moving away because there are much better opportunities in bigger cities/metro areas. The parents want things to be the way they were 50 years ago, but that’s not going to happen because that’s not the way life works anywhere.
It’s a personal anxiety about being left behind while family and friends and personal support networks disappear.
Of course, people can’t have a thriving town that never changes and is locked up in a glass case. Greenfield Village isn’t real life. Finding ways to change as the economy and technology changes is important, and that means attracting new people of all kinds. That means good schools, good facilities, sensible government that doesn’t punch down. It doesn’t’ mean turning Pidgeon Forge into Berkeley, but it does mean that one has to recognize reality and work with it. Because change is coming whether we like it or not.
Cheers,
Scott.
OId Man Shadow
@Matt McIrvin: Yes, he could write.
And that’s why Aragorn is a hero. Even at the lowest, when there is no hope, he keeps fighting anyway because that’s what good people do.
Same with Sam. He had no right to expect anything but more suffering and a death far from home, but he kept walking because he loved his friend and he loved his home.
Ksmiami
@Soprano2: crime, fentanyl/meth heads, abandoned crumbling buildings and limited health care… you mean that reality Rt?
Sister Golden Bear
@Matt McIrvin:
Speaking as a Bay Area techie leftie, I just wanted to clarify that the local techie industry has been in a large recession for the past couple years, with thousands of layoffs every year. It’s hit older (i.e. more expensive) workers like me especially hard.
At this point, I’m honestly not sure whether I’ll ever be able to find another job in the field again—and moving to any other field means a significant pay cut.
Buuuut…. I also recognize this is an exception to the broader economy.
Chief Oshkosh
@Ruckus: Yep, as opposed to the FNYT, The New Yorker had several (great!) writers who published pieces about the dangers of fascism way before Hitler took power (EB White comes to mind). Glad to see they’re keeping with that theme.
Nazis. I hate those guys.
rikyrah
@Chief Oshkosh:
I honestly want to go to one someday…
Literally, that’s why I wanna go to one..LOL
Eolirin
@Sure Lurkalot: It is. I’m only saying that to highlight one of the political barriers that has to be overcome. Until unhoused people and lack of workers become so much of a problem that it starts forcing housing prices down significantly, that’s a problem for tomorrow not today, and people are very bad at properly assessing those. So they’ll resist things that cause a loss now even if it guarantees a bigger loss later.
SatanicPanic
@Matt McIrvin: I’m not saying it’s a cure-all
UncleEbeneezer
@Ruckus: The paragraph about Biden being too old and Dem leadership being afraid of new leaders, is kinda gross and unnecessary, imo.
Sister Golden Bear
@Scout211:
Honestly, he’d be impeached signed it. The alerts would trigger if you went 10 miles over the speed limit — which essentially is the “speed of traffic” on any freeway here in the Bay Area when there’s not congestion. Not to mention the drives between LA and the Bay Area, or LA to Vegas.
I’m not opposed to the speed warnings, but they also need to be realistic given how people actually drive in a very large state.
Baud
@UncleEbeneezer:
I’ve noticed even articles that are 99% spot on need to have these sorts of “Easter Egg” side observations to maintain credibility with the elites.
Suzanne
@Chris:
I mean, I also want a lot of things that I can’t have.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Have your thought about hating immigrants?
catclub
@Chris: Beat me to it.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Suzanne: Me, too, but that “small town just for us, but sustainable” sounds like the backstory of a video game. Naturally, the game begins after it’s all collapsed and gone to hell.
catclub
if you are running a google map it tells your speed and the speed limit. So you already know. It could flash red!
Sister Golden Bear
@Chris:
It’s similar to the dying small towns in Japan. Seen a couple documentaries on them, and the folks there lament that all the young people have moved out, but then completely freak out about the idea of “outsiders” moving in. Even though they know that this means the literal death of their town in the not distant future.
catclub
Yeah, the reason there are more and better restaurants and healthcare providers in cities is because there are enough people to keep them open.
I am amazed at the restaurants in rural areas that do stay open.
Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog
@frosty
(and anyone looking for newspapers that can be read without subscribing) —
It’s worth checking to see what’s available online through your local library. I checked mine just now and among other things, I found something called Pressreader that lets you read newspapers and magazines.
Scanning it quickly, and limiting the results to English — it also covers publications in other languages — I found these :
The New York Times, The Globe and Mail (various editions), USA Today, the Guardian, the Philippine Star, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Otago Daily Times, The Independent, The Observer, The Japan News by Yomiyuri Shimbun … and filtering by just the United States, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Dallas Morning News, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Atlanta Journal-Constitution … and many others both large and small.
Some libraries offer an online card to pretty much anybody. When I said “my local library”, I was actually looking at a library that’s not local to me that I “visit” regularly, but have never been to in person.
Bupalos
@cmorenc: I think this is very much wrong as a matter of practical politics and that the “gettable voters” are much more people who need to hear some kind of a plan for change. “You have no choice” isn’t going to resonate and is a toxic message to someone who believes things must change. Much of Trump’s support is simply an idea that at least chaos could lead to unpredictable change instead of continued decline. It’s a profoundly misguided underwear gnome thing, But you don’t beat it with “you have no choice.”
much better to talk UP Harris at this point than talk down Trump.
Ksmiami
@Sure Lurkalot: we have to build more workforce housing- it will in the end actually make higher end housing more valuable.
Sister Golden Bear
@catclub: My rental car on my last vacation had CarPlay, and in some areas, the Google Maps speed indicator did in fact turn red when you exceeded the posted speed.
However, one of my problems with automated speed warnings is that the databases aren’t always accurate. E.g. for months, the 101 had a “construction speed limit” of 55 mph (normally it’s 65 mph) without any actual construction occurring.
Suzanne
@Belafon:
Oh, do not get me started.
Also, you know what could accommodate multi-generational families in cities and dense suburbs without having to leave? Row houses, townhomes, duplexes, courtyard homes, etc.
Ksmiami
@Sister Golden Bear: have you considered Virginia? Or the Denver area?
Sister Golden Bear
@catclub:
It’s the same reason why resort towns have more and better restaurants than their populations would otherwise allow. Unfortunately they also tend to have big city price tags for housing.
Suzanne
@Baud:
I have, but I prefer to save my ire for my local assholes! There’s plenty!
Another firework went off this morning.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Kay: Agree completely. Leftist friends of mine stopped consuming MSM years ago in favor of social media. That’s why they didn’t vote for Clinton in 2016. They were THAT disconnected from reality. NPR and Washington Post are deeply flawed, but better than social media. Retreating to a bubble when you don’t like hearing other views is how the right wing went so crazy.
Chris
@Sister Golden Bear:
What tends to get left out is the extent to which all the people who left were pushed out in the first place. Everything from LGBT kids and women and girls who didn’t want to stay in the kitchen, to middle-class workers that were pushed out by their bosses as soon as automation or illegal immigration offered an opportunity to replace them. Yes, small towns would have shrunk to some extent regardless, but the extent to which it’s happened and to which no effort has been made to make up the difference owes a hell of a lot to the local reactionaries’ endless need to purge and purge and create an ever-smaller world with everything under their thumb.
Sister Golden Bear
@Ksmiami: Years ago I looked at Denver. But I own a home that I love, and I’m not eager to leave the state I love.
Back in college did two summer internships on the East Coast, one in PA and one in DC. Hated the weather—hot, humid weather is something I don’t handle well at all.
But one of the biggest factors about staying in CA is its strong trans protections. CO is relatively safe(r), but VA had 11 anti-trans bills this year. Thankfully all failed, but I’m not eager to live somewhere where my rights could be stripped away if Republicans win.
Sister Golden Bear
@Chris:
THIS.
Suzanne
Guessing this was not an immigrant.
From Pittsburgh Scanner:
I don’t know what kind of lemony-fresh fucking idiot leaves all of that in their car to be stolen, but, yes, thank you.
ETA: HoW dArE tHe LiBtArDs InFrInGe On ReSpOnSiBlE gUn OwNeRs.
Chris
@Suzanne:
So yesterday, there was a fucking lunatic running around Pittsburgh with a Remington Model 700, a suppressed AR-15, 250 rounds of ammo, and a plate carrier. Today, there’s a different fucking lunatic running around Pittsburgh with a Remington Model 700, a suppressed AR-15, 250 rounds of ammo, and a plate carrier.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Sister Golden Bear: The tech industry is suffering everywhere largely due to outsourcing. Since the pandemic, large corporations are firing their entire data center staff and application development teams and moving it all to India. There are a number of reasons this is a profoundly bad idea a.s it has national security consequences, but it’s so much cheaper they don’t care. Basically, if IT workers can work remote, why bother with expensive US workers?
Ruckus
@Kay:
How much access do most websites have?
Most newspapers have a fair amount of access to actual news, mainly because they work in an atmosphere far older than TV. Granted major TV networks have wider coverage but what is the cost/profit ratio of TV news? Because let’s face it, business is about money. I’ve owned 2 businesses, believe me – what the business is, is how you make the money, how you run the business you are in is about the money. And no, I’m not a wealthy person, I didn’t screw my customers, they got what they wanted and paid for.
Ksmiami
@Sister Golden Bear: totally understand. I think tech hiring is in process of coming back. The need is huge overall so I’ll think good thoughts for you
Juju.
@Rose Judson: how did you hear from your colleague? I can’t get through to friends by cell phones or text.
Juju.
@Rose Judson: how did you hear from your colleague? I can’t get through to friends by cell phones or text.
Juju
I have no idea why it did the double post.
catclub
WTF
Msb
@TBone: great news!
Kayla Rudbek
@Scout211: how did that get through with Stanford and USC being located there?
Ruckus
@Kay:
That’s nuts. I find it disorienting and a little scary that they were able to sell this lie so easily. If they could sell that they could sell any lie.
People that watch the news daily, read a newspaper front to back are looking for information, what’s going on, are there problems, etc. It rarely changes the world but it does keep humans informed, to a degree and that can help or hinder a human to make those decisions. A lying news source is just selling lies. Which may or may not be helpful to their bottom line, that depends on the audience, do they believe their word, or not. But now the kicker and that is the internet. Individuals can discuss news, rumors, etc, etc, like we are doing now. That makes one’s neighborhood a hell of a lot bigger and far more likely to be more open and possibly less one sided. Or just a bigger rumor mill.
UncleEbeneezer
@Eolirin: Thank you. If anything this past year has shown that critical thinking can also be easily weaponized to justify Anti-Semitism (or any other Ism/Phobia). The Soviet Union (now Russia) has been spreading Anti-Zionist propaganda (that is rife with Anti-Semitic tropes) to the Left under the language of Anti-Imperialism, Anti-Colonialism, Anti-Racism and Anti-Capitalism for a very long time. And the people who eat it up will swear that it is just the logical conclusion of their own critical thinking. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Izabella Tabarovsky, an historian of Soviet Anti-Semitism:
Tabarovsky’s Zombie Anti-Zionism, is an even deeper dive into the details of how the Soviet Union spread this stuff worldwide to left-leaning activists, politicians and organizations. It was quite a project!
Soprano2
@rikyrah: I’m still eating the fudge I bought there when I was coming home from St. Louis. I see why people are impressed with Buc-ees.
Soprano2
@Sister Golden Bear: Even in MO, the average speed on I-44 is around 80 MPH. If you try to drive 70, people keep passing you.
Msb
@Sister Golden Bear: I wish this weren’t true, but it is. They’ve been attacking the BMA for disagreeing with the Cass report, as if the latter were Holy Writ.
Jeffro
@frosty: oh I know – me and the Mrs. are kinda sorta slowly working our way through it, occasional weekend at a time! =)
Sister Golden Bear
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Outsourcing is one major problem, but far from the only one.
In my particular field, user experience/product design, there’s systematic problems because many, many companies, from start-ups to Fortune 100, have decided that building good products
are less important than hitting next quarter’s numbers or landing the next round of fundingdoesn’t matter. Hence the widespread enshittification of all sort of websites and apps.Companies aren’t just offshoring my sort of jobs, they’re just eliminating them, and/or staffing them with the least experienced, i.e. least expensive, people they can. This has been a cyclical things in my industry, and in the past usually the pendulum eventually swung the other way as companies discovered poor user experience had consequences, and junior-level designers weren’t capable of leading larger strategic stuff. Not sure that’s gonna happen this time around.
Soprano2
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: This has always been a danger with remote work. I understand that there are call centers in Mexico that recruit people who have been deported from the U.S. because they often speak pretty good English.
Jørgen
@Chris: I am pretty sure the general immigration rate in Europe (excepting the UK and France) was similar to what I lived through in Denmark. Until the early seventies there basically were no immigrants. In the school I attended in ’70 there was exactly 1 pupil out of 1000 who was not pasty white (his mother was Jamaican). Most of the racial tension, at least in northern Europe, comes from the ‘guest workers’ (primarily Turkish and Pakistani) that arrived in ’68-’75 and never left, even though the jobs disappeared.
UncleEbeneezer
@Jørgen: So in other words, the Danish welfare system was built/passed largely before the were any substantial racial divisions.
Chris
@Jørgen:
Yes, and before there were Turkish and Pakistani immigrants, there were other easily scapegoated racial and cultural groups, just like there are everywhere in the world.
The continent that gave the world Hitler and Mussolini did not suddenly discover the existence of racial divisions in the sixties and seventies because of guest worker programs.
Manyakitty
@Baud: in addition, a positive/hope-based perspective makes it easier to see opportunities to further the message. (If that made sense. It’s only Monday and I feel like I’m out of words)
Mrstealyourcostcosample
@Chris: status based on exclusion. If a ni-CLANG can get the same job as me or better, I feel poor
Fair Economist
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Except that’s NOT what the polls say. The large majority, around 2/3ds, say their *personal* situation is good. When asked why they think the economy is bad, they say it’s because they hear so much bad news on the economy.
TerryC
Reminds me of the time I learned about California driving while driving from San Francisco to LA. I don’t know what highway it was but there was a long bridge that was engulfed along its length by a dense blanket of fog. Zero visibility.
I had been following a line of five cars, on each others’ butt, at about 85 mph as we descended into the bottom of the valley where the bridge was.
I do the opposite of tailgating, so I was well behind them as they disappeared into the fog. I thought, “I have no idea how much they might slow down or even stop,” so I pussy-footed through the fog, across the bridge and started up the other side.
The five cars were gone. Out of sight and I could see nearly a mile ahead. Apparently they never slowed down at all. Really shook me up.
Is there some kind of rule in CA that when your vehicle becomes invisible to others in fog that you must not slow down?