… It’s not even past…
Ruby is now 70….this is not ancient history….this is recent American history and it’s what they don’t want taught in schools
— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) November 14, 2024
We have 50 days left to do everything we can on behalf of the American people.
This is our final window to confirm independent judges who will make decisions based on the law – not for special interests.
Senate Democrats cannot leave a single judge behind. pic.twitter.com/xgxLtVTfQD
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) November 14, 2024
Americans aren’t any dumber than they were 50 to 100 years ago but the news media they consume is significantly dumber https://t.co/iRzUYKRix5
— The Great El Wokismo (@canderaid) November 14, 2024
Trump is an authoritarian with no business being President. Not hard to find. Not even hard to hear.
— Henry Porter 🇺🇸 (@HenryPorters) November 15, 2024
All too often, ignorance is a choice.
People who intentionally don’t know anything about the world around them went +19 for Trump https://t.co/NItXWLeQ2S
— RyanMarino.bsky.social (@RyanMarino) November 15, 2024
Circuses, back on the menu, courtesy of our global megacorps!
Airbnb users to play gladiators in Rome's Colosseum, sparking mixed reactions over $1.5 million deal https://t.co/gQuUfK7PjE
— The Associated Press (@AP) November 14, 2024
Baud
I hope the fight is to the death.
suzanne
Can I note that I am really impressed by Osita Nwanevu? I have heard him on a few podcasts recently, and I have found him deeply insightful.
hrprogressive
People have chosen to “check out” of “being informed” because the ones doing the informing have often done so with such a corporate and politician friendly slant, it’s hard for those who aren’t in the weeds all day / terminally online to “know the truth”.
That does not *excuse* people from choosing to be ignorant.
But generations ago, news and journalists actually, by and large, appeared to be mostly facts-based organizations.
That has not been true for at least the last 25 years, plus or minus, if not longer.
The public ecosystem has been polluted by those in wealth and power who benefit from an ignorant populace.
lowtechcyclist
Good morning, y’all.
WereBear
It WAS the common clay of the New West!
Baud
@lowtechcyclist: Good morning.
Omnes Omnibus
@hrprogressive: Actually, for much of the history of published news, the media has been overtly partisan. The years of the “neutral reporter” have been an exception. Oddly, this largely mirrors the Supreme Court, for which the years that it worked to expand rights are the minority. It began under FDR, peaked under LBJ, and has been fading ever since.
lowtechcyclist
WRT the FTFNYT, I guess the truth IS hard to know if your brain is stuffed full of a ‘narrative’ that the facts have to fit into and must be presented in a way that’s consistent with the narrative.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus: Our bigger problem is that we don’t have much of a partisan Dem media. In the past, you had some balance.
hrprogressive
@Omnes Omnibus:
Fair, but I certainly think from a “low information public perspective”, the veneer of objectivity likely helped people to stay way more informed than they are now.
Perception is reality sometimes.
Hence why the “bothsidesing” of our nation into Fascism appears to have worked.
Chris
Correct.
Another Scott
In the spirit of “every generalization is false” I offer this.
(I’m reminded that Jefferson wanted people to grow grapes and make wine because most of the male population was drunk on whisk[e]y all the time.)
Hang in there, everyone.
Best wishes,
Scott.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
I’m reading Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, and I read this bit just now:
“If you spend your whole time thinking about the universe, you tend to forget the less important bits of it. Like your pants.”
There’s your built-in excuse for being pantsless.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist: Saved for later use.
p.a.
Take an axe to any institutions responsible for the situation where Jeff Sessions at DoJ is even marginally “The Good Old Days…”
Soprano2
Good morning everyone. So I’ve been saying I was going to write something about the election. This will be part of it, probably in no particular order. I’ve been listening to and reading lots of stuff and it’s all been rolling around in my mind since Election Day.
First off, I want to say that this is all about “normie” voters, not about MAGA’s or even Democrats. It’s about people who don’t listen to the news much at all for whatever reason. We have to figure out how to reach them with our message, because I don’t think we’re penetrating much at all and these people decide many elections. I also want to say that I’m FULLY AWARE that racism and misogyny and lying and the press lying about the Biden administration’s accomplishments and right wing media all had a role in this election. This isn’t about that, it’s about things I’ve heard in interviews of people who do focus groups with voters and people talking about conversations they’ve had with people they know. We have to deal with the world the way it is, not the world as we’d like it to be, or else we’ll never be able to create that better world.
First off, I think the upshot of everything is that people basically voted to go back to the world as it was in 2019. That makes no sense at all, but I think at its base that’s what happened. It’s what’s happening with governments all over the world, people are upset about all the changes since Covid and want someone to make everything “normal” again. I think much of the anger at Biden is because he promised to restore things to normal; as far as we’re concerned he did, but to the normie voters he didn’t because of all the changes since Covid that they don’t like, inflation being the number one thing. We can tell people all we want that this is the best economy in the world right now (which is true), but if they remember that in 2019 they paid $0.50 for a can of cat food and now they’re paying $0.95 for the same can, they think you’re lying to them. (I don’t like using commodities because things other than inflation make those prices fluctuate wildly). I agree with what Rev. Rick said the other day that Biden should have been preparing people for what was going to happen with inflation, because it was inevitable. Maybe they should have done something analogous to FDR’s fireside chats. These people don’t care that things are worse in other countries, they care that things are worse for them. We have to address that, because otherwise they think you don’t care about them. I think we had a good message, but it didn’t reach people.
As for immigration, I heard something in a podcast from Carlos Odio of Equis Research; he’s an expert on the Latino vote. He said they heard over and over anger from Latinos that their undocumented family members who have been here sometimes for over a decade can’t seem to get any help from Democrats, while the asylum seekers who just came here are getting all kinds of help and even legal status. He said there was a lot of resentment about that from these people, which is partly why they voted for TCFG, because he promised to stop those new, “undeserving” immigrants from coming here. There are other reasons, but this stood out to me as something I hadn’t heard before.
As for whether or not Biden should have run for re-election, I’ve come to the conclusion that he shouldn’t have done it, although we might have lost anyway. Sarah Longwell says voters in focus groups have been telling them for two years that they thought Biden was too old, that they thought he promised not to run again (I know he didn’t, but that’s what a lot of them thought) and they weren’t enthusiastic about him at all. That’s average voters, not Democratic politicians or people in the media. I know their beliefs were partly shaped by what they heard from the press, but again we have to live in the real world not the one we’d like to live in. We all know that Biden isn’t senile, but a lot of these people believed he was after the debate performance and there isn’t anything you can say to them to convince them otherwise; once again, they think we’re lying to them. It’s a big problem when a lot of the voters think your political party is lying to them, especially when we KNOW the other party lies all the time. I think if we had stuck with Biden the wipeout down the ballot would have been epic, and I doubt he would have gotten more than 40% of the vote. It’s not about whether or not we or Democrats had his back, it’s about how the voters saw things.
I heard Ezra Klein (yeah, I know not a blog fave) say something about why the vote in even liberal areas swung toward TCFG. He lives in NYC, and he said a lot of the people he knows are furious about the way things are going there with prices and the homeless and all the immigrants coming from other places, and they blame Democrats for it. He said London Breed lost her race for mayor, and because she won before I don’t think you can blame that on sexism. Unfortunately, voting for TCFG isn’t going to solve any of this for them, but I think people were protesting in the only way they thought they could.
So that’s pretty much it for now, until I think of something I’ve forgotten. I hope Democrats can learn the right lessons from what happened in this election. It was actually razor thin, but unfortunately the idea that it was some kind of sweeping victory for the R’s seems to have set in with the press. I think we had a good message that turned voters our way in the places where they heard it, like the swing states, but we need to figure out how to reach people with our message when there isn’t an election, because trying to do it six months before an election isn’t working well for us.
Chris Johnson
Fuck me, would you look at that tweet with the big white signs.
I was more impressed with that in the original Russian.
Way to own it, I guess?
different-church-lady
People may not be any more stupid than in the past, but the results sure as fuck are.
Soprano2
@hrprogressive: I think it’s the fact that it’s a lot easier to live in a news bubble of your own choosing now. Used to be three stations on TV and the local newspaper and maybe you subscribed to Time and Newsweek. Most people saw the same news reported the same way. It began with the explosion of right wing talk radio and then Fox News, and has been going that way ever since. We don’t have a common base of beliefs anymore.
John S.
@Chris:
It’s not just the media that is worse. Education is also in a dreadful state.
The lack of critical thinking skills exhibited by the general population is a function of decades of conservatives attacking public schools to ensure that history, civics, logic and other essential building blocks have been gutted.
The result is a compliant population that is far too willing to unquestioningly believe whatever our oligarchs feed them.
ETA: You can really see the result in the young male vote. We may have lost an entire generation of minds that were trained to be gullible from an early age.
hrprogressive
@Soprano2:
This all sounds reasonable.
I just don’t expect the current iteration of the Democratic Party to learn it.
The Party needs to get a lot younger, and a lot more populist, and quickly.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
The fact that the best way to come close to neutrality and honesty, be it in the press, the courts, or the civil service, is “elect an unprecedented number of liberals and leave them in charge for an unprecedented amount of time” is a reality that absolutely breaks the Very Serious People community’s brains.
Tony G
Well, yes. The media environment is worse than it used to be. But the media environment is worse because a large number of people WANT it to be that way. Fox News and its clones, and the late (not great) Rush Limbaugh and his clones have made a lot of money for decades because they’re telling tens of millions of people exactly what they want to hear. The same is true of the various highly-successful right-wing websites. The rise of the internet (and the rise of cable TV before that) have revealed something very ugly about humanity. Given the opportunity to access all of the information in the world, most people will choose pre-packaged. garbage that supports the opinions that they already have. And it’s not lack of intelligence per se. I’ve known a variety of right-wing lunatics who nevertheless are intelligent enough to do demanding jobs competently. It’s basically cognitive laziness — avoiding independent thought and preferring to see and hear what validates their prejudices.
Chris
@Another Scott:
Much as I loathe Bill Maher, he had it exactly right back in the teabagger days:
“The founding fathers would have hated your guts, and you would have hated them. They were everything you despise. They studied science, read Plato, hung out in Paris, and thought the Bible was mostly bullshit.”
Josie
@Soprano2:
Thank you for this. It is well reasoned and convincing. We can only hope that the Democratic leaders do the homework and reasoning as well as you have.
New Deal democrat
@Soprano2: Pretty good take, imo. A friend was visiting earlier this week, and we pegged the election results to 40% immigration, 40% inflation, and 20% toxic Democratic brand (i.e., Dems are “coastal elites”).
Your immigration take is particularly interesting. As I mentioned last week, the UN Human Rights Convention has been thoroughly gamed by both State and non-State actors, and badly needs revision. It’s also occurred to me that a very disproportionate share of immigrants in the last few decades have come from places in the world that reject “liberal” civil rights about things like abortion and LBGT issues, and may also favor a conservative “strongman” in charge. By being goodie-two-shoes about immigration, did we really want to tip the scales in that direction?
John S.
@hrprogressive:
We’re going to find the younger part extremely difficult with the current generation. There’s a lot of poisoned minds out there in the under 25 cohort.
I don’t how we get through to them.
Steve LaBonne
Heather Cox Richardson’s piece today contains the interesting but unsurprising factoid that voters who paid “a lot of” attention to political news went for Harris by 6 percentage points while those who paid “none at all” went for Trump by 19. It’s hard to get excited about this or that theory about how the Democrats need to “message”, or about the sins of the media, when a lot of people simply aren’t listening at all but vote anyway.
geg6
@Tony G:
Yes! Cognitive laziness is a perfect description.
AM in NC
@Soprano2: Yep, this is the issue. FOX and AM Radio were the first problems, but social media is SO.MUCH.WORSE.
We at least know and see/hear the messages coming through traditional outlets and can at least theoretically counter them.
We never even SEE what lies and poison are being pumped out on people’s individually-curated feeds, so we have no way to counter disinformation and lies. There is ZERO way to combat this without regulating these platforms.
The second they use an algorithm to curate a feed, THEY ARE PUBLISHERS, not utilities like a telco, and need to be under the legal regime of PUBLISHERS. Responsible for every lie coming across the transom.
How do we get THAT law?
John S.
@Tony G:
A large portion of the population simply lacks the skills you are describing.
You can’t expect people to have good cognitive skills and independent thinking when they were never taught how to do those things in the first place.
The Truffle
@hrprogressive: It already is convertible younger. AOC, anyone? Maxwell Frost? Pat Ryan?
MinuteMan
I think the Time list got cut off—the last one was
frosty
Does no one remember Hearst’s Yellow Journalism or Harrison Otis’s LA Times? Dumber and rabidly partisan. Maybe 50 years ago it was better but not 100. The US has mostly had bad journalism.
@Omnes Omnibus: I see I’m not the first to mention this!
Tony G
@John S.: Kids mostly learn from their parents, by example. The schools that I went to back in the sixties and early seventies were pretty lousy — rote learning at best. But I learned from the example of my father (blue-collar, non-college educated) the value of skepticism and independent thinking.
Ramalama
Good morning. Hoping that commenter stacib shows up, the one who said this (and it moved me) in a thread from yesterday:
I asked one of my many uncles about what he, a professional de-clutterer, would do. He said this:
I drink my huge quantities of tea out of fine bone China cups left behind by my grandmother because they’re incredible to drink from, and I loved her. But there were other things I had no room for and there weren’t many stories available …
Steve LaBonne
@John S.: The right has for decades been waging all-out war on the idea of teaching students to think. They pretty much have won that war.
Soprano2
So they don’t mind a “strongman” as long as it’s one they agree with. I think that’s probably a factor, they aren’t threatened by that part of TCFG because he’s promising to do things they agree with.
Soprano2
@Steve LaBonne: Well, they heard stuff from somewhere. We need to figure out how to go to the places where they are listening.
John S.
@Tony G:
School curriculums have gotten demonstrably worse over the past few decades. The focus is all about testing and memorizing information to pass those tests, not learning how to think.
I agree that it’s up to parents to help teach their children logic and reasoning. But as the generations go by and more people lose these abilities, it gets harder to expect people who lack these skills to somehow pass them on to their kids.
Public education has an important role to play, but that has been all but destroyed in this country. We’re not going to be very successful going forward without doing something about that.
Omnes Omnibus
@New Deal democrat: That is edging toward “we don’t want to let ‘those people’ in. they don’t share our values” territory. People applied it to the Irish, Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans, Jews, the Chinese, etc. We need to be careful of it.
geg6
@frosty:
Not to mention the post-Revolutionary War broadsides and such. Rabidly partisan, committing libel with abandon.
John S.
@Steve LaBonne:
And we are all seeing the result of that victory.
Chris
@Soprano2:
That tracks, since the media had been working the drumbeat of “Joe Biden’s Age Is The Greatest Political Issue Of Our Time” for four to five years (five years is when the original bullshit story of “Biden promised not to run again” was planted through Politico).
That’s fine, but since “the real world” as framed this way is defined by a relentlessly hostile media environment, what this amounts to saying is “we need to take bullshit concerns seriously” with no answer to the fact that these bullshit concerns are going to continue to be generated out of thin air for as long as the status quo continues. Not running X candidate who’s vulnerable to Y issue isn’t actually a solution because there’s no candidate we could run that wouldn’t have been buried in equivalent bullshit through no fault of his own. So far, the only solution we’ve found to this is to run candidates in times of extreme, actual crisis when enough of the low-infos are shocked into paying attention.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Omnes Omnibus:
Actually, for much of the history of published news, the media has been overtly partisan.
Exactly. People should read some of the partisan attacks on Jefferson. He fathered children by a slave! Back then, that was partisan as historians still didn’t believe it as late as the 1980/90s.
The difference now is the proverbial industrialization of media in it’s ability to apply Goebbels 24/7. It’s no longer somebody reading a (maybe) weekly newspaper. And then the foreign actors.
I’ve posted this before but it always bears repeating repeatedly: The Firehood of Falsehood:
A Russian-style of propaganda for an age of information abundance.
-High volume/multi-channel approach
-Shameless in its willingness to broadcast lies
-No commitment to, or requirement for consistency
-Rapid, continuous and repetitive messsaging
-Point is not to persuade but to confuse and overwhelm
-Assumes a low trust environment and lowers it further
-Number of arguments matters more than their quality
-Drown out competing messages thru sheer volume
Suzanne
@AM in NC:
We have definitely lost whatever monoculture we may have had.
storm777
@Soprano2:
I am thinking something similar. Occasionally, I read the suggestion to create our own media ecosystem, but that won’t work if those uninterested or only in the right ecosystem never see it. We need some tech guru to find a way to infiltrate the algorithms of the existing systems to get our messages out. It is a long term strategy to start with more softer messages and then ramp up.
Layer8Problem
I was always of the opinion that one could reliably explain this “reality” thing with “facts” and “numbers” and things like that. How does one get decent reliable results and better outcomes when “feels” are what we have to work with? Better fibbing?
Soprano2
@Chris: Well, Democrats need to figure out something, because it’s a problem for us. I think it all goes back to the idea that we need to start building out our own information ecosystem. It might not look like what the right does, but we need to do something because we can’t count on the mainstream press to get our message out anymore.
Chris
@New Deal democrat:
That doesn’t really say much, because most immigrants all through history have always come from places that were more conservative than the United States (healthy tolerant liberal societies don’t tend to breed refugees). Generally, we try to sell these people on the notion that American liberalism is the antidote to the problems they experienced in their home country. And it does, in fact, work fairly well: Democrats have been crushing it in the naturalized citizens’ votes in recent elections, though I haven’t seen if that held true in 2024.
3Sice
That’ll show ’em.
John S.
@Layer8Problem:
How do you expect those things to work when so many people lack the basic ability to process information?
You might as well take someone off the street, sit them down in front of a computer and expect them to code armed only with a book on software engineering. And then get upset that they can’t do it when you gave them all the information you think they needed to be successful.
tobie
I’ve been living in rural Maryland for a few years; I believe my county voted over 70% for Trump. My neighbors all have FOX running constantly on the TV in their living rooms. As most are tradespeople who can easily listen to broadcasts while working, they consume a steady diet of podcasters like Joe Rogan. Some have recommended to me that I listen to Jordan Peterson and Lex Fridman. I guess they think of those two as intellectuals. They don’t read newspapers. Their minds are absolutely warped by the crap they consume. This slice of American life is larger than we think.
Quinerly
@Soprano2:
Such a great comment. Thank you. Actually, wasn’t going to read any comments but scanned and saw a couple of nyms that I respect, including yours.
Ducking out.
Will leave this here.
Those oh, so swingy, swing voters.
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/15/trump-elon-musk-focus-group-2024
Chris
@Soprano2:
Biden tried not talking to the press and starving it of gossipy information. It didn’t work. Harris tried going around the press and doing a lot of non-traditional news media interviews. It didn’t work. What will work isn’t clear at this point.
Tony G
@John S.: Yes, that’s very true. Inductive and deductive reasoning don’t come naturally to most people. But my point about “cognitive laziness” referred to an admittedly small subset of the population that actually has those reasoning skills but chooses to turn them off sometimes. (I worked in software development and support for forty years. To do that job competently you have to have those reasoning skills — at least when you’re on the job. But I knew plenty of guys — mostly guys — who had that intelligence on the job but who would flick a switch and turn it off when Trump, or the Bushes, or Reagan would say something idiotic that they already agreed with. It was a form of compartmentalization. Critical thinking is an attitude as well as a skill — and there are people who have the skill but not the attitude to do it.). I have no answers!
Melancholy Jaques
@hrprogressive:
Not you or Soprano2, but I can’t deal with all these “Democrats do it wrong” or “Democrats need to completely remodel themselves” discussions.
Republicans are racist, misogynist, brazenly corrupt & dishonest, and when it matters most, incompetent.
But we Democrats are the assholes. I cannot throw up enough.
Mai Naem mobile ¹
@Soprano2: if you don’t have a media ecosphere that’s is even half the size of the GOP size, nothing is going to change. Or just wait for tfg and the GOP rape and pillage and leave the disaster for the Dems. to fix.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@John S.:
There’s a Greek Chorus of us here who say this repeatedly. Two generations (good ole Reagan) of a direct attack. I’d urge everybody to read this BJ piece from 9 years ago:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2015/08/09/no-one-could-have-predicted-schoolteacher-edition/#comments
As Garrison Keilor (I know, I know) once said something to the effect that,
hrprogressive
@John S.:
Well, as an example, I am still under 40, not brain-rotted by “the manosphere” or TikTok or whatever, and have had to work for a living my entire life.
People like me should be in Congress, not people who have been there 20-40 years, have generational wealth, and are out of touch with the working class.
The people younger than me are mad that they feel left behind.
You probably can’t un-brain-wash the incel part of their brain very easily, but if they weren’t struggling economically, I think a lot fewer of them would have either voted Trump or stayed home.
Omnes Omnibus
@hrprogressive:
Then run for office.
John S.
@Tony G:
It’s a deeply frustrating situation, and frankly a bit of a self-defeating cycle we have gotten sucked into.
IMHO, the answer is to repair our broken education system and find a way to imbue kids with these incredibly important skills. Teach them how to think again, and stop focusing so much on standardized testing.
Unfortunately, that’s going to be even harder given the outcome of this election and the fact that there’s an entire political ecosystem dead set against allowing that to happen.
The Audacity of Krope
I really need to get started on my Youtube project. General interest overall, but I want to spend a lot of time speaking about media and source literacy.
hrprogressive
@Melancholy Jaques:
We literally just had an election where the Democratic Party spent most of the campaign cycle saying those exact things to the electorate, and they rejected the Dems and voted for the party telling them “brown people bad, eggs cost too much”.
I’m sorry you don’t like hearing that, but the Dems just suffered a humiliating defeat.
Refusing to learn from that is the definition of insanity.
They could choose to be the Party of the working class instead of the donor class and not become racist, exist assholes.
Soprano2
@Quinerly: Thanks for the compliment. I enjoy your comments too.
I think you have to be willing to listen to people even if you don’t agree with everything they say. I know mentioning people like Ezra Klein makes some people mad, but I think his actual life experience observations are valuable. People hate on the Pod Bros, but they actually worked on campaigns and in the White House so I think they have insights that the average pundit doesn’t have. I also like to listen to their guests. I would highly recommend the episode where they talked to Sarah Longwell and Carlos Odio, they imparted a lot of good information if only Democrats would listen to it. We can’t just decide that it’s all about racism and misogyny, or we’ll keep losing.
hrprogressive
@Omnes Omnibus:
I am considering it.
Soprano2
I’m not so sure about that. I think she didn’t have enough time. Remember, the swing toward TCFG was a lot less in the swing states where we were concentrating on getting our message out. I think if she’d had a couple of more months to campaign she might have pulled it off.
John S.
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
All too true.
Full disclosure: my wife has been a science teacher for nearly 15 years.
CaseyL
We are, as Omnes noted, reverting to what had been the norm, pre-FDR.
Or maybe I should say Pre-WWII.
I think WWII was the bigger factor, if only because the war shattered so much and USians as a whole couldn’t block it out or find “alternative facts” to make it go away. Also, after the war, the US was the only industrialized nation still intact, which led the way to enormous economic growth and general prosperity over two generations. People who are doing well and have expectations of continuing to do well are more outward-looking, more forward-looking, and more generous.
That is no longer the case. Boy howdy, is that no longer the case.
I have no illusions left about Americans, or America. We’re definitely going back to how things were before WWII economically, to pre-FDR politically, and fuck knows how far back we’re regressing socially.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: This space has become increasingly hostile anyone who is not white. Look at most of the analysis since the election results both on FP and in the comments its been about how white people were wronged by Dems and by the evil others.
Baud
@The Audacity of Krope: What is your YouTube project?
tobie
I wish modern monetary theorists like Stephanie Kelton would have the decency to admit that the kind of deficit spending the theory recommends can be inflationary. We had the greatest experiment with UBI during COVID, and economists estimate it contributed roughly 4% to the overall inflation rate. I’m not saying the spending wasn’t necessary to keep the economy afloat, but accepting that there are consequences to fiscal actions shouldn’t be so hard to stomach. I sometimes have the feeling that three-quarters of Americans live in fantasy land in which everything can be magically solved with this or that measure or this or that leader.
Layer8Problem
@John S.: People were stupid in the nineteenth century and somehow the republic, flawed and selective in its choice of approved citizens as it was, didn’t turn into a dictatorship. Critical thinking skills weren’t part of the curriculum.
Perhaps the answer was right in front of us all the time. If we throw at them better, smarter liberal militias and committed liberal authoritarian leaders with focus-group tested liberal propaganda and negative reenforcement camps for the uncooperative we can’t fail. As should be obvious I don’t approve of that.
PIGL
@Chris: but this immediate environment is polluted and dumber that pretty much makes the citizens dumber as well; as in poorly informed and unable to make good decisions.
suzanne
@tobie:
This is a common mindset in people, in many other arenas besides politics and economics, and it blows my mind. The idea that there are no tradeoffs to things is very frustrating and yet incredibly difficult to shake.
I may have just had a meeting with a client who instructed us to make rooms smaller smaller smaller than I advised….. and is now finding out that she can put less stuff in them, and took me to task for apparently not telling her that?
The Audacity of Krope
@Baud: I’ve been meaning (for years to my shame) to put together a channel called “Erik Likes Everything.” Erik is my first name, if that wasn’t clear.
I’d like to see more positive, uplifting discussions and analysis on Youtube, so I’m going to be very focused on looking at things in a positive light and promoting understanding. People and things, but also abstract concepts.
I want it to be educational, but fun. And I do want particular focus to things that are overlooked and the unfairly maligned. Media literacy and educational, to my eternal frustration, certainly fall under these categories.
Almost Retired
@frosty: Yup, bad journalism has always been out there, and has been dominant before.
But the difference may be that it’s so much easier to access and consume junk now. Whatever pollution was spewed by Hearst or Chandler, it did require picking up a newspaper and spending time reading it.
These days, Fox may be on at the gym or doctor’s office or (alas) military mess hall. You can just sit there in front of the television, slack-jawed and drooling, and absorb their noxious messaging with no effort at all on your part.
Baud
@suzanne:
Doctor Who fan?
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
Quinerly
@Soprano2:
Totally agree with you about news sources. Way too much criticism here by a certain few who have strong feelings about certain Washington players, podcasts, et al. And, I am none too pleased with the WaPo and NYT but will continue to read them.
You obviously spent a lot of time putting together this comment. I sure hope folks here can appreciate it.
Take care. (And, Moar, Please)
lowtechcyclist
@Soprano2:
No, it wasn’t inevitable. There was a choice between full employment with inflation on the one hand, and recession and unemployment and people losing their homes, but relatively stable prices on the other. Biden made the right choice, but he should have made it clear to the American people that that was the choice ahead of them, and to let their representatives know which way they preferred, before trying to get the American Recovery Act through Congress.
Inflation’s always a matter of demand exceeding supply, too much money chasing not enough stuff. If there isn’t enough stuff to go around, prices go up to a level where less people are willing to pay that price. If that happens widely enough, your money is worth less because it buys less stuff, and that’s inflation.
At a time of supply chain issues, Biden made sure there were an abundance of jobs, everyone had money, and so prices went up. (That also created the opportunity for greedflation, which couldn’t have been a thing in a recession.) Hardly anyone lost their house, unlike in 2009-2010, but you don’t notice when you aren’t about to lose your house.
So really the only way to have somewhat avoided this problem was to make sure the American people at least felt like they were in on the choice between another recession like 2008-2010, or full employment but inflation on the other.
But at the time, I can understand why it just seemed like the obviously right choice to make, given the memory of 2009-2010. It sure seemed obvious to me.
Baud
@The Audacity of Krope:
Cool.
suzanne
@Baud: It blows my mind. Everything has a downstream effect.
cmorenc
@Soprano2:
Many fellow BJers fiercely, disapprovingly resisted accepting that most normie voters, even those who would vote for Biden anyways over Trump, had indelibly concluded from their own witnessing of Biden’s debate performance that he was not mentally up to another 4 years as POTUS, and that his candidacy was fatally wounded at that point. Also, Biden’s been deservedly praised in here for having the stones to end our potentially endless, futile war in Afghanistan, but the disturbingly abrupt, chaoitic withdrawal was the exact point where the sharp decline in Biden’s approval rating occurred and never recovered.
We can bitterly complain about the unfairness of the MSM’s slanted, sensationalized coverage of these events, supplemented by RW propaganda in social media, but the hard fact remained that we have to deal with how normie voters are perceiving events, not how we wish or think they should view them.
Denali5
Yes, low education played a part, but the elephant in the room is the fact that TFG defeated two qualified women. It did not help that one was seen as Black. I still cannot believe that women did not vote for the woman this time. Our daughters see this.
frosty
The five Moms for Liberty candidates who took over our school board aren’t about to do anything like that.
The Audacity of Krope
@Baud: I’ve been driving myself crazy with “I don’t know enough about editing, I don’t have a good place to film” and other associated thoughts.
That’s stupid. I watch some low production value type shit and I know other people do too.
cmorenc
@Denali5:
The shock we all feel isn’t just that Trump won over vastly better-qualified woman with vastly better temperament, but even more so because the election results shattered our fundamental beliefs about the nature of the country we live in, especially since a narrow popular majority, not just an EV majority, chose such a vile, reckless, corrupt ass-clown over Harris.
Fair Economist
@Chris: I suspect Harris’ approach of communicating through nontraditional channels *did* work, just not well enough.
lowtechcyclist
@Tony G:
I know exactly what you mean. One of the things about working on a doctorate in math is that you’re coming up with theorems nobody’s ever proven (or often even thought of) before, but they’re no good unless you can prove them. And all it takes is one step that looks solid at first glance, but isn’t, and there goes your proof. So you’re constantly going back over your own logic, looking for the holes in it.
If you take that habit and apply it to reasoning in general, especially your own, that’s one hell of a good life skill – at least, I’ve certainly found it to be so. But like you say, a lot of people leave behind those thinking skills they use in their fields when they go out into the rest of their lives.
The Truffle
@CaseyL: We’re going back to 1929. Think his voters have buyer’s remorse now? Wait until Hoover 2.0.
i don’t see us regressing socially. I do see a lot of buyer’s remorse.
dc
@Soprano2: Instead of voting for Showman Hitler, people who are frustrated with the state of their community can, I don’t know, actually get together with others and act to change things. What a bunch of lazy assholes, but that is the way of the world. That’s how we end up with the Hitlers of history (and the present): Hate + Ignorance + Fear + Laziness = voting for the Asshole Hater-in-Chief of the moment or sitting on your hands because thinking and doing are just too hard. It’s amazing humanity has lasted this long.
The Audacity of Krope
@Fair Economist: Agreed here. She was out there. She did *some* MSM appearances.
If the narrative says she has no policy and she issues ample policy and discusses it at campaign stops and the narrative keeps saying she has no policy, there is nothing she ever could have done to change that narrative.
Chris
@Soprano2:
Maybe. Hopefully that’s true. It’s for damn sure that we need to find some way to get around the bullshit. But that’s always been one of the hardest tasks of any liberal government.
Betty
@John S.: No Child Left Behind has meant teaching to pass standardized tests. Big changes are needed.
Scamp Dog
@John S.: I don’t think our education system is as broken as you think it is. Reading scores have been going up gradually, and even the gap between white and black students is going down.
But the education system is a big pot of money that private interests want a chunk of, so they need news stories about “how bad the schools are” and our credulous prestige media buys the narrative those interests want told.
I’m sure that Trump and whatever toady he installs at the Department of Education will do their best to turn the progress around. We’ll see what’s left after four years of R governance.
Fair Economist
@lowtechcyclist:
Inflation *was* inevitable. During the pandemic, the Federal Reserve increased the money supply by 6 trillion dollars, about 35% of the existing supply. This is the largest proportionate increase *ever* since the Fed was established. Substantial inflation was inevitable. Even if we’d had a recession, we’d have had stagflation (as a number of other countries have had because they all did the same thing during the pandemic.)
Sure Lurkalot
@Almost Retired:
Yes. And as for critical thinking skills, just think of the difference between “discovery” or “due diligence” in the 80’s, reams of paper that needed to be read and indexed and organized vs. software that makes short work of a lot of that for you. Seeing the forest through the trees uses different tools now and those who didn’t spend those time consuming hours distilling info to, say, make a case or write a dissertation, are sometimes blinded by the ease of things technology does for them.
New Deal democrat
@Omnes Omnibus: Point taken.
UncleEbeneezer
The Media only took this ball and ran with it because bitter Progressives kept pushing it endlessly on Twitter, starting all the way back to the 2020 Primary when Biden took the lead. It was always their little fantasy. And they have an outsized voice on social media. Twitter of course, loves to amplify anything that disses Dems. The MSM (and Russia) then picks that shit up and amplifies it and next thing you know it is a widespread (mis)belief. It’s always the same damn playbook and it’s extremely frustrating that people seem so oblivious to what is so painfully fucking obvious. The Very-Online Left (including many here) will take every opportunity to drag down Dem chances while patting themselves on the back for their virtue. Every. Fucking. TIME!!!
Dronez. Emailz. Student Loans. Gaza. They do it over and over again and yet we write these post-mortems and fixes that never admit this huge part of the problem saddling Dems in every election. We spend more time bashing our party than we do talking it up.
I keep reading think-pieces that say we should look to Black members of our coalition and follow their lead. I’ve BEEN doing that for several years. And they were not the ones constantly griping about Student Loans, Afghanistan withdrawal, Biden’s age, and GenocideJoe. If you need a sample, just look here. We have a small but important slice of Black commenters here and notice how it definitely wasn’t them pushing all these Dem-bashing narratives, ad nauseam through the seniority of Biden’s term and right up to Election Day. It was mostly White Progressives who did that shit, even when many of us tried, repeatedly to kindly urge them to STFU and use their voices to help, not hurt, our chances. White Progressives have an outsized voice in our political narratives and they rarely use it responsibly. Inflation put Dems behind the eight ball right from the start in this election, but a steady stream of shitting on our candidates/party for four years put us so much further back that even unprecedented enthusiasm for an amazing, once-in-a-generation candidate like Kamala, couldn’t save it. The voters are fickle and dumb. The Media hates Dems. Russia too. But it’s the people on our side who never want to actually help us win that bother me most. This election is only the latest in a long line of examples. It’s hard to win razor-thin margin elections when one of the two biggest factions on our side won’t stop spreading Anti-Dem propaganda, no matter how big the stakes. We can’t seriously talk about the tarnishing of the Dem brand without some honest talk about the Progressives who are constantly complicit.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: Here in Ohio we have a second generation Indian American male (Niraj Antani) in the state legislature trying to get a bill through that will require all voters to prove citizenship in order to register to vote or change their registration, possibly reregister if voter hadn’t had to prove citizenship already.
I was born in North Carolina not Ohio. Getting a copy of my birth certificate was a yea long process. I will also have to get a copy of my marriage certificate to prove I am the same person as rhe birth certificate. My step-daughter born in America is adopted. Her birth certificate situation is a mess.
This bill will probably pass. Non-citizen voting is already a stae and federal felony ceime.
I don’t want to fight with you because I really value your comments here, but white people aren’t the only ones at fault here. And voter suppression was a major factor in the poor turnout and the results of the election.
John S.
@Layer8Problem:
People who lack critical thinking skills aren’t necessarily stupid. The more you and others continue to make that mistake, the more you concede our future.
suzanne
@Soprano2:
I think Ezra Klein has been making a lot of great points in recent weeks.
His wife, Annie Lowrey, had a piece in the Atlantic this week around the concept of “deliverism” that makes some similar assertions: people are losing trust in Democrats to deliver basic economic and social functionality. We may think that’s bullshit, and created by the media, and point to where Biden or Harris or whomever made a statement that should have allayed some fear…. but this is a broader brand issue.
Almost Retired
@Soprano2: Very thoughtful comment, thank you. I live in a liberal bubble (Los Angeles), but I hear a lot of frustration with the persistence of homelessness and the proliferation of tent cities in public spaces from liberal and moderate friends.
Our mayor is doing a decent enough job of relocating the unhoused into temporary and permanent housing, but the persistence of so many unhoused people in our streets strikes many people as visual evidence of failed policies. Which it is. And it’s held against whoever is in office, regardless of fairness.
Can’t help but think that – as you say – this issue swung a few votes in some (but not all, cf Seattle) liberal cities.
John S.
@frosty:
Obviously.
Fair Economist
@schrodingers_cat: Um – I’m not seeing people here saying white people were let down. Can you quote any examples?
RevRick
@Baud: Are you talking about the ersatz gladiator games or our struggle against Trumpist fascism?
New Deal democrat
@3Sice: I think the reason behind the resolution reaffirming the 22nd Amendment is to attempt an end-around John Roberts et al.
After all, what is the textual difference between the 22nd Amerndment and the “insurrections” clause of the 14th?
Since the SCOTUS 6 held that the insurrections clause is not self-executing but must be applied by an Act of Congress, it would be the easiest thing in the world for them to apply it to te 22nd Amendment as well.
Of course the problem is that the GOP won’t go along with a 22nd Amendment resolution either. Which would give Roberts eat al an even stronger argument to rely on.
tobie
@suzanne: How frustrating for you! I’ve been trying to figure out in what environment trade-offs are considered tolerable and the only thing I can come up with is that if you feel you are part of a collective, you don’t assume that you’ve been forgotten, abandoned, ignored or dismissed when you don’t get everything you want immediately. We’re all so atomized…at work, on roadways, in our homes, etc. I’ve been watching S. Korean TV and the dramas often rest on the existence of a community. I’m of course not capable of judging whether this is just an illusion or a genuine aspect of life there.
Steve LaBonne
@Fair Economist: It demonstrably worked. In the swing states where she actively campaigned, she cut the nationwide rightward swing almost in half. But people don’t want to hear that because she lost, so they won’t learn anything from her campaign.
John S.
@Scamp Dog:
Sorry, but standardized test scores aren’t an accurate measure of anything other than a child’s ability to memorize information and pass a test.
You want to see if our children is learning? Ask them to perform multiple steps to complete a task. Ask them why they believe some of the things they believe. Ask them to give you directions to somewhere. Ask them to use the scientific method in a real world application.
Far too many of them are incapable (as are far too many adults).
Baud
There are centrist pundits who will point to evidence that voters think Dems are too left, generally or with respect to specific issues. Are we going to take those arguments seriously, or we just going to accept narratives that confirm our priors?
I for one have decided not to engage in any post mortem navel gazing from any direction, but I’m mostly stepping back. But those of you still in the game will need to figure out what facts you’re going to grapple with.
FelonyGovt
To think we were so concerned about getting people to vote. Turns out a lot of the people who did vote were ignoramuses.
schrodingers_cat
@sab: He is trying to curry favor with the dominant group. Ohio is no longer purple but has become reliably red.
White supremacy can have a non-white face. That’s how the British ruled the world. Its nothing new
The group that is the default (both in terms of numbers and influence) takes the lion’s share of the blame.
John S.
@Betty:
Absolutely. That program is one of the worst things ever to happen, and the harm done will not be easily undone.
Harrison Wesley
@Scamp Dog: Who will make education great again? Why, who better than Chris Rufo!
schrodingers_cat
@Fair Economist: The white is silent to give the white person in the media or the comment section making the comment plausible deniability.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I think that’s what I am going to do too. Step back from politics.
tobie
@Baud: Wise words. I don’t have the information or the skill to make sense of the election. I know what’s important to me as a voter and that’s about it.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: Okay. Fair point.
Baud
@sab: What’s strange about these bills is that naturalized citizens will have an easier time proving citizenship than people who need to find a birth certificate. But I guess it hurts black voters more.
tam1MI
@Soprano2: Focus groups of voters are useless this cycle. The Dems problem wasn’t the voters who showed up, it was the voters who didn’t. Job #1 should be getting the people who voted for Biden in 2020 and who stayed home in 2024 back.
Steve LaBonne
@suzanne: Let’s see how people enjoy Trump’s chaos, economic crises, and national humiliation before the likes of Putin. Biden delivered more for ordinary people than any president since LBJ, but he didn’t perform the impossible magic trick of returning prices to 2019 levels so (just) enough people felt like blowing it all up. Treating that political behavior as in any way rational is a category error.
TBone
That Coliseum thing makes me long to post my most shocking meme from the olden days of Fascistbook flame war.
Jesus literally getting “nailed” on the cross by Roman soldiers. It shut so many people right the fuck up.
sixthdoctor
@The Truffle: Oh, I agree, and I think a good 10% of the people who voted for him will lose their shit on the DURABLE GOODS PRICES SKYROCKET UNDER TARIFFS headline in March. Not that it will do any good for anyone.
John S.
@TBone:
Jesus wasn’t nailed to a cross (it was really a stake, with his hands over his head, not spread out). But I won’t get into how the ankh was integrated into the cross to make early Christianity have mass appeal to pagans and adherents of other religions.
There’s enough flame wars around here. 😉
Betty Cracker
@Baud:
The latter, of course. Silly wabbit!
p.a.
@Soprano2: Well before the election season, well before the debate, Biden was looking frail. I know this says nothing about mental ability, especially compared to “book, woman, television…” man, but it was not a reassuring look. When was the last time we saw Joe on a bike? Even with as much exposure as a candidate gets, tRump, as not-the-president, could present curated views of himself to the public. This is even excluding the fucking medias’ sane-washing. The President couldn’t/shouldn’t. Not the script has flipped. Let’s see how much his own people try to limit the idiot’s exposure now, and what the media does.
Different time, but millions didn’t know F. Roosevelt was usually in a wheelchair.
*showing my age: I usually type “press” then have to go back, replace with “media”.
Harrison Wesley
@sixthdoctor: Shouldn’t that be prefaced with “JOE BIDEN’S LEGACY?”
Quinerly
@cmorenc:
Looked for your nym. So glad you dove in and I scrolled back and caught this comment. TY.
sixthdoctor
@Harrison Wesley: Of course, you’re right, and thank you for reminding me it’s never too early to pour Skrewball Peanut Butter Whisky Egg Nog{tm} in my morning Rice Chex…
The Audacity of Krope
Those same centrist pundits have been painting that same picture and making the same claim every election cycle. The epistemic closure of radical elements of the political center who have far too much sway in our media is probably among the larger chunks of our more generalized media problem.
tobie
@Steve LaBonne: @suzanne: I wrote this yesterday regarding what the admin delivered and I’m sticking with it. My grad students (who now earn $55K/year as a stipend) complain that Dems have done nothing for them. Their unabashed transactionalism bothers me.
Soprano2
@schrodingers_cat: Well, I for one am trying to figure out why those people voted the way they did. Did you read what I wrote up above? I think it’s useless to cast blame like that, because no matter what the reasons are people have reasons for what they do.
lowtechcyclist
@frosty:
Same here, alas.
Soprano2
@suzanne: During the Covid years supply and demand worked exactly the way economics say they work, and it made people incandescently angry. They tried to blame everything else other than the huge disruptions to our system caused by a worldwide pandemic, because they want one thing to point at and say “fix that one thing and everything will be better”. There’s a reason for that joke about one weird trick.
John S.
@lowtechcyclist:
And while many people here are busy discussing creating an alternative media ecosystem to counter-program people, the Moms for Liberty keep quietly infiltrating school boards and twisting the education system to even better suit their preferred agendas.
I wonder who’s going to win. 🙄
Soprano2
What I meant was that once they chose that path, inflation was inevitable. I think the Fed dicked around because they thought inflation was transitory, but they should have known better.
Baud
@The Audacity of Krope:
Agreed. But the same is true for opinion-havers who are leftist, populist, or otherwise not centrist. The question is, is there any compelling factual basis this time around, beyond our own preferences, for believing one endlessly repeated viewpoint over the others? Or are people just spouting off like they always do when things don’t work out well?
Steve LaBonne
@John S.: Their school board candidates have been performing quite poorly in a lot of places for the last several years. We have to give up this bad habit of thinking our opponents are all 9 feet tall and never make mistakes.
Another Scott
Fractured media is a problem.
I’m reminded that Ted Turner got his start with his family’s billboard business.
Billboards, bus wraps, etc., are a decent place to start to get the message out. Unlike stuff on the web (where lots of people have ad blockers or simply don’t go to where the ads are,) people do look at them whether they want to avoid them or not.
If you never see reports of what good Democrats are doing, then you won’t know that good Democrats are doing. “Where you stand depends on where you sit” – we have to get messages to people where they are.
Pay to put sensible messages on billboards, buses, community newspapers / flyers, etc., etc., and do it for years. There are no ad-blockers for those things. There is no One Weird Trick. There’s no magic on-line media strategy – things are too fractured, and too often captured by monsters with their “algorithms”.
It’s a slog. We have to keep trying.
Best wishes,
Scott.
The Truffle
@John S.: Who is running against them?
Run for Something is out there.
RevRick
@Soprano2: Thank you for the shout out
@New Deal democrat:
Immigration as well as inflation have been hot button issues around the world. It was part of the motivation for Brexit. It has fueled the rise of AfD in Germany. It has been Orban’s go to in Hungary. And that’s just a couple examples.
The “other” has invaded “our” space. And resentment about perceived advantages that other has been given.
We have been down this road before, when labor groups demanded the exclusion of Chinese immigrants in the 1880s, and nativists railed against immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe in the 1920s.
They’re easy scapegoats for the wrenching changes that have occurred in my lifetime. When I began my ministry in Western Pennsylvania in 1975, there were over 120,000 jobs in the steel industry around Pittsburgh. When we left in 1988, that had shrunk to 23,000. Since 1975 three fourths of all jobs in the steel industry have disappeared worldwide. And this is true in industry after industry. And at the same time civil rights were being extended to people who had endured various forms of second class status.
We have shifted from a world where manual labor could provide work for many to a world where service dominates, an area where emotional intelligence carries advantages. And the premise of white male supremacy means men often fail to develop those skills.
It has long been the case that women and blacks have understood white men better than white men do themselves, because they have had to navigate a world that automatically advantaged white men. And when it comes to understanding women and black people, white men have often been tone deaf, because they didn’t have to be.
Steve LaBonne
@Soprano2: Inflation was inevitable- it happened everywhere. The question was whether you wanted a side of stagnation with that. We (Biden and the Fed) didn’t, but a lot of other countries went down that path.
Suzanne
@Steve LaBonne:
I never said it was rational. In fact, I have repeatedly said that people are often irrational and make bad decisions.
RevRick
@Baud: It also hurts married women who took on their husband’s last name.
Steve LaBonne
@Suzanne: The problem is that too many chatterers are pushing simple solutions that assume transactional rationality in voters. They’re guaranteed to be not even wrong.
The Audacity of Krope
We’ve all seem the same, very limited, evidence. I think the evidence points to most voters being very deliberately misinformed and reactive to a sequence of disruptive events.
ETA: Also, those center-to-right leaning pundits basically own the airwaves. Their interpretation has had far more than due consideration.
Soprano2
@UncleEbeneezer: I don’t disagree with most of that, but I also think the debate performance sealed this in people’s minds in a way that was impossible to shake them from. Hindsight is 20/20, I’m fully aware of that. Joe Biden was a great president who did great things, but people wanted something else. Also see my comment about how they were mad at him because he didn’t restore everything to 2019 like they thought he was going to do.
Betty Cracker
@tobie: I’d be okay with a purely transactional approach if the votes cast were based on facts rather than vibes.
schrodingers_cat
@Soprano2: Yes I did read it.
Your analysis is not that different from the MSM
You are blaming Joe Biden for not stepping down earlier
And you are blaming immigrants, by appealing to the authority of Ezra Klein
Soprano2
@schrodingers_cat: Oh good grief, I was reporting something Ezra said was his personal experience, not “blaming immigrants”. Did you read what I wrote about what Carlos Odio said? He’s not Ezra Klein. I’m fully aware that hindsight is 20/20, and I was risk averse and not happy about all the Joe Biden step down stuff, but in listening to and reading what actual voters said (not Dems in D.C. or people with pundit brain) I think people need to be honest about it, and the honest truth was that the actual voters wanted someone else on the Democratic ticket regardless of how successful we think Biden was.
Mr. Bemused Senior
You put your finger on a key point. Yes, Trump lies constantly, but when he says “I am your retribution” his committed supporters know he isn’t lying. That is what they want and expect from Trump.
I don’t know how to solve this but solve it we must.
Ramona
@The Audacity of Krope: let me know your channel and I’ll subscribe.
Chief Oshkosh
@lowtechcyclist: Small Gods is my favorite Pratchett book (so far; I still many to read).
Frank Wilhoit
@John S.:
I expect them to recognize their transcendent moral obligation to teach themselves. No excuses.
Soprano2
@Baud: When you’re a business owner with homeless people camping on the sidewalk in front of your door every day and shitting in your doorway, it’s hard to be sympathetic to their problems. Many liberals seem to want to deny that this is a problem for us. The other thing is that it would take serious money to come anywhere close to solving this problem, but people want “one weird trick” to just make it go away.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Chief Oshkosh: I’m on book 12 (Witches Abroad) and enjoying them immensely. Moving Pictures is a hoot.
Chris
@Ramona:
Seconded.
Soprano2
@tam1MI: First we have to figure out if that actually happened. The vote totals may turn out to not be as short as was initially thought.
Soprano2
@sixthdoctor: I’m seriously thinking of taking pictures of prices when I shop on the Saturday before the inauguration just so I have a dated record of what they were. People’s memories are not reliable.
Suzanne
@Steve LaBonne: The thing is, we do it, too. Like, there are comments here all the time about needing better media and civics education. And that’s both true and insufficient. It presumes that people make decisions based on evidence.
But most people do not, and we have known this for a long time….. people are emotional. Right now, shit-tons of people are unhappy. IMO, some of that’s justified based on conditions, some of it isn’t….. but we’re only going to ever be successful if we are even better at emotional appeals.
Ramona
@Soprano2: it really does seem the case that the Harris Walz campaign in a 100 days swung the vote the right way in the swing states and we well might have prevailed if the election were a few weeks later. Bear in mind, we also had a fair deal of voter suppression, weird returns of mail-in ballots and bomb threats called in.
I hope her army of volunteers stays tune and continues reaching out. We have state legislature votes in Virginia next year.
The Audacity of Krope
So, this is important, what do you propose we do to address this issue? Do we try to compete on cruelty? Offering plausible solutions is the same thing as only talking to Dem primary voters.
ETA: Also, this comment is gross. Not the content, the attitude.
narya
One consistent thing I’ve been seeing in every damn discussion is that many or most of the people who voted for TCFG live an an insulated media bubble (and every single person has ALSO said that Harris ran a spectacular campaign). One even said that it’s not that the Dems are “too far left” or “too progressive,” it’s that the media environment and targeted R ads were able to paint her that way, despite anything she did or said. To me, that doesn’t mean, and they aren’t saying, that Dems need to abandon their principles or move right or any of that. In other words, the message isn’t bad, it’s not getting through; those are two different problems.
Layer8Problem
@John S.: No, not necessarily stupid, just more inclined to sell the family cow for bags of magic beans or vote for grifters because of a vague sense that that grifter will bring back the good old days of 2019. Which you’ll have to demonstrate isn’t stupid. Perhaps I’m being uncharitable to half of the voters here.
Soprano2
@Steve LaBonne: Yes, they usually get tossed out on their ear after on term because they fuck things up so badly.
tam1MI
I don’t think that is true. One the first things that folks here broadly agreed on was that Harris was an excellent candidate who ran a near flawless campaign.
schrodingers_cat
@Soprano2: I love the alacrity with which #notallwhitewomen contingent on this blog has jumped on Latinos (especially the men) as the demographic group that is beyond pale
And as I said to sab, white supremacy can have a non-white face. Just like patriarchy can be upheld by women, I am looking at you, Moms for Liberty.
Keep denying the existence of the elephant in the room and blame Biden.
The Audacity of Krope
@schrodingers_cat: I’m against assigning group blame of any sort toward any group. I’m not alone. But I sense you aren’t gonna vibe with that either.
tam1MI
It will also hurt older rural voters, many who don’t have birth certificates because they were home births.
schrodingers_cat
@The Audacity of Krope: I am not blaming any individual. But group dynamics are the reason why majority of white people vote R and the reason why the press bends over backward to appease the R party. The Republican party is the party of the default demographic that has the numbers and the influence. That’s a huge structural disadvantage Ds face.
We have to acknowledge that fact when we analyze the election results or politics in general in this country. Race is the unspoken subtext. YMMV.
Ramona
@lowtechcyclist: I remember reading some time ago that teaching geometry as a part of middle or high school curricula improved critical thinking skills even in students who did not do well in geometry.
Another Scott
@Chris: Lots of the political press decided that Biden was doomed because he had already run too many times and because of SpeechGate and all the rest, also too.
It seems that lots of them resented that Blacks in South Carolina saved his campaign. They wanted a horserace between DJT and some “radical lefty”, preferably woman, instead, for the lols and clicks and eyeballs.
The narrative can not fail, it can only be failed.
The press is not a disinterested actor. They have an important role, but they are usually not going to be non-partisan, objective, reality-based, etc., etc. They’re businesses that intend to maximize profits whenever possible.
Grr…,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
@Another Scott:
Truth.
lowtechcyclist
@hrprogressive:
Sure, but I’m thinking the urgency many of y’all seem to feel about this is misplaced.
As the 2026 election approaches, normies will either be OK with what Trump is doing, or in a state of panic about it, or somewhere in between. The lessons to be learned from our all-too-recent defeat might help us a bit around the edges, but the terrain will be extremely different.
Also, I’m sure that for many people here, it just prolongs and intensifies the agony of last Tuesday’s defeat. I agree that we do have to figure out what we did wrong, but we don’t need to do it right now.
And yet they won anyway.
The Audacity of Krope
@schrodingers_cat: I don’t think anyone here would disagree with this as stated here.
frosty
Maybe I should buy that set of 1,000 postcards at the wholesale rate. Should be good for 3 or 4 elections!
LAC
@UncleEbeneezer: If I could set off fireworks in celebration of this response, I would. Thank you for those words. It sums up not only my feelings but the feelings of many other black people I know and who I follow on social media. We are still seeing the glossing over and “but the economy” phase of discourse. There may never be that come to Jesus moment from within but a lot of us know and thankfully are speaking to it. Even if it is not here.
lowtechcyclist
@Ramona:
Yep, all those congruence proofs. Side-angle-side and all that. Probably the only time when most of those students have to do proofs, but that beats not ever having to do that at all.
Layer8Problem
@lowtechcyclist:
Sorry, Bernie smoked them out. Democrats will always fail us, because otherwise they would win. And if they win, they did it wrong.
WereBear
@tobie: The 4B movement started there.
Might be wishful like a genre romance.
frosty
@Soprano2: Here’s hoping. They won for our school board while they were getting tossed out all over the country. We’re a little bit behind the times here in Confederate PA.
UncleEbeneezer
@Soprano2: I think the debate performance was just the justification to let the damn break but the real flood behind the damn was his terrible poll #’s. And those poll numbers can’t be separated from the four years of constant smears. Think about it: pretend we are normie/Independent voters. The Media everywhere tells us Biden ain’t shit. Republicans tell us Biden ain’t shit. And Progressives on Twitter (which the Media often use for their own narratives), blogs etc. tell us that Biden ain’t shit. It’s not a huge surprise that the average, kinda clueless voter is gonna believe it. As I’ve said countless times before, we love to shit on Dems for their failures of message discipline, but all of us are part of that problem and we have much greater influence on the narratives than many believe. Trashing our candidates anywhere, no matter how principled and justified we think it is to do so, always comes back to bite us on the ass at election time. We can cheer or we can boo. The GOP gets this. We don’t.
schrodingers_cat
@UncleEbeneezer:
We have more than one FPer and many valued commenters here who belong in this group
Biden enacted their agenda and got nothing for it except the epithet “Genocide Joe”.
Another Scott
@Fair Economist: Dunno. I continue to think that the Fed is pushing on a string because so much of the “banking” system is outside of traditional banks.
The Fed still has a role in expectations, and expectations are important, but …
Colunbia.edu:
This strikes me as a very smart take.
I’ll state again my belief that inflation is likely to drop to below 2% again in the near-ish future and stay there (barring DJT and his minions blowing up the economy again) because the pre-pandemic issues with “banking” continue to accelerate – too much money not doing productive things because taxes are too low. The Fed couldn’t get US inflation up to 2% when interest rates were around zero for years. People don’t need to go to “banks” to get financing any more, so the Fed won’t be able to use their tools to adjust levels in a meaningful way (except for housing, for people who need federally-backed mortgages).
tl;dr – IMO, the pandemic inflation actually was transitory, but the transient had a longer time constant than I (and some others) expected.
FWIW.
Best wishes,
Scott.
The Truffle
Dems need their own Contract with America. That is all.
Chris Johnson
@schrodingers_cat: We have also had trolls who use tag-team tactics to make sure we’re going to war against somebody who is supposed to be on our side but is secretly the enemy.
Just sayin’.
I will reiterate: Moscow Rules. Nobody is to be trusted, ever, and this is a shitty and sus time to be picking fights.
I know I don’t have that luxury, much less turn it into a campaign and make sure everyone notices. I’m quite busy enough having to constantly remind myself to back off and do my real work.
Cheers <3
frosty
No need to worry about that. Once you’ve logged into Minivan once they have your email and phone number and you’ll be getting texts and emails with a link to volunteer. I wish I’d gotten a burner phone with a different number 20 years ago but it’s too late now.
kalakal
@The Audacity of Krope:
You’re absolutely right. Basic non linear editing isn’t really that difficult, and there’s lot’s of free/ low cost software.
A lot of people seem to actually prefer that the videos aren’t too polished, a slick video lacks “authenticity”
Gloria DryGarden
@lowtechcyclist: thank you for explaining it. Very clear.
TBone
@John S.: He was getting it in the ass in the meme I referenced.
Might’ve been tied to a stake but that’s not what the point was. Shock value has its moment, as we are all seeing right now.
Soprano2
@p.a.: My husband is like that, a lot stronger than he looks. The physical therapist was surprised at how strong he was. The way he looks and walks signals frail, though.
New Deal democrat
@RevRick:
The same has been true not just in the past 10 years, but for the past 5000 years. And the only reason I can’t be confident about it before then is that writing hadn’t been invented yet.
But if “the ‘other’ has invaded ‘our’ space” is a constant point of revulsion of (majority) human nature, what is the reaction to it besides losing elections?
Soprano2
@The Audacity of Krope: No, we don’t try to compete on cruelty. 🙄🙄 Did you see where I said we need to solve this but it’s hard? If I had people camping in the parking lot by my bar and shitting in the doorway, I wouldn’t be happy about it. What’s your solution for that business owner? I’ve come to believe that one problem is that people won’t say stuff plainly. We get calls from business owners to come and wash out the doorways that people are using as bathrooms. How long would you put up with that? Compassion only goes so far.
UncleEbeneezer
@LAC: Thanks. I listen to several Black Podcasters who are loyal Dems and quite progressive in their policy dreams, but lord are they forever-frustrated with the way White Progressives routinely bash our candidates/coalition and act like this shit is a game. And I gotta be honest, that’s exactly what I thought when I saw so many of my people spend this past year screaming “GenocideJoe” with an existential election approaching: oh this shit really is just a game to you…SMDH…
The Audacity of Krope
@Soprano2: More housing. More health and career resources for the poor. Go after housing costs by breaking up organizations that buy it all up to manipulate prices.
I’m not saying any of this will be quick or easy or ever quite complete. It’ll actually accomplish more than the person providing the simple, brutal answer most of the inattentive voters would prefer.
Soprano2
@schrodingers_cat: Sure, but in order to fight against it you have to know about it. Did Democrats know that so many Latinos felt this way? They should have. It doesn’t sound like an excuse to me like the “I don’t know what her policies are” bullshit was.
The Audacity of Krope
@The Audacity of Krope: And frankly, fuck a lot of business owners anyway. Retail associations were out there putting false propaganda about a crime wave the last couple years.
A bunch of these people should have their shit burnt to the ground.
tam1MI
But that doesn’t explain why Harris lost states that Biden had run strong in the primary. That doesn’t explain the down ballot Dems who got more votes than Harris because voters voted for them and left the top of the ballot blank. It doesn’t explain why so many Dem voters stayed home.
The bottom line to this election is that Donald Trump lost a little bit of Republican voters and won, and Kamala Harris lost a whole bunch of Democratic voters and lost (Dems vote totals even degraded in California. CALIFORNIA!!! Harris’s home state!). And the explanation can’t be, “Voters wanted someone other than Joe Biden on the ballot” because THEY GOT WHAT THEY WANTED. Talking to people who voted doesn’t offer any solutions to that problem.
The Audacity of Krope
Of all the eligible voters I spoke to who said they wanted that, the only one who showed up to vote at all voted for Trump.
Soprano2
@LAC: Well, except that this is happening all around the world. I think if we’d had a few more months she could have pulled it off. There were multiple reasons for what happened, we have to look at them all.
tam1MI
@Soprano2: When you’re a business owner with homeless people camping on the sidewalk in front of your door every day and shitting in your doorway, it’s hard to be sympathetic to their problems. Many liberals seem to want to deny that this is a problem for us. The other thing is that it would take serious money to come anywhere close to solving this problem, but people want “one weird trick” to just make it go away.
Well, we could always try putting them on buses and sending them to Texas… [/Sarcasm]
Soprano2
@UncleEbeneezer: I mostly don’t disagree with this. The thing to figure out is how to fight it.
Soprano2
@tam1MI: That’s why things like that happen.
Bupalos
@The Audacity of Krope: At the less educated and engaged end of the scale where we lost, creating your policy persona isn’t a matter of stating lists of policies. It’s incessant repetition (as in short slogans) and stunts and poses and embodying those policy priorities. Build That Wall! Lock Her Up! Drill Baby Drill. Make America Great Again! Send Them Back! Drain The Swamp! They’re Eating the Dogs! And he climbed in a garbage truck and he did the French fry stunt.
that is actually how you message to the broader electorate, and if you don’t have that kind of rough, dumb summation and performance of your policy slate, then to these people you don’t have policies.
Harris had “We’re not going back” which was very good and corresponded with the one policy that people did universally understand that she stood for, reproductive freedom. I don’t think there was any simple messaging around the rest of the platform. Nothing stuck for defending democracy, housing relief, a more equitable tax structure, or price gouging.
I think that’s the sense that she “had no policies.”
The Audacity of Krope
@tam1MI: I don’t understand. Do homeless people not exist in Republican-led jurisdictions?
I’m pretty sure I already know the answer, which leads to my confusion. Why is this only our problem?
Anyway
I don’t understand the people harping on Covid restrictions – it seems like ages ago. I don’t get that at all. Doesn’t come up at all in my IRL world
The Audacity of Krope
@Bupalos: What you said, while correct, ignores one huge salient issue. The media ought to be highlighting and explaining this stuff.
The Thin Black Duke
I noticed “the high price of eggs” didn’t stop the majority of black people from voting for Biden. Funny thing, that.
The Audacity of Krope
@The Thin Black Duke: I live primarily on eggs. I call it the ovarian diet. I didn’t flinch at the thought of voting for Harris.
Anyway
it’s the Dem brand – people don’t care for it or don’t have a strong attachment to it. I don’t know the answer for that. I must say receiving zillions of text messages is a huge turn-off but not enough to go anywhere near voting for a R.
Melancholy Jaques
@hrprogressive:
I respectfully disagree. The campaigns – and I mean all of them, president, senate, congress – spent very little time addressing the corruption, constant lying, and incompetence.
This allowed people & the press to continue their false memories of the Trump years. No TV ads showing grocery store shelves empty and refrigerator trucks filled with dead bodies. I don’t want to belabor this. Maybe sometime in the future I will be able to discuss this. I might end up agreeing with you. Right now, Democrats might be human all too human, but none of that justifies putting that asshole back in power.
The Thin Black Duke
@The Audacity of Krope: As usual, missing my point. Racism is the 800 pound gorilla taking a shit in the room, and as long as that isn’t acknowledged, nothing will change.
The Audacity of Krope
@The Thin Black Duke: Or joking?
UncleEbeneezer
@Soprano2: Beats me. I wish I knew. I’m open to ideas and trying to listen. It’s a real nightmare scenario, especially with so much mis-information and social media. Ugh.
Soprano2
@The Thin Black Duke: So we need to expand that to more people. As I said in my post I’m fully aware that racism and sexism played a part in the election, as it as it always does. That’s not the only thing that was a factor.
Soprano2
@Melancholy Jaques: Every time I heard the “are you better off than 4 years ago” question I wanted the candidate to say “Yes, do you remember what was happening 4 years ago?” Make them say “before Covid”, because that’s what they were really asking.
Soprano2
@The Thin Black Duke: Oh it definitely has to be acknowledged. The Democrats are seen by many as the party of black people. How do we tell people we’re so much more in a way that they see and hear it?
eemom
@The Thin Black Duke:
Thanks to you and the few others who keep pointing this out amid these endless threads of repetitive bullshit.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@hrprogressive: Yeah, no. Those NYT consumers went +6 for Harris. The people getting all their ‘news’ from social media and podcasts? They went for Trump or Stein. The hardcore right and left have been on a sustained campaign against the very idea of object truth for the last 30 years. Trump is the bitter fruit of that effort.
LAC
@Soprano2: That just read badly, even though I think that you didn’t mean it to. We are not a foreign entity that inserted ourselves into a party. We are citizens of this country. Maybe people should stop othering us and be unapologetic about the makeup of this party and our part in it. What we want is not outside the norm, but is often viewed as not ours to have or ask for.
I dunno, but that was uncomfortable to read.
schrodingers_cat
@LAC: Agreed.
Anyway
How do we get people to see it, acknowledge it? I’m at a loss…
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Soprano2: Very nice comment.
eemom
@LAC:
You’re too kind. That was a sickeningly racist comment
“We’re so much more than the party of Black people.” Oh my fucking God.
Dadadadadadada
Apropos of the bit about deliberate ignorance:
https://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comments/1gmpokf/trump_won_with_misinformed_naive_lowinfo_voters/
Tl;dr, Trump won by large margins (9-26 points) among people who wrongly answered basic questions about crime, the economy, etc. Among those who got them right, he lost by much bigger margins (20-65 points).
Soprano2
@LAC: I’m sorry, that’s something I hear from people that I was repeating. I don’t think it’s true, but that perception is out there. As I said we have to speak plainly. I’ve been told many times recently that as a white woman I’m complicit in TCFG’s election. That makes me uncomfortable, but i listen to it anyway.
Soprano2
@eemom: If that’s what some people think, how do we disabuse them of that notion? Aren’t we always saying that R’s are the party of white people? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound racist but I hear this from people, are we supposed to ignore it?
This is why these things are hard to discuss. Do you really think I’m a deliberate racist?
Chris Johnson
Regarding the perfidy of white progressives, I very deeply distrust a whole bunch of them. Some of you folks aren’t from those circles, and just get a general sense of wrongness associated with the whole category.
I’m from those circles and at this stage I feel like I can say I KNOW a pack of those folks are literal Russian trolls. It’s that horseshoe thing: go and infiltrate all the places indiscriminately. On the right, you’re getting people to form militias and conspire. That doesn’t work on the left as people don’t have that kind of discipline so what you get is the ability to stampede people into social bullying.
I could tell you specific names of influencers who have had a great deal of effect on the culture of demanding very rigorous language and behavior. It’s in aid of making people act in such a way that the other wing is offended. But then… it really came in handy when all those people started out demanding ‘force the vote’, took a detour into antivaxxing, and the next thing you know, everything is ‘Genocide Joe’ and you’ve got social circles where it is death and shunning, to express any support for the Democratic admin.
And we wonder why Dem votes stayed home? I’ve seen how toxic this stuff is.
All I can do is step the hell back, and remember what I’ve seen. And one thing I won’t forget: if I hear the words ‘Genocide Joe’, I know I’m either hearing from a vatnik, or from a leftwinger whose entire silo is now policed by vatniks.
Sucks. And if all ‘progressive Left’ means, is that, then it’s dead to me. But I will point out that I have personally seen the effort that goes into poisoning that well, and that it’s not organic. It’s really more of the same. Exactly the same playbook as everywhere else.
All governed by left-wing influencers who embody the tone-policing, and have mysteriously AMAZING production values that are never, ever explained. That’s one tell. The actual videos are performatively woke but if you know what to look for, there’s a huge amount of money that’s gone into that production: you know, like Tim ‘I’m just a humble youtuber and centrist’ Pool.
LAC
@Soprano2: You don’t ignore it, but you do not humor it either. People should never feel comfortable saying that to you. You do not have to yell, but making cringey faces and shrugging is not an answer either.
dnfree
@Mr. Bemused Senior: I’ve said this before, but Biden looked very bad at the debate. I was surprised, because I knew he was somewhat frail and had the lifelong stuttering issue, but this was beyond that. He had an unfortunate slack-jawed look when Trump was speaking that made him look like he didn’t know where he was. I’m a Biden supporter, but that debate left an impression that wasn’t going to be easily erased or overcome.
But the kicker was a couple of days later, when an interviewer asked him if he had watched video of the debate. Biden hesitated a little and then said “I don’t think so, no.” He didn’t know if he had watched the video or not? The thing that told my husband’s family for sure that she had dementia was when they had gone to a movie with her one night and then asked her the next morning how she liked the movie. “What movie?”, she said.
VFX Lurker
Yup. After 2016, anyone who professed their irrational hatred for Hillary Clinton on social media got a block from me. I knew their misogyny wasn’t confined to one woman.
The new red flag is anyone accusing Biden/Harris of genocide. I block/pie and move on. I know their carelessness is not confined to Palestinians.
Kathleen
@Steve LaBonne: I posted a comment there this morning about 3 am.
Kathleen
@Steve LaBonne: Also too, Sherrod Brown. The guy who is legendary for his devotion to working people in Ohio and he’s defeated by a guy who stole his workers’ pay and destroyed the documentation. I for one refuse to resort to the “Dems and messaging in disarray” trope. It goes much deeper than that.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@dnfree: I ignored the discussion about Biden’s mental state as much as possible. I’m referring to the impression voters have that the Democrats are lying (Soprano2’s point). That’s something we have to address I think.
Harry
Please stop supporting Elon.
Miss Bianca
@Ramona: Proofs. I sucked at math, but sucked less in geometry than in other areas, and the one thing I *nailed* – as in, “got an A on the test, Ma!” – was geometric proofs.
Set up the pathway for logic classes in philosophy later.
Citizen Alan
@Soprano2: One of the dirty little secrets of our polity is that the people who scream the loudest in near hysteria about the dangers of “SOCIALISM!!!1!” consistently demand socialist policies from our leaders and become irate when capitalism fucks them over by working exactly the way it is intended to. I wonder how all those assholes would have reacted if Biden had enacted price controls exactly like the ones Nixon imposed in the 1970s.
Citizen Alan
@RevRick: I just printed up the docs to renew my passport and noticed how much extra work it would be if I’d ever changed my name for any reason.
Citizen Alan
@tam1MI: True, but disproportionately older blacks. Older white rural people were not forbidden by law to be delivered in a whites-only hospital.
Soprano2
@LAC: I don’t humor it. What I was trying to inelegantly say was that we need to show people that we are the party of the people, of everyone who wants to pull in the direction of progress and making this country better, of those who want to go forward and not back to the bad old days. How do we impart that message to people who believe we are exclusionary and will constantly “tone police” them if they accidentally say the wrong thing or use a word the wrong way? I heard something else in one of those podcasts, that too many normies have come to believe we have contempt for them. Saying the voters are stupid and don’t vote their interests only feeds into that idea. I think we need to quit saying that. There’s a difference between uninformed and stupid.
Kathleen
@UncleEbeneezer: I agree 100%. I made a similar, shorter comment on Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter this morning. Thank you for this. My opinion of “what went wrong” is vastly different from most opinions here and it has to do with the undercurrent that drives the scenario you eloquently outlined.
Soprano2
@Citizen Alan: I have a Bloom County cartoon where Opus was trying to say both “Keep those flat footed goombahs out of my hair” and “Hurry up with my federal bail out check” without laughing, and he was unable to. That’s a perfect illustration of what you said.
Gvg
@storm777: no we need to find those algorithms and subvert them. Counter program. Send out taylored debunking videos. Not debunking specific stories, teaching how to spot the lie, so they realize it themselves.
maybe slip those into everyone’s feed on a regular basis.
Kathleen
@LAC: I agree with you 100%.
Kathleen
@Melancholy Jaques: If Democrats had done that they would have been blasted by media because “they have to offer something positive to voters and they can’t rely on talking about how bad Trump is”.
Gvg
@schrodingers_cat: I think most of us are mad at stupid voters (which are mostly white), mad at disinformation and worried about what to do about it and I don’t see any blame on Latino males at all. We do notice voters including legal immigrants were against illegal immigration. They did not see Trump and the GOP’s statements as being threats to legal immigrants too which we did. We thought it was obvious. He said he was looking at removing citizenship, he has a history of racism his advisors are worse etc, but evidently lots of normies don’t understand how anti emigration is really a mob emotion not a rational one.
i haven’t seen any proposals for how to solve it. Maybe we don’t need to. Trumps is likely to make it clear for us.
1 person wondered if we had been allowing more people from authoritarian countries to come in due to asylum laws than was good for us, and another person reminded them that this was the thinking that was used to against Slavic countries, the Irish, and the Chinese in our past, and that usually those immigrants valued democracy more. I thought it was a good reminder. I don’t always remember every bit of history and appreciate others memory.
sab
I am the same age as Ruby Bridges and went to school white in the segregated South. A couple of years later my fifth grade teacher reminded us to be gentle to our books because they would be passed on to the kids at the mainland school when we got new ones.
I remember hearing about her back then.
Ramona
@lowtechcyclist: it makes people realize for the first time that thinking can be managed by corralling knowledge into sensible clumps rather than trying to hold an awareness of free-floating unrelated facts.