Ken White (Popehat) has started writing again at his blog, and he has a piece on why it may be uncouth to celebrate the death of a healthcare CEO, but it sure is American:
America is largely aspirational. We talk big and then, more or less, sometimes strive towards goals like justice, equality, decency. Many people are willing to put their shoulder to the wheel of those aspirations even in the face of the many ways America falls short. I’ve written about a formative experience I had as a young lawyer: attending a naturalization ceremony for Filipino World War II veterans who still exulted to become Americans even after America had betrayed them for decades. Those men still believed in the promise of America despite so many years of broken promises. Many of our greatest citizens have worked to better this country even as it has treated them as less than full Americans or even less than human.
But hope should not be blindness. We can hope that America will be kinder, more graceful, more compassionate, more sincerely devoted to all people being created equal and entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But the truth is that celebrating the death of other human beings because we hate them or what we think they stand for is absolutely American. To ignore that is fantasy, not aspiration. America remains the country that proclaimed that all men are equal while enshrining slavery, that enacted the First Amendment and the Alien and Sedition Acts in the same decade.
When the shooter was apprehended yesterday, the NYC police commissioner couldn’t wait for one second to celebrate the work of her detectives. I think the rest of us with two eyes and a brain see that a McDonald’s worker in Altoona, PA, deserves at least some of the credit. But, as it turns out, that person might have their claim for the reward denied. Irony died and went to hell when I typed that sentence.
While we’re on the topic of real America versus make-believe America, one of Paul Campos’ friends in the JAG got hold of a 60’s vintage legal manual that appears to be designed to inform officers of the laws of the land. Campos took a screenshot of the page on miscegenation, showing laws against intermarriage of the races that were in effect until Loving v. Virginia in 1967. That’s during the lifetime of many readers of this blog, including me.
Finally, Jamelle Bouie has screenshotted a few comments by Trump voters in a NYT focus group, if you want to see the fantasmagorical reasons they give for their vote. They’re clearly living in made-up America.
Leto
Edit: misread, deleted.
Suzanne
I was reminded this weekend about a passage from Achieving our Country, by Rorty. He writes about the work of Avishai Margalit, an Israeli philosopher. He defines a decent society as one in which institutions do not humiliate citizens. Relatedly, a civilized society is one in which individuals do not humiliate one another.
If anything, I feel like the election of Trump is an attempt by individuals to humiliate one another.
Belafon
Did they catch the people who killed that kid because he didn’t speak English? If not, maybe they can devote the same amount of resources towards it.
matt
wow, fake reward for turning him in. What a joke.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Belafon:
Sorry, the overtime budget for the year was shot having cops wander around Central Park “searching” for clues.
brendancalling
If that’s uncouth, I guess I’m uncouth.
craigie
Actually, I do not.
Chris
I can’t remember where I read this, but I remember seeing a story a while ago about how, while DOD in theory offered bounties for the capture or any information leading to the capture of a fair number of prominent jihadists, in practice they almost always found excuses not to pay them.
New Deal democrat
FWIW, the best line I heard about this is that the shooter turned himself in after he found out what Altoona pizza is:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PizzaCrimes/comments/1hajqe0/in_honor_of_the_arrest_of_luigi_mangione_in/
Suzanne
I will note that it strikes me as exceedingly American to have a whole slew of fine print on getting a reward for coming forward with a tip that aids in capturing a criminal. Nothing works well in this country.
Leto
@Suzanne: could just be social murder. (Engels)
karen gail
@Suzanne: Not only is lying about rewards so totally white American but we are about to return to Oval Office a man who has spent his whole life lying and cheating. And he brags about it!
piratedan
in regards to the NYT poll responses that Bouie cited, made me stop wondering about the authenticity of those Penthouse forum letters I used to read as a young adult.
Jeffro
I read that NYT focus group piece this morning and a) laughed my ass off and b) was going to post some excerpts here later.
But then I thought, “why bother…we all know MAGAts are beyond low-info”
Jeffro
also…looks like The Turtle took a bad fall this morning?
ahem
gotta go check our fridge in the garage and make sure we’re well-stocked up here…
Chris
@Jeffro:
“It’s lying on its back, and it can’t turn itself over. Not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?”
Suzanne
@Jeffro: Thoughts and prayers!
TBone
@New Deal democrat: lol!
TBone
@Suzanne: seconded
Move over, Henry Kissinger!
eemom
Speaking of the Fascist Times, Krugman’s farewell column today is awesome.
Suzanne
@karen gail: All these exceptions and hurdles and forms to fill out and complicated processes that exist at the point of any transaction erode social trust. Just a little. Each one.
Do not get me started on two-factor authentication.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Jeffro:
Seems like he’ll recover:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/mitch-mcconnell-falls-senate-republican-lunch/story?id=116650005
More’s the pity. If there’s a hell, he’ll be in the cubicle right next to Kissinger.
mrmoshpotato
@Jeffro: Did Mitch fall into his own grave?
Yutsano
@eemom: Krugman finally did a GBCW to the Times? I wonder what the final straw was. Hopefully he ends up somewhere decent after this.
mrmoshpotato
@eemom: Does Krugman’s final column include the words “Fuck the fucking New York Times!”?
Ohio Mom
@Yutsano: Krugman wrote for the Times for 25 years, he’s 71. I don’t know if he needs any reason beyond that for ending his column. He certainly does not need the money.
As I recall, he was something of a Justice Souter hire. The Times was surprised when his work veered from what they were expecting. But they were good sports about it for a quarter of a century.
He says he will keep on writing, we’ll know soon enough where he lands next. Maybe he’ll start a substack?
Old Man Shadow
The very American thing is that we all recognize the base injustice of our society where the police throw all of their resources to catching and punishing the killer of a rich, white CEO, while on even doing half as much… a quarter as much… for the other murders in the city of people who aren’t rich, famous, or “important”. But we do nothing about it.
We all recognize that corporations, especially health insurance companies, hurt, kill, and destroy human lives and families with the stroke of a key, click of the mouse, or flourish of the pen. We know it’s all perfectly legal and we know that the chances of any of them getting anything remotely like justice is nil because they have high powered lawyers to shut down civil suits and lobbyists to change laws in their favor.
And we refuse to change this.
But we cheer on when someone uses a gun to give the legalized killers a bit of justice.
That’s American as hell.
Raven
Here we go again.
libraryguy
Many of our fellow citizens are steeped in a blunt, relentless propaganda stew by the Right.
I’m not excusing or justifying their ignorance or uncritical acceptance of lies, but we have to acknowledge, as mistermix and others have pointed out, that this the reality we have to deal with.
gvg
I was thinking about Mistermix’s question on why we don’t see more elected Democratic leaders pushing back against the normalization of Trump and last night I came up with an uncomfortable answer. Not sure it’s the right one or only one but politicians cannot win if they blame the voters. Not ever. More than the customer is always right, you can’t blame voters. But what if the voters really are to blame? What if we have too large a percentage of mean people plus ignorant and gullible? We can make excuses and examine how to change things like media and education, and blame ourselves for not figuring it out sooner, but they are adults too and made choices. Maybe the clued-in politicians are having a hard time not screaming at people who call them to “stop Trump” but didn’t vote for them because they were busy or didn’t think Republicans meant it. Maybe they need a cooling off period.
That doesn’t mean they should be going to parties with Rabid republicans right now, though they will have too in a while. Their job requires shmoozing. There are only a few that have been too social.
I would not make a good politician.
Old Man Shadow
@gvg: Very few of us would.
I’m an angry, swearing introvert who would rather be reading than schmoozing.
Baud
You people are old.
Suzanne
@Old Man Shadow:
Come sit by me.
Quietly. While I read. And we can not interrupt one another except for the occasional expletive.
TBone
@Old Man Shadow: on that exact topic, I just read this updated article. It has some very good points. I said already that, if third graders can get used to the constant threat of being shot, so can CEOs (especially Elno). This is why:
Don’t Kid Yourself, The Powers That Be Are All Shook Up
Is that such a bad thing?
I just rewatched the Seuss video The Star Bellied Sneetches yesterday. So this was a bit chilling:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:keg3c3lhpxiihjho4e7auzaq/post/3lcvlm6w3is2l
Chris
@Old Man Shadow:
Yes.
The closest I’ll come to criticizing all the celebrations over the CEO’s death is that we’ll happily cheer when the guy gets killed for his crimes, but we won’t come together and do the minimum it would take to prevent his crimes from happening.
And that, at least, is nothing to celebrate.
Marmot
Those reasons for those idiots’ votes for Trump are pretty much what I expected. The vast majority of the voting public does not vote for a candidate’s issues, contradicting the thread immediately below.
Most voters don’t know what a candidate stands for. It’s just social affiliation. And when you poll voters on specific issues, they’ll just repeat what leaders say about those issues, if they can remember.
One conclusion this leads to is that “popularism” is a fool’s game, with ever-decreasing returns.
TBone
@Baud: get off my lawn!
Chris
@libraryguy:
Yeah.
Especially if, as suggested in the last thread, the question is “why did Democratic turnout fall by so much,” it’s really difficult to answer that question without giving center-stage to the fact that the media environment is as bad as it’s ever been.
rikyrah
@Suzanne:
they want to own the libs.
And, when we collectively didn’t get hysterical. But, some cutting the toxic MAGA’s out of their lives..
and, then us turning around and saying..
” I hope you get everything you voted for.”
Has unnerved them.
As has the collective
” Aight…bet..”
From the Black community.
stacib
@gvg: Jon Meacham said the day before the election that it was a referendum on the American voter moreso than on Kamala Harris / Tim Walz. I totally accept that reasoning.
karen gail
@Suzanne: More than anything I hate paperwork, last time I had to do a pile of it all I could think of was carbon paper and that faint last copy.
Once upon a time we were told that by using computers we would no longer have to deal with multiple copies or multiple layers of authentication. They lied.
TBone
@karen gail: I’m so old I have actually used a mimeograph.
pajaro
@Baud:
I am old. I remember one of our early family vacations, when we drove from our home in Chicago to Miami. I particularly recall the three-room bathrooms at a gas station–men, women, colored as we traversed the South. But racism wasn’t just confined to the South, of course. The home I bought in the lovely neighborhood in the Kansas town where Iived beginning in the 80’s had a covenant (no longer enforceable) that excluded non-aryans, which meant that even my white self would have been excluded (i’m Jewish).
Suzanne
I think, like, emotional valence is the lizard-brain part of the appeal. Not even sure if “valence” is the right word. Maybe it’s more like “emotional alignment”. Just like with personal relationships, we usually look for those who match our energy and reflect it back. (Probably why dramatic people get into romantic relationships with other dramatic people.) Trump matches the energy for people who are pissed off. It feels familiar.
Redshift
In case you think it’s just low-info voters who do “I’ve decided the only things TCFG is actually going to do are the ones I like,” here’s a NYT social media post summarizing an article today:
Hoodie
Those responses Bouie shows look like the Jimmy Kimmel man on the street thing. From time to time he does man on the street interviews in which people, in response to questions about various subjects, make up all kinds of reality, and do so with the greatest of conviction. These focus group analyses may be problematic because they assume people can actually give you an honest answer to the questions. In a lot of cases it’s probably just what they could think of at the time to avoid being embarrassed to admit, mostly to themselves, that they really don’t know why they voted the way they did.
Doc Sardonic
I remember back eons ago, in the early days of PCs, just after the discovery of fire, when I was installing a 10base2 network in a medical office. The office manager was thrilled with the prospect of electronically filing claims and said “Oh we are going to save so much paper!”. She was less thrilled when I told that she needed to buy more printer paper because once the Docs discovered all the reports that could be compiled and printed it would be mind boggling, she only thought they used a lot of paper before.
Belafon
@Redshift: I’ve taken to summarizing people like this in the phrase “I only wanted a little evil”.
Chetan Murthy
@Suzanne: Your comments made me think of two things:
(1) I’ve been reading The Guardian (UK edition) for many years, and it seems like under the Tories, every institution has gotten worse — every one. More and more, it seems like every governmental and private organization is just a predator upon ordinary Britons. It really is what you wrote about an (in)decent society.
(2) and you make me think about what Ronald Coase wrote about the reason for the existence of large firms — why doesn’t everybody just outsource everything. He wrote that when people -within- large firms transact with each other, they can make some baseline assumptions of good faith — they all work for the same company, they all have that company’s well-being in mind. When people in different firms transact with each other, they cannot make such assumptions, and need to be on their guard, take precautions, and these all add -cost- to each transaction. And of course, when one of the two parties is much, much stronger than the other party, the weaker party is more likely to be victimized, not because the stronger party is evil, but because in a world, a society, where everyone slowly comes to believe that the proper position is always “caveat emptor”/FYIGM, the natural thing to do, is to screw anybody you can get away with screwing.
Markets in Everything ™ was such a stupid, immoral idea. Sigh.
Betty
I heard a different take on the shooting today from my stepdaughter who sells health insurance to employers in NYC. She said the guy was well liked and had worked his way up through the company. The whole community seemed shaken by the shooting, not just other CEOs.
Baud
pajaro
@stacib:
The post-mortem’s I’ve read seem to show that Democrats, across the board, did the worst among the least-engaged voters. The more people knew, even from the lamestream media, the more they were likely to support Democrats. The other side was able, over a long period of time, to poison the information and social media spaces that these barely-voters inhabit so that, when they finally heard from us during the campaign, they were unlikely to trust our messages about who we were. That we cared more about trans individuals and open borders than the economic concerns of everyday Americans was obvious to them, as it was what they had been endlessly told we were about. The party is aware it needs a means of engaging in alternative information spaces, and that the messaging can’t be turned off now that the campaign is over. How to do it without billionaire money is a problem, obviously, but it’s an answer that doesn’t just blame the voters, but identifies the problem that they believe we and they need to solve.
Baud
@Betty:
I’m pretty sure people we don’t like aren’t human.
Suzanne
@Chetan Murthy: I read an observation, some years ago (so I can’t remember where I saw it), about how we don’t just live in a market economy. We live in a market society. And thus our base self-conception of ourselves in public life is as consumers, not citizens.
karen gail
@TBone: Oh, the memories. Nothing like ripping the stencil you spent hours working on so that once you typed it out it was “perfect.” Then top it off by ink problems and stencil ripping.
Baud
@Suzanne:
I agree with this. And liberal politics isn’t going to be successful if people see themselves as consumers.
karen gail
@Suzanne: I read that also, the push for people to consume is overwhelming; we keep reading about new jobs, new housing, new products.
Have you seen the “Rat Race Cartoon” or the one where guy keeps consuming until all that is left is a junk yard full of discards? That is what has happened not just in this country but in the world as a whole.
Old School
I’m not sure the Time Person of the Year means anything in this day and age, but they’ve narrowed it down to ten finalists.
I’m sure everyone is on the edge of their seats.
Chris
@Chetan Murthy:
It really does feel like we’re determined to turn ourselves into the mirror image of the communist world with all its disasters throughout the twentieth century.
Communism takes a fairly unobjectionable premise (let’s just call it “government should do more in the economy”), and charges off with it to the point of utter absurdity (“government should do everything in the economy”).
Substitute “government” for “market” and we’re basically there. We’ve taken the premise of “markets are important, no society can function well without them!” and, somehow, extrapolated from that to “markets are important, everything should be run by the market!”
Marmot
@Suzanne: I don’t disagree. A lot of people were very pissed off about the cost of a burger, or rent, or eggs. I was right there all “don’t you remember what caused this? This is currently the best economy in the world!”
But the average voter knows fuck-all. And is pissed at prices (too bad it’s not wages!). Trump seemed more like their kinda guy—“he’s actually going to do something!”
This experience has made me Bernie-bro adjacent. Left populism stood a better chance in the last election.
Martin
@gvg: I think the problem is that ‘blame’ is the center of our focus, as if we have been personally wronged. And we may feel as though we have been personally wronged, but some rando in Indiana didn’t seek to wrong us. They don’t fucking know we exist. And sure, there were votes cast with that general idea in mind – some pro-palestinian single issue voters voted for Trump to ‘send a message’ to Dems, but there aren’t many of them.
You didn’t vote to reward or harm other people. You probably had other people in mind when you voted – ‘this will be supportive of trans people’, but you aren’t expecting them to come up and thank you for that vote. You didn’t vote for Harris as a gift to them, you voted for Harris because harm to them is internalized as a harm to you – you are sympathetic to them, and you are really just voting for you, with that investment in the welfare of the trans community being a property of you. And that investment varies – we are more sympathetic to Ukrainian soldiers than Russian soldiers, even the Russian soldiers who have no agency in being there. And there’s a whole pile of people we don’t even know exist, as the trans community generally was a decade or more before. By and large, the electorate simply didn’t think about them and they never factored into those decisions because they weren’t part of us. Any of us could have taken a few seconds to consider that the trans community must be out there, invisibly, affected by various policies. But hardly anyone was considering whether Obama or McCain would hurt or help them. Those of us voting in that election never considered them good or bad. Were we to ‘blame’ if harm came to the trans community as a result of our decision?
The unfortunate reality is that most Americans just don’t care about other Americans. They care about their family, and maybe their neighbors and that’s about it. I suspect most care about the players of their favorite team more than they care about any class of person. Those of us who do, get outraged when they don’t act like us, and they’re just offended when we dismiss their reasons for why they voted and blame them for not considering the specific group of people we care about (when we might not even be aware of, or care about the specific groups that they might care about).
I think politicians, at least good politicians, see things in more that way. Voters aren’t to be blamed, but educated and persuaded and delivered to.
Martin
No, but we should be able to shake them up through peaceful political means, rule of law, etc.
That doesn’t seem to work (by their own admission), that the only functioning process to balance things is by shooting them. That’s a bad thing.
Old School
@Baud:
Does the VA count as military spending?
ColoradoGuy
Trump is a product of the Hatertainment industry, which was pioneered by Rush Limbaugh. It’s a distinctly American version of fascism … hate disguised as low-life comedy. Trump had listened to Rush for decades, and figured, “I can do that!”
He parlayed his NBC connections into TV and more TV … remember the Empty Podium coverage by NBC in 2016? Trump’s demographic are the folks who watch Reality TV, and don’t care about politics, but are fervent about the local sports team. Reagan and Rush paved the way to Hatertainment, and Trump perfected the format.
The GOP figured out back in the days of the Reagan governorship of California that Issues Don’t Matter … it’s all entertainment and the memorable soundbite.
Suzanne
@Baud: Liberal politics will also not be successful if people see themselves as consumers and yet they’re able to consume less and less. It is an erosion of living standards.
For a big fucken bummer, guest post by Tom Owens: Is a Middle Class Life Still Attainable? The Economic Struggles of Generation Z Are Real
The market is the primary mode of public organization, and the market is failing people.
Baud
@Old School:
I don’t think so. But aid to Ukraine might.
Belafon
@pajaro: It’s going to take investments from us.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Well, people are about to spend four years getting a lot more market.
Suzanne
@Baud: Where did I read, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism”? It’s true.
Baud
@Chris:
Agree. Crypto is that idea applied to money.
Baud
@Suzanne:
End of the world is just physics. That’s much easier to comprehend than human economic interactions.
Omnes Omnibus
@TBone: I’ll answer your question with a question. When has vigilante violence been a good thing?
Chetan Murthy
Whenever anybody thinks of achieving any end, any end whatsoever, the automatic assumption is that it will be achieved by harnessing the market. This is the bedrock assumption of neoliberalism too, btw. As you so rightly point out, the market is failing to achieve those ends. And there is simply no mental, societal, moral, ….. ideological force that is trying to work against this assumption that “The Market Uber Alles, Peace Be Unto The Market Amen.”
Ohio Mom
@Betty: I think most CEOs are well liked. If for no other reason, who is going to admit they don’t like the boss? But really, you need friends to climb up the ladder.
Which brings me to, I am impressed that he worked his way up the ranks, I didnt think that happened much anymore.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
The Batman
Martin
@Suzanne: I think Trump gives them permission to be angry. Obama and Romney and McCain and Clinton(s) and Bush(s) all signaled that we shouldn’t be angry, so much so that it became an open joke around Obama that he needed an anger translator.
Usually politicians when they do give permission to be angry focus that on specific things, people, etc. Reagan toward communists, that kind of thing. Trump doesn’t care as long as you aren’t angry about him. If you’re angry about other republicans, he’ll turn that into a position and go after those republicans. He gets support by validating whatever anger you come up with.
It has limits – a lot of us don’t respond to that. Too many do though, including a lot of people on the left who get red pilled by it.
JML
@Betty: I heard the same from someone who works at UHC. People aren’t just their jobs.
Not to let him off the hook for UHC doing rotten things to many people, but I doubt they were uniquely awful for an insurance company.
But for me it’s more about my discomfort with the “he worked for a shitty company therefore he deserved to die” attitude some people are very comfortably projecting from their screens…
Ohio Mom
@Suzanne: I am not a historian or sociologist, this is my harebrained/tin foil theory, but I can’t help but think it’s decades of libertarian propaganda that has convinced us we are consumers before we are citizens. All the better to privatize everything.
One example is public schools vs. school choice. The idea that educating young people is a community and civic endeavor is replaced by the idea that parents should have the right to customize their children’s schooling. It’s every family for themselves.
Chetan Murthy
@JML: I guess I need to state that no, vigilante murder is NOT good. Doesn’t matter who or why.
That said, he’s not just “working for an awful health insurer”. He was the CEO of that insurer. If command responsibility means nothing, then nobody is responsible for anything and …. [insert Monty Python “I blame society (for killing the dead bishop on the landing)” sketch]. The idea that somehow he wasn’t responsible for the brutal and deadly policies of UHC ….. is ludicrous, I’m sorry.
Again, that doesn’t mean he deserved to be murdered, just as David Gelerntner didn’t deserve to be attacked with a mail-bomb decades ago by the Unabomber.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Ohio Mom:
As I say here repeatedly, it’s 40+ years of Laughernomics/Reaganomics/Neoliberal/Trickledown policies bearing fruit.
And, such policies are baked in to both sides of the political aisle as we’ve seen in education (my favorite person Arnie Duncan!) and more recently on other economic policies championed by some people in here as well as at least one front pager.
rikyrah
@Baud:
Phuck Bernie
Baud
@rikyrah:
Does he think Musk is only going to propose defense cuts (if at all)? So weird.
Suzanne
@Ohio Mom: But I will note that it’s not just the idea that parents have the right to control their kids’ education. It went along with defunding and neglect of our public schools to the point that it is now completely rational for parents to take their kids out of public schools.
I will note that my kids attend a public school built over 100 years ago. They can’t put air conditioning in it and so they cancel school when it gets too hot. They can’t make all of it disabled-accessible. It doesn’t have modern educational technology like Smartboards, they still have chalkboards. We have just…. let stuff degrade, slowly, over time.
Belafon
@Baud: I think he’s just challenging Musk to do something unthinkable: Cut military spending. If they actually cared about spending, defense would be on the table.
Martin
So, focus groups vary in terms of how active they are. Some are pretty hands off, just asking for details on their positions. Others are more interactive where you challenge their statements and press them to reconcile inconsistencies, or reveal deeper ideas that they might be less forthcoming about. You can usually tell if someone is being honest in a focus group (that doesn’t get communicated in the transcript, btw). You can’t tell in a poll, which is why you do the focus group.
One of the big uses for focus groups is to give you things to poll on that you might not think to poll on. I would have liked to see a set of questions on government and economic reform, but I never saw a poll like that.
Another use is to clarify. For instance on the 4th respondent linked above, I’d want to ask why they thought Trump would be better at lowering healthcare costs than Harris. I think there’s a decent chance that the answer would fall along the lines of ‘Biden/Harris didn’t do much in lowering those costs’ which apart from insulin and maybe a few other drugs is true. And why Trump might be seen to do that – ‘he’s angry about it like I am’, which is also true. But anger doesn’t make a policy. That last respondent is someone that Democrats might have been able to reach if we better understand how they came to that conclusion. And if you see a pattern in that, that becomes a sign you should shift your approach because there’s possibly a real well of voters you can reach.
Part of the job of evaluating the focus group is the broader take-aways ‘these people were angry’, ‘these people were demoralized’, ‘these people were enthusiastic’. My sense from the Biden-Trump focus groups is not enthusiasm for Trump, but anger. They are not excited about Trump, they are angry at what currently is, and Biden/Harris are responsible for what currently is, as all presidents are. Sometimes you vote for a candidate despite who the candidate is. Sometimes there’s a meta layer to that, anger at the alternative for forcing you to vote for someone you don’t like, because they disappointed you on the thing you really needed. That’s probably reflective of the pro-palestinian Trump voters who felt that Biden forced their hand in voting for an asshole. You can say that’s irrational, and it is – anger makes you act irrationally. Don’t make your voters angry with you.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: “Funny” how nobody seems to include St. Bernard in the list of gerontocrats who need to step aside.
frosty
@Suzanne: Yes! You and Ms F would definitely get along.
Baud
@Belafon: we’ll see. I can see Musk doing it as part of a package, although Trump won’t go for it.
@Steve LaBonne:
He gets some heat on Blue sky.
TBone
@karen gail: aarrrggghhh!
Marmot
@Ohio Mom: The book Democracy in Chains recounts the (very racist) Libertarian history of the school voucher “movement.”
TBone
@JML: they were uniquely awful as an insurance company, which takes a LOT of awful. They have the highest “rotten things” murder rate, oops rate of claim denial. Starkly higher than their
partners in crimecohorts.TBone
It is clear that some people have never had to go through the health insurance claims denial process, or watch a loved one do so, all while very sick and some bureaucrat (or AI algorithm) is holding your beating heart in its hand.
Martin
Yeah I think there’s a different way to interpret that. If an event/person has the power to cause prices to go up, why doesn’t the government have the power to cause prices to go down? There are two answers:
Both answers are bad answers for voters. Either the incumbent should be voted out because he’s a callous asshole, or we need to reform the government so it can do those things.
In a poll a year ago, there were the following top lines:
Poll after poll show that voters believe the government should be active in the economy. Trump expressed he would take charge, implying he would be active in the economy. And by all indications – he will be. Tariffs are him being active in the economy.
Democrats are still advancing a philosophy of governance that the government really shouldn’t be active in the economy, except in the margins – as Biden’s two signature bills do (which are popular). They are a sharp departure from the previous neoliberal approach, but not in a dramatic way that consumers would feel.
Omnes Omnibus
@TBone: Why do you say that? Because people aren’t okay with a vigilante killing?
TBone
@Omnes Omnibus: not at all. Some people are just as cavalier about the deaths caused by the insurance system, and it shows.
Jim Appleton
@Suzanne:
Kinda like health-care benefits denied.
//
Marmot
@Martin: That is not different from what I said, but definitely more detailed. Thanks for that!
Adding: most voters know fuck-all about tariffs, but “he’s gonna do something.” This fucking bullshit is the legacy of technocratic government and “a rising tide lifts all boats” bullshit.
Jeffro
@TBone:
RIGHT??!
TBone
@Jim Appleton: that’s why this front page says “irony is dead.”
TBone
@Jeffro: hahaha! Those two fucking guys also caused a lot of unnecessary death. I will not mourn them.
My inner Dorothy Parker is feeling very woke.
RevRick
In what is clearly a repudiation of everything Democrats stand for the difference between a Republican majority in the House of Representatives and a Democratic majority was 7,309 votes spread across three districts: Iowa 1, Colorado 8, and Pennsylvania 7, according to Dave Wasserman. Also, Trump’s landslide stands at 1.4%.
(PA 7 is my district and I am Facebook friends with Susan Wild). I now am blessed with a shitty Republican.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m curious why you took that position rather than the somewhat more obvious one given the threads direction of ‘why do people defend market-based healthcare’.
I only bring this up because we’ve been talking about judging voters motives, and here TBone expressed a value, and you took a more judgmental interpretation, when I think there was a more charitable one given the general views of the community. (My sense is that you would be toward the outlier group here of not cheering on the CEO shooter.)
Not trying to pick on you – I raise it because I think you will be introspective about it and give a thoughtful answer.
mrmoshpotato
MSNBC is acting surprised at Dump being a grifting pile of shit.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Martin:
This – at some point I want to dig in to the Michigan voting. Lack of perceived choice + anger => weird voting patterns that aren’t easily explained by rational analysis.
Jim Appleton
@TBone: Yeah ….
Bill Arnold
@Chris:
LOL.
How many years have you been waiting for that?
cmorenc
@Chris:
What compounds the impact of D turnout falloff 2020-2024 is that Trump & MAGA take it as solid evidence Ds “stole” the 2020 election by at least 7 million fraudulent or illegal ballots (differnce is 81.28 million for Biden, 74.9 million for Harris).
Baud
@cmorenc:
I hope we can get to a point where we stop wringing our hands about their delusions.
Martin
@RevRick: I’m genuinely surprised that CA flipped 3 more districts. I didn’t see that coming. Notable, too that Trump did better in CA despite that.
One of our local dynamics is that a union help oust an incumbent Dem for a piece of shit Republican (I personally know this individual and can say that with authority) who has long worked to undermine unions, because the Dem incumbent voted against something the union wanted. The folks I’ve heard from suggest this is really a longer-term effort to pull the party left, and they’re willing to take the near term hit to do that. I think the republican being a piece of shit probably helped that decision happen. Not convinced their strategy is sound, but it’s gotten everyone’s attention. That dem was popular.
cmorenc
@RevRick: Or, take the impact of the NC GOP winning control of the NC state Supreme Court in the 2022 midterms – despite a roughly even partian split in the statewide aggregate of votes in US House races in both elections, and a 7-7 split in the party affiliation of the NC congressional delegation in 2022, the Rs used the NC SCt’s rehearing of the districting case with the new R majority to permit the R legislature to gerrymander the split to 10-4 Rs. The Ds who were displaced by the revised congressional maps had won their seats by 3, 9, and somewhere in the teens of margins.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@RevRick:
in CO 8, 3rd party doofuses sucked off 2.8% of the vote. I don’t have a good feel for CO 8 so can’t say who benefited from that more.
I do know some Dems weren’t thrilled with Caraveo’s “Repub Lite” messaging but I only watched this one kinda/sorta.
One thing about the district: it was carved out to be competitive and gee, that’s what we got.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: I’d be fine with the entire GOP fucking off back to 2020 and screaming their heads off there.
(And of course there’d be a massive die off while screaming that COVID-19 is a hoax.)
karen gail
@TBone: My stepdaughter had Cystic Fibrosis, every hospital visit was filled with paperwork horrors; the worst were when the company her father worked for changed insurance companies.
Years later I discovered a number of people I knew had found good paying jobs shuffling papers for a couple of different insurance companies; they knew nothing about medical conditions all they knew were the guidelines company printed out about what was acceptable claim and what wasn’t. I had one company who believed that a respiratory therapist wasn’t needed three times daily while in hospital. It wasn’t until a patient advocate contacted insurance company that bill was covered.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: I may not have read carefully enough, but I don’t see many people here defending market based health insurance. I see some people saying that the CEO was reputed to be a good guy. I, personally, have my doubts about that. He may be a personable and friendly guy, but that is a different thing. I can understand people have justifiable rage at him. I don’t think that extrajudicial killing is the solution.
As far as why I chose the response I did, why do you tell some commenters that their answer made no fucking sense and respond politely to others?
mrmoshpotato
@TBone:
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
@Jeffro: Look up “John Oliver Henry Kissinger” on YouTube.
Steve LaBonne
@Omnes Omnibus: “Nice is different than good.”- Red Riding Hood
Omnes Omnibus
@Steve LaBonne: Yes. Exactly. In either case, no one deserves to be shot down in the street. But my sympathies are more engaged by the poor guy who was killed for not speaking English.
TBone
@karen gail: sorry you had to go through that with her and then come to a better understanding of why. I worked on both sides of the docors’ malpractice table. For plaintiffs suing and defendant doctors at different law firms. The error stories and hurdles victims of malpractice face in seeking any modicum of justice is another fine mess, but all of it opened my eyes just as thoroughly as trying to get care for my own chronic illness and being denied, having to jump through the hoops, and taking less care, generics, etc. because it was just barely better than nothing. And my family members’ medical denial horror stories are worse. But once one spends years reading the legal medical horror stories abundant in law offices, and combs through thousands of pages of medical records, it leaves a mark.
different-church-lady
Well yeah, what we want is an America where health care executives don’t behave in a way that makes people glad they got murdered.
Kay
@Betty:
He may have been well liked but his company is bottom tier. Twice the industry average for coverage denials.
TBone
PSA: on TCM it is Maggie Smith night! Beginning at 8pm Eastern.
different-church-lady
@Chris: Why is that? It’s McConnell, you gotta ask why is that?!?
Sure Lurkalot
@Betty:
The article linked below intimates that Brian Thompson may not have been held in high esteem by the lower ranks at UHC.
I can’t imagine being in the claims department and having to be the face that denies procedures, claims and/or reimbursement, getting screamed at and threatened, hearing customers cry and thinking that you might have delivered someone’s death sentence would inure you to your higher ups who tell you the denials are for the efficiency of the system and the elimination of “unnecessary” treatments.
Guy making eight figures and grabbing more via (allegedly) trading on inside information.
I don’t support vigilantism but I also don’t support pretending the guy was a good egg.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/unitedhealthcares-leaked-talking
frosty
@Raven: Yep, another time around the same old same old.
TBone
@mrmoshpotato: priceless, thank you!
Glory b
@Marmot: No it didn’t.
cmorenc
@TBone: if you even used a copy of something made via mimeograph, you cannot forget the smell- a chemical smell like some sort of very aromatic cleaning fluid the school custodian used on the floors,
TBone
@cmorenc: yep! Can still smell it (mom was a teacher).
Nukular Biskits
Okay, what are you kids talking about this evening?
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Still a thing only 42 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu3iCvAQCHg
Miss Bianca
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Wait, did Caraveo not win? I thought she did. I knew that one was close.
Nukular Biskits
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
@TBone:
OMG! I haven’t thought of that smell in years and, after reading y’all’s comments and looking at that Youtube video, I swear I can smell it again!
TBone
@Martin: I didn’t write that sentence, I should have specified it was the subhead in the article I linked. Just now saw your comment. I don’t pretend to have answers, I simply am biased against the insurance and financial systems and tend to root for the underdog in general. Am a former Bernie bro. Still a democratic socialist.
TBone
@Nukular Biskits: sorry!
Glory b
@@mistermix.bsky.social: Its strange because several articles I read that interviewed Palestinians IN PALESTINE, and they were asking Americans to vote for Harris, wanting any fate except a Trump victory.
The same pro Palestinian protesters have also been asking Biden to do what he can to save them from Trump.
That’s not irrationality, it’s stupidity.
But when asked before the election, the Uncommitted folks said Harris losing was more important than Trump winning.
Muslims had been returning to the Republican party before 10/7, based on their shared animosity towards LGBTQ people, meeting with Mike Flynn & QAnon up to the Muslim mayor of Hamtramck MI endorsing Trump.
They weren’t “our” voters in the first place. Frankly, Jewish voters are a much more reliable Democratic constituency than Muslims.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Miss Bianca:
Nope:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/colorado-us-house-district-8-results
2449 vote difference.
Bear in mind that when she won the seat two years ago, she won it by around 1600 votes.
WTFGhost
Wow. Is it really hard to understand, when the uber-powerful are revealed to be humans, just plain old people, whom the same worms will eat when they die, is it hard to realize that death leads people who feel helpless to cheer the reminder, they’re all just mortal, like us?
If people felt powerful and free, they’d be in shock that someone would murder a poor, innocent, CEO who was just trying to deny the *cheats*, not legitimate claims. And they’d feel that way because it would be hard to deny legitimate claims – otherwise, they wouldn’t feel powerful and free.
My humble opinion, anyway.
NotMax
@cmorenc
Methinks you mean ditto fluid.
Mimeographs used an ink which wasn’t particularly aromatic. And invariably smudged the fingertips of anyone operating the machine. Except,, when it came to design Gestetner machines, which were almost never messy.
Geminid
@Martin: This is an intriguing story, but now I’m wondering what the name is of the Democrat you’re talking about. I’d like to find out more.
TBone
Reposting this because of what the judge said.
https://www.cancerhealth.com/article/judge-criticizes-unitedhealthcare-refusing-treatment-cancer-patients
Also, in case you missed Elno’s commentary on the CEO shooting, a direct quote:
Suzanne
On the topic of stinky reproducibles….. it always makes me laugh when people ask me if I “draw blueprints”. I’ve literally never drawn a blueprint in my life. I haven’t seen a blueprint machine in probably 25 years.
WTFGhost
@Glory b: One thing to consider. Republicans will say “you need to protect Palestine the way our pro-lifers protected preborn life. You need to FIRE anyone who won’t do what you say!”
Republicans would *love* that, because no Democrat can give a full throated defense to Palestinians while Israel is actively waging a war, because pro-Israeli folks would tear them a new one.
Divide and conquer.
Glory b
@WTFGhost: also, consider the irony that the family fortune that nutured & educated the shooter came from them owning & operating nursing homes, not exactly a group of innocent players in US healthcare.
Nukular Biskits
@TBone:
Bring back the guillotines.
BellyCat
Am I the only one who finds the latest swerve here into Everything is Shit-tastic ™ a bit much?
I mean, I’m all for curmudgeonly perspectives, but JFC…
Kay
@TBone:
In 6 months they’ll all just be standard Republicans.
Suzanne
@TBone: I bet Elmo has been paying a lot more for security in the past week.
Can’t say I’m sad about that.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Nukular Biskits:
I have several tumbrels in the garage rarin’ to go.
TBone
@TBone: I guess the people driving/traveling in or near his vehicles are unconcerned about the ruthless measures he takes in providing a product while maximizing shareholder value.
TBone
@Suzanne: ha!
TBone
@Nukular Biskits: there’s a song for that!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=acT_PSAZ7BQ
Nukular Biskits
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
With or without salt?
WTFGhost
@karen gail: Random thought: Republicans don’t care about *justice*, only *performative justice*. You got your day in court, so you could plead out, to time served, to get a felony on your record, but, at least you’re out of jail, and, you *did* get your day in court! You *could* have had a jury trial!
That’s “performative”. That’s Scalia’s version of “Due Process”. We walked to first base, touched it, then second, touched it, third, touched it, then home plate. That’s a home run. No one cares if they didn’t actually hit the ball, or, if they did, the opposing team wasn’t on the field – you saw them touch all four bases, HOME RUN!
Justice is, if you’re incarcerated, your public defender gets a big boost in pay, since you can’t work and pay an attorney yourself. If the states don’t like that, they can reduce or eliminate cash bail, right? And your attorney gets a reasonable budget to investigate, so they can at least say “items 5, 8, and 12 on the plea deal are bullshit; the rest are misdemeanors; this is *not* a crime that scores incarceration for *this* perp.”
Alas, no one wants to pay for justice, and too few people are directly pained by injustice, so it continues.
Sister Golden Bear
@Chris:
I’m out of network.
Kay
@TBone:
Musk is a moron. United Health Care denies claims at a rate of 32%, which is twice the industry average and three times the rate of the top tier. Even if one accepts his dumb Tweet at face value, how are the other insurance companies performing so much better? Why can’t United Healthcare return shareholder value while meeting at least industry average for claims denial?
NotMax
@Suzanne
Now remembering the scene described in A Canticle for Leibowitz of monks hunched over large unrolled sheets of white parchment, studiously and assiduously applying blue ink to replicate blueprints from the before times.
WTFGhost
@NotMax: Fascinating. I remember using a dot matrix printer to print math quizzes on what *I* thought were “mimeograph” machines, but I think you’re saying they were “ditto machines” instead? Because the fluid wasn’t nasty-stinky, but you knew you were using the machine, from the smell, and the pages (ordinary paper) all came out a bit cold. “From the fluid,” I always assumed.
(Um. I should mention, since I’m not NT, some of my observations might not be observations you’ve made. Would *everyone* consider my math quizzes to feel a bit cold? I dunno. *I* did. But neuro-divergent people can have synesthesia effects, and can have annoyances from common, not-uncomfortable, sensations. But since my fingers never got smudged, “ditto” sounds right, which annoys me, since I’d never be a dittohead.)
Citizen Alan
@Baud: This is just so painfully fucking naive! He can’t possibly think that anything on earth is going to reduce the military budget!
NotMax
Sigh. Italics fail above. Fix.
@Suzanne
Now remembering the scene described in A Canticle for Leibowitz of monks hunched over large unrolled sheets of white parchment, studiously and assiduously applying blue ink to replicate blueprints from the before times.
Starfish (she/her)
I have no clue where Ian clipped this one from, but violent video games like Among Us are to blame for the UHC CEO getting killed. Who writes this stuff?
WTFGhost
@Suzanne: I went to high school in the 80s. T-squares and triangles, and mechanical pencil sharpeners. Some students were PRIVILEGED and got to use a DRAFTING MACHINE.
I was proud, because one of my draft works was used to create an actual blueprint, from an actual blueprint machine, and, yes, I knew, it was a “your mother will be really proud of you” moments, but, I knew that *blueprints* mattered. I didn’t think my future would have me creating blueprints, but… hey, this was my baby blueprint, and it was mine, all mine.
A few years later, CAD/CAM destroyed everything I’d learned :-).
Starfish (she/her)
@Betty: This is what I heard from a friend whose spouse works at UHC as well.
WTFGhost
@Kay: Musk is a bigger moron, because if UHC wanted to make big money, it would be cutting heroin with fentanyl and… what ?I thought maximizing shareholder value was *everything*.
It has to be *legal*?
Well… how about *moral*?
If you’re an insurance company, you should be in the business of *paying* claims, trying to deny the cheats, only.
If you think UHC should DENY lawful claims, to make more money, why don’t you think they should be importing fentanyl, cutting heroin with it, and selling it for big bucks?
Both actions kill people. Why is one okay, and the other not?
NaijaGal
@TBone: And this is why health insurance shouldn’t be a for profit business and healthcare generally isn’t in most parts of the world.
Brant Lamb
@Baud: Yep, so are you.
Nukular Biskits
@WTFGhost:
During my 2 years getting my associates in electronics, I had to take electronic drafting (drawing electronic circuits). I still have some of my templates +40 years later. Don’t ask me why.
Wasn’t but just a few years later computers rendered (pun intended) that skill obsolete.
Kay
@WTFGhost:
I love the tech bro Big Proclamation which on two minutes reflection turns out to be just dumb. Some of the Trumpsters were starting to question why this company was ripping them off so Elon had to shut that down.
Baud
@TBone:
The DOGE privatization motto.
Citizen Alan
@Martin: i think the class MAGA voters I despise the most is the ones who demand socialist policies to fix what they’re bitching about, but who will scream in absolute hysteria about the evils of communism every time democrats try to do anything. What these people want, but don’t have either the intellect to understand tgat they want or the guts to admit that they want is for the president to enact price controls to keep the cost of things at an artificially low level. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Deep down every fucking Maga. In the country would be perfectly happy with aggressive scandinavian style socialism as long as they could be sure that the non whites aren’t getting any of it.
Martin
@cmorenc: I haven’t seen any meaningful effort to understand why Democratic voter registration steadily fell from 2020-2024, apart from the strong uptick after Harris was named as the nominee, which I’m assuming was a short-term spike.
Timill
@Betty: Makes his actions as CEO worse. If he’d worked his way up, he knew damned well what the lower ranks were doing and approved it. He may even have ordered more of it…
NaijaGal
@Baud: That statement bothered me so much. I read it, thinking ruthlessly sounds good until it’s your loved one whose life-saving treatment is denied to turn a profit.
Lack of empathy seems to be the defining trait of Elon and those who worship him. They can’t conceive of a system that provides decent healthcare and still allows some profit taking (like Switzerland).
I know a completely non profit healthcare system is considered communism by too many but what if the CEO made $1 million a year instead of $10 million and we all got the care we needed? Is that such a terrible thing?
Can there be no ethical element to maximizing shareholder profit? Would it be acceptable to collect insurance premiums and never pay out for anything at all – dragging every policy holder through the claims process and tying them up in mandatory arbitration until they die or give up? I’m sure that would maximize profits even further. Gaah!
frosty
@Suzanne: One of my first jobs was drafting for a surveying shop. They had a blueprint machine and I was the one who changed the ammonia (which printed the drawings). I’d take the old stuff out to the field behind the shop, kick it over until it was drained, then fill it with new stuff.
Definitely not the environmentally friendly way to do it!
ETA 50+ years ago
divF
@Belafon: Remember Paul Krugman’s dictum about the federal budget: if looked at from a budgetary standpoint, the federal government is an insurance company with an army
That is the cleft stick the GOP is stuck on: the only place there is real money is either the defense budget, or Social Security / Medicare / VA. Conventional wisdom is that these are all third rails in in American politics. I guess we are about to find out.
tobie
@Martin: The insurrection on Jan 6 never ended. Bots on social media as well as the mainstream media more generally were hammering this admin and the Dem party from Day One. Biden was blamed for school closures when he reopened schools. “Let’s go Brandon” took off like wildfire with t-shirts, flags and bumper stickers manufactured in China because of the relentless campaign to smear Biden and the Dems. We focus on this or that in the campaign because it’s easier than admitting a massive cyber war was waged, we missed it entirely, and ended up losing.
TBone
@NaijaGal: Chris said a wonderful thing here last night. In the SANE nations, “pre-existing conditions” are just called “your medical history.”
Nukular Biskits
@TBone:
Speaking of which, there was a program on NPR yesterday concerning genetic testing (such as that offered by “23 and Me”) and whether insurance companies could potentially use the information to deny claims or coverage.
Need to find that …
ETA: Found it:
NPR: Think
frosty
@NotMax: Not to get too pendantic … oh, hell, why not. The way I learned it was that what you’re describing is a blueline. A blueprint has blue background with white lines. I’ve seen these from the 1940s but never saw one printed.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus:
That was sort of my point – people here don’t defend that. I never saw anyone suggest he might be a good guy apart from my hypothetical that none of us bothered to ask because ‘healthcare CEO’ was all the ‘bad guy’ we needed to hear to be okay with the action. Maybe he was great, but we didn’t care. That was not a defense of our reaction, it was an indictment of it – and I shared in that reaction.
My original line of inquiry was about why a bunch of people that I trust to agree with your sentiment that violence is not the answer immediately rejected that in this case. I find that troubling. I think it’s worth exploring why that happened.
Because sometimes I feel attacked (which is sometimes accurate and sometimes me being defensive) and sometimes I don’t.
That’s sort of the point I was trying to get across.
Steve LaBonne
@divF: The immediate move they’re likely to make on Medicare, pushing us all into crappy “Advantage” policies, will actually cost MORE, at least for a while.
frosty
@Steve LaBonne: Medicare Advantage doesn’t work if you live on a state border and all your docs are in the other state. But I guess if they can force us onto that they can force us to change all of our providers too.
I’m going to be Pollyanna and say this ain’t gonna happen.
Tony G
@gvg: The voters are almost always to blame when bad people are elected. But politicians and the corporate media are not allowed to point that out.
Steve LaBonne
@frosty: I sure as fuck hope not, but I’m not feeling terribly optimistic today.
Suzanne
@WTFGhost:
And Revit destroyed CAD.
The cool kids all use Rhino now.
Miss Bianca
@Nukular Biskits: one of the many, many reasons I will never do that DNA testing BS. Until,.you know, the Trump Directorate makes it mandatory.
NotMax
@frosty
Nope.IIRC in the book they use lots and lots of blue ink, carefully leaving white spaces only where the lines are on the original.
Gvg
@Baud: why wouldn’t Trump go for military cuts? Before, no. He used to be a little in awe of the military. Now? He knows a lot of the leadership has been resisting him and is anti dictator. Plus I bet the classified doc handling really angers them, including even rich defense contractors who used to be military, and I suspect he has heard. He has not seemed nearly as respectful and admiring since leaving office and those leaked plans call for a lot of firing in the higher ranks. I don’t know what he will do, but I don’t think the military is safe due to him.
Now the rest of the GOP who do not have his Teflon with their voters are not going to want to cut military spending, and the real reason the military budget is bloated is Congressmen wanting money sprang in their district.
TBone
@Nukular Biskits: thanks, I always figured they weren’t innocently collecting our DNA solely for entertainment purposes and would use that information in a dastardly way. So I avoided that pitfall, at least. Fascistbook and Cambridge Analytica was a learning experience.
TBone
@Martin: you were attacked IMO – after I deflected the attacker he moved on because you had the gall to be charitable toward me. Sad to say I knew that response was coming.
YY_Sima Qian
More than a few local LE organizations need to be defunded & rebuilt from the ground up:
A particularly revolting detail:
Martin
Trump floating an idea that if you invest a billion dollars in the US, you can bypass regulations. Looking forward to big techs unregulated nuclear reactors to train AI models getting built. Given that states still have sovereignty, I’m guessing these are going to have get built in states with republican legislatures.
Barry
@Yutsano: “Krugman finally did a GBCW to the Times? I wonder what the final straw was. Hopefully he ends up somewhere decent after this.”
My theory is that this was a good changepoint, *and* that the NYT had made it crystal clear what the policy was about the Restored God King.
wenchacha
@Ohio Mom: That is pretty much the whole game. Are we fellow citizens in community or not?
Geminid
@Martin: This is where yhe small nuclear reactors that have been touted recently might come into play. I don’t think a commercial version has been built yet, but I remember one being being authorized for an Air Force base in the Aleutian Islands. That base could really use one; right now it’s is powered by a coal-fired generation plant and they have to store the coal indoors.
Anither possibility: huge new coal-powered electrical generation plants, like the Four Corners plant New Mexico intends to shut down in 2032. With its large deposits of coal and Republicans, Wyoming would be a potential venue.
wenchacha
@Suzanne: Those big machines were pretty cool! I was an art grad turned drafter in the early 80s. I did a few years of contracting, and I liked working on paper more than keyboard and screen.
Fake Irishman
@Geminid:
….except coal is a massive money loser.