Linky Friday: Everything Is Political

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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643 Responses

  1. Road Scholar says:

    G6:

    If you think about democracy in the terms we prefer, you might say the biggest limitation at the moment is that we don’t know how to incorporate the role of political elites in a constructive way into the governing process or to somehow make it possible to ensure that they’re working on behalf of the interests of ordinary people.

    And this is how we got President Trump.Report

    • Kimmi in reply to Road Scholar says:

      What? Because they hired someone incompetent to play the bad guy??Report

    • Stillwater in reply to Road Scholar says:

      Or is THIS how we got Trump:

      “So democratic elections, on your view, are essentially just a competition to see who can activate the most identities among the voters?”

      “I would say there’s a variety of identities people have that are more or less salient and can be made more or less salient politically. For many people, the principles become part of the identity and are important moving parts of the way they think about politics. But our claim is that the identities are more fundamental, the principles come later rather than the other way around.”

      Maybe the case for Trump was just massively over-determined. Which is bad, bad, bad.Report

  2. Oscar Gordon says:

    G3: Drawdown shouldn’t be a book some guy writes, it’s the kind of thing that should be part of the IPCC report, or similar.Report

  3. Michael Cain says:

    M3: For informational purposes, forging the HTTP Referer: field to say “www.facebook.com” will provide access to at least most of the WSJ content. At least so far, the WSJ appears to think the value of allowing Facebook users to follow links posted by their friends is more important than any revenue loss due to people willing to forge the entry. Forbes will also deliver content if the Referer: value is “www.facebook.com”. The Financial Times will deliver content if the Referer: value is “www.google.com”.Report

  4. notme says:

    Liberals are melting down after Trump pulled out of the Paris agreement. All that for 2/10 of a degree seems a bit much.Report

  5. Oscar Gordon says:

    It’s less about any real meeting of targets & more about the signals it sends both home & abroad.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

      Damnit, misthreaded. This is a reply to @notme .Report

    • notme in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

      Maybe so. I guess Trump could have come out and said that the US would stay in but wouldn’t implement anything. He did campaign on leaving so he was already committedReport

      • Michael Cain in reply to notme says:

        Well, more precisely, he could say that the US wouldn’t implement anything by federal regulatory rule. Even that might not be true if the courts say that statute requires it (Massachusetts and Utility Air Regulatory Group say CO2 regulation is required). Nothing much Trump can do if Congress passes statutory requirements by veto-proof majorities (as unlikely as that seems). Also, absent statutory changes, California has permission to set tougher emission levels and other states have permission to choose to adopt all or part of the California rules.

        I’ve said before that I don’t think modifying the Clean Air Act to take away California’s privilege to lead (and other states’ privilege to follow them) is the hill that McConnell can/will kill the filibuster for, but it’s a possibility.Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to notme says:

        I was listening to an interview with a VP from Mars Corp. and while they were lobbying for Trump to stay in, he didn’t seem too concerned. Despite his rhetoric that the accords are bad for business, most major corporations have seen the writing on the wall and have already invested heavily in reducing pollution in general and their carbon footprint specifically. Financial firms have also invested heavily in ‘green’ energy technology companies and aren’t really interested in shifting back to large fossil fuel investments.

        Trump was probably committed to the move, but I doubt it will have the effect he’s selling the move on.Report

        • notme in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

          I thought part of the reason he used was the cost to the American economy. I’ve seen figures of 38-45 billion per year for 2/10 of 1 degree.Report

          • Kimmi in reply to notme says:

            notme,
            Try multiplying $55,836 by 100 million people.
            That’s how much global warming is going to cost us, in 20 years, give or take.
            (Numbers are pinned on crop losses, with subsequent deaths of the Americans we can no longer feed. Just crop losses, mind. I could do more work, but I’m lazy)Report

            • Les Cargill in reply to Kimmi says:

              This is a bit weird because there’s ag. land going out of production all the time. There is even a type of trust available in Texas to abate taxes on family land if you agree to let it return to a state of nature.

              At least in the US, arable land is at quite a surplus. Whether water is available is a different thing.Report

          • Oscar Gordon in reply to notme says:

            And I’ve seen critiques of those figures that say the authors are cherry picking big losers and ignoring growth that results from technological advancement.

            Either way, if a large number of the biggest global corporations are just fine with the Paris accords, and they are growing despite, or because of, those efforts, that says something.Report

            • Kimmi in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

              Oscar,
              One has to account for many things… For instance, when not if we lose Miami, what’ll we do with all the people? And what does that cost?

              If we prevent that, we save a ton of money, but how much do we need to do to prevent it?Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Kimmi says:

                Losing South Florida, or New Orleans, will happen slowly, such that the region will have time to adapt, or people will just leave on their own over time.

                If we really want to mitigate things, we can stop subsidizing their home values and insurance premiums.Report

              • Kimmi in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Oscar,
                Not if what gets them is a good storm surge. Not if what gets them is floating raw sewage (that’ll take at least a billion to fix.) and subsequent disease (there’s a Lot of Stuff that can make people Leave and Not Come Back).

                Maybe if the issue is fresh water…

                (and Yes, their housing values are still going up. It’s stupidity, is what it is!)

                We’re probably going to lose the keys catastrophically too, though there’s fewer people there.

                [A friend of mine has been working on Miami’s evacuation plans, pre-trump of course]

                Alll-ways fun to explain to the Crunchy Conservatives that there are some things we just Can’t Fix, and seawater infiltration is one of them. (well, I suppose we could run some water down from the Appalachians, a la NYC…)Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Kimmi says:

                All kinda my point. If you stop subsidizing their insurance and home values, they’ll leave either before too long, or immediately after the next storm causes their house to be a total loss.

                Alternatively, once insurance companies aren’t being forced to spread the risk around to the rest of us, residents who wish to rebuild will start being told how to reduce their premiums, and the character of the local architecture and infrastructure will change profoundly.Report

              • Kimmi in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Oscar,
                They’re already not giving out insurance in tidal Alabama and Mississippi. I think they fear the Floridians would squeal too much (that and we have a history of fixing florida).Report

              • Will H. in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Florida codes have a “red zone,” which is from the coast to six miles inland at any given point. The red zone has all sorts of restrictions. Andrew did that.
                Galveston has sort of the same thing. Different codes there that aren’t widely recognized elsewhere though. For example, metal brackets hold down the studs to every footer and header, screws, no nails for the brackets.Report

              • Lyle in reply to Will H. says:

                It is possible to build in such zones you just build the house on stilts (or the larger building with an empty lowest story, and in that case move the utilities to the top of the building. You can see such houses outside the seawalls at Galveston (not so much on the outer banks). If you provide an open space as high as the highest expected storm surge and wave height the flood won’t be a problem. I have seen pictures of houses built on barges in the Netherlands that are able to float up and down on pilings (tall enough to hold the building at max expected water heights as well) It is just that you can’t use conventional construction.Report

            • notme in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

              Why does Mega Corp being ok with the paris accord mean it’s good for the average Joe citizen? It doesn’t. Are we back to what’s good for GM is good for America?Report

              • Kimmi in reply to notme says:

                notme,
                Do you HAVE to use one of the companies Vital To Our National Security as your example?
                Could you NOT have chosen some other company? Really???Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to notme says:

                How is it bad for the average American?Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Well, that’s just it. The political argument isn’t that it’s bad for the average American (cuz it isn’t) but instead that it’s bad for these particular Americans.

                Which is why arguing that environmental regs hurt coal miners makes no sense. First, because coal jobs are declining due to market forces and not CO2 regs, and second because the argument flips the normally – and rationally – accepted justification of policy from “on average” to “not for these guys”.

                Of course, I know that the political significance of the miners, and mining, and coal, and regulation and etc have symbolic political appeal. (“Liberals suck!”) But only because the appeal is viewed purely symbolically. Evidence contradicts the policy changes the symbolism is supposed to justify, and undermines the justification of the symbolism taboot.

                But that’s all MAGA is. Symbolism.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Stillwater says:

                Won’t someone think of the ice men… err, the buggy whip mak… err, the coal miners!Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                I’m not trying to trivialize the argument. Back when B Clinton pushed for NAFTA I remember thinking “there goes the Democratic party”, and for precisely the reasons mentioned above: passing legislation which explicitly and predictably entails lots of job losses in identifiable sectors without also (at least) attempting to recognize and ameliorate those effects was a political nightmare unleashed. Subsequent to that both the GOP and the Dem party went all in on free trade by taking NAFTA on a world tour. More job losses, more economic uncertainty for workers. BSDI!

                And now we have Trump.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Stillwater says:

                @stillwater

                We’ve had this convo, you know I agree with you.Report

              • George Turner in reply to Stillwater says:

                Australia can’t hire coal miners fast enough to meet demand.

                Gee. What could be so different about the two markets?Report

              • gregiank in reply to George Turner says:

                Kangaroos…..really the answer is kangaroos.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to George Turner says:

                Most of Australia’s coal mines are deep in the interior dessert where it’s hot & miserable work that requires a great deal of physical effort, long periods of isolation from friends and family, etc. From what I’ve read, the mining companies have a real problem with new worker turnover, despite offering salaries of $80K-$150K for miners who can do the work for 3-6 months.Report

              • Jesse in reply to George Turner says:

                One place still has easily available coal and is very close to 2nd and 3rd world markets that still use coal?

                Also, that’s not actually happening.

                http://www.smh.com.au/business/mining-and-resources/coals-dirty-australian-secret-its-not-coming-back-20170402-gvc357.html

                “The world’s biggest coal exporter has a problem.

                Demand for the dirtiest fuel is on the wane. The International Energy Agency – which has tended to overestimate coal production, and underestimate renewables – doesn’t expect consumption to regain its 2014 levels until 2021. Investment in new mines is “drying up”, according to its latest market forecast.

                That’s reflected in Australia’s export figures. Since overtaking Indonesia as the biggest shipper in 2015, loadings at its coal ports have gone sideways. Even last year’s price spike, which drove the cost of energy coal up 87 per cent and caused the steel-making variety to almost triple, wasn’t enough to stop Rio Tinto Group selling off its last mines in the country.

                Those seeking a revival in Australia’s coal industry – as well as those hoping for its end – have pinned their expectations on a former cattle ranch in an isolated spot of the country’s northeast.”Report

              • George Turner in reply to Jesse says:

                If it’s dying, why are they projecting that in 2021 the market will match its 2014 peak? 2021 is in the future.

                Africa, which has a lot of coal reserves, is also turning to coal to power its growing cities. The third world is waking up, and it wants reliable coal energy.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Stillwater says:

                Thinking about that some more, maybe the Trumpist wave dominating political culture comes from a deep, inherent human desire for symbolism expressive of a national purpose. Trump merely fed that appetite and reaped the rewards.

                Why and how we got to this place will be researched for decades to come.Report

              • notme in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                If new regs put folks out of work or cost us money that’s bad right? What is the lowest cost of these new regs you’ve seen? Are billions worth 2/10 of 1 degree? Not to me.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to notme says:

                Yes, it’s bad if coal miners or rig workers are unemployed, and I wholeheartedly agree that we should do something to help them*. But we have to weigh that against what is growing. Wind turbines and solar farms need people to operate, repair, and maintain the systems, and we will need a lot of those kinds of workers in the coming years. Toss in all the other tech systems coming online as well as there is a lot of growth that is looking for workers.

                *What we should do varies and we’ve had that convo before. But we should not just leave them hanging, certainly not if the decline of the industry is driven in part by policy decisions.Report

              • George Turner in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                If the idea is to provide jobs in the energy sector, why not hire people to run in giant hamster wheels?

                If the idea is to provide cheap, reliable energy to benefit all the people who aren’t among the 6.4 million energy sector workers, then perhaps hydroelectric, nuclear, coal, and fracked natural gas are the better base load options.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to George Turner says:

                Of those 4 options, only one is not politically toxic (and even dammed hydro has it’s detractors).

                Coal is dying, and will continue to do so. It’s going the way of whale oil.

                Natural gas itself is fine, but fracking is getting to be a political headache. I wouldn’t mind seeing more use of bio-reactors to generate methane.

                Nuclear, despite my sincere belief that this is the base load path we should be taking (and spending money to develop & certify safer reactor designs), is just not in the picture near term. Perhaps if China can demonstrate how it can be done safely (a stretch, I know, given how China treats industrial safety), we’d see a resurgence, but until then that topic will be dominated by fear mongers.

                We can also start replacing dammed hydro with things like Run of the River.

                Absent Nuclear, I think we should be investing heavily in tidal power (since as long as the moon is in the sky, the tides will ebb & flow), and telling the eco-radicals to piss off (while actually taking some care not to deploy designs that slaughter marine life wholesale).

                All of those options need skilled labor.

                PS If there is ever a local, or international, movement to tax carbon emissions, coal dies even faster, and gas isn’t as attractive.Report

              • George Turner in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Coal will stay around because it’s massively abundant and almost as cheap as dirt. India, China, and developing countries are going to use a whole lot of it. We’re not going to hunt coal to extinction anytime soon. (As an aside, I got through a power outage by burning whale oil. Unlike vegetable oils, it burns clean.)

                China’s nuclear push is greatly benefiting Western nuclear companies because they can try out advanced designs they’ve had sitting on the shelf.

                I think the future is in liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTR), if they can gain any traction. They are inherently safe, reliable, can start up and shut down quicker, and only produce about 1% as much nuclear waste as a conventional U235, U238, plutonium plant. The hurdle is that our entire regulatory framework was built around the older solid-fuel plants, so hooking a thorium reactor to the grid is going to take an immense amount of legal work. For that reason, Kirk Sorensen of FLiBe energy is trying to target military installations that have their own, completely separate regulations.

                My idea is that for a start, we could use the LFTR reactor as purely a source of heat, as they can run much much hotter than solid fueled reactors. That heat could split water for hydrogen, perhaps melt sand into glass (which is currently made with natural gas), make cement, or most importantly, provide the heat input for turning coal into gaseous and liquid fuels, which would slash the inherent losses in burning part of the coal to provide the required heat.

                On another technological route, the University of Ohio came up with an ingenious way to burn coal by simply using it as a reducing agent to turn iron oxide into pellets of iron wool. The iron wool can then be transported and “combusted” back to iron oxide by rapidly rusting it, giving off heat and absolutely no pollution at all, not even any combustion products. Then the used pellets are sent back to be reduced with coal again, turned back into iron pellets, and the cycle continues.

                And of course we can use wind and tidal power in areas with strong winds and tides, but unfortunately most of humanity doesn’t live in such places. Asia and Africa, for example, have very little wind.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to George Turner says:

                You got a link for that UO process? I know there are massive coal reserves, but the appetite for expanding extraction operations in the US is waning. I suspect that we’ll exhaust the current mines and new mines will be few and far between. Doesn’t matter how clean you can burn it, it’s turning into the new nuclear (politically toxic).

                As for nukes, there are easily a half dozen safe designs just itching for a place to prototype, and another half dozen still in the design phase, but between terrorism concerns and the looming specter of radiation, they’ll never see the light of day in the US. I give China credit for being willing to field test them.Report

              • Lyle in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Actually there are different futures for western surface mineable coal and eastern underground coal. Give that the labor per ton of a surface mine is 3+ times less western coal will drive eastern coal out first. Also eastern coal has been mined for far longer and its quality is declining due to the best having already been mined.
                Further there is a limit of around 1000 feet or so for mining coal due to increased methane in deep coal. Now of course there is coal bed methane to use the deeper reserves, where you pump the formation water out and extract the methane. Studies indeed have shown that you could replace the methane by Co2 and pump it back down, since the methane has been there for at least millions of years the Co2 will likley have about the same residence time.Report

              • Will H. in reply to Lyle says:

                Except for anthracite.Report

              • Lyle in reply to Will H. says:

                Note that Anthracite costs 3x bituminous coal so it is not used for power generation, and it is primarily used for domestic heating, in hand fired stoves or stoker fed furnaces according to Wikipedia.
                The same article says that 2000 people are employed by the Anthracite industry in the US. 1/3 of the reserve remains in ne Pa according to the same article.Report

              • Troublesome Frog in reply to George Turner says:

                China’s nuclear push is greatly benefiting Western nuclear companies because they can try out advanced designs they’ve had sitting on the shelf.

                I hope this is how it works out, but I also cringe because China is the type of place that might build it with shaky safety margins, screw it up, and give the anti-nuclear lobby this generation’s Chernobyl to throw in the faces of people who are pushing for the new designs. Fingers crossed.Report

              • notme in reply to George Turner says:

                Sadly, I doubt the enviro nuts will ever truly let up on nuclear. Maybe when all the boomers are long dead.Report

              • El Muneco in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                I wonder if it would be a winner for someone (hypothetically, since neither side would do it) to promise:
                – Multi-billion dollar infrastructure project
                – Targeted at exceeding Paris goals and demonstrating that America always leads the rest of the world follows
                – Thousands and thousands of honest industrial jobs
                – Bring the highest tech industrues into depressed areas that need them the most
                – Costs largely offset by taxing the living hell out of imports from countries dirtier than we are
                – Did I mention what that last one does for goods made in the USA?Report

          • Will H. in reply to notme says:

            I don’t get this “cost to the economy” argument.
            When I was in the trades, I worked on a few super-critical steam coal-fired plants. There were a number of developments that led to them, the main ones being the introduction of high-chromium steel in the late 80’s – early 90’s, and the introduction of telecommunications equipment to massively expand the sensor points.
            I have also worked on a gasification system, which refines coal to its component gases prior to burning.

            And I don’t understand why new coal technology, developed primarily by the Japanese and Germans, is reviled by both Right & Left.
            Consider the difference in mileage between an Edsel and a Neon. It’s that big of difference, if not more.
            Some of those old coal plants were built back in the 1930’s.

            Innovation used to be seen as a benefit for business.Report

            • George Turner in reply to Will H. says:

              Sometime I should tell you about my idea for an Ericsson cycle liquid piston power plant. The thermal efficiency would be extremely high.Report

            • notme in reply to Will H. says:

              Generaly speaking new govt regs cost money, right. Or are they cost free? What is the least expensive estimate of the paris accord regs you’ve seen?Report

              • Will H. in reply to notme says:

                I didn’t really pay attention to the Paris Accord.
                Not something I can influence one way or the other.

                In this case, not having gov’t regs is what’s costing money.
                Imagine no hard figure for how much E. coli bacteria is safe for a cut of meat. Now imagine that everyone knows that the gov’t is going to come out with a number someday, but no one knows what it is, though there is a lot of speculation.
                Now, say a rancher wants to slaughter 300 head of cattle. If he guesses low enough, then the meat can stay on the shelves until it sells. If he guesses too high, all that meat has got to come off the shelves once the gov’t comes out with their number.

                That’s where power companies are at with coal-fired plants.
                The biggest difference is that there has been enough speculation for so long that there is the standard guess, and the approved deviation upward guess, and then the lower just-to-make-sure guess.

                In this case, having a published regulation that everyone can abide by means removing a lot of uncertainty from the equation.
                The workarounds for that uncertainty are rather costly, and doing away with them would mean more productivity.

                If you’re going fishing, you want to know the bag limit and size limits beforehand, rather than have the game warden tell you, “Go ahead and fish, and I’ll just come out with few numbers here directly– and there will be hell to pay if you get it wrong.”Report

              • notme in reply to Will H. says:

                Then clearly we need as much regulation as possible to make things as certain as possible regardless of the expense. Here we have a cost of billions for 2/10 of 1 degree. What a bargin.Report

              • Will H. in reply to notme says:

                I think it’s the safety issue.
                Any issue where safety is a concern tends to like hard numbers everybody can look to rather than the interpretation depending on how tall the inspector is they sent out.Report

              • notme in reply to Will H. says:

                So billions for 2/10 of 1 degree is
                cost effective?Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to notme says:

                Where are you getting these numbers, if I may ask?Report

              • notme in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Trump cited the 2/10 in his speech and I’ve seen it other places. The billions seems common knowledge. I’m open to other numbers of you have any.

                http://freebeacon.com/issues/report-obamas-paris-climate-change-plan-to-cost-up-to-45-billion-per-year/Report

              • Will H. in reply to notme says:

                I don’t know if it is or not.
                I do know that, if your shoes wear out, it’s best to get a new pair before the soles are gone.

                But something tells me that, when I spend $10, it goes to somewhere.
                I’m thinking the same that happens with billions.Report

              • notme in reply to Will H. says:

                Some billions go to the UN rathole while other get passed a long as increased prices bc of regs.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to notme says:

                Except all those targets are entirely voluntary and Trump could have dialed them up or down without pulling out.Report

              • notme in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Sure he could have but then it might still be alive for dems to revive. No, better to put a stake in it like he promised.Report

              • Nevermoor in reply to notme says:

                Ooh, look, if you combine two dishonest numbers together you can make a bad argument!

                Could you please, for once, test your ideas against facts instead of fantasy? You may find they don’t hold up as well as your current sloganeering.Report

              • notme in reply to Nevermoor says:

                If you have better numbers then produce them. I’ve asked and don’t think anyone has yet.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Will H. says:

                In this case, having a published regulation that everyone can abide by means removing a lot of uncertainty from the equation.

                This assumes the Greens will be happy with an agreement which doesn’t “solve the problem”, and actually barely addresses the problem.

                After we put into place a regulatory framework which can be tightened, it will be tightened, because the Greens will pocket any concessions and demand “more”.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

                After we put into place a regulatory framework which can be tightened, it will be tightened, because the Greens will pocket any concessions and demand “more”.

                Are you asserting the US *doesn’t have* a regulatory framework to address carbon usage outside the Paris Accords?

                Because, newsflash to all those people here who LITERALLY SEEM TO HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE PARIS ACCORDS ARE, the Paris Accords do not have any regulatory framework in them. They do not have regulations in them at all. There are no requirements whatsoever, except that we give a relatively microscopic amount of foreign aid.

                The Paris Accords say we have to create carbon goals (Which we already do.) and have to issue reports on how well we met them (Which we already do.)

                So not only is there no regulation in there, there is nothing in there we already aren’t doing. The Paris Accords were jut trying to get *everyone* on board with that and putting the information in one place and the goals issued to the same timetable and progress kept updated, and then we’d all meet and talk about it.

                The US *does* have all sorts of climate goals, and has regulation intended to meet them, but *that* regulation has fuck all to do with the Paris Accords.

                Everyone here, and I mean *everyone* because there appears to be plenty of pro-Paris people who do not understand what it does, needs to go read:

                https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/5/7/15554286/paris-climate-accord-exit-bannon

                I quote, emphasis mine: The spirit of the Paris negotiations was to solicit ambition, to get every country on record with specific action plans. In order to do that, negotiators deliberately refrained from including any legally enforceable compliance regime. The only thing participating countries have to do is a) have an NDC on record, and b) report emissions during regular reviews.

                Trump can weaken the US NDC, without penalty. He can roll back all of Obama’s carbon regulations, without penalty. He can simply fail to meet the targets of the NDC, without penalty. All he has to do is explain himself at the five-year review, and the explanation can be as minimal as he likes.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC says:

                I was wondering what this thing was other than a photo op and signalling, and it turns out the US has to pay $2 Billion (more) to join this club.

                Which means Trump has a point when he says we’re not getting our money’s worth.

                https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/06/05/michael-bloombergs-millions-cant-compensate-for-trumps-climate-policies/?utm_term=.21f8ec725ad6Report

              • notme in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Yes, I was right, again.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Worrying about what seems to be about half a billion dollars a year in foreign aid is a bit absurd.

                We give the world half a billion dollars in foreign aid every year to support ‘Good Governance’.

                Wait, no, I lie. We give half a billion dollars in foreign aid every year to support good governance *just to Afghanistan*.

                As for getting our money’s worth: Well, we *used* to actually have ‘reduction in world’s CO2 emissions’ as a *national goal*, and thus whether or not we got our money’s worth would be dependent on if this worked or not.

                I have yet to hear anyone argue the Paris Accord is not *working*. If someone wants to claim that, they should probably do so.Report

              • notme in reply to DavidTC says:

                I have yet to hear that it’s working. Let me know if this changes.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to notme says:

                Erm, the agreement didn’t even come into force until *November 2016*, when the EU signed it (Yes, apparently as a whole), which got it over the ‘goes into effect’ threshold.

                We are currently eight months into the agreement. Almost everyone’s plan was on the *decade* timeframe.

                We have not even had the first status meeting about how everyone is doing, which will happen in 2018. Everyone *just*, like in the last month, published their *first* status update.

                Some countries are meeting their goals, some are not. A few, like China, have been criticized for setting goals they were already meeting. (Although complaining that China was *already* reducing carbon emissions is a weird complaint.)

                notme, I know this is probably pointless, but maybe I can get through to you: Looking at this via any sort of *objective* viewpoint, this agreement is not possibly anything to complain about. It basically tries to reduce carbon emissions by *peer pressure*. It does nothing at all, and the US hasn’t even done anything in response to it. (We already had all those carbon reduction policies in effect.)

                In fact, we didn’t even do anything at all, not even write down our plans…because the plans required under Paris (Nationally Determined Contributions) *were actually created by Kyoto*! The first, non-binding part of Kyoto, had everyone create plans to reduce emissions, which everyone, including us, did…and then no one would sign the binding part.

                So Paris says ‘Okay, forget binding. Everyone just keep publishing your NDC, update them if needed, and also every year you now have to publish if you’re meeting the goals you made up. Nothing is binding at all. And we’ll get back together to talk about this later. Oh, and also, let’s create some foreign aid so that poor countries can measure all this, because there are countries that have no idea how much carbon they are emitting.’.

                That’s it. It’s the most inoffensive ‘treaty’ in history. Normal treaties are laws, or contracts, creating obligations and all sorts of things. This is a bunch of drunks deciding to set up a fricking AA group, where everyone decides they’re going to show up and talk about whether or not they met their goals of not drinking each month, and Trump is whining because it cost $100 to rent the church basement and we had to pay $30 of that because we’re one of the people who has a job.

                It also might not *work*, which is a valid point (That is apparently why Nicaragua didn’t sign on.) but it not accomplishing anything at all seems very unlikely, and the price is *incredibly* low. $3 billion dollars is loose change. (And, it sorta looks like we’ll have to pay that anyway.)

                And, BTW, we’ve *already* been spending *more* than that much helping other countries deal with climate change: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/americans-spent-745b-3-years-helping-other-countries-deal-climate (Note the year, that’s from before Paris.)Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC says:

                I have yet to hear anyone argue the Paris Accord is not *working*. If someone wants to claim that, they should probably do so.

                I thought I’d already done that. The previous agreement apparently did *nothing* because basically everyone but the US broke it. So all of these countries (including us) are following economics or local politics or both.

                That 2 Billion dollars could do a lot of good in the world, using it for Global Warming is basically just taking it out and setting it on fire.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

                I thought I’d already done that. The previous agreement apparently did *nothing* because basically everyone but the US broke it. So all of these countries (including us) are following economics or local politics or both.

                We actually have very little information as to who ‘followed’ the last treaty (Which was Kyoto), which, BTW, no one ‘broke’ because everyone refused to sign the binding part. (Well, a few countries did, but not enough to trigger it going into effect.)

                Instead, everyone signed the first part, and, as required by that part, published the plan they were supposed to be following, but then refused to sign the second part that *legally obligated* them to follow that plan, with the threat of various sanctions and fines if they didn’t.

                So that clearly didn’t work.

                Except now everyone was obligated to keep publishing carbon reduction plans that no one was obligated to follow.

                If only we had, at that point, come up with a treaty that built on that, and took those plans that everyone was already having to publish, but it *wasn’t* binding, so people would agree to it. Instead, (and this is the clever part so bear with me) what if everyone was just required to publish how well they followed their own plan?!

                Man, that would have been awesome! I mean, even if *no one* met those plans, or everyone wrote plans they can easily met, we *at least* would know how well everyone is doing. Everyone would have to stand behind their plan, win or lose, making the results public for all to see.

                Instead we *holds hand to ear* oh, I’m being told we did *exactly that*. Literally that exact thing.

                Weird.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Will H. says:

                I didn’t really pay attention to the Paris Accord.
                Not something I can influence one way or the other.

                In this case, having a published regulation that everyone can abide by means removing a lot of uncertainty from the equation.

                So, yeah, not to be rude, but please don’t talk about it when you don’t know anything about it. You’ve already got people talking about how ‘those’ regulations will lead to more regulations.

                But the Paris Accord is not any sort of ‘regulatory framework’. At all.

                The Paris Accord is all the signatory involved promising to a) set *their own* carbon limits, and b) publish updates on how well they did.

                There is no regulation *at all* in the Paris Accord. There is nothing we have promised to do except say what our targets are, and then judge *ourselves* on how well we hit them.

                This is, incidentally, why it didn’t have to be ratified by the Senate, and is not technically a ‘treaty’. It’s just something the executive branch said it would do, and that thing was already *entirely* within the executive branch’s capabilities. In fact, we *already* set goals, and we *already* judge ourselves on them….we’re just now (Or, were.) going to do it how and when the Paris Accords wanted it.

                (The Paris Accords, also, apparently, involved 15 million dollars of foreign aid to help subsidize this in poor countries, but 15 *million* dollars of foreign aid is pocket change.)Report

              • Will H. in reply to DavidTC says:

                I was referring to a conversation with a field engineer from Duke Energy on a jobsite at a gasification facility, where we were comparing that power plant with others, and the additional questions that raised.

                I don’t know anything about the Paris Accord.
                Frankly, I haven’t heard of it apart form this site.

                But if it’s as inconsequential as you claim it to be, why even bother?
                If there is an international agreement for no one to drink down sea level by three inches, and Donald Trump rescinds U.S. participation in that agreement, big deal. No one was going to drink down the water line at sea level by three inches anyway.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Will H. says:

                But if it’s as inconsequential as you claim it to be, why even bother?

                I didn’t say it was inconsequential.

                It’s basically the first climate change treaty that the entire world is participating in, and it has resulted in a lot of countries setting goals and *sticking to them*. (Not particularly the US, because the US was *already* doing that.)

                However, our removal from that will alter nothing at all. The international community pretty clearly understands we are now operated by batshit morons, but that doesn’t color the good we *used* to do.

                If there is an international agreement for no one to drink down sea level by three inches, and Donald Trump rescinds U.S. participation in that agreement, big deal. No one was going to drink down the water line at sea level by three inches anyway.

                Because a) Donald Trump appears to think this agreement *stops* us from doing that, and it’s something he’s planning on doing, and b) we look like complete fucking morons.

                There are a lot of very stupid people on the right and the left that think withdrawing from this agreement is going to accomplish something WRT carbon emissions.

                It is not.

                What (trying to) withdraw *does* do is makes us look incredibly stupid and selfish on the international stage by reminding everyone we have a political party that denies climate change.

                We are, at this point, in a downward spiral to try to *remove* ourselves as the moral authority in the world, as the global leader. That *really is* going to be the end result of the Trump presidency if it continues….a United States that has lost *all* the international goodwill it’s built up over the decades.

                And at some point other countries are going to stop putting up with Trump’s bullshit and actually slap us with some tariffs.Report

              • George Turner in reply to DavidTC says:

                Actually the opposite is true. What we have are a bunch of incredibly stupid world leaders who think a 2 degree shift in global temperatures will happen, and that 2 degrees will be some kind of catastrophe. Basically, that if Brussels becomes as warm as Paris suburbs, homo sapiens in Europe will go extinct.

                It’s bat shit insane.

                And the funny thing is, those morons deny climate change. The Holocene has been highly unstable. We’ve had five major climate shifts in the last 11,000 years. Those will continue to occur. We can’t yet change the Earth’s orbital parameters or the sun’s output, so we’re just along for the ride.Report

              • Nevermoor in reply to DavidTC says:

                Or, worse, they’re going to look to China when they need a reliable ally.

                But don’t worry, we’ll still have NATO. Or, you know, not.Report

  6. Michael Cain says:

    T1: There’s a growing body of work on the subject that all indicates designing a safe tiny car involves different principles than just scaling down the ideas that work in large cars. Radical changes to the steering wheel arrangement have bigger benefits. Across a wide range of accident types, there’s a net gain from making the car much more rigid.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Michael Cain says:

      There is something to be said for side mounted joysticks.Report

    • dragonfrog in reply to Michael Cain says:

      That study seemed to be entirely about deaths inside the cabin of the car – I wonder if there’s something about deaths of people struck by the cars? Are there some kinds / models / styles of vehicles that are notably more or less involved in killing people on foot or bicycles?Report

      • Dark Matter in reply to dragonfrog says:

        Given how often “struck by the car” means drunk/drugs/distracted/too-old/young-stupid, I suspect replacing the driver (i.e. “driverless”) is the thing of importance.Report

  7. fillyjonk says:

    F4: If accurate, wow, that’s chilling. I tended to think of all small children as “potential psychopaths if not socialized properly” but I guess that was an oversimplification. It also raises all kinds of questions in the “nature vs. nurture” debate.

    The question that is still hanging is: what do we do with the “hardened” cases? I am a college prof – the last paragraphs where they talk about “training” the kids to respond to reward and then sending them out to the workforce or college….given HIPAA and the like, I would not know if I had a student who had these problems. I wouldn’t know how not to “set them off” if such a thing were the case.

    (I once had a student explode with rage in my office over something he saw as unfair – being asked to do a homework that required use of the textbook – and it was terrifying, not least because he was blocking my office door as he yelled at me. I called his advisor after he left, because I was thinking “There needs to be a paper trail about this so there isn’t a chance of some later incident on the evening news being played out as ‘oh, we never knew he could be violent'” Nothing ever came of it – the student wound up dropping out – but it is kind of terrifying to contemplate what I would do, with NO psychological training, if I had someone prone to violence in my class)

    (Maybe I am extra sensitive to these things; one of my good friends in high school was raised by her grandparents because her father was dead and her mother had some serious psychological issues, and I know my friends’ grandparents – her mother’s parents – wondered if they had messed up or if the woman was just born “lacking” something)Report

    • Will H. in reply to fillyjonk says:

      Data suggest that the model envisioned by Nye is inaccurate. The birth rates of developing countries tend to lower as they develop, until there is an inversion point.Report

      • Pinky in reply to Will H. says:

        Is Bill Nye considered more prominent or intelligent than Kathy Griffin?Report

        • Will H. in reply to Pinky says:

          Yes, I believe so.
          So much that it really isn’t a question as much as a veiled protest of some sort.

          Frankly, I had to look up who Kathy Griffin is.
          Knew who Bill Nye was right off the bat.
          So, there’s your answer.Report

    • George Turner in reply to fillyjonk says:

      A few months ago I ran across an interesting article about two different brain mutations for the gene that produces an enzyme that helps processes serotonin and dopamine. One of the mutations was slightly more common in Africa. It seemed connected to psychopathy.

      I hope that’s the case, and if it is something simple like an enzyme (one with broad consequences for how the brain responds, feels, etc), then perhaps we’ve had treatments sitting in our laps the whole time, as we have a host of drugs for adjusting serotonin and dopamine. If could be that the psychopath brain is developing into what it is because of a simple chemical imbalance, and if we can intervene very early we can completely prevent it.Report

      • Of course, that then raises the whole ethical question of, “Can you force people to take these treatments even if they say they don’t want them?”

        I’ve read that “a little bit of psychopathy means you’re a better businessperson.” No idea if that is actually true but apparently the supposed “dark triad” of personality traits correlate with that kind of financial success.

        But yeah. It would be nice for parents to realize that they could intervene early and prevent the kind of problems with their children described in that article.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to fillyjonk says:

      Keep in mind that psychopath happens on a gradient. A little is useful, a lot is bad.Report

  8. Road Scholar says:

    P5: The battle lines there are just baffling if you attempt to understand it any other sense than pure tribal signaling. Also, is it the height of irony that gun owners (or at least the groups purporting to represent them), who likely suffer more hearing loss on average, are on the forefront of legislation that would seem to disproportionately benefit them?Report

    • Troublesome Frog in reply to Road Scholar says:

      I think we’re going to see more and more cases of constituencies torpedoing things that would be good for them primarily out of spite.

      We’re all going to come to hate government because before too much longer, everybody is going to vote for things that hurt them as long as they think those things will hurt the other team more. We’re going to see proposals like, “Let’s stop filling potholes. Think of the liberal tears!”Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

        Right. This is going to happen a lot and why a lot of people on the left think Cleek’s law is a real thing. See also the right-wing tweet bellow. For many people, the issue is pissing off the other side or hurting them more.Report

        • Troublesome Frog in reply to Saul Degraw says:

          I think Tom Nichols once tweeted something along the lines of, “I’m not sure what they’re getting out of this other than the fact that it upsets people who are more informed than they are.”Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Road Scholar says:

      Yeah, I don’t get this. If she was writing a bill trying to outlaw suppressors, or noise cancelling headphones, I could see it. But opposing it just because Warren is pushing it is pure spite.

      But then, that is par for the course for American politics today.Report

    • pillsy in reply to Road Scholar says:

      My belief is that “gun rights” advocates, at least at the level of leadership, are much not all that interested in actually advocating for the right of individuals to keep and bear arms. They’re much more interested in scoring culture war points for purposes of fundraising, or just advancing “bundled” issues that have nothing to do with guns.

      The linked article sure didn’t do much to challenge that belief.Report

  9. Saul Degraw says:

    G1: There are some places that can only be built up and not out for a variety of reasons. The questions is how high up are people willing to go. Personally I’m freaked out by the super-tall skyscrapers/apartment buildings because I dislike heights and have a phobia of falling. I don’t even like going on roof decks.

    G2: Interesting that the seems to be in a very GOP area. It also shows them the power of entrenched interests because it seems to be professional gardening companies that are trying to undercut competition.

    G5: I am not as far left as Jacobin but I do find it odd that a lot of people on my side are becoming Intelligence hawks because of the boorishness of Trump.

    G6: The restless voter/1916 shark thing would be fine in a system where both parties were ideologically close and very center-oriented but that isn’t the case anymore. We know have stark partisan division with a GOP that seems to go further and further to the right no matter what.

    P4: I don’t know if I would call this leftward lurching per se but it is clearly not racist friendly.

    P6: The problem is that the California Republican Party is a lot like their GOP counterparts in the South and just can’t get it into their heads that what flies in Alabama doesn’t fly in California.

    F3: This is running into the same issue that another linky Friday article did. This is written for a very specific audience and/or it assumes that everyone is a kind of latent Protestant Evangelical/Fundamentalist. I’d like to see Bill Nye’s comments in a more neutral platform. I found something on the Post where it characterized him as “wondering/questioning” whether we should “penalize” parents for having extra kids. This sounds very different than the alarmist tones of this article and something in the always derp-filled Federalist. The whole paragraph begins with the idea that people are God’s greatest gift. This isn’t going to play well with secular types or even many religious types.

    M1: I hope so.Report

    • Richard Hershberger in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      G2: This looks to me more like a poorly drafted ordinance. The mayor mouths a piety about following the law, then pretty comes comes out and says they aren’t actually going to do anything, and then talks about rewriting the ordinance. It also isn’t clear if the people leading the charge are more than one guy.Report

    • Troublesome Frog in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      P6: The problem is that the California Republican Party is a lot like their GOP counterparts in the South and just can’t get it into their heads that what flies in Alabama doesn’t fly in California.

      I’m guessing that’s what Will was getting at when he was lamenting the lack of separation between state level and national level parties. A California GOP that was soft on social issues and immigration but highly focused on lean government an deregulation could probably do quite well here. I’m betting that there are states where pro-life Democrats or something similar would make a big dent in the Republican majority.

      Ideological bundling a the national level has resulted in a really bizarre set of litmus tests that really don’t have anything to do with each other. The fact that party lines are such a hodgepodge of unrelated stuff makes me immediately suspicious of anybody who appears to 100% support everything in a particular party platform. It’s kind of hard to arrive at all of those beliefs with a single coherent ideological framework. It’s much easier to arrive at them if all you’re doing is rooting for a team.Report

      • I’m guessing that’s what Will was getting at when he was lamenting the lack of separation between state level and national level parties.

        Yep. That is exactly what I was getting at. Either in the form of the California GOP being more tangibly different than the Alabama GOP (and Texas vs Oregon Dems) or in there being a state-only party that represents the centrists and rightwards in the state spectrum, ranging from Republicans to Ahnold to Loretta Sanchez.Report

        • Jesse in reply to Will Truman says:

          The issue, @will-truman is that the Republican’s in California don’t want that.Report

          • Troublesome Frog in reply to Jesse says:

            To some extent, this is why I was happy to have two Ds on the ballot for Senate in California rather than the usual D vs R. I was initially horrified, but I came around to it. It’s not because I want one-party rule with no checks. It’s because I think that it might actually end up giving people more of a voice in the general election.

            If I lived in a place that was solid Republican and I was given a choice between voting for a D who would lose or an R who would win, I’d probably stay home. If I could choose between two Rs on a spectrum, each of whom actually has a shot, I might actually be happy to have a say. It might be something to counter the primary system that produces polarization and foregone conclusions.Report

            • Richard Hershberger in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

              This is why I am registered Republican. I am in a solidly red county in a blue state. For local offices, the Republican primary is the relevant election. And some of those Rs are raving lunatics. So I vote in the primary for the sanest Republicans on the ballot, and usually vote for the Democrat in the general.Report

          • Will Truman in reply to Jesse says:

            Oh, there are a number of problems with it. Republicans, Democrats, partisan instincts, etc. Some of it comes down to the lack of organizational distinction that exists between state and federal parties in the US compared to (for instance) Canada.

            California Republicans and Texas Democrats are working within the confines of the existing system. If the system were to change, so would behavior. We actually sort of do see it in California when Republicans line up behind Loretta Sanchez. Back home where they have non-partisan mayoral elections the Republicans usually have a preferred Democrat.

            So why don’t state parties adapt? Partisan instincts of members are one example. The notion of having a California Party (analogous to the Saskatchewan Party) is rather anathema. More practically, state parties are very reliant on federal fundraising dollars, making it pretty hard for one to break free even if they were so inclined.

            I don’t have an agenda to reverse this or anything. I am merely noting that I do not believe people in California and Texas are optimally served by it.Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

        @troublesome-frog @will-truman

        Maybe but I am not so sure. IIRC I’ve seen California GOP politicians try and do what you describe and fail. The last GOP candidate for Governor tried this.

        But the simple issue is that a lot of California Republicans in the Central Valley or rural Eastern parts of the state might just be really out of step with the rest of the State. They could sincerely believe in their social conservatism and they control the state GOP. I’m not sure who in charge the California state GOP can decide to change this and jettison their base in the Central Valley and eastern parts of the state. As far as I know, the state GOP elite could come from those sections as well.Report

        • pillsy in reply to Saul Degraw says:

          I still have pretty clear memories of Bill Simon’s “I’m not afraid to be a Republican!” campaign for governor.

          Dude got straight wrecked. By Gray Davis. Seeking re-election.Report

          • Saul Degraw in reply to pillsy says:

            I was thinking more of Neal Kashkari who tried to do what Troublesome Frog describes above. He marched in Pride parades and really tried to avoid speaking on socially conservatives issues all together. He still only got 40 percent of the vote and only did well in those rural and still GOP parts of California. Bill Simon did slightly better.Report

            • Oscar Gordon in reply to Saul Degraw says:

              I think there is a fear among voters that the national parties won’t permit a local or state politician deviate from the national platform, so even if you have, for instance, an ‘R’ politician who avoids religious and socon issues, the GOP will turn the screws on the guy when votes come up.Report

              • Saul Degraw in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                That is not necessarily an unreasonable fear.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                No, it’s not, and it runs both ways.

                There is value in parties maintaining some platform discipline, but if you turn the screws too often, you start losing your ability to win in a given area.Report

              • veronica d in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Honestly, here in MA, they could run a queer/trans Republican who promises abortion on demand and free buttplugs, versus a Democrat who literally ate a baby on the capital steps, and all the same I know how I’ll vote.

                It’s just, too much damage done. The national party long ago proved they’ll use my dignity as a “wedge issue.” Actions have consequences. If you spit in my face I’m not going to like you, even if you are nice to puppies.Report

              • I think this is especially true when it comes to federal office, where they will be voting and will be subject to whips. On the other hand, state parties can and have behaved differently from one place to the next. It’s a decision they make or don’t make. So it’s reasonable to break party lines and vote for Charlie Baker for governor and then oppose him vociferously for the Senate. It makes more sense to “vote the man (or woman)” in one context than another. Though in some cases, like Manchin, it can make sense for either if you’re not far off-center. That’s pretty rare, though.Report

              • Saul Degraw in reply to Will Truman says:

                To be fair, some of them like being subjected to whips….Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                That would make C-SPAN so much more interesting to watch…Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Will Truman says:

                Except, as you note above, that dependency on the federal party check book is an ever present threat. If my local rep annoys the party bosses too much, even if he is responding to his constituents, and the national party supports someone else in the primary…Report

              • Kimmi in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Then I will vote the bastards out.
                If it’s my party, and you inner circle people decide to fuck with my vote, well, I’ma tell you where to shove it.
                (And I did. You can see the photos even).Report

              • Well sure, there is always the possibility of being primaried. Though, as always, I feel I have to point out that it is the most overstated threat in politics. And it’s pretty unusual the national party backs a challenger (I can think of only one case that didn’t involve corruption, Bob Smith of New Hampshire).

                Governors that play to the base and against their constituents usually do so for a different reason, though. Either it’s what they were elected on, or they have presidential ambitions.Report

              • Richard Hershberger in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Also, if the choice is between a guy in the other party who seems to be not terrible versus someone in your own party who seems to be not terrible, why vote for the guy in the other party? This only really kicks in if your own party nominates an obviously terrible person.Report

              • Zac Black in reply to Richard Hershberger says:

                Except apparently not even then, hence the current president.Report

        • Lyle in reply to Saul Degraw says:

          Recall that the northmost counties in California have off and on discussed the idea of seceeding from Ca to form a new state. These counties have population densities of less than 10 per square mile, while the two emptiest counties are Alpine and Inyo (which largely covers death valley, 1.6 and 1.8) So in essence Ca has a smaller version of the problem of the whole us, in that differing population densities call for different kinds and levels of regulation. The most densely populated county is San Francisco at 17k per square mile. (city=county here).Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

        There are also plenty of times when Ds push for deregulation.

        Look at SF where it was Scott Weiner v. Jane Kim and Scott Weiner said “If you want cheaper housing, you got to build more housing.” It was close but Weiner won over Kim in the primary and the general.

        You also have Jerry Brown telling the legislature that they need to make it cheaper, faster, and easier to build new housing and he will veto any housing reform bill that fails to do so. Essentially, deregulation.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      @saul-degraw

      I think Google’s new London headquarters would appeal to you.Report

  10. Saul Degraw says:

    Jeet Herr on those who see politics as total war against their ideological/partisan enemies:

    https://newrepublic.com/article/142962/conservative-intellectuals-pledging-loyalty-general-trump

    Oakeshott’s quaint, gentlemanly Toryism is just one form of conservatism, of course. In many ways, Trump-era conservatives are closer to Oakeshott’s German rival, Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), who believed it was delusional to hope for a respite from political warfare, either domestically or in foreign relations. The “friend-enemy distinction,” for which he’s famous, asserts that politics is inherently combative, everyone an ally or foe. “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy,” he wrote in The Concept of the Political (1927). “Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict.”

    Prager struck a Schmittean note in calling for conservatives to follow Trump into battle, as did Townhall columnist Kurt Schlicter in a Monday tweet declaring war on liberals:

    Why did I (since Cruz dropped out) and still do support President Trump?
    Because fuck liberals.
    We win, they lose.
    Nothing else matters.
    ??
    — Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) May 29, 2017

    Report

  11. dragonfrog says:

    [F1] two thoughts on that:
    How did we get to where gauging gaps in traffic to survive darting across a busy road without any lights or pedestrian crossing (because of course you can’t just wait for drivers to stop, you’d be there all day, and walking over to the nearest signalized crosswalk is a mile and a half detour) is a normal and required life skill?

    So kids can’t safely walk across the street until 14, but they’re just fine to drive a car at 16? No way the fact that roads are full of 16 year old drivers could be part of the reason they’re dangerous to cross in the first place?

    Nah. Better to lower the driving age to 14 and not allow walking outdoors until 18.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to dragonfrog says:

      Yeah, whatever happened to “teach your kids not to jaywalk”?Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        You clearly aren’t a New Yorker where jaywalking is an artform and way of life.Report

        • Oscar Gordon in reply to Saul Degraw says:

          Sure, I get that, and you can start learning your art after you are 14. Before that, stick to the damn crosswalk and signals.Report

          • Kimmi in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

            Oscar
            And from an adult’s perspective, that seems fine. From a kid’s perspective, don’t do it if you’re less than ten. (maybe twelve, they’re taller).
            Must Be This High To Jaywalk will make sense.Report

        • Lyle in reply to Saul Degraw says:

          Actually the recent events in London, suggest Jersey Barriers between streets and sidewalks, with bollards at defined crossing points 4 foot apart. The idea is that cars can’t get to the pedestrians and vice versa. I wonder how much safer these measures would make streets and roads?Report

          • notme in reply to Lyle says:

            Why not just fix the problem at the source? Oh wait, liberals need to admit we have a problem. Maybe the Europeans will wake up now.Report

            • Stillwater in reply to notme says:

              I’m always surprised by conservatives’ insistence that we can bomb our way to peace in the ME, and especially so since ISIS is a direct result of employing that very principle to justify the war in Iraq.

              What’s the source of an ideology? It’s not a physical location, right?Report

              • notme in reply to Stillwater says:

                I’m not sure which generic conservative you making assumptions about but I prefer a multi prong strategy.

                For years the Europeans have had an issue with folks not assimilating. They let folks travel to war zones and then let them back in. The chickens have come home.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to notme says:

                All of ’em, cuz it’s the generic conservative response. But in this case I’m speaking specifically about you:

                Why not just fix the problem at the source?

                Are you now suggesting that “the source” of Islamic violence in the west is lax vetting of Muslim immigrants? That makes no sense on any level whatsoever.Report

              • notme in reply to Stillwater says:

                Actually better vetting might have helped in the San Bernardino case. And if you really think that the US gov’t really vetted all those Syrian refuges very well you are naïve. Plus I’d remind you that some of the Paris attackers were “refugees”.

                Investigators probe whether wife radicalized husband before San Bernardino massacre.

                http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/12/04/investigators-probe-whether-wife-radicalized-husband-before-san-bernardino.html

                When I said source of the problem what I meant was that putting up jersey barriers won’t fix Islamic terrorism. There are many ways to fight Islamic terrorism only some of which involve direct force.Report

              • Will H. in reply to notme says:

                Ending domestic black flag operations would be a good start.Report

              • notme in reply to Will H. says:

                Would you you care to name a few or did you get your info from kimmi?Report

              • Will H. in reply to notme says:

                I believe that was in one of the links.
                An old tactic, really.
                General knowledge.

                And it really isn’t surprising to anyone who has studied criminal justice; i.e., law enforcement personnel (I took the classes as part fo a paralegal certificate program).
                Four models of policing which have been popular in the history of the U.S.:
                Political model, then professional model (both of which have generally accepted and alternative start dates), the community policing model, and intelligence-led policing.
                That’s on the state level.
                The feds are, and always have been, in the political model.

                As one CJ prof. (a police detective, who won the Officer of the Year award the year previously, for breaking up a burglary ring) stated it to the class:
                The feds work the complete opposite of us. What you’re used to is finding a crime, and then going to look for a suspect. The feds work the other way around. The decide who they’re going to arrest, and then go looking for a crime.

                Common knowledge.

                The political model of policing entails exactly what it sounds like.Report

          • Lyle in reply to Lyle says:

            Let me modify from Jersey Barriers a bit. Thinking about the cable barriers they put in interstate medians, perhaps these would work as speeds on bridges are less than on interstates. A couple of cables perhaps 1 and 2 foot off the ground would not impact the viewscape, and also make it obvious that jaywalking is not to be done, plus confining vehicles to the traffic lanes.Report

      • dragonfrog in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        While I agree with not jaywalking, it’s no panacea.

        At least where I live, the city is somewhat walking back its big “don’t jaywalk” campaign, in the face of people pointing out that only a small minority of people killed crossing the street, were in fact jaywalking.

        e.g. http://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/new-edmonton-jaywalking-signs-anger-victims-friends

        (The particular crosswalk in the article is notoriously bad – some of my friends call it “the crosswalk of doom”)Report

        • Oscar Gordon in reply to dragonfrog says:

          The actual lesson to teach is that you want to cross at the crosswalk because that is where drivers expect you to cross, and thus where they will be looking (ideally) for you to cross.

          As for busy streets, I sure do like pedestrian overpasses.Report

          • dragonfrog in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

            That’s the problem – they’re not reliably looking for you to cross, or are driving fast enough that they’ll too often see you too late, because the road was designed with a mentality of “a good road is a fast road”, and then crosswalks were put in without measures to slow the traffic because that would make the road “worse”.Report

          • fillyjonk in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

            I once had an a-hole speed up as I was entering a crosswalk. I was able to jump back but I wasn’t happy. (And he SAW me, I know he saw me).

            I grew up in a town that allegedly would ticket jaywalkers. As an excessively-law-abiding child, it had the effect of making me always use crosswalks.

            Pedestrian overpasses are an excellent, if costly, solution. Locally, they installed a new crosswalk with flashing warning lights (when you cross, you press a button, which turns the lights on telling cars to STOP and WAIT). The crosswalk is between the basketball arena and its parking lot across the street from it and I confess I WISH my university had had the bucks to do an overpass, because there are times you wind up sitting and waiting for 5 or more minutes when a lot of people are crossing. This is the main north-south spine of the east side of town and the route I take to get home at the end of the day….I just try really hard to leave early on the days when there’s a game so I can avoid most of the pedestrians.

            There have been a few cases in the DFW area of people trying to run across interstates and it has almost always ended badly.Report

    • pillsy in reply to dragonfrog says:

      I’m trying to figure out how the story is even all that shocking given the existence of crossing guards? Like, the idea that kids up to a certain age need special help to cross a street safely is not remotely new, and the article itself says that the older kids would compensate by waiting for bigger gaps in traffic.Report

    • Brandon Berg in reply to dragonfrog says:

      walking over to the nearest signalized crosswalk is a mile and a half detour

      Can you give me the GPS coordinates of three non-rural spots (because rural roads are generally not particularly busy or particularly wide) where this is the case? You can get the coordinates on Google Maps or some similar site. Links would work, too.Report

      • dragonfrog in reply to Brandon Berg says:

        Do you reckon the argument in the link – kids’ younger than 14 inability to judge gaps in traffic is relevant to their ability to safely get about on foot – doesn’t make sense?

        A mile and a half is an exaggeration for effect, for sure. There are only a couple of places where it’s notably bad in my city.

        For example, https://www.google.ca/maps/@53.5469809,-113.5483283,17z – Stony Plain Road is an arterial road through the middle of a residential area; four lanes, gets very busy during rush hour. In the section on the map link (if I managed to get it to work), there are lights at 127 St and 134 St. If you’re at 131 St and want to go to a signalized crossing, it’s only about a half mile detour to the nearest signalized crossing.Report

      • pillsy in reply to Brandon Berg says:

        I was sure that I had to walk a half mile out of my way to go to a signalized crosswalk when I was a kid, but when I looked at it on Google Maps it was more like a quarter mile.

        In my defense, my legs were a lot shorter then.Report

      • DavidTC in reply to Brandon Berg says:

        Can you give me the GPS coordinates of three non-rural spots (because rural roads are generally not particularly busy or particularly wide) where this is the case?

        Oh, for God’s sake:
        https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Starbucks,+110+S+Chestatee+St,+Dahlonega,+GA+30533

        That is Starbucks. There is a Suntrust Bank across the street. And….goooo!

        Most locations have signaled crosswalks *only at the traffic lights*, and there are a hell of a lot of places where there are heavily trafficked roads *without any nearby traffic lights*.

        Some of those places do not have traffic lights because they rely on stop signs and yield signs…and some just don’t have traffic lights because they don’t have any *cross* roads!

        I know you’re trying to dismiss those areas as ‘rural’, but that has very little to do with the amount of *traffic* on them, or how many people attempt to *cross* them.Report

  12. Saul Degraw says:

    Former OTer Bouie on the Trump reawakening the dark currents of American history:

    http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/06/this_year_s_string_of_brutal_hate_crimes_is_intrinsically_connected_to_the.html

    ey to all of this is the interplay between racism in culture, in politics, and in public life. Each reinforced the other, creating an atmosphere of hostility and violence that wasn’t otherwise inevitable, even as it had its antecedents. Put differently, racist violence isn’t spontaneous; it creeps up from fertile ground, feeding on hate and intolerance in the public sphere. The lynching epidemic exploded with the end of Reconstruction and the reconciliation of Northern and Southern whites under the banner of white supremacy, pogroms in towns like Tulsa occurred in an atmosphere of unimaginably virulent racism, and the killings and assassinations of the civil rights era were inseparable from the segregationist fire-eaters that governed states like Mississippi and Alabama. Today, the rising pace of hate crimes is tied to a political style that has harnessed and weaponized white resentment by way of an ethno-nationalist movement that sees America in narrow, racially exclusionary terms.

    Report

    • veronica d in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      It’s hard to act as if stuff like this is “normal.” It certainly feels new to me.

      http://nitro-nova.tumblr.com/post/159929247857/man-yells-make-america-great-again-beforeReport

    • veronica d in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      The thing is, I don’t think the causality is a simple a->b, like this

      Trump -> Rising hate crimes

      Instead, I think it is a cycle, like this

      Right wing media -> rising intolerance -> more right wing media -> more intolerance, some hate crimes -> Trump -> more media/intolerance/hate crimes -> more Trump, more media, more intolerance

      rinse repeat.

      It’s very ugly, but Trump is certainly part of this. It’s more like, there are three piles of shit in your house. They all stink. You want them all out. One of them is Trump.Report

      • Kimmi in reply to veronica d says:

        And another one is “safe spaces”. How intolerant do we want to be, people?
        “no, you can’t enter my safe space, it’s Mine”

        … these aren’t liberal ideas. They’re kreepy conservative ones.Report

      • George Turner in reply to veronica d says:

        Except that almost all of those incidents are fabricated. The left now has its own alternate reality.Report

        • Kimmi in reply to George Turner says:

          George,
          I question your ability to do the complex statistics it would take to come to an accurate conclusion on the subject.
          Perhaps you’d care to cite some sources? I’m sorry to ask, but a few won’t cut it, that’ll read as anecdotes.Report

          • George Turner in reply to Kimmi says:

            Just about every one of those stories (I’m familiar with more than a few) got debunked as a fraud within several days of appearing. In many cases the person confessed that they’d made it up.

            Conservatives didn’t suddenly become violent racists because Trump won, but liberals did suddenly become paranoid and unhinged.Report

  13. Saul Degraw says:

    How about those Paris Accords?Report

  14. Pinky says:

    P: The quote from P2 explains P1. People will lash out in polls. As surveyed and questioned as we are in this age, we still feel unheard, so when the pollster finally gets around to asking us a question, we’re going to choose the most inflammatory option on the list. I suspect that most of the truther and birther poll results were just people’s way of saying that we don’t trust anyone anywhere. There’s a lot of signalling going on in polls, too. (I wonder if in another few years we’re going to look back in embarrassment at how many things we attributed to tribalism and signalling just because they were trendy. Nevertheless, I think I’m right on this.) If a president does something in foreign policy that a party likes, the members of a party will increase their support for the president’s foreign policy, but also his economic policy, health care policy, whatever, even if he hasn’t made a change in those. That’s just someone clicking as hard as they can on the “like” button. It doesn’t mean anything like what pollsters claim it means.Report

    • pillsy in reply to Pinky says:

      I think this is one of those plausible arguments that doesn’t hold together quite as well as all that. To take the really obvious example, in polling, Republicans for years said they were open to birther conspiracy theories, and then in the primary election… they nominated the birther. Now, maybe they still didn’t believe it [1], but if saying it to a pollster became a good way to assert their identity, why wouldn’t voting for the guy who got up and said it as loudly as possible with a national audience?

      [1] But given the whole motivated reasoning thing, I expect that vehemently saying something is true is going to incline people to believe it’s true.Report

  15. Saul Degraw says:

    Kevin Drum ponders Michael Tomasky’s article on liberal elites:

    http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/05/contempt

    Drum thinks the problem of the Big Sort goes back to the GI Bill in WWII but this is the key section:

    The two groups barely interact anymore. They don’t really want to, and they’re physically separated anyway. (More and more, they’re also geographically separated, as liberals cluster in cities and conservatives live everywhere else.)

    Second, there’s the decline of unions. Fifty years ago, the working class commanded plenty of political respect simply because they had a lot of political power. No liberal in her right mind would think of condescending to them. They were a constituency to be courted, no matter what your personal feelings might be.

    But young liberals in the 60s and 70s broke with the unions over the Vietnam War, and the unions broke with them over their counterculture lifestyle. This turned out to be a disaster for both sides, as Democrats lost votes and workers saw their unions decimated by their newfound allies in the Republican Party. By the time it was all over, liberals had little political reason to care about the working class and the working class still hated the hippies. Without the political imperative to stay in touch, liberals increasingly viewed middle America as a foreign culture: hostile, insular, vaguely racist/sexist/homophobic, and in thrall to charlatans.

    I’m off two minds here. I think my dislike of how large segments of the United States seemingly uses the word elite is well known and tiresome to most of this community but it seems like elite in the United States means you went to college and/or grad school regardless of your income and it also corresponds with your entertainment choices. So a 24 year old teacher or admin assistant is an elite if he or she lives in a blue city and likes to go to the Ballet and/or read the New Yorker and/or likes This American Life. But a person who makes a good salary or might even be really wealthy is salt of the earth if his or her hobbies include hunting and fishing and prefers Toby Keith to the Magnetic Fields.

    I think this is bonkers and nuts but it is what it is I suppose.

    I suppose there has always been a tension in center-left parties historically between their middle-class bourgeois members (who always had a semi-Bohemian and artsy streak) and the working-class and Union base. The UK Labour Party had these tensions and similar fissures in the 1960s. You had middle class or above types in Labour like Clement Attlee and you had people who worked real working class jobs like Aneurin Bevan and James Callaghan and Harold Wilson potentially. Then you had some in-between types like Roy Jenkins (he was from a working class background but toff’d himself up. There is a famous anecdote where people were speculating whether Jenkins was lazy and Bevan replied “No one from Jenkin’s background who learns to speak with an accent like that is lazy.”)

    The other issue is that contempt seems very large here and it seems like a lot of people complaining about liberal elites have eggshell skins despite being allegedly so tough.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      So don’t think “élite”. Think “Team Blue”.

      No dissonance required. Sure, they’re “only” a 24 year old teacher or admin assistant BUT! he or she lives in a blue city and likes to go to the Ballet and/or read the New Yorker and/or likes This American Life.

      Team Blue.

      Hell, you know they like the ballet, the New Yorker, and This American Life?

      You can now guess as to whether they caucused for Rubio during the primary. (We both know that “they didn’t caucus for Rubio.” If I’m wrong about that, I’ll eat a bug.)

      It also explains what happened with the unions. Sure, they had a coalition for a bit… but, man. Team Red and Team Blue ain’t no joke. Reagan really brought those guys home, didn’t he? It’s like they didn’t even care that he made jokes about nuclear war! And they claim to love their kids!Report

      • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

        #signalReport

        • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

          So much better than #protocolReport

        • KenB in reply to Kazzy says:

          Oh god, I hope this isn’t going to become the new “99”.Report

          • Kazzy in reply to KenB says:

            When you start talking abou Team Blue, you’re signaling.Report

            • Stillwater in reply to Kazzy says:

              Compare your comment to this:

              “When you start talking about the Chicago Bears, you’re signalling.”Report

            • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

              What if one talks about “Team Blue” in response to someone saying, wait, let me cut and paste this:

              I think my dislike of how large segments of the United States seemingly uses the word elite is well known and tiresome to most of this community but it seems like elite in the United States means you went to college and/or grad school regardless of your income and it also corresponds with your entertainment choices.

              Report

            • KenB in reply to Kazzy says:

              Team Blue and Team Red, or Blue Tribe and Red Tribe, are terms to indicate membership in a class defined around a broadly-shared set of cultural & political assumptions, not an accusation of partisanship. If we want to talk broadly about people on the lefter half of the main divide, “Team Blue” keeps us away from dealing with all the fine distinctions that people like to draw within the group (“I’m not a liberal, I’m a progressive! I’m a Leftist! I’m a pragmatist! I’m not a Democrat, I’m a registered Independent!”) when we’re talking about attributes that generally cross those divisions.Report

      • Jesse in reply to Jaybird says:

        I mean, actually, over at RedRacingHorses, a right-leaning electoral analysis site i like to visit because it has one of the last sane conservative commentariat in the world, a lot of them were Rubio supporters, and a lot of those people were cosmopolitan young folks who used happened to be conservative.

        Is it likely the person you listed didn’t vote for Rubio? Absolutely. But, if they are a Republican, they likely did caucus for Rubio over the rest of the GOP competitors.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Jesse says:

          Strikes me as a hell of a lot more likely that they caucused for Bernie.

          Or Clinton, maybe.

          I mean, given little more information than “lives in Blue city, likes the ballet, the New Yorker, and This American Life”.Report

      • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

        OK, but without that, so what? If it’s just two “teams” with their own cultural preferences, why is preferring to drive a Prius instead of an F150 horrible snobbery, but thinking it’s profoundly immoral for a dude to bone another dude A-OK?

        I mean, my experience is that dudes who bone dudes think boning dudes is pretty damn fun, but somehow social conservatives aren’t being scolds when they endlessly wring their hands about it?Report

        • Saul Degraw in reply to pillsy says:

          @pillsy

          Because once upon a time a college student was snooty to a truck driver and people at LGM are so mean for liking their steaks medium rare.Report

    • Stillwater in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      I gotta say, I question the utility of analyses attempting to tease out deep causal connections which account for often questionable and necessarily incomplete descriptions of our current culture. Eg., analyses like what was quoted above:

      Description: the liberal elites are held in contempt.
      Account: it’s the hippies fault.

      Political culture is always changing. To the degree policy reflects political social culture in a liberal democracy (or is perceived to), that society is +/- stable. Questions of how we arrived at a point where political culture has fractured into two (or more) fundamentally oppositional, antagonistic and destabilizing groups seem to me entirely distinct from questions regarding best practices or likely outcomes or amelioration going forward, and especially so once dissatisfaction peaks out from under the political covers. So identifying the causes of political tension which destabilize a political economic system which is viewed (probably incorrectly) as recently being in equilibrium strikes me as either a purely academic exercise (in the sense of practically and politically useless tho intellectually interesting) or a function of blame-assignment.

      We live in a democratic republic. Viewed as a whole, our politics appears to be increasingly chaotic because our culture appears to be increasingly fractured. Whether that’s the case or not is subject to opinion but also beside the point. There are no fixes within our system other than letting the feedback loops which define the democratic process proceed and hope that a new equilibrium can be achieved. The alternative is that dissonance reaches a tipping point realized by regressive measures undermining liberal democratic institutions themselves. IOW, that all hell breaks loose.Report

      • George Turner in reply to Stillwater says:

        Part of what happened over the past eight years is that the elites (all those Harvard and Yale graduates who take cushy, super-important jobs in New York and Washington) have continually exposed themselves as being both arrogant and dumb as a box of rocks.

        When government was much smaller and much less important in people’s lives, we really didn’t mind so much that there were elites who were utterly clueless, as it was rather funny, kind of like watching British Lords who don’t know where eggs come from because their butlers never told them about chickens.

        But when stupid people like that are demanding control, authority, and obedience, the public blanches. We watched State Department spokesman Jen Psaki open her mouth day after day, regularly removing the slightest doubts that she was way dumber than the average viewer. The Iranians mocked her as “that stupid girl”, and they were right. Then we see videos of Yale graduates protesting and realize that they’re all probably too clueless to pass muster at a two-year college in the South.

        So along comes the election and the Democrats run perhaps the most out-of-touch candidate in history, one who couldn’t find Wisconsin on a map and who can’t even comprehend the most basic security protocols, ones that even enlisted soldiers follow without the slightest problem. She couldn’t even remember her own passwords. She couldn’t find Wisconsin on a map. She couldn’t drive a car. She couldn’t set her DVR to record. She had to depend on her staff for things like that.

        Scads of elite celebrities breathlessly endorsed her as a feminist icon, even though she used private detectives to harass and threaten her serial rapists husband’s many victims. The conclusion was that the elite celebrities are likewise not very bright.

        And then Trump entered the race and the elite Republican politicians and pundits denounced him and laughed off his candidacy. The first to crash and burn in ignominious defeat was Jeb Bush. The rest of the pack followed, and all the while the elite GOP opinion makers went bananas, with National Review Online becoming a sick parody of The Daily Kos. George Will seemed to get up every morning and somehow hit himself with an egg. Donald Trump said Washington was being run by morons, and he was right.

        All the elites, the pundits, the thinkers, said he didn’t have a chance of winning. He said he did. He was right and they were embarrassingly wrong, and not just wrong, but utterly clueless.

        So what’s happening in both camps is that we’re looking at a bunch of out-of-touch, privileged elites who have been at the trough of public policy for far too long, and gotten far too much benefit than what we’d expect from people with their very limited faculties.Report

        • Will H. in reply to George Turner says:

          I agree with quite a bit of this.

          On the Right, it started with McCain as presidential candidate. Whatever his campaign failings were, he had the reputation of a maverick. The SoCons holding the Bush coalition together had folded. It wasn’t so much that they were out of favor in the party, but rather an uprising occurred.
          This was followed by the Tea Party, a stern rejection of the Republican establishment.
          And then Trump.

          On the Left, it was Bernie’s surprise showing in the coronation of HRC. He stepped on the trailing robe of Queen Hillary during the coronation ceremony, just as she was stepping up to claim her crown.

          It’s a shift occurring in both parties, a rejection of the establishment. The donor base has separated from the voter base. The talking heads spew gibberish (Same as it ever was!) because the lines they’re talking are tied to a shipwrecked party whose main deck just broke the waterline.
          In short, a realignment.Report

        • j r in reply to George Turner says:

          When government was much smaller and much less important in people’s lives…

          I get that this has become part of the conservative/right of center mythology, but this time never existed.

          If there was ever a time that you or your parents/grandparents/etc. didn’t feel the heavy hand of government being asserted in your life, it’s because that hand was busy elsewhere, exerting itself on other people for the benefit of keeping you comfortable.

          If folks on the right really want to speak up for individual freedom, the first thing that they need to do is come to terms with history. I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon, though. We are in a populist moment and the only thing to do is hold on and hope that it passes without doing too much damage.Report

          • Lyle in reply to j r says:

            The point is that it used to be state and local governments that imposed the handedness I have heard a comment that before the income tax amendment most folks sole dealing with the federal government was the post office.Report

    • veronica d in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      This is dishonest rubbish and the author is a lying sack of shit:

      Rhetorically, the big issue dividing liberal elites and middle America is less the existence of different lifestyles, and more the feeling that lefties are implicitly lecturing them all the time. You are bad for eating factory-farmed meat. You are bad for enjoying football. You are bad for owning a gun. You are bad for driving an SUV. You are bad for not speaking the language of microaggressions and patriarchy and cultural appropriation. Liberals could go a long way toward solving this by being more positive about these things, rather than trying to make everyone feel guilty about all the things they enjoy.

      Something seems missing here — right? — some other side of this equation. Can we guess what it might be?

      Oh yeah, they think I’m a faggot. Somehow the author missed that part, where I suppose I wouldn’t mind mixing with these folks, inasmuch as I actually enjoy things like shooting guns, and I’ve been to tractor pulls and monster truck rallies, and honestly I don’t hate those things. But they think I’m a faggot. And even if it’s only 10% who will step up and call me a faggot, those 10% can harass me, even hurt me, and the remaining 90% will stand aside and do nothing, cuz even those who won’t call me a faggot kinda think I’m a faggot nevertheless.

      Evidence: the Brietbard comments section, the Fox News comment section, a metric fuckton of YouTube videos, where gap-toothed hillbillies explain how they would murder me if they saw me in the women’s room, etc.

      Fuck this. The question is, are they actually bigots?

      If the answer is yes, then it is yes.

      Hint: the answer is yes.Report

      • pillsy in reply to veronica d says:

        It’s comprehensively fucking idiotic and I’m actually kind of disappointed in Drum for repeating it. “I’m just going to pretend that liberals hate every sort of fun based on absolutely nothing,” is not a good way to argue. I mean, around here Lawyers, Guns, and Money is kind of the watchword for out-of-touch liberal craziness, and it seems like every other post there is about football.

        Which makes sense because football is a lot of fun and even liberals often enjoy fun things.

        Also, of course–and it’s deeply entangled in the bigotry angle–there’s a general, endless, and persistent drumbeat of rage from social conservatives over people daring to enjoy sex and romance. They’ll couch it in terms of “consequences”, of course, but casual examination shows that the concern over consequences are lies and have nothing to do with their objections. “Yeah, gotta stop men from marrying each other or else they’ll have a lot of babies out of wedlock,” is perhaps the most flagrantly stupid thing anybody could possibly believe, yet barely disguised versions of it have been coming from the right for decades.Report

        • Dan d in reply to pillsy says:

          Do see how much food snobery there is on LGM? That’s what people are fed up with.Report

            • Jesse in reply to Dan d says:

              So, what you’re saying is Americans are thin-skinned snowflakes who can’t take a joke?Report

              • Dan d in reply to Jesse says:

                They’re sick of people like you looking down their noses at them. People like Erik Loomis talk about the difference between punching up and punching down then make fun of how proles eat their food.

                And this has policy implication soda is taxed but arugula is not.Report

              • greginak in reply to Dan d says:

                Heck I’m sick of people looking down on me. SoCons have been looking down on me for decades for not being a believer. People have told me i hate freedom or that i’m a traitor for being a liberal. The food thing would be a better point if conservatives didn’t’ have a freak out about Obama choosing some fancy mustard. Nobody likes to be looked down on, so everybody should stop doing it.Report

              • Dan d in reply to greginak says:

                Heck I’m sick of people looking down on me. SoCons have been looking down on me for decades for not being a believer. People have told me i hate freedom or that i’m a traitor for being a liberal.

                The people who say aren’t the cultural elites.

                he food thing would be a better point if conservatives didn’t’ have a freak out about Obama choosing some fancy mustard.

                That’s nopt looking down on him that accusing him of looking down on them. It’s the difference between punching up and punching down.Report

              • greginak in reply to Dan d says:

                Highly paid preachers with huge TV shows are sure as hell elites. Rich folk with Benz’s and corner office jobs are hella elites. Plenty of conservative folk are elite.

                The mustard freak out came after some quick snip on tv where Obama was ordering a tasty sammich and asked for the wrong kind of mustard. There was no looking down involved. That’s why i raised the point. It was as a silly a freak out about ketchup on a steak.

                Listen i’m all for not looking down on people. If that is to mean anything we all have to do our best at that because looking down on others is a people thing not a one side does it thing.Report

              • Dan d in reply to greginak says:

                Highly paid preachers with huge TV shows are sure as hell elites. Rich folk with Benz’s and corner office jobs are hella elites.

                They may have money but they are hated in Cambridge, Georgetown and Hollywood.

                The mustard freak out came after some quick snip on tv where Obama was ordering a tasty sammich and asked for the wrong kind of mustard. There was no looking down involved. That’s why i raised the point. It was as a silly a freak out about ketchup on a steak.

                They were making fun of him for having snobby taste not unsophisticated taste, that makes it punching up not punching down.Report

              • greginak in reply to Dan d says:

                And hollywood types are hated in various parts of the country.

                They were making fun of his tastes. Yes exactly. They were looking down on him for having the right taste. That is just the kind of crap we shouldn’t do. Don’t look down on people for having different tastes.

                I’m with you on the soda tax thing. They are not a good idea and are aimed only at certain people.Report

              • George Turner in reply to greginak says:

                Elvis ate peanut butter banana sandwiches.

                Back then we didn’t judge people by their diets, but by their table manners. You could tell someone was going to hell because they’d eat their salad with the dessert fork.Report

              • greginak in reply to George Turner says:

                Yeah and now he is dead. So there.

                Desert fork? Maybe you fancy types had them.Report

              • Dan d in reply to greginak says:

                And hollywood types are hated in various parts of the country.

                By people with lower social status not higher social status.

                They were making fun of his tastes. Yes exactly. They were looking down on him for having the right taste.

                They were not looking down on him they were accusing him of looking down on them. It’s comparable to when Liberals made fun of Paul Ryan for drinking expensive Wine, something I did not object to them doing.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Dan d says:

                That’s nopt looking down on him that accusing him of looking down on them.

                Because of the mustard he ordered on his own fucking sandwich?

                Give me a break.Report

              • Dan d in reply to pillsy says:

                Because of the mustard he ordered on his own fucking sandwich?

                Give me a break.

                I don’t care what he puts on his sandwich, I do think that making fun of him for it is fundamentally different than making fun of someone for eating like a prole. No one here would argue that joking about Obama eating fired chicken and watermelon is the same as joking about Romney eating caviar.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Dan d says:

                I’m not particularly fussed about people making fun of Obama ordering fancy mustard. Whatever.

                What’s bizarre is assuming that he’s looking down on you because of how he eats his own sandwiches.

                Then again, the idea that people are punching down by making fun of a guy who’s been ridiculously wealthy from birth and went to an Ivy League school for how he orders his $60 steaks is pretty bananas, too.Report

              • Dan d in reply to pillsy says:

                Then again, the idea that people are punching down by making fun of a guy who’s been ridiculously wealthy from birth and went to an Ivy League school for how he orders his $60 steaks is pretty bananas, too.

                Is it punching down to make jokes about Obama eating fried chicken and watermelon? They are making fun of Trump for eating like a prole, they aren’t just making fun of him they are making fun making fun of everyone who isn’t a yuppie foodie, they also made fun of Pence for eating at Chili’s.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Dan d says:

                Except Trump isn’t a prole. He wasn’t even born and raised as a prole.

                And I eat at Chili’s fairly frequently.

                Maybe your theory is just dumb.Report

              • Dan d in reply to pillsy says:

                They are making fun of him for eating like a prole* rather than a sophisticated urbanite.

                *I think it’s mainly an urban prole thing rural proles like their meat rare from what I can tell.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Dan d says:

                By your argument, if someone made fun of Trump for eating fried chicken, it would be racist.Report

              • Dan d in reply to pillsy says:

                By your argument, if someone made fun of Trump for eating fried chicken, it would be racist.

                Is it homophobic to make fun of straight man for having stereotypically gay interests?Report

              • Saul Degraw in reply to pillsy says:

                @pillsy

                See above and this is tribal. A 24 year old Smith grad making 40k a year is an elite cause she likes modern dance. Trump and DeVos who are idiots who inherited daddy’s money are proles.Report

              • Dan d in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                A 24 year old Smith grad making 40k a year is an elite cause she likes modern dance.

                40K is well above the median income for 24 year olds, she’ll probably be making 6 figures with in 10 years.Report

              • greginak in reply to Dan d says:

                We’re going to Red Robin in just a few minutes. Good burgers.

                Fried chicken and watermelon are associated with racist stereotypes.Report

              • Troublesome Frog in reply to pillsy says:

                “Dijon mustard, please.”

                “WHAT? YOU THINK YOU’RE BETTER THAN ME???”

                “HEY, THAT GUY THINKS HE’S BETTER THAN US!”Report

              • pillsy in reply to greginak says:

                It’s almost as if the Dan d’s complaints about liberal cultural elites is circular nonsense.

                “Oh, those people don’t count as elites.”

                “Why not?”

                “Because they aren’t elites.”Report

              • greginak in reply to pillsy says:

                Well that does seem to be where this goes. “Elite” is just a way of saying “people we hate because they have different tastes.” It doesn’t seem to have any other definition that isn’t tied to having the wrong tastes or living in the wrong area. Money or actual power don’t seem connected to “elite” as it is often used. I’ve heard this many times. I’m some liberal living in Alaska but I’m an “elite” who lords over others and has all this power that somehow i’ve never noticed.Report

              • Dan d in reply to greginak says:

                It’s about social status. Liberals have no problem with believing things other than money or power matter when those things are race and gender.Report

              • Will H. in reply to greginak says:

                Sorry, but you can’t be an elite and live in Alaska.
                We have our standards.

                Try Hawai’i.Report

              • greginak in reply to Will H. says:

                True, Palin is our only Elite. Being non contiguous is a harsh burden.Report

              • J_A in reply to Will H. says:

                Sorry, but you can’t be an elite and live in Alaska.
                We have our standards.

                Try Hawai’i.

                Nothing says “elite” as knowing that there is an apostrophe in Hawaii (*)

                (*) The best part of the movie The Descendants is hearing George Clooney say Hawai’i. It’s like he actually sounds the damn thing.Report

              • Michael Cain in reply to Will H. says:

                I’ll assume that WordPress is at fault in rendering the incorrect glyph here. The ʻokina is not an apostrophe, it’s a letter in the Hawaiian language. A left single quote — not a right one — is often used to represent it. The English language spelling is Hawaii, and is used by the state in official forms and titles.

                At least in my case, typography nerd rather than an elite.Report

              • dragonfrog in reply to Michael Cain says:

                I’m sorry, there is no such thing as a non-elite typography nerd.

                Your coffee with milk is now officially a latte.Report

              • I’ll try to remember how elite I am while I’m fixing my toilet and scrubbing the kitchen floor this afternoon.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Michael Cain says:

                It’s called a commode.Report

              • Saul Degraw in reply to greginak says:

                @greginak

                And then they get encouraged by the media.Report

              • Dan d in reply to pillsy says:

                It’s almost as if pillsy and Greg want to examine everyones privilege exept their own.

                Since the United States is not a formal aristocracy social status can be difficult to define. Paul Fussell did the best job of anyone I’m aware of.Report

              • greginak in reply to Dan d says:

                I’m fine with examining it and have thought about social status kind of stuff and culture for a long time. Like i noted above i’ve been told i’m not a real american when i lived in NJ or a million other judgments based on my beliefs or tastes.

                Social status is difficult to define which i one reason i’m pretty darn skeptical of a lot of it. The way “elite” is used seems to be shallow and just another word for people whose tastes we don’t like. You can’t tell if someone is an elite based on what they eat or where they live or what they pray to. Money might be a start of defining elite. Privilege is very much related to race and gender. Actual power to steer things is actually pretty rare.Report

              • Dan d in reply to greginak says:

                Social status is difficult to define which i one reason i’m pretty darn skeptical of a lot of it.

                So because it’s difficult to define means it doesn’t exist? That’s strange logic lot of things are difficult to define.

                Privilege is very much related to race and gender.

                Who do you thin has more privilege George P. Bush or a coal miner in West Virginia.Report

              • greginak in reply to Dan d says:

                Difficult to define usually means a complex definition. It isn’t likely to be a simple partisan thing.

                Umm George Bush. That doesn’t mean privilege isn’t related to race and gender. Privilege is complex. FWIW it’s more complex than SJW’s often see and they often over simplify it.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Dan d says:

                Yeah, that’s right. I’m a straight white guy who, as you assert, believes [1] that straightness, whiteness, and maleness all confer privilege, but sure, I want to examine everyone’s privilege but my own.

                [1] With a number of caveats that aren’t really important here.Report

              • Dan d in reply to pillsy says:

                You don’t want to examine the class privilege that lower status straight white men don’t enjoy..Report

              • pillsy in reply to Dan d says:

                Nope. I just think your ideas about class privilege are dumb and circular.

                I mean holy shit dude. I have a ton of class privilege. I generally think this is illustrated in the fact that I have a nice desk job, really flexible hours, a bunch of degrees from well-regarded schools, and only a mild regional accent.

                I don’t think it has anything to do with the looking down on people who drink soda and eat at fucking chain restaurants, because I drink soda and eat at fucking chain restaurants.

                I also don’t think it has anything to do with looking down on repulsive bigoted reactionaries, because a lot of the repulsive bigoted reactionaries I look down on also have mild regional accents, post-graduate degrees, and nice desk jobs.Report

              • notme in reply to pillsy says:

                You got all that bc of your privilege and not hard work? Wow, that’s really great.Report

              • pillsy in reply to notme says:

                Well, the mild regional accent took literally no work on my part.

                As for the rest, it’s not all because of privilege, but it’s also not all because of hard work, either. A lot of the time I was able to focus my work on studying and getting good grades instead of, say, earning money. When I did have to work as a student, the work was usually interesting and paid pretty well.

                And no matter how I got here, now I’m here, you know?Report

              • notme in reply to pillsy says:

                You may be there now but we know you didn’t build it.Report

              • pillsy in reply to notme says:

                Indeed I did not. I work for a huge company that’s been around for ages.

                Entrepreneurship is not my bag.Report

              • Dan d in reply to pillsy says:

                I mean holy shit dude. I have a ton of class privilege. I generally think this is illustrated in the fact that I have a nice desk job, really flexible hours, a bunch of degrees from well-regarded schools, and only a mild regional accent.

                Do you not think that your cultural tastes made it easier for you to get and keep your job? I Know that my cultural tastes and the resulting social network have made it more difficult for me. Why do you think most jobs want someone who is a “cultural fit”.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Dan d says:

                Do you not think that your cultural tastes made it easier for you to get and keep your job?

                Not really, no. Accent, degrees, skill-set? Sure.

                How I order my steak, or the TV shows I watch, or my preference for craft beers over mass-market beers? Nyah.Report

              • Dan d in reply to pillsy says:

                How about your social networks? Have you gotten your jobs through connections or have you gotten them all through job postings. How about how you appearance at an interview do you not think having the right look matters?Report

              • pillsy in reply to Dan d says:

                Social networks? Yes, especially when I was getting part time or summer jobs in college and grad school.

                Having the right look? Oh my no. Definitely matters for some career tracks, but mine isn’t one of them.Report

              • Dan d in reply to pillsy says:

                Social networks? Yes, especially when I was getting part time or summer jobs in college and grad school.

                And do your cultural tastes not effect who’s in your social network and how helpful they are when finding the type of job your looking for?

                Having the right look? Oh my no. Definitely matters for some career tracks, but mine isn’t one of them.

                Really you must work in a strange industry. Does being a good “cultural fit” no determine who get hired and who’s the first one out when layoffs happen.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Dan d says:

                My education is in math and physics. I got my start, after bailing on academia, as an IT contractor. My job title is “health economist”.[1]

                There are a number of ways in which my upper middle class background helped me, but making me cool and stylish is really not among them.

                [1] Some people have the strange idea that this means I know something about economics. Don’t be fooled!Report

              • veronica d in reply to greginak says:

                I too dislike people looking down on me. So gosh, I sure feel sorry for those “real Americans” who have to experience people looking down on them. That must be rough for them. However do they deal with the burden!

                Give me a fucking break.Report

              • notme in reply to Dan d says:

                The proles should welcome the tax, as it’s for their own good.Report

              • George Turner in reply to Dan d says:

                Right now I’m eating like a king. Beans and fresh cornbread from the Martha White recipe on the back of the corn meal bag, not some freaking cake recipe with corn flour added as an afterthought to make it “cornbread”. It’s supposed to be cornbread, not bundt cake.

                But back to royalty. King George III’s favorite meal was beans and cornbread. The British government kept that a state secret because they knew Ben Franklin would go nuts on him.

                Also, I highly recommend that everyone order some wasabi arugula seeds. It’s awesome. Put the leaves on an Arby’s roast beef sandwich and you won’t need horsey sauce.Report

              • notme in reply to George Turner says:

                That sounds great. My wife brought a cast iron cornbread skillet to our marriage. She uses the same recipe.Report

              • Jesse in reply to Dan d says:

                In other words, yes, you’re snowflakes who can’t take a joke. Good to know. Seems like you’ve been triggered.Report

              • Dan d in reply to Jesse says:

                So you think you have a right to look down your noise at me then lecture me about the difference between punching up and punching down. People like you are a cancer on this country.Report

              • Dan d in reply to Jesse says:

                Do the admins of this blog think punching down is acceptable? Whenever someone like Jesse starts punching down at me maybe I should start punching down at someone else. Maybe I should start telling Jewish joke to Saul or Gay jokes to Veronica.Report

              • Dan d in reply to Jesse says:

                This demonstrates the central tenant of modern “liberalism”: Whitev proles need to take abuse the betters like Jesse and smile, if they don’t they are racist scum.Report

              • Dan d in reply to Jesse says:

                If I have to choose between a political movement that hates uncool whites and one that hates minorities I’ll choose the one that hates minorities every time.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Dan d says:

                Why?

                Also, who defines what’s cool?Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Dan d says:

                And this has policy implication soda is taxed but arugula is not.

                One isn’t healthy to consume, the other is. Why isn’t that explanation sufficient?Report

              • Dan d in reply to Stillwater says:

                Because I don’t believe that’s why it taxed I think it’s about cultural snobery.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Dan d says:

                Right. But by saying that you’re in fact-free conspiracy-theory land. The offered rationale for the tax relates to reducing diabetes and obesity: consuming less sugar accomplishes those goals; adding an additional cost to the price reduces consumption of sugar. All that’s true. You’re suggestion is that people who accept the truth of those claims are lying about their real motives, motives which are revealed by merely noticing that arugula isn’t taxed. But per the premises in the argument, consuming arugula doesn’t cause health problems for consumers.

                If that’s the argument, it makes no sense, Dan.Report

              • Dan d in reply to Stillwater says:

                1) Soda taxes also cover diet soda.

                2) It’s not a conspiracy theory anymore than claiming that support for tough on crime policies are motivated by racism is.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Dan d says:

                It’s not a conspiracy theory anymore than claiming that support for tough on crime policies are motivated by racism is.

                So we have two theories: liberal snobbery expressed as taxes differentially imposed on the proles and white racism expressed as the law differentially applied to blacks.

                How are those two things the same?Report

              • Dan d in reply to Stillwater says:

                They are both suggesting motivations that are different than ther proponents claim.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Dan d says:

                Sure, but now you’re just appealing to the fact that a person’s internal mental states, their motives, are logically inaccessible to anyone other than that person, and using that as the basis for your theory. Which is irrefutable. Which is sorta my point. It’s conspiracy theory land.

                Add: which distinguishes if from the motive of racism, which there’s actually lots of evidence of.Report

              • Dan d in reply to Stillwater says:

                How is it the same as a conspiracy theory?Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Dan d says:

                A conspiracy theory (which is different than a theory that people conspired) is typically defined by being impervious to falsification by any evidence or argument. Each new piece of information is accounted for as consistent with the main thesis. So in that sense it’s irrefutable.

                A theory that relies on a person’s motive as an explanatory account is similar since motive is logically inaccessible to others. So attributing motive to someone cannot be refuted by any evidence since any evidence can be accounted for consistently with that (attributed, in this case) motive. Suppose someone suggests the motive was different – that the tax is intended to reduce diabetes – the motive attributor accounts for that claim by saying its a lie (which is exactly what urban snobs do :).

                So, you’re theory is that the soda tax is motivated by bigotry. Is it possible that it isn’t? Surely it seems possible that the motive was to reduce diabetes. But according to you’re theory that is not possible because the motive was actually urban liberal snobbery against the proles. The attribution of bigotry, in this case, can’t be refuted. (Even tho it strikes me as obviously false 🙂Report

              • Dan d in reply to Stillwater says:

                A conspiracy theory (which is different than a theory that people conspired) is typically defined by being impervious to falsification by any evidence or argument

                That’s a definition of conspiracy theory, a conspiracy theory is a theory about people conspiring.

                So, you’re theory is that the soda tax is motivated by bigotry. Is it possible that it isn’t? Surely it seems possible that the motive was to reduce diabetes. But according to you’re theory that is not possible because the motive was actually urban liberal snobbery against the proles. The attribution of bigotry, in this case, can’t be refuted.

                So how is it different than claiming that “though on crime” policies are motivated by racism?Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Dan d says:

                No, reading thru the other comments you’ve made I don’t think I wanna go any further with this. You’re clearly in an intellectual space where discussion isn’t gonna be useful. For me anyway.Report

              • Dan d in reply to Stillwater says:

                If your going to bow out of the debate could you do it without the passive-aggressive condescension?Report

              • KenB in reply to Stillwater says:

                Too bad, I was curious to see how you were going to answer that question. From my vantage point it looks like “My side sees the true underlying motives behind the actions, your side engages in crazy conspiracy theories”.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to KenB says:

                Seeing true underlying motives based on no relevant evidence which confirm your priors simply is a conspiracy theory.

                I don’t want to keep going since it isn’t a discussion: it’s a reverse interrogation. You assert something absurd then challenge everyone to refute your view, even after they’ve told you your errors.Report

              • Dan d in reply to Stillwater says:

                Funny how you have no problem coming up with an absurd re-definition of “conspiracy theory”; then claim call class bias absurd. You’ve made it very clear that you look down your nose at me.Report

              • pillsy in reply to KenB says:

                The argument that tough-on-crime policies are racist doesn’t depend much at all on assuming secret motives for its advocates, though. A few of them are outright racist hate mongers [1], but most of the argument looks at disparate impact, public statements from more mainstream advocates that reveal unexamined and tacitly accepted racial prejudice, and the like.

                All of this tends to screw up policies that spring from the completely legitimate, sincere desire to reduce violent crime, which is one of the core functions of the state.

                You could turn the above into a plausible argument about how soda taxes are classist and actually bad by changing a few words here and there. Maybe @dan-d should try that instead of insisting it’s all about how liberals hate the proles.

                [1] Think Steve King, for example.Report

              • KenB in reply to pillsy says:

                The argument that tough-on-crime policies are racist

                No, the argument Dan D is referring to is that tough-on-crime policies are motivated by racism. It doesn’t even make sense to call a policy racist.Report

              • pillsy in reply to KenB says:

                Wait, how does it not make sense to call a policy racist?

                That can’t possibly be right, because, “School segregation is racist,” is a perfectly intelligible sentence, and one which is likely to arouse little disagreement.Report

              • notme in reply to Stillwater says:

                Really, I drink coke every day and am in good health.Report

              • greginak in reply to Stillwater says:

                It’s entirely possible to drink sugared soda and be healthy. I’m diet soda person and lord knows people will misread data to say i’m gonna die 5 years ago from 18 kinds of cancer. Soda taxes are unwise. Unless the taxes extend to all the fancy sugar delivery coffee like drinks ( what are those things, lattemochechino’s or rainbow frappes at starbucks?) then it does have a class based tinge to it.Report

          • pillsy in reply to Dan d says:

            Food snobbery–especially the exact sort you complain about–is the opposite of what Drum is complaining about.Report

    • LeeEsq in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      Wilson was from the bon-conformist Protestant do-good middle class faction of Labour.Report

    • Dan d in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      The problem is the that the Yuppies are passing law favoring their lifestyle choices; blue city after blue city is passing soda taxes when there are plenty of upscale products they could be taxing instead.Report

      • fillyjonk in reply to Dan d says:

        Or like in my area, where they were pushing for a 1% sales-tax hike (and we pay sales tax, FULL sales tax, on groceries as well as other products) “to raise teacher pay”

        A lot of us were observing it would make more sense to raise property taxes instead – our property taxes are comparatively low. For one thing, people like me, who have a bit more income, could afford that raise, whereas the working-mom living in an apartment with her kids might have a harder time dealing with her sales tax going up to somewhere over 10%.

        (And yes, I know: a property-tax increase would probably raise rents, but I suspect the bite on individuals would be smaller than paying it every week at the grocery store).

        That said? I’d bitch like hell about a “luxury tax” levied on, say, good cheese. Consistency, hobgoblin, small minds, all of that. (Not that it’s very easy for me to get truly “luxury” quality cheese where I live….)Report

    • Les Cargill in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      Unions arguably peaked about the time that Galbraith wrote “The New Industrial State”. This was when large monolithic corporations ran things; interfirm competition wasn’t considered important because intrafirm competition kept the best and brightest at the top. It’s parallel to the Wise Men thing in Federal service.

      Of course it was all predicated on the destruction of much of the world in WWII and as globalization advanced, those firms declined and with them went the habitat for unions.

      I can’t tell if the 1960s New Left was caused, causal or parallel to this. The (naive) attack on the Military Industrial Complex to the side, there wasn’t much for them to do to those firms.Report

  16. Jaybird says:

    G2: Is that really targeting kids? I see this as far more likely to be used against undocumented dreamers just trying to make a better life for their families.Report

  17. Kolohe says:

    G5 – I’m trying to think of anytime in my lifetime (i.e. from circa 1970 onward) that popular culture treated the FBI well. Agents Mulder and Scully were heros, but the institutional FBI was rotten. In the original Die Hard, the FBI were reckless cowboys that gave the late great Alan Rickman the christmas miracle he needed to pull off his heist. Agent Cooper was kind of a dope, that wasted time eating pie when he should have been helping solve Laura Palmer’s murder. Agent Starling was, again a hero, and the FBI, again, turned out to be institutionally rotten. I’ve never seen it, but from the commercials, this seems to be the case with the Quantico as well.

    And in the real world, we have Robert Hanssen, whose crimes were blamed on an innocent guy for decades. Plus failure to connect the dots before 9/11.

    So whence the idealization of the FBI?Report

    • Jesse in reply to Kolohe says:

      In movies, maybe no so much, because the focus on an individual hero fighting against “the system.”

      However, when it comes to the TV, Criminal Minds, The Blacklist, Bones, White Collar, Without a Trace, and a ton of other reality shows all have heroic FBI agents as main characters.Report

    • pillsy in reply to Kolohe says:

      Criminal Minds is/was a super-popular show, and generally portrays the FBI as unambiguously heroic genius badasses.Report

  18. Oscar Gordon says:

    T5: This is something that has ALWAYS bugged me about passenger rail. Train cars are fecking massive! They are heavy, and they roll along on steel wheels on steel tracks. Getting just a single empty train car moving and stopped requires a whole lot of energy. Even light rail, despite the name, has cars that mass easily twice what a bus of similar size does.

    The energy cost works for freight lines because you can string together dozens of cars, and once they get moving, you don’t have to stop them and the momentum carries the day. Passenger rail, especially urban transit, is constantly stopping and starting.

    Thinking about this, the smart thing to do, from to POV of urban transit, is to mix bus service and Bus Rapid Transit, where the BRT has dedicated lanes (instead of rail lines).Report

    • J_A in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

      Passenger rail, especially urban transit, is constantly stopping and starting.

      I have two words for you:

      “regenerative braking”

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_brake

      Subways starting and stopping is, on the net, extremely efficient (*)

      (*) The fact that electrical motors are inherently -and significantly- more efficient than internal combustion cycle engines is the cherry on the topReport

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to J_A says:

        King county metro is getting all electric buses. Can charge in 10 minutes. Could be fitted with regenerative braking systems just fine and still weigh half of what a rail car does.

        And urban rail has only recently started to use regenerative braking (past 5 years or so), so it’s not like they’ve been reaping the benefits for decades.

        So again, what significant benefits do we gain with urban passenger rail that could not be realized with BRT in dedicated lanes?Report

        • J_A in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

          And urban rail has only recently started to use regenerative braking (past 5 years or so), so it’s not like they’ve been reaping the benefits for decades.

          I was in college in the 80s and was working with a research group on power electronic controls for subway systems. Spent many a night in the tunnels. Regenerative braking was standard technique then.

          Now, it might be that that was just a European thingReport

          • Oscar Gordon in reply to J_A says:

            Regen to battery, or grid, or resistor? Only one of those can consistently make stopping & starting highly efficient (well, to grid can, if the grid is sufficiently smart enough).Report

            • J_A in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

              @oscar-gordon

              Allowing for the fact that it was more than 25 years ago I was deeply involved in (European) subway systems:

              Each and every wagon had two axles powered by DC motors. The motors would be connected in parallel between the third rail (400V DC if I recall correctly) and ground. The third rail-ground circuit was fed by rectifier banks connected to MV substations every couple of stations.

              As you know, DC machines can move seamlessly from motor to generator mode. Accelerating trains would drain power from the DC bus; braking trains would fed power to the bus. Because all the engines were in a parallel configuration, power would flow from generating to motorized engines. Trains at steady speed would just coast with minimum energy consumption. The rectifies stations would keep the voltage (and feed power) when more trains were accelerating than braking.

              When there was excess power from braking, resistors would be automatically connected to dissipate the excess power as heat, because the electronics of the time were not good enough for fast switching inverters to return the power to the utility grid. That technology is available today (it’s used in solar generators for instance) so I’m sure that the resistors are a museum relic now.

              I can’t give you energy consumption comparative numbers between different technologies, but the power recovery was astonishingly efficient in the 90sReport

              • George Turner in reply to J_A says:

                It would be difficult to wire, but you could have put the braking resistors in the home water heaters of everyone who lived near the train tracks, where they’d give a free temperature boost. Or you could use them to directly make steam that spews across the platform when the train arrives for a dramatic and retro choo choo effect.Report

        • J_A in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

          So again, what significant benefits do we gain with urban passenger rail that could not be realized with BRT in dedicated lanes?

          None in particular that says rail is always the preferred solution

          Rail is probably better when you want to move large volumes of people. Each European or East Asian subway train moves scores more people than dedicated buses could. And it’s scores times more costly to build.

          Just like power plants: different technologies are better fit for different demands.

          I was trying to make the limited point that starting and stopping trains is not particularly a significant problem from an efficiency POV. Subways even have (*) resistors to dissipate excess energy when there are more trains braking than accelerating

          (*) Had 30 years ago. Power electronics nowadays are probably perfectly capable to return that energy to the utility AC grid.Report

          • Oscar Gordon in reply to J_A says:

            Rail is probably better when you want to move large volumes of people long distances.

            FTFY

            The efficiency of urban rail has only recently become realizable, and I would love to see a comparison of energy usage between a subway or light rail system & a hybrid or electric bus.Report

        • Lyle in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

          The crazy thing is that Seattle along with a number of other cities used to have electric buses (trolly buses) than ran on rubber tires. (I rode them as a kid in Ft Wayne In) These were removed in the mid to late 1960s. Just like about 1900 there was an alternative electric railroad network that one could with a number of transfers ride from New York to Chicago, the interurbans. In addition there were the crack trains of the Pa and NYC that typically stopped 5 or 6 times between NYC and Chicago (when the had to change engines), and did the run in 16 hours.

          To answer the final question rail provides an opportunity for the real estate developers to make a killing if they know the route in advance. With rubber tired bus lines property values don’t increase and intensive development does not occur.Report

          • LeeEsq in reply to Lyle says:

            Busses in America have the reputation of being something people with low status take. Commuting or using a train is generally seen as something middle or high status people can do.Report

            • Oscar Gordon in reply to LeeEsq says:

              But why are trains higher SES signalling? It isn’t the vehicle itself, light rail isn’t more comfortable that a bus. Which means the signal is more about where trains go, rather than the vehicleReport

              • Saul Degraw in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                @oscar-gordon

                It’s a good question and one that might take a lot of research but trains have always felt more romantic in the popular imagination than buses and this seems to be since the dawn of the train.

                My guess is that the original bedroom communities (read wealthy inner ring suburbs) took off because of trains and trains had the allure of intrigue and luxury since the dawn of intercontinental or inter-nation travel.

                Busses seem to be what were given to poor people after everyone else was driving their cars and the old trolley tracks were torn up and paved over.Report

              • Case in point, the Denver suburbs’ shiny new system. The large majority of the 100+ route-miles are/will be in the suburbs and outlying parts of Denver. Stops are typically spaced at greater than a mile. To the extent possible, no at-grade crossings of major streets. Pay at the vending machine before you get on the platform. Big doors in the center of the cars with the intent that you can empty or fill a train completely in 60 seconds. Hits major job centers: downtown, the Tech Center, the Federal Center, the big hospital complex on the east side. Education: U of Denver, CU-Denver, Metro State, multiple community colleges. Major event venues: the big sports complexes, LoDo, the Convention Center, free circulator to within a few blocks of the Performing Arts Complex. Airport.

                What the system is providing is an enormously better alternative to RTD’s express bus service. The bus service required at least several minutes to get between the highways it used and each loading point. It failed right along with auto traffic when it snowed, or there was a major accident. The rail system has much larger capacity, and easy to add more. Daily ridership has reached about 90,000, and as the additional lines open I expect to live to see it pass 150,000.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Michael Cain says:

                Once you have an artery, it makes sense to run rapid mass transit along it, be it rail or BRT, as long as it is in a dedicated lane, it will probably serve the community well. It’s when planners run rail to strange places, or try to shoehorn it in to areas that never envisioned rail (or abandoned that vision long ago) that I start to cringe at the cost, unless they are willing to do some serious urban renewal (as in tearing things up to make room for the system).

                I remember reading the history of a neighborhood I once lived in. Near the house I owned was a bike path that was nice and flat. Previously it was a graded right of way that was set aside for a future commuter rail that never materialized. The city eventually turned it into the bike path, but kept the right of way as is, which is smart. The bike path is nice, but if a RT system ever did materialize, the city could flip that path into a dedicated line in a hot minute and few would complain. That’s the kind of long term planning that makes RT systems successful.Report

        • Nevermoor in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

          This is one of the hard–and interesting–mass transit questions.

          Buses are cheaper, easier to build, and more flexible. People just don’t seem to like ’em as much (both on the government planning side, because you can’t name a bus after someone, and on the use side).

          So to answer your question, there’s no rational reason I know of (especially if you’re proposing dedicated lanes), but that doesn’t mean the policies are equivalent.Report

          • Oscar Gordon in reply to Nevermoor says:

            Thing is, the weight of rail cars has more to do with legacy designs than any real efficiency gains of the system. Large, heavy freight trains enjoy the benefits of the high mass, but we could develop a true light rail system where the cars mass a lot less and operate on dedicated tracks that are a lot cheaper to install and maintain.Report

            • Nevermoor in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

              Hey, if I believed that ridership and political support for buses (especially with devoted lanes) would lead to their successful adoption, I’d be all for it.

              Heck, I’m all for buses AND trains anyway, so I’m an easy sell.Report

          • Kazzy in reply to Nevermoor says:

            Do dedicated lanes work? I ride the bus but dealing with traffic sucks.Report

            • Oscar Gordon in reply to Kazzy says:

              Depends on how dedicated they are, but in general, they do. The more cross traffic they have to deal with, the less effective they become,.Report

  19. Jaybird says:

    Speaking of everything being political, are you guys keeping up with the Kathy Griffin press conference?

    Personally, I think that if Clinton runs again in 2020, she should avoid campaigning with Kathy Griffin.Report

    • notme in reply to Jaybird says:

      Yes, she hired a lawyer and did a press conference blaming the Trumps for bullying her. She’s a class act.Report

    • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

      Saw a quote of her saying something like “Trump broke me, I won’t have a career after what he did to me.” Amazing.Report

      • Brandon Berg in reply to Stillwater says:

        Did anybody here know who Kathy Griffin was before this?

        I didn’t.

        Maybe he improved her career.Report

        • notme in reply to Brandon Berg says:

          I knew she was a D list celeb.Report

        • Pinky in reply to Brandon Berg says:

          She was on Suddenly Susan (including one episode where they all went out to a bar with Warren Zevon), and a few episodes of Seinfeld (where she sent some hot sauce to Jerry, and later blamed him for ruining her career). She then had a show about celebrities that maybe was called My Life on the D-List. She made a living out of insulting celebrities. She’s been doing live broadcasts with Anderson Cooper for the past few New Year’s Eves, and got into some controversy because of her swearing. That’s off the top of my head.Report

        • Oscar Gordon in reply to Brandon Berg says:

          I think she was a stand-up comedienne, once upon a time, who gets attention because she seeks it, pathologically.Report

          • El Muneco in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

            She was. For some reason, I have her mentally filed as a less-talented Maria Bamford rather than, say, Laura Kightlinger or Amy Schumer.

            (To me, it does make sense to only make stylistuc comparisons to other female comedians like it doesn’t for white point guards or slot receivers)Report

    • j r in reply to Jaybird says:

      For the life of me, I cannot figure out why anyone cares what Kathy Griffin does. It doesn’t seem like there is anything too faux controversial, too banal, too obviously fake and meaningless, that a bunch of other people won’t pretend to get outraged about it.

      How the hell did we get here?Report

      • Pinky in reply to j r says:

        And how do we get out of it? Ignoring stupid stories isn’t enough, at least on one’s own. We need to ignore them en masse.Report

        • Oscar Gordon in reply to Pinky says:

          We have a D list attention-monger celeb who did something to get attention and got said attention (perhaps not exactly the attention she wanted, but whatever), and the media feeding cycle continues to churn.

          Reminds me of a skit from the US version of Spitting Image, where Ed McMahon forces Johnny Carson to divorce another wife to distract the media.Report

          • Pinky in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

            You mentioned the media feeding cycle, and it made me think: is there a mechanism any more which allow the media to realize when a story is “done”? Is there any way (other than Twitter trending, I guess) for the media to realize that a story is too trivial, or too played-out?Report

            • Oscar Gordon in reply to Pinky says:

              I’m still seeing covefefe all over the place, and that should have run it’s course about 10 minutes after the tweet went out.

              So my guess is, “no”Report

              • Pinky in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                In the structured, institutional media? Or just among the tweeters?

                It wouldn’t bother me if tweeters are immature. Twitter encourages superficiality. But the institutional media are different. They should have a sense of decorum. Absent that, they need a way of sensing the crowd’s dissatisfaction. But that question leads back to everyone’s favorite discussion about bubbles. If the media are less responsible than they should be, and don’t respond to the people’s call for improvement…uh oh, I can’t think of a way to end this sentence.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Pinky says:

                Except the media figures are the ones tweeting #covefefe still (I bet, I don’t have twitter, so I just see it in Facebook).Report

              • Pinky in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Covfefe may be a worst-case scenario. It’s a chance to stupidly politically tweet about a stupid tweet from a politician. It’s like the dream girl and the sure thing all in one for people of a certain mindset.Report

            • Kolohe in reply to Pinky says:

              Sharks and Gary Condit indicate that the only way a story is done is for there to be a bigger story.Report

      • Stillwater in reply to j r says:

        For the life of me, I cannot figure out why anyone cares what Kathy Griffin does.

        Punition-based endorphin buzz.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to j r says:

        I’m using it as a bit of a bellwether for 2018.

        I’m under the impression that the Democratic Party doesn’t know why they lost in 2016.

        (Sometimes, I’m under the impression that the Democratic Party doesn’t know *THAT* they lost in 2016.)

        There are two ways for Democrats to get more seats in the various state-level and national level offices.

        1. Win Elections
        2. Just Manage To Not Lose Them To The Freaking Republicans God Damn It

        Of course, #1 would be better than #2, but #2 seems to be more likely.

        In any case, depending on how the Kathy Griffin thing plays out, I’m adjusting my opinions on how likely #2 is.Report

        • j r in reply to Jaybird says:

          I’m using it as a bit of a bellwether for 2018.

          OK, but why? I’m largely in agreement about the Dems, but this is so far out of the bounds of anything that actually matters in that conversation. It’s like Kanye saying that GWB doesn’t care about black people. Did that have any political significance or impact outside of being celebrity gossip?Report

        • Pinky in reply to Jaybird says:

          OK, so you don’t care about Kathy Griffin, or what she does; you’re studying the rhythm of the story. That I can handle. Or maybe I’m just cutting you some slack for your comment in parentheses.Report

        • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

          I’m under the impression that the Democratic Party doesn’t know why they lost in 2016.

          I think you’re mistaken about that. I think Dems and the Democratic party view the evidence exactly as you do. The question is whether the party, as an institution, can change in response to that evidence. My guess is that it won’t. Because it can’t. (Only new candidates will shift the current coalition/platform.)Report

          • Stillwater in reply to Stillwater says:

            Which isn’t to say that bite-and-hold, or stay-the-course won’t sufficient to pick up seats. The GOP self-destruction at the policy/governance level can do a lot of the Dems work for them.Report

        • Saul Degraw in reply to Jaybird says:

          And I don’t think you understand that the Democratic Party lost in 2016 for very anti-democratic reasons and you simply don’t care because a lot of your libertarianisms and personal background gives you R-sympathy whether you want to admit it or not. But you certainly show your elephant and gamergate curious undies enough.

          HRC received more votes than Donald Trump. Democratic candidates for the House and Senate received more votes than Republican candidates. The Democratic Party managed to pick up some seats in both houses of Congress but not enough to win a majority.

          Yet here you are acting like Trump won a mandate of heaven instead of a freak victory because the profoundly anti-democratic electoral college and gerrymandering gives the GOP a lock on Congress despite getting fewer votes. And as far as I can tell your response is really close.

          So what’s the solution here or can I just gather that you like to troll Democrats and Liberals cause you saw a college student be snooty to a truck driver once.Report

          • j r in reply to Saul Degraw says:

            And I don’t think you understand that the Democratic Party lost in 2016 for very anti-democratic reasons…

            Serious question: what does that mean in English?Report

            • Kimmi in reply to j r says:

              jr,
              it means that Saul doesn’t want to admit that trolling Hillary was just as fun as trolling Mitt Romney, and that Hillary lost because she got outplayed, just like Romney did.

              Instead, he’d rather blame Russia, The Fbi, Comey, and a Vast Cavalcade of Horrors… instead of Clinton.

              I’ve the graphs. Clinton’s popularity ALWAYS drops as she campaigns. For Any Elected office. It was her fault, mostly.

              People like to pretend that the whole Expose on Trump’s “filthy and mysogynistic attitudes” didn’t happen. And that they weren’t certain that Hillary would win because of it.Report

            • Jesse in reply to j r says:

              Bluntly, The Electoral College and Senate continues to exist. That’s not even getting into the various voter ID laws and such.Report

              • j r in reply to Jesse says:

                That’s not what the word democratic means.

                Also this is simply false in any meaningful way:

                … and gerrymandering gives the GOP a lock on Congress despite getting fewer votes.

                So, I go back to the thing I keep saying. When you start with a premise that assumes your conclusion, you end up working backwards towards a lot of bad ideas. And I don’t mean bad in the “I disagree with you” way. I mean that you start mis-defining words and making false empirical claims.Report

            • pillsy in reply to j r says:

              Electoral College, vote suppression, and James Comey slapping his stupid, self-righteous dick on the scale at the eleventh hour.

              Of course the real issue isn’t that the Democrats understand why they lost, or even that they lost. It’s that they understand why Trump won.

              The fact that they aren’t interested in retrospectives or post-mortem of their loss, and in fact are convinced that they lost because of the fundamental perfidy and corruption of Donald Trump suggests that they understand very, very well why Trump won.Report

              • j r in reply to pillsy says:

                The fact that they aren’t interested in retrospectives or post-mortem of their loss, and in fact are convinced that they lost because of the fundamental perfidy and corruption of Donald Trump suggests that they understand very, very well why Trump won.

                No. It doesn’t at all. People are essentially using the same models that told them that Trump couldn’t win to analyze the election. Good luck with that.

                And the Electoral College is not “anti-democratic.” It’s the rules of this particular game. If you lose a ga!e of basketball, because the other team hit a lot of three point shots, you don’t get to start claiming afterwards that you scored more baskets so you really won.Report

              • pillsy in reply to j r says:

                No. It doesn’t at all. People are essentially using the same models that told them that Trump couldn’t win to analyze the election. Good luck with that.

                No they aren’t. They’re essentially adopting the model that led Trump to victory, while eschewing analysis of why they lost the election as a waster of time. Which, by the way, is what the GOP as a whole did by nominating Trump in the first place.

                And the Electoral College is not “anti-democratic.” It’s the rules of this particular game.

                And the rules of this particular game are anti-democratic. They were anti-democratic before the election, and they’re anti-democratic now.Report

              • j r in reply to pillsy says:

                Democracy isn’t defined by a particular voting system. It’s defined by a representative government that drives it’s power from the people. Most Prime Ministers and some Presidents aren’t directly elected, but that doesn’t mean that those voting systems are anti-democratic.

                It’s one thing to have preferences, but words have meanings.Report

              • pillsy in reply to j r says:

                The issue isn’t the directness of the election.

                The issue is that the system empowers a minority to elect the president at the expense of the majority.Report

              • George Turner in reply to pillsy says:

                The majority of Americans voted against Hillary and Stein, and for either Trump or his many challengers on the right.

                The majority of Americans voted for Republicans in the House, and the Republicans retained their hold on it.Report

              • pillsy in reply to George Turner says:

                Uh huh.Report

              • greginak in reply to George Turner says:

                Tastes may come and go, but Kool Aid is forever.Report

              • George Turner in reply to greginak says:

                2016 US House election

                R 63,173,815
                D 61,776,554
                —————–
                diff 1,397,621

                And of course the Republicans get a lot more seats out of their margin because Democrats concentrate themselves in cities where the D wins with ridiculously high percentages. That’s because like Hillary, Democrats have no idea how to deploy their votes where those votes will make a difference. They clump them up.

                Republicans know that every R vote past 51% is a wasted Republican voter. Hillary just kept working Hollywood and Martha’s Vineyard to try and get every last vote in those two places.

                It’s things like that that cost the Democrats about 1,200 legislative seats since 2008.Report

              • greginak in reply to George Turner says:

                It’s interesting the vote totals you don’t show. I wonder why so sensitive.Report

              • George Turner in reply to greginak says:

                The vote totals I don’t show are for the Senate, but the Senate votes depend on which class (there are three) is running.

                And absent California and New York, Hillary got creamed in the popular vote. Since Democrats always carry California and New York, she has once again misdeployed her voters because Hillary is not very bright and has no idea how our election system works.Report

              • j r in reply to pillsy says:

                That still doesn’t quite jive with the meaning of the word democracy. Take a parliamentary system, where the party that wins a plurality gets to form a government. You can have a situation where 60% of the population voted for another party, but that party wins. Is that anti-democratic?

                Or let’s say the party that wins can’t form a coalition, so the second place party gets to form a government. You’d now have a h as of government from a party that didn’t win the most votes. But again, there is nothing anti-democratic about it.Report

              • pillsy in reply to j r says:

                You can have a situation where 60% of the population voted for another party, but that party wins. Is that anti-democratic?

                That party wins, but the other parties that are part of its coalition (which people voted for) are also part of the government it forms. It’s not like the Presidency in the US, where a candidate can win without getting the most votes for reasons that mostly seem to boil down to it being too hard to change.

                It’s really a goddamned shame that Kerry didn’t get 50k more votes in OH in ’04, which would have wrecked the stupid EC for good.Report

              • George Turner in reply to pillsy says:

                Keep tilting at that windmill. You’ve almost got it defeated!

                Now if you can just convince all those tiny little states to give up their importance and ratify a constitutional amendment that strips them of political power, you’ll have won.Report

              • pillsy in reply to George Turner says:

                Most tiny little states lose importance under the EC, not gain it. The tiny boost they get from the EC votes they get for being states at all is irrelevant compared to the fact that almost all of them are too lopsided in terms of partisan affiliations to matter.

                The states that get the most attention and influence under our current system are FL, OH, and PA. None of them are small.Report

              • j r in reply to pillsy says:

                … reasons that mostly seem to boil down to it being too hard to change.

                This gets to the heart of what democratic means. It means that we have a process in place, so that we don’t have to make assumptions. You can think one process is better than another process and I may even agree with you, but the point is that the process is abided until its lawfully changed.

                How do you know that the only reason that we have an electoral college is because it’s too hard to change? Congress can’t even pass a budget these days, so I have no illusions about the ability to amend the constitution. But in some other universe were the process still worked, how do you know it would get rid of the electoral college. Heck, how do you even know that the electoral college wouldn’t survive a straight referendum? Looking at polling, most people generally tend to support abolishing the EC, but the most recent number have it about 49% to 47%. And as the Brexit example shows, public support for these kinds of big changes can swing significantly.

                And that’s what it comes down to. We have no method of divining the will of the people. All we have is the ability to count votes and feed those votes into the lawful process. That’s what democracy is.Report

              • pillsy in reply to j r says:

                So this argument generally proves a lot too much, but the point is that I think the rules suck, have thought the rules sucked for as long as I understood them (even though prior to 2000 they mostly seemed like a quirky curiosity). Among other problems, like indefensibly weighting the residents of some administrative districts more than others, I believe that any colorable argument that undermines the legitimacy of the Trump Administration is worth pursuing.

                And it’s obvious that losing the popular vote just eats at the fucker in the Oval Office, which is all the more reason too pursue it.Report

              • George Turner in reply to pillsy says:

                You do not want to undermine the legitimacy of a President. If you do, he’ll probably let the Russians nuke all our big blue cities.Report

              • pillsy in reply to George Turner says:

                Uh huh.Report

              • KenB in reply to pillsy says:

                And the rules of this particular game are anti-democratic.

                You can call the rules anti-democratic, but it’s stupid to blame them for why Hillary lost. If the rules were different, both candidates would have conducted their campaigns differently, and a significant portion of the electorate would have made different choices (since it would no longer matter if you lived in a blue state, red state, or purple state). There’s no way to know who would’ve won in that case. But you should be embarrassed to still be making this juvenile argument that just because Hillary got the plurality of the vote under the existing rules, that meant that she was cheated out of the election under a different set of rules.Report

              • pillsy in reply to KenB says:

                But you should be embarrassed to still be making this juvenile argument that just because Hillary got the plurality of the vote under the existing rules, that meant that she was cheated out of the election under a different set of rules.

                I think flogging the argument is, in fact, a fine way to adapt to the world where Donald Trump is President. Not because the rules are to blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss, but because it’s exactly the kind of argument that works to win elections in this day and age, and it’s an overwhelming counter to any claim Trump makes that his policies are justified by popular support.

                Indeed, the very idea that popular support and vote totals are irrelevant to legitimacy [1] is belied by the fact that the GOP has invested quite heavily in a series of outrageous lies in an attempt to refute the obvious fact that Trump did lose the popular vote, conjuring an imaginary horde of illegal votes cast by undocumented immigrants to explain away HRC’s margin.

                If it didn’t hurt, they wouldn’t lie about it.

                And all else aside, the EC is really frigging dumb.

                [1] The idea that simply following the rules for tallying votes is all that’s required for a result to be democratic or legitimate seems to suggest that any way of tallying the votes is democratic and legitimate as long as everyone agrees to it beforehand. This strikes me as clearly absurd, but I don’t see the limiting principle that keeps from sliding down that slope.Report

              • Kenb in reply to pillsy says:

                Ok, if you’re just making a dumb argument strategically then I’ll leave you alone, though this blog hardly seems like fertile ground for it.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Kenb says:

                I don’t think it’s a dumb argument, because I don’t think the essentially legalistic position that you and @j-r are taking on what it means for an electoral outcome to be “legitimate” or “democratic” is correct. This is especially true in the US system, where a huge amount of the functioning of our political system is encoded in unwritten norms that, in recent years, are respected until they aren’t.

                Consider a counter-factual world where the desperate fantasy of faithless electors tossing the election from Trump to Hillary had actually transpired. As far as I can tell, this would also by a legitimate democratic result based on that definition, which suggests that the EC really does have a serious problem as a democratic institution since the votes cast by individuals don’t actually constrain it at all.

                The counter-argument is that such a thing has never happened, but then again, we went for well over a century without a PV/EV split and then we had two PV/EV splits in 16 years. Something that went from a bit of Jeopardy trivia–“Who is Rutherford B. Hayes?”–become a routine reality in our elections.

                So the system is bad, and has a real, recently salient problem with democratic legitimacy. That recently salient problem has cut in favor of the same party twice in a short period of time. I think people have every right to be pissed about that, and people are pissed about that, and if it’s politically useful as a weapon against Trump, so much the better.Report

              • KenB in reply to pillsy says:

                You’re mixing me up with others — none of this has anything to do with my comment.Report

              • pillsy in reply to KenB says:

                Uh… yeah, looks like you’re right. Sorry.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to pillsy says:

                And the rules of this particular game are anti-democratic. They were anti-democratic before the election, and they’re anti-democratic now.

                I agree that they aren’t anti-democratc and for precisely the reasons j r gave. But one thing I find interesting about this discussion is that scholars seem to agree that the original constitutionally imposed process for determining the President was instituted to prevent nogoodlowdown populist Presidents just like Trump from being easily elected. So by that metric, the last election cycle suggests the current process is already too loose, not too tight.Report

              • James K in reply to Stillwater says:

                @stillwater

                And comparisons with other countries back that up – its not very common for the head of government to be elected directly, especially among the better-functioning democracies.Report

              • pillsy in reply to James K says:

                Our system doesn’t have a directly elected President, but it also lacks all the features that make the indirect election of the head of government work, while having a completely indefensible bias towards arbitrary administrative units that happen to have close partisan splits among their populations.Report

              • James K in reply to pillsy says:

                @pillsy

                For all intents and purposes you do have a directly-elected President, just one with an odd weighting on the votes, as you note.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Stillwater says:

                “These rules that were adopted to prevent a popular demagogue with dubious loyalties from ascending to the Presidency elevated an unpopular demagogue with dubious loyalties to the Presidency,” is a remarkable thing to say about a system that’s supposedly democratic.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to pillsy says:

                Types of democracy, like j r said. Seems to me you’re prioritizing one form of democracy – direct Democracy – over others without argument. (There are reasons lots of people don’t like ballot measures.) But it also seems to me that if Trump won the popular vote and Hillary won the EC by the margins we saw last year you wouldn’t be arguing that Hillary’s victory is evidence of an undemocratic process. You’d be saying “thems the rulez”.

                And the rules are the rules, and totally consistent with representative democracy.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Stillwater says:

                Seems to me you’re prioritizing one form of democracy – direct Democracy – over others without argument.

                No, I’m objecting to the arbitrary way in which EC votes effectively magnify the interests of some constituencies while degrading the interests of others. I’m not a huge fan of the malaportionment in the Senate, but at least there is a credible rationale there in terms of preserving federalism.

                But it also seems to me that if Trump won the popular vote and Hillary won the EC by the margins we saw last year you wouldn’t be arguing that Hillary’s victory is evidence of an undemocratic process.

                Absolutely wrong.

                I would be, in fact, glorying in the way its undemocratic nature would have burned both parties in close proximity, providing a much clearer path to killing the stupid thing.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to pillsy says:

                “Yes! Yes! You Trumpers are absolutely right! Hillary was elected by an illegitimate, undemocratic process!”

                I can’t imagine what a square circle looks like, and I can’t imagine you saying the above, Pillsy. But maybe I suffer from a lack of imagination. 🙂Report

              • pillsy in reply to Stillwater says:

                Well, I’d like to think I’d be more of a smug prick about it.Report

              • Kolohe in reply to Stillwater says:

                2016 was filled with people and institutions that the exclamation You Had *One* Job! applies to.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

            I readily admit that I am not a member of The Blue Tribe, Saul.

            I do not see this as a lack of virtue in and of itself the way that you seem to, though.

            HRC received more votes than Donald Trump. Democratic candidates for the House and Senate received more votes than Republican candidates. The Democratic Party managed to pick up some seats in both houses of Congress but not enough to win a majority.

            Stillwater, this is the sort of thing I’m talking about.

            So what’s the solution here or can I just gather that you like to troll Democrats and Liberals cause you saw a college student be snooty to a truck driver once.

            Can you restate the problem?Report

            • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

              Stillwater, this is the sort of thing I’m talking about.

              Sure. For every Saul there’s an Aaron David-like person, tho, who publicly expresses why they’re disenchanted with the party. People who are paying attention are aware of both. IE., surely the DNC and DCCC are aware that Dems don’t control the House, and lots of Obama voters went for Trump, and that Hillary’s numbers with white women were lower than Obama’s in demographics X and etc., and so on. I just don’t think they’re able to shift course.

              I mean, I agree with you that Saul’s take on things excludes lots of very relevant evidence. It’s more that at the end of the day, Dems have to believe that what they bring to the table right now is enough to win, cuz they ain’t (can’t) gonna change. It’s already been broughten.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                The ability to hold the available evidence is an exceptionally important first step.

                I’d probably mind a lot less if I thought that they held it and then said “no” rather than this weird thing where it looks like the evidence is protected by a SEP field.

                But maybe the Republicans will screw things up so bad that not even the Democrats can screw things up even worse.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                One easy change to help them to win at all levels of government: legalize it.

                Why don’t they do it? Institutional inertia? Ignorance? Risk-aversion? There has to be some reason.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                I think I remember reading something somewhere about how we have a treaty with The International Community saying that marijuana will be illegal.

                Two ideals that, in this case, come in conflict. The more important ideal wins out.

                There.

                That’s my best shot.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                Not at the state level. DNCCC puts out a policy paper encouraging all new candidates to support legalization of MJ at all levels of government for reasons X, Y and Z. People run on that policy proposal. They support it, along with all the other Dem carrots and sticks.

                If asked about it they’ll say, “on the first day of my term I will introduce legislation yadablahblah.” “Well, we’ll deal with federal issues regarding treaty obligations later. The first thing to do is get legislation on the table and passed.”
                Etc and so on.

                You know. They do some politics.Report

              • Jesse in reply to Stillwater says:

                Because in many of those red and purple states, the people that really care about marijuana staying illegal vote and some of the people who want marijuana to be legal will vote for the Republican’s anyway because of guns, etc.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jesse says:

                One recent poll I read had roughly this breakdown in support of legalization:

                Dems: 70%
                Ind: 60%
                Cons: 50%

                Seems like a political winner to me. Oooorrr, Dems could maintain the status quo and hope for the best going forward.Report

              • Jesse in reply to Stillwater says:

                I’m not saying the Dems shouldn’t do it. I’m saying it’s not a pancea that’ll turn red states blue or even purple.

                I’m saying 99% of those Republican’s will still vote for Republican’s because marijuana legalization is less important than tax cuts, abortion restrictions, gutting unions, or whatever other conservative policy they favor.

                Also, that’s great for polling. Now, show me a poll showing how many Republican’s will cross over to vote for a Democrat who’s in favor or legalization and vice versa.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Jesse says:

                It might be nice if the Democrats were willing to risk having one candidate legalizing it, though.

                It wouldn’t even have to be someone running for re-election. It could be someone going up against a Republican from outta nowhere.

                Oooh! I know. If Trump appoints a congressman in a safe red district, the dems should run someone against him and have this person say something about legalizing it.

                You know, test the water.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jesse says:

                I’m saying 99% of those Republican’s will still vote for Republican’s because marijuana legalization is less important than tax cuts, abortion restrictions, gutting unions, or whatever other conservative policy they favor.

                Dems aren’t trying to get GOP voters, tho. They’re trying to get Dems to the polls and win over Indy voters. If a Dem candidate ran on legalizing it, the GOP candidate would reflexively oppose it and attack the moral character of his/her opponent as well as liberals in general, the media, scientists, deep state bureaucrats, hollywood celebrities, tenured professors, and everything else which poses an existential threat to the conservative way of life.Report

              • Jesse in reply to Stillwater says:

                I guess, my argument is there is no secret group of pro-marijuana legislation voters that will come out and vote if Democrat’s went hardcore for it.

                I still think Democrat’s should be for it, but I don’t buy the “this will lead to Democratic victories in unexpected places” argument.Report

              • Joe Sal in reply to Stillwater says:

                Did that poll mention in more general terms Republicans than just conservatives?Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Joe Sal says:

                I’ll try to find the link, but IIRC it was partisan breakdown totaling 100%: Dem, Ind, and Rep.

                Here’s a different one:

                Dem: 67
                Ind: 70
                Rep: 42

                for all adults. So at least similar. I’ll keep looking.

                http://www.gallup.com/poll/196550/support-legal-marijuana.aspxReport

              • Joe Sal in reply to Stillwater says:

                This is good, many thanks, looks like the independents are leading the charge, ha.Report

              • Every state (and DC) that has legalized marijuana has done so through citizen-initiated ballot measures. None of them have passed by margins that would support those numbers, at least for actual voters.

                State legislatures are invariably older, whiter, and more conservative than their constituencies. I’m not complaining about that particularly, it’s inherent in the constraints on membership (eg, age restrictions, the requirement in most states that members take three to seven months away from their regular income source, etc).

                Pretty soon all but the most rural initiative states will have legalized. I expect a substantial delay after that before we see an actual legislature do legalization.Report

              • El Muneco in reply to Michael Cain says:

                Supporting this – there’s significant evidence that the movers and shakers in both partie think the general public is more conservative than it actually is. Supports the natural inclination to tack to the center long after the numbers support action.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Joe Sal says:

                Here’s some interesting data on people’s views of legalization at the state level:

                Majorities of Republicans (63 percent), Democrats (76 percent), and independents (72 percent) oppose the federal government trying to stop marijuana use in these states.

                “these states” refers to states that have already legalized/decriminalized.

                The survey says, without partisan breakdown, that 61% of Americans support legalization.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                61%!

                We’re very close to “stupidity no longer explains this”.Report

              • Jesse in reply to Jaybird says:

                If it’s 61% of all voters, but only 45% of all voters guaranteed to come out in low turnout state and local elections….Report

              • Saul Degraw in reply to Stillwater says:

                @stillwater

                My recollection is that the only group that really opposes marijuana legislation is GOP over 50s. Basically the big base of the GOP.

                But I think @jesse is right here and @jaybird is being a kind of purity pony and complaining because the Ds aren’t handling marijuana legalization exactly how he wants and with the fervor he wants.

                HRC and many older Democrats are possibly too hesitant to advocate for legalization because they remember how the issue hurt them from the 1960s until very recently. But there are very few (if any) prominent drug hawks in the Democratic Party advocating for strong crackdowns.

                But you have that in the GOP and it looks like AG Sessions wants to ramp up the drug war back to the bad old days and lots of people are with him. Every Democratic politician I can think of believes this to be a bad and dangerous idea.

                But it isn’t enough for JB because he wants the language to be nothing more than full-throttle for legalization now and he wants it with ultra-zeal.

                This neglects that there are a lot of issues (like housing, wages, discrimination, civil rights, climate change, etc.) that are really important to Democratic Party members and the Democratic Party spends a lot of time arguing for things beyond marijuana legalization.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                Saul,

                I totally get what you’re saying here. The context of the initial suggestion was a little bit different tho: I proposed legalization as a way to expand the Dem base without making serious changes to the party’s core issues and identity. Jaybird and I discussed why that would work, or not, for various reasons, etc.

                But the point isn’t that Hillary-age people would oppose it. That sorta goes without saying. The point was whether or not the institutional thinking which defines the DNC and Dem establishment could ever even back people running on that policy. And I gotta say it’s a disappointment to me that Dem politicians aren’t responsive the clearly changing demographics – not to mention stone cold evidence and argument – supporting legalizing pot.

                JB isn’t advocating full throttle zeal, in my view. Hell, he said that Dems should take a throwaway Red district and run a candidate advocating legalization to see what happens. My guess is that that candidate (if at all competent, which is a bar the Dems have a hard time not stubbing their toes on anymore) would wildly outperform expectation.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                I would be down with moving it from a Schedule I Drug to a Schedule III Drug, on a National Level despite my deep suspicion that it truly belongs on Schedule IV.

                It’s the “it’s not a big deal if we keep it on Schedule I, not a big enough deal to risk an election, anyway” folks that strike me as being kinda nutty, honestly.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Jesse says:

                Until marijuana is legal, they need those guns to protect their stash. It’s an impossible position, really.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                No idea. Maybe there is some institutional memory of the schellacking they got at the hands of Republicans in the 80’s due to drug war stuff?

                When I think about how the military doesn’t allow edibles to be part of PTSD treatment, I think about how the leadership probably came up remembering the body counts on the television and associating drugs with the hippies rioting so that makes sense… maybe the democratic leadership is the same way.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

                The late ’80s/early ’90s were just about the length of time it takes a junior staffer to go to being a senior staffer or elected official in their own right. And for all the Clinton Years are looked back on now with disdain by the base–as the beginning of the end, with triangulation laying the seeds of the party’s destruction–at the time Bill Clinton was really popular and the first Dem to be reelected to the Presidency in a generation.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Jaybird says:

                But maybe the Republicans will screw things up so bad that not even the Democrats can screw things up even worse.

                Like nominate Donald Trump for President?

                Dang, now we’re in a recursive loop.Report

              • Saul Degraw in reply to Stillwater says:

                I admit that I’m a pretty strong Democratic Party partisan.

                But the issue here is that Jaybird is doing is typical wanna-be Socrates dada and every bit of evidence for the Democratic Party is discounted and every bit of evidence against them is highlighted.

                It would have been nice to win Montana and Kansas but that did not happen but as a lot of people pointed out, Democrats came a lot closer in both districts than they have in decades and even the Washington Free Beacon said that if every congressional district followed the patterns of those two, it would be a Democratic landslide.

                But this doesn’t seem to register to Jaybird and I am not sure what would.

                And he is also dodging my questions. How is what Kathy Griffin did different than those who hung Obama in effigy? Is he going to pontificate pompously about how hanging in effigy is a grand political tradition?

                Was the Kathi Griffin thing helpful? Probably not. Is it different than hanging Obama in Effigy? No.

                I don’t really care if JB isn’t on Team Blue. I want him to be more honest about what side he is on though because from my prospective he might not totally support the Gamergate crowd but he is strangely sympathetic to them at times.Report

              • Kimmi in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                Hi! Do you want a comprehensive rundown of how the “gamergate crowd” was militarized to both remove a game reviewer and a self-shilling liar of a conman (erm. woman now, I suppose)?

                Do you want a rundown of how much of the hatred was really simply made up? There’s evidence that some of the doxxing was provided by the people who claimed they got doxxed. Liar Liar, as we all say.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                How is what Kathy Griffin did different than those who hung Obama in effigy?

                I’ll try to answer these.

                What Kathy Griffin did was different than those who hung Obama in effigy insofar as hanging Obama in effigy has racial baggage out the wazoo in addition to the death imagery while what Kathy Griffin did only had death imagery.

                I suppose it’s also different insofar as what Kathy Griffin did was done by someone with several upcoming gigs in various casinos as well as done by someone who has a job for a major news network (albeit in an entertainment capacity) while the nobodies who hung Obama in effigy had nothing to take away from them.

                Is he going to pontificate pompously about how hanging in effigy is a grand political tradition?

                Burning in effigy? Yes.
                Hanging in effigy? No.

                I want him to be more honest about what side he is on though because from my prospective he might not totally support the Gamergate crowd but he is strangely sympathetic to them at times.

                I suppose, at this moment, I’m between sub-teams. Politically, I think that both parties are rotten to the core and have precious little representation of anybody who doesn’t either go to the same schools they went to *OR* capable of bundling checks for their re-election campaigns. I guess I might describe myself as “hoping the transhumanists are right” with a dash of “I hope we get a superintelligent AI soon and I hope it doesn’t kill us.”Report

              • Jesse in reply to Jaybird says:

                So, who was bundling re-election checks for Medicaid expansion? For expansion of the school lunch program? For the expansion of child care?

                I mean, I get it. You want a nice simple story of “both parties are corrupt, so I get to sit on my A Pox on Both Sides Throne,” but you look silly to anybody looking in and convincing absolutely nobody with your silly Socratic routines.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Jesse says:

                Those are good examples of Democrats delivering stuff to the population, sure. Great examples.

                I don’t see them as evidence that the Democrats aren’t corrupt, though.

                Perhaps they’re evidence that it’s better to vote for a corrupt party that delivers stuff to the population than for a corrupt party that doesn’t.

                It’s insufficient for me, though I totally understand how it might be sufficient for someone else.Report

              • Jesse in reply to Jaybird says:

                Do you still believe political donations are free speech?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Jesse says:

                Not as strongly as I believe that the government shouldn’t censor movies that criticize politicians. Why do you ask?Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

                You talk about parties but not ideas. And most of your ideas line up with one party and, more notably, it’s ugliest elements. And you pretend otherwise.

                You want to talk about Kathy Griffin.
                But when the Montana candidate did his thing, you wanted to talk about Nazi punching.

                If…Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

                You’d rather I spend more time signaling?Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

                OR just honestly and genuinely expressing and owning your position.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

                Kazzy, I’d like to think that when I talk about why it’s a bad idea to brag about putting miners out of work, I *AM* talking about ideas rather than parties.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

                What idea are you talking about?

                You aren’t talking about energy policy. Or jobs. Or the economy.

                You are talking about Hillary talking about those things.

                Which allows you to run an end run around criticizing her interpreted position on them without actually taking a position of your own. So, no, you aren’t talking about ideas.

                So let me ask you: What should the federal government do about the coal industry?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

                Replace it with solar, wind, and nuclear.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

                How?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

                I imagine we’d be completely unable to do that without getting government involved.

                Which means that we need to elect people who will support such a policy.

                Which means that we need to get these people elected in the first place.

                Which means that one of the things that you do *NOT* do is brag about how many coal miners you’re going to be putting out of work after you get elected when you’re campaigning before the election.

                Because if you do that, the guy who is going to pull us out of the Paris Accord will get elected and he’s going to pull us out of the Paris Accord.

                And then you’re going to find yourself arguing against people who defend idiocy that results in such things as “not getting elected” under the guise of… I don’t even know what it is that Hillary defenders are doing at this point. Clinging to some moral victory? I guess?Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

                There you go again.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

                Clinging to some moral victory? I guess?

                To an extent, yes.

                Clinging to moral victories is a useful political tactic.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Kazzy says:

                Which allows you to run an end run around criticizing her interpreted position on them without actually taking a position of your own.

                What does Jaybird’s motive have to do with the truth of his claim? Let’s suppose that Jaybird really is a Hillary hater, just can’t stand her or the Democratic party, finds them all morally and intellectually repugnant. Does it follow from this recognition that his claim about the political merits of what Hillary said doesn’t have an independent truth value?Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Stillwater says:

                Not at all.

                But Jay constantly takes the stance of, “I’m not saying XYZ, I’m just saying if…”

                And then proceeds to say something amounting to XYZ. And when people respond to XYZ, he insists he isn’t saying XYZ.

                I don’t carw about what Clinton said. She said it. She lost. The debate here is about what should actually be done about coal. What should the Dem position be going forward. How we should approach coal country.

                Does anyone here have any idea what Jay actually thinks about those things? Is it unreasonable to ask him to articulate a clear position?

                “I’m not saying Jaybird is a hardcore right winger with weird sympathies toward racist, sexist, and other hatefilled ideologies. But if he was, he’d do things like make disingenuous comments denouncing such ideologies only when pressed after voluntarily weighing in on Kathy Griffin. I’m not saying he is. But if. He isn’t. But if.”Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

                The debate here is about what should actually be done about coal. What should the Dem position be going forward. How we should approach coal country. (emphasis added)

                HOW’S ABOUT NOT BRAGGING ABOUT PUTTING COAL MINERS OUT OF WORKReport

              • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

                Who here is doing that? No one.

                Get over Hillary. She’s done.Report

              • veronica d in reply to Kazzy says:

                JB is slippery, and dammit it’s distasteful.

                Whatever.

                It is useful to hear criticisms from the outside. That said, often such criticism comes from a very different set of values. For example, I could give much advice to Christians on how to pledge their lives to queer transgender Satan, but that advice might not be useful to them.

                For the Democrats, I think there is a real issue to confront: how to stay true to social justice principles while taking into account the reality of white and/or male fragility. Is there a workable middle path? Perhaps there is, perhaps not.

                JB adds little to this discussion, because he never talks about white and/or male fragility. Instead, he simple demonstrates it. However, this is a low-value input. After all, any random Reddit thread will contain 6.022140857*10^23 sentient fedoras (“it’s a trilby!”) perfectly eager to demonstrate white and/or male fragility. It is boring.

                We have nothing to learn from him we do not already know.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to veronica d says:

                I think there is a real issue to confront: how to stay true to social justice principles while taking into account the reality of white and/or male fragility.

                Get the gov out of picking winners and losers, focus on a fair playing field. “Fair” doesn’t mean “equal outcomes”. Process is important, outcomes far less so.

                I’m not sure what “Fragility” means in this context. I don’t care about others success (or failure). BIll Gate’s success does make me fail. Letting gays marry does not threaten my own. Trans is conceptually weird but I assume you know what you’re doing and no one wants to strap me down on an operating table so whatever.

                But it seems unjust and even threatening to insist that my kids have fewer opportunities or less chance of success because otherwise they’ll be too successful. Checking their skin color (or the size of my wallet) before seeing what programs they have access to. Forcing them to learn next to dysfunctional children because although it’s bad for mine kids, they’ll be a example for the others.

                A good hunk of the social justice agenda seems to be an effort to use government as a magic wand to trump poor decision making in an effort to make reality what you think it should be instead of what it is.

                Having said that, I am hardly typical. On the Myers–Briggs I’m around 100% Thinking and this may be more of a “Feeling” issue on both sides so it’s hard for me to relate.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

                Interesting rhetorical question. Why would you assume the answer should be no?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

                I was tweaking him a bit. The other day he accused me of signaling.Report

              • Will H. in reply to Jaybird says:

                “This bread is moldy.”

                “How do you know if it’s moldy? You haven’t proposed eating something else!”

                That got old a long time ago.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Will H. says:

                “If you wanted bread to be moldy, some might suggest baking it the way Hillary did. Did Hillary want moldy bread? Or was she powerless to avoid it?”
                “Do you think the bread is moldy?”
                “Dude… this is’t about me.”
                [Three days later.]
                “Yes.”Report

              • Jesse in reply to Stillwater says:

                @stillwater, if you really buy Aaron David’s concern trolling, I have some beautiful waterfront land in Nebraska to sell you.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jesse says:

                He used to be a Dem voter, now he isn’t. And he isn’t shy about telling you why.Report

              • Jesse in reply to Stillwater says:

                Sure. So did any number of Southern Democrat’s in the 70’s and 80’s. Should Democrat’s have listened to them?Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jesse says:

                Not if you think the party is healthy and strong. If you don’t, tho, maybe a fresh set of eyes could be helpful.

                I can tell you that the last decade or so but particularly this most recent election cycle has curbed my Dem enthusiasm to about a quarter of what it was in ’08. Maybe less. And it wasn’t all that high to begin with.Report

              • Jesse in reply to Stillwater says:

                A fresh set of eyes that basically says, “stop doing good things for minorities or women because it upsets blue collar males” is not someone the DNC needs to listen too.

                I question why eight years of the Democrat’s actually accomplishing things is making you less enthusiastic about the Democratic Party. In my view, over the past decade, the DNC is finally getting closer to the goal of actually standing for economic and social justice.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jesse says:

                A fresh set of eyes that basically says, “stop doing good things for minorities or women because it upsets blue collar males” is not someone the DNC needs to listen too.

                Legalize it!

                Also, it’s interesting you think blue color voters are upset about Dems helping women and minorities. I think it’s actually much simpler: that blue color workers feel like Dems aren’t doing anything for them. Is it possible for Dems to propose policies that help all those constituencies?Report

              • Jesse in reply to Stillwater says:

                So, you think it’s such a coinkydink there was a massive rural upsurge in votes when a candidate who explicitly ran slamming Mexican’s and Muslim’s was the Republican nominee?

                I mean, there are policies that will help all those people and Democrat’s support many of those policies. But, many blue collar voters will only support policies that help white blue collar voters and hurt women and minorities.Report

              • Joe Sal in reply to Jesse says:

                Massive rural upsurge, ha. Do you guys all read the same script or something?Report

              • J_A in reply to Stillwater says:

                @stillwater

                I think we are trying to say the same thing, but, just for emphasis, this is what Dems are saying to white blue collar voters

                Hillary Clinton met a tough crowd in West Virginia coal country recently.

                The state, which will hold its primary May 10, backed Clinton over President Barack Obama in 2008. But some voters now see her as a threat to the area’s coal industry.

                See related rulings
                “How you could say you are going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs, and then come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend?” unemployed coal worker Bo Copely asked Clinton at a campaign event on May 2.

                Clinton acknowledged that she said something to that effect, but she also apologized.

                “I don’t know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context for what I meant because I have been talking about helping coal country for a very long time,” Clinton said. “It was a misstatement because what I was saying is the way things are going now, they will continue to lose jobs. It didn’t mean that we were going to do it. What I said is that is going to happen unless we take action to help and prevent it.”

                So what did Clinton say about putting coal miners out of work? We decided to look at the full context.

                She made the comment during a March 13 CNN Town Hall. Journalist Roland Martin asked, in effect, why should poor white people vote for her.

                In her response, Clinton did say that she would be putting coal companies out of business, as a result of moving toward renewable energy sources. But she followed that by saying she wanted to create new economic opportunities for current coal workers, possibly spurred by clean energy development.

                Here are her full remarks, with the most relevant parts in bold:

                Look, we have serious economic problems in many parts of our country. And Roland is absolutely right. Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let’s reunite around policies that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these underserved poor communities.

                So for example, I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?

                And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.

                Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.

                So whether it’s coal country or Indian country or poor urban areas, there is a lot of poverty in America. We have gone backwards. We were moving in the right direction. In the ’90s, more people were lifted out of poverty than any time in recent history.

                Because of the terrible economic policies of the Bush administration, President Obama was left with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and people fell back into poverty because they lost jobs, they lost homes, they lost opportunities, and hope.

                So I am passionate about this, which is why I have put forward specific plans about how we incentivize more jobs, more investment in poor communities, and put people to work.

                And this I’d what the GOP is saying

                We’re going to get those miners back to work … the miners of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, which was so great to me last week, Ohio and all over are going to start to work again, believe me. They are going to be proud again to be miners

                Yes, the first plan is long winded, and looks like a badly done PowerPoint presentation. The second one is crispy, clear, and exactly what the audience is looking for. It’s great marketing.

                The problem is, the second one is impossible to achieve. And those that are offering the second plan know it’s impossible to achieve. There’s a word to describe knowingly offering impossible things in order to dupe your audience. It starts with L.

                Yes, perhaps the bullet point list can’t or won’t be implemented because reasons. But one is feasible and the other one is not.

                So it’s not that the Dems are not offering concrete things to the white blue collar voters. It is that they are restricting their offers to what is possible, even if difficult. And the voters prefer the guys that are offering them the impossible thing.

                Could the first, long winded program be better packaged? Sure it can. Even I, long winded pedantic non-native speaker that I am, could do better.

                But of course, the Dems could also lie. That will also get them votes. It will get them even more votes. Trump got a lot of votes by promissing that Repeal and Replace would make health coverage better and cheaper. Nowhere he offered to also cut 20 million people out of health coverage to fund a tax rebate to high earners. But that’s what he’s giving his blue collar voters.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to J_A says:

                Could the first, long winded program be better packaged? Sure it can. Even I, long winded pedantic non-native speaker that I am, could do better.

                It’s funny how men have detailed thoughts on complicated subjects but women are long-winded.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird says:

                To put a finer point on it, *NOBODY* is arguing that “Democrats should lie”. *NOBODY*.

                My argument always was “don’t brag about how you’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of work when you’re freaking campaigning in coal country”. I’m pretty sure that that’s in the ballpark of what Stillwater was arguing too.

                Arguing against the position that “Clinton shouldn’t have done that, Jesus” as if the argument was “so, you want her to lie?” is to defend Clinton against attacks that nobody is making.

                If we want to fight climate change, if we want to run with green energy as a country, we need a better way to get our co-citizens on board than millionaires from the other tribe to tell them “it’s time for you to take one for the team and change!”Report

              • J_A in reply to Jaybird says:

                My argument always was “don’t brag about how you’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of work when you’re freaking campaigning in coal country”.

                She wasn’t bragging about putting a lot of miners out of work. She was acknowledging it was happening because of market forces, that all of the King’s men and all of the King’s horses would be unable to stop, and that we should engage in policies that would mitigate the impact of those closures.

                That’s very clear [or not] in her detailed thoughts quoted above.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to J_A says:

                She wasn’t bragging about putting a lot of miners out of work.

                Christ.

                This is doubly stupid because we’re not disagreeing on whether she should have done what she did. We’re merely disagreeing on the degree to which she shouldn’t have done it.Report

              • J_A in reply to Jaybird says:

                We’re merely disagreeing on the degree to which she shouldn’t have done it.

                And here is where you again befuddle your readers

                Should she have:

                ignored coal miners completely, refusing to acknowledge their existence or their issues one way or the other; or

                lied to them about all the good things she would do and how they will all have their jobs back; or

                given the detailed and thoughtful long answer that acknowledges there is a problem, is realistic about the root causes, and the impossibility of turning the clock back, and offered mitigation measures; or

                something else that you will finally explain in detail?Report

              • Stillwater in reply to J_A says:

                If she’s in conference with policy makers discussing, she gives the Policy speech.

                If she’s in a nationally televised debate selling a view that market forces are undermining coal jobs she doesn’t say “we’re gonna put a lotta miners and companies outa work, right Tim?” That’s just terrible retail politics: she explicitly says that miners will lose their jobs because of actions she will take if elected.

                If she wants to get coal-country votes, she plays politics on the issue by making hand-wavey gestures at clean coal technology reviving the coal industry, just like Bush 2 and Obama did.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to J_A says:

                This is the old-fashioned “what do you replace it with?” gambit.

                “I think we should put out the fire.”
                “What do we replace it with?”

                When it comes to Hillary Clinton saying what she said in front of the group, my response is “Holy Crapola. That was horrible. She shouldn’t have done that.”

                “Oh? You want her to lie? You want her to ignore miners? I notice you haven’t provided us with a detailed policy!”

                “Dude. We’re still arguing over whether she should have bragged about putting coal miners out of work and I’m still arguing that she shouldn’t have.”

                (Here’s your opportunity to tell me that she wasn’t “bragging”, again.)

                “I don’t see why we should give your thoughts any weight when you don’t even tell us what she should have done instead!”

                “Fair enough.”

                Now, I *WILL* imagine someone like Slick Willie or Uncle Joe giving a similar speech because I think that they wouldn’t have effed up on a massive scale and here’s how I imagine their points would have gone.

                “Man, I look at how communities in these communities have been devastated by the communities changing because the mines close. That’s awful and it’s terrible for the communities. I want you to know that I have policies that will help these communities. Move them from the industries that are going away and into the industries that will be replacing the old ones. New jobs to help revitalize the communities. By the way, I’d like to point out that I have nothing to do with these industries going away, which is why I used the passive voice back there. Communities. Jobs. Revitalizing.”

                Something like that.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

                The Hillary/put em outa work issue seems like perfect time to remember my friend’s now famous words: “I thought that if I could just get that person to understand my pov, they’d agree with me.” Wrong then, wrong now.

                The policy-paper defense of Hillary’s argument that night is wrong for two really important reasons, seems to me. The first is that retail politics strikes me as the worst context to adopt the “if I can explain myself clearly enough voters will agree with me” approach to persuasion because it implies that the speaker doesn’t actually have a policy position, just a bunch of analysis about an underlying problem. I recall Bernie demonstrating this distinction in a pretty devastating way: when asked whether EPA officials who knew about but didn’t report lead contamination in the FLint water supply, Hillary went into a long, detailed account of how blahblahsnore-snore, whereas Bernie’s response was “they should be fired”. Boomshagalaga!

                The other reason it’s terrible retail politics is that explaining your reasoning even more carefully doesn’t change people’s minds when they already disagree with you. It won’t get you votes. People who already agree with you accept that detailed reasoning, and people who disagree obviously reject that reasoning or they wouldn’t disagree. “No, you’re wrong. Let me explain myself one more time, more carefully, and you’ll see that I’m right!” “Arrgghhhh!”

                I mean, we’re pretty deep in the weeds in the Retail Politics 101 type analysis but I think it’s illustrative of why some people – me for example – viewed Hillary as a very weak candidate.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

                I’ll run back to my voter triad again:

                1. People who, if they vote, will vote for you
                2. People who, if they vote, will vote for the other guy
                3. People who might be persuaded to vote either way, depending

                I am *NOT* arguing that the country consists solely of #1s and #3s. There are a lot of #2s out there. You don’t deal with them by hoping that they’ll turn into #1s. You deal with them by getting them to forget to vote or to be outnumbered by #1s and #3s that vote for you.

                And the worst way to do that is to say things that get #2s fired up and raring to vote against you, #3s to say “Man, I don’t want to vote for someone who says that… what does their opponent have to say?”, and #1s to say “No, you didn’t understand what they said.”

                I can’t believe that we’re still arguing over whether Clinton did make a mistake or merely may have.Report

              • J_A in reply to Jaybird says:

                That I can agree with.

                The criticism is that she gave a long-winded, or seriously thought, policy speech that was not tailored to her audience.

                And that it gave their opponents selectively quoted from that speech to imply she was happy about miners losing their jobs, and she would expedite the process.

                All that is bad campaigning.

                However, their opponents lied about what they would do for the miners. They lied to their faces.

                There’s a party with policies to address the problems of white working class people. And gay party is not the GOP. We can discuss the marketing issues the Dems have, which are plenty. But when people say the Dems should devise policies to help the white working class I’m at a loss. What policies do people want to help the WWC that are not already part of the Democratic platform.

                Unless what “policies to help the WWC” is code for “stop helping people that are not like us”

                BIG NOTE: I know very well that you, Jaybird, do not want to stop policies that help women and minorities. But it seems that some voters would rather lose their Medicaid that have Medicaid cover people they dislike.

                So how do we campaign among this people? Bait and switch? Promise to do what we won’t do? It’s an honest question, because I don’t know how to square that circle.Report

              • pillsy in reply to J_A says:

                So how do we campaign among this people?

                We don’t.

                If they’re the only people we can’t reach, we win, which is good, because by construction they’re a group of people we can’t reach, and we don’t want to reach because they’d be toxic to any coalition we could actually form.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to J_A says:

                The criticism is that she gave a long-winded, or seriously thought, policy speech that was not tailored to her audience.

                Not exactly.
                My criticism is that she bragged about putting coal miners out of work.

                “We Are Going To Put A Lot Of Coal Miners & Coal Companies Out Of Business”

                We! SHE SAID “WE”!

                “However, their opponents lied about what they would do for the miners. They lied to their faces.”

                Uh, yeah. Looky there. Their opponents won.
                Oooh! And they just pulled out of the Paris Agreement!

                Didn’t see that coming.

                So how do we campaign among this people? Bait and switch? Promise to do what we won’t do? It’s an honest question, because I don’t know how to square that circle.

                How’s this? Before we agree on the best way to reach them, we should hammer out the things that we should definitely avoid, lest we alienate them.

                Here’s my list so far:
                1. Avoid bragging about putting them out of work.

                Can we agree that this list is good so far? Or would you like to argue about how what you want is a list of things to do, not a list of things to *NOT* do, and how you’re guessing that my list of things to do *MUST* therefore contain “1. Lie to them” as their first entry and how you’re too principled to do the things on the list that I’m refusing to provide?Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to J_A says:

                Well, no, she said “we” are going to be putting coal companies out of business. As in, the government she would put together.

                That was fatal, right there.Report

              • J_A in reply to Jaybird says:

                Even I, long winded pedantic non-native speaker that I am, could do better.

                It’s funny how men have detailed thoughts on complicated subjects but women are long-winded.

                For what it’s worth, even I, long-winded pedantic non-native speaker man that I am, could do better.

                FIFYReport

              • Dan d in reply to J_A says:

                The problem is, the second one is impossible to achieve.

                No it’s not the government could easily put coal miners back to work by buying coal and putting it into storage. It’s just that nobody wants to do that.

                The government creates lots of jobs for the people it cares about, if it weren’t for government funding 90% of college professors and administrators would be out of work.Report

              • J_A in reply to Dan d says:

                No it’s not the government could easily put coal miners back to work by buying coal and putting it into storage. It’s just that nobody wants to do that.

                Put it in storage and do what with it? It seems we truly are all Keynesians now.

                How much should our taxes increase to do that? What should we cut to pay for that coal? Medicaid? The military? Waste and fraud?

                You know who else is losing their jobs? Sears workers. Perhaps the government should buy every American and green card holder a pair of jeans from Sears every quarter. Why do you hate blue collar workers?Report

              • Stillwater in reply to J_A says:

                Put it in storage and do what with it?

                Isn’t it already in storage? Put it back in the storage location it was extracted from? I’m confused by the proposal.

                Dand has a point that the gummint could, if it chose, subsidize extraction and relocation of coal into massive storage containers, but only if the jobs themselves have some intrinsic or instrumental value worth preserving justifying not simply making cash payments to miners to sit on their hands and watch tv all day. Why not just pay them to not work at that point, rather than engage in irrational, stupid work? Which makes it pretty clear – to me anyway – that the jobs themselves have no intrinsic value.Report

              • Saul Degraw in reply to Stillwater says:

                @stillwater

                This would still be an environmental disaster. The government can also revive the WPA and CCC and embark on a decades long (and it will take decades) plan to clean up the environment in places like West Virginia, rural PA, and Kentucky. This can employ miners.

                But coal miners seemingly don’t want that. They seemingly want their dangerous jobs that leave people with Black Lung cause it is manly or some such.

                Sometimes materials are no longer needed. Should we still be mining for asbestos? Natural gas is too abundant for coal to be useful.

                JAs point was that retail workers are blue collar too and suffering from the retail meltdown but no one seems to care about them because they are often minorities and women and city dwellers. Retail workers are told to suck it up and nothing lasts forever. The GOP just panders and gives special pleading to coal miners.

                But those mines aren’t opening again and the GOP wants it that way. They are just going to complain about environmentalists and get votes over and over again. And people like Dan d fall for it because they just can’t stand the existence of New Yorker reading liberals who like NPR and used book stores.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                I agree with all that except for the claim that retail workers are blue collar workers. If you believe that, you’ve never done actual work with a “blue” collar on. And not to pick on you specifically here, I can’t tell if the obliteration of a pretty obvious (tho vaguely bounded at the edges) distinction between types of work is willful or not, but liberal’s failure to admit it – either politically or substantively – is part of what pisses off the WWC.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Stillwater says:

                Based on what the most vocal defenders of the WWC say in this very comment section, you can also piss off the WWC by daring to live in a major coastal city, ordering the wrong condiments on your sandwich, believing in harm-reduction strategies for heroin addiction, or not being incredibly, profoundly worried about the precise condition of strangers’ genitals, or failing to recognize how stylish you are for wearing black cargo pants and black T shirts everywhere.

                Oh, and you can also piss of the WWC by offering to hire coal miners to do useless work and by failing to hire coal miners to do useless work.

                Maybe trying to avoid pissing off the WWC is just a pointless waste of time.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to pillsy says:

                Maybe trying to avoid pissing off the WWC is just a pointless waste of time.

                I think it depends. Putting aside the scope of the WWC as its being used here, your position is mor’rless that no matter what libs/dems do it will piss off the WWC. Which if true, means Dems can no longer reach them politically. But Obama did very well with those voters (black dude!) so something changed between then and 2016.

                The more important worry is that if it’s true that Dems increasingly can’t reach the WWC, remaining competitive at the Presidential level will require Dems to pick off and add a new block of voters. Which means changing something in their platform/outreach. Which is what pro-Dem people deny as being necessary.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Stillwater says:

                Putting aside the scope of the WWC as its being used here, your position is mor’rless that no matter what libs/dems do it will piss off the WWC.

                That seems to be the inescapable conclusion if you believe that the WWC is motivated by nothing but despicable cultural war bullshit, spite directed at imaginary “elites”, and symbolic commitments to dying industries.

                This seems like a pretty shitty thing to believe about the WWC, and indeed if someone were to spring it on me without context I’d think it was nothing more than a set of vicious slurs, but the people asserting the accuracy of this description purport to be speaking in defense of the WWC, and at least one of them claims to be a member of it himself.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to pillsy says:

                I’m losing the thread of your view. Earlier, in response to a comment from J A, you said ‘we don’t campaign for those people’ referring to WWC people who didn’t vote for HIllary because they’re racists, etc. Now you’re saying that Dems should try to recruit WWC people who didn’t vote for Hillary for reasons that weren’t based on racism, etc.

                This strikes me as trying to have it both ways: that Hillary only lost votes from racist WWC but that Hillary also lost votes from non-racist WWC voters.

                How do you distinguish between the two? How do you message to reach one group but not the other?Report

              • pillsy in reply to Stillwater says:

                OK, my response to @j-a is premised on the idea that some WWC people are indeed racist, spite-infused asshats, not because those things are inherent to being part of the WWC, but because racism, spite, and asshattery are things that are found among members of all races and classes.

                So those people are unreachable.

                But I don’t see any reason to believe that those people are the entirety of the WWC, except the fact that self-proclaimed champions of the WWC keep insisting that they are.Report

              • J_A in reply to Stillwater says:

                But Obama did very well with those voters (black dude!) so something changed between then and 2016.

                There was eight years of continuous attack from the GOP in between. That must have had some effect

                Plus, things also changed for the better for many non WWC people. That probably hurt, too.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Stillwater says:

                Second response just for the Obama part.

                One obvious answer is, in fact, economic anxiety. When he was elected in ’08, the economy was a burning wreck teetering on the edge of collapse after 8 years of GOP rule, and the GOP candidate at the time was running a super-crappy campaign which particularly botched its reaction to the financial crisis.

                In ’12 he was an incumbent they’d already accepted.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

                Maybe trying to avoid pissing off the WWC is just a pointless waste of time.

                If I were a Republican, I would hope and pray that you continue to think this and would donate money to you if you promised to campaign as if it were the case.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

                If I were a Republican, I would hope and pray that you continue to think this and would donate money to you if you promised to campaign as if it were the case.

                Why? Is my assessment of what pisses off the WWC flawed?

                If it’s not, then it’s impossible to avoid pissing them off, and we need to figure out how to work around that particular obstacle.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

                You do *NOT* want the WWC voting as a bloc.

                Well, until you abolish the electoral college. But if you don’t abolish the electoral college, you don’t want to contribute to the feedback loop that seems to be having them do so.

                Trying to avoid pissing them off is worth your while.

                Maybe you won’t get their votes, fine. But you can make them not care who wins.

                If you make them care who wins and it’s the other guy?

                That’s really dumb.

                You should avoid that.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

                You do *NOT* want the WWC voting as a bloc.

                I don’t want a lot of things, including (as you astutely note) the Electoral College itself, but that doesn’t mean I’m not stuck with them.

                So, based on what I said above, it doesn’t seem like there’s any way to avoid pissing the WWC off and having them vote as a bloc, so it’s time to start figuring out how to deal with that extremely unpleasant electoral reality. Anything else is just denial, right?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

                So, based on what I said above, it doesn’t seem like there’s any way to avoid pissing the WWC off and having them vote as a bloc, so it’s time to start figuring out how to deal with that extremely unpleasant electoral reality. Anything else is just denial, right?

                I guess it depends on whether you see “pissing them off but not to the point where they’ll vote for your opponent” as a possibility.

                If you don’t, may I suggest “Global Climate Change will hurt Black People more than it will hurt White People” as a campaign slogan?Report

              • George Turner in reply to Jaybird says:

                The ACLU is claiming that climate change will disproportionately impact people of color, but as they’re better adapted to warmer climates than Norwegian Americans are, I don’t see how that makes sense.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

                I guess it depends on whether you see “pissing them off but not to the point where they’ll vote for your opponent” as a possibility.

                Based on what I’ve been seeing in the comments here, it seems pretty much impossible to do so, because any commitment to social liberalism, or simply having people living in big cities in one’s coalition, is a mortal insult.Report

              • El Muneco in reply to Stillwater says:

                Just a quibble – there are literal blue collar workers in retail (the guys like Fred Clark at Slacktivist who unload the trucks and stock the shelves). And certainly at some point “retail” dovetails into “supply chain” where they install microwave ovens (custom kitchen delivery).

                Hell, even a supermarket checker has more in common with a coal miner (shitty shifts, chronic pain, union busting, no promotion path) than anyone who works where I do.

                I get your point, but maybe I just don’t draw the distinction the same place you do.Report

              • Saul Degraw in reply to Stillwater says:

                @stillwater

                Some retail work can be highly lucrative especially if someone is good at sales and works at an upscale shop that offers a commission.

                A lot of retail work is for around minimum wage (maybe slightly above), offers inconsistent hours,* and often zero benefits. So it might not kill you but it certainly isn’t a picnic.

                *https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/business/economy/volatile-income-economy-jobs.html?_r=0

                Again, I object to any definition of blue-collar that has jobs that were only done by white working class men and might have excluded minorities for racist reasons.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                Saul,

                Correct me if this is wrong: your definition of retail work is a person who wears pretty nice clothes, as well spoken and fairly articulate, works the floor of a retail outlet, interacts with people to sell them products, and goes home at the end of the day just as clean as when they started it. Something like that.

                Blue collar workers would agree with you and deny that retail workers are blue collar on precisely those grounds. Maybe this is a useful metric: as manual effort to perform a task increases so does the identification of that task as blue collar. So being blue collar isn’t a function of how much money a person makes – oil rig workers make notoriously good money and it’s about as blue collar as it gets.Report

              • Saul Degraw in reply to Stillwater says:

                @stillwater

                Retail is a very broad category. A person who works in a GAP folding t-shirts is a retail worker. A person working in a used bookshop is a retail worker. But so is a person who sells new cars or fancy audio equipment and/or sells expensive clothing in department stores on commission.

                There are people who can make good incomes via retail but I think that is only a small-segment of the total.

                When I’m talking about retail workers as blue-collar workers, I mean everyone from Wall-Mart greeters to Supermarket checkout people to CVS aisle stockers or people who work at mega-chains. Bouie covered the retail crisis and how it hurts poor people in cities at Slate:

                http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/04/the_response_to_the_retail_apocalypse_shows_which_workers_count_in_trump.html

                There’s one other answer to consider, one that speaks to deep divides in our society. Retail work in malls and shopping centers and department stores is largely work done by women. Of the nearly 6 million people who work in those fields in stores like Sears, Michaels, Target, J.C. Penney, and Payless, close to 60 percent are women. There’s another issue to consider. A substantial portion of these workers—roughly 40 percent across the different kinds of retail—are black, Latino, or Asian American.

                The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t disaggregate this data by race and gender, but it’s likely that a large number of those nonwhite workers—if not a majority—are women too. By contrast, heavy manufacturing, industrial, and extraction work is overwhelmingly white and male. What’s more, it’s tied to a particular image of the standalone (and often unionized) worker who can provide for his family on one income. Americans have historically had an almost romantic attachment to the hard-hat worker, usually white, in a way that we don’t to any other profession.

                Work is gendered and it is racialized. What work matters is often tied to who performs it. It is no accident that those professions dominated by white men tend to bring the most prestige, respect, and pay, while those dominated by women—and especially women of color—are often ignored, disdained, and undercompensated.

                Report

              • J_A in reply to Stillwater says:

                Blue collar workers would agree with you and deny that retail workers are blue collar on precisely those grounds. Maybe this is a useful metric: as manual effort to perform a task increases so does the identification of that task as blue collar.

                So McDonald short-order cooks are not blue collar? Nurses and hospital orderlies are not blue collar? Office cleaning ladies (those elves that clean your office trash bin and bathroom late at night) are not blue collar? Yard maintenance teams are not blue collar?

                So why don’t oil riggers and coal miners identify with them? Are they not getting dirty enough at the end of the day?

                It is as if all of the above are failing in something that would make them WWCReport

              • Stillwater in reply to J_A says:

                J A, (and Saul too):

                So McDonald short-order cooks are not blue collar?

                I guess my point is this, in a nutshell: you can insist that McDonald’s cooks (and retail workers) are blue collar workers, but if you do you’re going to continue to misunderstand the economic and culturally based grievances of people we’re referring to as (blue collar) WWC.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Stillwater says:

                True. But.

                They need a different term to self-identify than blue collar or even white working class. You can’t co-opt a turn because it is politically useful and exclude folks who historically were included.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Kazzy says:

                Was there ever a time prior to this thread when retail workers were viewed as blue collar?Report

              • George Turner in reply to J_A says:

                Except that Hillary’s plan was total BS. There is no universe of possibilities in which wind turbines would be built in a coal mining town because there’s nothing remotely like that being built in coal mining towns. The wind turbines are going to be built in states that have existing wind turbine and aerospace industries. Perhaps St Louis, Wichita, San Diego, or Dallas. Those jobs do not help coal mining areas. Nor are wind turbines ever going to be set up in coal mining areas because those areas don’t have much wind.

                So what Hillary was telling Appalachia is that she’s going to throw us all out of work, but provide new jobs to other people who live far away.

                Trump’s message was different. His message was that we are going to keep mining coal, we can keep our jobs, and we can keep our homes. And he is correct. Coal is one of the best fuels there is, and we will keep burning it.Report

              • J_A in reply to George Turner says:

                There is no universe of possibilities in which wind turbines would be built in a coal mining town because there’s nothing remotely like that being built in coal mining towns. The wind turbines are going to be built in states that have existing wind turbine and aerospace industries.

                Wind turbines are manufactured in just a handful of facilities.

                Wind power plants are installed anywhere there is good and steady wind.

                I drove 12 hours one day to Ely, NV, to go inspect a wind plant being constructed. There’s no aerospace industry in Ely, NV. Fish, the closest commercial airport is 6 hours away. But there’s plenty of wind.

                And there’s lots of work in building a wind power farm. Actually much more than in manufacturing the turbines (a highly automated job)Report

              • George Turner in reply to J_A says:

                I don’t think people in West Virginia or Eastern Kentucky are going to commute to Nevada to put up wind turbines. And how could they, as their cars are all up on blocks?

                We’re also not going to put wind turbines up in Appalachia, as there’s very little wind here. Wind only has a decent rate of return in very windy areas, which rules out wind power for most of the world. (global wind map)

                It also causes grid instability if you use very much of it. A Planning Engineer cover that subject in detail here.

                Often wind and solar projects are a way to get a conventional “backup” power plant approved. It’s a bit of bait and switch.

                Sometimes it becomes outright fraud, too. Spain was paying such a high rate for solar generation that one site got caught because it was selling massive amounts of solar onto the grid at night. The subsidized rates had made it highly profitable to run diesel generators and claim the power was solar, so of course somebody did just that.

                In any event, we can use some but not much wind power due to grid issues.Report

              • J_A in reply to George Turner says:

                As you might recall, my day job is in running utilities, particularly power generation utilities, in several parts of the world. We use every commercial technology: coal, gas, hydro, wind, solar.

                In the last ten years, wind and solar generation total all-in generation prices (fixed and variable costs), on a per kWh generated, have fallen as low as mid-size gas fired combined cycle generation and below coal generation. Granted, the plant factor is in the 30% instead of the 90%, but the cost to produce one kWh is the same, no subsidies. And the back up plants, that’s a thing of the past.

                And the instabilities introduced in the grid operation by wind farms are (to my eternal surprise, I was opposed to increases in wind generation for that same reason) much lower than you could have imagined, unless you have a weak, long, poorly interconnected grid. Wind power output doesn’t really shift that fast or that unpredictably that this would become a major issue. And new grid control systems can help those weak grids withstand more wind power injections.

                And, of course, solar is highly predictable.Report

              • George Turner in reply to J_A says:

                Hooking up a little wind and solar is the easy part. Hooking up a lot of wind and solar creates serious issues. You either have to build a large amount of ridiculously excessive capacity or come up with a storage system that can pretty much power the entire grid for perhaps several days.

                So assuming that wind and solar will never provide more than 20%, at least in the foreseeable future, the effect is the same as having a world population that’s 20% smaller, but still industrializing at the same rate. All we’ll accomplish is a slight delay in hitting the same emissions increases.

                The solution, of course, is nuclear, but the same people upset over CO2 tend to be strongly opposed to that, too.Report

              • J_A in reply to George Turner says:

                Wind is 40% of the Nicaraguan system generation

                They get to make it work ok.Report

              • George Turner in reply to J_A says:

                I’m sure it runs their country’s light bulb just fine. ^_^

                Denmark also has a very large amount of wind power, I think 40%, but they’re hooked into European grids for stability.Report

              • Lyle in reply to J_A says:

                Further using ERCOT as an example the grid control stations need to hire meteorologists to predict the wind in more detail than the NWS. As wind farms are developed you can find out the average difference between winds at the weather station and the wind farm, and factor that into the forecast for wind. (Ercot started doing this since before they had it a couple of rolling blackouts occurred) Of course you also need meteorologists to predict hot and cold spells because they affect demand also. On their site you see todays wind power forecast as well as that for the next day.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to George Turner says:

                These two almost snuck by me.

                What I am seeing here is an awful lot of complaining that employment opportunities are in decline in eastern coal country, and we should do something to bring those jobs back by burning more coal (and/or stop enacting policies to make coal power unattractive). The response has been to talk about how coal is on the decline, and even if it wasn’t, the mining jobs still would be, because of automation. But how about the good, hard working people of coal country do what good hardworking people have always done when economic conditions in a given area turn sour.

                PACK YER SHIT AND MOVE TO WHERE THE JOBS ARE!

                Seriously, this is a time honored tradition of people the world over. Human migration is a thing when you can’t support yourself or your community, and in the US, we have the added benefit of being so large that a person can move to find work and not even have to enter a foreign country! Our ancestors did this all the time, and almost always did it blind, with little to no ability to look for or secure employment prior to pulling up stakes. Thanks to instant communication, it’s easy to do.

                Instead of looking for welfare for an area, just offer relocation and training to anyone that wants to leave. I’d rather my tax dollars go toward that than to have them propping up a failing place because it’s old and has deep roots, or worse, helping to support substance abuse.Report

              • George Turner in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Moving can be difficult when you have too many outstanding warrants. It also means convincing your wife and sister to move, and if she’s not amendable, that’s all there is to it.

                Also, people do move out. Many of those communities have trouble retaining people. They tend to go off to college and not come back. When I was growing up my home town’s population was 13,700 or so. Now it’s about 10,000.

                The coal industry’s direct employment wasn’t as important as the indirect employment from the money it put in the community. Mining and logging are just about the only two things the region will produce for outside income.

                The primary problem is there’s little else you can do in Appalachia that can’t be done better elsewhere. I work in factory automation all over the country. I’ve racked my brain for a reason to put a nice facility in eastern Kentucky, as opposed to somewhere else, and the only thing I can come up with is that a factory on the side of a mountain could accept deliveries on the uphill side and send shipments out the downhill side, using gravity conveyor for all the internal transport to save electricity, thus shifting the energy costs to the trucking companies.

                Other than that, I got nothing. You don’t have a high concentration of highly educated, highly skilled people. You don’t have a good transport infrastructure because all the roads are necessarily long and meandering. You don’t have a thriving arts scene or cool bars. You don’t even have much farmland.

                I recall one potential factory that was looking for an executive to run the place. As a condition of taking the job running the plant, one of the conditions was that the director would have a suite in the Lexington Hyatt Regency every weekend, UK basketball tickets for every game, and a few other perks. Basically it was like trying to hire someone to work on an offshore oil rig.

                We do have deer and elk, though. And trees. Lots and lots of trees.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to George Turner says:

                GEntrication sucks.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to George Turner says:

                Outstanding warrants is either a non-sequitur, or coal country has some serious LE/crime issues it needs to deal with.

                The family issue I get, but lots of people come to the US, legally or otherwise, looking for work, and they leave all their family behind. If they can do it…

                As for the territory, I propose an acre for acre trade through the national forest/park service. For every acre of vacant Kentucky land the service takes over, an acre is opened up somewhere in the west (hell, we could probably do 10 to 1, and it would hardly make a dent in the federal land holdings in the west). There is nothing wrong with letting those towns die and get torn down.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                IT’s almost as if the obstacles… aren’t.Report

              • There is no universe of possibilities in which wind turbines would be built in a coal mining town because there’s nothing remotely like that being built in coal mining towns.

                Absolutely. When Vestas was looking to site a manufacturing facility in the US, they didn’t look outside of major metro areas in/around the Great Plains and prairie states where their major markets are. Then they ran down the list that they published: large educated workforce geographically concentrated; large industrial space (million square feet for blades and nacelles); steel mill and associated work force; high-volume rail access to their markets; robust subcontractor population for sub-assemblies; quality-of-life amenities for the managers and engineers.Report

              • George Turner in reply to Michael Cain says:

                Gee. We have, well, almost none of those things in Appalachia.

                And we have another problem. Top notch CEOs and factory managers, who would have to be recruited from somewhere else, don’t want to live back in the hills, shop at an IGA or Piggly Wiggly, and send their kids to Knox County High School. We have trouble retaining the smart people who grew up in the hills.

                Appalachians all know this, so when we heard Hillary’s long-winded policy position, we knew we’d lose all the coal jobs and not get one job in return for the same reason that none of the other promised jobs ever materialized. And so Hillary had trouble getting 17% of the vote in areas that were once solidly Democratic union strongholds.

                But the region didn’t support Obama either, because he promised that although people could still build a coal plant, it would go bankrupt because of his policies. He used the EPA to make them as expensive and unworkable as possible, and tried to use the EPA to ban them altogether with their “endangerment” finding.

                That’s the main reason why companies started switching to gas turbine plants and didn’t upgrade or expand their coal plants, even though coal is cheaper, in some cases massively cheaper, such as Powder River coal, which is four or five times cheaper than the Appalachian coal, the expensive coal which is still about 65% the cost per BTU of natural gas.

                And as I’ve said, natural gas prices are spiky. natural gas price chart, 1997-2017

                The price bounced around between $1.61 to $18.25 per thousand cubic feet.

                natural gas prices from 1922 to 2012

                Prior to 1970, gas prices were lower than $0.17 cents per thousand cubic feet (adjusted for inflation, 1/3rd of current prices), but we burned coal instead because it’s cheaper. The price largely stayed below $2.00 per thousand cubic feet until 2000, but we burned coal instead because it’s cheaper. In 2014 gas prices hit $5.41 and we were building gas plants all over the place, because Obama had made coal plants unbuildable and unmaintainable.

                If you look at the latter natural gas price chart, you would never conclude that natural gas was the wave of the future. You would think we’d be abandoning it because the price had skyrocketed.Report

              • J_A in reply to George Turner says:

                If you look at the latter natural gas price chart, you would never conclude that natural gas was the wave of the future. You would think we’d be abandoning it because the price had skyrocketed.

                Looking at charts will tell you nothing useful unless you understand the fundamentals behind the changes

                Before 1970, natural gas was waste, a nuisance. We flared it at the wellhead because there was no good alternative economic use: the amount of gas a family would consume for cooking and heating is ridiculously small compared to the volumes available (*), and there were no real gas turbines for generation in those days.

                Then in the 1970s a petrochemical boom started, with natural gas as feedstock. Suddenly you go from two much gas to not enough. Add the development of efficient, commercial large combined cycle generation and now gas is bloody expensive

                Hence fracking, and no more flaring, and reinjection to wells.

                We always knew there was plenty of gas in the ground. Like, really, an awful lot. It was that there was no reason to dig for it.

                Until the demand for gas was created. And here we are now. How long until this situation changes? Isn’t know. I monitor it constantly in exchange for my paycheck. But we are in a lull right now. I don’t expect changes in the next decade though

                (*) Natural gas distribution utilities are also part of my purview at the officeReport

              • George Turner in reply to J_A says:

                We’ve had gas turbines power plants since 1939. We’ve been using them ever since as peakers, as coal and nuclear were cheaper for base load. We have centuries worth of coal and somebody is going to burn it.Report

              • This seems an appropriate point to put in one of my standard comments. The contiguous US states have three power grids. Things that are true for one are often not true in others.

                Consider spiky natural gas prices. Anything that says “Henry Hub prices” historically matters a lot in the Eastern Interconnect, not nearly so much in Texas, and for practical purposes not at all in the states of the Western Interconnect. The big Rita/Katrina spike in 2005 was a non-event in the Western; in some areas, Canadian suppliers were still paying US customers to take NG off their hands.

                Intrastate NG prices in Texas, which don’t completely track the Henry Hub price, have been so low and so stable for so long that NG has been the dominant fuel for electricity generation in Texas for decades. Not just for peakers but for base load.

                Coal faces challenges in the Western that don’t exist elsewhere. Horrible efficiency numbers absent cooling water, of which there is essentially zero for new plants; combined cycle NG is much better. Much more stable NG prices. Enormous miner productivity, so there aren’t many jobs (Wyoming produces twice as much coal as KY and WV combined, with one-fifth the jobs). Heavily urban/suburban populations who want, for various reasons, NOx and SOx and PM2.5 to be gone. Much better renewable resources, both geographic and type diversity, than elsewhere. Eg, in 2016, conventional hydro accounted for 26% of Western generation; in wet years it runs as high as 35%; within the region it could be doubled.

                I cheerfully admit that I comment/write here with a Western bias. And often say that the consequences if US policy can’t be flexible enough to let the Western make quite different policy choices than the Eastern, Bad Things happen.Report

              • J_A in reply to George Turner says:

                We’ve had gas turbines power plants since 1939. We’ve been using them ever since as peakers,

                And we’ve had cars since 1886. I’m sure they were just as powerful and efficient as today’s

                If we want to be pedantic, the first gas turbine patent that resembles the current apparatus we call a gas turbine was granted in 1791. The 1939 gas turbine you mention, installed in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, was all of 4 MW. The first utility application of a gas turbine, 1946, was all of 27 MW.

                In 2011 Mitsubishi tested a 570 MW combined cycle unit with efficiency above 60%. The GE 9HA is rated 62% efficiency at 605 MW

                I guess we are not in Neuchâtel anymoreReport

              • George Turner in reply to J_A says:

                My point is that by the 1960’s we could’ve been switching from coal to natural gas, which was extremely cheap back then, but we didn’t because coal was also very cheap, and perhaps more importantly, easy to store on site because you can just pile it on the ground.

                Currently Powder River Basin coal sells for the energy equivalent of about $4.00 a barrel oil. It’s hard to beat that.

                Getting back to the point of non-hydro renewables, those will have trouble supplying more than about 20 percent of the grid, whereas an increase in coal power plant efficiency from about 30% to the current state of the art of 47%, with waste heat going for local heating, would probably have done more to reduce emissions.

                And we could increase efficiency far more. I have an idea for a split-cycle (separate compression and expansion pistons) Ericsson cycle plant with dual brick recuperators (like a glass plant) and liquid pistons to handle extremely high temperatures. (kind of like raising and lowering magma in a lava tube). It could probably surpass 80% efficiency, yet be really low-tech, consisting almost entirely of brick and concrete.Report

              • J_A in reply to George Turner says:

                Coal st current prices does not compete with gas at current prices because:

                – CC plants are more efficient than steam turbines plants, so the same $/MMBTU of fuel produces more MWh

                – CC plants have a fraction of the O&M costs of coal plants

                – The capital cost of a new coal plant is roughly twice that of a gas fired CC

                (From an internal study we commissioned one year ago)

                Coal competes very well with LNG in markets without/ with limited access to piped gas (like China. Chile, Central America and the Caribbean Brazil, Africa, India) but has very little future in markets with domestic gas like the USA.

                And your (we could have done gas in the 1960s fails to account that:

                Natural gas prices were regulated at the wellhead until the Carter administration, which made exploration for NG unprofitable.

                Interstate transportation of NG was heavily regulated up to and through the 1960s, which resulted in very limited transportation of natural gas across state lines.

                The state of the art of metallurgics in the 1060s-1980s did not allow for the high efficiencies and massive sizes of CC plants today. In the 1990s a 100 MW turbine was BIG. Today, it’s so small it’s hard to buy one.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to J_A says:

                There is also stuff like Kingston to consider. NG burns relatively clean and produces insignificant solid waste. As far as I know, there is no coal fired plant that does not produce tons of Ash & has stacks as clean as a CC NG plant.

                Since we don’t have a method in place to price the cost of coal plants combustion products, the price of coal lacks any consideration for the associated externalities.Report

              • Lyle in reply to J_A says:

                Note there is a large supply of natural gas in deeper coal beds (see coal bed methane). It currently costs more than fracked gas, but is is source, you pump the formation water out and the gas comes out. (Methane has always been a problem in coal mines causing explosions, called firedamp by miners) This is one of the reasons one can’t go to deep for coal, because the amount of methane increases with depth. But one could produce coal bed methane from the formations.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

                Appalachians all know this, so when we heard Hillary’s long-winded policy position, we knew we’d lose all the coal jobs and not get one job in return for the same reason that none of the other promised jobs ever materialized. And so Hillary had trouble getting 17% of the vote in areas that were once solidly Democratic union strongholds.

                ‘Appalachians’, or rather coal miners, (Which, again I remind you ‘Appalachia’ is not the same as ‘coal country’, which is a very small part of Appalachia. Here in Georgia, we don’t give a damn about coal mining.), however, were *not* smart enough to realize they were going to lose those jobs regardless of the amount of coal produced, because back ‘in the good times’ that everyone remembers, the 1980 to 1990s, coal miners produced 4 to 7 tonnes of coal a year, whereas now they produce 18, and it’s only going to keep going up.

                Did you happen to see my extremely long posts on the previous time we talked about this? How I pointed out that, at the current level of coal mining efficiency, we’d have to now mine *four million* tonnes of coal to need the same amount of coal mining jobs as in 1980? (That is not only three and a half times more coal that we’ve ever produced, but twice as much as we’d need to power *the entire country* with coal plants, with literally no other sources of power.)

                Yes, you are correct, that coal countries are, in fact, voting for Republicans because they promise the jobs will not go away, and will even come back…

                …but you keep leaving out the fact the Republicans are *lying*. Unless the government starts paying coal companies to have excessive miners, we have reached ‘peak coal mine employment’…or, technically, that was 2006.

                The coal industry will *never* need more miners than it currently has, even if we *completely reverse* the trend of moving away from coal, because the coal industry has figured out how to mine coal with fewer and fewer of those pesky ’employees’. At best, trying to reverse away from ‘less coal’ just extends the low slow death of coal mining employment another decade, where the jobs go away *slower*.Report

              • notme in reply to DavidTC says:

                I never heard republicans promise to restore every coal job. I did hear them say they wouldnt use the power of the govt to go after coal unlike the Dems war on coal.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to notme says:

                So you’re asserting that Republicans repeatedly saying things like ‘We will put our miners back to work.’ just means a *few* of them?

                So the lying is only by *implication*, then?

                But, anyway, as I pointed out, it’s basically impossible to increase coal mining jobs *at all*. NO ONE is getting ANY jobs back.

                Even in the ‘best possible world’, where natural gas increases in price, and solar somehow goes away, and coal power plants get spun back up, and coal production increases back to 2006 levels…

                …that will result in *less than half* the people who lost their jobs since then their jobs back, due to automated advances.

                And this tech advancement continue to happen, so by the time this hypothetical ‘increase in the amount of coal production’ finishes happening, and those mines are reopened, it’s not going to be ‘less than half’, it’s going to be…none. None of the people will get their jobs back.

                Super pro-coal policies by Republicans might result in some people merely *not being laid off* as quickly. And that’s it.

                That’s the reality we are in.Report

              • notme in reply to DavidTC says:

                Why do you so badly want to twist their words so you can call them liars?Report

              • DavidTC in reply to notme says:

                Everyone make a note, when people saying something about *groups* of things, but it turn out they only meant it for a few of that group, they’re not lying, according to notme.

                For example, when Obama said that if you like your plan, you can keep it, he meant that *some* people would be able to keep their plan.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to George Turner says:

                SO you want the governnment to pick the coal towns as winners and subsidize and protect their industries because the resident snow flakes will be sad to loss their jobs and unwilling to use their boot straps to perservere? Cool!Report

              • George Turner in reply to Kazzy says:

                No. I just would like the government to quit trying everything in its power to pick winners and losers by regulating an industry out of existence.

                When Germany decided to phase out nuclear, it turned to coal, even though it has huge natural gas lines from Russia. Europe still uses more coal and nuclear than natural gas.

                China is building hundreds of new coal plants. The US is building zero. That’s because Obama and the EPA promised utilities that they would go bankrupt if they built a new coal plant.

                But if our remaining coal plants shut down tomorrow, the grids would collapse entirely, as they still produce 30% of our power.Report

              • greginak in reply to George Turner says:

                Pollution affects people. Whether we do something about it or not is picking winners and losers.Report

              • George Turner in reply to greginak says:

                But noise pollution that disrupts the environment – forever, and scads of dead birds don’t get counted because acknowledging that would be politically incorrect.

                Running the Southeastern forests through wood chip plants to make the European power grid a little greener doesn’t get counted, because it would be politically incorrect.

                Covering countless acres with solar cells, which no animals can eat, doesn’t count as environmental degradation because it would be politically incorrect.Report

              • J_A in reply to George Turner says:

                You keep trying to prove a political point (that Democratic politicians hate coal or coal miners) by ignoring economics

                Europe and China do not have (significant) domestic gas. Their gas is priced at LNG prices. Coal competes well (on cost only, ignoring externalities) with LNG. Hence, they build coal plants (and a lot of renewables. too. China has more wind plants than anywhere else)

                If you want to create any kind of desired change (like bringing jobs to Appalachia) you’d do well if you start with factsReport

              • Kazzy in reply to George Turner says:

                SO coal companies shouldn’t have to bear the full cost of their environmental impact? Why do they need so many handouts?Report

              • George Turner in reply to Kazzy says:

                And yet we’re not billing wind turbines $1,000,000 per dead endangered or threatened bird that they kill.

                We have to start doing that to protect the environment, and our precious wildlife. Wind turbines need to pay for their externalities.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to George Turner says:

                Doesn’t answer the question.Report

              • George Turner in reply to Kazzy says:

                So you support million dollar fines for killing birds with wind turbines?Report

              • Kazzy in reply to George Turner says:

                Clever.Report

              • George Turner in reply to Kazzy says:

                So why doesn’t the environmentalists frame such arguments in defense of the environment? Why did Obama give wind turbines a pass when it comes to enforcing the endangered species act?

                Trump could just pick up his pen tomorrow and sign an executive order requiring wind turbine installations to be fined for killing endangered and threatened species according to existing law, which is $50,000 per dead endangered bird and $25,000 per dead threatened bird.

                If he does, a 1 MW wind turbine with a 34% capacity factor (US average) at $0.12 per kWh would produce $1,000 worth of electricity per week, and have to pay $25,000 in fines for the murder of a black-capped petrel and $25,000 more for a golden cheeked warbler. About a week after the executive order is signed, all the wind turbine owners would file lawsuits trying to block him, and they would lose. Then they’d shut down and dismantle every wind turbine in the United States because owning bird-choppers would guarantee bankruptcy.

                Wiping out our remaining threatened and endangered species isn’t “saving the environment.” It’s destroying our environment.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to George Turner says:

                Should coal plants be expected to bear the environmental costs they produce?Report

              • George Turner in reply to Kazzy says:

                Of course, but they should also be given huge subsidies for all the CO2 the emit that has created a massive increase in plant productivity, which is about a 31% increase over the 20th century. Nature link

                So, given that world food production is about $5 trillion, and 31% is due to coal, we should be paying coal producers and coal fired power plants about $1.5 trillion a year to cover externalities – just counting food for humans. If we tried to pay them for the benefits they bring to the entire ecosystem, well, we probably don’t have that much money.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to George Turner says:

                You are REALLY bad at math.

                31% increase is not 31% of total.Report

              • George Turner in reply to Kazzy says:

                Well, okay, 23% of total. So we only need to pay the coal industry about $1.1 trillion a year. Of course, that will mean they can sell the coal for free.

                My point is that when we use environmental regulations piecemeal (requiring mountain reclamation, fines for spills, but no fines for killing endless numbers of bald eagles, spotted owls, and whooping cranes), and just the fact that we’re choosing which parts of the environment to regulate, we are making political decisions to favor one industry and destroy another. A slightly different focus and we do the opposite.

                Should we use environmental regulations to destroy coal or to destroy wind turbines? We can do either. We could do both.

                It was the use of such regulations, based on fear, that led us to put a halt to nuclear power plant construction, even though nuclear power plants are the greenest technology there is. They take up very little space, unlike solar, and run 24/7 for baseload power. Heck, when they melt down they’re an even greater boon to the environment. Chernobyl was the best thing to happen to European wildlife since modern humans first arrived in the neolithic, unless you count the bloom in plant productivity caused by coal fired power plants.Report

              • J_A in reply to George Turner says:

                At some point it becomes clear you are going that much interested in facts, which is a pity because you are obviously an educated guy. But you’d rather make a partisan/political than an economics or technical argument, which makes talking with you a bit fruitless.

                And wind turbine actually kill very few birds fwiwReport

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to J_A says:

                According to The Audubon Society, they do kill a lot. But to their credit, the utilities and the manufactures are actively trying to come up with a solution.

                Note that on HAWTs, it’s the blade tips that are killer. Birds aren’t flying into the middle of the turbine, they are getting clipped by the tips because they have no way to gauge the blade path and speed. One solution being proposed is to be very careful siting HAWTs to avoid bird habitats and migratory paths. When that can’t be done, one recommendation is to use VAWTs, since the tighter spacing and other geometric arrangements discourage birds from trying to fly through the turbines.Report

              • George Turner in reply to J_A says:

                What I’m illustrating is that the partisan/political positions we’ve already taken are in large part determining the economics. Everybody is running around saying coal is dead. That’s because we’ve decided to kill it for partisan political reasons.

                Everybody says wind power is the future. That’s because we decided to exempt wind power from almost all environmental laws, such as the endangered species act, noise ordinances, on top of paying them green subsidies, or making utilities absorb the cost of grid stability.

                Everybody says nuclear is dead. That’s because we decided to make it really expensive, and then just too expensive to build.

                We dropped research into liquid fluoride thorium reactors. That’s because we made the political decision that their inherent safety would make our existing nuclear plants look wildly unsafe, and because the thorium cycle doesn’t produce weapon’s grade plutonium for a nuclear arsenal.

                Almost all the economics and tech we’re choosing between was largely determined by past political decisions.

                So to really get to the economics, you have look back out how we’ve framed the choices and how we’ve rigged the costs.Report

              • Francis in reply to George Turner says:

                we decided to exempt wind power from almost all environmental laws, such as the endangered species act,

                cite, please. It looks to me that the FWS has been doing its job by issuing incidental take permits under section 10 of the ESA. See here.

                It’s also really bizarre to read one of more die-hard conservatives at this site complaining about the ESA being enforced!Report

              • George Turner in reply to Francis says:

                Your source says:

                To meet the growing demand for rapid approval of wind energy plants, yet ensure conservation of federally-listed species, the Service and a coalition of states, The Conservation Fund, and representatives of the wind energy industry are preparing a Multi-Species Habitat Conservation Plan. If approved, this would provide for an incidental take permitting program for existing and future wind energy projects in the Midwest that may impact federally listed wildlife.

                Show me the fast track approval and rewriting of environmental regulations for the rapid construction of nuclear plants and we’ll talk.

                Wind turbines slaughter birds. Bird lungs aren’t remotely like mammal lungs. They can’t take the sharp pressure pulse produced by the wake of an airfoil. The blade doesn’t have to hit them to kill them. They die from the misses.

                The technology is environmentally unacceptable. We might as well try to power our economy with whale oil.Report

              • Lyle in reply to George Turner says:

                Note that windows kill birds also. Every so often I hear a thump as a bird flies into one of my windows and that is just the second story, what happens as you go higher? Do we require buildings to be underground or have no outside glass?Report

              • Kazzy in reply to George Turner says:

                Does the increase in plant productivity due to coal map perfectly to an increase in agriculture for food?

                Let’s make all energy industries pay the full freight on production and let the market decide. Deal?Report

              • Francis in reply to Kazzy says:

                Greening is a real thing, but there is no scientific linkage I’ve seen yet between planetary greening attributable to increased CO2 in the atmosphere and recent increases in industrial-scale agricultural productivity.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

                Pssst: Fossil fuel plants actually kill a lot more birds than wind turbines. Even when measured proportionally to kilowatt hour.

                Bird are *extremely* susceptible to mercury in the environment. Oh, and selenium. And arsenic.

                And all the other shit that coal burning dumps into the air.

                And coal burning kills a lot more *non*-avian species, also.

                *One* coal plant, literally just one coal plant, is killing more fish a year than the entire highest-end estimates for the number of birds killed by all wind turbines:

                https://thinkprogress.org/coal-ash-is-killing-900-000-fish-each-year-in-a-north-carolina-lake-study-finds-68b61130cbae

                Actually, I take that back. It’s not even the power plant doing it anymore. They don’t even *use* that lake anymore. They just sorta *left* that lake there, killing fish.

                How many fish do wind turbines kill again?

                Also, I feel I should point out that wind turbines pose no risk to the most important animal: Humans.

                Whereas the production of coal and the burning of it still kills slightly north of than 10,000 humans a year in the US. (Turns out we are not fans of arsenic either.)Report

              • George Turner in reply to DavidTC says:

                Oh, there’s some garbage science. Their study saying selenium is killing 900,000 fish in one lake is based on noticing some minor deformities in a sample of 1,200 fish, and then just flinging crap at a wall. Their graph shows selenium levels in the lake of 1 ppb, whereas in the open ocean the selenium content is 4 ppb.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

                Their graph shows selenium levels in the lake of 1 ppb, whereas in the open ocean the selenium content is 4 ppb.

                …are you just making stuff up now?

                The study was of the level of selenium in *fish*, not in the waters.

                Also, the amount of selenium in the open ocean appears to be 0.9 ppb.

                Whereas, as is *trivially googleable* with ‘selenium ppb lake sutton’, surface water samples in Lake Sutton tested *above* the EPA standard of 1.5 ppb. (We do not know how much above.)

                However, the EPA has recently revised those standards anyway (Because surface water can be fine and yet there is too much selenium.) and now instead tests how much selenium is in fish.

                You know, like the study did.

                heir study saying selenium is killing 900,000 fish in one lake is based on noticing some minor deformities in a sample of 1,200 fish

                …which they then *tested for selenium* and found it in the fish.

                ‘In Sutton Lake, 85 percent of all fish muscle samples examined contained selenium levels above the EPA’s threshold of 11.3 parts per million.’

                Those are, it must be noted, the *living* fish.Report

              • George Turner in reply to DavidTC says:

                Those are the *living* fish because they didn’t have any *dead* fish to study. If the selenium levels were too high, they wouldn’t let people eat the fish.

                Selenium is an essential element. They sell it at the store.

                It’s in the coal because it’s an essential nutrient for plants.

                In the water, which they tested, selenium was about in the same concentration as ocean water. If it’s becoming concentrated in the fish, it’s probably because the fish need it, as it’s an essential element and not in their environment in greater than normal abundance.

                They’re not doing science. They’re doing “sciency” stuff. In science, you’d have a fish kill and work to figure out why they were dying in large numbers. What they did was measure an element that they thought would be toxic, and then extrapolate that there must be a bunch of dead fish out there in fish world.

                I could take blood samples from Berkley students, come up with a theory about the maximum safe level of THC and alcohol, and project that there must be 900,000 dead Berkeley students somewhere. But the Berkeley morgue would remain mysteriously empty. That’s a clue that the theory was invalid.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

                If it’s becoming concentrated in the fish, it’s probably because the fish need it, as it’s an essential element and not in their environment in greater than normal abundance.

                That doesn’t even make sense.

                You are correct in that that many fish cannot possibly be dying in Lake Sutton. I withdraw the claim.

                However, there *are* levels of selenium above the EPA’s normal level in *almost all the fish* in that lake. The lake not only has elevated selenium, *Duke Energy agrees* it does, and has agreed to clean it up.

                I could take blood samples from Berkley students, come up with a theory about the maximum safe level of THC and alcohol, and project that there must be 900,000 dead Berkeley students somewhere. But the Berkeley morgue would remain mysteriously empty. That’s a clue that the theory was invalid.

                Oh, even more obviously, you could talk about how many birds wind turbines kill a year, when more of them are killed by coal, and *even more* of them are killed by fricking power lines! (And even more are killed by cats.)

                You seem to be making the argument that the government has been picking and choosing which externalities to focus on.

                The problem is that, in this case, this is utter crap. Coal has *huge* externalities, both in mining, and in burning it. I know *you* think most of the externalities are made up, but a giant rolling wall of coal ash slurry in Roane County in 2008 would beg to differ, as would the estimated ten thousand *human* deaths from coal power a year.

                In response, you point at…some dead birds. But not only is ‘killing birds’ basically a *habit* of civilization, with a lot more of them dying due to *windows* than turbines, but *coal itself* kills more more birds than wind turbines! (Via a combination of general air pollution and mercury and other crap.)

                And this is a weird argument…surely we should be treating all animals the same. Hey, how many animals does *mountaintop removal* kill?

                There is no possible way to pretend that wind power has *more* externalities than coal, and that’s not changed by the fact that some people dredged up some ‘number of birds killed’ numbers that confuse people who aren’t aware that humanity and our stuff probably kills *millions* of birds a *day*.Report

              • George Turner in reply to DavidTC says:

                Well, let’s break this down.

                First, many plants and animals concentrate trace elements. In fact, one the methods of remediating toxic waste sites is introducing plants that will concentrate the elements in the spill, so they can be harvested and burned. Mammals concentrate sodium far above normal continental water levels. If the EPA used the same logic on sodium levels as they just did on fish, all land animals would die. We suck in those essential nutrients because they are rare in the environment yet essential to our biology. Face it. Life evolved in a toxic waste dump and took full advantage of the possibilities. Our evolution took paths that we cannot undo.

                Second, evolution is fast in species that quickly reproduce. Darwin’s finches are observed to evolve over months, not millennia. It’s possible that lake Sutton’s fish took advantage of increased selenium within the first few years and optimized to take advantage of it. Real science would investigate such a question. Pseudo religious science would take a tissue sample and spin a tale of good and evil. You read a tale of good and evil, one contradicted by fishing reports.

                You cite a waving wall of coal slurry spill in 2008 as an example of a the massive externalities with coal. London suffered far more casualties than the post 9/11 terror attacks with a catastrophic porter (beer) spill. One bereaved widow, when informed her husband was dead, was glad that his death was at least quick. The government officer told her “No! He got out three times to pee!”

                Our catastrophic coal failures cause less damage than the construction of an LA suburb or shopping mall. I grew up with this shit. My hometown’s skyline doesn’t remotely resemble the one in my childhood photos. This upsets me far less than the cancellation of Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles. For that you will all die in atomic fire.

                Birds do not die from “general pollution”, whatever the heck that is. If it’s killing birds then why am I not seeing dead people on the sidewalk, because we breathe the same air they do. Again, this is BS “sciency” math were you conjure up hypothetical deaths instead of real deaths. In another thread I used similar math to prove that Bill Clinton killed millions of pregnant teens.

                Hypothetical deaths are not real deaths. They’re deaths from witchcraft. You have to start with a dead body and work back, like an autistic forensic investigator with OCD. All the rest is BS. We are convinced that cooking over open fires kills tens of millions of third world people due to lung disease, so we started programs to replace firewood with propane, and those programs were heavily monitored. The switch to propane didn’t save any lives. The deaths the switch was going to prevent turned out to be hypothetical, not real.

                For real deaths, look at transgender people and their 40% suicide rate. Those deaths are real, with people in morgues with an obvious cause of death – suicide. We’re not allowed to talk about that, even though it’s probably a higher human death rate than any other cause in history outside of pneumonic plague.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

                You cite a waving wall of coal slurry spill in 2008 as an example of a the massive externalities with coal. London suffered far more casualties than the post 9/11 terror attacks with a catastrophic porter (beer) spill.

                The London Beer Flood was *over two hundred years ago*…and somehow the death count was only in the low double digits. (Eight deaths are confirmed, but there were probably more than that.)

                Please note that, 200 years ago, hell, *one* hundred years ago, we regularly had *dozens* and sometimes *hundreds* of people die in theatre fires. We…don’t let theatres get built that way anymore. Nor breweries. Or even coal mines(1) or any of the other vast number of things we *used* to let get built as deathtraps.

                1) At least in theory.

                Birds do not die from “general pollution”, whatever the heck that is. If it’s killing birds then why am I not seeing dead people on the sidewalk, because we breathe the same air they do.

                You are not seeing dead people on the sidewalk because we do not allow dead people to stay on sidewalks (Actually, the government pays people to go around and collect dead bodies off the sidewalk. If you find a dead person on the sidewalk, you can call 911 and the government will come and dispose of it for you.), and most people who die of pollution-related disease die in the hospital anyway.

                http://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-early-deaths-each-year-in-the-us-0829

                Approximately 200,000 people a year die due to air pollution in this country. The largest amounts of deaths, 58,000 a year, are attributed to…cars, in fact. (Specifically, 53,000 deaths to particulates, and 5,000 deaths to ozone.) Bet you thought I was going to say coal, didn’t you?

                But coming in right behind that is ‘all power production’, with 52,000 deaths from particulates, and 5,000 deaths from ozone.

                Now, in theory, this is all power production, but I’m having trouble figuring out what other sorts of power production besides coal produce any ‘particulate matter’. Diesel *can* (And is probably doing so with cars), but that’s almost a non-entity in US power generation.

                Many sorts of power generation can, of course, produce ozone (I know any electrical generator can, which would include all power generation except straight photovoltatic solar…and for all I know those can too.), and I have no idea what percentage of that is from coal. So let’s ignore that 5000 due to ozone, and only look at the 52,000 due to particulate matter.

                Note this is, indeed, *study of dead people*. These are not *hypothetical* dead people, these are actual causes of death due to conditions caused by particulates (and ozone), corrolated with long term exposure to those things. Obviously there is some statistical modeling going on, but there are real dead people.

                But we’re talking birds, not people, for some reason.(1)

                So…are birds more susceptible to particulate matter than humans? Yes. Yes they are:

                https://www.treehugger.com/environmental-policy/singapore-smog-breaks-records-indonesian-forest-fires-partly-blame.html

                Birds literally started dropping out of the sky in Singapore due to particulate matter, while humans were still, mostly, able to function. Birds have a higher breathing rate, and just as importantly spend *all* their time outside, whereas, while human dwelling are not airtight, they are airtight enough to greatly reduce particulate matter.

                52,000 *humans* are dying each year from what coal plants are putting in the air. Is it so hard to believe that at least *ten times* as many birds die from that? Why? Some people have put the number closer to a *hundred* times.

                The highest estimates for the number of birds killed by wind turbines is approximately 500,000.

                1) I am not sure *why*. Even if coal killed *no* birds, I am at a lose as to why we should trade 52,000 people lives for 500,000 bird lives. But that is not what we are discussing. We are discussing that coal *also* kills a lot of birds, and while that exact number is unknowable, it is probably *as many if not more* as wind turbines do, so even on this *lone cherry-picked point*, you haven’t demonstrated anything.

                Aka, the environmental side effects of coal are *so* massive that they *incidentally* are killing more birds than the amount of birds you are supposedly worried about with wind.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to DavidTC says:

                BTW, I love the idea that we should compare the level of chemicals in a lake to the ocean.

                I can just imagine a coal company dumping in hundreds of tons of salt into a lake, and you insisting that can’t kill fish because the oceans are 20% saltier! LOGIC!

                Hint: Oceans are the collection basins of the planet, where all the random chemicals end up. Any naturally-occurring water-soluble (Or even *not* water-soluble, often.) chemical will be much more concentrated there (Like, again, salt. Or selenium, or mercury, or arsenic, or heavy metals, or anything!), and the fish *will have already evolved* to deal with it. The water evaporates, the chemicals do not, and they just keep piling up.

                Freshwater lakes, OTOH, tend to be fed by rain and ground springs, neither of tend to bring chemicals along. (Although we did try putting acid in the rain for a while recently.)

                The water *does* pick up some chemicals from the soil it passes over (And through, if fed from underground)…but those chemical just keep moving out to the ocean, and (excluding new lakes and rivers, or one that move onto new ground) those things have have long since leeched out most of the water-soluble chemicals out the soil they passes over.

                A lake, at least one that isn’t a terminal lake like Great Salt Lake or the Dead Sea, is supposed to have much *less* chemicals in it than the ocean. Not just toxic chemicals, all chemicals.

                I’m sure that sometimes there are weird naturally occurring situations where there are is some specific chemical constantly leaking in the lake (Like there are exposed nickel deposits nearby or something.), and the fish in those situations have surely evolved to deal with that…

                …but that’s not what’s going on with Lake Sutton, where *perfectly normal* fish are having to deal with large amounts of selenium…and arsenic, and all sorts of other things, because *there are coal ash pools leaching into the lake*.Report

              • George Turner in reply to DavidTC says:

                That’s quite an amusing take.

                If fish, birds, or mammals don’t get a good fraction of the ocean amount of selenium, they get sick, and they can die.

                It’s an essential element. That’s why they sell it in expensive little bottles at the store. It’s like zinc, copper, and iron. You have to have it because you evolved on Earth and it was a really handy atom to use in our biochemical processing at the cellular level.
                .
                Maybe your sources will convince you that the big threat to the planet is dihydrogen monoxide. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they did.

                Lake Sutton’s fish were never suffering, they were thriving. When they shut down the coal plant for a couple of years to convert to natural gas, the fishing there began to suck. The fish were thin, undersize, and hard to find, perhaps because they weren’t getting enough selenium.

                Local fishermen were sad, and even upset. It turns out that the fish were all breeding in the high selenium effluent from the coal plant.

                What you present is garbage science. A fantasy disconnected from reality. A religion wackier than Medieval European Christianity. A religion refuted by observations that teaches its mindless believers that coal is Satan’s sulfurous brimstone.Report

              • Francis in reply to George Turner says:

                On selenium: Kesterston DrainReport

              • Will H. in reply to DavidTC says:

                You should see the number of birds that die at a pickle packing plant.
                And the rats.

                You probably wouldn’t want to eat pickles for awhile.Report

              • George Turner in reply to Will H. says:

                My local Home Depot has a bird infestation in the outdoor section where they store bags of bird seed. The birds are like “Holy moly, we found the birdseed store!”

                But yes, a study that claims 900,000 fish in a lake are being killed, without finding any actual dead fish, is garbage science.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Stillwater says:

                The Democratic Party was pretty fucking sickly in the late ’60s and early ’70s, though.Report

              • Jesse in reply to pillsy says:

                Right. In the aftermath of 1972, would @stillwater be saying, “ya’ know, George Wallace has some good points about desegregation…”Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Jesse says:

                “Huh. Why doesn’t ‘racist’ work as well as it used to?”Report

              • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

                I’m trying to remember the halcyon days when “racist”, ah, worked, and to be blunt, I can’t.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jesse says:

                So, the logic appears to be that only people who accept everything about the Democratic party can legitimately criticize it, which results in the absurd conclusion that legitimate criticism is therefore impossible.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Stillwater says:

                The logic appears to me that people who “left the Democratic Party” are not necessarily possessed of any particularly important insights about its shortcomings. Arguments to the contrary prove far too much, not least that the Dems should have stuck with segregation.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to pillsy says:

                The logic appears to me that people who “left the Democratic Party” are not necessarily possessed of any particularly important insights about its shortcomings.

                There’s a difference between making a valid criticism and making a legitimate criticism. For some reason, strong Dem identifiers want to replace “valid” with “legitimate” in these types of discussions, and restrict legitimate views to only people who strongly identify as Dems, ie., people who think there are no valid criticisms to be made.

                Hence all the heat I take for criticizing Hillary’s tactics and strategy and the DNC for blocking rather than demanding a competitive primary. Those criticisms strike me as entirely valid but are delegitimized precisely because I’m the type of person who didn’t uncritically support her.

                It’s a big ole circle.Report

              • Pillsy in reply to Stillwater says:

                My objection isn’t that criticisms coming from people who left the party are necessarily invalid, but that they aren’t necessarily valid either.

                Indeed, I think your specific criticism about the primary is correct, and have been saying similar things on and off since late 2015 or so.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Pillsy says:

                In this context, the issue isn’t how many times I’ve said it (way too many, I admit), but whether or not strongly identified Dems accept it as valid. And more importantly, I guess, what electoral implications follow from it and similar. I think (haven’t scrolled up in a while) that’s the topic that started this thread: Jaybird’s suggestion that Dems haven’t learned anything from this last election cycle and are still of a mind that they won. I mean, I think he’s right that the electorate’s priorities have changed. Trump won. The question is whether the Dems respond to those changing priorities.Report

              • Jesse in reply to Stillwater says:

                The reason why there wasn’t a competitive primary wasn’t because the DNC blocked people from running.

                It was because a large majority of Democrats, including many Democratic elected officials thought Hillary would be the best candidate. Why should somebody like Cory Booker run if he agrees with Hillary on 98% of the issues and end up like Martin O’Malley?

                Maybe that wasn’t the right choice, but this idea pushed by certain people that horse heads ended up in Sherrod Brown’s bed or something isn’t what actually happened.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Jesse says:

                I can’t think of a more devastating criticism of the Democratic party than that qualified candidates didn’t run against Hillary because they shared all of her policy views.Report

              • George Turner in reply to Stillwater says:

                Of course they shared all of Hillary’s party views. It couldn’t be otherwise because Hillary’s staff asked everybody what their views were and then told Hillary what her beliefs were.

                You know, some of those e-mails were kind of damning.

                Perhaps the DNC needs a slightly better set of litmus tests, like “Are you married to a serial rapist? Do you make millions by giving secret speeches to big banks? Do you think there are Russians hiding under your bed?” Things like that.Report

              • North in reply to Stillwater says:

                I’d question you pretty hard on that. The last election was not lost on policy. The GOP had virtually none of it. Hillary (narrowly) lost on character, strategy and political charisma (or lack thereof). As Jesse noted the Dems did not, despite what the panting right wingers assert, rig the primary. Hillary logistic-ed her way into a dominant position long before the primaries were a twinkle in anyone’s eye.

                If you’d wanted to knock Hillary out you probably would have needed to keep her our of Secretary of State. You probably would have needed to keep Bill from giving his convention speech in 2012. You probably would need to have been going after them from within the party from Obama on. And of course had you been doing that a lot of people would have thought you were a total asshole and you might have failed on those grounds.

                Hillary lost the election and it’s ultimately always going to be on her. Prior to her losing the election her supporters had all kinds of assumptions the proved false. We, I certainly, definitely underestimated her opponents abilities to hate her no matter what and of the power of the branding she got saddled with during the big media shakeup in the 90’s*.

                What is weird to me, though, is this suggestion that the Democratic Party’s policy platform has some deep changes that need to be made when the whole election turned on character, branding and Comey’s excellent adventure. Hell, what exactly are the policy changes you think should be done? Other than legalizing pot absolutely nothing is being suggested. For fish’s sake, Obama and the Democratic Party quite literally saved the entire fishing American car manufacturing industry while the GOP were leaping up and down and screaming to let all those blue collar jobs be eliminated like libertarian gremlins. Yet still the Dems are the party that don’t like blue collar working class whites?

                *But, granted, the Clintons clearly gave up on trying to shake off that branding as her paid speeches, the email server etc show. They evidently said to themselves that they’d be damned either way so might as well take the easy way.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Stillwater says:

                That’s not the end of his history. Which he won’t discuss.Report

          • George Turner in reply to Saul Degraw says:

            Hillary and Stein only got 49% of the vote. Trump and the vast array of libertarian never-Trumpers got more votes than the left.

            House Republicans got 1.4 million more votes than House Democrats.

            The Senate election only covers seats that were in play.Report

            • gregiank in reply to George Turner says:

              Please continue with this 49% stuff Georgie…it’s comedy gold.Report

              • George Turner in reply to gregiank says:

                Hillary only got 48%. 1% of that was Stein. Hillary also only got 227 electoral votes. It takes 270 to win. Trump got 304.

                Ever fresh LA Times piece from November 6th.

                Our final map has Clinton winning with 352 electoral votes. Compare your picks with ours.

                That’s how badly she lost.Report

              • gregiank in reply to George Turner says:

                Ohh…49% i wonder what % Trump got. I’m sure it was more than that. I mean why bring up Hillary’s percentage if Trump got so many more people. It seems sort of odd to bring up her % but not his. I wonder what that could mean.

                Yeah we’ve heard of the EC. Trump won that. It was in all the papers.Report

              • George Turner in reply to gregiank says:

                Trump, and the people right of Trump, won 51%. About 5% was a conservative/libertarian anti-Trump vote, leaving him with only 46%, and yet Trump still won 304 to 227. That’s because he’s a political genius. He ran campaign ads in Minnesota and the DNC couldn’t figure out why! They didn’t realize that much of Wisconsin watches Minnesota TV stations. Due to Russian hacking, they didn’t even know Wisconsin was a state.Report

          • Kimmi in reply to Saul Degraw says:

            Saul,
            Can you get me that Chaos Theory book back?Report

        • Jesse in reply to Jaybird says:

          First of all, lot’s of people like the Freaking Republicans and what they stand for. Outside of the “bubble”, people are pro-life, anti-gay marriage, etc, especially in states that really shouldn’t exist as anything more than a few large countries.

          Second, we lost because it ends up we had two bad choices for candidates in 2016, choose the least worst one who has been the target of a 25 year smear campaign that I now admit had gone deeper into the American psyche than I expected.

          Despite all that, without the Comey letter, we’re all right now arguing over Bernie blasting Hillary for her corporate tax reform deal with the Republican’s.Report

    • Saul Degraw in reply to Jaybird says:

      1. Clinton isn’t running again in 2020.

      2. Did she campaign with Kathy Griffin in 2016?

      3. Is what Kathy Griffin did worse than people who hung Obama in effigy during his entire term? If yes, why?

      Honestly Jay, I don’t get you man. You claim to fear the escalation of political violence on all sides but you only seem to tsk tsk when someone ostensibly on the left does something that is ostentatious and shocking. What’s your preferred solution to all your concerns of escalating political language/violence? Having Democratic/Liberal/Left constituent groups shut up? Why the hell don’t critique gamergaters for rape and death threats against women?Report

      • Kimmi in reply to Saul Degraw says:

        Saul,
        Well, I know what my preferred solution for “escalating political violence” is…
        Cut Off The Fucking Financial Chicanery.

        See? Simple. When you stop paying people to be flamin’ idiots who steal delivery trucks, they’ll stop being so stupid.

        … then you can have them do more useful stuff.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

        1. You don’t know that. Are you saying she doesn’t deserve to run again? She got more votes than any other candidate in history excepting Obama. Is it because she’s a woman that you’re saying that?

        2. She didn’t, but she did give her instagram over to Lena Dunham for a while. Remember that? She also sent the cast of The West Wing to campaign for her in Ohio.

        3. Is what Kathy Griffin did worse? The original photoshoot? Meh. Probably not. Is this press conference exacerbating things? Oh yes. Oh yes indeed.

        What’s your preferred solution to all your concerns of escalating political language/violence?

        Divorce.

        Having Democratic/Liberal/Left constituent groups shut up? No, not really. I do think that if they are shooting themselves in the foot that I should be able to say “they shouldn’t shoot themselves in the foot” without it being *TOO* controversial.

        Why the hell don’t critique gamergaters for rape and death threats against women?

        I hereby condemn gamergaters for rape and death threats against women.Report

        • Jesse in reply to Jaybird says:

          First, as well know, this election cycle proved Americans hate celebrities getting involved in politics.
          Because frankly Jay, your definition of “Democrats shooting themselves in the foot” is “any person who ever voted for the Democratic party saying anything that upsets any single Trump voter ever.”Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Jesse says:

            Because frankly Jay, your definition of “Democrats shooting themselves in the foot” is “any person who ever voted for the Democratic party saying anything that upsets any single Trump voter ever.”

            Frankly, Jesse, if these single Trump voters in the swing states also happened to vote for Obama, I’d say that saying the shit that upset these single Trump voters provides a great example of “Democrats shooting themselves in the foot”.Report

            • Jesse in reply to Jaybird says:

              Those Obama/Trump voters started disapproving of Obama because Obama started talking about things like Trayvon Martin, etc. It didn’t help Clinton wasn’t as good at lying about free trade as Obama was to those voters.Report

        • North in reply to Jaybird says:

          No. Hillary does not deserve to run again. No one of power and no constituency of any pull (except for conservatives longing for one more pull from that heady 90’s bottle) carries any brief for another Hillary run. She cashed in her chits, called in her favors and did all the leg work to get her shot in 2016 and she blew it. Hillary will never be the Democratic Party nominee for President again. I’d be astonished if she’s ever a nominee at all but that’s too strong a prediction to make; maybe she will want to run for Governor or something.Report

          • George Turner in reply to North says:

            Unless her Parkinson’s really kicks in, she’s going to run again in 2020 because she still have a vagina and still has the support of angry feminists everywhere. That will allow her to win victory after victory in early primaries against a scattered Democrat field, making her the front runner once again.

            I predict you will find this extremely nauseating and probably want to strangle her supporters. They will call you names and try to shame you into submission. They will probably succeed.

            And then she’ll crater again, and we get four more years of Trump, followed by eight years of Ivanka Trump, then Donald Trump Jr (with Ivanka becoming President of Mars), then Barron Trump, and more Trumps. It’s just Trumps all the way out.Report

            • North in reply to George Turner says:

              I think you’re deluding yourself by imagining that the fictional right wing noise machine version of the Democratic Party that exists in your head bears any significant resemblance to the one that exists in reality. I can understand why- there’s a whole industry on the right built up on Clinton muckraking and the thought processes associated with them are deep, comfortable and familiar (Google Hillary 2020 and the first page of results is two thirds right wing sites). But Hillary won’t run in 2020, even if her health is excellent, and if she did run she’d go down in flames- probably before the primary even got under way.

              If I’m wrong I will be here and will have no compunction about saying so (probably at length) but I’m deeply confident on this one. Kerry lost to W and his electoral political career was pretty much over. You do not come back from losing to Trump. The Clintons are done as an electoral force and, looking at 2016, that’s a good thing for the center left and the Democratic Party. The scars of the 90’s run too deep, best to keep the policy and let the irreparably damaged actors go.Report

      • notme in reply to Saul Degraw says:

        Bc she is a celeb, folks like KG will always get more press than average Joe. They use their fame to get the media to push their message.Report

      • pillsy in reply to Saul Degraw says:

        The right comparison for KG isn’t randos with Obama effigies, it’s either Ted Nugent (“Suck on my machine-gun,” et c.), or, indeed, Donald Trump himself (“Second Amendment people”).

        I mean, if we want to be fair.Report

        • Troublesome Frog in reply to pillsy says:

          Which means the big litmus test will be whether she’s an honored guest the next time a Democrat occupies the White House. I dearly hope not.Report

    • Troublesome Frog in reply to Jaybird says:

      A press conference? Have we not learned that if you just go away for a few days, the news cycle will forget about you?

      Alternately, another newer technique that seems to work is to do scandalous things over and over again so that outrage over any one of them seems petty. “Of course you’d say that Kathy Griffin’s throwing paint on Barron Trump was out of bounds. You say that *every time* she does something!”Report

    • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

      Personally, I think that if Kathy Griffin runs in 2020, she should probably campaign with Hillary Clinton.Report

    • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

      Funny that given all going on in the world, your focus is not only on Kathy Griffin, but how she relates to Hillary’s hypothetical 2020 campaign. It’s getting weird, dude.

      I know, I know… Twitter is talking.

      If only there was a way to talk about things other than what Twitter is talking about. If only.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

        Because I think that the Democrats are preparing to shoot themselves in the foot all over again in 2018 and 2020 and go on to lose an election that is winnable in theory, but not if they can’t figure out that they effed up and effed up bad in 2016 and why and how.Report

        • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

          Sure.Report

        • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

          Just like the GOP did in 2012.

          Wait, what?Report

          • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

            Hey, the possibility exists that the DNC will stumble across lightning in a bottle and find someone so absolutely charismatic that they’ll catapult themselves to the presidency (Hell, maybe Trump will be so absolutely toxic by 2020 that even Clinton would win against him).

            Barring a miracle, however, I suspect that there’s going to need to be some changes made.

            Even if only of the “okay, let’s try to not alienate people” variety.Report

            • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

              Hey, the possibility exists that the DNC will stumble across lightning in a bottle and find someone so absolutely charismatic that they’ll catapult themselves to the presidency

              Like two out of the last five Dem nominees.

              (Also remember who won.)

              Barring a miracle, however, I suspect that there’s going to need to be some changes made.

              Oh, they’re going to make changes. They’re making changes already. It’s just that the changes are guided by rage at an Administration they view as fundamentally illegitimate, not a careful analysis of which demographic slices of the electorate they can do better with.

              Sound familiar?Report

            • Jesse in reply to Jaybird says:

              We don’t need somebody “absolutely charismatic.”

              We need somebody who hasn’t been the target of a negative campaign since I was in grade school, never took money to speak at a Wall Street, and has no reason for the AG to say anything about them.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Jesse says:

                Give me six lines penned by an honest person…Report

              • George Turner in reply to Jesse says:

                The reason Hillary had been the target of a negative campaign since you were in grade school is that she should have been spending all that time in a federal prison. She is a narcissistic sociopath who is unable to not commit crimes. She makes Cersei Lannister look like a paragon of virtue and self-control. Anthony Weiner would have been a better candidate. Jeb Bush was a better candidate.

                Back when I thought Trump’s run was a joke, I took the Republican race seriously because Hillary was going to run, which meant the Democrats had decided to sit this one out just to satisfy her insatiable ego.

                Everything she’s done since her loss should confirm that view. It wasn’t her fault she lost, it was the fault of him and him and her and them and you and you.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Jesse says:

                HRC was to corruption what Trump is to blunt (offensive) language.

                Everyone knows it, everyone understands it, and their own party has decided to live with it out of self interest and pretend it’s not a problem even if they flinch occasionally.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Amazing that despite HRC being flagrantly corrupt in public not a single charge has ever stuck.

                Oh… wait…Report

              • George Turner in reply to Kazzy says:

                That’s because the law doesn’t apply to Hillary. Just today a federal contractor in Atlanta was arrested for leaking NSA information to the press in violation of 18 USC 793. She faces ten years in federal prison. Hillary violated 18 USC 793 hundreds of times, but she can’t be charged because she’s Hillary.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to George Turner says:

                Maybe it is time to take the tin foil hat off… take your meds… maybe some juice and a little nappy-nap?Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Kazzy says:

                Amazing that despite HRC being flagrantly corrupt in public not a single charge has ever stuck.

                My assumption is that everything they did was technically legal (except for the part that got Bill disbarred).

                However, after HRC lost power, her “charity” wasn’t worth giving hundreds of millions to any more.

                And let’s quote Jimmy Carter again: Of the Rich pardon, Carter said: “I don’t think there is any doubt that some of the factors in his pardon were attributable to his large gifts. In my opinion, that was disgraceful.”

                So, yes, “openly corrupt” is a good way to describe it. There’s a connection between the money they got and the favors they gave, just not, quite, rising to the level where it’s “illegal”… but strong enough that people as far to the left as Carter think it’s a problem.

                When we talk about “everyone to the Right of Jimmy Carter thinking she’s corrupt”, maybe that’s a problem which stops her from winning elections.Report

  20. Jaybird says:

    I don’t know how to best gauge these things but this morning my twitter feed was full of “Paris! Climate Change!” and now it’s full of Kathy Griffin.Report

  21. George Turner says:

    From the Hill: Donald Trump nominates Richard Spencer for Navy Secretary

    We’re going to have the whitest navy since Doenitz. ^_^Report

    • Marchmaine in reply to George Turner says:

      Heh, if the SNL writers haven’t already written the script where Spicer is doggedly and “befuddlingly” defending the appointment of Richard B. Spencer (rather than Richard V. Spencer) to a press corps egging him on… well, then they should all have to work on school plays for a year as penance.Report

      • George Turner in reply to Marchmaine says:

        Very true! It’s comedy gold, although it may have happened to late in the news cycle for both the writers and the audience to get on top of the story.Report

  22. Jaybird says:

    “Hey, Republicans. You should never, *EVER*, use the phrase ‘legitimate rape’ in a campaign ever again.”

    “What? Are you suggesting we just roll over for the people who want to slaughter infants in their mothers’ wombs?!?”Report

    • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

      You still haven’t answered my question about how my assessment of things that will piss off the white working class is incorrect, you know.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

        There’s stuff that will piss them off so that they’ll stay home and other stuff that will piss them off so that they’ll go out and vote for the other guy.

        Saying “everything pisses off the WWC!” is true, but uninteresting.

        I’m arguing “Don’t piss them off in such a way that they go out and vote for the other guy!” and you’re arguing back “but *EVERYTHING* pisses them off!”Report

        • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

          What reason is there to believe that it’s possible to piss them off in a way that will make them stay home instead of pissing them off in a way that will make them vote for the other guy?Report

          • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

            If the fact that many voted for Obama isn’t evidence, I guess I don’t have any evidence at all.Report

            • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

              Hey, hey, hold the phone: they voted for Obama?!

              The actual dude who delivered a mortal insult to every white working class American by ordering Dijon mustard on his sandwich?

              How about that.

              Maybe it’s also not actually true that every dippy Fox News talking point and culture war shibboleth is actually crucial to the modal white working class voter. Keep going like this and you might make me suspect some of them don’t much care about the precise configuration of other people’s junk.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird says:

      “No, I’m saying ‘don’t ever use the phrase “legitimate rape” in a campaign ever again. Hell, don’t say it at home.”

      “Have you looked at the numbers for how unmarried young women vote? We’re not going to get their vote anyway.”Report

  23. Aaron W says:

    [G1] I don’t think it will necessarily lead to more upzoning either. The main point is to reduce housing costs by increasing supply everywhere, which may just lead to people in the suburbs renting out mother-in-law units. If housing were determined more by market forces and less restricted by zoning laws, you may very well see more people in the suburbs. A central planner in a city or regional government isn’t necessarily going to know ahead of time what kind of housing is fashionable, necessary, etc.Report

  24. George Turner says:

    Breaking: More terrorists attacks in London.

    I’m watching news.sky.com liveReport

  25. Pyre says:

    @burt-likko

    Since last time I was here, you were still a practicing lawyer. As such, I have a question.

    So the usual internet drama is happening over this.

    https://drafthouse.com/austin/show/women-only-screening-wonder-woman

    My question is: Is it legal to refuse service at a public business on the basis of gender for single-showings as well as moving shift schedules away from that single screening based on gender? (My arguments for it being legal have fallen flat due to the fact that even the White Appreciation Barbecue didn’t outright ban people. All my examples just gave discounts to various classes/races/genders. Unfortunately, I’m not lawyer enough to actually give any citations of it being legal for single events.)Report

  26. Jaybird says:

    The current may-may running around on the twitters (I first saw it on sister Elizabeth Bruenig’s feed).

    Dear Liberals & Independents, In 2020 there will be a candidate competing against Donald Trump for President. It is very likely this candidate:
    1) Isn’t your first choice
    2) Isn’t loo% ideologically pure
    3) Has made mistakes in their life
    4) Might not really excite you all that much
    5) Has ideas you are uncomfortable with

    Please start the process of getting over that shit now instead of waiting until 2020.

    Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

      But you don’t understand, it’s really, really important that our candidate be Operating Liberal Level IV!Report

    • Hoosegow Flask in reply to Jaybird says:

      I see it as a long-winded version of “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” but others on Twitter seem to be terribly offended by it.Report

      • DensityDuck in reply to Hoosegow Flask says:

        I could see someone having a legitimate objection along the lines of “this is what we kept saying about why you should vote for Clinton, and you kept telling us that you wanted to vote for Sanders”

        The response being that Sanders really was a better candidate in 2016.

        Another legit objection is that people will use this as an excuse to not react to criticism. “What, who are you gonna vote for? Trump? TRUMP?! You really care so much about my position on tax breaks for oil companies that you would vote for Donald Trump?”Report

        • pillsy in reply to DensityDuck says:

          The counter-counter-argument is that for a lot of Dem voters (probably a majority), the same description would have applied to Sanders, too.

          But point taken in that the intended audience is probably Sanders supporters.Report

        • Troublesome Frog in reply to DensityDuck says:

          The response being that Sanders really was a better candidate in 2016.

          During the primaries, he might have been. I doubt it, but he might have been.

          During the general election he wasn’t. Because he wasn’t on the ballot. For all of Bernie’s amazing qualities, Hillary Clinton had the edge in that she was actually the person on the ballot against Donald Trump. That makes pining for Bernie a pretty damned awful use of resources at that stage of the game.Report

          • Pyre in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

            Troublesome Frog: For all of Bernie’s amazing qualities, Hillary Clinton had the edge in that she was actually the person on the ballot against Donald Trump.

            And she got on the ballot because the DNC, through questionable means, told their base “Your vote really doesn’t matter in the primaries but, HEY, come back and vote for us in November”.

            Whether Bernie could have beaten Trump is a matter of some debate. Whether Hillary would have received more votes if she had beaten Bernie cleanly is not.Report

            • Troublesome Frog in reply to Pyre says:

              Well, if “being popular among the political classes as well as more popular among the voters” is questionable means, then yes, that’s true. Bernie had an uphill battle, but he lost that battle pretty handily. People jumping from, “You got outvoted,” to, “Your vote doesn’t matter,” are living in a strange version of reality where they think their voice is only being heard if they win. There will always be somebody on the losing side of every election.

              In any case, he lost in the primary for the left-of-center party to a candidate that ran to his right. That seems like a pretty bad omen. Given all the available data, the only data point I can see in his favor is that Clinton lost to Trump, so any other candidate’s chances of winning in an alternate reality are at least as good as hers were in our current reality.

              Ultimately, the facts on the ground still remain. There’s a set of people on the November ballot you choose from. One of them is going to end up being POTUS. You can choose or not choose, but your lack of participation doesn’t mean we don’t all get whatever POTUS wins. I’d probably have voted for Abraham Lincoln, but he’s dead.Report

          • Dark Matter in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

            I’m going to continue to wish we had Romney in the White House for a long time, probably every time Trump opens his mouth or otherwise runs the WH like a reality show.

            But as much as I like Bernie (unlike HRC or Trump, he’s a decent guy), Bernie was the only guy around who would have convinced me to vote for Trump.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Hoosegow Flask says:

        For some reason, the lefties on twitter are taking the attitude that it’s a direct subtweet to them, like they have to prepare themselves for a neocon/neoliberal hybrid.

        For some reason.Report

  27. Francis says:

    I’m not seeing much hope quite yet.

    How closely are you looking?Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Francis says:

      I think what we’re worried about is that we’ll be told there are Nazis and Trump and therefore we have a Historical Moral Imperative to vote for someone whose rallying cries are “We shall work to form a nationwide healthcare payments negotiation policy with the goal of at least a ten-percent year-on-year decrease in the rate of increase in HMO co-pays!” and “We plan to hold frank and open talks with representatives from the newly-formed Eastern Orthodox Combined State to develop a policy regarding their plans for normalization of diplomatic relationships with Qatar!”Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Francis says:

      I’m looking at stuff like the DNC’s Perez vs. Ellison election and then the more recent special elections.

      First special election. The DNC didn’t want to spend money on it because they didn’t want to hurt Thompson’s chances. Fair enough. It allows for the claim “Warshington is trying to meddle!” and the like. Estes won.

      Second special election. Gianforte. Lotta stuff to process with that one even yet. The DNC still didn’t spend much.

      I suppose a reason to hope is that the DNC is actually shelling out for the upcoming Georgia election. (I admit, I didn’t know that until I googled it just now. I had thought that they were going to be keeping their powder dry for this election too.)

      But, so far, the main things I’ve been noticing are such things as the outcomes to the election post-mortems, the actions of the DNC, and, yes, attitudes toward the idea of what, exactly, went wrong somewhere in 2016 (as reflected in the comments here). If anything, of course.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird says:

        Now, one thing that might be true is that Clinton was historically awful at this. Like, holy crap, bad at this. Like, hey, maybe even a random person picked off the street would have been likely to be better at it.

        If that’s the case, then 2020 might even look pretty good.

        Because Trump is a buffoon and he had this “what the hell? Maybe he’ll be able to do something like what he says, maybe…” energy behind him and that energy will be gone, daddy, gone come 2020. Assuming the next 2-3 years go like the last 100 days did, anyway.

        Maybe the Republicans will even be able to primary him.

        If Clinton was historically bad at this, then the DNC should be able to find someone who is capable by beating Trump just by getting out of the way!

        I’m not sure that the DNC will get out of the way. (See: Perez/Ellison)
        I’m not sure that the DNC knows that Clinton was bad and, as such, not sure that they’ll be able to avoid meddling in such a way that will result in someone equally bad.Report

        • Dark Matter in reply to Jaybird says:

          Trump defeated an entire room full of professionals whose name wasn’t Clinton.

          In 2020, Trump will still be a buffoon but he’ll be a known quality. Hopefully he won’t have nuked anyone. He will have delivered on the Supreme(s). He’ll have tried various things, some of which worked. Serious players will be backing him because he’s one of the powers that be and they know how to work around him or with him. He’ll have his twitter account suspended by his campaign much earlier in the process.

          Terrorism will still be around. Trump won’t have set up death camps. Gay rights will have continued to advance, and maybe even Trans rights. He *will* have found ways to monetize the Presidency for the Trump empire, but the press will have been too busy paying attention to his foul mouth to care and they’ll have been screaming wolf every week for the last 4 years so neither will anyone else.

          Trump will still be impossible to embarrass and anyone jumping into that slime pit with him will find he’s going to run a campaign which made this last one look clean.

          If Trump’s health doesn’t break, and he hasn’t blown himself up (President Pence continues to have a nice ring) he’ll be very hard to beat. If we had the election right this minute against a generic Dem, I’d vote for him because in terms of economic sanity he’s somewhat blundering in the right direction.

          Doing things for economic growth and also reforming the government? Count me in. I’m not happy the leader wears a clown suit but I’ll live with it.Report

          • George Turner in reply to Dark Matter says:

            I’m curious is Rep Clay Higgins (R-La) will be Speaker by then.

            Facebook post from yesterdayReport

          • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

            If Trump…hasn’t blown himself up (President Pence continues to have a nice ring) he’ll be very hard to beat.

            Trump not blowing himself up seems increasingly unlikely, because he cannot seem to internalize that obstructing justice *really will* get him impeached and removed from office.

            All the other stuff can *probably* blow over, mostly because he almost certainly didn’t do it, and didn’t know much about it. (Why would anyone tell *him*?)

            Hell, there might not even be anything *there*. I don’t know. It might turn out that a bunch of his people did a lot of inappropriate things and so they get their security clearance yanked, but *that’s it*. Not even any actual crimes.

            And if there are any actual crimes, (I have my money on ‘Roger Stone was coordinating with Russian hackers’, almost exactly like that Florida guy.) Trump almost certainly didn’t participate in them to any level of legal liability. Again, why would anyone *tell* him they were doing it? The man would immediately go bragging about it on Twitter!

            So Trump’s clear if he doesn’t keep screwing around with the investigation. He might lose some people, but he’s mostly clear *legally*, although there would be a lot of political damage.

            The problem is, he is much too stupid and impulsive to understand that, and he does not have anyone who can contain him and understands this. So he will *continue* to interfere in the election.Report

          • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

            Oh, and as for his 2020 chances if he *does* make it to 2020:

            Here is an alternate theory of Trump’s election: Trump ran a *completely different* campaign, and everyone reacted exactly wrong to it.

            The media treated it as the most interesting joke ever, and gave him tons of free air time.

            The Republicans all waited for someone else to step on that landmine, and ended up being picked off one by one.

            The Democrat pointed out that the guy was a complete asshole and utterly unfit for office, and seemed to have no problem hanging out with racists…instead of pointing out that his supposed populism was a) designed by inbred ferrets and b) not something you could even slightly trust him to do.

            There have been a bunch of articles, and I can’t find them now, but they’re out there, about how you can’t fight nationalistic populists like everyone’s *instinct* says, which is to point out their personality flaws. You can’t treat them like they’re this huge fascist threat (Even if they clearly have fascist tendencies), and you can’t treat them like they’re a joke.

            Instead, you have to treat them *exactly like normal*. You have to pretend they are seriously proposing their policy proposals, no matter how stupid the proposals are, or how basically unfit for office they are, or how many financial conflicts they have.

            I.e., do not point out that The Wall is racist demagoguery, point out that most people in the country illegally are people who overstay their visas. And keep pulling up images of places The Wall cannot work, and ask where it will fit.

            Don’t let him wander around promising everyone will be covered for cheap. Instead, demand, over and over, that he *explain* how he’s going to do that. Where is the plan? What is even the *rough outline* of the plan?

            Don’t let him vaguely claim other countries are screwing us over and he’s going to negotiate better deals. Ask him to *explain* how countries are doing that, and then deconstruct what he’s saying to point out *he has no idea how trade works* for the informed voters…and, for the less informed voters, to point out that the US has basically been strong-arming other countries into trade deals for decades *to our advantage*, and the idea that we’ve been strong-arming them into deals that are bad for us is idiotic, and that trying to get ‘better deals’ will instead result in trade wars. (That is an over-simplification, but it’s certainly a better understanding of foreign trade than *Trump* has.)

            Instead, everyone lets him do all those things, and tries points out he bragged about how he can get away with sexual assault because he is rich. But…apparently, no one actually cares about that.

            When faced with a person as horribly flawed, and with the history of, Donald Trump, everyone either tried to point out those flaws, *or* said ‘He cannot win’ and ignored him. This was *exactly wrong*. I don’t think *anyone* was a bad candidate, or at least that’s not really why they lost the election. What happened is everyone reacted wrongly, because we have never had a candidate like Trump in recent memory. The Trump campaign was a black swan, a completely un-planned for event, and no one managed to get their act together and deal with it *correctly*.

            Pretending Trump will actually be on the ticket in 2020, the test will not be how Trump runs…the test will be: Is everyone willing to ignore the shiny spinning targets of how he is an asshole with tons of tons of baggage that used to be disqualifying for the presidency…and instead just keep harping on how *completely stupid* most of his ideas are?

            And by then, we’ll have plenty of evidence. (And also plenty of evidence he will just *wander away* from his ideas.)

            And also, in 2020, I suspect the media will be a lot less willing to treat him the same as a visit from the Weinermobile, or an attempt to set a world record with the world’s largest inflatable bounce-house.Report

            • DensityDuck in reply to DavidTC says:

              “Instead, everyone lets him do all those things, and tries points out he bragged about how he can get away with sexual assault because he is rich.”

              Because accusations of rotten behavior worked all the other times. It worked on Gary Hart. Bill Clinton and John Edwards spent a great deal of effort and money defending themselves against it. I can’t really blame people for going with a game plan that worked out in the past, but you’d think that once the pussy-grabber tape came out and Trump didn’t quit they would have recognized that they were dealing with something new.Report

            • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC says:

              Well put. Very solid post and well reasoned. I agree with everything you said.

              Thing is you’re depending on getting a more intelligent media and electorate next time. I think the odds of that are low.

              I also think Trump isn’t doing bad if you ignore the whole raging narcissistic psychopath part and the intrinsic lack of dignity he brings to the office and everything else he touches.

              #109, Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.

              Or for a different phrase, “better the devil you know”.Report

      • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

        “yes, attitudes toward the idea of what, exactly, went wrong somewhere in 2016 (as reflected in the comments here).”

        This suggests you either aren’t looking very closely at all or are more susceptible than most to confirmation bias.Report

        • Morat20 in reply to Kazzy says:

          538 had some thoughts. And a few more just today.

          But, overall, the trend is clear. Democratic special-election candidates have improved their margins over Republicans relative to their district’s partisan lean by an average of 14.4 percentage points. This pattern has popped up in districts from rural Minnesota to the suburbs of Atlanta to the Black Belt of Louisiana. In two instances (New Hampshire House District Carroll 6 and New York Assembly District 9), the shift was enough to flip the seat from red to blue. As Trump himself might say, “There’s something going on.”

          Report