Tuesday, October 10, 2023
The Long Con
I realized over the past decade that all the talk about JAYUB CREATION was bunk, that full employment was something the powers that be would always oppose.
Until this last round I wrongly thought they just had a somewhat irrational obsession with inflation. Now I realize that's a cover for the fact that they understand too well what full employment does - it gives workers, especially at the bottom, actual bargaining power.
And that can't be allowed to happen ever again.
Trump But Not Trump
As I said, I never understood why people on the D side were paying so much attention to Kennedy, especially when he was supposedly a Democratic primary candidate. Was he going to beat Biden? In a single state? Haha no.
And as a third party candidate, well, the Trump folks are correct that he'd be taking from Trump.
And as a third party candidate, well, the Trump folks are correct that he'd be taking from Trump.
The sleepy countdown to the 2024 presidential primaries got a jolt on Monday when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped his primary challenge to President Joe Biden and announced plans to run as an independent – a move that triggered a barrage of attacks from former President Donald Trump and Republicans worried over polling that shows the longtime Democrat could gnaw into Trump’s support.
Afternoon Thread
Taking care of a friend's cat for awhile and have to deal with a visit to the vet (he'll be fine I think).
Amazing Stuff
Must be the Charter Schools and lack of teacher's unions.
Give me my $10 million education grant you cowards!
I'll add an additional guess: they don't follow every bit of "trendy" education advice coupled with expensive technology pushed by the foundations that fund the Education Nonprofit grifters.
(In case it's not obvious, the first sentence is a joke. They aren't charter schools and there is a union)
Improving America’s schools can sometimes seem like an impossible task. Politicians have been promising to do so for decades, yet the U.S. remains well behind many other countries in basic measures of learning. The Covid pandemic, with its extended school closures, aggravated the problems.They're adequately funded and everyone (parents) has jobs and health care.
But making progress really is possible, and a story by my colleague Sarah Mervosh describes perhaps the best case study. The network of schools run by the Defense Department has been performing well for years and continued to do so during the pandemic. These schools are typically on military bases, and they educate about 66,000 children of service members and Defense Department civilian employees.
Last year, this school system outperformed all 50 states on reading and math scores for both eighth graders and fourth graders. Before the pandemic, the military schools did well but were not ranked No. 1. The schools also have smaller learning gaps between white and both Black and Hispanic students than other schools have.
“If the Department of Defense schools were a state, we would all be traveling there to figure out what’s going on,” Martin West, an education professor at Harvard, told Sarah.
Give me my $10 million education grant you cowards!
I'll add an additional guess: they don't follow every bit of "trendy" education advice coupled with expensive technology pushed by the foundations that fund the Education Nonprofit grifters.
(In case it's not obvious, the first sentence is a joke. They aren't charter schools and there is a union)
Come Back, Kev
Gotta admit that'd be pretty funny.
McCarthy said Monday that he is willing to resume serving as House speaker if enough of the Republicans who voted in favor of his ouster last week are open to his reinstatement.I, too, will serve if enough people vote for me.
Monday, October 09, 2023
WHAT ABOUT GIRLS IN SPORTS
Related to this is all the people who pretend to care about the integritude of women's sports when trans women are involved, or the educational experience of Chicago Public School kids when teachers go on strike. You think any of these people care about women's sports? Do you think any of them care about public school kids? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Popularism!
Brian's missing a piece here, which is that fake empiricism lets bad faith actors smuggle in bullshit and call it SCIENCE.
But along the way somewhere it stopped being just a useful cudgel and came to dominate how Democrats and liberal elites think about everything, including politics. It’s all science, and we trust science. But, 1) no it’s not; and 2) it’s hard to be a spontaneous, confident politician if you believe there’s a real science to campaigning and you should never toss anything outside the formula into the mix.Republicans were flooding the press with junk election polls, while "progressive" polling firms were flooding party leaders with junk issue polls, or at least junk unsupported conclusions from them.
The advent of poll aggregating, and the forecasting successes of Nate Silver, were benign precursors to something more insidious. On its own, poll aggregating amounted to a huge improvement over an earlier world of sweeping media narratives stitched together with yard signs, crowd sizes, and one-off surveys, whether or not they were outliers. The obsession with polling that followed the 538 boom has not been particularly healthy. It’s made polls and media about polls endogenous to politics, such that polls are often the entire basis for media narratives, and those same media narratives become drivers of subsequent poll findings. Republicans have thus taken to flooding aggregators with junk polls in uncompetitive races, in the hope of manipulating media narratives about national elections. Polling can now fulfill its own prophecies.
But it’s also fed a sense within the Democratic Party that data science, as applied to politics, is very precise and can more or less tell candidates and campaigns what to do and how to talk. That Democrats should do and say nothing of consequence until it has been surveyed and run by focus groups.
Success
A dispiriting thing I have learned over time is that a great deal of "success" comes not from what we normally consider to be "talent" (very broadly defined)," "luck," or "hard work," but rather a relentless shamelessness, an ability to be dishonest and ruthless at such a level that is actually unfathomable to normal people. It is a superpower.
A system which greatly rewards sociopathy is not such a great system, especially as that success grants those sociopaths even more power.
We've long celebrated the "ruthless" businessman without giving much thought to what that ruthlessness means in practice.
The top is filled with these guys, convinced of their superiority in all things.
A system which greatly rewards sociopathy is not such a great system, especially as that success grants those sociopaths even more power.
We've long celebrated the "ruthless" businessman without giving much thought to what that ruthlessness means in practice.
The top is filled with these guys, convinced of their superiority in all things.
Why Do I Care About SBF?
I vagueblog a bit because there are things I don't know, precisely, but Sam's $ was quite influential among a certain set of influentials during the 2021-2022 period and they did tremendous damage (and tried to do much more).
Some of your faves might be implicated!
Some of your faves might be implicated!
Does SBF Really Seem Like A Guy Who Just Wants To Do Good
I suppose it has been a running theme of mine back to the Iraq war: basically, do these people seem like good guys? Do the people telling you they are good guys, themselves, seem like good guys?
Obviously, Dick Cheney and The National Review weren't interested in "spreading freedom," at least in the way that normal people would understand that concept, but did you really think the circus of The (old) New Republic "centrist" ghouls were interested in the lives of brown mostly Muslim people thousands of miles away? 10 years of articles about how to save American poor people by making their lives harder and about black community "pathologies" and suddenly they're humanitarian anti-racists?
Oldheads remember that Iraq war opponents were called racists because they didn't believe Iraqis loved freedom! You shouldn't listen to lectures about racism from genocidal racists!
Should we really be taking lessons on morality and generosity from David fucking Brooks?
Is there anything about SBF that makes you think he's a saint? Is there anything about most of the fans of SBF that suggests they were good judges of who is or isn't a saint? Oh, Sam, he just wants to get rich so he can do good? Back then he was doing good by [checks notes] supporting crypto politicians and throwing money at journalists to do his PR for him.
A big part of the appeal of EA - and then SBF - was they were "doing good" the right way, unlike all the stupid hippies. Earning to Give AND to Own The Libs. Another big part of the appeal was all the fucking money.
Obviously, Dick Cheney and The National Review weren't interested in "spreading freedom," at least in the way that normal people would understand that concept, but did you really think the circus of The (old) New Republic "centrist" ghouls were interested in the lives of brown mostly Muslim people thousands of miles away? 10 years of articles about how to save American poor people by making their lives harder and about black community "pathologies" and suddenly they're humanitarian anti-racists?
Oldheads remember that Iraq war opponents were called racists because they didn't believe Iraqis loved freedom! You shouldn't listen to lectures about racism from genocidal racists!
Should we really be taking lessons on morality and generosity from David fucking Brooks?
Is there anything about SBF that makes you think he's a saint? Is there anything about most of the fans of SBF that suggests they were good judges of who is or isn't a saint? Oh, Sam, he just wants to get rich so he can do good? Back then he was doing good by [checks notes] supporting crypto politicians and throwing money at journalists to do his PR for him.
A big part of the appeal of EA - and then SBF - was they were "doing good" the right way, unlike all the stupid hippies. Earning to Give AND to Own The Libs. Another big part of the appeal was all the fucking money.
I feel a little bad picking on Dylan because unlike some of the cynical ghouls I think he actually meant it. The man donated a kidney!
But, you know, Sam didn't donate a kidney (I don't know if he advocated it, either, but it was a big part of EA). The cult leaders don't actually live by the rules they set out for the cultists!
Sunday, October 08, 2023
Why Did Anyone Care
The amount of attention paid (and concern expressed) by people in the D side for a couple of months was baffling to me. The effect of any spoiler candidate is hard to predict, precisely, but Mr. Anti-Vax isn't going to get your suburban Dobbs mom votes.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears headed for a breakup with the party his family defined for generations, teasing that he’s preparing to ditch the Democrats in a “historic” announcement Monday in which he is expected to launch an independent presidential campaign against President Joe Biden.He'll pull some votes from the people who think the vaccine was Trump's worst moment, but that's about it. Again, the overall effect of such candidates is never entirely clear and can't be measured just by the votes the might/do take directly, but he's competing with the Republican, not the Democrat.
Afternoon Thread
If you buy stuff, I get money!
People sometimes complain about the Amazon links, and, yes, no ethical capitalism and all that. Don't buy things from Amazon to help the site, but you do help the site (me) if you click the links before you buy whatever you were going to buy anyway.
People sometimes complain about the Amazon links, and, yes, no ethical capitalism and all that. Don't buy things from Amazon to help the site, but you do help the site (me) if you click the links before you buy whatever you were going to buy anyway.
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