United States Politics Thread 46

[MacAnDàil]

Why do you think that the non-economy-focussers would not survive? And that it would be appropriate to focus on that?

Under Trump, 70% of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck before Covid. Under Biden, it was 60% IIRC. A bad economy limits their power to purchase essential goods. Fewer essential goods makes survival challenging.

OK, essential goods such as food and water are important. And this could be achieved, especially in a large unequal industrial economy such as the US, by redistribution, not economic growth. So, even on this issue, it's as much social as it is economic.

How would placing importance on morality lead to genocide, the opposite of morality? Why do you think that left could not be supported on a myriad of bases?

Many people living unexamined lives are of the opinion that being moral means punishing disobedience with the utmost strictness. I suspect seeing blood makes their dicks hard.

(Edit: See Altemeyer's Authoritarianism book.)

That may be the case and the argument for an examined life, not for abandonning morality. That would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Even some of the least exaémined lifes may realise that killing people is a bad thing and one of the most basically bad things.

[MacAnDàil]

That argument could work for the environment, health and democracy too: Everyone breathes and drinks water so surely want to keep environmental protections that Trump wants to remove and prevent the state from putting in place instead. Everybody has healthcare at some time in their life so would rather not get measles, mumps and rubella because of RFK Jr. Everybody who votes.. votes so would want to do so again.

Work is different in that people actively structure their whole lives around work, because they usually spend 8 hours per day, 5 days per week doing it. They don't actively devote the same amount of time, energy, or mind to their health, water, or environment until Something Happens and it's suddenly not suitable anymore.

Certainly, people mostly pay more attention to work, as you say. Something Happens might just be around the corner if a decade of heat records and a stomring of the Capitol is not enough.

Stick to your policies:Harris' policies differed between 2020 and 2024 unnecessarily, in an attempt to attract centrist/right-wing voters.

This is a mistake, because it assumes that the political arena is only one dimensional, which it isn't.

Sure, it is complex so maybe that point was not as strong as thought it was.

This is more so the case than a few decades ago and a problem brought on by the current overuse of screens encouraged by megacorps hawking them for others to waste time on but they often would not dare put their own children before them.

I do not think this is true. There's no shortage of people in the 40+ age bracket who can't write a grammatical paragraph or sound out an unfamiliar word.

I agree. Screen time is irrelevant. Indeed, people who read books for fun don't realize how many people are functionally illiterate, and for whom the last time they read a book was in high school.

I do realise that too many people stopped reading after school and it is precisely because I do read for fun that I have the data and not just and impression on the matter.

To me the whole "screens" thing is a moral panic, first and foremost. And the focus on "screens" in the present seems selective, how was sitting for hours in front of the boob tube decades ago (when they were real live CRT's) really any better? (I remember thinking as a kid back then how gawdawful much of TV was.)

Alot of TV did suck 20+ years ago, but I think the issue is that screens are so much more common now that people look at them nearly all day. They can even do so when they're sitting on the toilet!

Yes, indeed, and so too much attention is paid to them.

[MacAnDàil]

This is one of the mistakes the Democrats made. Who the hell cares about the Washington Post?

Liberals do, and they love patting themselves on the back for it.

Right, second only to the New York Times... which is an absolute monarchy. Oops! It's pretty funny how illiberal the liberal sense-making institutions are.

Why call the NYT an absolute monarchy?

[MacAnDàil]

As to the question of who cares about the Washington Post... I don't know, but I wouldn't be so quick to pronounce the traditional newspapers dead -- though they may smell a bit funny.
The Washington Post refusing to endorse Harris certainly didn't make or break the election, that's for sure. It does mean something; in that case that the American plutocracy (whether Californian or not) doesn't care anymore who is president as long as the money keeps flowing.

It was Bezos, the owner who decided the neutralithy against many of the journalists' pro-Harris wishes.

[rotting bones]

OK, essential goods such as food and water are important. And this could be achieved, especially in a large unequal industrial economy such as the US, by redistribution, not economic growth. So, even on this issue, it's as much social as it is economic.

These go back to the fundamentals I've been arguing about since 2019.

1. Redistribution lowers profit, disincentivizing investors from producing essential goods. If production falls, there is less to go around. If there isn't enough to go around, redistribution is insufficient to solve the problem.

2. Because redistribution lowers profit, moneyed individuals like Elon Musk fight tooth and nail to prevent governments from enacting such policies. Recently, they have been winning these fights worldwide by scapegoating Muslims, immigrants (especially nonwhites but in Europe, also Jews, Poles, etc), gays, trans people and other marginalized communities.

3. Redistribution lowers the self-esteem of young and healthy people who are forced to receive handouts instead of working. These people have a lot of energy and feel like it's going to waste if they can't make a difference in the world.

...

I have been arguing for an alternative for years.

That may be the case and the argument for an examined life, not for abandonning morality. That would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Even some of the least exaémined lifes may realise that killing people is a bad thing and one of the most basically bad things.

No they don't. I have met people who honestly don't understand how anyone can think of Arabs as intelligent lifeforms.

1. Education costs money. Trump says he will will gut the Department of Education, etc.

"Money" is technically an incorrect shorthand for goods. The presence of goods causally implies the production of goods. Producing more goods is conventionally called "a healthy economy" by those subjected to capitalist indoctrination.

2. Morality is subjective. Those who reflect on it often come to conclusions that are diametrically opposed to the majority. This often aligns with one's class interests. For example, Nietzsche rejects the golden rule by saying the powerful should simply take what they can because they can. Whichever class thinks they are about to win is often a fan of Nietzsche, whether capitalists or revolutionaries. There are also similar, more reasonable individualist alternatives like in Max Stirner's book.

3. Because morality is subjective, Marx characterizes society in terms of "class conflict" rather than some pre-lapsarian harmony. Since people have always fought over resources throughout history, the dispossessed majority should unite and dictate terms to the powerful.

...

To summarize, the problem is that: 1. The various interests in society will hire fancy lawyers to argue that helping them is the moral position. To your surprise, they will convince people. 2. As long as you keep capitalism around, the argument put forward by capitalists that raising profits is necessary to feed the poor won't be entirely wrong. This is because, under capitalism, the poor are fed when investors feel like feeding the poor will raise profits.

All the capitalist arguments against this position are like perpetual motion machines: there is a flaw somewhere in the scheme that opposes the flow of capital. However, this is not a problem outside capitalism. Just feed the poor through socialized industries.

Note that these answers are tailored to your framing of the problem, which I fundamentally disagree with. I have posted many times about the approach that I think minimizes harm.

---

Can't believe I'm having an argument about moral relativism with an atheist. I think you are so insulated in a leftist bubble that things leftists say sound like common sense to you. This is not how humanity in general thinks of the problems confronting us.

After you realize there are people who have honestly convinced themselves that raising corporate profits is the moral thing to do, you have to think about how they strategize to bring the poor over to their side.

There are two factions that want to revolutionize society: 1. Those who want to improve people's lives. 2. Those who want to oppress women and minorities like their heroic ancestors did.

It's group 1 that the capitalists are mainly afraid of. Since the costs of group 2's "revolution" will be paid mainly by the multitudes rather than capitalists, the latter fund this group to help them take out group 1. This is called "fascism".

[rotting bones]

Certainly, people mostly pay more attention to work, as you say. Something Happens might just be around the corner if a decade of heat records and a stomring of the Capitol is not enough.

I kind of don't believe that people don't know what Trump stands for 8 years later. I think Trump pushes a simplistic, wrestling-like narrative of good vs. evil. Since everyone thinks they are good and their adversaries are twisted people, many who don't know better see themselves in Trump's message. For example, I once saw an interview with an immigrant Latino waiter who voted for Trump: "If there are millions of criminals pouring over the border, we have to stop them!" He can't be convinced Trumpists are talking about him because Trump is against evil, and he's a "good person".

There were also many others who distrusted Harris because of the "motivational" content of her speeches and the relatively short time she spent talking about "policy" compared to Trump. Some pseudointellectuals think bad policies like mass deportation are better than a few sentences about policy here and there.

Yes, indeed, and so too much attention is paid to them.

I'm too poor to have books without screens.

[rotting bones]

So neorurals? This article appears to support your idea that rurals on average have higher environmental impact: https://climateadaptationplatform.com/w ... -dwellers/

It also says, based on https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/t ... -emissions: "Consume less from clothes, furnishings, and electronic gadgets. Be a minimalist."

The original source says: "City dwellers consume a lot of carbon indirectly — enough to approach, or even exceed, the carbon footprints of their rural counterparts. We find in cities folks who are early adopters," University of Maine anthropologist Cynthia Isenhour said on The Takeaway. "They are more responsive to ideas about fashion or technological obsolescence. So they do tend to replace things like clothing, furnishings, and electronics more frequently."

Is this the one? https://zompist.com/jacobs.html

I always forget.

[rotting bones]

Sigh. Obviously our rhetorical styles, and previous interactions, get in the way. You like to be extremely abstract and try to be clever about it, and that gets on my nerves. I mean, you write stuff like this— "the fact is, capitalism is absolutely rife with such irrationalities -which the economists call "market failures", but they are in fact the market working precisely as it can be expected a market to function. they just want you to think the default state is market good and the aberration is market bad."... absolute, over-simplified statements, telepathic claims about how The Man operates, sloganeering (capitalists look dumber if you make them say "market good"), not a word indicating that non-market solutions that have been tried also sucked... and when you're called on this, your defense is that oh, you had a more nuanced view all along.

Personally, I think all human thought should be abolished, including both capitalism and socialism. Start over from first principles like particles interacting in space or whatever this is: https://youtu.be/ZAEmKkVRkXo?si=HThUcFjr-GcIaB3X lol

[keenir]

Personally, I think all human thought should be abolished, including both capitalism and socialism. Start over from first principles like particles interacting in space or whatever this is: https://youtu.be/ZAEmKkVRkXo?si=HThUcFjr-GcIaB3X lol

so, this is something you and I agree on: that Ripley was right: "Nuke it from orbit."

(unless you were joking or being facetious, in which case I retract you from the statement)

[Ares Land]

Isn't the global housing crisis just urbanization? Housing is cheap in places that don't have jobs, but expensive in places that do. Most jobs used to be in agriculture; now they're in providing domestic services to people with Anglo-Norman job titles. The issue in the US is that the Anglo-Normans have a substantial part of their net worth invested in neighborhoods that are vastly more expensive than others which are geographically but not culturally nearby. This model does well at predicting the distribution of cranes in North American cities: Toronto has more cranes than all major US cities combined, and the top three US cities by crane count are Seattle, LA, and Denver, none of which are on the East Coast. (LA is a little surprising.)

The transition from a largely rural to largely urban lifestyle really occured decades ago in the West. So that's definitely not it. As for the rest of your point, yes, housing is treated as an investment which I think chimes in with my earlier remarks: this is directly at odds with the human need to reside somewhere.

But less so in Japan, for a simple reason: they build more housing.

People really tie themselves into knots on this one issue, but housing is not an exception to the general rule that when you make more of something it costs less. Japan builds about 6.9 housing units per thousand residents, California just 2.4.

I don't know what the excuse is elsewhere, but in the US the basic reason for limiting housing is that Americans hate density.

I think the exact specifics of the issue defers from country to country. But your point is intriguing in that it shows that currently capitalism is unable to do fairly basic stuff like building houses -- or apartment buildings. I do believe part of the problem is using housing as an investment vehicle. It looks like the decades from 1950 to 1990 were an anomaly -- and we're going back to rentier capitalism.

So neorurals? This article appears to support your idea that rurals on average have higher environmental impact: https://climateadaptationplatform.com/w ... -dwellers/

I lived in the countryside, I used to live in the city -- in both cases trying to minimize environmental impact.
It's generally just as easy (or just as difficult) here in the countryside; easier in some respects. The one huge exception is having to drive most everywhere; there really aren't any good alternatives. And electric cars are still horribly expensive. What I'd like is a bus service to the closest city:that wouldn't be too hard to set up and would fix almost all of the problem, but there just isn't one.

That may well be the average in your experience and that differs from the statistics cited in Faites-les Read (Get Them to Read) by Michel Desmurget, p. 44-7.

I'm not sure I trust Desmurget that much. He's a 'cognitive neuroscientist' which is IMO borderline pseudoscience.

I do agree with the idea that people should generally do things and read books; it is a problem, what I disagree with is the idea it's a new problem. It's been that way for decades.

[bradrn]

He's a 'cognitive neuroscientist' which is IMO borderline pseudoscience.

Hmm, what makes you say that? (I know very little about the field.)

[Ares Land]

He's a 'cognitive neuroscientist' which is IMO borderline pseudoscience.

Hmm, what makes you say that? (I know very little about the field.)

I honestly don't know about it that much; I can't really follow the actual scientific work. But it's fashionable as pop-science these days. I've read several books that claim to be supported by 'neuroscience' and I have two problems with them:

• They assume we know a lot more about how the human brains works than we really do. Last I checked we still have very little idea how the human mind works. We can see how and when mirror neurons fire up and that's fascinating but I think we're still very far from drawing conclusions about it.
• There is a certain tendancy to bully the reader into accepting the authors' thesis. You should do X / educate your children in that way BECAUSE SCIENCE SAYS SO. (And to the extent I can follow the actual scientific work -- it does not says so.)

I am very skeptical when a scientists relays very human cognitive bias, such as 'kids these days are stupid', 'things were better when I was personally younger' or 'this new thing which did not exist when I was young is obviously detrimental to human health'.
I may be unfair to Desmurget, especially since I kind of agree with him. There's plenty of evidence of the Internet making people stupid -- but didn't people make themselves stupid in other ways before that?

[Travis B.]

He's a 'cognitive neuroscientist' which is IMO borderline pseudoscience.

Hmm, what makes you say that? (I know very little about the field.)

I honestly don't know about it that much; I can't really follow the actual scientific work. But it's fashionable as pop-science these days. I've read several books that claim to be supported by 'neuroscience' and I have two problems with them:

• They assume we know a lot more about how the human brains works than we really do. Last I checked we still have very little idea how the human mind works. We can see how and when mirror neurons fire up and that's fascinating but I think we're still very far from drawing conclusions about it.
• There is a certain tendancy to bully the reader into accepting the authors' thesis. You should do X / educate your children in that way BECAUSE SCIENCE SAYS SO. (And to the extent I can follow the actual scientific work -- it does not says so.)

I am very skeptical when a scientists relays very human cognitive bias, such as 'kids these days are stupid', 'things were better when I was personally younger' or 'this new thing which did not exist when I was young is obviously detrimental to human health'.

Agreed completely.

I may be unfair to Desmurget, especially since I kind of agree with him. There's plenty of evidence of the Internet making people stupid -- but didn't people make themselves stupid in other ways before that?

I think that the idea that people are stupid because of the Internet in particular is misguided. Stepping back a few decades one can say the very same thing about TV, if not more so. (I remember as a kid -- I was born in the 1980's -- finding most TV to be exceptionally stupid, and once my family had the Internet finding the Internet to be far superior to it.)

[jcb]

But less so in Japan, for a simple reason: they build more housing.

People really tie themselves into knots on this one issue, but housing is not an exception to the general rule that when you make more of something it costs less. Japan builds about 6.9 housing units per thousand residents, California just 2.4.

I don't know what the excuse is elsewhere, but in the US the basic reason for limiting housing is that Americans hate density.

I remember watching a video once that said that part of the reason for this is that it's much harder for NIMBYs in Japan to block projects.

[zompist]

I am very skeptical when a scientists relays very human cognitive bias, such as 'kids these days are stupid', 'things were better when I was personally younger' or 'this new thing which did not exist when I was young is obviously detrimental to human health'.

I think that the idea that people are stupid because of the Internet in particular is misguided. Stepping back a few decades one can say the very same thing about TV, if not more so. (I remember as a kid -- I was born in the 1980's -- finding most TV to be exceptionally stupid, and once my family had the Internet finding the Internet to be far superior to it.)

Just as suspect is the idea that kids used to be smart. Was there an ideal time when kids loved education, admired the intelligent, did calculus problems for fun, and avoided all non-education pastimes? There was not. As Travis says, before the Internet was blamed, the culprit was TV. Before TV, it was comic books; before that, jazz and trashy novels; before that, novels in general.

The details differ, of course. My understanding is that social media allows kids to be bullied at home, where it used to be limited to school. But bullies could terrorize other kids very effectively when I was young— they knew to do it when adults weren't watching, and there were plenty of opportunities.

[Travis B.]

In the past the kids were all above average.

[Ares Land]

The details differ, of course. My understanding is that social media allows kids to be bullied at home, where it used to be limited to school. But bullies could terrorize other kids very effectively when I was young— they knew to do it when adults weren't watching, and there were plenty of opportunities.

That's one of the main worries yes -- often adults are being bullied on social media.
One thing that did improve: adults take bullying more seriously. When I was a kid, adults didn't really care much and usually figured kids should sort it out themselves.

[Torco]

To summarize, the problem is that: 1. The various interests in society will hire fancy lawyers to argue that helping them is the moral position. To your surprise, they will convince people. 2. As long as you keep capitalism around, the argument put forward by capitalists that raising profits is necessary to feed the poor won't be entirely wrong. This is because, under capitalism, the poor are fed when investors feel like feeding the poor will raise profits

basically, yes. the economic system we have inherently necessitates scarcity for at least some sizeable portion of people. examples will be offered to the tune of finland or norway, countries noticeably not being imposed austerity, privatization and social cuts by the international system. just like someone has to breathe that toxic vapor, some countries have to be the resource rich exporters of cheap primary goods.

Isn't the global housing crisis just urbanization? Housing is cheap in places that don't have jobs, but expensive in places that do. Most jobs used to be in agriculture; now they're in providing domestic services to people with Anglo-Norman job titles. The issue in the US is that the Anglo-Normans have a substantial part of their net worth invested in neighborhoods that are vastly more expensive than others which are geographically but not culturally nearby. This model does well at predicting the distribution of cranes in North American cities: Toronto has more cranes than all major US cities combined, and the top three US cities by crane count are Seattle, LA, and Denver, none of which are on the East Coast. (LA is a little surprising.)

The transition from a largely rural to largely urban lifestyle really occured decades ago in the West. So that's definitely not it. As for the rest of your point, yes, housing is treated as an investment which I think chimes in with my earlier remarks: this is directly at odds with the human need to reside somewhere.

if it was, you'd expect urbanizing regions like bolivia and non-urbanizing regions like spain or portugal to have different outcomes: yet even in places where people migrated to the cities a looong time ago you get problems. countries with small rural percentages, like chile, still have pretty high rents. construction is a part of it -though the point is correct, why isn't "the market" building? maybe cause it's convenient for marketrunners for prices to be high!-, but so is public infrastructure and policy in general, in order to mitigate what the market left to its own devices will do. thought experiment: if tomorrow all the railtracks and buses and so on in a city were to disappear overnight, would more or fewer people have trouble securing adequate housing?

[jcb]

As most Americans do: across parties, by conservative, moderate (= centrist), liberal. E.g. from Pew polls:

This assumes that the political space is one-dimensional, which is false.

When you attack "liberals", you are attacking the leftmost part of the Democrats-- people who might call themselves progressives or socialists. It's probably worth remembering that about half of the Democrats voted for Sanders. Guess which half?

(1) I don't care what they call themselves, as long as they want the same things that I want.
(2) I'm not convinced that all the "liberals" do want the same things that I want.

Of course people use these terms in a relative fashion, so the NYT is more liberal than Fox News. But it's pretty ridiculous to call it a liberal paper; it's the voice of the center-left... the people who call themselves "moderate or conservative Democrats".

Indeed, or, as I said before: "republicans that don't want to admit that they're republicans".

[zompist]

As most Americans do: across parties, by conservative, moderate (= centrist), liberal. E.g. from Pew polls:

This assumes that the political space is one-dimensional, which is false.

Fine, go tell them.

Pew Research Center
901 E St. NW Suite 300.
Washington, D.C. 20004

When you attack "liberals", you are attacking the leftmost part of the Democrats-- people who might call themselves progressives or socialists. It's probably worth remembering that about half of the Democrats voted for Sanders. Guess which half?

(1) I don't care what they call themselves, as long as they want the same things that I want.
(2) I'm not convinced that all the "liberals" do want the same things that I want.

From what you've said, most of your complaints are about the centrist half of the party. If you don't like the leftist half either... well, inter-left divisions are a long tradition by now (so we all feel that way), but waiting till the 7/8 of Americans who disagree with you to change their minds may take awhile.