Best anaylysis I’ve read in a long time

[PaulKay]

Tribal epistimology

[brucemacneill]

I take it the author (nope I didn't look for who it is) is a Communist.

[dradtke]

When you're backed up against the right-field fence, the pitcher is far to your left.

[Deleted]

"Journalism cannot be neutral ...."  

Sorry, I read the under headline and said, "Yep that's what's happening and that's a large part of the problem." Journalists and pundits are not smarter than everyone else and as has been shown in the last year can be a great deal stupider.

[brucemacneill]

Lost me at the point it was explaining why city slickers are more important than country folk so obviously Hilary should have won. VOX is really anti Trump. Apparently one of their writers was encouraging people to riot at Trump rallies pre-election. That makes them Democrats, far left Democrats who are indistinguishable from Communists since the Democrat platform is indistinguishable from the American Communist Party, which now calls itself the Democratic Socialist Party, platform.

[dradtke]

QED

[brucemacneill]

Best I've heard:

www.cnbc.com/2018/02/09/scott-mcnealy-government-should-only-care-for-people-incapable.html

[fauxmaha]

It does seem that Vox is something of a self-refuting source for discussion of the perils of "tribal epistimology".

[Deleted]

Whichever direction it comes from, when journalism becomes advocacy, it is no longer journalism. At best, it is considered opinion, at worst, partisan boosterism.

[jdd2]

Here's one I had out: (bloomberg editorial board)

Washington Needs a Correction Too
There's no avoiding stock-market volatility. But there's no need for lawmakers to make it worse.

If you're not worried, you're not paying attention.

Thursday's drop in the S&P 500 brought the fall since last month's peak to more than 10 percent, making this a correction, according to the usual definition. Such a reassuring term: It suggests not so much a setback as an overdue adjustment. Is that right?

U.S. Budget Frees Up Government to Spend Trillions

It could be. The economy looks pretty healthy at the moment. Shares got pounded after better-than-expected numbers aroused fears of tighter monetary policy -- and an economy needing to be restrained is a much better problem to have than an economy that's threatening to tank. Asset prices looked high relative to earnings and other fundamentals; now they aren't so high. Maybe all's well.

Maybe. The problem is that despite a continuing, moderately paced, worldwide expansion, an unusual number of uncertainties cloud the picture. Some of these were unavoidable; some of them were made, and are still being made, in the U.S. capital.

Monetary policy will have to contend for years with the legacy of the crash of 2008. The extraordinary measures undertaken to bring the economy back from that disaster -- bond-buying on an enormous scale and super-low interest rates -- were vital to avoid an even worse recession, but now they must be unwound. It isn't easy to say how quickly that should happen, much less how quickly it will happen. And for as long as this process is underway, asset valuations inflated by quantitative easing and super-cheap money will be called into question.

Much of the uncertainty over monetary policy was inevitable, once the crash had been allowed to happen in the first place. But added economic uncertainty arises from U.S. fiscal policy, if one can call it that, and from the country's larger political dysfunction.

The recent tax reform is expected to add as much as $1.5 trillion to public borrowing over the next ten years. Before that startling prospect had begun to be digested, Congress was discussing spending increases that will add significantly to borrowing this year and next.

More disturbing than the details of the short-term budget deal is what the negotiation said about the longer-term fiscal outlook. After briefly shutting down the government, Democrats and Republicans came together to apply fiscal stimulus to an economy already at full employment. Neither party is even thinking about the alarming long-term trend of public debt. In all, a more vivid display of fiscal irresponsibility would be hard to imagine.

President Donald Trump has shown, on the other hand, that he can rise to the challenge of doing the unimaginable.

There's no avoiding market volatility. But it's a disgrace that Washington is doing all it can to make the problem worse.

To contact the senior editor responsible for Bloomberg View’s editorials: David Shipley at [e-mail] .

www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-09/washington-needs-a-correction-too

[PaulKay]

Feb 11, 2018 16:03:42 GMT -5 brucemacneill said:

Lost me at the point it was explaining why city slickers are more important than country folk so obviously Hilary should have won. VOX is really anti Trump. Apparently one of their writers was encouraging people to riot at Trump rallies pre-election. That makes them Democrats, far left Democrats who are indistinguishable from Communists since the Democrat platform is indistinguishable from the American Communist Party, which now calls itself the Democratic Socialist Party, platform.

Interesting. The replies I see here rather clearly prooves his point.

[Deleted]

After reading more, I'd have to tell the author, David Roberts, to get a mirror. I don't know how someone writes that with a straight face. First of all, he totally misrepresents the "climategate" story and then uses Rush Limbaugh, who is the other half of Roberts' coin, to discredit all those who just may have done some actual journalism in covering the story. They were "cleared"? So was Hillary Clinton, apparently. Not knowing when the fix is in, is the first sign of advocacy "journalism".

[fauxmaha]

A more serious comment goes like this:

There is a lot going on in that article, and I really don't have time to address it all, but three things stood out to me: A "materialist" bias, the idea that "the right" has rejected American institutions, and a presumption that somehow, what he sees happening is something about which something can be done.

The materialist bias is found in his accounting of the relative amount of GDP produced by the 500 Clinton-voting counties vs the 2600 Trump-voting counties. That's always struck me as a truly curious observation/complaint. What is the intended point? "We make more money, so we should be more highly valued?" I'm not sure the underlying facts are anything new. The Constitution was explicitly constructed with mechanisms for preventing the economically dominant areas (which are always, inherently higher population) from always dominating the government vis-a-vis lower population areas. So, one way of looking at the Clinton v Trump economic output chart is to say "The Constitution is working precisely as intended". Beyond that, the fact that nearly 250 years ago this exact situation was understood and anticipated and therefore codified into our structures seems to argue against the idea that there is anything novel going on here.

As for "the right" abandoning institutions, I think it's reasonable to look at the same set of statistics/facts and say "the right believes those institutions have abandoned them". For example, those institutions have told the right that it's position on school prayer is unconstitutional. That it's position on abortion is unconstitutional. That it's position on gay marriage is unconstitutional. That if you don't want your 5 year old daughter sharing a bathroom with a man wearing a dress, you are a bigot. Etc, etc, etc. Without taking a position on any of those issues in particular, one can still reasonably ask "What did the left expect to happen?" Did the left think that, having successfully wielded the levers of power such that (for example) anti-abortion laws in the states are rendered null, that the matter was settled? Furthermore, if the question is reverence for American institutions, the right could reasonably ask "Precisely when did we vote for any of that?". Note that California actually did vote to codify traditional marriage, and the same institutions that Vox complains the right does not sufficiently respect worked tirelessly (and successfully) to nullify that plebiscite. 

I probably shouldn't have included any of the preceding, since all that is really just a distraction to my core point: What we are seeing is, IMHO, the inevitable result of the fact that the core premise of the Progressive project, going back 100 or so years, is fundamentally flawed. The Progressive movement is (among other things, of course) animated by the desire to centralize as much as possible in Washington. That has been an explicit goal of theirs since their inception. I believe it is flawed for two specific reasons. First, the Constitution is just not set up that way. They have tried to shoe-horn a parliamentary style government into a structure that is very much not compatible. If you want a nimble, effective centralized government, you don't start with the US Constitution.

Beyond that, I think that the sort of consensus required for centralized government in a continental nation with over 300 million people is simply not possible. There is too much diversity of opinion, diversity of interests, diversity of culture, diversity of values. There is no example in history that contradicts my view. In fact, every lesson from history would suggest that the breakup of the US is inevitable. 

Vox is looking for something nefarious to explain why people hold different views than they do, but I don't think it's that complicated. They lament Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump, but those two men are effects, not causes.

The most dispiriting thing to me about Trump's election is the almost complete and universal refusal of the left to try to understand it beyond some simplistic cartoon ("basket of deplorables", "Russian hacking", etc) explanation that inevitably takes the form of "THEY are bad, we are good!". 

[Deleted]

Feb 11, 2018 17:40:32 GMT -5 fauxmaha said:

A more serious comment goes like this:

There is a lot going on in that article, and I really don't have time to address it all, but three things stood out to me: A "materialist" bias, the idea that "the right" has rejected American institutions, and a presumption that somehow, what he sees happening is something about which something can be done.

The materialist bias is found in his accounting of the relative amount of GDP produced by the 500 Clinton-voting counties vs the 2600 Trump-voting counties. That's always struck me as a truly curious observation/complaint. What is the intended point? "We make more money, so we should be more highly valued?" I'm not sure the underlying facts are anything new. The Constitution was explicitly constructed with mechanisms for preventing the economically dominant areas (which are always, inherently higher population) from always dominating the government vis-a-vis lower population areas. So, one way of looking at the Clinton v Trump economic output chart is to say "The Constitution is working precisely as intended". Beyond that, the fact that nearly 250 years ago this exact situation was understood and anticipated and therefore codified into our structures seems to argue against the idea that there is anything novel going on here.

As for "the right" abandoning institutions, I think it's reasonable to look at the same set of statistics/facts and say "the right believes those institutions have abandoned them". For example, those institutions have told the right that it's position on school prayer is unconstitutional. That it's position on abortion is unconstitutional. That it's position on gay marriage is unconstitutional. That if you don't want your 5 year old daughter sharing a bathroom with a man wearing a dress, you are a bigot. Etc, etc, etc. Without taking a position on any of those issues in particular, one can still reasonably ask "What did the left expect to happen?" Did the left think that, having successfully wielded the levers of power such that (for example) anti-abortion laws in the states are rendered null, that the matter was settled? Furthermore, if the question is reverence for American institutions, the right could reasonably ask "Precisely when did we vote for any of that?". Note that California actually did vote to codify traditional marriage, and the same institutions that Vox complains the right does not sufficiently respect worked tirelessly (and successfully) to nullify that plebiscite. 

I probably shouldn't have included any of the preceding, since all that is really just a distraction to my core point: What we are seeing is, IMHO, the inevitable result of the fact that the core premise of the Progressive project, going back 100 or so years, is fundamentally flawed. The Progressive movement is (among other things, of course) animated by the desire to centralize as much as possible in Washington. That has been an explicit goal of theirs since their inception. I believe it is flawed for two specific reasons. First, the Constitution is just not set up that way. They have tried to shoe-horn a parliamentary style government into a structure that is very much not compatible. If you want a nimble, effective centralized government, you don't start with the US Constitution.

Beyond that, I think that the sort of consensus required for centralized government in a continental nation with over 300 million people is simply not possible. There is too much diversity of opinion, diversity of interests, diversity of culture, diversity of values. There is no example in history that contradicts my view. In fact, every lesson from history would suggest that the breakup of the US is inevitable. 

Vox is looking for something nefarious to explain why people hold different views than they do, but I don't think it's that complicated. They lament Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump, but those two men are effects, not causes.

The most dispiriting thing to me about Trump's election is the almost complete and universal refusal of the left to try to understand it beyond some simplistic cartoon ("basket of deplorables", "Russian hacking", etc) explanation that inevitably takes the form of "THEY are bad, we are good!". 

They won't be happy until they achieve Venezuela and then they won't be happy at all.

[james]

Smearing, ridiculing and discriminating against victimised minorities, eg. transgender people is straight up bigotry and people who do it are bigots. No way round it.

[fauxmaha]

QED

[millring]

As Jeff so ably points out, it's tough to even know where to begin.

This comment, though, struck me as the most out of touch with reality:

On one side is what we might call the classic liberal democratic (small-l, small-d) theory of politics. In this view, politics is a kind of structured contest. Factions and parties battle over interests and policies, but the field of play on which they battle is ring-fenced by a set of common institutions and norms. Inside that fence is “normal politics” — the subject of legitimate political dispute. Outside that fence is out of bounds, in violation of shared standards.

The “game” of politics is defined by explicit rules (e.g., the Constitution), enforced by various legally empowered referees (e.g., courts and the executive branch). But it is also defined by implicit norms, unwritten rules more informally enforced by the press, academia, and civil society. These latter institutions are referees as well, but their enforcement power operates not through law but through trust. Their transpartisan authority exists solely because participants in the game agree it does.

The reason the author is out of touch with reality is that it is so easy to observe that the author has it exactly 180^o backwards in his claim of who is desiring those structures upon which our political well-being rests be upheld, and who is either tearing them down or utterly misunderstanding them.

A most telling thing happened during the Presidential debates of 2016. Hillary Clinton was asked about the constitution and the courts. Her reply was typical of the current state of liberal democratic thinking -- that the constitution is actually NOT a document defining and limiting the power of government (that ring-fenced set of common institutions and norms that the author refers to). It is, according to her, subject to the whims of whoever may populate the courts. In other words, to the liberal, judges rule the constitution rather than the other way around. As Obama lamented, "The constitution is a set of negative liberties" ...utterly twisting the very central concept of that constitution was to limit the power of government.


In the author’s view, it is central government's role to dictate our norms and if the constitution gets in the way, well, we just need to stack the court to "interpret" it differently. (Ditto his view of all the other institutions. And it’s telling that he excluded church).

So, for instance, the right has ALWAYS maintained that gun control is completely within our democratic determination. All that needs to be done is to amend the constitution accordingly. That's how that "ring-fence" was created for our political health and well-being. The left says, "by-pass the rules by whatever means necessary to meet our progressive goals".

It's interesting that all the frantic hair-on-fire ranting about Trump's current "over-reach" of power is actually exactly the opposite. Most of the complaints in that regard are in response to President Obama's actual over-reach in the form of executive orders (orders which illustrate yet again that it is, indeed, the left – not the right -- that is trying to destroy and undermine our institutions). Trump's choice to un-do them is not an over-reach. It's merely an undoing of the means by which the left favors ruling us -- by bending the very rules that were instituted to keep us civil.

It’s the left that is attempting progress by promoting the idea of the illegitimacy of opposing party’s dissent. It’s the left that has foisted this thinly veiled fraud of “bipartisanship and compromise in order to get things done for the American people”. Notice the author even has to make up a word to interject this very fraud into his article -- "transpartisan"

And the author is suggesting that an inherent and intentional dishonesty exists in our press in their very coverage of the news. That’s a worse charge of ethical misdeed than any I’ve ever suggested about our press. Way worse.

It's not the right that has that wrong. It's people like the author. He's the one exhibiting tribalism.

[Deleted]

Feb 11, 2018 18:34:55 GMT -5 james said:

Smearing, ridiculing and discriminating 

And you quote Orwell? Too funny! 

[millring]

Feb 11, 2018 14:40:21 GMT -5 dradtke said:

When you're backed up against the right-field fence, the pitcher is far to your left.

I want to see that diamond.

[brucemacneill]

Feb 12, 2018 7:17:40 GMT -5 millring said:

Feb 11, 2018 14:40:21 GMT -5 dradtke said:

When you're backed up against the right-field fence, the pitcher is far to your left.

I want to see that diamond.

As usual, he was really coming in from left field. Like Kimmel said, it takes a level of intelligence to be liberal, a fairly low level.