The American Politics Thread

you totally miss the f**king point...

i don't know why I bother with you.. probably because you bother with us.

It isn't a question of being right or wrong....  it is reading where we are at NOW.  And questioning how... or more importantly IF anything can change the dynamics of this election prior to November.

and the answer is of course..  you bet your ass it can.. but it isn't going to be anything of Biden's doing...  people aren't voting for him as much as against Trump

so can Trump do anything to take what would be a landslide if the election was held today.

Well today was a good example of just why it isn't a questions as much if he can give himself a chance.. but just how far he can fall. 

He was caught at the heart of it today with his Twitter rage fest against the CDC.. the cost???? goddamn right.. that is why containing this was so important from the beginning.. the costs to the country.. in monetary terms will be extreme. 3 more trillion on top of the debt to reopen the schools

but if they are not..  don't think anyone has done analysis on those costs.  Something we have discussed quite heavily at work.  Several of my coworkers have kids in the school system here.  4 of the 6 highest income counties in the nation.. are right here in this area. They can afford to provide students the means to remotely school...  and they are going to. The teachers unions here are going BAT sh*t crazy at teh mere thought of bringing kids back into schools

yes.. those same well educated.. suburbanite.. women voters that Trump can not win without. Now that is how you win them back huh... caring nothing for the safety of THEIR children..

yet what about school systems that don't have the resources to send kids home with laptops.. and high speed internet access.. they are f**ked

the human toll of the virus thanks to Trump's bungling is bad enough.. the financial cost will be ... years and years to recoup. And that the reality check Trump had to face today.. and of course.. rather than face it. 

He doubles down...

I don't think the letter, if anything, goes far enough and I would have liked them not to be so hasty but draft it in depth with specific instances and name and shame the 'naming-and-shaming' brigade.  Perhaps, though, they didn't want to face litigation.

I was also disappointed that it took the attempted cancellation of Steve Pinker for all these intellectuals to speak up.  The most egregious instance of cancellation was imo of David Shor.  

A one time Obama election campaign operative and a Democrat, he was fired from his job because the mob outraged at him sharing a study that suggested that peaceful protests help liberals in elections and riots help conservatives.  One can argue with the study or arguments based around it but it does not make someone sharing the study a bigot FFS.  

There has retrospectively been an attempt by the Twitter mob to claim they had nothing to do with this and if the employer caves in, it's not their fault (yeah, zero accountability).  But as the above NYMag article by Chait clearly documents, a group of think tank operatives and others working in politics called Progressphiles not only declared Shor a racist but came down heavily on any attempts by 'dissenters' to debate the issue.

There are, by the way, many, many such cases and it is by no means an isolated incident.  I don't have a compilation of all of them but I have noted many such cases over the last few years.  As mentioned in the letter, books being pulled from publication because somebody applied a magnifying glass to one character in the book and decided it was somehow bigotry by some convoluted form of argument and there was no pushback to such claims (or the pushback was ignored).

Thought control has gone, well, out of control in the progressive world.  I remember pointing this out to a lady of Indian origin working as an academic in Pittsburgh when she shared an 'explainer' about social justice which had the words "some opinions are inherently dangerous".  I asked firstly how opinions could be dangerous by themselves as long as they are in the mind and not acted upon and secondly, does it not amount to thought control if you declare an opinion dangerous?  Being that the forum was not a 'progressive safe space' but an open, diverse one like this, she made some excuse and shied away from a debate.  All this was back before Trump became President.  Mind, this lady would likely be at least 10-15 years older than me, if not more.  I was NOT dealing with angry Zoomers.  So the fact that middle aged people had chosen to believe in something like this was both amusing and scary to me.

I thought they would learn their lessons from the reaction they helped unleash (which was about many things, those including economic decline and clear and present racism but was also about a backlash against political correctness).  But no!  In the intervening years, it has become even worse as it seems people can now be parted from their livelihood if the Twitter mob feels it is justified.  I do blame the corporations too for being so spineless.  But the mob cannot escape blame by saying it's not they who fired these people.  No, you abetted it, so you own it too. It is one thing to fire somebody (Amy Cooper) who is caught on camera calling the police on a black man because he dared ask her to follow the rules, it is another to seek to impose a narrative on everyone by bringing down the hammer on anybody who even slightly dissents without even saying anything remotely bigoted.

I understand your concerns re being a teacher, I have many teachers amongst my friend and know this is true.

Your first paragraph made me remember a school story re my son.  5th Grade History class, students were required to write a paper and make a short presentation on the Constitution of the US.  Son rebelled and didn't want to do the presentation.  So on his turn to rise and make the presentation, he walked up, and stated that it was his Constitutional right to not do the presentation.  The teacher didn't get at all angry, in fact, she rather thought it was clever, as she told me later.  She responded with, "Indeed you are protected by that right, however, I also have a right to lower your grade on this assignment accordingly.  You may do the presentation, or not, but if not, this is the consequence of your decision."  He declined the opportunity and received only a grade on the written portion (an A).  Luckily, he did well enough throughout the class that the ungraded presentation didn't matter much.  But a case in point.   By the way, I did support both his and his teacher's decisions.  These days, he is quite at ease at presentations, doesn't even ever use notes and has obtained a Master's in International Relations.  Ya never know where a little disobedience will lead.

But what if you are cancelled for something you said decades back?  This is not even hypothetical. I believe the Boeing CEO had to step down for that reason. Now the Right is asking why shouldn't Obama be cancelled for opposing same sex marriage in his election campaigns. This culture war is a needless time suck that distracts from energy that would be better deployed to oppose Trump. You can't do that effectively if you have to also watch your back lest you say something the Twitter mob will cancel you for.

Agreed.  Or maybe corporations can go back to due process.  If people are given the opportunity to at least step back and contextualise what they said, and if it is felt that there is nowhere where it doesn't cause offence, just delete the tweet and apologize.  What I find frightening is the notion that an apology is not enough and a person doesn't deserve a second chance EVEN where clearly no offence was implied. Why does firing the person have to be the only solution. If somebody has a habit of say, saying the N word and then apologising and deleting, have a three strikes rule or something for that and then cut them out.  By all means punish a malafide offender.  But there are so many practical ways to navigate this issue that it seems unfortunately, people won't consider.

Personally I totally feel the ambivalence... both the anger at racist, sexist and fascist stuff that some people say, and the concern about political correctness going much too far, stifling free speech...