…it’s not who you know [DOT 10/2/22]

it's what they're like...

…ok…so this one might have gotten away from me a little…so for the scrolling-averse do remember the little comment counter above the header image is a short cut to the bottom…because in between…there might be a lot of variables involved

Despite setting a record, experts said the 2021 total was within expected bounds. Police have fatally shot roughly 1,000 people in each of the past seven years, ranging from 958 in 2016 to last year’s high. Mathematicians say this stability may be explained by Poisson’s random variable, a principle of probability theory that holds that the number of independent, uncommon events in a large population will remain fairly stagnant absent major societal changes.

That the number of fatal police shootings last year is within 60 of the average suggests officers’ behavior has not shifted significantly since The Post began collecting data, said Andrew Wheeler, a private-sector criminologist and data scientist.
[…]
Advocacy for policing overhauls has intensified since the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. More than 400 bills were introduced in state legislatures last year to address officers’ use of force. Police departments increasingly partnered with mental health experts to respond to people in crisis. Cities established civilian review boards for use-of-force incidents.

None of it decreased the number of people shot and killed by officers last year. The total has increased slightly most years since 2015 — a pattern that Wheeler said may or may not signal that fatal shootings truly are trending higher.
[…]
The demographics of the people fatally shot have remained largely constant since The Post started tracking after a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., killed Michael Brown in 2014, gathering information from news coverage, social media posts and police records. Although the FBI launched its own data collection program to track police use of force in 2019, a lack of participation by departments has put that program’s existence at risk.
[…]
The relative stability of the annual number of fatal shootings does not mean the total is unchangeable. Wheeler said societal interventions, such as new policies around use of force, could shift the total from its expected range.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/02/09/fatal-police-shootings-record-2021/

…but I’m not liking some of the constants there seem to be

A few short decades ago, both parties acknowledged that winning brought benefits such as redrawing legislative districts, determining state election regulations, and making appointments to boards, commissions and courts. The losers complained, sure, but that was part of the dance.

From 1955 to 1995 — from the administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower to Bill Clinton — Democrats controlled the House of Representatives. Somehow, this one-party domination prompted little anguish from reformers or the media. In most states, drawing state and federal legislative districts was recognized as a perk of winning. Some states have new laws designed to take the partisan fun out of it, but in places like Ohio and Michigan they have proved problematic.
[…]
The Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday stopping a lower court order citing the Voting Rights Act in requiring Alabama to redraw its congressional map might remind people that redistricting is a legislative prerogative, some partisanship notwithstanding.

When it came to Supreme Court nominations years ago, there was the occasional fight, but through the mid-1960s, confirmation was often by acclamation, with no roll call necessary.[…]

Democrats, newly in control of the Senate, were alarmed by Reagan’s choice of Robert H. Bork and soon created a radical blueprint for thwarting an ideological shift of the court. As New York Times columnist Joe Nocera recalled in 2011, the clash over Bork was arguably “the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics. … Ted Kennedy gave a fiery speech describing ‘Robert Bork’s America’ as a place ‘in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters,’ ” and other nonsense.

Bork’s nomination was defeated by a vote of 58 to 42. Only two Democrats voted to confirm. Reagan’s next pick, Douglas H. Ginsburg, withdrew after admitting marijuana use. Patrick J. Leahy, a Democratic senator from Vermont and member of the Judiciary Committee, announced that Democrats would not consider another nominee until after the 1988 presidential election unless it was someone mutually agreeable. All sides finally compromised on Anthony M. Kennedy, who retired in 2018 and remains the last Supreme Court nominee to be confirmed unanimously.
[…]
But the left remains especially brutal in “borking” Republican picks, including all three of President Donald Trump’s nominees, who were confirmed only after then-majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) ended the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. Neil M. Gorsuch was alleged to have sexist attitudes toward pregnant lawyers. Brett M. Kavanaugh was accused of having committed sexual assault as a teenager. Critics likened Amy Coney Barrett to a character out of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Gorsuch received just three Democratic votes, Kavanaugh got one and not a single Democrat voted for Barrett.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/09/supreme-court-redistricting-and-partisanship/

…given their inability to stave off those appointments if the seemingly accurate characterization of people being offered a lifetime appointment to positions that allow them to determine the legal landscape of a nation deserves to be labelled as brutal…it’s a curiously impotent example of brute force…whereas at some level

You know the Rubicon has been crossed when the Supreme Court issues a conservative voting rights order so at odds with settled precedent and without any sense of the moment that Chief Justice John Roberts feels constrained to dissent.

This is the same John Roberts who in 1982, as a young lawyer in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, fought a crucial amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965; whose majority opinion in 2013 gutted one-half of the Voting Rights Act and who joined an ahistoric opinion last summer that took aim at the other half; and who famously complained in dissent from a 2006 decision in favor of Latino voters in South Texas that “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”
[…]
The Supreme Court will hear Alabama’s appeal of the district court order in its next term, so the stay it granted will mean that the 2022 elections will take place with district lines that the lower court unanimously, with two of the three judges appointed by President Donald Trump, found to be illegal.
[…]
This is no mere squabble over procedure. What happened Monday night was a raw power play by a runaway majority that seems to recognize no stopping point. It bears emphasizing that the majority’s agenda of cutting back on the scope of the Voting Rights Act is Chief Justice Roberts’s agenda too. He made that abundantly clear in the past and suggested it in a kind of code on Monday with his bland observation that the court’s Voting Rights Act precedents “have engendered considerable disagreement and uncertainty regarding the nature and contours of a vote dilution claim.” But in his view, that was an argument to be conducted in the next Supreme Court term while permitting the district court’s decision to take effect now.

[…]maybe the others couldn’t indulge in the hypocrisy of Justice Kavanaugh’s description of the standards for granting a stay. The party asking for a stay, he wrote, “ordinarily must show (i) a reasonable probability that this court would eventually grant review and a fair prospect that the court would reverse, and (ii) that the applicant would likely suffer irreparable harm absent the stay.”

But wait a minute. Weren’t those conditions clearly met back in September when abortion providers in Texas came to the court seeking a stay of the Texas vigilante law, S.B. 8, which was about to go into effect? That law, outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and authorizing anyone anywhere in the country to sue a Texas abortion provider for damages, was flagrantly unconstitutional, and the law was about to destroy the state’s abortion infrastructure. But did Justice Kavanaugh or any of the others in Monday’s majority vote to grant the requested stay? They did not. Chief Justice Roberts did.
[…]
Disturbing as this development is, it is even more alarming in context. Last July, in a case from Arizona, the court took a very narrow view of the Voting Rights Act as a weapon against vote denial measures, policies that have a discriminatory effect on nonwhite voters’ access to the polls. That case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, was brought under the act’s Section 2, which prohibits voting procedures that give members of racial minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” Justice Alito’s opinion for a 6-to-3 majority set a high bar for showing that any disputed measure is more than just an ordinary burden that comes with turning out to vote.

It was an unusual case, in that Section 2 has much more typically been used as it was in Alabama, to challenge district lines as causing vote dilution. Obviously, at the heart of any Section 2 case is the question of how to evaluate the role of race. In its request for a stay, Alabama characterized the district court of having improperly “prioritized” race, as opposed to other districting factors, in ordering a second majority Black district. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, representing the Alabama plaintiffs, called this a mischaracterization of what the district court had actually done when it took account of the compactness and cohesion of the Black community and the history of white Alabama voters refusing to support Black candidates.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/09/opinion/supreme-court-voting-rights.html

…it’s hard not to feel like when it comes to some pretty widespread consequences

The study, published Feb. 1 in the Lancet, produced headlines because of its intriguing finding that infection rates were lower, and vaccine coverage higher, in countries where polls show a high level of interpersonal trust and trust in the authorities — regardless of how pandemic-ready a given nation appeared according to conventional indicators of preparedness.

When it comes to deaths per infection, however, the study found two factors loomed largest: the aging of a given country and its average body-mass index, a measure of obesity.

The United States’ national average body-mass index ranks near the heaviest among all countries. If instead we were just average — roughly the level of Denmark — the death rate would have been 19.5 percent lower between Jan. 1, 2020, and Sept. 30, 2021, the study’s lead author, Thomas J. Bollyky of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me in an interview. That is, some 157,000 fewer people would have died during those 21 months. The toll now stands at just over 900,000.
[…]
Caveat: The Lancet article does not report clinical research; strictly speaking, it describes not causes but correlations. Also, Bollyky told me aging was twice as strongly correlated with death rates as obesity was.

Nevertheless, it’s a striking correlation. Of the 16 states with adult obesity rates 35 percent or higher, 10 — Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas — rank in the top 20 for age-adjusted per capita covid death rates, according to Bioinformatics CRO, a consulting firm.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/08/obesity-and-covid-deaths/

…& what I guess I’ve started to think of as their lowest common denominator

If you aren’t a regular viewer of Fox News, you might think the network is consumed only with stories about frightening Black people and perfidious liberals. Not so — Fox also finds heroes to praise, the righteous and the brave who will defend the principles they espouse.

Like shutting down traffic as a form of protest. Turn on Fox today and you’ll find one host after another — Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson — waxing poetic on the noble cause of the “Freedom Convoy.” This is a group of Canadian truckers who descended on the capital city of Ottawa to protest a requirement that those who cross back and forth over the U.S. border be vaccinated.
[…]
Now Republican politicians are getting into the act: After GoFundMe announced that it would be returning money raised for the truckers, whose ranks include a variety of far-right cranks, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas announced they’d be mounting investigations of the company. And of course, Donald Trump — who as president loved nothing more than sitting in a truck like a big boy — expressed his support for the truckers.

It’s somewhat ironic that DeSantis would come to the defense of these protesters, because in the past he hasn’t looked on the exercise of that particular right with a great deal of sympathy. Last April, he enthusiastically signed a bill that makes it a felony to block traffic in a protest and “grants civil legal immunity to people who drive through protesters blocking a road,” as the Orlando Sentinel put it.

A similar law passed in Texas, as it has in a number of conservative states. Oklahoma’s version gives drivers both civil and criminal immunity for injuring or killing protesters.
[…]
This group of truckers — who represent a small minority even among their own profession — probably have more support among American conservatives than they do in their own country. One poll found 65 percent of Canadians agree that the convoy was a “small minority of Canadians who are thinking only about themselves and not the thousands of Canadians who are suffering through delayed surgeries and postponed treatments because of the growing pandemic.”
[…]
There are a couple of interesting things going on here. The first is that the American right increasingly sees itself as part of a transnational movement, embodied in its embrace of both bottom-up populist protests like the truckers, and top-down authoritarianism like what we see in Hungary or Russia.

The second is that the party of “law and order” has come to fully embrace law-breaking and disorder, as long as it’s performed by people the party has sympathy for. Led by Trump, more and more Republicans have come to see the Jan. 6 insurrection as a noble feat of patriotism, not a thuggish betrayal of American democracy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/08/american-right-canadian-truckers/

…there’s a certain sort of people who seem to bear an outsize level of responsibility

Some Republican lawmakers in Georgia have proposed legislation that would prevent schools from requiring any childhood vaccination requirements. Apparently fanning the coronavirus pandemic is not enough; they appear willing to spur a comeback of childhood diseases once nearly obliterated in advanced societies, such as polio or measles.

Meanwhile, the MAGA crowd in Florida has proposed legislation that seeks to prevent teaching topics that might make White students uncomfortable. Robert P. Jones, head of the Public Religion Research Institute, explains:

The most pernicious part of the bill is its bizarre definition of “individual freedom,” consisting of eight principles plainly written to protect white people. The final one is the most sweeping: “An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” The bill then proceeds to define “discrimination” under Florida state law as a violation of “individual freedom.”

This provision effectively gives any single white person veto power over the content of history curriculum in schools or trainings in the workplace. White discomfort governs historical truth.

Keep in mind that Florida Republicans have no problem making gay children uncomfortable. They have also introduced legislation that would hobble education about gender identity and sexual orientation. The Tampa Bay Times reports, “Critics, who call the measures Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ bills, argue the measures are an attempt to weaponize the idea of parental rights to marginalize LGBTQ people.”
[…]
And in Texas, if some Republicans get their way, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Ku Klux Klan could be excised from school curriculum. Under the banner of prohibiting critical race theory, which is not taught in schools, right-wingers convinced they are victims of discrimination and tyrannized by demands for tolerance in a diverse society no longer see private or home schooling as a way to shield children from unwanted influence. Now, they want to enlist public schools to do the indoctrination for them.
[…]
A common theme among these measures: protecting Whites — not Blacks, Hispanics or Native Americans, the groups that have actually suffered from racism and repression — from feeling “bad” about historical facts. That motive is racist — a sort of trigger warning intended to shield White people from unpleasant truths about discrimination against minority groups. Minorities upset about the miseducation of youth simply have to suck it up.

The bills also encourage frivolous litigation that would make trial lawyers blush. Incentives to harass teachers and tie up schools in endless litigation suggests that Republicans would rather spend time and money fighting these legal battles than on education. It’s a peculiar position for a party that used to look askance at tort litigation.

Much of the hullabaloo takes place in states where schools are massively underperforming in basic subjects such as math and reading. In fact, many of these states — Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Louisiana, South Carolina, Mississippi, West Virginia — rank at the bottom of educational performance or can claim some of the least-educated populations in the country. One would think adults concerned with catching students up to compete with peers in high-performing blue states (let alone China) would have different priorities.
[…]
It’s easy to see how such measures could dissuade people from relocating to these states, diversifying their economies, building high-tech businesses and expanding higher education — the attributes that characterize more affluent and diverse states. Come to think of it, maybe that’s the point.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/09/republicans-trying-to-turn-red-america-into-dystopia/

…not in the sense of taking responsibility

Another week, another platform in trouble for allowing its talent to give voice to misinformation. This time, Joe Rogan suggested that the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines are a type of “gene therapy” and that young people are at a greater risk from the shots than the disease, among other false and dubious health claims featured on his popular, Spotify-hosted podcast. The calls to remove his podcast have only intensified after revelations that he’s also repeatedly used a racist slur on the show, leading Spotify’s chief to apologize to the company’s employees.
[…]
Medical drivel has ballooned with the rise of streaming, e-commerce and social media platforms. Unlike the anti-vaccine pamphlets that skeptics handed out centuries ago, people spreading erroneous health advice today can near-instantly reach audiences of millions.
[…]
To get a sense of the scale, take a stroll down the giant virtual health aisles at Amazon, which has more than 200 million subscribers and millions more customers who shop without subscriptions. There, retailers hawk sedative drops, dopamine boosters and metabolism boosters, all of which possess only dubious evidence for efficacy for their marketed uses. One supplement maker seems to imply it can help HPV “vanish,” while another purports to “help cleanse and repair the liver.”

If you’d rather read harmful health gobbledygook, Amazon has plenty of books to choose from. You can study a two-week plan to “kill H.I.V.,” a vaccine “reappraisal” from a doctor who promotes homeopathic medicine for childbirth, or “The Truth About Covid-19,” co-written by Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician whom researchers labeled the single-worst spreader of Covid misinformation.

Over at Netflix, Gwyneth Paltrow, a notorious peddler of dubious wellness claims, like the effectiveness of mediums, energy healing and “cold therapy,” shares her Goop Lab with the platform’s roughly 222 million subscribers. After Goop, you might watch a topsy-turvy nutrition documentary, like “What the Health,” which features such overstated claims as drinking milk can exacerbate cancer risks and eating an egg a day is as dangerous as smoking — one of the most dangerous human health habits. On Apple TV (and Amazon), you can bask in “The Magic Pill,” a documentary that touts a high-fat, low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet as a salve for autism and cancer.
[…]
Quackery won’t disappear by deplatforming or censoring people. Dr. Mercola proved that: After his posts were curtailed by Twitter and Facebook, he simply migrated to the newsletter platform Substack, where he’s one of a number of anti-vaccine activists reportedly making over $1 million annually for stoking vaccine fears. If we really want to push back against health nonsense, we also need more than one-off celebrity condemnations and targeted content disappearing. Instead, we need to prevent false or misleading health claims from reaching millions of people in the first place.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/08/opinion/joe-rogan-health-misinformation-solutions.html

…they do kind of a lot to squirm away from that every chance they get

As a journalist who relies on freedom of speech, I would never advocate tossing Rogan off Spotify. But as a citizen, I sure appreciated Young calling him out over the deeper issue: How is it that we have morphed into a country where people claim endless “rights” while fewer and fewer believe they have any “responsibilities.”
[…]
When our trust in each other erodes, though, as is happening in America today, fewer people think they have responsibilities to the other — only rights that protect them from being told by the other what to do.
[…]
Because the Rogan podcast episode that set off the controversy, an interview with Dr. Robert Malone, who has gained fame with discredited claims, completely ignored the four most important statistical facts about Covid-19 today that highlight our responsibilities — to our fellow citizens and, even more so, to the nurses and doctors risking their lives to take care of us in a pandemic.

The first three statistics are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest surveys. First, unvaccinated adults 18 years and older are 16 times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid than fully vaccinated adults. Second: Adults 65 and older who are not vaccinated are around 50 times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid than those who have received a full vaccine course and a booster. Third: Unvaccinated people are 20 times more likely to die of Covid than people who are vaccinated and boosted.

The fourth statistic is from a survey from the staffing firm Cross Country Healthcare and Florida Atlantic University’s College of Nursing, released in December. It found that the emotional toll and other work conditions brought on by the pandemic contributed to some two-thirds of nurses giving thought to leaving the profession.
[…]
But as Wired magazine columnist Steve Levy wrote last week in a critique of Rogan’s three-hour Spotify interview with Malone, none of these statistics were mentioned during that podcast.

“You can listen to the entire 186-minute lovefest between Rogan and Malone and have no idea that our hospitals are overloaded with Covid cases,” wrote Levy, “and that on the day their conversation transpired, 7,559 people worldwide died of Covid, 1,410 of which were in the United States. The vast majority of them were unvaccinated.”

Instead, “the entirety of the podcast makes it clear that Rogan and Malone are on the same team,” Levy added. “When Malone uncorks questionable allegations about disastrous vaccine effects and the global cabal of politicians and drugmakers pulling strings, Rogan responds with uh-huhs and wows.” There is no mention of the numerous studies that “unvaccinated people are many, many times more likely to be hospitalized or die.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/08/opinion/spotify-joe-rogan-covid-free-speech.html

…more in the sense of being responsible

…you know how it goes

In 2016, Thiel supported Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and later served on his transition team. Now he’s playing an even more direct role in politics, funding the Senate campaigns of two of his close associates, J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona. At the same time, he’s still a force in tech investing and plays a major role in companies including data-harvesting firm Palantir, where he serves as chairman.
[…]
Thiel is one of the most dominant voices in Silicon Valley and has parlayed his personal network, financial investments and zeal for debate into a business philosophy emulated by start-up founders, who idolize Thiel as “the cult leader of the cult of disruption,” wrote Max Chafkin, author of the 2021 Thiel biography “The Contrarian.

Thiel’s family immigrated to the United States from Germany when he was an infant and settled in California. He was a childhood chess champion who attended Stanford as an undergraduate and then the university’s law school. While there, he launched the conservative publication the Stanford Review, which railed against what Thiel and his fellow writers derided as the encroaching force of political correctness on college campuses. Later, Thiel co-wrote “The Diversity Myth,” with tech investor David Sacks, which covered the same topics.
[…]
In a 2009 essay about his personal political evolution, Thiel described being disillusioned with politics and its ability to accomplish libertarian goals, writing, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He went on to argue that extending voting rights to women and increasing the number of welfare beneficiaries has made it more difficult to elect libertarian politicians, though he later clarified that he didn’t support taking away the right to vote from women.
[…]
Thiel first aligned himself with Trump in the run-up to his election in 2016, donating at least $1.25 million to his campaign, according to the New York Times. The donation came just weeks after a video surfaced of Trump making lewd comments about women. Thiel went on to give a speech at the Republican National Convention and join Trump’s transition team, where he acted as a liaison between Trump and Silicon Valley, helping to install some of his acolytes in positions of power within the administration.
[…]
Some of his most prominent investments stand to benefit directly from government contracts. Palantir, which Thiel helped found in 2003, counts government agencies like the Department of Defense among its biggest clients. More than half of Palantir’s revenue comes from government clients, according to its latest earnings report. Anduril, which builds automated surveillance towers and drones to police borders, was awarded a five-year contract by the Trump administration in 2020.

Thiel, whose net worth according to Bloomberg News is about $8 billion, also has a serious interest in shaping tax policy. Last year, ProPublica documented how Thiel has shielded billions of his own money from taxation by running his investments out of a Roth individual retirement account. Last year, Democrats in Congress proposed a bill that would force Thiel and other wealthy people using Roth accounts to pay huge tax bills if they ever withdraw their money. Thiel has also given money directly to anti-tax advocacy organizations, such as the Club for Growth.

Thiel has been an influence on Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, over the years, pushing him to take a more laissez-faire approach to moderating content and ads on the company’s apps, according to a 2019 Wall Street Journal report. Liberal employees had bristled at his presence on the company’s board, which Facebook critics also pointed to in their arguments for how the firm enabled the rise of right-wing populist politicians in the United States and elsewhere.
[…]
Thiel’s investments in other companies were also beginning to potentially clash with his duties as a Facebook board member. He has funded Rumble, a video platform that says it has a less hands-on approach to content moderation than that of social media giants like Facebook and YouTube. The New York Times reported in January that Boldend, another of the companies supported by Thiel’s Founders Fund, had claimed it developed the ability to hack WhatsApp, one of Facebook’s products.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/09/who-is-peter-thiel/

…so I guess I’d see the smaller number of people who might be said to bear what you might call ultimate responsibility for fanning certain sorts of flames

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/peter-thiel-donald-trump-white-nationalist-support

…as maybe analogous to the flame in that metaphor…& there’s no getting around the part where that particular flaming dumpster fire is a fucking problem that needs quenching

…but there’s a thing about fires…the flames themselves kill less people directly than the smoke does…& in this poor tortured metaphor I guess that makes the smoke, well…kinda pale?

Over the past six decades, according to [Michael Bang] Petersen [a political scientist at Aarhus University, Denmark, and the lead author of “Beyond Populism: The Psychology of Status-Seeking and Extreme Political Discontent,”] there has been a realignment of the parties in respect to their position as pro-establishment or anti-establishment: “In the 1960s and 1970s the left was associated with an anti-systemic stance but this position is now more aligned with the right wing.”
[…]
Instead of focusing on the economic system and its elites, [Lea] Hartwich continued,

Right-wing populists usually identify what they call liberal elites in culture, politics and the media as the “enemies of the people.” Combined with the rejection of marginalized groups like immigrants, this creates targets to blame for dissatisfaction with one’s personal situation or the state of society as a whole while leaving a highly unequal economic system intact. Right-wing populists’ focus on the so-called culture wars, the narrative that one’s culture is under attack from liberal elites, is very effective because culture can be an important source of identity and self-worth for people. It is also effective in organizing political conflicts along cultural rather than economic lines.

In a January 2021 paper — “Neoliberalism can reduce well-being by promoting a sense of social disconnection, competition, and loneliness” — Hartwich, Julia C. Becker, also of Osnabrueck, and S. Alexander Haslam of Queensland University found that “exposure to neoliberal ideology,” which they describe as the belief that “economies and societies should be organized along the principles of the free market,” results in “loneliness and, through this, decreases well-being. We found that exposure to neoliberal ideology increased loneliness and decreased well-being by reducing people’s sense of connection to others and by increasing perceptions of being in competition with others.”

Diana Mutz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, described the political consequences of white status decline in her 2018 paper “Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote.”
[…]
In “Local Economic and Political Effects of Trade Deals: Evidence from NAFTA,” Jiwon Choi and Ilyana Kuziemko, both of Princeton, Ebonya Washington of Yale and Gavin Wright of Stanford make the case that the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 played a crucial role in pushing working-class whites out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party:

We demonstrate that counties whose 1990 employment depended on industries vulnerable to NAFTA suffered large and persistent employment losses relative to other counties. These losses begin in the mid-1990s and are only modestly offset by transfer programs. While exposed counties historically voted Democratic, in the mid-1990s they turn away from the party of the president (Bill Clinton) who ushered in the agreement and by 2000 vote majority Republican in House elections.
[…]
Before enactment, the Republican share of the vote in NAFTA-exposed counties was 38 percent, well below the national average, but “by 1998, these once solidly Democratic counties voted as or more Republican in House elections as the rest of the country,” according to Choi and her colleagues.
[…]
Katheryn Russ — co-author along with Katherine Eriksson and Minfei Xu, economists at the University of California-Davis, Jay C. Shambaugh, an economist at George Washington University of the 2020 paper “Trade Shocks and the Shifting Landscape of U.S. Manufacturing” — wrote in an email that trade-induced economic downturns “affect entire communities, as places with the lowest fractions of high school or college-educated workers are finding themselves falling with increasing persistence into the set of counties with the highest unemployment rates.”

Even worse, these counties “do not bounce back out with the same frequency that counties with the highest fraction of high school and college-educated workers do. So we aren’t just talking about a phenomenon that may influence the self-perceived status of individual workers, but of entire communities.”
[…]
These shortfalls emerge just as demand increases, [Leo] Feler and [Mine Z.] Senses write: “The demand for local public goods such as education, public safety, and public welfare is increasing more in trade-affected localities when resources for these services are declining or remaining constant.”
[…]
Public safety expenditures remain constant at a time when local poverty and unemployment rates are rising, resulting in higher property crime rates by 3.5 percent. Similarly, a relative decline in education spending coincides with an increase in the demand for education as students respond to a deterioration in employment prospects for low-skilled workers by remaining in school longer.
[…]
In localities that are more exposed to trade shocks, we also document an increase in the share of poor and low-income households, which tend to rely more on government services such as public housing and public transportation, both of which experience spending cuts.
[…]
Rui Costa Lopes, a research fellow at the University of Lisbon, emailed in response to my inquiry about the roots of right-wing populism: “As we’re talking more about those who suffer from relative deprivation, status insecurity or powerlessness, then we’re talking more about the phenomenon of ‘politics of resentment’ and there is a link between those types of resentment and adhesion to right populist movements.”

Lopes continued: “Recent research shows that the link between relative deprivation, status insecurity or powerlessness and political populist ideas (such as Euroscepticism) occurs through cultural (anti-immigrant) and political (anti-establishment) blame attributions.”
[…]
“Socially disadvantaged and economically insecure citizens are more susceptible to the appeals of the radical right,” Mitrea, Mühlböck and Warmuth observe [in “Extreme Pessimists? Expected Socioeconomic Downward Mobility and the Political Attitudes of Young Adults”] citing data showing “that far-right parties were able to increase their vote share by 30 percent in the aftermath of financial crises.”
[…]
The concentration of despair in the United States among low-income whites without college degrees compared with their Black and Hispanic counterparts is striking.
[…]
Poor blacks are by far the most optimistic group compared to poor whites: They are 0.9 points higher on the 0-10 scale (0.43 standard deviations). Poor blacks are also 14 percentage points (0.28 standard deviations) less likely to report stress the previous day, half as likely as poor whites to report stress in the previous day, while poor Hispanics fall somewhere in the middle.
[…]
Graham and Pinto write:

The deepest desperation is among cohorts in the white working class who previously had privileged access to jobs (and places) that guaranteed stable, middle-class lives. Rather ironically, African Americans and Hispanics — the cohorts that historically faced high levels of discrimination — retain higher levels of well-being, especially hope for the future.

The data suggest that a large segment of the white, non-college population lives day-by-day in a cauldron of dissatisfaction, a phenomenon that stands apart from the American tradition.
[…& coming back to petersen from the beginning]
We know that humans essentially have two routes to acquire status: prestige and dominance. Prestige is earned respect from having skills that are useful to others. Dominance is status gained from intimidation and fear. Individuals who are high in the pursuit of dominance play a central role in political destabilization. They are more likely to commit political violence, to engage in hateful online interactions and to be motivated to share misinformation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/09/opinion/trump-status-anxiety.html

…so

Tyson Foods utilizes between nine and 10m acres of farmland – an area almost twice the size of New Jersey – to produce corn and soybeans to feed the more than 2 billion animals it processes every year in the US alone, according to new research.

The study by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) published on Wednesday also estimates that only about 5% of this land, 408,000 acres, has been enrolled in sustainable farming programs announced by Tyson in 2018.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/09/us-poultry-giant-tyson-farmland-twice-size-new-jersey-feed-animals

…what’s that got to do with truck drivers?

In a world contending with the unrelenting impact of the Great Supply Chain Disruption and its attendant worry of the moment, rising consumer prices, a shortage of truck drivers is frequently cited as an explanation for shortages of many other things — from construction supplies to electronics to clothing.

Last year, trucking companies in the United States suffered a record deficit of 80,000 drivers, according to the American Trucking Associations, a trade association. Given that trucks move 72 percent of American freight, a lack of drivers spells substantial disruption.
[…]
Some experts counter that the very notion of too few drivers is bogus — a reach by the industry for federal subsidies to train recruits as compensation for its poor rates of retention. The average trucking company has a turnover rate of roughly 95 percent, meaning that it must replace nearly all of its work force in the course of a year. More recruits boost the supply of drivers, which keeps a cap on wages.

As the trucking association itself noted, more than 10 million Americans held commercial driver’s licenses in 2019. That was nearly triple the 3.7 million trucks that required a driver holding that certification.

“This shortage narrative is industry lobbying rhetoric,” says Steve Viscelli, a labor expert at the University of Pennsylvania who previously worked as a truck driver. “There is no shortage of truck drivers. These are just really bad jobs.”

Until the 1980s, truck driving was a lucrative pursuit in which one union — the Teamsters — wielded enough power to ensure favorable working conditions, Mr. Viscelli recounts in his book “The Big Rig.” But the Carter administration deregulated the industry in the name of fostering competition, clearing the way for an influx of new trucking companies that diminished pay and increased demands on truckers.

The result was an opening for big-box retailers, which harnessed increasingly cheap freight and international trade to stock enormous stores with a vast profusion of wares. Along the way, truck driving was downgraded from a middle-class profession to one best avoided, Mr. Viscelli asserts.

[…]A truck driver is 10 times more likely to be killed on the job than the average American worker, according to federal data.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/09/business/truck-driver-shortage.html

…now…you might be thinking that a job with a risk of on-the-clock death an order of magnitude above average sounds like it probably ought to induce some better analysis of the risk:reward ratio when it comes to a thing like a vaccine than the headlines lately point to…but…that’s not the logic that determines things in the peter thiel school of nudging things along

There’s a lot going on in the world right now. If you’re not Canadian, then the protest in Ottawa might not be top of your list of things to worry about. But I’m afraid you should be worried. You should certainly be paying attention. What’s unfolding in Ottawa is not a grassroots protest that has spontaneously erupted out of the frustration of local lorry drivers. Rather, it’s an astroturfed movement – one that creates an impression of widespread grassroots support where little exists – funded by a global network of highly organised far-right groups and amplified by Facebook’s misinformation machine. The drama may be centred in Canada, but what is unfolding has repercussions for us all.

That’s a big claim, so let me break it down. We’ll start with the Canadian lorry drivers. The people protesting against vaccine mandates, it can’t be stressed enough, are by no means representative of the Canadian haulage industry as a whole. Just 10% of cross-border drivers refused the jabs, according to the Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA), meaning that from 15 January they can no longer cross back into Canada without quarantine. The CTA, along with other major industry organisations, has disavowed the protest. The protesters don’t represent the vast majority of lorry drivers, nor are they representative of public sentiment towards vaccines in Canada – a country where 84% of the population, children included, have received at least one vaccine dose. They are, as Justin Trudeau has said, a “small fringe”.
[…]
“Donations from abroad are quite a common part of any large crowdfunding campaign,” Ciaran O’Connor, an expert on online extremism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told Politico. “But the scale of this one is unprecedented.”
[…]
Another reason why you should take the Ottawa protests seriously? Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, fringe groups can have an outsize influence. I’m sure you’ve heard of troll farms: organised groups that weaponise social media to spread misinformation, promote division and influence public opinion. Get this: in the long run-up to the 2020 US elections, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by eastern European troll farms. According to an internal Facebook report written in late 2019 and leaked to MIT Technology Review, troll farms were reaching 140 million users every month. Three-quarters of these users had never followed any of the pages: they’d had the content thrust upon them by Facebook’s engagement-hungry content-recommendation system.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/08/ottawa-truckers-protest-anti-vaxx-canada

…whereas…any of you that spent much time in the kinja comments ecosystem might feel a sense of déjà vu when it comes to what seems to underpin that astroturf routine

…sadly, it doesn’t seem like we have any handy nearby alternative planets to go live on…& what with what zuck thinks the meta part of any hypothetical metaverse should mean I don’t know that virtual realities seem all that enticing, either…but all the same…you might prefer to look at pictures of a differently inhospitable world…I’m not sure how reassuring it might be…but maybe things here will look better by comparison?

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/sun/parker-solar-probe-captures-its-first-images-of-venus-surface-in-visible-light-confirmed

…either way…anyone that made it all the way through that definitely deserves a bit of a breather & something that sounds better…so I’ll come back & leave some tunes here as soon as I get a chance

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32 Comments

  1. this one might have gotten away from me a little

    That’s different from…when, exactly?

    • …it’s hard to give you an exact rule of thumb…but you know how when you scroll there’s a little vertical block that appears on the right to indicate how far down the page you’ve got…& the longer the page the shorter that you-are-here line is?

      …it’s sometimes bigger than it wound up being today

      …lots of times, even

      …so…different from sometimes…I think what might have clued me in was the part with a long set of excerpts from that piece that itself was a long set of excerpts from a whole spread of academic papers…even if that’s a difference without a distinction from a certain point of view?

  2. That Gary Abernathy piece in the Post is another embarassment from one of their worst hires from their affirmative action for conservatives program.

    Arguing that the Democrats somehow politicized the Supreme Court process completely ignores what the GOP was doing in the previous decade both in terms of blocking and nominating for the Supreme Court. But then Abernathy has never cared about history. He’s a propagandist, pure and simple, literally citing Jim Crow era voting laws as a sign of how things used to work the right way.

    At least Thiessen has no pretense of being anything else than a partisan hack — he wears his lies on his sleeve. But Abernathy is schtick-heavy concern troll. Just an awful writer and awful man.

    • …not that you’re necessarily wrong about abernathy…but on the one hand unlike the piece he seemed to have taken his lead from it’s recent…although I guess either would have sufficed for at least an acknowledgement of what it might mean to say something is/has been “borked”…& while they might not need the reminder I’m fairly certain there’s at least someone other than me that likes those sorts of etymological tidbits…& on the other…one side of the aisle being worse than the other sadly doesn’t make the less awful side un-awful…so whilst they might make it in service of a bad faith construction of an argument…both pieces might still draw on a valid observation

      He was a strongly opinionated, somewhat pugnacious, deeply conservative judge. (At 84 today, he hasn’t mellowed much either, to judge from an interview he recently gave Newsweek.)

      I bring up Bork not only because Sunday is a convenient anniversary. His nomination battle is also a reminder that our poisoned politics is not just about Republicans behaving badly, as many Democrats and their liberal allies have convinced themselves. Democrats can be — and have been — every bit as obstructionist, mean-spirited and unfair.

      I’ll take it one step further. The Bork fight, in some ways, was the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics. For years afterward, conservatives seethed at the “systematic demonization” of Bork, recalls Clint Bolick, a longtime conservative legal activist. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution coined the angry verb “to bork,” which meant to destroy a nominee by whatever means necessary. When Republicans borked the Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright less than two years later, there wasn’t a trace of remorse, not after what the Democrats had done to Bork. The anger between Democrats and Republicans, the unwillingness to work together, the profound mistrust — the line from Bork to today’s ugly politics is a straight one.

      […]There was tremendous fear that if Bork were confirmed, he would swing the court to the conservatives and important liberal victories would be overturned — starting with Roe v. Wade.

      But liberals couldn’t just come out and say that. “If this were carried out as an internal Senate debate,” Ann Lewis, the Democratic activist, would later acknowledge, “we would have deep and thoughtful discussions about the Constitution, and then we would lose.” So, instead, the Democrats sought to portray Bork as “a right-wing loony,” to use a phrase in a memo written by the Advocacy Institute, a liberal lobby group.
      […]
      Conservatives were stunned by the relentlessness — and the essential unfairness — of the attacks. But the truth is that many of the liberals fighting the nomination also knew they were unfair. That same Advocacy Institute memo noted that, “Like it or not, Bork falls (perhaps barely) at the borderline of respectability.” It didn’t matter. He had to be portrayed “as an extreme ideological activist.” The ends were used to justify some truly despicable means.

      [https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/opinion/nocera-the-ugliness-all-started-with-bork.html]

      …sure, it’s always possible to track something back to a prior proximate cause…but when both sides make use of the same tactics it seems worth occasionally acknowledging the part where one of them being worse doesn’t intrinsically make the other one better in any sense but the relative…not least when the common denominators I was thinking about owe their apparent political allegiances more to opportunistic expediency than to what you might call actual political principles

      …I’d have tried to expand a bit more on the context than either of those articles seemed inclined to…what with the current admin’s record on things like drilling permits for fossil fuels being what it is…or some recent examples of how well the dems can do the gerrymander thing when they put their minds to it…but…it’s not like I didn’t already know butcher was going to think this went on too long as it was?

      • Abernathy is propagandizing for the original sin of the Supreme Court. It has been deeply politicized by conservatives for almost all of its history, but he wants to portray it as inherently neutral until liberals broke the seal. He’s larding up a patently anti-historical framework.

         

        For a a short period of about 20 years it waffled between liberal and moderate, and in response the right went into a fever pitch to swing it back to the hard right.

        Politicization is not new. It has been the rule, and the Supreme Court has been and is again a conservative bulwark. Jim Crow, the empowerment of corporations, sexism, the imprisonment of Japanese Americans, crushing of unionism — all of these were not simply tolerated by conservative Supreme Courts, they were superpowered by their activist rulings. Non-political small “c” conservative jurisprudence is big “C” Conservative propaganda. And Abernathy knows it.

        There is simply no way to look at the history — the actual facts — and argue the way Abernathy is arguing here. Which is why he has been a strident advocate and apologist for the kind of across the board historical erasure sweeping the GOP, always in his threadbare cloak of tut-tutting at a token excess to cover his rear.

        It’s the heart of the propagandist method, unlike the pure advocates like Thiessen. Salt the lies with kernels of truth so that people think the entire narrative is plausible. It’s just not.

        • …& yet similarly there’s not really any way to paint the democrats’ approach to gaining &/or maintaining political &/or legislative advantage as being blameless over the same timeframe…which would be in no small part what both enables & incentivizes the likes of abernathy & their stridently partisan efforts to frame this stuff in a way that favors their interpretation to keep doing it

          …however dumb people may be in the aggregate…& however flawed an instrument the fourth estate might be…if it was only ever the case that one side sinned…the overall picture we all have to look at would presumably offer a very different vista…with similarly altered horizons…but that isn’t what we’re looking at

          …so however disingenuous the use might be to which abernathy &/or nocera want to put it…the observation that bork’s case was one that could be understood as the sort of fault line that literally became linguistic shorthand for a phenomenon that is common to the point of being ubiquitous in the contemporary political arena…that part still seems to hold quite a bit of water?

      • I’m fairly certain there’s at least someone other than me that likes those sorts of etymological tidbits

        Me!

    • Axios and Haberman, unsurprisingly, are missing the bigger picture.

      The issue is not just that documents went missing, it’s which documents and why. Unlocking that issue is what changes a minor crime into obstruction of justice, which is a major one.

      Destroying documents after they have been subpoenaed or otherwise ordered to be preserved is a critical piece to proving elements of a conspiracy case, which is why there are signs of Trump and his people scrambling to find missing data or explain critical gaps.

      Framing the issue this way is an attempt to write off obstruction and conspiracy as simple carelessness. Watch for outlets like Axios and the Times to be carrying water for the least harmful explanation.

          • He’s such a bizarre caricature of a “mob boss.” He runs around playing Untouchables, and people are just staring at him going “what the fuck is wrong with you?”

            • Did you say Untouchables?

               

          • Is he really a germaphobe though? He won’t use condoms when having sex with porn stars.

            • I think in this case “germaphobe” means “I have a reason to avoid things I don’t want to do.”

    • Anyone named Joe who calls themselves “Big Joe” is more than likely exaggerating or over compensating.

       

    • In this case, I have no problems putting Trump as #1.

  3. Oh, for fuck’s sake. 

    “Greene had likely confused the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, with gazpacho, a traditional Spanish cold tomato soup made of raw, blended vegetables. ”

    Marjorie Taylor Greene accuses Pelosi of sending ‘Gazpacho Police’ — and unleashes a wave of ridicule

    The tweets are golden, though.

      • She’s playing to the trump bouillabaisse.

    • …thank you…I was really hoping I’d find somewhere to fit that into the post…but other stuff ran long on me & I couldn’t decide where to put it…some of the tweets I saw, though…*chef’s kiss*

      • And did no one even mention the dreaded avocado or evil cilantro or contentious celery soup? Truly, vegetable-based threats abound…@SplinterRIP.

        • If MTG asked nicely, I bet she could get a Jewish space laser to heat her soup.

  4. seems that freedom convoy shit is contagious

    the french now have one too

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60317807

    from what im hearing we are about to have a few of our own here too….tho i havent yet figured out if its going to be the hague..or brussels…or both

    more importantly tho

    rest in peace miss Davis

    • Betty Davis was a legend. 2022 isn’t wasting any time putting a whoopin’ on us. I’m doing a reverse Arya Stark with a list of names that I’m afraid to say out loud for fear of jinxing them.

       

  5. My wife’s Facebook account keeps having all these “Trucker meme” groups popping up.  I block them and then another one will come next time you log in.  I’ve even tried reporting them to Facebook & blocking them but keep getting more.  Either they are just blanket flooding Facebook with this shit or my wife has some explaining to do!

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