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Ffs

 

[PedroMendez]

http://richmedia.lse.ac.uk/publiclecturesandevents/20170130_1830_inclusiveProsperity.mp3

Speaker(s): Tharman Shanmugaratnam
Chair: Professor Lord Stern

Recorded on 30 January 2017 at Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

Inclusive growth has to be at the centre of our agenda, if we are to avoid the continued unravelling of the social compacts that have underpinned an era of open economies. It will require new strategies, redefining the role of government and reinvigorating the politics of the centre. There is also something to be learnt from international experience.

Tharman Shanmugaratnam (@Tharman_S) is Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for Economic and Social Policies in Singapore. He has been appointed Chairman of the Group of Thirty from Jan 2017. He also chaired the International Monetary and Financial Committee between 2011-2015, and was its first Asian chair. He served for several years as Minister of Finance, and earlier as Minister for Education. Tharman is an alumnus and Honorary Fellow of LSE.

 

[Organic Potatoes]

Dam failures are quite scary....

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/12/us/california-oroville-dam-failure/index.html

 

[JustAFan]

Dam failures are quite scary....

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/12/us/california-oroville-dam-failure/index.html

Saw that story this morning, at least they have the warnings ahead of time.

 

[PedroMendez]

Brawl in the South African parliament. The country is heading in a bad direction. https://www.theguardian.com/world/v...-breaks-out-in-south-african-parliament-video

 

[berbatrick]

Not sure where to put these

Spoiler

 

[PedroMendez]

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/


It is one of the most interesting posts that I have read all year (and completely independent of the current madness, that is going on). I’d definitely recommend reading it, because it is thought provoking. I’d add, that I don’t agree with all his examples/details, but his overall argument is quite interesting.

Considerations On Cost Disease

Tyler Cowen writes about cost disease. I’d previously heard the term used to refer only to a specific theory of why costs are increasing, involving labor becoming more efficient in some areas than others. Cowen seems to use it indiscriminately to refer to increasing costs in general – which I guess is fine, goodness knows we need a word for that.

Cowen assumes his readers already understand that cost disease exists. I don’t know if this is true. My impression is that most people still don’t know about cost disease, or don’t realize the extent of it. So I thought I would make the case for the cost disease in the sectors Tyler mentions – health care and education – plus a couple more.
(...)

 

[berbatrick]

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/


It is one of the most interesting posts that I have read all year (and completely independent of the current madness, that is going on). I’d definitely recommend reading it, because it is thought provoking. I’d add, that I don’t agree with all his examples/details, but his overall argument is quite interesting.

Thanks, it's interesting.
For an example of how insane college is: I'm on a full scholarship funded by a long-term NIH grant, on which my stipend is 30k, and the tuition paid (from the program grant won by the college, to the college) is 50k.

That said, when they said in point 2 near the end that "markets aren't working" - aren't they basically re-inventing the wheel and describing inelastic goods/"status" goods, and incomplete information (in point 3) which were all part of Econ 101?
In fact isn't the whole post ("super-inflation of essential things") summarised by 4 explanations- oligopoly, incomplete information, inelastic goods, and govt intervention? (all feeding off each other)

 

[PedroMendez]

Thanks, it's interesting.
For an example of how insane college is: I'm on a full scholarship funded by a long-term NIH grant, on which my stipend is 30k, and the tuition paid (from the program grant won by the college, to the college) is 50k.

That said, when they said in point 2 near the end that "markets aren't working" - aren't they basically re-inventing the wheel and describing inelastic goods/"status" goods, and incomplete information (in point 3) which were all part of Econ 101?
In fact isn't the whole post ("super-inflation of essential things") summarised by 4 explanations- oligopoly, incomplete information, inelastic goods, and govt intervention? (all feeding off each other)

ultimately you can break these things almost always down to these categories (+measurement problems, which are often underestimated). I think few people realize just how bizarre some of these examples are. At least I wasn't aware of this magnitudes. In the end you need to look at each case separately to see what went wrong, but the reflexive reaction to ask for more money seems to be clearly the wrong way to approach these problems. Additionally we have to really question our political system, that it can't even solve some of the worst issues. Education for children is extremely complicated, so lets leave that out, but improving health-care wouldn't be so hard, because the american system is so bad. Just copying an average system from western europe would be a huge improvement. Housing is another-one; almost as important as education and the solution doesn't need incredible creativity. It wouldn't be unrealistic at all to come up with reforms, that are not radical at all, that would save the average person ~5k a year and that would be just the low-hanging fruits.

 

[berbatrick]

ultimately you can break these things almost always down to these categories (+measurement problems, which are often underestimated). I think few people realize just how bizarre some of these examples are. At least I wasn't aware of this magnitudes. In the end you need to look at each case separately to see what went wrong, but the reflexive reaction to ask for more money seems to be clearly the wrong way to approach these problems. Additionally we have to really question our political system, that it can't even solve some of the worst issues. Education for children is extremely complicated, so lets leave that out, but improving health-care wouldn't be so hard, because the american system is so bad. Just copying an average system from western europe would be a huge improvement. Housing is another-one; almost as important as education and the solution doesn't need incredible creativity. It wouldn't be unrealistic at all to come up with reforms, that are not radical at all, that would save the average person ~5k a year and that would be just the low-hanging fruits.

Yes, the numbers are quite crazy. And I agree some of these problems seem to be easy, but politically impossible (single-payer would probably reduce costs, given the experience of everyone else). And the govt-subsidised **** of (large) home ownership I thought is quite insane.

The university case is the most interesting. It's an oligopoly, not susceptible to any new innovations, and yet it is the prime method for social mobility. But govt subsidy for tuition will result in disgusting outcomes like seen in the US healthcare model - thousands of dollars for an X-ray, knowing that most people are either rich enough, or covered by insurance, or covered by govt., so they need not afford the treatment themselves. It is also why this was the most conflicting part of Bernie's manifesto for me - very desirable to have equal access to higher ed, but with univ money going into sports and fancy dorms (and every other univ is forced to do the same to compete) an unending inflation was likely. All the while the number of adjunct professors grows exponentially while tenured positions are constant (which is why PhDs are a road to nowhere; at replacement every advisor can train only 1 student in her lifetime who gets a tenured faculty position).

Spoiler: A reverse of that inflation analysis

just under $10,000 a year, with full benefits – health, retirement, and educational benefits (their family’s could attend college for free.) And guess what? Average pay for Temple’s faculty is STILL about the same — because adjuncts now make up the majority of faculty, and earn between $8,000 to $14,000 a year (depending on how many courses they are assigned each semester – there is NO guarantee of continued employment) — but unlike the full-time professors of 1975, these adjunct jobs come with NO benefits, no health care, no retirement, no educational benefits, no offices. How many other professions report salaries that have remained at 1975 levels?

I don't know enough to comment, but how do Germany and Sweden manage?

 

[PedroMendez]

Higher education is paid by the state government. I don't know if the data would show a similar pattern to that in the US.


Here is a “free-market” response that I only agree in part: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.de/2017/02/economies-in-reverse.html

I think the first big mistake in all these analysis is the interpretation of the data. Both prices and output could be very misleading. I have to think more about it.

 

[MTF]

Higher education is paid by the state government. I don't know if the data would show a similar pattern to that in the US.


Here is a “free-market” response that I only agree in part: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.de/2017/02/economies-in-reverse.html

I think the first big mistake in all these analysis is the interpretation of the data. Both prices and output could be very misleading. I have to think more about it.

I read it a few days ago. It's certainly a topic that could use more digging by economists. Would explain quite a bit if true, but also agree that the data seems sketchy at first. Hence the work needed.

I have had an intuition about how education doesn't seem to evolve much in terms of methods for a while though. So I'm biased towards buying the argument.

 

[PedroMendez]

I read it a few days ago. It's certainly a topic that could use more digging by economists. Would explain quite a bit if true, but also agree that the data seems sketchy at first. Hence the work needed.

I have had an intuition about how education doesn't seem to evolve much in terms of methods for a while though. So I'm biased towards buying the argument.

Yes. I think that is part of the reason. Cochrane says somewhere:

The unavoidable answer: The number of people it takes to produce these goods is skyrocketing. Labor productivity -- number of people per quality adjusted output -- declined by a factor of 10 in these areas. It pretty much has to be that: if the money is not going to profits, to to each employee, it must be going to the number of employees.
(…)
Contrariwise, I think we know where the extra people are. The ratio of teachers to students hasn't gone down a lot -- but the ratio of administrators to students has shot up.

I have the hunch, that this is generally a trend: We pay for a lot of things that have no value at all, but do it anyway due to bad information. It is certainly an issue when it comes to education and health-care, but also in many other sectors. In the end that’s rent-seeking. It would be interesting to explore in which sectors this seems to happen (e.g. finance and banking)

 

[MTF]

I have the hunch, that this is generally a trend: We pay for a lot of things that have no value at all, but do it anyway due to bad information. It is certainly an issue when it comes to education and health-care, but also in many other sectors. In the end that’s rent-seeking. It would be interesting to explore in which sectors this seems to happen (e.g. finance and banking)

If private firms get "fat" all the time, what to say of the public sector?

Finance and banking, rent seekers? No...

 

[PedroMendez]

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cost-disease/

(….)

Very long list of comments that all highlight some aspects

(…)

I think any explanation that starts with “well, we have so much money now that we have to spend it on something…” ignores that many people do not have so much money, and in fact are really poor, but they get the same education and health care as the rest of us. If the problem were just “rich people looking for places to throw their money away”, there would be other options for poor people who don’t want to do that, the same way rich people have fancy restaurants where they can throw their money away and poor people have McDonalds.

Any explanation of the form “evil capitalists are scamming the rest of us for profit” has to explain why the cost increases are going towards bells-and-whistles rather than to evil capitalists. It seems pretty well established that most of the increases in college costs go to better gyms, more student life activities, more administrators et cetera. How does an evil capitalist get more profit by raising prices and using the money to hire more administrators?

Any explanation of the form “administrative bloat” or “inefficiency” has to explain why non-bloated alternatives don’t pop up or become popular. I’m sure the CEO of Ford would love to just stop doing his job and approve every single funding request that passes his desk and pay for it by jacking up the price of cars, but at some point if he did that too much we’d all just buy Toyotas instead. Although there are some barriers to competition in the hospital market, there are fewer such barriers in the college, private school, and ambulatory clinic market. Why hasn’t competition discouraged administrative bloat here the same way it does in other industries?

 

[berbatrick]

This is a great article, hopefully non-biologists can understand too

https://medium.com/@johnhawks/how-mammoth-cloning-became-fake-news-1e3a80e54d42#.ysb6qzvwb

 

[berbatrick]

I know it has been discussed, I didn't know there was peer-reviewed research on it:
Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241.abstract

 

[berbatrick]

Sweden to reintroduce conscription amid rising Baltic tensions
Draft will cover men and women born in 1999 or later, though only small minority will be selected to serve


Sweden has voted to reintroduce military conscription by 1 July after struggling to fill army ranks on a voluntary basis, citing increased Russian military activity in the Baltics as one of the reasons for the policy U-turn.

 

[berbatrick]

Calais mayor bans distribution of food to migrants
Natacha Bouchart says handing out of meals poses security threat, as city tries to stop establishment of new refugee camp

 

[2cents]

Not sure where to stick this:

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[berbatrick]

Not sure where to stick this:

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Surreal. Performance art?

 

[berbatrick]

News site makes readers answer questions to prove they understand story before posting comments
The creators also hope that the quiz will force people to calm down before they post

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...-understand-post-quiz-questions-a7607246.html

 

[berbatrick]

A study last year by Lawrence F. Katz of Harvard and Alan B. Krueger of Princeton, a former chief economic adviser to President Barack Obama, concluded that independent contractors, on-call workers and workers provided by contracting companies or temp agencies accounted altogether for 94 percent of employment growth over the last 10 years.

Nonstandard employment arrangements like these account for nearly one in six jobs today. That is 24 million jobs, nine million more than 10 years ago.

Many of these jobs are poorly paid. A 2008 study by Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Ethan Kaplan, then at the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University, found that outsourcing imposed a wage penalty of up to 7 percent for janitors and up to 24 percent for security guards.

The Government Accountability Office of Congress concluded that contingent workers in the education field — substitute teachers, adjuncts and the like — earn almost 14 percent less per hour. In retailing they earn 9.4 percent less. Contingent workers across the board are less likely to have health insurance. One-third live in families making less than $20,000 a year. That is three times the share of workers employed in standard full-time jobs.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/...labor-wages-subcontracting.html?src=recg&_r=1

 

[berbatrick]

Burger-flipping robot replaces humans on first day at work
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolo...lipping-robot-replaces-humans-first-day-work/

 

[PedroMendez]

Interesting take on a frequently asked question: why the Middle East fell behind Europe?

http://www.jaredcrubin.com/blog/Why_Middle_East_Fell_Behind

 

[berbatrick]

http://www.theage.com.au/world/fury...of-millions-in-war-debts-20170311-guvxyp.html

Half a century after United States B-52 bombers dropped more than 500,000 tonnes of explosives on Cambodia's countryside Washington wants the country to repay a $US500 million ($662 million) war debt.

@PedroMendez that was a great article, thanks.

 

[sammsky1]

#WifeNotNanny

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[berbatrick]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/far-right-ukip-fn-welfare-immigration-working-class-voters/

This leftist rebranding of far-right parties should not be taken at face value, however. There is a gulf between what they sayand what they vote for. Even when their program and rhetoric claim to defend working people, the radical right often sides with capital when it comes to legislation.

The latest labor reform passed by the French government in 2015 is a good example. It aimed to further facilitate dismissals for business reasons and give more flexibility to companies for wage-setting. Officially, the National Front called for its withdrawal, denouncing it as an attack on the job security of French workers. Le Pen called it another ultra-liberal “diktat of Brussels.”

At the same time, its senators fielded amendments to remove representation rights for workers in small firms, remove the obligation to provide training, cut the ability of workers in strenuous jobs to claim early retirement, and cut taxes on extra hours. They then attacked union rights: asking to remove the monopoly of unions in wage negotiations, which would make it possible for firms to negotiate wages with nonunion groups.

In the end, the amendments were withdrawn and parliamentary assistants blamed for them. When unions organized mass demonstrations against the law, Marine Le Pen first called for them to be banned (France was officially in a state of emergency after the Bataclan attack), only later recognizing their “legitimate right to protest.” By then, she knew that the majority of her own voters supported the protests.

The Far Right’s Leftist Mask
The European far right has cynically appropriated left-wing and pro-worker talking points for its own purposes.

 

[PedroMendez]

Maybe I am reading too much into the article, but it strikes me as extremely deceptive. Either the author is fairly illiterate on the history of European movements or he he has a rather strong bias towards a certain narrative. It is probably the later, considering his work/research.

 

[berbatrick]

Maybe I am reading too much into the article, but it strikes me as extremely deceptive. Either the author is fairly illiterate on the history of European movements or he he has a rather strong bias towards a certain narrative. It is probably the later, considering his work/research.

Which part do you find deceptive?
The article is basically arguing that the far-right (nationalists) have been opportunistic in taking up welfare and economic populism. Originally Le Pen Sr, Wilders, etc. all campaigned on a liberal economic platform, but now they take the opposite, interventionist, position (which is the graph). Secondly that this position is rhetoric and they still would fight labour on economic issues (which is the quote).

I can see 2 exceptions: Mosley, and their stance on trade. But other than that I think the article is solid, and they skipped another example: the Conservative slogans of the 60s and 70s (if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour).

 

[PedroMendez]

the case selection, how he portraits the message of some of the parties, how ideologies can actually evolve and the idea that there is just one form/interpretation of strong welfare organised by the government.

 

[PedroMendez]

(...)
II.

A new Nathan Robinson article: Debate Vs. Persuasion. It goes through the same steps as the Harford article, this time from the perspective of the political Left. Deploying what Robinson calls “Purely Logical Debate” against Trump supporters hasn’t worked. Some leftists think the answer is violence. But this may be premature; instead, we should try the tools of rhetoric, emotional appeal, and other forms of discourse that aren’t Purely Logical Debate. In conclusion, Bernie Would Have Won.

I think giving up on argumentation, reason, and language, just because Purely Logical Debate doesn’t work, is a mistake. It’s easy to think that if we can’t convince the right with facts, there’s no hope at all for public discourse. But this might not suggest anything about the possibilities of persuasion and dialogue. Instead, it might suggest that mere facts are rhetorically insufficient to get people excited about your political program.

The resemblance to Harford is obvious. You can’t convince people with facts. But you might be able to convince people with facts carefully intermixed with human interest, compelling narrative, and emotional appeal.

Once again, I think this is generally a good article and makes important points. But I still want to challenge whether things are quite as bad as it says.

Google “debating Trump supporters is”, and you realize where the article is coming from. It’s page after page of “debating Trump supporters is pointless”, “debating Trump supporters is a waste of time”, and “debating Trump supporters is like [funny metaphor for thing that doesn’t work]”. The overall picture you get is of a world full of Trump opponents and supporters debating on every street corner, until finally, after months of banging their heads against the wall, everyone collectively decided it was futile.

Yet I have the opposite impression. Somehow a sharply polarized country went through a historically divisive election with essentially no debate taking place.

Am I about to No True Scotsman the hell out of the word “debate”? Maybe. But I feel like in using the exaggerated phrase “Purely Logical Debate, Robinson has given me leave to define the term as strictly as I like. So here’s what I think are minimum standards to deserve the capital letters:

1. Debate where two people with opposing views are talking to each other (or writing, or IMing, or some form of bilateral communication). Not a pundit putting an article on Huffington Post and demanding Trump supporters read it. Not even a Trump supporter who comments on the article with a counterargument that the author will never read. Two people who have chosen to engage and to listen to one another.

2. Debate where both people want to be there, and have chosen to enter into the debate in the hopes of getting something productive out of it. So not something where someone posts a “HILLARY IS A CROOK” meme on Facebook, someone gets really angry and lists all the reasons Trump is an even bigger crook, and then the original poster gets angry and has to tell them why they’re wrong. Two people who have made it their business to come together at a certain time in order to compare opinions.

3. Debate conducted in the spirit of mutual respect and collaborative truth-seeking. Both people reject personal attacks or ‘gotcha’ style digs. Both people understand that the other person is around the same level of intelligence as they are and may have some useful things to say. Both people understand that they themselves might have some false beliefs that the other person will be able to correct for them. Both people go into the debate with the hope of convincing their opponent, but not completely rejecting the possibility that their opponent might convince them also.

4. Debate conducted outside of a high-pressure point-scoring environment. No audience cheering on both participants to respond as quickly and bitingly as possible. If it can’t be done online, at least do it with a smartphone around so you can open Wikipedia to resolve simple matters of fact.

5. Debate where both people agree on what’s being debated and try to stick to the subject at hand. None of this “I’m going to vote Trump because I think Clinton is corrupt” followed by “Yeah, but Reagan was even worse and that just proves you Republicans are hypocrites” followed by “We’re hypocrites? You Democrats claim to support women’s rights but you love Muslims who make women wear headscarves!” Whether or not it’s hypocritical to “support women’s rights” but “love Muslims”, it doesn’t seem like anyone is even trying to change each other’s mind about Clinton at this point.

These to me seem like the bare minimum conditions for a debate that could possibly be productive.

(and while I’m asking for a pony on a silver platter, how about both people have to read How To Actually Change Your Mind first?)

Meanwhile, in reality…

If you search “debating Trump supporters” without the “is”, your first result is this video, where some people with a microphone corner some other people at what looks like a rally. I can’t really follow the conversation because they’re all shouting at the same time, but I can make out somebody saying ‘Republicans give more to charity!’ and someone else responding ‘That’s cause they don’t do anything at their jobs!'”. Okay.

The second link is this podcast where a guy talks about debating Trump supporters. After the usual preface about how stupid they were, he describes a typical exchange – “It’s kind of amazing how they want to go back to the good old days…Well, when I start asking them ‘You mean the good old days when 30% of the population were in unions’…they never seem to like to hear that!…so all this unfettered free market capitalism has got to go bye-bye. They don’t find comfort in that idea either. It’s amazing. I can say I now know what cognitive dissonance feels like on someone’s face.” I’m glad time travel seems to be impossible, because otherwise I would be tempted to warp back and change my vote to Trump just to spite this person.

The third link is Vanity Fair’s “Foolproof Guide To Arguing With Trump Supporters”, which suggests “using their patriotism against them” by telling them that wanting to “curtail the rights and privileges of certain of our citizens” is un-American.

I worry that people do this kind of thing every so often. Then, when it fails, they conclude “Trump supporters are immune to logic”. This is much like observing that Republicans go out in the rain without melting, and concluding “Trump supporters are immortal”.

Am I saying that if you met with a conservative friend for an hour in a quiet cafe to talk over your disagreements, they’d come away convinced? No. I’ve changed my mind on various things during my life, and it was never a single moment that did it. It was more of a series of different things, each taking me a fraction of the way. As the old saying goes, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they fight you half-heartedly, then they’re neutral, then they then they grudgingly say you might have a point even though you’re annoying, then they say on balance you’re mostly right although you ignore some of the most important facets of the issue, then you win.”

There might be a parallel here with the one place I see something like Purely Logical Debate on a routine basis: cognitive psychotherapy. I know this comparison sounds crazy, because psychotherapy is supposed to be the opposite of a debate, and trying to argue someone out of their delusions or depression inevitably fails. The rookiest of all rookie therapist mistakes is to say “FACT CHECK: The patient says she is a loser who everybody hates. PsychiaFact rates this claim: PANTS ON FIRE.”

But in other ways it’s a lot like the five points above. You have two people who disagree – the patient thinks she’s a worthless loser who everyone hates, and the therapist thinks maybe not. They meet together in a spirit of voluntary mutual inquiry, guaranteed safe from personal attacks like “You’re crazy!”. Both sides go over the evidence together, sometimes even agreeing on explicit experiments like “Ask your boyfriend tonight whether he hates you or not, predict beforehand what you think he’s going to say, and see if your prediction is accurate”. And both sides approach the whole process suspecting that they’re right but admitting the possibility that they’re wrong (very occasionally, after weeks of therapy, I realize that frick, everyone really does hate my patient. Then we switch strategies to helping her with social skills, or helping her find better friends).

And contrary to what you see in movies, this doesn’t usually give a single moment of blinding revelation. If you spent your entire life talking yourself into the belief that you’re a loser and everyone hates you, no single fact or person is going to talk you out of it. But after however many months of intensive therapy, sometimes someone who was sure that they were a loser is now sort of questioning whether they’re a loser, and has the mental toolbox to take things the rest of the way themselves.

This was also the response I got when I tried to make an anti-Trump case on this blog. I don’t think there were any sudden conversions, but here were some of the positive comments I got from Trump supporters:

— “This is a compelling case, but I’m still torn.”

— “This contains the most convincing arguments for a Clinton presidency I have ever seen. But, perhaps also unsurprisingly, while it did manage to shift some of my views, it did not succeed in convincing me to change my bottom line.”

— “This article is perhaps the best argument I have seen yet for Hillary. I found myself nodding along with many of the arguments, after this morning swearing that there was nothing that could make me consider voting for Hillary…the problem in the end was that it wasn’t enough.”

— “The first coherent article I’ve read justifying voting for Clinton. I don’t agree with your analysis of the dollar “value” of a vote, but other than that, something to think about.”

— “Well I don’t like Clinton at all, and I found this essay reasonable enough. The argument from continuity is probably the best one for voting Clinton if you don’t particularly love any of her policies or her as a person. Trump is a wild card, I must admit.”

— As an orthodox Catholic, you would probably classify me as part of your conservative audience…I certainly concur with both the variance arguments and that he’s not conservative by policy, life, or temperament, and I will remain open to hearing what you have to say on the topic through November.

— “I’ve only come around to the ‘hold your nose and vote Trump’ camp the past month or so…I won’t say [you] didn’t make me squirm, but I’m holding fast to my decision.”

These are the people you say are completely impervious to logic so don’t even try? It seems to me like this argument was one of not-so-many straws that might have broken some camels’ backs if they’d been allowed to accumulate. And the weird thing is, when I re-read the essay I notice a lot of flaws and things I wish I’d said differently. I don’t think it was an exceptionally good argument. I think it was…an argument. It was something more than saying “You think the old days were so great, but the old days had labor unions, CHECKMATE ATHEISTS”. This isn’t what you get when you do a splendid virtuouso perfomance. This is what you get when you show up.

(and lest I end up ‘objectifying’ Trump supporters as prizes to be won, I’ll add that in the comments some people made pro-Trump arguments, and two people who were previously leaning Clinton said that they were feeling uncomfortably close to being convinced)

Another SSC story. I keep trying to keep “culture war”-style political arguments from overrunning the blog and subreddit, and every time I add restrictions a bunch of people complain that this is the only place they can go for that. Think about this for a second. A heavily polarized country of three hundred million people, split pretty evenly into two sides and obsessed with politics, blessed with the strongest free speech laws in the world, and people are complaining that I can’t change my comment policy because this one small blog is the only place they know where they can debate people from the other side.

Given all of this, I reject the argument that Purely Logical Debate has been tried and found wanting. Like GK Chesterton, I think it has been found difficult and left untried.

(...)

 

[berbatrick]

The hero of the edgy anti-imperialist left, because apparently insulting the US == upholder of the global revolution now.

Duterte hits critics who say he 'kills the poor'
President Rodrigo Duterte says: 'I'm sorry. You say you're poor; that's not an answer. I have a problem: 4 million addicts. Do you want 4 million more?'

http://www.rappler.com/nation/165196-duterte-killing-poor-war-drugs

 

[berbatrick]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/04/alt-right-lana-lokteff-racism-misogyny-women-feminism/

 

[Wednesday at Stoke]

The north African nation is a major exit point for refugees from Africa trying to take boats to Europe. But since the overthrow of autocratic leader Muammar Gaddafi, the vast, sparsely populated country has slid into violent chaos and migrants with little cash and usually no papers are particularly vulnerable.

One 34-year-old survivor from Senegal said he was taken to a dusty lot in the south Libyan city of Sabha after crossing the desert from Niger in a bus organised by people smugglers. The group had paid to be taken to the coast, where they planned to risk a boat trip to Europe, but their driver suddenly said middlemen had not passed on his fees and put his passengers up for sale.

“The men on the pick-up were brought to a square, or parking lot, where a kind of slave trade was happening. There were locals – he described them as Arabs – buying sub-Saharan migrants,” said Livia Manante, an IOM officer based in Niger who helps people wanting to return home.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/10/libya-public-slave-auctions-un-migration

How badly did Hillary Clinton feck up Libya? In all the Trump madness we forget how terrible she was as Secretary of State.

 

[JustAFan]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/10/libya-public-slave-auctions-un-migration

How badly did Hillary Clinton feck up Libya? In all the Trump madness we forget how terrible she was as Secretary of State.

Obama fecked it up for sure.

 

[Wednesday at Stoke]

Obama fecked it up for sure.

Hilary was adamant at ousting Gaddafi and that's one of the few cases where he should have overruled her. Infact appointing the most hawkish democrat to secretary of state was probably his worst move, followed up with doubling down on "moderate" rebels all over the place.

 

[JustAFan]

Hilary was adamant at ousting Gaddafi and that's one of the few cases where he should have overruled her. Infact appointing the most hawkish democrat to secretary of state was probably his worst move, followed up with doubling down on "moderate" rebels all over the place.

He was the fecking president of the U.S. Everything his administration does falls squarely on his shoulders.

 

[Wednesday at Stoke]

He was the fecking president of the U.S. Everything his administration does falls squarely on his shoulders.

Ok.

 

[berbatrick]

He was the fecking president of the U.S. Everything his administration does falls squarely on his shoulders.

You don't think they share responsibility on this?
(I would blame both) (Also under-reported is the effect the UN vote for a nofly zone and how it was interpreted by NATO/the west, had on Putin's actions on Syria; it's partly why he maintains such a hardline against any condemnation).