Current Affairs General US politics (ie, not POTUS related)
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TN Toffee
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I can't find the video, but my favorite example of this was in the wake of the George Floyd murder where a woman was waving one of those Thin Blue Line flags at a pro-police protest while Killing in the Name was blasting in the background.
Sassy Colombian
Member: Team PoP
Republicans keep making a big deal about Hunter Biden when in reality the traitor and the one making the most cash out of his connections is corrupted Kushner.
TN Toffee
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This is a long read, but worth your time if you’ve got it.
www.theatlantic.com
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
It’s not just a phase.
great article, thanks for posting.
This is a long read, but worth your time if you’ve got it.
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
It’s not just a phase.
That was very insightful. Thanks. I like Haidt's work, even some of the stuff that I disagree with.This is a long read, but worth your time if you’ve got it.
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
It’s not just a phase.
Martin Alvito
Player Valuation: £50m
This has been a much longer process than the author seems to think. Bob Putnam pointed out the decline of social capital all the way back in 2000 with Bowling Alone. There's a really good article in the APSR from 2004 or so that demonstrated in the lab that exposure to opposing views moderates viewpoints, which is why the decline in social capital is a problem. The argument goes like this: if you were down at the bowling alley or the Elks lodge in the '50s, you were surrounded by people that disagreed with you politically. You BS'd over beers, got exposed to competing viewpoints and exposed them in return, and both parties moderated their views. This made compromise feasible.This is a long read, but worth your time if you’ve got it.
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
It’s not just a phase.
People were self-selecting into echo chambers well before 2011. They moved into communities full of people that looked like them and thought like them, and were surrounded at work all day by people that thought like them. (Otherwise they had to leave, because they despised the neighbors who wouldn't listen to reason/could never succeed in that work environment). Sure, since 2005 or so people have gotten on social media to converse with other people that thought like them, which led to rounding up Internet posses to terrorize those that disagreed. This made matters worse, but it's far from the entire problem.
The trust in government issue runs all the way back to Vietnam and Watergate. Marc Hetherington's 2005 book is pretty persuasive on that one. The Republicans just learned to exploit it to further a laissez faire small government agenda that favored wealthy interests. The only way to solve things like monopoly power and collective action problems is regulation. Big business didn't want that, because it cost them money, so they played up the notion that government is incompetent at solving problems through regulation. It is, but well-maintained regulation is far better than nothing from the standpoint of broader societal welfare. This is why the Scandinavians are happy, while those in the US and UK are not.
The fragmentation of major media is also a big part of the problem. Outlets get paid on clicks, which has led all of them to develop a relatively narrow audience and feed it clickbait that plays on anxieties. This is a large part of why we have no shared narrative, the way we did a few decades back where the nightly news more or less provided the same content.
TL;DR: Social media threw a match. The brush was already there waiting to catch fire. If we want to put the fire out for good, it's not enough to regulate social media. We also need to clean up the brush.
Are they all this thick in Arizona
@sniderman would be proud. This is quite a crush (transcript of her speech is in the twitter thread).
Martin Alvito
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Why Disney has its own government in Florida and what happens if that goes away
Here's a look at the history of Reedy Creek, why it has become a focus in a special legislative session, and what removing its special status would mean for Disney and for Florida taxpayers.
www.cnn.com
So, you are the governor of Florida. You want to punish Disney for their stance on pending state legislation. Do you:
a) close tax loopholes which benefit Disney, but also benefit other wealthy corporate interests in the state
b) give Disney a billion dollar handout by dissolving their privately held government entity that provides social services, effectively taking the debt off Disney's books, and foist the debt off on local municipalities?
The net annual profit from such an effective writedown is probably a "mere" 40-50 million a year, which is something of a drop in the bucket for a corporation raking in over a billion last year. Orange County taxpayers, by contrast, would feel it.
Folks in Orlando and Osceola county are expecting a 25% increase in property taxes as a result of this "owning of the libs".Why Disney has its own government in Florida and what happens if that goes away
Here's a look at the history of Reedy Creek, why it has become a focus in a special legislative session, and what removing its special status would mean for Disney and for Florida taxpayers.
So, you are the governor of Florida. You want to punish Disney for their stance on pending state legislation. Do you:
a) close tax loopholes which benefit Disney, but also benefit other wealthy corporate interests in the state
b) give Disney a billion dollar handout by dissolving their privately held government entity that provides social services, effectively taking the debt off Disney's books, and foist the debt off on local municipalities?
The net annual profit from such an effective writedown is probably a "mere" 40-50 million a year, which is something of a drop in the bucket for a corporation raking in over a billion last year. Orange County taxpayers, by contrast, would feel it.
Liz Cheney’s been waiting in the long grass for McCarthy.
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