Open Forum
Where you can't be off topic because there IS no topic.
Doug Mataconis
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Sunday, August 25, 2019
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62 comments
The floor is yours.
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.
I’m going to have to add Jelani Cobb to my following list on Twitter, this piece in the July 29 New Yorker is so damn good.
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@Teve:
Test successful.
@Doug Mataconis: I posted an old link and then tried to change it to something different but I was only allowed to edit once. I wonder if that’s just my weirdo browser.
Anyway what I was trying to change it to:
ETA jeez, I meant AirPods, not iPods. I’m having all kindsa difficulties braining this morning
@Teve:
They could run into a design patent issue depending on the extent of Apple’s patent.
@Teve:
Your ability to cut and paste liberal commentary uncritically is working.
@95 South: Your idiocy is unfettered by reality.
@95 South: See how easy it is to make gratuitous insults?
@95 South: Can you refute any of it?
A little while back Kevin Drum had a post (which I cant seem to find again) about a study which looked at how someone responded to an unprovoked hostile interaction. Someone is taken down a hall purportedly to enter a room and participate in a psychology experiment, but on the way there an unknown person (actually an experimenter) bumps into them and calls them an asshole. No surprise but Northerners were more likely to have a “geez, look at this loser” type of response while Southerners were more likely to go into fight mode. This, of course, is not really a surprise as the prevalence of an honor based culture is pretty much associated with poor levels of social and economic development anywhere in the world. Just look at many Arabic cultures, or Eastern European ones. And of course here in the United States it is entirely unsurprising that the most honor obsessed states have the poorest outcomes for income, education, health, etc.
It got me wondering. In the US why are these honor states so unfailingly Republican today? Republicanism didn’t used to be so obsessed with honor based issues (refighting the civil war, keeping their children safe from the gays, attacking those not properly respecting their Jesus, etc). In fact, until the Reagan Revolution there was a strong tradition of pragmatic Northeast Republicans who cared about things like infrastructure, education, clean water and so forth, things that have no place in the modern Republican Party.
I’ve come to the conclusion that that though these trends are coincident they are not causative. I think low performing states settle on Republicans the way some people find a doctor who won’t nag them about leading a healthy lifestyle but instead will just prescribe opioids while making a small fortune running unnecessary tests and keeping them coming in for visits in order to rack up insurance charges. Republicans aren’t the cause of the honor states problems, just the enablers. They don’t give their residents what they need but they most certainly give them what they want.
I read Drum pretty regularly. I don’t think it was Drum. But it is a fascinating study.
But I have had a thesis that is exactly the opposite. You note there were once Republicans who cared about infrastructure, education, and clean water. Once Republicanism devolved to nothing more than ‘give rich people all your money’ they had no choice but to go after the most gullible potential supporters. Leading that list are evangelicals and the poorly educated.
Our current political situation didn’t just happen. There are villains in the story. Republicans made it happen.
Klan rally in Hillsborough North Carolina has “Make America Great Again” on their sign, which is deeply surprising to exactly nobody.
supply-side economics, global warming denial, deregulation, and even racism, are all scams to convince poor dumb white people to let rich people take everything. The states with the lowest education among poor and middle-class whites are the best targets for the scam.
@MarkedMan: @gVOR08: 2 words: Southern Strategy.
Landmark US case to expose rampant racial bias behind the death penalty
Much more at the link.
I was living in Raleigh when I joined the ACLU.
I was going to note that Joe Walsh announced he is primarying Trump, but then I couldn’t think of any reason anyone should care.
@OzarkHillbilly:
2 more: Moral Majority.
(Admittedly, these 2 stem directly from your 2.)
This seems like a BFD:
From Bloomberg News:
Group of Seven leaders have gathered in Biarritz, France and the host, French President Emmanuel Macron, has just pulled a massive surprise on his guests by inviting the Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif.
Merkel Defends Macron Decision to Fly in Zarif (6:39 p.m.)
As news of Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif’s lightning visit to Biarritz was still sinking in, German Chancellor Angela Merkel rode to Macron’s rescue.
She espoused the French line that it is a meeting of two foreign ministers and therefore not part of the G-7. She told reporters that every attempt to solve the crisis in Iran was welcome. She later said she only knew Zarif was coming a short time before he arrived.
If nothing else, this is a big fuck you to Trump. As long as Trump is POTUS (or any Republican, at this point), there is no reason that the EU should not conduct its own foreign policy. If Trump loses in 2020, the relationship between the EU and the US can start to return to normal, and if Trump wins the EU needs to be ready to operate in a world where they and the US are at best nominal allies.
@OzarkHillbilly: When I first noticed Teve, he was asking whether the Second Amendment was created for slavery, based on an article from a liberal site. Commenters were praising him for being open to new ideas. But he only reads liberal sites. This whole open forum is an echo chamber.
@95 South:
Dude, if you had anything to offer by way of facts or logic, you would. But you don’t. So you regurgitate memes. We could hire a parrot to play you in the movie.
#Greenland
#IHerebyOrder
#KingOfIsrael
#ILoveKimJongUn.
There you go, some nice easy hashtags so you won’t be burdened by a need to read. Jump on in and defend any or all.
And maybe you’d like to try and answer the question your ilk never even tries to address:
It’s a free forum, no one has blocked you, so give it a try. If you won’t even try that’s consciousness of guilt.
Are even Trump Chumps dumb enough to believe this? My guess is yes.
@95 South:
And yet you are incapable of refuting anything he says and so resort to moronic schoolyard taunts, because really, that’s all you have. Even when he isn’t talking about anything at all, but clearly having difficulty with posting something…
You can not restrain the impulse to insult him. Because that is who you are.
And by the way, I remember that post, and I don’t remember anyone “praising” him. I certainly didn’t. I did defend his asking of a question when he was unsure of something he had read, after you had attacked him for not knowing the answer.
But then I guess we can’t all have your gift of omniscience and feel the need to ask questions from time to time.
@Teve: @Doug Mataconis: As a wearer of hearing aids, I find myself wondering if they’d sell particularly well. The biggest market seems to be CIC (completely in the (ear) canal) and the selling point is that no one can tell that you wear them. (I didn’t care for them myself. I prefer open architecture ones that don’t feel like you have your thumbs in your ears 24/7.)
…
ETA:
I’m sorry, but is this even a question? Of course courts will tolerate racial bias. Some will even endorse it.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I’m a little surprised we haven’t gone back to the “audio processor on the outside, speakers in the ear mode” given we no longer have to connect the two by wire
At 71 I don’t always pick up what people are saying the first time around. I see their lips moving and hear noise but it isn’t always clear.
Some times when say “I can’t hear ya’!” I’m chastized for not having a hearing aid.
My response to that is always “What makes you think I want to hear what you have to say?”
@Teve: Two of the wifi networks in my apartment building are named “FBI Surveillance Truck” and “ISIS Mainframe.”
@Just nutha ignint cracker: good point, they are basically invisible these days, I just seem to remember that they used to go through batteries like a motherfuker, and the thing about an airpod-like hearing aid is that presumably there’s a bigger battery in that tube structure and it would last longer. Or has the battery problem in hearing aids been solved and I just never knew that?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
😛
@michael reynolds: I don’t have to explain it. It doesn’t concern me. My guess is Trump likes one on one meetings. He’s the head of a company. Let the underlings talk out the details. What do you think? Trump gets secret orders from Putin? They have no other channels to communicate so Trump has to meet one on one with him?
@MarkedMan: I would guess that it has to do with how hearing aids are marketed. Most of them are relatively expensive. Even the one that I use–which uses technology that my SOTA hearing aid from 6 years ago in Korea had–retail at close to $1000/unit when not covered by insurance. Technologies that use Bluetooth to link to your smart phone might not be cost effective to market. The other thing is that microphone technology is so amazing relative to what it was that you get no particular advantage from an outside processor vis a vis CIC. Behind the ear technology is basically an outside processor for that matter.
@Teve: I get about a week from a battery these days and if I buy them from the manufacturer of the device, they’re roughly 50 cents each. At the store I get 10 for $10-14 depending on the brand and store. My first one (15 or so years ago) used up a battery in 3 days.
He’s the head of a company.
No.
He is President of the United States.
@95 South:
Then why is it only meetings with Putin?
See, the requirement was for a plausible answer. When he meets with Netanyahu, he has other Americans there. Macron, May, Merkel, everyone else. Everyone but Putin. Just Putin. No American translator, no note-taker, no one.
Why?
I thought you might be @Guarneri using a new alias, but he’s smart enough not to try, he just runs away. Because there is no innocent explanation. None at all.
@95 South:
Given that we know about various failed attempts to set up a secret back channel, yeah, I’d say that he has no other SECRET channels is a pretty good guess.
@95 South:
This is a lie.
He did post a link to an article, and ask what people thought, but go back, and reread the comments after Teve’s comment — mostly “not likely” responses. Really.
You mischaracterize based on what you believe people would do, rather than paying attention to what they do.
And Teve’s link and question seemed more like a “I read this, and it sounds possible, but maybe it’s bullshit? Does anyone know?”
@Mister Bluster: Every few years, I have to get a blob of earwax blasted out of my ear with high pressure (I have narrow, curvy earholes), and afterwards it’s like I have super-hearing.
And then I hear all the nonsense other people talk about all the time, and wish I was half deaf again.
@michael reynolds:
I have long suspected that you are also Tyrell. Just amusing yourself, playing a character who could be from The Andy Griffith Show. A very gentle bit of trolling performance art.
Trump deliberately does deeply suspicious things just to make people suspect the worst, so they make up conspiracy theories?
Putin insists upon it, for similar effect, to weaken America?
I mean it’s probably so Trump can roll over for belly rubs, and become convinced of crazy shit as he listens attentively to strong men.
This post of Kevin Drum’s is exactly what I think, and why I stopped talking about climate change on social media. There’s no point. Catastrophe is coming and we will do nothing significant to stop it.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/08/why-climate-change-is-so-hard/
@Teve: I’ve occasionally thought this might be a metaphor for how the country will end.
On a more serious note I read an article about global warming where the author was suggesting that instead of protocols for reversing our carbon footprint, the time of the global leaders would be better spent on working out where all the people who will lose their homes as the climate changes and oceans rise should go. It was written in 2009, IIRC.
ETA: As the song says, “We’ve taken all this poor world can give, and we ain’t put back nuthin’.”
@Teve: From the Drum:
I will not ride a bus. Maybe I’m a special case, because I am 6’6” and I don’t fit in the seats, but I hate busses.
If we don’t get electric cars that are reasonable, or increase the mileage, then cars will remain the personal pollution factories that they are.
I’d sooner spend 35 minutes in my car, where I fit and don’t have another person too close and can enjoy my music in peace, than spend 10 minutes walking to the bus and waiting, and then spending 30 minutes crammed on the bus with all those other people and another 10 minutes walking to the office.
Our cities are laid out for private transportation. Unless that changes — raised public transport out of the traffic — we have to make private transportation better.
I tried to hold out on replacing my car until full electric was an option, but now that I have bought my beast, I’ll have it for another fifteen years.
And a hearty “fuck you” to the bicycle crowd. Bunch of ablist motherfvckers. You’re maybe 3% of the potential population, just fvck off, you’re not the solution, you’re just a rounding error in the way,
@Teve: For anyone who likes numbers, I suggest the following page from Wikipedia. Perhaps before reading, one might ask oneself just how much more CO2 the US burns compared to some other country that seems to offer an equivalent life style.
But you’re right: most people will do nothing, putting the lie to all their talk about the budget deficit and concern for future generations. All Americans worship the almighty God of convenience.
@Gustopher:
I find this absolutely bizarre. In the Netherlands, +99% of the population cycles.
@Kit: the Netherlands probably has a president who can walk more than 12 feet without needing a golf cart. This is Murka!
Kochland examines the early crucial influence of the Koch brothers on climate change denial
@Teve: That was depressing. I cannot understand how Republicans can read such things and not see that they have been played for fools. Or how Libertarians can read it and not think conclude that their principles are simplistic given how the free speech of a couple of men can lead the country to ruin.
I might have to add the Atlantic to the list of things I subscribe to. It’s been pretty good lately.
what goop really sells women
@Kit: in the rankings of World’s Biggest Suckers, people who deny global warming are ranked right behind people who’ve sent four figures to Nigeria.
@Gustopher:
A large part of the problem with public transportation is that it was designed decades ago to bring people to where jobs were then, and not to where they have been growing recently. I live in the suburbs of Philly. I have worked downtown, and gladly taken commuter trains to get there. At rush hour, the trains run about every 20 minutes, and take about 35 minutes station to station, instead of a drive which would be at least that without traffic, and with rush hour traffic would be well over an hour.
However, I am working now in a suburban office park. It’s about a 30 minute drive from home, but would require 2 bus rides of roughly 5 miles each, one to the transportation hub in the county seat, and one to the office park. However, neither is a straight line, with the one between home and the hub taking a 20 minute detour to serve another town, so that part of the trip takes about 45 minutes. Then I would need to wait at the hub for 20 minutes until the bus for the other leg of the trip arrives, followed by a 30 minute ride to the office. So the ride which takes 30 minutes by car takes about an hour an a half by bus.
@Kit: I don’t hear much talk out here about climate change. Everyone talks about the weather – the big storm the other day, our hot summer (the summers are always hot here). But most people in this region like warm weather a lot more than winter.
The people have already put their time and money into making their homes energy efficient, including efficient appliances, insulation, thermal windows, solar panels, and tankless water heaters. I will be switching out my heat pumps soon and the high seer type will save 30% on the power usage.
Most people have cars that get better mileage. The utility company here phased out the coal plants a few years ago. So there has been a lot of progress and change in this country.
Like most people out here in the sub – rural area, I depend on my car to get to work, to stores, and other places. Buses or light rail is not an option in these type of areas.
Some promising fuels for vehicles are hydrogen and natural gas. Electric cars are fine, but very costly and troublesome in terms of range. Cars are not the only gas burners. There’s the construction equipment: ships, trains, jets, and trucks. Politicians talk up the climate “crisis”, but travel on their private buses and jets. They use the streets, sidewalks, and buildings built with heavy equipment. Some live in big homes at the coast. They don’t give sensible, concrete solutions or ideas.
The people are not going to go for high taxes and controls. Inventiveness and imagination are the answers, not big government or foreign treaties.
I have yet to see what the climatologists think the average global temperature should be.
@Teve: I understand. As a city kid, I had always assumed, based on the biblical story, that roosters crow three times. On a trip to Brazil, I stayed in a place that had a rooster for a neighbor. That’s when I learned that roosters crow nonstop for 20 minutes as soon as the sun comes up.
A good, mordant take-down of what Goop is offering. Some of the paragraphs are hilarious.
(I used to be involved in a company that intersected slightly with this sort of stuff. The term my business partner regularly used to describe it was “New Age ninnyism.”)
P.S. Hadn’t noticed Teve’s link to the same article above. Yes, read it. It’s very good.
hey, remember that dumb bullshit about how it’s not conservatives’ fault they do shitty things, because Democrats are mean to them? well now it’s not Russia’s fault that Russia does shit either. It’s the Democrats again.
@Gustopher:
Well aren’t you just the snowflake of all snowflakes. Jeez! I hardly ever even got a seat on the bus when I was in Korea, and my stop was the 3rd or 4th from where the fvcking bus started its route. Now the subway was different, because it ran a loop, nobody ever got on a subway train that had seats available.
Look, if you wanna drive your car everywhere in Seattle, I get you. I grew up there and knew I wasn’t coming back on the day that I went to visit my parents at the end of the semester in grad school and drove 35 miles in bumper to bumper traffic at 1:30 in the afternoon. Just remember, you’re the guy grazing 11 out of your 10 allowed sheep in the pasture. (And the guy Kevin Drum is talking about, but at least you’re not alone.)
@Teve: I’ve subscribed to the Atlantic off and on for years, but I think you have to wait until you can get a good deal on the subscription. I think I got 2 years for $19 total, this last time around. (I started subscribing again while I was in Korea. A single copy of The Atlantic goes for $50 at bookstores there–and it’s not even the most expensive English Language magazine).
@Kit:
First, the Netherlands is much more compact, so bicycling makes a lot more sense. Our cities are laid out differently.
Second, that number is obviously wrong. You believe that less than one percent of people in the Netherlands is in some way disabled? That would be an amazingly healthy country.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Also a bad knee that can collapse if jolted wrong, so standing on a bus is often problematic.
I could get a cane and shoo people out of the disabled seats, but… we’re still talking a commute that takes more time and is more unpleasant using public transportation.
Double or triple the number of busses, create better routes (enforce bus lanes, or close some streets to cars, or bus tunnels, or elevated roadways), and we might be getting to a situation where public transportation is a reasonable alternative.
And, the bus routes are often bizarre and leave out major commuting patterns.
Meanwhile, Seattle is building bike lanes everywhere, for a vocal minority, when what we need are bus lanes.
And then, when all of the other people are in busses or something, my drive will be even more pleasant.
@Gustopher: while I adore my Fiesta, I really would like to live somewhere that I could get by without a car. Places like that are few and far between for people like me who don’t make much money and therefore can’t live in downtown Portland or San Fran etc.
@Teve:
When I visit Las Vegas, I get around using the bus, and I walk.
I do well enough, but it’s worth noting that a) I’m not usually in a hurry to get anywhere, b) I’m not on a schedule of any sort, c) I make rather long visits, so I’m not short on time, d) I’ve been plenty of times, so I don’t have to pack in all the sights and casinos.
Also, the bus system for the Strip and Downtown is pretty good. Elsewhere, not so much. Oh, I’ve ranged quite a bit over the years. One trip I frequented the Palace Station, well off the Strip. Sometimes the wait for the buss back to the Strip was over 20 minutes.
There’s a monorail in Vegas, too. It’s quite efficient, and reasonably priced. Unfortunately the track is on streets parallel to the Strip. Stations are at hotels, but well away from anything, requiring a very long walk at every stop. The one exception is the station at the Westgate (formerly the Hilton), which is an off-Strip property and has the station emptying right into the casino (I went once, all the way back in 2008, because the then Hilton hosted the Star Trek: The Experience attraction, since gone*).
At home I use my car. Sometimes if I expect bad traffic, difficult parking, or terrible weather, I will drive to a subway station, park there, and take the subway the rest of the way.
(*) The Trek attraction was very good. The two “rides” were ok, but the really neat thing was the original ride where you get beamed up to the Enterprise D, and you get to actually visit the bridge (you couldn’t sit in Jean Luc’s chair, though). The line leading to the ride had original props from the various shows on exhibit, which was nice.
The exhibit/rides closed a few months after I visited (no connection), and for years there were rumors it would reopen elsewhere. To this day, eleven years later, it remains gone.
Indeed…
@Tyrell:
I’m guessing you’ve also yet to see a doctor opine on how much fever is the right amount. The reason is pretty much the same — lower is better, and “no change” is no longer on the menu.