Home
|
« Liberal Outrage: July 2017 | Main | Liberal Outrage: September 2017 » Liberal OutrageThe Chump Defense Trump, of course, very much falls into that core audience for Republican Party spin. So when Republican leaders said over and over and over again that they had a plan to replace Obamacare with something better, Trump naturally developed the opinion that they had a plan to replace Obamacare with something better. And if they had had such a plan, it wouldn't have been difficult to pass it... ...All that said, Trump is president now. On the campaign trail, he outlined some humane and politically popular ideas about health care policy like that Medicaid shouldn't be cut and that the United States should have a system that covers everybody even if that means the government needs to pay for it. By fnord12 | August 25, 2017, 10:06 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link By fnord12 | August 25, 2017, 6:58 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Ryan Cooper has a number of more substantive points, but there's just a practical point against the "pivot to video" movement for me. I can read an article in a 10th of the time it takes me to watch a video, especially in this context where the videos just consist of people talking at me. And the dirty secret is that many people are consuming all of this stuff at work, where you can't really watch videos anyway. (Once again in this regard i am like a Millennial.) By fnord12 | August 24, 2017, 9:23 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Cause there's nothing else. No money, no management, no direction. Underlying this rationale were two related convictions. One was the standard conservative bias against expertise and bureaucracy, according to which experts lacked the "common sense" that an outsider from the private sector could provide -- a conviction shared, of course, by the man who nominated Carson for the job. The other was a more particular conviction that he, Carson, possessed extra doses of such common sense by virtue of his biography. He's a black man who grew up poor. That automatically makes him qualified to run HUD. Clearly. He's also got some interesting ideas about what slavery was. There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder, for less. But they, too, had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land." And when the Trump administration cut the HUD budget by $7 billion, Carson told the HUD employees not to worry, poverty is a state of mind. But if Carson was troubled by the disembowelment of his department, he showed no sign of it. Even before the final numbers were out, he had assured housing advocates that cuts would be made up for by money dedicated to housing in the big infrastructure bill Trump was promising -- a notion that his fellow Republican Kemp, among others, found far-fetched. "I'm not sure he understood how that would work," Kemp told me. "He was probably repeating what had been told to him." Then, a day after the budget was released, Carson downplayed the importance of programs for the poor in a radio interview with Armstrong Williams, saying that poverty was largely a "state of mind." This, more than anything, seemed to be a crystallization of the Carson philosophy of HUD: that privation would be solved by the power of positive thinking, that his own extraordinary rise was scalable and could be replicated millions of times over. The one thing he seemed concerned about was the possibility of public housing being too luxurious. Yep. That's the problem. Poor people are living too well with their doors that open and close and elevators that only stop working some of the time. And like Trump, Carson's got his family hanging around, attending meetings, and making decisions. Career employees are leaving. Those who are staying have been barred from doing the work that they normally do. And the HUD secretary running it all is perpetually mentally checked out. By min | August 22, 2017, 4:22 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link I missed this when it came out but it seems relevant today: Trump has said he would sit down with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to try to stop Pyongyang's nuclear programme and has criticized the decades-old NATO alliance with mainly European nations as obsolete and too costly for the United States. ..."Donald Trump's statements about North Korea show that he has more interest in making Kim Jong Un like him than backing up our friends and allies in the region," [Clinton aide Jake] Sullivan said, noting that South Korea has worked with the United States on missile defence. Today, Dianne Feinstein is surprising me in a good way by admitting that isolating North Korea hasn't worked. By fnord12 | August 8, 2017, 6:05 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link The New York Times has a nice animated chart illustrating the data from Piketty (et all). By fnord12 | August 8, 2017, 10:48 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions. By fnord12 | August 8, 2017, 10:36 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Brian Beutler argues that now is a good time. By fnord12 | August 7, 2017, 12:40 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link If someone gets punched by another person, do we ask the assault victim "yes, but did you fight back?" and use that as a measure for how guilty the attacker is. Link But new research adds to the evidence debunking this common belief. According to a recent study, a majority of female rape survivors who visited the Emergency Clinic for Rape Victims in Stockholm reported they did not fight back. Many also did not yell for help. During the assault they experienced a kind of temporary paralysis called tonic immobility. And those who experienced extreme tonic immobility were twice as likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and three times more likely to suffer severe depression in the months after the attack than women who did not have this response. Tonic immobility (TI) describes a state of involuntary paralysis in which individuals cannot move or, in many cases, even speak. In animals this reaction is considered an evolutionary adaptive defense to an attack by a predator when other forms of defense are not possible. Much less is known about this phenomenon in humans, although it has been observed in soldiers in battle as well as in survivors of sexual assault. A study from 2005, for example, found 52 percent of female undergraduates who reported childhood sexual abuse said they experienced this paralysis. We have the expressions "deer in the headlights" and "frozen with fear". I'm sure there are plenty of horror movies depicting a victim standing still with their mouth moving silently as the terrible thing approaches. Is it really so amazing that someone who is threatened with sexual assault will experience the same kind of paralysis? This "rape-induced paralysis," [University of Sydney psychiatrist Kasia Kozlowska] explains, is one of six automatically activated defense behaviors in animals and humans that make up the "defense cascade." Typically, nonhuman animals are programmed to go through each of the states as the proximity of the danger escalates. The stages are: arousal (alertness to possible danger); freezing (momentarily putting flight or fight on hold while assessing danger); "flight or fight"; tonic immobility; collapsed immobility (fainting in fear); and quiescent immobility (a subsequent state of rest that promotes healing). People who experience sexual assault may go through several of these stages, or skip straight to tonic immobility. The system should be focusing on the rapists and their behavior and not on trying to shift responsibility to the victims. By min | August 4, 2017, 2:14 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Some good discussion here. This in particular was interesting, but it almost reaches conspiracy theory levels. IF it's true, it's pretty sick. ...saw high petroleum prices as a way to tax the First World, and then redistribute that revenue through equitable social programs, solidarity, and support for poor energy-importing nations, and an oppositional foreign policy. Thus many of Barack Obama's energy initiatives, especially when Hillary Clinton was at the State Department, were counterstrikes against this repoliticization of oil: promoting fracking, not just in the United States but worldwide; wooing of Mexico away from Venezuela while promoting the privatization of PEMEX, Mexico's state-run oil industry; turning Central America into one big biofuel plantation (that's one of the things the 2009 coup in Honduras was about). It worked. By fnord12 | August 3, 2017, 5:24 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Ryan Cooper on the left's distrust of the 2020 candidates. Semi-relatedly, i've found this mocking of Mark Zuckerberg's "I Swear I'm Not Running For President" tour to be pretty funny. Meanwhile, here is some full throated union support from Bernie, who is helping to organize at the Nissan plant in Mississippi. By fnord12 | August 3, 2017, 12:42 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link I try to not do too much vegan advocacy on this blog and i just linked to a related article yesterday, but i won't pass up an opportunity to advocate for that prince of foods, the bean. By fnord12 | August 2, 2017, 11:17 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link My level of sophistication on Syria doesn't extend much beyond "we should get the fuck out", but this is a compelling interview. By fnord12 | August 2, 2017, 1:45 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link As every centrist politician in the country has been hinting that they're going to run in the Dem 2020 primary, i've found myself wondering how to get around the problem that aside from Bernie and Elizabeth Warren* there's basically no one acceptable to the growing leftist wing. Not just for 2020, but just in general. There's Barbara Lee and Keith Ellison* and a few others in the House, basically no one else in the Senate. The Berniecrats are having a lot of success at local levels and with Our Revolution and Justice Democrats and the like i am hoping that they continue to bubble up. But not a strong bench of people ready now. But the governor of Oregon seems pretty good. *Foreign policy still being a big problem with these two. By fnord12 | August 2, 2017, 1:08 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link WSJ: Earlier this year, he got an earful from a woman who didn't get it. "She was mad," he recalls. "She says, 'No, you can't live in America for free, what are you talking about?'" Almost a third of Americans (29%) are unaware local TV is available free, according to a June survey by the National Association of Broadcasters, an industry trade group. By fnord12 | August 2, 2017, 12:04 PM | Liberal Outrage & TeeVee | Link New Republic reviewing Supersizing Urban America. By fnord12 | August 2, 2017, 10:51 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link What happened to you, Mother Jones? Link Drum's controversial passage came when he attempted to reconcile these views with this reasoning (emphasis in original): Worse, the reasoning in the Mother Jones article implies that people are naturally and justifiably disgusted by those who lose their homes, struggle with addiction, or have mental health afflictions. Who still thinks this way? It's as if a caricature of some 1950s retrograde moralizer was reincarnated as a 21st-century columnist for a magazine named after a fiery pro-labor revolutionary. But perhaps the most serious problem is one raised by the researchers on whom the Mother Jones article purports to rely. In an email to me, which I promptly posted on Twitter, one those researchers -- professor Spencer Piston of Boston University -- objected that the Mother Jones article profoundly misrepresented their research: The article goes on to print the full response the researchers sent The Intercept for publication. Feelings of disgust for the homeless are a learned behavior that are, at the very least, exacerbated, if not caused by, the negative way they are portrayed in the media. And here comes Mother Jones basically saying, "Of course! The homeless are disgusting." *smacks forehead* Great self-reflection there, Kevin Drum. I'm also starting to question your reading comprehension abilities. The response from Mother Jones' editor-in-chief shows how the magazine continues to miss the point. Uh, no. They were actually challenging you, the media, to overcome your shortcomings in they way you report on the homeless. By min | August 2, 2017, 10:39 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link (No jokes about the dead zone being "roughly the size of New Jersey".) By fnord12 | August 1, 2017, 2:12 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link We get articles like this every few years, but Dem consultants don't ever seem to listen (for obvious reasons discussed in the article). By fnord12 | August 1, 2017, 9:58 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Interesting article on the relationship between cities and universities. (I do wish the article expanded more on the "and their attendant medical centers" portion.) By fnord12 | August 1, 2017, 9:52 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link To pollute. And he's also giving them a $3 billion tip for their troubles in the form of subsidies. Link Under those laws, companies are prohibited from discharging materials or otherwise polluting wetlands without a specific permit to do so. Under the bill that Walker has put forward, companies within the new "economics and information technology manufacturing zone" will be allowed to discharge material into non-federal wetlands if it relates to the construction or operation of a manufacturing facility. Walker has called a special session that will discuss his bill tomorrow. Another section of the bill outlines how existing Wisconsin law requires companies to obtain a permit to disturb or transform nearby waterways. According to the official analysis of the bill by analysts in the Republican-controlled legislature, the new legislation will allow Walker's administration to waive those permitting requirements "if they relate to the construction, access, or operation of a new manufacturing facility" in the zone where Foxconn is planning to build its facility. A separate section of the bill exempts new energy utilities built inside the Foxconn development zone from facing regulatory oversight by the state's Public Service Commission. Those provisions also exempt regulation of the building and relocation of high-voltage transmission lines, according to state legislative analysts. By min | August 1, 2017, 12:13 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link « Liberal Outrage: July 2017 | Main | Liberal Outrage: September 2017 » |