The Virginia Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of High-Quality Posts

[GeorgiaModerate]

Obviously Wisconsin will be very close, but I think that Biden will ultimately win Wisconsin. There are several factors involved in this. I am listing them in no particular order.

The first is that many parts of rural Wisconsin, while not maxed out for Trump, can’t get too much more red. Places like Taylor County are already 75-25 GOP, and places like Marinette, Rusk, Langlade, Shawano, Clark, etc already are voting 70/30 Trump. There just simply are not a lot of places for Trump to squeeze out of rural Wisconsin; rural Wisconsin is not rural Alabama; Trump won’t win it by 80 points. There are a combination of enough 1) retired Chicago/Illinois/Twin Cities liberals that have lake homes in places like Hayward, Spooner, and Rhinelander 2) Native Americans and 3) remote workers to hold most of rural Wisconsin from dropping off completely for Dems.

Second, shifts are bad for the GOP in both WOW and BOW. Republicans have seriously lost ground in eastern Waukesha and Ozaukee counties in a big way. Additionally, inner ring suburbs such as Greenfield, Franklin, and Hales Corners in MKE county have moved solidly left too. This isn’t just Trump, but Evers did well there in 2022, and Barnes actually cracked 37% in Waukesha and 42% in Ozaukee. Often overlooked, but critically important, are the Fox Valley suburbs. Evers only lost Brown by 4%, and Democrats flipped places like De Pere and significantly improved in places like Bellevue and Howard. If Trump loses any support in BOW or WOW, it’ll be very hard to make that up elsewhere.

Third, Dane County’s growth is stupid. It’s crazy how many people are moving there, many of them Democratic leaning. Although much smaller, St Croix County and Eau Claire are growing solidly too, with St Croix being some blue spillover from the Twin Cities.

Lastly, Wisconsin actually got fair state legislative maps this year. Democrats are investing a lot to try to flip the state assembly (the senate is still out of reach). This will likely help with Democratic turnout, and I can’t explain how much of a dumpster fire the WisGOP is right now. Despite having billions of dollars in state surplus, the GOP refuses to find Wisconsin schools and they are going to referendums to try to avoid shutting down. The GOP refused to expand abortion access, marijuana, and are constantly infighting (see Robin Vos recall effort). This is unlikely to stop anytime soon.

Thoughts?

[Kamala's side hoe]

LFG Averroes Nix

1. The decline of professional political journalism is getting severe enough that we have fewer real stories to talk about. It's become much harder to understand what's going on at the state and local levels.
2. A lot of people here don't seem to follow politics outside of social media, and this is one of the site's biggest problems, especially for posters who are young enough that this is all they know.
3. The spread of propaganda enabled by modern social platforms is so severe that this site doesn't have much of a future unless it develops a better "immune system." (This is not just about moderation.)

The X/Twitter embed function is the worst feature enhancement ever to happen to this place. Getting rid of it would be an ideal first step.

It would be even better if everyone just got so bored with that type of content that we just stopped reacting to it. And that's where we need to get. This stuff is dull and tells us virtually nothing about elections.

[Kamala's side hoe]

There is a general problem from middle school upwards. There has been a total collapse in discipline.

There used to be three ways of maintaining discipline for teachers. Competent ones.

1. Force - Suspensions, often enforced by the Vice Principal, who used to be a very intimidating older woman, physically dragging them from the room, with their parents called. The parents, having been recalled from their $400 an hour jobs then handled the rest especially when it was made clear colleges would find out if it happened again.

2. Grades - Teachers were able to use class participation to enforce discipline on those who were disruptive.

3. Social pressure/playing students off against each other


All three have fallen apart.

#1 no longer exists. What started at universities - the attitude that students are customers - has spread down to elementary school. If you attempt to enforce discipline, rather than parents punishing their kid, they will threaten to sue you. Don't even think of attempting to enforce discipline on a student of a different gender from you, who is LGBTQ+, non-white, or if you are not white, white. Parents have gotten weaponization of ID politics down to an art form AND they have taught their spawn to ID pol lawyer as well. Administrations which are risk adverse won't back you.

#2 this follows from #1. Every single effort to give a grade below an A will be challenged. The kid has emotional issues, depression, strife at home, you are singaling them out. If you call upon a kid you think has not been doing the reading, that is bullying. Which in turn means students who complete the work lose motivation. The only possible accountability is university references, and those are now vetted by the administration.


All of that leaves #3 which is a short-term expedient that encourages factionalism in the long-run. But it has been the only way teachers, and increasingly university instructors can run classes. By recruiting like-minded student loyalists into a private army to crush dissenters.

At the university level grades are worthless. Any grade below an A can be challenged or appealed and it is just not worth the effort to do so. 70+ year old senior faculty can get away with it, but most of the problem students then avoid their classes. Attendance cannot even be enforced.

This then feeds into a wider culture of impunity.

I've probably quote-posted at least one Xing effortpost in this megathread that also describes this apparent lack of discipline in schools and accompanying Karen-like behavior among parents of K-12 children.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Despite my disagreement with some of coloradocowboi's takes and framing of CA politics and elections, I broadly agree with their observations here. Lower-class employees and students are generally socialized into culturally "left" viewpoints and voter engagement patterns.

Okay, first of all. Let me as an academic just clarify some misconceptions. I am a union member. I am a working-class person. And so are most of the students I have had across my career, including by the way a way larger number than you would think at USC. And as for my rich students at USC? Most of them are center-left to right-wing, Zionists, pro-capitalist, very lukewarm on the kind of identity issues we are talking about, not queer, not radicals. Those students almost uniformly come from the working and middle classes, at Cal State, at USC, at private Catholic schools, and where I work now.

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

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Do I agree with their confrontational style and us vs them rendering of decolonial theory? No. Not at all. But do I think they, not the rampant misinformation campaign against them, is ruining the leftist movement? No.

And I don't wanna hear about having to choose between Palestinian solidarity and workers' rights. These are connected issues, and as someone who has spent my literal life - including when I identified as a centrist and not a leftist - on picket lines, working low wage public service jobs, literally giving my blood as my ancestors had done before me for the labor movement, I can't stand this argument. It's missing the forest for the trees and laying way too much responsibility at the feet of teenagers. You are doing exactly what the Right wants: scapegoating some teens protesting an actually worthwhile cause and not at all questioning the narrative about them.

By the way, I am in town and I was at USC yesterday. I saw with my own eyes what happened and, as usual with this issue, the media has made an enormous deal about what shouldn't even be more than a thirty second story. Students peacefully occupied the campus they pay 70k a year to go to, many of them going deep into debt. The least the university can do is protect their 1st amendment rights.

If other leftists want to buy into the Fox News caricature of college students and professors as some kind of elite, you're just going to divide the movement. Accomplishing nothing. At the end of the day too, many of us college professors are directly involved in the labor movement... certainly more than a lot of our vociferous online critics. So, please don't exclude from something we are actively building.

Beyond that, it would be INSANE to drop Gaza right now as an issue. Look at the polls. Deal with reality. The young people have spoken, and even if you disagree if we don't get their buy-in, we are irrelevant to them. They are literally the future, and why so many people want to go out of their way to antagonize them and mischaracterize them is beyond me.

This is also a great post, and gets at some of why I personally chose not to pursue a PhD.

The term "Left" here is actually important. The entire US left has suffered from a takeover of individuals with upper-middle class educational credentials and lifestyle expectations on lower-middle class incomes whose cognitive dissonance is funded through unsustainable debt.

Until the 1980s, doing a PHD in the humanities was largely reserved to the sons(and daughters) of the elite because it was accepted it was a money-losing venture. 99% of those who undertook it would never earn back the investment.

The result was that it became a home for a certain type of gentleman scholar. That absolutely defined the type of history we received which was well-written, critical, but largely followed a great man model, precisely because those "great men" were often than the great-uncles of the authors.

The 1980s did not just open federal student loans to undergraduates but to postgraduates. This was a good thing to a limited degree as it allowed a wider number of people into the humanities. The problem was that programs, rather than using this to admit promising and high quality applicants from non-traditional backgrounds, turned it into a cash cow, exploiting the desires of many students who lacked the social skills to go out into the private sector or were too scared to try.

This is a major difference. Many PHDs previously had been successful commercially before they entered academia. Increasingly you not only had students without that experience, but those least capable of navigating a competitive market. As it became flooded, and the tenure process became brutal, someone who went into a Phd because they didn't to navigate the internal politics of Goldman Sachs was going to struggle in academia.

So the influx turned political and "critical theory" the ancestor to modern DEI became a weapon to distribute limited resources. I am not even sure there was an inherent progressivism here, so much as people saw that most senior positions were held by wealthy white men, who tended to favor people who approached the subject matter like them. There probably were gender and racial elements, but I generally feel the correlation was stronger here. A lot of the "new" academics were simply not very good by the traditional standards of History or International Relations, and while it may be subjective whether Queer or Critical approaches are bad or merely different, being able to claim that not wanting to promote them was bigoted was a useful weapon.

The thing is that people who could be successful elsewhere didn't want to put up with this nonsense only to win the prize of tenure in a field now dominated with what they viewed as garbage and defined by petty politics. So they left.

It is not that Academia is Marxist. It is that in a process Marx could recognize, it was taken over by a class that politicized their economic anxieties.

It is Jacobin - talking openly about their economic complaints would offend their self-identity within the middle class, so they use radical social causes as a proxy.

And the net effect has been that the Left cannot talk about economic issues in general because its intellectual elite is dominated by people whose entire sense of self would be undermined by doing so.  

[Kamala's side hoe]

I blame media and especially social media.

Firstly I think social media has spread false narratives that things are crappier than they are by only showing the extremes; extremes wealth and privilege and extreme poverty and violence, making it seem like there’s MASSIVE inequality. Furthermore because extreme wealth is just spammed everywhere people sort of expect it to be the norm when it never was. I really dislike this believe the 60s were some golden era for the mainstream American public than that was far from true.

There’s genuinely a cohort of people on my generation who think they’re struggling economically and getting screwed over until they can afford to party all day in the Penthouse of 432 Park Avenue.

I also think social media has just lowered many people’s social trust and caused them to act weirder and more hateful towards eachother. Social media also comes with the byproduct of less real person interaction where people tend to have more mutual respect for eachother and actually feel more connected to the community around them. Also what allows folks to fall down conspiracies

That’s not to say there aren’t real problems like housing cost, but even that is a bit inflated; it’s only a few cities that have it really bad, and while average home price has generally gone up, so have things like home size.

I think there needs to be a serious mass movement to try and get people off social media, and I think social trust and country optimism would increase.

This can also be accomplished by encouraging certain patterns of social media usage that promote real-life interactions and facilitate greater civic engagement. Which really needs to be done by civil society and not by government or big business.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

I blame media and especially social media.

Firstly I think social media has spread false narratives that things are crappier than they are by only showing the extremes; extremes wealth and privilege and extreme poverty and violence, making it seem like there’s MASSIVE inequality. Furthermore because extreme wealth is just spammed everywhere people sort of expect it to be the norm when it never was. I really dislike this believe the 60s were some golden era for the mainstream American public than that was far from true.

There’s genuinely a cohort of people on my generation who think they’re struggling economically and getting screwed over until they can afford to party all day in the Penthouse of 432 Park Avenue.

I also think social media has just lowered many people’s social trust and caused them to act weirder and more hateful towards eachother. Social media also comes with the byproduct of less real person interaction where people tend to have more mutual respect for eachother and actually feel more connected to the community around them. Also what allows folks to fall down conspiracies

That’s not to say there aren’t real problems like housing cost, but even that is a bit inflated; it’s only a few cities that have it really bad, and while average home price has generally gone up, so have things like home size.

I think there needs to be a serious mass movement to try and get people off social media, and I think social trust and country optimism would increase.

This can also be accomplished by encouraging certain patterns of social media usage that promote real-life interactions and facilitate greater civic engagement. Which really needs to be done by civil society and not by government or big business.

Maybe in theory, but that’s expecting social media to behave in a way fundamentally antithetical to its design.  Such a movement would need to come about organically through real-world/in-person interaction and word of mouth.  That said, I do think the TikTok ban - whether or not one agrees with the reasoning - will help as TikTok has become a uniquely malicious influence on this stuff even compared to the likes of Twitter, Instagram, and FaceBook (which is really saying something).

[Kamala's side hoe]

I blame media and especially social media.

Firstly I think social media has spread false narratives that things are crappier than they are by only showing the extremes; extremes wealth and privilege and extreme poverty and violence, making it seem like there’s MASSIVE inequality. Furthermore because extreme wealth is just spammed everywhere people sort of expect it to be the norm when it never was. I really dislike this believe the 60s were some golden era for the mainstream American public than that was far from true.

There’s genuinely a cohort of people on my generation who think they’re struggling economically and getting screwed over until they can afford to party all day in the Penthouse of 432 Park Avenue.

I also think social media has just lowered many people’s social trust and caused them to act weirder and more hateful towards eachother. Social media also comes with the byproduct of less real person interaction where people tend to have more mutual respect for eachother and actually feel more connected to the community around them. Also what allows folks to fall down conspiracies

That’s not to say there aren’t real problems like housing cost, but even that is a bit inflated; it’s only a few cities that have it really bad, and while average home price has generally gone up, so have things like home size.

I think there needs to be a serious mass movement to try and get people off social media, and I think social trust and country optimism would increase.

This can also be accomplished by encouraging certain patterns of social media usage that promote real-life interactions and facilitate greater civic engagement. Which really needs to be done by civil society and not by government or big business.

Maybe in theory, but that’s expecting social media to behave in a way fundamentally antithetical to its design.  Such a movement would need to come about organically through real-world/in-person interaction and word of mouth.  That said, I do think the TikTok ban - whether or not one agrees with the reasoning - will help as TikTok has become a uniquely malicious influence on this stuff even compared to the likes of Twitter, Instagram, and FaceBook (which is really saying something).

I'm not necessarily referring to the Metaverse platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) here. There are other apps that have more specific purposes.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

I blame media and especially social media.

Firstly I think social media has spread false narratives that things are crappier than they are by only showing the extremes; extremes wealth and privilege and extreme poverty and violence, making it seem like there’s MASSIVE inequality. Furthermore because extreme wealth is just spammed everywhere people sort of expect it to be the norm when it never was. I really dislike this believe the 60s were some golden era for the mainstream American public than that was far from true.

There’s genuinely a cohort of people on my generation who think they’re struggling economically and getting screwed over until they can afford to party all day in the Penthouse of 432 Park Avenue.

I also think social media has just lowered many people’s social trust and caused them to act weirder and more hateful towards eachother. Social media also comes with the byproduct of less real person interaction where people tend to have more mutual respect for eachother and actually feel more connected to the community around them. Also what allows folks to fall down conspiracies

That’s not to say there aren’t real problems like housing cost, but even that is a bit inflated; it’s only a few cities that have it really bad, and while average home price has generally gone up, so have things like home size.

I think there needs to be a serious mass movement to try and get people off social media, and I think social trust and country optimism would increase.

This can also be accomplished by encouraging certain patterns of social media usage that promote real-life interactions and facilitate greater civic engagement. Which really needs to be done by civil society and not by government or big business.

Maybe in theory, but that’s expecting social media to behave in a way fundamentally antithetical to its design.  Such a movement would need to come about organically through real-world/in-person interaction and word of mouth.  That said, I do think the TikTok ban - whether or not one agrees with the reasoning - will help as TikTok has become a uniquely malicious influence on this stuff even compared to the likes of Twitter, Instagram, and FaceBook (which is really saying something).

I'm not necessarily referring to the Metaverse platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) here. There are other apps that have more specific purposes.

Good point

[Kamala's side hoe]

Anti-Palestinian nationalism grandstanding aside, this is a high quality post and quite possibly the only post in the "Palestine college student protest megathread" I'll bother to read.

...I visited the UW encampment yesterday and it was basically what I expected based on my previous description that "this is just like the early days of CHAZ."

When I was at college we had an event every September for the freshmen where you would get six of your friends together and set up tents on the main student green, and you'd sleep over in the tents.  Everyone would decorate their tents so it kind of had this Halloween feel, and different student organizations and Greek houses would have their new freshman recruits turn their tents into an organization tent so it also served as kind of an orientation event.  You'd go to different tents to meet people and see what they were about.  And then there was also this kind of sexual aspect to it because the tents were coed so you were putting together a group of six friends you'd known for maybe a couple weeks, and maybe you wanted to know the girls better and hoped that by sleeping together in a small tent it would lead to some cuddling or some emotional intimacy or at least something to build on for the future.  It was also very socially stressful because "pick your top 6 friends" meant you would find out who considered you a top friend and who was going to exclude you.  Interesting phenomenon in general.

Anyway, that was what this reminded me of.  Every tent had its own "thing" going on and it was all playacting like they were either a warzone, or a music festival, or a mini-school.  So one tent was making s'mores, one tent was doing finger painting, one tent was offering to teach you about the time in 1475 the Jews kidnapped a toddler for ritual sacrifice and cannibalism.  There was some Arabic music being played over a speaker that I'm sure 95% of the students couldn't understand.  There were also tents for different organizations -- including one hilarious one for the evangelical christians on campus that said "Ask me why you will burn in hell" and was actually attracting the most attention as students wanted to intellectually defeat the guy trying to tell them why Jesus Christ was the truth.

It's very similar vibes to the early days of CHAZ, which people thought was just going to be a block party.  You had various pop-up canopies for different activities and organizations that you could browse, and there was food and drink and live music and most people were just treating it as a way to have fun.  But of course there were also lots of "ACAB" and "Defund the Police" and "Piggies go Home" and "Murderers!" and those kinds of signs and sidewalk chalk and posters and paintings and things like that, and plenty of people who wanted to tell you all about their ideology.  I really can't overstate just how much "From the river to the sea" and "Intifada!" are the two most popular slogans after the generic "Free Palestine" -- I thought "end the genocide" would be more popular but nope there was "intifada" plastered on everything in sight.

idk, kids in their 20s like doing this kind of thing, street festivals are one of the few ways left to have a proper third-space where people will actually want to talk to each other and socialize.  

-snip-

...these sorts of things are often going to end up hijacked by the radicals and opportunists who will veer it off in a direction of violence and extremism and lawlessness.  That was what happened with CHAZ, that happened at Columbia and UCLA, I'm hoping it won't happen at UW because it will make my commute annoying to have streets shut down.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Re: What should Biden be doing differently?

He is in a tough spot. The backlash against globalization is complete in both parties. However, the reality no one in Washington wants to talk about is that globalization, especially trade with China, did lower prices significantly on a huge number of goods. The China-WTO era 2000-2020 was an era of very low inflation. That enabled lower interest rates. The average person got used to both. Rolling it back with a combination of tariffs, bans, and sanctions, and a push for "friendshoring" and industrial policy essentially means trading a pure economic decision for a political one. That has implications.

The conventional wisdom has become that no one who supports trade with China can win in the Midwestern swing states, and that may be true. Everyone, from the Dem elites on down to the average Trump supporter, has told themselves a story that China is to blame for everything and that America's big mistake was to trade with China, and that trade with China has never brought anything good to America. That ignores the fact that trade with China was never done out of charity. It was because China just happens to be very good at making a lot of stuff for a very low price, and utilizing that capability in exchange for paper dollars that the Fed could print at will had benefits for America. Forcibly shifting supply chains to countries in geopolitical favor was never going to be economically optimal and was always going to have costs. It was never going to solve all the problems that we told ourselves were due to China.

Now Biden has the worst of all worlds. There are only about 200,000 more manufacturing jobs today than there were four years ago. After Trump created about 400,000 in his first term. But the 4 - 5 million manufacturing jobs lost in the first two decades of the millenium have not come back. That's due to a combination of increased productivity and manufacturing and imports simply shifting from China to places like Mexico and Vietnam -- where good cost more to make, but still cheaper than in America. The trade deficit has not meaningfully narrowed under Biden -- on the contrary, it is higher today than it was in the globalization era!

The implementation of industrial policy may pay off in the future, but it's not going to happen in time for the election. Meanwhile, we've made a bunch of changes for the sake of sticking it to China that we've told ourselves were supposed to solve problems, but effectively just make the global economy less efficient, and it's coming at a detriment to Biden.