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

[Kamala's side hoe]

Re: Interesting (2020) Exit Polls Notes. Truncated because the original was kind of long

I think small business owners in the $100-$200k crowd are the types who are successful but are also the most sensitive to changes in regulations and taxes. You have a comfortable life and work hard in your business, but it feels precarious and requires huge work to maintain, while you also resent a few thousand dollars more in taxes and really hate the meetings you have to have whenever the laws change to make sure your business is in compliance. I can imagine the consulting and restructuring fees are pretty huge, as well as seeing the increased headcount and workload just for compliance purposes, can be really frustrating for these people and definitely breeds strong resentment.

Compare this to the smaller company in a less-regulated business where these changes are pretty small and you don't make enough to really get hit by taxes, or the larger firm where you just sit in an office all day and don't have to be as involved in the daily management and some consulting fees plus a few more people on payroll doesn't really bother you all that much.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Re: Which country is culturally most similar to the USA?

Culture is not about statistics or a country's government. Even with religion, if two countries are both religious, but attend different churches, that's only a very thin similarity. North and South Korea couldn't be more different in terms of their government or any statistic, but they are still arguably culturally closer to each other than to any other country. The Philippines is basically American institutions transplanted on an Asian archipelago, but you couldn't say they're terribly culturally similar to the US.

Culture is the sum of things like how people interact with others, how families are structured, what people prioritize in their lives, what institutions or people they value, etc. Kissing on the cheek when greeting someone or living multi-generational households are cultural things, having a large agricultural sector or partisan politics is not.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Mianfei doesn't post that often. He's been on this forum for four years now, and has only posted 306 times (as of the time of this writing). However, when he does post, he posts very substantive and insightful material that is well-written and contains excellent references. He's contributed more of value to this forum than the combined output of posters like olawakandi, LandslideLyndon, and numerous others who've posted far more than he has.

Characteristically high-effort mianfei doomer sh-tpost (part 2)

[Kamala's side hoe]

Mianfei doesn't post that often. He's been on this forum for four years now, and has only posted 306 times (as of the time of this writing). However, when he does post, he posts very substantive and insightful material that is well-written and contains excellent references. He's contributed more of value to this forum than the combined output of posters like olawakandi, LandslideLyndon, and numerous others who've posted far more than he has.

Characteristically high-effort mianfei doomer sh-tpost (part 2)

Are you saying that I was wrong in my characterization of what he posts?

I was complementing the quality of their Doomer post-GE sh-tpost, not contesting your statement.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Can't be bothered to read multiple pages on the matter, but if nobody else has said it: he's obviously using this as an opportunity to shore himself up for the runoff. What I can't figure out is why he feels the need - given California's demographics - to make this kind of promise. I guess he's just suffering from terminal national party identity brain-rot. Is there some evidence that black voters are going to disproportionately abandon him in the recall? Nothing in contemporary politics would suggest this to be the case. A simple appointment or statement before the fact also isn't going to bolster black turnout in the event his team feels like he needs it right now either. And even if they did, it would indicate there are far bigger problems for him; if that's a concern in a state like CA, then you're already losing.

People were "upset" prior because he didn't pick a black woman to replace a black woman, but 1) a lack of representation nationally is not enough of an excuse to force a single state to adhere to such standards (especially when it's one of the best examples of a state where Democrats are least reliant upon black votes in general) and 2) there are numerous identity combos in CA that make better choices from an electoral standpoint (and regardless of the posturing online and elsewhere, that is what it's all about when the people in power are making the decisions).

Since - like the last CA-SEN nomination - people want to make it about a combination of race and gender, here are the combos of race/gender from largest to smallest among CA's Democratic electorate:

Code: ("California's Democratic Race-Gender Electoral Groups, in Order of Size")

White Women 30.5%
White Men         27.5%
Latino Women 10.8%
Latino Men 8.9%
Asian Women 6.9%
Black Women 6.5%
Asian Men         4.6%
Black Men         4.3%

If Newsom were smart and playing the recall game here in conjunction with race-gender combos (can't imagine why a smart politician would corner himself on this choice; save me the rigmarole about how one of the literally greasiest politicians in the country that could easily be mistaken for a superhero villain legitimately believes all of this), he'd pick from one of the top four or five groups above. Obviously he has already picked from one of them (Padilla), which still leaves plenty of qualified Asian women (people forget Harris was arguably more in line with this grouping than the other) and others to consider for electoral gain.

[Kamala's side hoe]

There's an intolerance for "Trumpy" posters here but not for anyone right-of-center. Even ER/PLSIV is pretty well-regarded, or at least was until he staked out unpopular-on-this-forum COVID stances. So I'd say it has less to do with political beliefs in the abstract and more to do with personality, in the sense that many of Trump's supporters have ended up taking on aspects of his personality, which is (as is well-known) ultra-combative and ill-suited to serious conversations about policy or ideology.

In using the terms "red state" and "blue state," we are looking at the population through a seriously distorted lens. Only in the world of the much-flawed, winner-take-all Electoral College are there red states and blue states.

Outside of the Electoral College, the terms red state and blue state perpetuate the myth that the great majority of Biden voters are the so-called coastal elites, living along the Pacific or in the Northeast Corridor, and that the great majority of Trump voters are under-educated rednecks living in the hinterlands. This assignment of separate geographies ignores reality and perpetuates our political and social divisions, reinforcing a roadblock to the current administration’s goal of fostering unity.

A few days after the election, a New York Times reporter wanted to get a reaction from Trump voters. So she visited a sparsely populated part of Nebraska to talk to Republicans there. More than one in three voters in New York State voted for Trump, so she could have gotten a “Trump voter reaction story” without getting on a plane.

The deep division in this country isn’t neatly segregated by state. Understanding this will be a necessary step in bridging that division. Neither the Trump voter nor the Biden voter is The Other in a faraway place, and you don’t live in a blue state or a red state. Like every American, you live in a purple state.

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/2021/03/20/red-state-blue-state-myth-harmful/4736295001/

I could not agree more with most of the arguments in this fantastic article.

[Kamala's side hoe]

-snip-
For one, the guy who conducted the study didn't come to that conclusion.

There is a separate standard for Asians than for members of other races, how is that not racist?

I am speaking from the perspective of an asian american who had to have one of those "close to perfect applications" to get into a top 15 US school, and I won't argue if the current system is racist or not. But thinking of the SAT score as solely an admission standard for elite colleges (what the study focuses on) is completely false.

There are so many other factors that are more important than test scores for elite schools, such as specialized industry experience, research experience, leadership abilities, etc. Remember that when we are talking about elite schools we are talking about schools that want students who are going to build the next facebook or who are going to lead a presidential campaign one day. For elite colleges the SAT certainly does not compromise a significant portion of the admissions standard.

On the other hand, state schools which likely produce the vast majority of future "middle class" people in the US do not employ affirmative action much, if at all (e.g. UT with guaranteed admission for top 7% of the class or something).

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

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https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/who-cares-about-the-ivy-league?

A creeping, toxic elitism

I don’t want to veer too far into cultural hand-waving here, but it seems like obsession with the Ivy League is a symptom of a creeping, toxic elitism that has permeated American society over the last four decades. We’re obsessed with high-status winner-take-all jobs. Our economy is dominated by superstar companies. The cult of Hollywood celebrities may have given way to the cult of Instagram influencers and YouTube stars, but it’s still all about the glittering few. Even the people who spend all day yelling about Elon Musk on Twitter are still spending all day…thinking about Elon Musk. It’s as if the inequality of income and wealth is mirrored in a general inequality of status, where only a few people and institutions matter and everyone else is left to watch the glitterati from the cheap seats.

I don’t know how we reverse this trend. I don’t know how the everyperson becomes central to our culture and our policy and our visions of our own lives again. Maybe redistribution will do the trick. But I think one small piece of it is for the commentariat (and that includes me) to focus less on the Harvards and Stanfords of the world, and more on the Cal State Long Beaches and the SUNY Stony Brooks. Already I like what the Biden administration is doing, focusing more resources on HBCUs and community colleges. Perhaps the old man is onto something.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Friendly reminders that:

A: Hispanic is not a race
B: Many (most?) hispanics are white

Why wouldn't Hispanics be able to assimilate?

Even in Latin American countries where the overwhelming majority of the population are of Spanish descent still see social and economic divide among those considered "White" and the more mixed-race population. All signs point to that dynamic continuing in America especially since the definition of Whiteness in America and White Americans ancestry more often than not being associated with Northern Europe. (ie: British, French, Nordic, and the greater German area)

Nobody is saying that Hispanics can't be assimilated into American society and there is a strong case to be made that they already have. I'm just pointing out that all signs show the ethnicity known as Hispanics will establish themselves as an influential and independent minority in America in a similar fashion to that of Black Americans and not as an extension of the White Majority that many see Italians and Poles are today.   

[Kamala's side hoe]

I have no objection to making Juneteenth a holiday, just making it an additional holiday. They should've gotten rid of a different holiday to make room such as MLK Day, Columbus Day, or Veterans Day (the holiday formerly known as Armistice Day).

The US is short on national holidays vs. other wealthy countries.  Why not add a couple? 

I like the idea of going to 1 federal holiday per month.  So in addition to Juneteenth, we also need something in August, March and April.  We currently have 2 federal holidays in January and November.  MLK Day could reasonably be moved to August 28th to commemorate the March on Washington and his "I Have a Dream" speech.  Veteran's Day could reasonably be moved to April 9th, commemorating the official end of the Civil War, which was drastically more important in US military history than the WWI armistice.  For a March holiday, consider Cesar Chavez Day (March 31st), although this is admittedly really close to April 9th, even closer than the current Veteran's Day is to Thanksgiving.  And August MLK day would fall even closer to Labor Day in this scenario.  Another option would be Good Friday, which can land anywhere between late March and late April.

Also axe the stupid Monday Holiday Act and honor historical events on the day they actually happened when it is known (using Friday/Monday only when they fall on Saturday/Sunday).  President's Day currently cannot legally fall on Washington's actual birthday, which is idiotic.   

[Kamala's side hoe]

An interesting aspect of Canadian progressivism is multiculturalism, which is celebrated in Canada to an extent rarely seen elsewhere. Ironically, this is in part due to a relatively selective immigration policy that places huge emphasis on economic and family migrants who are much more likely to integrate easily, and it shows.

To be sure there are ethnic enclaves in Canada, like Brampton, but I would hardly call it a ghetto. But there is an easy acceptance of Canada that immigrants have that helps with integration. I grew up in an area with a lot of Iranian/Persian migrants and generally they were some of the most patriotic Canadians I've known. It's much harder to stoke fear of "outsiders" when the outsiders are often your neighbours.

Immigrants from socially conservative countries also tend to accept Canada's freakish social progressivism more easily than you'd see in places like the UK. I'm thinking of Rob Oliphant, an openly and vocally gay MP who represents a heavily Muslim constituency in Toronto and has a lot of support from the Muslims there. There was also talk of an anti-Liberal backlash among minorities, particularly Muslims, in ontario after the former Liberal government in ontario introduced a new sex ed curriculum that would discuss sexual orientation and gender identity early on. To be sure there were Muslim faith leaders who spoke out against this, and yet the precint-by-precinct data from the following election shows that areas with large Muslim populations were much more Liberal than average. So even if socially conservative immigrant groups maintain that social conservatism within the household, they are more than happy to support socially progressive politics that are pretty foreign to their homelands. By second and third generations, they assimilate and this personal conservatism tends to fizzle away too.

I get the sense that the last paragraph is very applicable to Canada's South Asian and ethnic Chinese communities (although the first partially overlaps with "Muslims").

[Kamala's side hoe]

Re: 'Impossible' to know what caused 2020 polling error

Re: You want to know why the polls were unusually inaccurate in the 2020 election?

We've been over this.

The problem with 2016 was that pollsters were not controlling for education because historically, education level was not a reliable predictor of voting patterns. That has changed, and now the more educated you are the more likely you are to vote Democrat.

That gap is especially true among white voters.

Pollsters are now controlling for education.

So unless there's something else they're missing, they're probably not overestimating Biden's white support.

Here's the thing: weighting by education only solves your problem if the small sample of non-college voters you do successfully get is conditionally representative of the non-responsive non-college population.

As I doubt pollsters' ability to reach non-college whites has increased since 2016, this means inflating the importance of the few non-college respondents you do have, which is a group which tends to be disproportionately elderly. If, for example, elderly non-college voters have moved left since 2016 while others have not (or even moved right), education weighting may actually make polls less accurate than without education weighting.

[Kamala's side hoe]

If you grew up in Highland Park, you will almost certainly be absolutely fine in life even if you attend a mediocre local school like UT-Arlington or North Texas.

Going to an Ivy League school isn't really worth the expense/effort from the standpoint of significantly improving your relative socioeconomic status if you're already in the upper socioeconomic strata.

The threshold for kids being able to just "whatever" their way through life and maintain high social status is a lot higher than this.  That works if your parents are tech founders, it doesn't work if they are just VP of XYZ making $200K at age 55.  You don't have to go to an Ivy, but you still have to be academically successful.

I said "do fine in life," not maintain elite social status. You can be academically successful or unsuccessful at any school. Some people fail out of Cornell. Some people graduate magna cum laude with a 4.0 at San Diego State.

If you want to live a "name brand" life where you work in the New York office of a white shoe law firm or at McKinsey/Bain or are a fellow at the Brookings Institution or a tenured Ivy League academic, or become a columnist for The Atlantic or The New York Times, then yes, you basically have to go to an Ivy League school (or Stanford or Chicago) to do those things no matter what your personal background is.

But if you "just" want to be in the highest earning 10% or so of society, living a nicer and more secure life than the overwhelming majority of Americans (to say nothing of the rest of the world) will ever experience, then, no, you really don't.

You can go to a UT-Arlington and get high grades and go to medical school (even one of those questionable ones in the Caribbean) and go be a specialist physician in a small town making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. You'll never be asked to join the National Academy of Medicine or be lecturing at Harvard Medical School or receive the prestige and deference of, say, Anthony Fauci, but you will have job security and a nice work-life balance and retire with millions of dollars in accrued wealth in a relatively inexpensive area. At a clinic I go to, one of the doctors went to medical school at Yale and another one went to medical school in the Barbados. You want to know what the difference is between them? The name that's on the piece of paper that hangs in their office. They both make plenty of money and do the same job.

You can go to a mediocre state university and major in engineering and become a project manager or go into technical sales and be able to live in a big house in a nice neighborhood, drive a nice car, and take nice ski and beach vacations. You won't be working on AI projects at Google; you won't be the next Zuckerberg. You'll be working on bank software or selling hydraulic components for oil rigs or construction companies. You'll be living in someplace like Sandy Springs, not Palo Alto. But that's hardly a life deserving of any sort of sympathy.

Plenty of kids who grow up in Highland Park and Preston Hollow and the other rich white Dallas neighborhoods just go to SMU, live the frat/sorority life, and use family/friend/alumni connections to go work for a local law firm or real estate firm. They end up in exactly the same place they were in before. "Giving up" going to Harvard/Yale/Princeton doesn't actually require them to give anything up.

[Kamala's side hoe]

I don't say low-info voter as a demeaning term. I am one of the low-info voters for Cuomo. People here tend to care about specific and intellectual dedication to key policy issues. I'm not among that group. Politicians like Cuomo and Kamala (and to some extent Trump) have limited allegiance to any policy objectives or ideology and really have solely built a personal brand around themselves more than anything else. Kamala's low-info voters may actually be of the high education, low curiosity subset whereas the other two are built around low education.

The best example of the candidate for high-info voters is Michael Bennet in 2020. Of course, he was not viable. Most high-info candidates are not viable because voters are not high-info. I agree with you that this forum is unnecessarily pessimistic on Kamala when she is the single most likely person to be the next president. I was just offering the reason why this is the case. Atlas' favorites will never do well in an election because Atlas is out of touch with what voters want.

Elizabeth Warren is perhaps the only viable candidate that best represents the high education, high curiosity quadrant last time around. I don't follow politics enough to know who the Democrats might run in the future.

[Kamala's side hoe]

One thing to consider is that this is a far less polarizing presidency. Ie. what precisely is there to approve of? With Trump there is a direct correlation between approval and partisanship, and as a result being a Republican or disliking Democrats almost required you to approve. This was obvious when you compared the Favorable numbers to the Approval ones which tended to be(slightly) less polarized.

With the exception of a few folks here who seem to be taking criticism of Afghanistan personally, there is no particular reason why large segments of Biden's electorate in 2020 would particularly approve of him. Has he handled it well? Ie. separate from any decision to withdraw? Maybe you don't think its entirely or even mostly his fault but in the spectrum of what he had agency over did he use it well?

Covid? You can blame anti-vaxxers, and blame Republican leaning voters for that, and even Republican pols for grandstanding but again within the scope of agency what did he do?

1. JJ pause which in hindsight was almost certainly a serious mistake
2. A weird, drawn-out approach to vaccine mandates which ended up allowing masking to become a live issue again. Whereas on a tradeoff, even if masking+shots was better, aggressively risking the (marginal given non compliance) risks of no masks to get as many shots
3. No approval for under 12 vaccines which contributes to why we are fighting over schools

On Covid Biden has either done nothing, little, been too slow, or acted in ways which haven't worked out. No real reason to approve.

Maybe spending money? But even then infrastructure stories are all about weird procedural stuff.

Like frankly why would you expect approval ratings to be high?

I am just unsure they matter that much. I mean they matter insofar as Democrats probably needed them to be historically high to not have a bad 2022, but I suspect that just as in 2018 the bottom for the GOP held up a lot better than in 2006 or 2008, the bottom for the Democrats will be a lot higher in 2022 than in 2014 because their voters will turn out due to "fear". So what you will get is going to be a 50-48 GOP popular vote margin and a mild wave as opposed to a 53-45 wipeout. But I am unsure that Biden at 50-46 and Biden at 47-46 changes that much. Biden at 55-39 might. Biden at 42-53 might. But 47-46 won't really change much from 50-45.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Rather than making a sweeping generalization, it might help to look at the various communities that comprise Latino voters overall. For CA (and for a lot of other places, too), I'd say break it down into three broader categories:

• distinctly urban clusters where the majority of Latinos reside
• relatively less urbanized areas with relatively large Latino populations
• rural or otherwise isolated places where Latinos are the overwhelming majority

It's fairly clear that Democrats aren't having long-term issues with the first group, and because of that, any major "realignment" or shift is impossible on some grand scale.

The second group in CA would more or less focus on the Central Valley, where huge fluctuations in Latino turnout between presidential and off-year elections occur. It's very likely any statistically large movements here compared to recent elections is merely turnout-based discrepancies. Remember that these CDs have some of the lowest turnout in the country in any midterm elections.

That leaves the third group (places such as Imperial Valley, and the RGV for that matter). I do think it can be argued that this group is trending toward the GOP, but it's a relatively tiny segment of the overall population. A good thread on AAD can be found around this discussion, but one quote in particular that applies to the RGV I think may broadly apply to a place like the Imperial Valley:

A few points:

1. When the national Democratic Party is talking about "racial justice" they are basically talking about racial justice specifically for black people. The 1619 Project, confederate monuments, police profiling - by and large those are questions of reckoning with the historical black-white dynamic in America.

Hispanic people do not feel like they have any role in that. Either they didn't come here until after slavery and Jim Crow ended or they were living in places that by and large weren't impacted by any of that.

A lot of these people are proud of their own heritage - many have roots in Texas much longer than the typical white person here. Others came here and struggled and were able to make lives for themselves and their descendants. They are proud to be tejanos or to be Mexican-American, but they are also proud to be American and when you have black activists and liberal whites ranting about how America is an irredeemably racist country that has to be broken down and rebuilt from scratch, that's kind of offensive to them. They think, "What does that make me? I'm not racist. I've never done anything to any black person."

In the 1960s, a generation of white ethnics were driven into the arms of the GOP for precisely this reason - they were sick of what they saw as white liberals taking away their jobs and their neighborhoods for the benefit of blacks, while those white liberals were living in favored quarters and sending their kids to private schools. They were tired of being asked to give up something for the sake of blacks when they and their ancestors had no complicity in slavery or Jim Crow.

2. You have to understand that everybody in the RGV is Hispanic. I mean, everybody. We're talking >90% Hispanic. If you live there, the gas station clerk and the janitor are Hispanic, but so is the doctor at the clinic, so is the police officer who pulled you over for speeding, so are your teachers at school, so are the lawyers and bankers who make up the local elite.

There is no dynamic down there of white people as an oppressive minority akin to South Africa. Hispanic people aren't getting beaten by white cops. Hispanic kids aren't getting bullied at school for being Hispanic. There are no angry white Boomers yelling "Go back to your own country!" at the supermercado.

Most of those people don't get around a lot. If they travel, it's to visit family in Mexico or Houston or San Antonio. They don't have any conception of "racism" because they live in a racially homogenous society.

The linked thread is emblematic of why I have an AAD account.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Thankful for high-effort, informed posts like this one, even if they’re from posters I have sharp political disagreements with (whether on COVID or more perennial political issues)

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

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People are all shocked cause Fauci is telling the vaccinated to wear a mask.  Yeah.  Cause it's become very obvious that the vaccinated are at much greater risk than initially alleged by Fauci and the many governmental and pharmaceutical actors pushing vaccinations down the throats of every American, and blaming the unvaccinated for all the setbacks that have occurred.  It's every evident that the medical and pharmaceutical community is lying about the number of vaccinated patients that are contracting, trasmiting, and dying from Covid-19, as well as suffering side effects from the injections that you can find videos of on Rumble.  Fauci told people that vaccinated people couldn't catch or spread the virus, which was obvious BS.  People vaccinated with the influenza shot spread it around every year.    You'd have to ignore 100 years of medical science to believe that a vaccine would stop the transmission of a virus that affects the upper and lower respiratory tract, in addition to organs like the kidneys, intestines and colon.  Fauci needs to F-ing go. It's bad enough we can't try that guy and others for crimes against humanity due to funding projects and conducting the experiments that engendered mutated coronaviruses in an unsafe setting. The whole lab-leak denial and cover-up was a F-ing serious violation of public trust. 

    

To prevent Covid, I wear a mask even though I'm a righty.  I was taught to do so as an EMT.  I believe it protects people from receiving higher loads of viral particles that directly enter nasal and oral pathways when an infected person breaths or talks in your direction.  It's tough for droplets and high loads of viral particles to travel below the small inflow of one's mask, because they usually drop to the ground due to their relative weight in the atmosphere, and the space between the mask and bottom of the chin makes it difficult for high viral loads from penetrating.  A strong ventilation system could pull and redirect coronavirus into the HVAC and above people in a closed space, but the top of the mask usually provides outflow that blows particles way.  Masks also prevent people from surface-to-hand-to-face transmission that quickly occurs when other people touch doors, tables, and chairs after rubbing their nose and mouth.  I might not wear a mask if I'm in a large space or sitting outdoors.  I think the reason people do not wear masks is due to government and democrat authoritative messaging that fails to provide the common sense reasons people should wear a mask. 

Also, if you want to keep people from overwhelming the hospitals, both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals with health issues like cancer and heart disease need to go for Monoclonal Anti-body therapy.  I think most people that got the treatment were vaccinated patients with serious issues.  The biggest benefit from such treatments is that it can work on multiple infections.  One of the issues doctors and hospitals found this summer was a resurgence of serious cold, RSV, and influenza infections that were attacking the upper respiratory system along with Covid-19.  Rhinovirus competes with, and mostly wins out against, Covid-19 in the upper respiratory tract, while covid-19 attacks the lower respiratory tract, as well as organs like the kidneys, lungs, intestines, and immune cells.  Coronavirus has been observed triggering severe infections of the common cold, COPD, and Asthma for over 40 years.  A study from march found that 15-30% of coronavirus infections triggered common colds while also infecting the lower respiratory tract, and consequently, other serious infections in the lungs like pneumonia.  I would argue that coronavirus is responsible for the significant increase in serious rhinovirus infections, and the study found that the worst cold, asthma COPD, etc. symptoms were among the old and immunocompromised patients. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7204879/

The monoclonal antibodies are great biologics that target specific illnesses, but have been repeatedly observed combating a host of other illnesses.  The FDA is constantly expanding treatment of antibody treatments.  Dupixent is an example of a monoclonal antibody that combats dermatitis, Rhinosinositus, upper respiratory infection and inflamation with nasal polyps, and Asthma.  I'm sure everyone has seen the pharmaceutical commercial with the guy taking his shirt off to jump in the pool and dancing with a floatation device. 

[Kamala's side hoe]

Thanks Khuzifeng.  I appreciate you taking the time out to compliment my post.  I've read some other ones on the thread, and I think the posters preserving quality posts is extremely commendable.  It shows great communal value.  I will start taking the time to find and publish extraordinary posts in order to contribute. 

It's khuzifenq, but thanks! Hope you're enjoying your Thursday!

This is an unpopular opinion but:

Politics doesn't actually matter all that much.

Elections, parties, candidates none of it.  It's quite rare that politics actually have a real effect on people's lives.  Individual parties and politicians and laws and such have far less power than we think.

So whilst politics are important and it is important to be in the know it isn't worth letting elections and results actually affect your life.  I learnt this in 2017 when I was gutted at the UK election result and felt awful for a week.  And sure, that election result mattered, but it didn't need to actually affect my life or my mental health because generally the actual real effects are felt over a much longer time period than one election cycle.

[Kamala's side hoe]

For the last thirty years or so, news media has been subjet to what I call 'sportsification'. Basically, the priority with a lot of sports coverage is to get as many eyeballs on the screen as possible, which means that major events become big advertising draws. Spots for an Ashes Test or the Superbowl don't come cheap, primarily because they are the biggest events around.

News has become 'sportsified' in that it has continually chased, for the last thirty years, that advertising money. This is because they've been systematically introducing more and more 'experts' who seemingly compete to say the most outrageous things. I use the term 'experts' loosely because they are often just trying to find something controversial to say.

The problem is that the news these days does not cover actual issues, because that would rock the boat. To use an example from Australia, the ABC was leaked a series of documents called the Afghan Files, detailing Australian war crimes in Afghanistan. The response of the government was not to investigate the findings and prosecute the soldiers resposible, but instead raid the ABC office.

This sort of thing has terrified news outlets into not reporting important news such as the Afghan Files. Instead, they're content to run with the latest traffic collision in the area, or something along those lines. The slogan "If it bleeds, it leads." Exists for a reason.

This is why Trump was a godsend to these people. Everything he said was so outrageous that it was being covered 24 hours a day. I seem to recall an incident in 2016 where Sanders won a primary, and instead of letting their audience hear his victory speech, they cut to an empty podium waiting for Trump to speak while his supporters were still filtering in. Trump was a ratings smash; it didn't matter what he said because they could count on people to watch their shows for the coverage. His attacks on outlets like CNN made things worse because these outlets, despite objectively being one of the groups most responsible for his rise, got to play the part of the embattled truth-seekers.

The final aspect is that a lot of these news shows in the US have been constructed around thew host's personality more than anything, and frequently they're set up to clash with someone like Jeffrey Lorde.

Neil Postman predicted this in 1985 when he wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death:

The effect on political life will be devastating. There will be less emphasis on issues, substance, and ideology, and an increase in the importance of image and style. Politicians will have greater concern for moment-to-moment shifts in public opinion, less concern for long-range policies. Unless the use of television for political campaigns is strictly prohibited, elections may be decided by which party spends more on television and media consultants. The line between political life and entertainment will blur, and movie and television stars may be taken seriously as political candidates

TL, DR: Journalists are chasing ratings instead of stories and it's making us all dumber.

[Kamala's side hoe]

This is going to piss people off (and I know the optics of sharing a GenMac post in this thread aren't great), but this is a lucid effortpost on the housing situation in Seattle proper.

Sawant has successfully driven a lot of small landlords out of D3 and now all the local apartment buildings are owned by big corporations who can afford to legally defend themselves against her, and that just makes things more expensive and impersonal for renters.

I am not a communist and I have no particular issue with the rest of what you posted, but is this really true? When it comes to renting, as with most economic transactions in my life, I'd rather deal with a large corporation that has established legal policies than with a small proprietor for whom things are personal.

I'm well-off and when I rented I always went with a large corporation because they knew what they were doing and had a solid reputation.  Basically, I knew what I was getting, and knew there would be a pretty high floor for the experience, and I was willing to pay a premium for that.

But Sawant isn't representing me, supposedly.  She claims to be representing the poor people (the "working class" -- not including people who make a lot of money working, like me) who are stuck renting more run-down places with fewer amenities and and less-experienced or less-professional management.  Obviously almost all those places are run by local landlords who are going out on their own rather than teaming up with some big megacorporation that will run their property for them.

In practice, here in D3, what this looks like is corporations handling the management of all the fancy new six-story glass "luxury apartments", which are around $2,000 a month for a 1BR.  But there are also still plenty of ancient three-story buildings, built pre-WW2 (and likely pre-WW1).  They're drafty, made of thin wood and plaster, you can hear everything everyone else is doing, the appliances are all decades out of date and break down all the time, and there's certainly no amenities.  No firepit on the roof.  But you can live in one of those for more like $1,300 a month.  So your Amazon employees live in the "luxury" apartments with the rooftop firepits, and your Starbucks baristas and artists live in the 19th-century apartments with matchlight ovens, and that's the way things are.

But when Sawant keeps making things worse and worse for the small landlords who manage those WW1-era buildings, they eventually decide, screw this, I don't have to deal with this.  They sell their WW1-era building to a developer, the developer tears it down and builds a new six-story glass luxury apartment building on the parcel.  Now there's more housing for Amazon employees and less housing for Starbucks baristas.  And with less supply of the WW1-era buildings, but the same demand, prices go up.  So those Starbucks baristas get angry at landlords for raising prices, and vote for Sawant, who promises to fight for them by antagonizing those landlords, thus driving more of them out and further shrinking the supply of housing for her constituency.

It's a vicious cycle, and one that's completely unnecessary.  A competent city councilmember could solve this problem, maybe by creating grants to restore some old properties or make improvements so they're more livable and the landlords don't have to keep raising rent to pay for new boilers and repairs to the centuries-old architecture.  But the only language Sawant understands is animosity, so she just attacks and demonizes them and introduces policies to make their lives harder.  And of course it's only the small landlords she goes after, since she can bully Grandpa Tom renting his old building out to six artists, she can't bully the big corporations with their professional legal outfits.

So how do you solve this problem?  Sawant's solution is rent control.  Just make it impossible for landlords to raise rents.  Of course this will never actually pass (there's a statewide prohibition on rent control ffs) but if it did, supply would immediately shrink to 0 because nobody would want to become a small-time landlord in Seattle anymore, and landlords would immediately search for any loophole available to evict their tenants and bail on their properties.  But the reality of this doesn't matter because Sawant has no intention of actually passing rent control -- it's just a wedge issue she can use to get re-elected again and again, which is her sole motivation.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Good substance-to-words ratio in this post.

For 70 years now, we have been pursuing an unsustainable Ponziesque model of development fueled by car dependency, local corruption, fraudulent city accounting, oil and auto industry bribes, opportunistic developers, and entitled boomers who expect city-quality services in rural-level density-- and now we wonder why wildfires are burning our precious suburban sprawl.

But also this:

crazy idea, if we stop using disaster funds to repeatedly rebuild people's homes that live in disaster areas, maybe we'd have fewer people living in disaster areas needing to be saved from disasters?

On the other hand, science has known that forests occasionally need fires since at least the 80s (I remember reading about it in middle school), why the hell are the Feds just now thinking about trying to look at that idea?

I don't even necessarily disagree with this, but the issue is far more widespread than mansions in the Hollywood hills. What happened in Colorado earlier this month is a good example--the fire started in the highly vulnerable hill areas you identified, but rapidly moved into suburbia. The places which were so devastated were relatively dense suburban areas in the cities of Superior and Louisville, where they essentially became urban fires. These are the exact sort of places which have traditionally been seen as 'safe' from wildfires. If this had happened further north it could have burned down Boulder.

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(img is public Domain).

Just a few years ago, much of Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge were devastated by wildfires, in a region which is famous for receiving heavy rains--the Southern Appalachians get tons of water due to the rain shadow effect. The cities nearly burned down.

With Climate Change, we're all at risk of disaster. No place in the country has the kind of resources to prevent massive disaster in the event of record flooding or fire, and moralizing about where people live as a response ignores the ways in which we're all at risk from increasingly random and frequent extreme weather.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Re: What caused SJW/Woke culuture [sic]?

I don't think anything political "caused" this, even if it has become somewhat relevant in political discussions. I think its roots have more to do with education and parenting, specifically a shift toward being "softer" than has occurred over the past 10-20 years. A lot of young adults and teenagers have become increasingly "sheltered", and thus react extremely negatively when exposed to a viewpoint or idea that they don't like, since they haven't had that experience much before in life. Rather than seeing this as part of learning and education, many adults have decided that it is more important to "protect" young people than to educate them, and feel bad for making young people  feel uncomfortable, even though discomfort is a key part of learning.

While it is the case that some have lived trauma, attitudes about how to handle this have changed. The whole idea of a "trigger" was not always the punchline of a joke, and it used to be the case that young people would be slowly reintroduced to potentially traumatic material, with the goal being to build new associations with said material. Trauma never completely goes away, but it is possible to learn how to manage it and learn new reactions to material that was once "triggering", or not give in to negative and fearful thoughts when they pop up. However, now, "triggers" are seen increasingly as something to be avoided rather than something to slowly overcome with time, and thus young people are sheltered from the material, regardless of how severe their trauma might be, and thus the trauma remains, and they never learn how to overcome or cope with it. (I also hate how the word "cope" has come to be used.)

Parents are also, on the whole, much more permissive than before, and thus more and more young people have very little experience in not eventually getting what they want or being forced into uncomfortable situations, and react in the way that they do. The school of thought that education and upbringing should be 100% positive has gained a lot of traction, as has the idea that discipline is "mean" or discriminatory, in part because it's difficult for adults to have to deal with disciplining young people and managing their often over-the-top reactions. It's perfectly normal for children to act whiny and butthurt when they don't get what they want, but after a certain amount of time passes, they calm down and start to learn why they can't have everything that they want and why certain behaviors are unacceptable. Being firm with boundaries and standing by previous statements ("this is your last warning") are both critical, but it takes discipline on the part of the adult, and many find it easier just to give in instead of putting their foot down.

In short, I don't think it has much to do with politics at all, it's just become politicized, like just about everything else.

On international undergraduate/graduate students:

The rise of advanced technology in China and the same happening to India eventually is posing perhaps the most important challenge to the Pax Americana that has governed the post WWII order, which I'm mostly fond of. Whereas 30 years ago maybe 80% of Chinese international students stayed in the US after graduation, that figure is likely below 20% now, given the proliferation of China's advanced economy.

The important thing is to retain foreign students and have them contribute to America, which these changes seem to partially attempt at least. Otherwise higher education will continue to develop into a degree farming cash cow for international students to attain "prestigious accreditation" while failing the needs of actually training young individuals to advance America's science and industry.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Re: NIMBY Dave Chappelle (and others) block affordable housing development.

I'm skeptical of how affordable this housing will actually end up being. Unless I'm misreading the article, it seems that the single-family houses will start in value at around 300,000 dollars, which is average for that rich little town but hardly affordable.

I'm always in favor of affordable housing, including single-family housing assuming we're not talking about the giant cities, but I suspect this development will just be the typical suburban homes with yards twice the size of the house's foundation. If you really want to solve the housing crisis, cut down the size of these lawns, and build starter homes. Nice little two- or three-bedroom houses with yards just big enough for the kids to run around in, that's what American communities need. No more McMansions, no more 5-bedroom houses (with football-field-sized backyards) for Karen and her husband and their one child to move into, because at least where I'm at, that's the kind of crap that is contributing to this housing catastrophe.

[Kamala's side hoe]

I don't think the people who constantly demand public employees work for little to no money ("They should be doing it out of a sense of public service, not personal enrichment!" "Why should those hoity-toity bureaucrats make any more money than what the average American makes?") understand that their attitude basically ensures these positions are disproportionately wealthy or from "comfortable" backgrounds.

Contrary to popular assumptions, most government employees in Congress and the Executive Branch and federal departments are underpaid, not overpaid. Most of those people are white collar professionals. The relevant question isn't what they make relative to what "the average American" makes; it's what they make relative to what they would be making in the private sector. An antitrust lawyer at Commerce could make far more money at a corporate BigLaw job. A scientist at the EPA could make far more money as a scientist at Monsanto.

People get mad when they read about which congressman bought and sold millions of dollars worth of stocks this week and insist it's proof they're "getting rich off their political position." People don't go to Congress and then become rich in the job. They go to Congress because they are already rich. A normal politically-interested JD holder has to worry about things like paying their student loans and how they could possibly afford two houses (one in DC and one in their district) and juggling their job with their spouse's job and raising their children.

When I was in college, the norm was that most internships were unpaid except for some of the engineering majors I knew (this was the post-2008 job market). And the result was that I knew a lot of people who never did summer internships in college because they couldn't afford to do them. They had to go back home and spend the summer waiting tables or working retail. They couldn't pay for housing and living expenses in a high COL city like DC without any source of income. So what happened? When those kids graduated, they were at a considerable disadvantage on the job market because they had no relevant experience.

[Kamala's side hoe]

I think that blaming “latinx” for the Democrats’ midterm losses is a little silly inasmuch as fundamentally they were going to lose badly anyway. Of course, every cycle with a major loss is an opportunity for every little camp in the party to blame someone else. I could say that the reason Democrats will do poorly in November is because they didn’t embrace “latinx” enough, and I would have just as much as evidence as other people.

It is understandable why, though. Finding a scapegoat/whipping post/punching bag is much more reassuring than accepting the fact that many times parties cannot avoid losses, or that the Democratic Party is fundamentally unlikeable regardless of what it says or does — most of the public’s opinion is baked-in and not logically changeable. With the diversification of media sources nowadays it is incredibly difficult to control the narrative, especially with a media as odious as that of the United States.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Re: How is Critical Race Theory specifically anti American ? from a S-AUS poster

Plenty of people view their country and its history as a reflection or extension of themselves. To take a critical view of a country, its government or its history is, to those people, to do the same to them.

Sometimes these people just can't blind themselves to the worst of the evils that occurred in their country's history - slavery and colonisation for the US, colonisation and the Stolen Generations (and some slavery) in Australia. Often as a defensive mechanism these people will insulate themselves in their current timeline and the idea that everything is a level playing field now - as if momentous events of history never leave legacies for the future. So "white privilege" (a much misused and misunderstood term) is nonsense because in some way the problems were all "fixed" by the 70s or 80s and the attitudes and actions of people still living now couldn't have left some lingering effects in society that are worth learning about.

I don't hold your average German responsible in any way for the Holocaust, and I don't want them to flagellate themselves as a nation for it. That'd be ridiculous. But I want German people to learn about the Holocaust, its context, its causes, the attitudes and actions involved, how all those events have shaped German society and Germans' lives today. And to be aware that German Jews and their families might have very different experiences to theirs, and be determined to continue to work for a Germany where it's safe to be Jewish or any other minority.

And, to return to the idea of country as an extension of self, that work is never complete, just how one never completely masters a skill or becomes a perfect version of themselves. There is always more work to do.