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A Worsening Culture War

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Re: A Worsening Culture War

#241

Post by slfnflctd »

slfnflctd wrote: post #185
awakeasleep wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both parties campaign on fixing healthcare. After the latest fixes, insurance for a self employed family of four is about $25k a year after insurance and deductibles.

I'm not 100% sure what the point you're making here is, but in case the reader is unaware, under the Trump administration, the ACA was definitely heavily gutted ( https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/10/14/7687316... ). Over less than 3 months, a friend of mine's monthly premium went up an order of magnitude - with reduced benefits - to the point where it made no sense to do anything but drop it completely…

Apologies, I forgot that discussing partisan politics is discouraged here. This one just gets me riled because there's so much misinformation around it. Regardless of political party, it would benefit us all in the long run to find sustainable ways of improving access to health care.

Re: A Worsening Culture War

#242

Post by thu2111 »

pjc50 wrote: post #210
motogpjimbo wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been profoundly odd watching UK BLM protesters (almost all of them white and middle class, of course) chanting "hands up, don't shoot"-type slogans recently. British police officers don't routinely carry guns and therefore couldn't possibly shoot you even if they wanted to. In fact, there is an almost zero probability of anyone in the UK getting shot by the police unless they happen to be committing an act of…

Incidents are rare .. but on the other hand, police shootings have sparked riots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadwater_Farm_riot / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Mark_Duggan And of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jean_Charles_de_Me...

Duggan was nearly a decade ago though, and he pulled a gun on police when they tried to arrest him. Involved in gangland activities. It shows how messed up some of these sorts of riots are: they invariably seem to be about people who were in the process of attacking the police when they were shot. de Menezes of course is a terrible exception.

Re: A Worsening Culture War

#243

Post by dakna »

themaninthedark wrote: post #238
dakna wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what we see here is the result of social media A/B testing on how to get votes, and this playbook is now followed by the rest of the world. In a democratic society, you have to influence the public opinion to stay/get in power. Propaganda is free, information costs money. If the majority of voters are not willing to pay for quality journalism, you have to get them engaged by fueling outrage and projecting fea…

Who says that paying for journalism would fix this problem? Both CNN and FOX are cable news, not broadcast for free. Go back to the start of the Second Gulf war and you had the NYT and other media outlets complicit in the WMD lies.

It seems to work in other countries.

Neither CNN nor Fox is quality journalism, "quality" being the adjective you left out.

The NYT also issued an apology for their coverage about WMD which was not rigorously fact checked. One of the reporters, Judith Miller, later joined Fox News.

Quality doesn't mean 100% correct all the time, it means significantly better than the alternative.

Comparing the coverage of different sources is part of how you can reach your own conclusions, instead of blindly adopting whatever opinion is broadcasted to you.

Re: A Worsening Culture War

#244

Post by tzs »

laverya wrote: post #206
tzs wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea if this actually means anything, but I did a couple amusing calculations. If the number of Electoral College votes each state got were proportional to that state's cumulative per capita COVID infection rates, the result would have been 329 Trump, 209 Biden. However, if we go by cumulative per capita COVID deaths, then the result would have been 228 Trump, 310 Biden. Why the big swing? I think it is bec…

> By the time it got big in rural areas, we'd gotten a lot better at dealing with it. Or by the time it hit rural areas, we'd also gotten better at testing for it. Perhaps the IFR is the same across both demographics, but better testing means a higher proportion of cases were detected later in the pandemic.

I grabbed the data again, and this time used the changes in cumulative cases and deaths over the last 60 days, per capita, in each state for doing the EV reallocation.

Using cases, it comes out 344 Trump, 194 Biden. Using deaths, it comes out 354 Trump, 184 Biden.

The big difference this time is largely rural states that are getting hit much harder than the rest of the states. North Dakota in this allocation gets 35 cases EV and 46 deaths EV, and South Dakota gets 30 and 36. Montana get 21 and 23.

For comparison to some high population states, California is 4 and 4, New York 4 and 3, Texas 8 and 10, Florida 6 and 10.

Now I'd be curious to see something that looks at various sliding windows on the data and sees how to allocations change, but that would be a bit more elaborate than I want to do.

Re: A Worsening Culture War

#245

Post by [deleted] »

maneesh wrote: post #152
krebs_liebhaber wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America is colonizing the rest of the developed world. There are probably at least a billion people worldwide (mostly in Europe, but also among Third-World elites) who act American and are invested in America's issues despite never having set foot in the country. The internet has exacerbated this greatly. Just look at the BLM protests in Poland and Japan... or the Amerikaner "digital nomads" who are able to live in f…

I don't understand the reference to digital nomads. How is it related? There are nomads from everywhere as well.

[deleted]

Re: A Worsening Culture War

#246

Post by bergstromm466 »

skim_milk wrote: post #97
Roritharr wrote: post #9

The craziest part of this american culture war, to me, is that it seems to spill over to the rest of the world. My sister and I, living in Germany, have a very loving relationship, but we absolutely disagree on almost everything political and basically are stuck in our seperate bubbles. This gave us an interesting observation: 5 years ago it took us about two to three months, to have a fight over something that start…

I'm at risk of sounding like I'm nitpicking, but I'm not following the popular narrative that it's a problem with America that spilled over into the rest of the world that's at the center of your story. Many people seem to agree that the rise of social media and its correlated loneliness have pushed people down their rabbithole/echo chamber/whatever people want to call it nowadays. Opposed to the popular narrative, t…

I think what we’re seeing has more to do with unaccountable invisible architectures (law/governance systems, IP and money) that obscure production processes, than that it’s anything to do with human nature or social media, or us being ‘hairless monkeys’.

Re: A Worsening Culture War

#247

Post by pjc50 »

thu2111 wrote: post #242
pjc50 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incidents are rare .. but on the other hand, police shootings have sparked riots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadwater_Farm_riot / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Mark_Duggan And of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jean_Charles_de_Me...

Duggan was nearly a decade ago though, and he pulled a gun on police when they tried to arrest him. Involved in gangland activities. It shows how messed up some of these sorts of riots are: they invariably seem to be about people who were in the process of attacking the police when they were shot. de Menezes of course is a terrible exception.

> he pulled a gun on police when they tried to arrest him

This is the disputed evidence at the center of the question; the gun was found several meters away from the scene, on the other side of a fence, "wrapped in a sock". There is a protracted argument about how plausible it is that he threw it there after being shot in the arm.

> they invariably seem to be about people who were in the process of attacking the police when they were shot.

If the police shoot someone, then of course all the official reports will say that they were attacking the police. There have been a number of mass casualty incidents in the UK (Hillsborough, Bloody Sunday) where the police or army reports turned out to be lies.

Re: A Worsening Culture War

#248

Post by bergstromm466 »

"False consciousness is a term used—primarily by Marxist sociologists—to describe ways in which material, ideological, and institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies, concealing the exploitation intrinsic to the social relations between classes." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness

Re: A Worsening Culture War

#249

Post by snarf21 »

bilbo0s wrote: post #114
snarf21 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The is true and is just more proof of the oligarchy we live in brainwashing us to believe the "other side" is the enemy while the rich and powerful robs us blind.

more proof of the oligarchy we live in brainwashing us to believe the "other side" is the enemy while the rich and powerful robs us blind Whose fault is that though?

It is our fault too. But most people don't care. It is easier to just be A or B. It doesn't help that government officials keep stacking the deck to keep things as is and let money run the game. It is hard to break the corruption cycle when a $1M donation to both political parties all but guarantees you a $1B government contract. We really a way to pass resolutions that bypass Congress sometimes.

Re: A Worsening Culture War

#250

Post by rossdavidh »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #58
geerlingguy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This viewpoint (where the unstated understanding is 'the group that is good is Democrats, and the group that is evil is Republicans') is part of the problem. The world is more complicated than that.

The viewpoint that both groups are just as bad or just as good for wage earners is a problem. It’s easily verifiable that Democratic states have better laws for wage earners, and have pushed for policies that benefit wage earners. They’re nowhere near perfect, but there’s no reason to pretend Dems and Repubs are the same.

Republican states tend to emphasize having a good labor market, and prioritize whatever gets employers to offer more jobs. This is a positive good for wage-earners. Democratic states tend to emphasize using government laws to require employers to do things like pay a higher wage. This is also a positive good for wage-earners. They both get lots of votes from wage-earners, and the ones voting for Republicans are not ignorant or blind. They are suspicious (rightly or wrongly) of the effectiveness of government regulations to help them, and know from experience that a tight labor market makes their boss suddenly see the importance of treating their workers better compared to when there was a line of people waiting to take their job if they didn't like it.

The difference between the two is mostly how they think it best to go about improving things for wage earners, who are the vast majority of their voters in both states. Not saying this makes them equal, but the difference is not what you assert.

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