Vance and his cohort arrogantly think they would be able to contain and control that kind of chaos. I don’t think it will get to that point because there are too many forces aligned against Putin but…
I think they really believe their Davos network is smarter and more powerful than a couple of millennia of global nation-state building and resulting dynamics. And you test that when you think you can operate entirely outside of it.
Someone who knew Mark Zuckerberg well once told me they had no concerns about Zuck running for president because Zuck already thought Facebook was a potential nation-state substitute. It’s easy to see where that kind of delusion comes from (and why it looks very silly now).
Vance operates in the same techno-utopian magical reality. And he doesn’t work as a politician because he creeps out the people he claims to represent. Whatever the redneck version of Uncanny Valley is, that’s Vance.
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If you need a break from terrifying world events I give you the alt narrative my six year old is getting right now which is that if he eats any more cheese puffs, he will turn into one and this is what will happen:
He’s mostly coming up with this himself but so far: he would get rolled to school and if he looked tasty enough his classmates might try to eat him but worse the pizza place across the street would pretend to be friendly but then offer him as a delicious cheese-a puff-a!
But their plan would be partly foiled because customers would find it “sus” that the cheese-a puff-a was talking about Fortnite so much. And their customers care about food safety.
If you want to understand right wingers cheering on Putin right now, you can read my Orban column, replace “Orban” with “Putin” and 90 percent of it holds. Starker example, same rationale.
I do not understand why Dems are so bad at messaging around inflation and why political reporters don't seem to understand what's causing it. The Occam's Razor explanation is demand surges (economy's doing well, people spending) + labor shortages + supply chain madness.
The Republican talking point is that it must be social spending. No serious economist believes this, but I hear it repeated by centrist Dems who have internalized this nonsense. And political reporters who don't understand economics.
And yes, inflation is bad. It's also a natural outgrowth of a rapid recovery. Would we rather not have a recovery?We're doing very well by most economic metrics, and all anybody can talk about is inflation. That's a win for people who hate social spending.
This was a thing that was referenced to me several when I talked to people about wanting to build a decentralized liberal media org in 2017 and tried to raise money for it.
I don't want to write about Bari for the Nth time, but having read that piece, the author (who apparently left Bryn Mawr not because it was woke but because she refused to get vaccinated and was also failing out) claims to be a liberal....
indicates that she's not. You're mad that your white classmates acknowledge that BIPOC people have it harder? Why? And then she transfers to Hillsdale(!). If you're not familiar with Hillsdale, it's not just conservative compared to Bryn Mawr; it's full on right wing.
I've written about Evangelical megachurches before and am on Hillsdale's mailing list as a result. I get their newsletters, which are full of bigoted nonsense and anti-democratic sentiment. Hillsdale is basically in the Claremont/Bob Jones/Liberty ecosystem.
This is a good example of how framing affects response in survey design. (The first option implies that Biden has not considered all possible nominees before committing to nominate a Black woman.)
You might get a different response if your two options were: "I think Pres. Biden should keep his promise to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court" and "I think it's okay for Biden to break his promise to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court."
Bad polling is sometimes about bad fielding and sampling methodologies, but most of the really bad stuff I see is bad because the *questions* are bad. They introduce biases, lead the respondent etc