US Politics: For Whom the Bell Tolls

[OldGimletEye]

23 hours ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Totally agree.  It's more of a reminder that change is possible and that there shouldn't be despair.  People DO evolve.

 

23 hours ago, S John said:

Agreed as well.  Things are looking pretty shitty right now, but we are only 1 year into this thing.  I have no doubts that Trump will be able to keep a good chunk of his base on board no matter what, but there will be plenty of people who voted for Trump in 2016 that will be sick of him come 2020.  He didn't have a political record in 2016, he will in 2020.  I think to an extent a lot of conservative types are still basking in beating Clinton and generally gleeful in that they are pissing off liberals, but the victory lap that's been going on for the first year isn't going to carry 2020 all by itself.  It'll wear off, and Trump doesn't have what it takes to evolve into even a decent, non-embarrassing president.  

The thing about despair is: No matter how annoyed, aggravated, or grouchy I get over the current situation, I just think its wrong to give in to a bunch of clowns. And I can't stand the idea of giving clowns the satisfaction.

[Meera of Tarth]

I was watching the news

The latest wisecrack of Trump has caused quite a lot of trouble in the Middle East

[Fragile Bird]

So one of Roy Moore's accusers, the lady with the yearbook, has come out to say that she added the date and place on the yearbook entry to remind her of when the signing took place.

Why oh why could they have not said that at the original press conference? The Moore campaign smeared her very strongly saying that the handwriting was not Moore's and demanded to have the yearbook examined, which Gloria Aldred refused to do unless Moore submitted to a hearing of some kind, Why the bloody hell didn't they just explain the difference in writing?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

I added this David Brooks NYT op-ed condemning Moore and Trump and a Republican aquaintance of mine on Facebook (who I tagged with the article in the hopes he would read it) called Brooks a "RINO".  So, if you condemn people people for their actions regardless of party affiliation you are a traitor to your party???

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/opinion/the-gop-is-rotting.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage&_r=0&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fm.facebook.com%2F

[Maithanet]

1 minute ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I added this David Brooks NYT op-ed condemning Moore and Trump and a Republican aquaintance of mine on Facebook (who I tagged with the article in the hopes he would read it) called Brooks a "RINO".  So, if you condemn people people for their actions regardless of party affiliation you are a traitor to your party???

RINO has been used for decades to describe any Republican who bucks Republican orthodoxy.  Trump says to vote for Moore, so any Republican who speaks out against Moore is a RINO. 

[Zorral]

Moore suggests that Putin is right.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/roy-moore-putin-is-right_us_5a2a2122e4b069ec48ac322f

US does terrible things such as allow same sex marriage, whereas good Putin does, o, I dunno, for starters, such as assassinating political rivals and critics.

[OldGimletEye]

23 hours ago, Zorral said:

Moore suggests that Putin is right.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/roy-moore-putin-is-right_us_5a2a2122e4b069ec48ac322f

US does terrible things such as allow same sex marriage, whereas good Putin does, o, I dunno, for starters, such as assassinating political rivals and critics.

Putin. He's the true conservative.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

8 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Putin. He's the true conservative.

I've had crazy people at church making this argument to me ever since I had the temerity to say that Putin was wrong to take Crimea and the Donbass by force.  

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

There was a school shooting New Mexico this morning. Two students and the gunman were killed. Just another day in Merika.

[DanteGabriel]

I guess the McJesusites were right about gay marriage leading to pedophilia. Gay marriage got them so crazy they're supporting a pedophile for US Senator. They fulfilled their own prophecy, which is usually how prophecies work I guess.

[OldGimletEye]

Interesting piece about Hayek, who has always been bigly influential to conservative sorts of people like say for instance the Kook Brothers.

He had some interesting ideas, but the bottom line, is that is policy proscriptions during the 1930s were horrible. Up until about 1934, he recommended deflation, which was terrible.

For Hayek, the Great Depression was about draining out “malinvestments” but the whole sorry process of deflation and loss of output, investment, and unemployment was the fuckin’ “malinvestment”.
 

http://voxeu.org/article/reflections-hayek

Quote

Friedrich A Hayek (1899-1992), well ahead of his time, viewed the market economy as an information processing system characterised by spontaneous order – the emergence of coherence through the independent actions of large numbers of individuals, each with limited and local knowledge, coordinated by price messages that arise from a decentralised process of competition.

Hayek also advocated for a broad range of free market policies, and indeed considered the market system to be superior to competing alternatives precisely because it made the best use of dispersed knowledge. These political views included opposition not only to central planning, but also to monetary and fiscal demand management policies, collective bargaining, wage floors, and significant public expenditures. His hostility to Keynes and to Keynesian policies in particular was deep and visceral.

 

Quote

However, shown in a recent paper (Bowles et al. 2017), we wish to call into question Hayek’s belief that his advocacy of free market policies follows as a matter of logic from his economic vision. The very usefulness of prices (and other economic variables) as informative messages – which is the centrepiece of Hayek’s economics – creates incentives to extract information from signals in ways that can be destabilising. 

Aggregate demand failures happen precisely because prices aren’t always capable of stabilizing the system. The point of monetary policy and fiscal policy is to make Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium true in practice, even if it’s nonsense in the real world.

Walrasian or Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium is nonsense. If it were true, then monetary policy would not matter. And well we know that’s not true. And plus there is plenty of evidence that prices are sticky.

Quote

Hayek’s critique was aimed at the assumption of the passive, price-taking behaviour that is a defining feature of the Walrasian framework.

He was right about this

Quote

In light of these contributions, is Hayek’s critique of Walrasian general equilibrium obsolete, something that should be left to history of economic thought courses?

It would be better if Walrasian general equilibrium died. Or at least it got explained that its a theoretical curiosity that doesn't have much real world application.

Quote

Leijonhufvud (2006) has argued that agent-based process analysis “will finally make it possible to tackle the central problem of macroeconomics, namely, the self-regulating capabilities of a capitalist economy,” but that the method remains in its “technical infancy.

It's too bad that Leijonhufvud's ideas didn't get much more prominence in the 1970s, losing out to Robert Lucas. The state of macro would be better off.

Quote

Hayek believed that his economic vision provided the foundation for his support for the unregulated workings of markets – “that our whole modern wealth and production could arise only thanks to this mechanism is, I believe, the basis not only of my economics but also much of my political views (Hayek 1994: 69). But a careful reading of The Road to Serfdom (1944) shows that he advocated minimal government because he saw hierarchical and collectivist political systems as a threat to individual liberty, not because his economics per se had demonstrated the superiority of unregulated markets.

So in other words Road To Libertarian Horseshit was more of a political polemic, rather than an astute analysis of macroeconomic problems. Though I'm sure Paul "I'm livin' in an Ayn Rand Novel" Ryan thought he was learning about how economies functioned when he read it.

Quote

But, seven decades later, we have a record of sustained liberal democratic values in economies with substantial government involvement, and the evidence does not support his most dire predictions.

Yup.

Quote

Ironically, the recent success of Hayek’s programme of limiting government may have contributed to an environment favourable to precisely the xenophobic and other anti-liberal sentiments and movements that now challenge democratic governance. 

Your high feudal "libertarian" overlords are coming after your democracy.

[Ormond]

10 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

There was a school shooting New Mexico this morning. Two students and the gunman were killed. Just another day in Merika.

Forgive my academic pedantic needs -- this is awful, but it was yesterday morning (Thursday December 7), not this morning.  http://www.daily-times.com/story/news/local/aztec/2017/12/07/school-shooting-aztec-high-school/930793001/

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

24 minutes ago, Ormond said:

Forgive my academic pedantic needs -- this is awful, but it was yesterday morning (Thursday December 7), not this morning.  http://www.daily-times.com/story/news/local/aztec/2017/12/07/school-shooting-aztec-high-school/930793001/

Greater accuracy is always appreciated. And that makes the story even sadder. I didn’t hear a single word about it until I listened to a week in review podcast.

[The Warlock of Qarth]

1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

So one of Roy Moore's accusers, the lady with the yearbook, has come out to say that she added the date and place on the yearbook entry to remind her of when the signing took place.

Why oh why could they have not said that at the original press conference? The Moore campaign smeared her very strongly saying that the handwriting was not Moore's and demanded to have the yearbook examined, which Gloria Aldred refused to do unless Moore submitted to a hearing of some kind, Why the bloody hell didn't they just explain the difference in writing?

Welp, that will pretty much give fence sitters the fig leaf needed to cast a vote for Moore. "See? The accusers were a bunch of godless lying whores after all!". Of course, it doesn't change the basics of the accusations at all, but Moore supporters will use anything to deny the veracity of the accusations and to justify their vote. Stick a fork in it, Jones is finished and Moore will be seated. What a world we live in...

[Darth Richard II]

46 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

There was a school shooting New Mexico this morning. Two students and the gunman were killed. Just another day in Merika.

That was actually yesterday morning, winch shows how much the media gives a shit at this point.

[Zorral]

55 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

There was a school shooting New Mexico this morning. Two students and the gunman were killed. Just another day in Merika.

Actually, this happened yesterday:

http://www.koat.com/article/what-we-know-about-the-deadly-aztec-high-school-shooting/14380005

http://people.com/crime/new-mexico-aztec-high-school-shooting-reported/

[OldGimletEye]

On 12/8/2017 at 4:04 PM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I've had crazy people at church making this argument to me ever since I had the temerity to say that Putin was wrong to take Crimea and the Donbass by force.  

I'd just been like, "uh,er, uh,  well okay, but are you sure he's conservative enough?"

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

29 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

That was actually yesterday morning, winch shows how much the media gives a shit at this point.

 

19 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Actually, this happened yesterday:

http://www.koat.com/article/what-we-know-about-the-deadly-aztec-high-school-shooting/14380005

http://people.com/crime/new-mexico-aztec-high-school-shooting-reported/

Yeah I already saw that.  But it goes to show how numb we've become to mass school shootings. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Solid article about how the two parties are reacting to the outbreak of sexual harassment scandals. This quote stood out in particular:

Quote

The difference with the Democrats is stark. True, Democratic Party leaders initially dithered in their responses to Franken, as well as to John Conyers, the Michigan representative who, like Farenthold, used public funds to pay off a former employee who accused him of sexual harassment. But eventually, the party decided that given its stated beliefs and progressive constituency, keeping accused harassers in office was politically untenable.

It’s not similarly untenable for Republicans, because the Republican Party is not the party of people who are fundamentally opposed to sexual harassment. Democrats, by and large, want their politicians held accountable. Republicans, by contrast, just want Democratic politicians held accountable. In a November HuffPost/YouGov survey, a majority of both Democrats and Republicans said sexual harassment is either a very serious or a somewhat serious problem in the Democratic Party. Only 36 percent of Republicans said the same about the Republican Party. Most Republicans said that Franken should resign, but only 31 percent said Moore should drop out.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/opinion/franken-trump-sexual-harassment-resign.html

The data from the linked survey is pretty interesting. Both Democrats (87%) and Republicans (72%) believe that sexual harassment is a somewhat or very serious problem in general, but it changes a fair bit when partisanship gets injected. A majority in both parties believe there is either a somewhat or serious problem with sexual harassment in the Democratic party (58% for Dems and 74% for Repubs), but it changes when you look at the Republican party. 75% of Democrats believe there is a problem in the Republican party (so in other words, both parties view the opposing party as equally problematic), but only 36% of Republicans feel the same way about their own party (and only 9% believe it’s a serious problem). My best guess is this is why so many Republicans are able to ignore or excuse away President Trump and Roy Moore’s problems with regards to accusations of sexual harassment and assault.

Also of interest, the poll found that the same percentage of people (35%) believe the person in their own party should resign or drop out when it comes to Franken and Moore. And not surprisingly, the numbers go up when it comes to the individual in the opposing party (70% of Democrats think Moore should drop out and 56% of Republicans think that Franken should resign). Given that the disparity in those two numbers is almost identical to the disparity in the numbers about the seriousness of sexual harassment in general, it seems that it’s possible that a false equivalency was created between Franken and Moore’s allegations, which is frustrating because Moore’s were obviously significantly worse than Franken’s.

[Darth Richard II]

23 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

 

Yeah I already saw that.  But it goes to show how numb we've become to mass school shootings. 

It does. Heck, that church shooting where the dude shot INFANTS was barely in the news cycle for a full week.