U. S. Politics: A noun, a verb and no collusion.

[karaddin]

On 28/04/2018 at 7:39 AM, Tywin et al. said:

Oh I understand that it’s an arbitrary test that makes an irrelevant comparison. I just wanted highlight that everyday people really don’t know that much about politics, our country’s history and the important affairs of our times. But they will know that Beyonce crushed Coachella. And I find that depressing.

A black woman performing for black people on a stage in front of a predominantly white audience, and not tempering the performance to be more palatable to said white people, is both important and political. This probably wasn't the best example to use.

[DireWolfSpirit]

Why dont more people understand that Rihanna is far superior to Beyonce though? I find that depressing.

4 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

I have mentioned how much I dislike Kellyanne Conway, right? Even I squirmed listening to the comedian, Michelle Wolf, at the WH Correspondents' Dinner. Sarah Sanders was not happy. 

K.Conway and S.Sanders are so perfect for the Trump admin. Two lying, liars without a shred of personal integrity between the two of them. Perfect fit for a Trump team. Im actually disappointed that MSM networks cover any of their poisonous propaganda when time and again they are continually caught in their Full Stop Fibs.

[Shryke]

On 27/04/2018 at 8:34 PM, Pony Empress Jace said:

If he doesn't want to be in a position of lying in a Civil case thereby jeopardizing himself in a criminal case maybe he should not be a goddamn criminal.

You are mistaken, it's not that he wants to lie in the civil case, it's that he wants to tell the truth. But doing so would involve talking about things he wants to take the 5th on in his criminal case.

And the defendants rights do not change based on whether or not they have actually committed a crime.

[LongRider]

21 minutes ago, Shryke said:

You are mistaken, it's not that he wants to lie in the civil case, it's that he wants to tell the truth. But doing so would involve talking about things he wants to take the 5th on in his criminal case.

So, the fixer has fixed so much BS for his main client, and perhaps a few select other **cough cough Hannity cough** he can't fix his shit for himself without incriminating himself.   And his main client will be happy to throw him under the bus, most likely his select client would too.   um, hahahahahahahah!!!!

[Shryke]

I think it's more that generally the issue is this:

In his civil case he needs to establish that the NDA actually means something, which requires that Trump was involved.

In his criminal case he wants to not testify to Trump's involvement because the line they've been going with is that Cohen was just a random person who paid off Stormy Daniels and thus there is no campaign finance violation here.

That's my understanding of at least the most basic part of what is going on here.

[kuenjato]

6 hours ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

Why dont more people understand that Rihanna is far superior to Beyonce though? I find that depressing.

 

THANK YOU

[TheKitttenGuard]

The reaction Michelle Wolfe reminds me a comment Chomsky makes on the News Media. To paraphrase is that News media may have a Liberal Bias but their main function to manage and limit discussion.

Sarah Huckabee lies with contempt on the regular and the News Media wants us to feel bad for her for she in the end is the Press Secretary and that is what is important.

[JGP]

35 minutes ago, TheKitttenGuard said:

The reaction Michelle Wolfe reminds me a comment Chomsky makes on the News Media. To paraphrase is that News media may have a Liberal Bias but their main function to manage and limit discussion.

Sarah Huckabee lies with contempt on the regular and the News Media wants us to feel bad for her for she in the end is the Press Secretary and that is what is important.

We got this machine ticking along nicely, let's not put our access in peril now.

le sigh

All these media types whinging about Michelle's routine are amusing. Most especially since it's the comparatively little side-eyed squint at their own reflection they didn't like. Fucking pathetic.  

[Fragile Bird]

8 minutes ago, JEORDHl said:

We got this machine ticking along nicely, let's not put our access in peril now.

le sigh

All these media types whinging about Michelle's routine are amusing. Most especially since it's the comparatively little side-eyed squint at their own reflection they didn't like. Fucking pathetic.  

Hey, the ‘whadya call a female uncle Tom’ stuff was fair game, the nasty personal comments were a bit much. 

We all cast Conway’s comments as bs, but just out-and-out calling her out as a liar wasn’t even funny. No comedy routine there except saying her name fit her.

[Larry of the Lawn]

4 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Hey, the ‘whadya call a female uncle Tom’ stuff was fair game, the nasty personal comments were a bit much. 

We all cast Conway’s comments as bs, but just out-and-out calling her out as a liar wasn’t even funny. No comedy routine there except saying her name fit her.

I believe it was Muhammed Ali that said "there are no jokes, the truth is funniest thing of all."

[JGP]

5 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Hey, the ‘whadya call a female uncle Tom’ stuff was fair game, the nasty personal comments were a bit much. 

Please, enlighten me. Not trying to be overly confrontational here, but I have to call bullshit. Quotes and explanations please, because to this latter part...

6 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

We all cast Conway’s comments as bs, but just out-and-out calling her out as a liar wasn’t even funny. No comedy routine there except saying her name fit her.

...I appreciated Michelle's routine as truth to power over comedy, personally speaking.  

[TheKitttenGuard]

4 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Hey, the ‘whadya call a female uncle Tom’ stuff was fair game, the nasty personal comments were a bit much. 

We all cast Conway’s comments as bs, but just out-and-out calling her out as a liar wasn’t even funny. No comedy routine there except saying her name fit her.

What were the personal attacks?

BS are lies so I do not see a problem. Conway is happy to do it then be happy to called a liar.

[Morpheus]

I find the entire Correspondent’s dinner to be problematic in the best of circumstances and terrible with the present fascist regime. These people treat the media like enemy combatants, we should not for even one night pretend things are normal. I guess there is honesty there, the symbotic relationship for the press and Trump. 

The highlight of the CD was Colbert some 13 years ago and he was critiized by the media for not being funny. In reality he was brutally honest about their complicity in the Iraq War, so they were bitter about being called out.

[Shryke]

8 minutes ago, Morpheus said:

I find the entire Correspondent’s dinner to be problematic in the best of circumstances and terrible with the present fascist regime. These people treat the media like enemy combatants, we should not for even one night pretend things are normal. I guess there is honesty there, the symbotic relationship for the press and Trump. 

The highlight of the CD was Colbert some 13 years ago and he was critiized by the media for not being funny. In reality he was brutally honest about their complicity in the Iraq War, so they were bitter about being called out.

The Correspondent's Dinner is for everyone in the DC bubble to fawn over the courtier press for being the sycophants they are, arranged of course by themselves.

They are desperately hoping for Trump to just be normal so they can stop being forced to not just let things continue as usual.

[LongRider]

Here's a quote from the FB page of '  Periods for Pence' an anti Pence group out his home state of Indiana and what they had to say about 45's rally yesterday.

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So while everyone was losing their collective minds over a comedian doing their job, just a quick reminder that yesterday, our president held a rally in which:
1) The crowd openly booed the mention of he word “Hispanics.”
2) The crowd was encouraged to boo John McCain, a war hero battling terminal brain cancer.
3) The “President” openly admitted that his son met with a Russian operative and tried to pull some serious Inception BS.
4) Same person essentially threatened a sitting US Senator with blackmail. The crowd went wild.

I am exhausted.

Disgusting.  

[OldGimletEye]

Aw, isn’t that cute. Libertarian and Kook Brothers clown, Tyler Cowen (hereinfater Clownwen) thinks, the right is just an intellectually vibrant place, unlike the kooky ka-ka-ka-crazy old left, and lefties just misunderstand the awesomeness of the conservatism.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-24/holding-up-a-mirror-to-the-intellectuals-of-the-left

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I find that left-wing intellectuals complain more about the right wing than right-wing intellectuals complain about the left. This negative focus isn’t healthy for the viability of left-wing intellectual creativity.

Yeah, right. You mean the people that made deligitimized the word liberal to the point even Democrats won’t call themselves that?

The idea that that conservatives “intellectuals” don’t spend a lot of time trashing the left is simply absurd and is wishful thinking on Clownwen’s part. Not that I really give a shit what conservatives have to say, let em take their best shots, as in my opinion it’s about time to just take the gloves off and hash this thing out. I’m not really interested in having a “polite and respectful” conversation with the conservatism, as I’m more interested in giving it a swift kick in the ass, until it cleans up its act.

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Probably the two best “market failure” books this year were written by colleagues of mine, coming out of libertarian traditions: Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson (with Kevin Simler, whose background I’m not as familiar with).

Except, I’m not seeing why Caplan’s book is all that new or innovative. Libertarian’s have been on a rant against public education for a very long time. It used be one of Milton Friedman’s pet causes and Friedman was probably a more reasonable libertarian. And I’m not sure why it’s a “market failure” book. Seems to me Clownwen is trying to spin it into something it is not.

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The left continues to produce plenty of content on market failure, but rarely am I surprised by the material.

Except your surprise or lack thereof has really no bearing on it's merit Clownwen. And a lot of it was likely standard stuff you probably learned in grad school or should have anyway, but choose to sweep under the rug, in order promote your "the free market" fundamentalism horseshit.

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I see social media as leading to more left-wing than right-wing intellectual conformity. 

So what is the explanation for conservatives always yelling at each other about who is the most conservative?

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I consider foreign policy to be the most important topic for the U.S., in terms of final impact on the world. It is easy for the right to have a dynamic and substantive debate in this arena, given the right includes both conservatives and libertarians in large numbers. I find that left-wing discussions of foreign policy are more likely to consist of criticizing Republicans, rather than outlining a conceptual approach or facing up to their own internal failures and contradictions.

So what hot new awesome foreign policy ideas have come out of the conservatism lately?

That complete fuckup in Iraq? Or maybe the Republican Party’s constant whining about Obama’s Iran deal, when the Republican Party had no viable alternative, except maybe a military intervention, which no sane person wants, and appeals to chicken hawks.

Perhaps the left does have a well fleshed out and viable foreign policy as of yet, but Obama’s dictum of “don’t do stupid shit” isn’t a bad place to start. More than can be said for the conservatism or the Republican Party.

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The same is largely true for the topic of immigration.

Oh really? Then what is the hold up on Daca?

How about Trump’s wall? How about Trump’s unfairly attacking immigrants and conservatives just eating that shit up?
 

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For intellectuals on the left, the primary emotional reaction to religion is to see it as a force standing in the way of social liberalism, feel awkward about how many Americans are still religious, and then prefer to change the topic.

Oh Clownwen. This isn’t hard. People should be able to use their religion as an excuse to fail to execute the legal duties of their office, like granting marriage licenses to gay people. And sorry if I disagree with people like that fraud David Barton, whom you think is a great conservative intellectual, apparently, to argue this is a christian country and according we should become a theocracy. Fuckin’ dear lord. Come on.

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Every intellectual on the right is extremely familiar with the doctrines of the left and center-left, but the converse is somewhat less true. 

Poor conservatives! The left just doesn’t understand where they are coming from! The modern conservative movement has been around for at least 40 years, with a good dose of libertarian thought. I think we know what it’s all about, as it’s been repeateding the same old horseshit for decades. The idea that the left doesn’t understand the conservatism, while conservatives have a deep appreciation of left wing arguments, is fuckin’ absurd.

By golly, after all this time, I think we’ve got it!

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In short, the new world of ideas is a free-for-all, and it is hard to wrap your arms around it. But the overall picture is by no means as favorable to left-wing intellectuals as left-wing intellectuals might wish to tell you.

Said by the guy, that asserted, that economy functions most of the time according to Real Business Cycle theory, except RBC theory is based on some real bad foundations.

Clownwen is trying to tell us that overall things on the right are very healthy. But, if things are so healthy over there, then why is the Republican Party so batshit fucking crazy? That seems to me to be exhibit A, that things are not real great on the right.
.......................................................................................................................................

On defending modern econ. I sort of agree, but sort of dissent.

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In last July, writer and researcher John Rapley penned an article in the British newspaper the Guardian entitled “How Economics Became a Religion.” This followed on the heels of shorter but equally acerbic critiques by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian and Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph, earlier that year. In 2015, the Guardian published an article by Joris Luyendijk called “Don’t let the Nobel prize fool you. Economics is not a science,” while Liam Halligan had a similar piece in the Telegraph in 2013.

 

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. In the forthcoming May 2018 issue of Prospect magazine, think-tank director Howard Reed published an article with the headline “Rip it up and start again: the case for a new economics.” Reed’s critique follows the by-now-standard pattern I described in my earlier rebuttal, almost to a T. He begins by castigating economists for missing the 2008 financial crisis. 

 

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And for decades, writers, policy advisers, and think-tankers successfully promoted a libertarian caricature of economics with relatively little pushback from academia.

Yeah, people like Tyler Clownwen who thinks everything is just awesome on the right.

Anyway, I think some of the blame here can be blamed on textbooks, particularly introductory textbooks, in the way a lot of the material is presented. And even advanced micro text books could do better. My two biggest complaints probably being with aggregation issues and GE theory.

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Many of Reed’s allegations seem out of date. For example, he alleges that economists still “worship” at the “temple” of classic models like the general equilibrium theory pioneered by Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu. Although this model -- which assumes that each buyer and seller is too small to affect the overall market -- remains influential, many theorists now prefer to work with game theory. Unlike the old neoclassical theories, game theory concerns strategic interaction between different people.

The problem with Arrow Debreau theory is that actors have to form correct price expectations over all markets, and I mean all markets future and contingent, and then start trading after equilibrium prices have been formed.

Alfred Marshall’s mode of theorizing, partial equilibrium theory. has been presented in many textbooks as being a logical extension of Walrasian GE theory.

But that isn’t true. Where Walras had trading happening after equilibrium prices appeared, being done in notational or logical time, Marshall’s trading process very much happened in historical time. And the difference is big as trades that happen in historical time means that trades can happen at non-equlibrium prices. Firms likely try to adjust their price and quantity pairs in order to maximize profit, but the learning process can take time and while this occurring, goods can remain unsold and labor unemployed, and the process can be reinforced through expectations that get revised during the process.

Being influenced by Leijonhufvud and Clower, I’d prefer GE theory to be developed on what I’d call neo-marshallian lines, and Arrow Debreau theory be relegated to an appendix or at least not take up so much the general equilibrium section of advanced micro  text books.

Game Theory might give a lot better description of how trading occurs in some applications, but it isn’t the heart of the problem, in my opinion.
 

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So the by-now-formulaic anti-econ broadside should disappear from the pages of British newspapers. But will it? I see that the Economist is running a series of articles on the “shortcomings” of the  profession. Let’s hope it does a better job than its peers.

Overall I don't think we need to start from scratch. But, a few things definitely could be improved, or we might end up with mindless libertarian caricatures.

[DireWolfSpirit]

Wow great comments above all around on the media being in bed with this occupying regime. No criticism can go too far imo, when your dealing with the likes of these in this White House. They are bancrupt of all integrity, wholly unfit, morally lacking and ethically wanting, with No business ruling this country. We are being attacked from within and much of the press hasnt now, nor does it ever, go far enough when its time to speak truth to power. They trade that critical function for "access and to stay embedded". They strive to parrot and neglect to challenge far to often.

Thankfully a few (too few)  courageous voices stand against the herd and we have to listen ever so carefully to hear them from beyond the echo chamber. So I didnt get to hear the CD but if Ms Wolfe called some of these degenerates liars, well BRAVO TO HER!!

[LongRider]

Here is a vid of Michelle Wolf if you haven't seen her.  

Judge for yourself.  

[Jace, Extat]

I thought she was great, watching live.

[LongRider]

I had mixed feelings, not all her comments were funny, some were.  Calling out Huckee Boo Boo on her lies when HBB was just two chairs away and facing the audience?  Gutsy!  Calling out Mike Pence and dissing the Trump kids, that again took guts.  Getting some in the crowd to answer "How rich is he?" when she called out "Trump is so rich" was really good.  Her calling out the media for being syncopates to Trump was well done.  So while I didn't find her all that funny, she certainly made many uncomfortable.   I'm sure she's receiving rape and death threats now, sigh.