US Politics: Talking about the Elephant in the race.

[Fragile Bird]

I firmly believe Trump saw her as an early threat and set out to destroy her. He already has his action plan, including donation requests and tv commercials in the can (I'm certain) ready to destroy the Socialist Monster. Now he's dusting off the Sleepy Joe and Criminal Family stuff for Biden.

Maybe a lesson learned is stomp on those romantic family stories you are telling your daughters, they may believe them...

[Zorral]

9 minutes ago, Ormond said:

you can't refute the idea that men average out more in favor of violent revolution than women

Can you prove that? 

In every violent revolution that comes to mind women are front and center, including that of the revolution against the Shah, and many others.

And then, their work and roles are conveniently forgotten by the men who win (or lose, for that matter).  Like Sánchez's, which is now being written back into the history of the Cuban Revolution because women are now going to universities, becoming scholars and getting published.  That situation is a very short time in the history of history, after all, where women are written out of it during all of history.

[Ran]

 

25 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Can you prove that? 

A paper on violent extremism and approaches to preventing and counteracting it notes that far-right and Islamic violent extremism, at least, is exceptionally dominated by men. Another paper on radical right voting in the Netherlands finds that most radical parties have a sizable gap in support between men and women, other than a handful of countries which are more similar (and one outlier, Poland, where the propensity is reversed). And of course there is the indisputable gender gap in violent crime, as another means of boring in on which gender is likelier to exhibit interest in violence and violent political change.

I feel very comfortable with the idea that violent revolution as an idea is likelier to appeal to men than women. Whether this is purely due to cultural factors or includes a genetic or biological compenent, I cannot say.

[DMC]

Warren's frank and genuine concession press conference right now makes me want to vote for her in the Florida primary just as a symbol.  I hope she'll be back in 4 years, even if Biden wins I'd welcome a primary challenge from her.

[Larry of the Lawn]

19 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Warren certainly would have been the best candidate to unite the party. It really is BS that she began to sink like a stone after she explained how she’d pay for her healthcare program, and yet Bernie never really has and his is going to be more expensive.

Again, just because people keep saying this doesn't make it true.  

 

[argonak]

15 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Warren certainly would have been the best candidate to unite the party. It really is BS that she began to sink like a stone after she explained how she’d pay for her healthcare program, and yet Bernie never really has and his is going to be more expensive.

Yeah I never understood why this was a big deal.  We take all the money that we already pay for health care, and pay it to medicare instead.  Medicare has lower costs than any other insurance company. . . and then we take the money saved and use it for the uninsured, and then figure out what the gap is after that.  And then anyone that wants more insurance than medicare can pay for supplemental to private companies.  

The HMOs will transition to just being health care providers, and the insurance companies will have to transition to being premium products.  People will lose jobs, but the system would work better and everyone would have health care, even the people who lost their jobs.   Its not like we're inventing the wheel here either, plenty of other nations have already made the step.

 

[Zorral]

31 minutes ago, Ran said:

 

A paper on violent extremism and approaches to preventing and counteracting it notes that far-right and Islamic violent extremism, at least, is exceptionally dominated by men. Another paper on radical right voting in the Netherlands finds that most radical parties have a sizable gap in support between men and women, other than a handful of countries which are more similar (and one outlier, Poland, where the propensity is reversed). And of course there is the indisputable gender gap in violent crime, as another means of boring in on which gender is likelier to exhibit interest in violence and violent political change.

I feel very comfortable with the idea that violent revolution is likelier to appeal to men than women. Whether this is purely due to cultural factors, I cannot say.

OK, this doesn't convince me -- nor do they come to a specific conclusion, considering who the authors are (male), and the problem as they see it is to keep women from joining violent rebel movements. The sources at the bottom seem to say just the opposite -- that women are attracted to this sort of violent idealism. And this among women who traditionally are rigidly and strictly repressed in many ways, with very few opportunities to operate with any autonomy. Yet, they are still doing it (and then learning it's not what they thought -- because men, you know!).

In modern times one of the most significant revolutionary wars was the War of the Rebellion. Women were vociferously active, despite being southern helpless women, in the forefront of Secession, to make it, keep it, and after the fighting stopped, they kept fighting themselves.  See: women in the lynching photos after Reconstruction was halted thanks to one of the most evil political deals to get the presidency ever made.  At the same time, it was poor white women who physically resisted the lack of food (hoarded for the ruling white class) in Richmond -- the famous Hunger Riots -- and all over the south, while physically resisting the theft of their food and goods done by the upper class white southern men.

Your argument comes across as deeply gender biased, whether or not unconsciously.

That's how so much racism and sexism work -- people don't even realize how biased they are.

This applies to every study of everything from health and medical matters to political and creative.  Why are there no great female composes? is still asked smugly by gender biased men, who seem to think that women were not allowed to be composers generally throughout history by so many factors, including early death from marriage and children, and of course, then, no time either.

What we are seeing now, across the board, in every area anyone can think of: when there is access and playing field -- and not necessarily even and equal playing field either, for better or worse (depending on one's bias toward a revolution's success or not) women are choosing to go there.

One area in which women are documented as being reluctant, is that generally enslaved running from the upper south to freedom, were men, and usually single men.  Running as a woman (another reason Harriet Tubman is an anmaly), with children, was very unlikely to be successful, and mothers were deeply reluctant to leave their children behind.  This, however, is not the same thing as being reluctant to take part in a violent revolution, for good or for bad -- and plenty of African American women, mothers or not, behind the lines during the war, were doing everything they could to help the violent revolution to end slavery, even as the white women were doing everything they could think of (including Theodore Roosevelt's mother and grandmother) to violently overthrow the constitutional federal government.

Over and over again when actual revolutionary movements are examined there are women in the forefront, including the labor movement, which was extremely violent.  The Black Panther movement was majority women (though it sure as hell didn't begin as a violent movement but got pushed into it), though it was the male figures that got the (male) coverage in the media and history.

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

23 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

Again, just because people keep saying this doesn't make it true.  

 

We have some general ideas on Sanders’ plan, but from I can tell no one can agree on the details, and the variances are staggering. Warren’s plan was more detailed, even if the details themselves felt fudged at times.  

[Fragile Bird]

I sure hope that Americans come out in droves to vote for Democrats in November, because (OMG SHE’S GONNA TALK ABOUT THE STOCK MARKET WARNING) whoever wins may inherit something awful.

If Trump is re-elected, an utterly incompetent real estate developer who has surrounded himself with seemingly incompetent but loyal advisers, I expect he will make things far, far worse for most Americans, maybe even all Americans.

The bond market can act as an early warning system. The 2-year rate is at .55%, the 5-year rate is .66%, the 10-year is .907% and actually briefly fell to .89%, something that has never happened in history, and the frigging 30-year bond is at 1.55%. Would you lend Uncle Sam your money for 30 years for 1.55%?

[a brief aside, a bond trader called the latter the Hotel California trade, or as they said years ago, the Roach Motel trade, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Buy a 30-year bond and you may never be able to sell it when interest rates rise]

The bond market is predicting a recession. Who knows, the bond market could be wrong, but I wouldn’t count on it.

As I have mentioned before, Trump is obsessed with negative interest rates and is doing everything he can to drive them down. So far these low interest rates are driving down the stock price of banks, especially regional banks, which are dropping like boulders, not stones.

Now, God bless, as the southerners say, Covid-19 lasts about 3 months like it seems to have done in China and everything returns to normal. However, China quarantined 100 M people to do it, which isn’t going to happen in the US, but on the other hand summer is coming and maybe that will help stop it.

And as I also said some people are worried about a Japan-like affect on the stock market. Japan lowered interest rates to zero, the stock market was halved and has never come back. That wipes out trillions and trillions of dollars of value, and while you might not own stocks every pension plan in the country does. Deflation is an ugly ugly thing.

[TrueMetis]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

Tell that to Celia Sánchez, without whom Fidel's revolution could never have happened.    Or, say the women of the French Revolution.  Or the women of the Haitian Revolution.

Right, men are attracted to the language and pomp around it, women will actually get out their and do it.

 

Similarly, and more seriously, I recently read a twitter thread (a really long twitter thread) about organization in the Occupy movement about how most of the actual organizing was done by women and POC, only for a bunch of white guys to show up, take credit, and act like they deserved to be on stage. Many of whom incidentally became prominent in the alt right.

[Ran]

 

12 minutes ago, Zorral said:

At the same time, it was poor white women who physically resisted the lack of food (hoarded for the ruling white class) in Richmond -- the famous Hunger Riots -- and all over the south, while physically resisting the theft of their food and goods done by the upper class white southern men.

Where were the poor white men? Cowering away in their houses while their wives and mothers did this?

Of course not. They were away at the war, or crippled by it, or killed by it. It was the economically vulnerable widows or women whose husbands or brothers who were away fighting who were in a position to need to act for themselves. That they rioted says nothing about propensities here. Anyone will riot if they are hungry enough or angry enough, I suppose. 

You have anecdotes in plenty (which can be met with a dozen others for every one of them that tell a different tale), but the facts are that violence around the world is dominated by men, and that violent movements around the world are dominated by men, that almost all far-right radical parties (used here as a stand-in for "revolution") are predominantly supported by men. The facts are the facts. Again, we're talking about propensities here.

This is a decided thread drift, though, so better to spin off a new thread if you really want to keep talking about this.

[Fragile Bird]

tmi

[Paladin of Ice]

*Takes a moment to pour one out for Warren’s presidential campaign*
 

1 hour ago, TrueMetis said:

Similarly, and more seriously, I recently read a twitter thread (a really long twitter thread) about organization in the Occupy movement about how most of the actual organizing was done by women and POC, only for a bunch of white guys to show up, take credit, and act like they deserved to be on stage. Many of whom incidentally became prominent in the alt right.

Sadly enough that sounds like par for the course.

Hell, if Bernie does get elected, Warren might wind up doing a lot of his homework for him, if an article I saw being passed around a few months ago was right. (Said article claimed that Sanders and his people had been looking into whether Warren could simultaneously serve as VP and a Cabinet Secretary. Of the treasury, if I remember correctly.)

Certain of the worst online Sanders supporters (about half of which are probably bots or alt-Reich trolls) would then no doubt happily graduate to blaming her for anything that goes wrong in a Sanders administration, and proof that she was backstabbing him all along on behalf of the Evulz Establishment.

[Bael's Bastard]

Garry Kasparov: The danger of nominating Sanders

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/05/opinions/danger-of-nominating-sanders-kasparov/index.html

[mcbigski]

1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

The bond market can act as an early warning system. The 2-year rate is at .55%, the 5-year rate is .66%, the 10-year is .907% and actually briefly fell to .89%, something that has never happened in history, and the frigging 30-year bond is at 1.55%. Would you lend Uncle Sam your money for 30 years for 1.55%?

[a brief aside, a bond trader called the latter the Hotel California trade, or as they said years ago, the Roach Motel trade, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Buy a 30-year bond and you may never be able to sell it when interest rates rise]

That last bit isn't true as stated.  It's a very straightforward relationship between bond prices and interest rate moves.  You could say you might never be able to sell you bond for its face value prior to maturity if newly issued bonds are now paying a higher rate, but there's nothing magical about crossing 0% for that.  You aren't going to be able to sell a 5% bond at par either when equivalent credit and duration bonds are being issued at 8%.  But you can certainly sell that 5% bond at discount that gives a total yield to maturity of 8%.  Concept still applies at -1% and 2%.

 

[OldGimletEye]

9 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

That last bit isn't true as stated.  It's a very straightforward relationship between bond prices and interest rate moves.  You could say you might never be able to sell you bond for its face value prior to maturity if newly issued bonds are now paying a higher rate, but there's nothing magical about crossing 0% for that.  You aren't going to be able to sell a 5% bond at par either when equivalent credit and duration bonds are being issued at 8%.  But you can certainly sell that 5% bond at discount that gives a total yield to maturity of 8%.  Concept still applies at -1% and 2%.

 

This all true. But, as yields go lower, the opportunity cost of holding money declines. Then what happens?

[Ran]

A "C+" poll (as rated by 538) has a 39(!) point total shift in Biden's favor from their poll two weeks ago, with 61% going for him. They say he won every demographic in their poll -- age, gender, race, etc. The 18-29 vote he won 61% to 14% vs. Sanders. Previously, Bloomberg was the soft front runner in Florida, but there's a massive shift towards Biden according to this.

 

[Fragile Bird]

23 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

That last bit isn't true as stated.  It's a very straightforward relationship between bond prices and interest rate moves.  You could say you might never be able to sell you bond for its face value prior to maturity if newly issued bonds are now paying a higher rate, but there's nothing magical about crossing 0% for that.  You aren't going to be able to sell a 5% bond at par either when equivalent credit and duration bonds are being issued at 8%.  But you can certainly sell that 5% bond at discount that gives a total yield to maturity of 8%.  Concept still applies at -1% and 2%.

 

OGE just answered, but believe me, when the financial crisis started I know lots of advisers who told clients to sell bonds and they refused because they needed the income. Then the bonds turned into trash when interest payments were suspended and values sank like stones. People also bought stocks for high dividend payments, and the dividends got cut. Wham! Roach motels!

You can tell people what can happen under certain circumstances but they refuse to believe you. 
 

Just before the tech crash - please, client, sell your Nortel! Sell your Rim! Sell your Boston Scientific! No, I’d have too much in capital gains! And, no, the stock can’t fall any further, people would lose too much money! It can’t happen!

People won’t sell!

PS: yes I know all about the correlation between bond prices and interest rates, I went out and did training on it. Not only do clients not grasp the concept, some advisers don’t understand it.

[OldGimletEye]

5 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

I know lots of advisers who told clients to sell bonds and they refused because they needed the income. 

Why would financial advisors give this advice if they know the clients intend to hold the bonds to maturity, unless there was a major chance of default? Secondly, wouldn't these same advisors be aware that the Central Bank would likely buy the bonds, pushing up their value?

[IheartIheartTesla]

24 minutes ago, Ran said:

A "C+" poll (as rated by 538) has a 39(!) point total shift in Biden's favor from their poll two weeks ago, with 61% going for him. They say he won every demographic in their poll -- age, gender, race, etc. The 18-29 vote he won 61% to 14% vs. Sanders. Previously, Bloomberg was the soft front runner in Florida, but there's a massive shift towards Biden according to this.

Ipsos has a very recent poll with just Biden/Sanders and the split is 55/45 (a bit higher than I expected for Sanders). Their last one was Sanders/Biden 51/49 ( I guess they were looking at head-to-heads). I find this 12 point shift over a week a bit more realistic.