Re: Deeply Unfunny People
 

We've watched some of the movies, I think, but she hasn't been all that interested. Maybe it won't come up? If it does, will probably let her watch and try to get books from the library instead of buying.

A trans family member bought her a bunch of Percy Jackson stuff as an alternative, but rather a bit early as that's above her reading level still and that was maybe two years ago.

Re: Deeply Unfunny People
 

Yep. The right does not have a monopoly on humorlessness.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

sorry the site was down. Someone tried to buy a linkedin premium account with my card and so I had to get a new one. Some automatic payments I didn't catch with the new info.

Re: Deeply Unfunny People
 

That trust is deemed necessary by so many is depressing as well. Comedy should be fearless. And a thing said that's funny should be funny in almost any context. "Eating the dogs and cats" is universally funny. It can't be anything else. Harris' word salads can be very funny. Some not so much, but others very much. And Biden staring into space, dazed, might be a mean thing to mock, but it's also comical when cited using the right comedic touch.

Greg Gutfeld is not very funny, IMO. Nor is Steven Colbert. They're both quite openly political and preachy, and so, as you note, their jokes fall flat. But there are a ton of openly anti-Trump comedians out there who are objectively funny, even with a clear agenda. And there are a number (far fewer, I think) conservative (or anti-woke... to which group the fewer caveat does not apply) comedians out there who are very funny. I'm not sure I need to "trust" the views of these people, or that they're on my side, to find them funny. I honestly don't care about their views. Their politics are immaterial. If they're out to smear a candidate and it's funny, it's still funny. Their inner beliefs should be of zero importance.

Re: Deeply Unfunny People
 

I don't see the issue with Rowling. She defines women narrowly. She picks fights with trans activists.

This issue touches .005% of humanity and we talk about it like it's the most pressing issue on the planet. The right loves to prattle on about men swimming with women, and phantom fears of sexual assault in the bathroom by trans people. The left acts like if one doesn't buy their novel and dubious quasi-scientific arguments on the matter, one is akin a guard at Dachau.

Give me a fucking break.

Are trans women actually women? I don't know. I also don't think the issue will ever be solved because people who are deeply invested in these things have views that long ago left the planes of logic and science and there's just no point trying to litigate this stuff. The best one can say is, "Who cares? Why not just be tolerant? If the chic science (really anthropology) on the subject is rubbish, what's the big deal?" Again, it's .005% of people.

I do think people born biological males should not be competing in women's sports. That one we can litigate because there's simply no counter, save perhaps the argument, "Well, if a biological male is smaller, on par in terms of strength with a woman, he's technically on even footing, so he should be able to compete." That argument is persuasive. It's also rarer than being struck by lightning twice in an afternoon. (Similarly, women with skill adequate to compete with males should be allowed to do so. If Serena Williams could beat 70% of male tennis players, which I'll bet she could, there ought to be a mixed-sex league where she could do so.)

Rowling is entitled to her view, and she's entitled to call out what she sees as bullshit. And one is entitled to refute her or boycott her if he likes. But of all the considerations that might enter my head when I walk into a bookstore, an author's joinders within the "trans controversies," as incoherent as these "debates" (really, political wedges used by the parties and activists on both sides to manipulate the credulous) about trans issues are, are about as significant to me as the author's diet.

Personally, I'm of the belief Rowling was slumming it to even get involved in such a debate. She's taking bait on which a person at her level should better sense than to bite.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

From a battleground, I'd say that more than half the country falls into a precariate.

In that fragile state, anything and everything is potential destabilizing event that could lead to financial ruin. Immigration is but one of many.

Are there some cruel people out there? Yup, but it's a small number. I'd guess the majority of people who want tighter borders simply view it as a way of controlling a society, and an economy, that are rapidly changing in ways that they perceive to be bad for them.

And what do the fortunate of us say to these people? "Oh, you fools. The economy is great. You just don't see it." Or, "You're racists!"

These two angles - bullshitting and trying to shame people - have not worked very well. Joe Sixpack isn't inventing inflation of whole cloth. It isn't in his head. It's very real to him. And I don't think he wants to hear a Chamber of Commerce libertarian like me say, "Well, immigration helps to keep certain prices down, particularly labor."

There's also an issue of fairness. People get really hung up on that concept. In the same way I'll hear a progressive insist on equity, I'll hear a MAGA person insist that if one wants to come into the country, such person is obligated to wait in line like everyone else. (And that's why, polls indicate, a ton of Latinos in the Rust Belt are now Trump voters. People who had to play the game resent those jumping the line.)

Illegal immigrants are just the poor bastards gifted the position of cudgel by both parties to gin up votes.

Re: Deeply Unfunny People
 

Yes. A stranger's gender is not something you should care about. If you choose to care about it, it makes you a freaking creep.

The problem with caring about it for the tiny fraction of .005% of people where it is relevant is that invites policing the bodies of cis women too. Those Olympic boxers did not deserve any of that.

If we must, we can have some rules about people who have gone through puberty as a boy, but again, it is a tiny number of people and it opens a can of worms, so do we even need that? And hopefully even that number will dwindle as acceptance of trans kids grows and they get puberty blockers.

Olympic shooting (I think it was), only got gender classes after women started winning.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Kamala is on Howard Stern tomorrow. In 2018 (or so) Hillary went on and admitted she felt if she she’d have won. Fingers crossed.

Re: Deeply Unfunny People
 

I think you misunderstand what I am saying about trust, which is about creating a relationship with an audience so that the comedian can do material about a controversial subjects. The very same joke can work or fall flat depending on the set and the comedian. The idea that something funny should be funny in almost any context just misses how comedy actually works.

Wouldn't know, don't know his stuff, but if I were looking for comedy I'd go to Netflix, not Fox News.

I think Colbert can be awesome, but I don't watch his show. The late-night talk-show monologue is a tough format, because of the audience you're trying to please and a bunch of other things.

Again, I didn't say you need to trust *their views.*

As an example of what I'm talking about, consider Sam Morrill. He is clearly in it for the comedy, not to grind an axe.

Re: Deeply Unfunny People
 

Male pros or all male tennis players? She's already admitted that she'd get beaten by any guy in the top 100.

Re: Deeply Unfunny People
 

Chapelle has done some really funny stuff on Trump as well. In fact, I'd say he's had the most astute take on Trump's appeal yet.
Chris Rock has also been blatantly political about Trump and at the same time astute and funny as hell.

Stewart, IMO, still has the magic touch. He manages that perfect balance of levity and "This guy was President? He's fucking insane."

Re: Deeply Unfunny People
 

IMO, she's wrong.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I don't think Harris is saying she feels she's going to win. One can take issue with many things about Harris, but hubris isn't one of them.

Anecdotally, here in Purple Country, Harris does not seem to have much support among blue collar voters, Middle Eastern, Latino, Asian, or Indian folks. I deal with lots of these folks and my experience is they are a mix of small business owners (tax voters) and people who resent illegal immigration, perceiving such immigrants as people who cheated a system through which they had to go in order to acquire citizenship. Polls seem to support that.

Harris, OTOH, seems to have hoovered up the upper middle class moderates. She's got a huge chunk of the W-2d professionals and managers.

The shy Trump voters are the business owners who socialize with the professionals and managers at larger corps. They're voting for Trump, but not saying it in mixed company.

It's kind of like the parties switched completely. Trump is so repellant he's gotten a lot of country club republicans to vote against their interests. (Or at least say they will.) That's no small feat.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

She did not claim she will win, you're right. To the contrary. I thought the interview humanized her in the same way the Hillary interview did. But Harris did the interview BEFORE the election. His audience is huge in PA.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Small business owners have always been a GOP crowd. There's nothing new about that.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I’m part of the small business crowd. Harris needs to amp up how insane Trump is. It was not an option when two doddering white men were running, but now get it!

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Howard's audience is big in Philly and the collar counties. Not so big in western, mid, or northeast. Sirius isn't cheap.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

But the immigrants in favor of Trump is an odd thing. They aren't shy about it. I haven't the temerity to suggest to any that perhaps that's pulling up the ladder behind them. Because they're paying me.

Yes, most of my exposure is immigrant business owners. And these do trend R. But it's odd to hear folks from India favor Trump over a women of half-Indian descent.

The Jewish vote seems really split. When I hear people continue to parrot the stereotype that Jews all vote Democrat, including the Orange Shmuck himself, I have to wonder if these people know many Jews. The ones I know who are freaked out by the last year's vile displays on campuses aren't voting Democratic. And more generally, that stereotype is as dated as it is awful. I'd say roughly half the Jews I know, and a lot of my social scene is Jewish, have always been conservative and lean Republican.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Yeah, but you're a lawyer. Ds create more regs, laws, etc. What little you lose on the tax and compliance side is far overcome by enhanced revenue. Regulation barely moves our bottom line, and the Democrats' favorite fix for everything, "We need to pass a law!", fattens us. Same goes for CPAs and HR professionals.

Ds are a red tape shitshow, from every angle. Rs aren't much better, as they never succeed in simplifying anything for the long term. But they defund oversight while in office and hobble enforcement, so at least people can breathe while they're in charge. Which is usually just long enough to over-reach in their deregulatory zeal and cause some form of crisis.

We can't have nice things here for too long because neither party can control itself and inevitably goes too far in one extreme direction or another.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

It has been eight years since 2016. If you're not convinced by now that Trump is insane, I'm not sure that's the button to try to push.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Maybe so.

Yup
 

"The past four years have highlighted the ways that Democrats exaggerate the political importance of racial identity. Joe Biden, after all, promised to nominate the first Black female Supreme Court justice (which he did) and chose Kamala Harris as the first Black vice president — who has now succeeded him as the Democratic nominee. Yet Harris has less support from Black voters than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

Biden also adopted the sort of welcoming immigration policies that Democrats have long believed Hispanic voters support. He loosened border rules early in his term, which helped millions of people enter the country. In spite of that change — or maybe partly because of it — Democrats have also lost Hispanic support.
. . .

More generally, many voters have come to see the Democratic Party as the party of the establishment. That may sound vague and vibesy, but it’s real. Trump’s disdain for the establishment appeals to dissatisfied voters of all races. As my colleague Nate Cohn points out, a sizable minority of Black and Hispanic voters think 'people who are offended by Donald Trump take his words too seriously.'

The Democrats’ second big problem is that they have wrongly imagined voters of colors to be classic progressives. In reality, the most left-wing segment of the population is heavily white, the Pew Research Center has found. While white Democrats have become even more liberal in recent decades, many working-class voters of color remain moderate to conservative."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/b...tion-poll.html

Re: Yup
 

"loosened border restrictions" is some dystopia shit.

Re: Yup
 

I don't follow immigration because I tend to benefit from and like immigrants, and the debate is, like most others, filled with unfalsifiable and dishonest claims from both sides.

But Biden's border enforcement rules were less restrictive than Obama's and Trump's, no?

Everybody Gets a Pony!
 

https://reason.com/2024/10/16/donald...rate-promises/

"Trump fans applauded when he said he'll eliminate taxes on tips. Then Harris proposed that, too. Her audience applauded. Trump then proposed not taxing overtime. More applause.

. . .

"No one likes tipping," says Schrager, "but all of a sudden, you'll have to pay tips for everything.…More people will be paid in tips."

I want lower taxes, but awarding specific exemptions to certain people doesn't just let some of us keep more of our money, it tells workers and employers to change their behavior.

"If you're a restaurant owner, you need chefs, hostesses, managers," says Schrager. "All of a sudden, one group of your employees isn't paying taxes, and the rest are. Suddenly, it would be very hard to hire anyone who's not a server."
. . .

"Why such economic ignorance?

"Look at Kamala's team," says Schrager. "Most of her core advisers are lawyers, not economists."

That last point is a bit unfair. Economists are often just as simultaneously dumb but certain they're right as lawyers. They're only slightly more respectable because, unlike lawyers, they're aware of the law of unintended consequences and don't propose as the solution to every problem, "We need to pass a law!"

BUT, in defense of Harris and Trump, aren't they only doing as shrewd Romans would? Biden kicked this can of jubilee open in the worst way a few years ago with his vote-purchasing student loan forgiveness promise.*

If one gifts debt discharge to the kid who amassed debt he or she cannot repay, how can one not give a similar benefit to those who did not take such a chance? (An often ill-informed risk, BTW, to major in a subject no employers value.) Harris and Trump are handcuffed here. Once one gets into the game of buying votes, and starts picking who gets economic benefits, well, sooner or later, everyone must get a benefit.

But let's not stop there. Wall Street didn't like high rates very much. And those poor buggers were suffering, what with the market only up over 40k and all. So the Fed prematurely cut rates a fat 50 points.

That's not Greenspan GWB-era recklessness, of course, as Powell has been measured and incredibly conservative in his moves thus far. No, to get back to dumb W-era policies, Harris decided to dust off this classic: "Everyone needs to buy a home!"

Never mind that Trump's doubling of the standard deduction already helped the middle classes to save money to buy a home. Never mind that one of the biggest lessons of 2008 was that having people tied to homes hobbled labor flexibility by making it impossible for millions to move to other areas with better opportunities. And never mind that we are entering a time where labor's ability to move is becoming increasingly important.

Forget all this and let's go back to 1950, MAGA's mythical Camelot, and sing that same tired song: The best way to encourage wealth creation is for people to buy homes.

What will giving $25k loans to everybody to buy homes do? Well, it'll make all of us homeowners $25k wealthier on paper overnight by driving up house prices. It'll incentivize private equity to grab the motherlode of that money building shit quality multi-units all over the place. And when the cascade of defaults that always follows loose lending inevitably comes, Schwarzman, Fink, Mnuchin, and the rest of the parasites will form vulture funds to buy the loans and/or properties and turn them into giant rental revenue streams. Just like they did after 2008.

Everybody gets a pony! With Stage Four cancer. Ride it as much as you can before its legs fall off!
______
*He probably regretted it immediately the morning after the election, where it was apparent he had won by such a margin he didn't need to have made such a promise... particularly given it only helped him in blue areas where he already had the race in the bag.

Re: Yup
 

Same re immigration, but my impression was that Biden rolled back some, but not all, of Trump's oppressive immigration policies, leaving him more restrictive than Obama. Immigration advocates have not been happy with him from the jump.

Not sure that any of that had anything to do with appealing to latino voters, though. Gets framed that why by Washington types.

Re: Yup
 

I think the Washington types hear or see the same "anecdata" (I hate it, too, but what else can one call it?) people around here relate to one another. That is, for reasons I don't understand, legal immigrants and children of immigrants seem to be most exercised about unlawful immigration.

Upper middle class white folks like yours truly don't seem to care a lot. Hence, I don't follow it.

I also happen to really like immigrants, lawful and unlawful. This stuff about many of them being violent welfare moochers has never been anywhere close to my experience in the more than 30 years I've been interacting with them. I've worked for a few. Maybe I wasn't supposed to do so... But clearly, I don't care about that. If a guy wants to set himself up in business and has worked hard enough to put himself into a position to do so, he's exactly the kind of person who ought to be incentivized to stay.

Re: Yup
 

Apart from business news, national media is not interested in covering policy disputes as policy disputes, so they get covered as if they were entirely political. Hence the assumption that Democratic policies should be understood as efforts to win votes. The political journalists see issues in that light, and can only portray them in that light.

That article, in particular, makes a bunch of good points but also oversimplifies. Black voters are an absolutely core part of the Democratic coalition, and they often feels taken for granted by the party. I wasn't a fan of Biden's commitment re the Supreme Court appointment, but I don't think it was an effort to win over black voters on the margins -- it was aimed at the black voters who were already solidly in the camp.

Hunter may not be alive...
 

But his spirit animal is. Holy lord is this epic.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/vi...n_history.html

He's not the greatest orator, so the text below:

"We ignore laws. It’s what America does. With this in mind, our government has moved past censorship to the larger project of changing the American personality. They want a more obedient, timorous, fearful citizen. Their tool is the internet, a vast machine for doling out reward and punishment through likes and views, shaming or deamplification. The mechanics are complicated, but the core concept is simple: You’re upranked for accepting authority, downranked for questioning it, with questions of any kind increasingly viewed as a form of disinformation.
. . .

America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Haydens, John Brennans, James Clappers, Mike McFauls, and Rick Stengels who make up America’s self-appointed behavior police.

In prerevolutionary France, even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword duel to the death. Our aristocrats pee themselves at the sight of mean tweets. They have no honor, no belief, no poetry, art, or humor, no patriotism, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They’re simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off.
. . .

To small thinkers, free speech is a wilderness of potential threats. The people who built this country, whatever else you can say about them, weren’t small thinkers. They were big, big thinkers, and I mean that not just in terms of intellect but arrogance, gall, brass, audacity, cheek.
. . .

To the people who are suggesting that there are voices who should be ignored because they’re encouraging mistrust or skepticism of authority, or obstructing consensus: I’m not encouraging you to be skeptical of authority. I’m encouraging you to defy authority. That is the right word for this time.

To all those snoops and nosy parkers sitting in their Homeland Security–funded “Centers of Excellence,” telling us day after day we must think as they say and vote as they say or else we’re traitorous Putin-loving fascists and enablers of “dangerous” disinformation: Motherfucker, I’m an American. That shit does not work on me. And how can you impugn my patriotism, when you’re sitting in Klaus Schwab’s lap, apologizing for the First Amendment to a crowd of Europeans? Look in the mirror.

I’m not the problem. We’re not the problem.

You’re the problem.

You suck."

https://www.thefp.com/p/matt-taibbi-...e-the-republic

Re: Yup
 

Yes, that is a big part of what is so annoying about the rhetoric. Who do you think is doing all the thankless hard work??

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Paging Ty: I really didn’t listen in con law. Michigan had a vote to amend its Constitution to make any act that restricts abortion illegal. Can a federal statute violate a State Constitution?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I think the short answer is that the Supremacy Clause suggests that if the federal government passes a law that requires a result inconsistent with a state constitution, the federal law takes precedence. For example, I believe Wyoming used to elect state legislators from counties (or districts?) which would pick multiple candidates, and my recollection is that the federal government said this was inconsistent with civil rights legislation and forced a change to single districts. Whether or not I have the details right, I think that's the principle.

OTOH, for the federal law to apply, it would have to be enacted under Congress's enumerated powers, and it's not immediately clear to me how one would justify federal regulation of abortion law, which is not the way it works.

Which is to say, it's not clear to me that the answer to your question is so clear that it couldn't be engineered by the Supreme Court according to what conservatives decide the law should be. This Supreme Court seems particularly results-oriented and unbound by the way the law has been understood, especially on the issues that matter most to conservatives.

Re: Yup
 

That’s what happens when bread goes up a dollar. But I tell people, bread is cheaper in Russia.

Re: Yup
 

Normal people just don't like progressives. It's a thing.

I don't think they like MAGA, either.

Pet theory on why Trump's numbers are resilient:

1. Inflation
2. Immigration

Hardly revelatory, I know. But those are bedrocks. Kind of like Harris' bedrock issue, which is reproductive rights.

Where it gets interesting, IMO, is the third issue, which I'd call "Officious Overreach."

There is a type of person, and they seem to gravitate toward progressive and right-wing politics, who think they know what's best for everyone, and insist that their views be enshrined in policy.

In the 80s, this was most pungently apparent in the behaviors of people like Brent Bozell and Focus on the Family groups boycotting media and products advertised on it which they deemed obscene. They even got Ed Meese to get behind policies to try to police and ban what offended them.

This pissed off the quiet majority of the country. And Meese became a kind of politically toxic Joe McCarthy in his day. Despite all their efforts, these "morality hall monitors" failed. Normal people told them to fuck off. And so they went back under their rocks and festered within the evangelical and fundamentalist cultures.

From 2010 on (and really aggressively after 2016), the most pungent example of this busy-bodyism has been the progressives. They've been scolding everyone who isn't 100% on their page for wrongthink for a long time now, and people are really irritated by it.

Unlike Meese and Bozell and the "culture police" of the 80s, who had to fight against an often mocking and openly disdainful media, the current puritans enjoy the support of much of the mainstream media.

Now, of course, few people watch mainstream media anymore, so this support is limited. But it is enough to keep their message - their insistent, naive, and white-hot righteous scolding - loud enough to create a highly annoying background noise withing our politics.

We can ignore the MAGA because, well, they're overtly nuts. They're in red hats, at rallies, assuming a posture akin to something between LaRouche supporters and Birch Society Members.

But its not so easy to ignore the left wing culture police. They look a bit more normal, they are far more articulate, often credentialed (in silly subjects, but nevertheless adequate to put letters behind their names) and they're armed with just enough pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-scientific "scholarship" to present defenses of their frequently preposterous positions.

Nobody wants a govt of hall monitors. Nobody wants to be scolded about how he needs to think by some 35 year old PhD in gender studies or intersectional anthropology.

This country's essential DNA is still individualism. One cannot expect to get anywhere in America by perpetually tsk-tsking people in a strident and self-assured manner. Particularly where, in the case of progressivism, the intellectual and empirical underpinnings of the ideology are weak and falter under even slight cross-examination. (Every extreme ideology falters the same way.) The quiet majority are not fools. They may be credulous in some regards, as all people are, but they can spot people selling unrealistic utopian policies.

It doesn't sell any form of widget and it certainly doesn't sell political candidates to tell people "We know what's best and you must listen to us." First, people who say that are almost always dead wrong. If one is that strident, he is demented, and that dementia is negatively impacting his thinking and his judgment. So whatever he's selling is probably going to turn out horribly post-purchase. Second, at no time in human history has anyone ever successfully shamed his opponents into conceding he is right and they are wrong. The rigorous studies explaining why are myriad (Haidt's The Righteous Mind is a good start.)

Telling half the country they mustn't - they cannot, ever - vote for a certain candidate is a great way to drive tons of voters to that candidate. Like it or not, this country reveres the outlaws, not the compliance officers who tell us "no" and school marms handing out detentions. We were founded on the idea that nobody tells us what to do.

And that's a good thing. Because that preserves the ragged and often cruel dynamism that has made this country different and better in many regards than all others.

If His Orangeness should win this fall, which looks increasingly possible, if not perhaps likely, I would hope the left takes a different tack toward this Project 2025 stuff (should there be an attempt to enshrine it in law). Rather than scold everyone and offer its own competing vision of a controlled and managed society, make the argument that every American feels in his or her bones: "No. I'm not going to do what you tell me. Go ahead and try to make me."

The last thing anyone needs - the very worst thing imaginable - is what we have now: One side arguing "My version of a control structure for our govt and culture is best," countered by, "No, yours sucks. My version of a control structure is best."

How about both of these groups of assholes stop trying to control everyone and instead, live and let live?

This would be welcome by all of us in the middle, who are sick and tired of attempts by competing groups of Officious Overreachers to dictate how the rest of us are expected to behave.

Re: Yup
 

Deporting a ton of immigrants is going to have a direct effect on prices.



https://media1.tenor.com/m/Um5wy5kuZ...an-science.gif

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

How the mighty have fallen.

CNN

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

For Sebby - https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/fa...olarship/2229/

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I'll never quibble with the notion that in politics, perception is more important than actual. Or that Trump was not as administratively effective as he claims.

However, when you have a pro-deregulation regime in place, business generally has more confidence. So merely saying you're going to go easy on regulation can free up investment.

And at the really really small business level, people aren't as concerned with enforcement. Saying you're going to fund 87k new treasury agents, OTOH, however immaterial that may actually be, isn't singing a song the restaurant owner, Uber driver, or hair salon owner want to hear.

If...
 

Here's why.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/o...democrats.html

"The politics of selective fidelity to traditional norms. Liberals fear, with reason, the threat Trump poses to the institutional architecture of American government. Yet many of the same Democrats want to pack the Supreme Court, eliminate the Senate filibuster, get rid of the Electoral College, give federal agencies the right to impose eviction moratoriums and forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student debt without the consent of Congress. They decry Trump’s assaults on the news media while cheering the Biden administration’s attempt to strong-arm media companies into censoring opinions it disliked. And they warn of Trump’s efforts to criminalize his political opponents, even as they celebrate criminalizing him. Hypocrisy of this sort doesn’t go unnoticed by people not fully in the tank for Harris.

It remains perfectly possible that Harris will win the election, in which case we will hear a great deal about the brightness of her appeal and the brilliance of her campaign. Wiser liberals might want to press two questions: How did Trump still get so very, very close? And how can we fashion a liberalism that doesn’t turn so many ordinary people off?"

Simple. Remember what it is to be a Liberal and kick the Progressives out of the tent.

Re: If...
 

It amazes me that the NYT publishes drivel like that from Bret Stephens as if it is contributing to the discourse. He just discovered liberal hypocrisy!

A wiser editor would have said to Bret Stephens, cut everything and start with the last two sentences, which are interesting questions on which many people are actually engaging. Do you have any ideas to add to that conversation? Maybe he didn't, so they just went with this to troll the libs.

P.S. It's not the hypocrisy. Bret Stephens has never, ever, ever written a column about how conservative hypocrisy costs them anything. The question is, why do the Bret Stephens of the world -- and I think you can count yourself among them, unless you disagree -- get bothered by liberal hypocrisy, but not by conservative hyprocrisy? What is really going on with that double standard?

Who, specifically, are the Progressives in the tent, what, specifically, have they done that moves the needle? And how do Democrats win elections by alienating a non-trivial fraction of their coalition?