Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 28,967]

1 hour ago, Fernando said:

Well I just watch this video. Un bias and in context. 

He is a Christian and old. I did not hear any crazy stuff here. 

He also appear on Joe Rogan. I'm just watching it now and I will tell you about what I hear. 

 

that first video is hardly 'unbiased'

its a Christian show therefore instantly biased

did she asked him about the heroin usgae and dealing?

the sexual assualt charges?

the brain worm?

and the 2nd video............

Joe Rogan???

unbiased???

he is a massive conspiracy and crackpot theory spreader

LOLOL

What's next, a Steven Bannon video?

Alex Jones?

Paul Joseph Watson?

Jordan Peterson?

Nick Fuentes?

 

RKK Jr is still pushing the CT bollocks that vaccines contain microchips that will be used to control the populace.

Just sheer madness.

People are entitled to their own opinions but NOT their own facts.

Just because someone says they are a christian doesn't mean they get a 'get out of logic/science/evidence/proof/truth free' card.

 

‘Plain old-fashioned dumb’: Joe Rogan slammed for spreading baseless Jan 6 ‘false flag’ conspiracy theory

‘If Mr Rogan is truly interested in focusing on who instigated the attack on the Capitol, he would find more truth in looking at the mirror,’ lawyer says

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/joe-rogan-january-6-false-flag-b2385733.html

Podcaster Joe Rogan has faced criticism after he once again pushed the baseless conspiracy theory that the January 6 insurrection was a “false flag” operation.

The same claim has led Fox News to face a second defamation lawsuit in connection to their coverage of the 2020 election. In a settlement, the network paid Dominion Voting Systems $787.5m for airing false claims about the company.

Mr Rogan has told his listeners on several occasions that federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies influenced the Capitol riot using “agent provocateurs”, including Ray Epps, a supporter of former President Donald Trump, who Mr Rogan said “clearly instigated” the insurrection, according to The Daily Beast.

“The January 6 thing is bad, but also, the intelligence agencies were involved in provoking people into the Capitol building, that’s a fact,” Mr Rogan said during his 28 July episode with fellow comedian Jim Gaffigan.

But the podcaster added that he wasn’t sure that Mr Epps was working with the FBI, claiming that he was only posing questions and noting that others appeared to think that Mr Epps was an undercover agent. But Mr Rogan made some of the same claims that Mr Epps included in his lawsuit against Fox and its now-ousted host Tucker Carlson.

“I think that every other person who was involved in January 6, who was involved in coordinating a break-in into the Capitol and then instigating people, they were all arrested,” Mr Rogan said. “This guy wasn’t. Not only that, but they were defending him in The New York Times, The Washington Post, all these different things saying Fox News has unjustly accused him of instigating when he clearly instigated, he did it on camera. I don’t know if he was a Fed. I know a lot of people think he was a Fed.”

Mr Rogan argued that the intelligence community wanted to frame Mr Trump because of his opposition to the “deep state” and that they created the right circumstances for the violence to occur to make Mr Trump appear responsible for the crimes committed by his supporters.

“Trump was very open about his disdain for the intelligence agencies. Throughout history, people of unchecked power and unchecked influence have enemies and Trump was their enemy,” Mr Rogan said.

He added that the intelligence community was “going to get him any way that they could”.

Mr Epps has sued Fox and Mr Carlson for defamation for claiming that he was an “agent provocateur”. It led to him facing death threats and he and his wife had to leave their home and move to a remote area.

“Just as Fox had focused on voting machine companies when falsely claiming a rigged election, Fox knew it needed a scapegoat for January 6th,” Mr Epps’ legal filing states. “It settled on Ray Epps and began promoting the lie that Epps was a federal agent who incited the attack on the Capitol.”

Mr Rogan has previously said that the intelligence community had a “vested interest in this going sideways”.

“If somebody wanted to disparage a political party or to maybe have some sort of a justification for getting some influential person like Donald Trump offline, that would be the way they would do it,” he has said.

In his legal filing, Mr Epps says he was a frequent viewer of Fox News and that their false claims that voting machines had been rigged was part of the reason he travelled to DC in January 2021.

The filing also states that following right-wingers accusing him of being a federal agent, the Department of Justice told him in May of this year that he was facing charges in connection to the insurrection.

The lawsuit states that this goes against the notion that he’s protected from prosecution.

Mr Epps’ attorney Michael Teter told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that “Joe Rogan’s recent comments show the staying power and consequences of Fox’s and Tucker Carlson’s lies about Ray Epps.

“For years, Fox targeted Ray and spread falsehoods about him and Fox’s viewers used the lies as a basis to harass and threaten Ray.

“The absurdity of the conspiracy theory does not stand in the way of it being spread and weaponized to harm Ray.

“If Mr Rogan is truly interested in focusing on who instigated the attack on the Capitol, he would find more truth in looking at the mirror than he does in focusing on a wedding venue owner from Arizona.”

The FBI has said that “Ray Epps has never been an FBI source or an FBI employee”.

The House Select Committee that investigated the riot has said there’s no evidence to support the claim that Mr Epps planned or instigated the riots.

Philip Bump of The Washington Post tweeted that Mr Rogan’s comments were “just plain old-fashioned dumb”.

Former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens added: “I’ve done a lot of reporting on steroids and multiple studies have proven steroid abuse is dangerous but does not turn you into a barking dog conspiracy nut. So Joe Rogan can’t blame his condition on the juice.”

“Now Joe Rogan, who currently runs one of the largest media platforms out there, is saying January 6th was a false flag. …please stop asking me why I think Rogan is a raging moron,” Ryan Shead wrote.

end

 

 

Science vs. Joe Rogan

In the on-going match between podcasting giant Joe Rogan and the scientific consensus, popularity is a dangerous fixer

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-health-and-nutrition-pseudoscience/science-vs-joe-rogan

“Lot of times, we’re drinking or we’re high, you know, and I say stupid shit.” Coming from a teenager, this statement may invoke memories of your own adolescence. But carried by the voice of then-53-year-old Joe Rogan defending his off-the-cuff, on-the-air remarks about COVID vaccines in young adults, it reeks of arrested development.

Rogan, whose CV includes the television shows NewsRadio and Fear Factor, is, by his own description, a “cage-fighting commentator” and a “dirty stand-up comedian.” But his influence on the health landscape can be felt the most through The Joe Rogan Experience, his long-form interview podcast now exclusively available on Spotify thanks to a $100 million deal.

And that influence is considerable given the scale of Rogan’s podcasting platform, which a few numbers can contextualize.

1920 and counting. That’s the number of episodes the show has released since its beginning eleven years ago, and that number goes up by three or four each week. The average length of these episodes is roughly 2.5 hours. It would take close to seven sleepless months to listen to them all.

28.7 million. That’s the reported number of views on the most recent show Rogan hosted with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

200 million. That’s the number of monthly downloads the show was asserting in 2019, before the move to Spotify. For this same year, the episodes still left on YouTube all have millions of views each, and they generated additional clicks through audio podcasting apps. This regularly put Rogan’s show above the total average prime time audiences for Fox News (2.5 million viewers), MSNBC (1.8 million viewers), and CNN (972,000 viewers). There is indirect evidence that his audience has shrunk since moving behind the great Spotify wall, but his reach still appears to be immense.

The Joe Rogan Experience often feels like being a fly on the wall in a teenager’s basement apartment. The parents are upstairs, watching Carlson, Maddow or Cooper, and we’re downstairs, listening in on private conversations that reveal mind-blowing facts about the world. These conversations, serpentine and unpredictable, fill the air of Rogan’s online and informal equivalent of a gentlemen’s club. Indeed, a whopping 88% of Rogan’s guests are men, as well as 71% of his listenership according to a MediaMonitors survey in 2020. The average age of his listeners according to the same survey is 24.

Rogan has an undeniable appeal to young men who are trying opinions and ideologies on for size. To them, social media may appear superficial and political commentators on American television may seem hopelessly biased. Rogan comes across as a neutral, curious, and relatable host sharing deep, unfiltered conversations with experts and celebrities. No artifice, no sound bites. Just Joe and his inquisitiveness.

Many of his shows feature mixed martial artists and comedians but others focus on health, and that is where his apparent neutrality crumbles and his inclinations become hazardous. Speaking to comedian Bill Burr about COVID-19 while smoking cigars, Rogan said, half-humorously, half-seriously, that wearing a mask was “for b*tches, it just is.” Testosterone is not in short supply on The Joe Rogan Experience. As Matthew Remski, co-host of the Conspirituality podcast, wrote about bro science, “in the rugged country of bros, there are no communities, but rather collections of homogenous, self-contained, self-responsible individuals.” And the gentlemen’s club of Rogan’s podcast has had a disreputable clientele of so-called “self-responsible individuals.”

Rogan platformed Dr. Andrew Weil, one of the kings of promoting unproven and disproven pseudomedical remedies, who ridiculed the idea that placebo effects needed to be ruled out from studies. For the record, they have to be subtracted, though, because they represent non-specific effects of everything but the intervention. However, Weil claimed enthusiastically that they should be ruled in because “that’s the meat of medicine, that’s pure healing from within.” This shows a stunning misunderstanding of scientific research.

Rogan also hosted Bret Weinstein, a former biology professor turned podcasting conspiracy theorist, and Dr. Pierre Kory, a critical care physician, for an emergency broadcast on the use of ivermectin for COVID-19 during which the taking of this antiparasitic drug was said to yield “near-perfect protection” against the disease. This is not the case.

Abigail Shrier was welcomed on the show to talk about her provocatively titled book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. The book promotes a made-up diagnosis, “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” to breathe new life into the cyclical moral panic surrounding children. The website Science-Based Medicine, following the publication of an endorsement of the book by one of its editors, posted a number of articles addressing the multiple inaccuracies of the book, written by actual experts. Meanwhile, Rogan portrayed the care given to transgender people as “stepping in to a developing baby that’s only been alive for six years and shooting chemicals into its body […] to hormonally interact with their body in some sort of a random, Dr. Frankenstein sort of way.” To be this clueless beggars belief.

Being interested in nutrition, Rogan has also aired long conversations with people on the topic of diets. Perhaps the strangest of all was with Mikhaila Peterson, who is not a dietitian, claiming that a diet consisting exclusively of beef and salt cured her arthritis. There are many, many problems with this “carnivore diet,” and it baffles me that Peterson is someone Rogan would look to for insight on what to eat.

And then there’s Alex Jones. The shock jock has embraced every grand conspiracy theory invented by humanity, from the existence of a New World Order to “Hurricane Katrina was a test of FEMA concentration camps.” He was sued for defamation by the families of ten people killed in the Sandy Hook school mass shooting, as he had repeatedly alleged that the massacre was a false flag operation and that the victims’ families were actors. He recently lost all of these defamation suits. Jones has been Rogan’s guest four times.

Rogan does not necessarily endorse what his guests say—he’s just asking questions—but he bullhorns their pseudoscientific and conspiracy-laden views to millions of audience members. To Alex Jones, he said, “it’s f---ing dangerous to censor you.” He subsumes calls for responsible platforming under a general defence of free speech. “Censoring is bad,” goes the thinking, “therefore the best thing to do is to platform as many iconoclasts as possible, to make sure their claims reach the ears of millions of people who can then decide for themselves where the truth lies.” Which leads to Alex Jones telling tens of millions of people that “they” are coming to your house demanding a COVID test and if you don’t agree, “they” will arrest you. And although Rogan often pushes Jones for evidence on his claims, he has still platformed a paranoid lunatic (or a man who acts in this manner for profits) who once said that Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children through a pedophilia ring found in the non-existent basement of a pizza joint.

A colossal reach like Rogan’s requires maturity, especially in the middle of an infodemic. But in clinging to the teenage desire to hear things that’ll blow your mind, the podcaster with a golden megaphone broadcasts lies, fantasies, and bad medical advice.

Living on the cutting edge

Joe Rogan’s attraction to pseudoscience wasn’t born with COVID. Like so many people passionate about fitness, Rogan is always looking for an edge. He has promoted cryotherapy in the past, even posting a photo of himself inside a cryochamber on his personal Instagram account which has 13.5 million followers. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has said this therapy has “very little evidence about its safety or effectiveness.” While the promoted claims may look scientific, they are based on a lot of hot air.

Rogan has also repeatedly publicized stem cell injections as miraculous treatments. They apparently completely healed his rotator cuff tear, and Rogan had Mel Gibson on to talk about how a stem cell treatment in Panama saved his 92-year-old father’s life, improving his thinking, his eyesight, “and other stuff […] that he would hate for me to talk about!” Anecdotes are not hard evidence, but the confessional atmosphere of the podcast gives these medical claims the weight of cutting-edge secrets. Make no mistake: stem cell research holds tremendous potential, but the current industry of stem cell tourism (and the growing creep of stem cell staycations) is built on scienceploitation. Its claims are unsubstantiated and the harms are very real.

The air of secrecy that surrounds these therapies—discovered through a personal network of would-be pioneers that Rogan’s status has allowed him to build—is also seen in the conspiracy theories he has embraced in the past. Moon hoaxes and Roswell aliens were frequent fodder in the early days of his podcast. One of his favourite guests is Graham Hancock, with seven appearances on the show, who wrote one of Rogan’s favourite books, Fingerprints of the Gods. In it, Hancock theorizes that an advanced civilization forgotten by historians existed in our distant past and was nearly wiped out, with survivors bringing their arcane knowledge to Egypt and the Americas. This kind of pseudoarchaeological hypothesis pushes all the right buttons: it’s revolutionary knowledge heretofore hidden from view and uncovered by a Galileo figure. This is heroin for the adolescent mind.

With COVID, Rogan’s habit for embracing pseudoscience and the rugged individualism that often puts him at odds with public health landed him in hot water with the media. COVID is no worse than the flu, he’d say. Ivermectin is a perfect storm against COVID: “extremely effective, extremely cheap, and generic.” And, infamously, if you’re a healthy 21-year-old, you don’t need to get the COVID vaccine. When confronted, Rogan simply says, “I’m not a doctor, I’m a f---ing moron.” But he’s a moron with influence.

A survey commissioned by The Washington Post revealed that Rogan’s listeners were significantly less likely to intend to vaccinate than those who do not regularly listen, with an 18% lower intent in February 2021. It would be foolish to infer that Rogan single-handedly swayed these people: many are drawn to him because of his libertarian tendencies and his suspicion of public health recommendations. But given the magnitude of his audience and its young average age, it would be equally foolish to pretend Rogan’s misinformed opinions have no effect. When quarterback Aaron Rodgers caught the disease, he took a cocktail of remedies, including ivermectin. Whose advice was he following? Joe Rogan’s.

Spotify, the company that exclusively platforms his podcast, says it will not allow “any inaccurate content on its podcasting platform,” which is ludicrous. First, audio content is notoriously challenging to moderate. Second, Rogan has proved to be too much of a draw for Spotify to risk their business relationship. Australian misinformer Pete Evans had his podcast removed by Spotify for “dangerous, false, deceptive, and misleading content about COVID-19.” Even though the same label could be applied to Rogan’s show, similar action has not been taken. Spotify did remove some episodes from its catalogue, including those with comedian Chris D’Elia (accused of soliciting nude photos from teenagers) and with far-right figures. But the COVID misinformation remains on the playlist for now.

The cycle of excitement

Whenever Joe Rogan is trending on social media, Dr. Danielle Belardo, a cardiologist, tweets out, “Joe Rogan is goop for men.” She is referring to Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness emporium, propped up by a foundation of pseudoscience. Indeed, Joe Rogan is a walking incubator for supplements. A fansite keeping close tabs on what the podcaster says reports that, during the pandemic, Rogan received weekly intravenous drips of vitamin C, zinc, glutathione, and NAD. At 40, he started testosterone replacement therapy. The site also lists a preposterous list of supplements Rogan has at least experimented with, from glucosamine to cannabidiol tincture, from quercetin to nootropics, including Onnit’s Alpha Brain, which the company started making it at Rogan’s suggestion and which he endorses. He says the supplement, which contains ingredients meant to increase levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, makes him mentally sharper. But while supplements can treat deficiencies, they don’t grant superpowers if you take more of them. Are the amounts in Alpha Brain enough to do anything? How do they interact together? The usual skepticism of the supplement industry should apply here. We are, after all, in the same territory as Alex Jones’ own Brain Force Plus.

There is another angle to the Rogan-Paltrow comparison: both hint at wealth being an important gateway to health. Rogan’s stack of supplements costs money. So does the private gym furnished with high-quality fitness and combat sport equipment. The Iron Neck, the glute-ham developer, the iron kettlebells with the ape faces sculpted into them, discussed on the air and Instagrammed for millions to salivate over, paint a familiar picture of aspirational wellness. Health is a personal choice that a multimillionaire can easily afford. Masks, after all, are for b*tches. But the metaphorical mask does slip when, despite a pantry full of supplements, Rogan did get COVID and did not trust his pantry to save him. He reached for the kitchen sink: monoclonal antibodies, ivermectin, the antibiotic azithromycin, prednisone, and extra drips of NAD and vitamins. Everything money could conjure up was used in the wake of, as he put it, “one bad day.”

Despite many of his critics calling Rogan a meathead, he’s not dumb. But his thinking is biased in ways that make pseudoscience look titillating. Faced with a new supplement or new intervention, his brain seems to lean on the same shortcuts. Is this new? Does it challenge the status quo? Has it not yet been endorsed by the medical establishment? Does it feel objective to me and well-reasoned? Is it recommended by a friend of mine, possibly an expert I’ve had on the show who’s cutting-edge? And are they being censored or criticized in some way? Consensus is not sexy when you’re attracted to innovation. Rogan wants secret knowledge from his rogue experts who can tell him what looks promising in the lab. He wants to beat the lab mice to it. And he’ll bank on his personal experience to decide if it works or not, even when he admits that he does so many things to improve his health, it’s hard to know if the umpteenth addition to the lot made a difference. But no worries because the cycle of excitement gets to start again with another shiny thing.

In the background of all this is an anti-establishment sentiment. Mainstream medicine is boring and too slow to pick up on novelty, is the message. The mainstream media attempts to control the narrative with lies. CNN, in fact, did lie about Rogan by claiming repeatedly that he had taken a horse dewormer. Ivermectin can be used to deworm horses but it can also be used in humans, and Rogan said he got human-grade ivermectin from a medical doctor, not a vet. What CNN did affects its credibility.

But you cannot sow distrust in mainstream establishments and not expect people to seek out an alternative. But is the alternative better? If the pharmaceutical industry puts money ahead of patients, any off-patent drug pushed by an even-keeled contrarian is a cure-all. If CNN is found to slant its coverage, Rogan’s audience should watch Tim Pool, an independent pundit with a heavily biased, faux-journalistic body of work who recently hosted both Rogan and Alex Jones. According to Rogan, the mainstream media is “a left-wing cult.” Are we supposed to turn a blind eye to the numerous problems with the alternatives because the mainstream sometimes misses the mark?

Rogan wants us to drift away from “the establishment” and listen to the siren song of its “freedom”-chanting critics. Its secrets are whispering to us. Joe Rogan’s popularity mesmerizes and suggests we must listen to him or miss out on the experimental magic. But the real secret may just be this: we don’t have to listen to him.

 

 

Joe Rogan: "It's Obvious The Videos From The Moon Are Fake"

 

smdh

[Fulham Broadway 16,894]

3 hours ago, cosmicway said:

Fulham Broadway the well known TC poster does n't like me writing stories from Greece

Only when you used them to deflect from a home truth. Your Greek stories are great -keep em coming

[cosmicway 1,333]

After J6 we expected Trump was over and done with.
Later he announced his intention to carry on, so we thought he was going for a Ross Perot like third party, no rep after trying to lynch his own vice president and all that.
Later again we expected he could not win the nomination for the republican ticket.
All these expectations proved wrong and by late 2022-23 he was really back.
So the Dems should have tried to adopt a rep agenda on domestic issues by as much as possible but they did the opposite.

[IMissEden 21]

Murdered by words. Awful people you few sheep too minnow minded to stop leading other sheep to shit lives via your lack of realistic outlooks. 
 

 

[IMissEden 21]

Can hear the mental mechanisms at work when people tell themselves, heh yeah, what does this idiot think, the sky being blue 🙄

The lack of self awareness, awareness in general is hard to put into words. Like explaining colours to the colour blind. Never again will it happen in the west. You’re divisive dangerous symptoms, of the same disconnected rhetorics. 

[Fernando 6,477]

18 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Only when you used them to deflect from a home truth. Your Greek stories are great -keep em coming

I got a question for you, you often have said that what Israel is doing is genocide? 

Well I'm not one to debate that because I always say war is horrible no matter what side you are. 

Now the question I have is this. That term genocide is thrown but what it really means? If I'm not mistaken I think it was coined after Hitler try to destroy the Jewish race. Is that correct? 

And if that's correct then I have a question. To constitute genocide based on that past history then a genocide is destroying of a race/ethnicity etc etc for no apparent reason other then that you don't like them, is that correct? 

And last question if someone is label "genocide" and they show mercy, is it still genocide? 

Can mercy and genocide be in the same context? Or mercy will never show up in a genocide event? 

Edited November 16 by Fernando

[cosmicway 1,333]

2 hours ago, Fernando said:

I got a question for you, you often have said that what Israel is doing is genocide? 

Well I'm not one to debate that because I always say war is horrible no matter what side you are. 

Now the question I have is this. That term genocide is thrown but what it really means? If I'm not mistaken I think it was coined after Hitler try to destroy the Jewish race. Is that correct? 

And if that's correct then I have a question. To constitute genocide based on that past history then a genocide is destroying of a race/ethnicity etc etc for no apparent reason other then that you don't like them, is that correct? 

And last question if someone is label "genocide" and they show mercy, is it still genocide? 

Can mercy and genocide be in the same context? Or mercy will never show up in a genocide event? 

This is a nonsense accusation against Israel, left wing newspeak.
Genocide means to eliminate an entire nation or a race of people. 
There was the holocaust - no reason, just because Hitler did n't like the Jews.
Before that the Armenian genocide. This happened after some Armenian tribes in eastern Turkey rebelled against the Sultan during the early days of world war I. The triumvirate of pashas ruling Turkey instigated by the Germans ordered the elimination of all Armenians living in the Ottoman realm,
In both case there was the intent to kill everybody and the number of victims justifies the term genocide.

Criminal acts but less than genocide were things like My Lai and the Greek villages Kandanos-Distomo-Kalavryta burned by the Germans. Those are called massacres.

With Palestinians it is parallel victims, it's happening because the Hamash are using Gaza as a fortress, they are not declaring it undefended.
Even if Israelis committed some atrocities during this war or previous wars the term genocide -as understood by the United nations- is not justified.

Edited November 16 by cosmicway

[Vesper 28,967]

Why the Democrats Lost Workers – And the Election

The Democrats’ failure to reconnect with American workers cost them the election, leaving the party adrift in a coalition dominated by elites and urban professionals.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/why-the-democrats-lost-workers-and-the-election

 

The outcome of the US presidential election was more of a Democratic loss than a triumph for Donald Trump. The Democrats lost not because US President Joe Biden stayed in the race too long, and not because Kamala Harris is unqualified, but because they have been losing workers and failed to win them back. 

The party ceased to be a home for American workers long ago, owing to its support for digital disruption, globalization, large immigrant inflows, and “woke” ideas. Nowadays, those most likely to vote for Democrats are the highly educated, not manual workers. In the United States, as elsewhere, democracy will suffer if the centre-left does not become more pro-worker. 

While the Democrats did win some previous elections with support from Silicon Valley, minorities, portions of organized labour, and the professional class in large cities, this was never sustainable. Such a coalition is alienating to workers and the middle class in much of the country, especially in smaller cities and the South. The problem was already obvious after 2016, which is part of the reason why Biden adopted a pro-worker industrial strategy in 2020. 

The Biden economy did deliver for the working class by creating jobs and strengthening the US industrial base. Wages at the bottom rose rapidly, and policies started moving a little toward the views of American workers on immigration, protectionism, support for unions, and public investment. But the party establishment – especially the highly educated activists concentrated in prosperous coastal cities – never internalized workers’ cultural and economic concerns. Instead, Democrats often seemed to be lecturing or scolding them. 

Here is my own test for understanding the relationship between the Democrats and American workers: If a member of the Democratic elite is stranded in an unfamiliar city, would he prefer to spend the next four hours talking to a Midwestern American worker with a high-school diploma, or to a professional with a postgraduate education from Mexico, China, or Indonesia? Whenever I pose this question to colleagues and friends, they all assume it’s the latter. 

With her emphasis on the middle class and patriotism, Harris initially seemed ready to address this problem. If credible, a true effort to win back workers may well have won the election. But by the end, the campaign had centred around the issues that mattered most to the base. The biggest attempt to broaden the coalition came from using Liz Cheney (a Republican former congresswoman who has been banished from her party) to appeal to suburban women on the issue of abortion. Reproductive freedom may be a critical issue, but it was never going to win over the working class, certainly not working-class men. 

On the economy, Democrats can talk about opportunity and jobs until they turn blue, but unless they distance themselves from the tech and global business elite, such messaging will not translate into a real pro-worker agenda – and workers will see right through it. With even Silicon Valley starting to leave the Democrats (ironically), there is no better time to change course. 

But a redirection will be difficult now that Trump and J.D. Vance’s Republican Party has become the main home for workers – especially those in manufacturing and smaller cities – and now that Democratic elites are so culturally disconnected from workers and much of the middle class. 

The great tragedy is that while Biden’s agenda had subtly started paying off for workers (proving that globalization and rising inequality are not just blind forces of nature), the next administration’s policies will almost certainly support plutocrats. High tariffs on imports from China will not bring back jobs that have left the country, and they certainly won’t help keep inflation in check. While Biden’s pandemic-era policies (coming on top of Trump’s own stimulus measures) did fuel inflation, the US Federal Reserve managed to restore price stability. But if Trump pressures the Fed for more rate cuts (to boost his own popularity), inflation could return. 

Moreover, Trump’s championing of the crypto sector will probably allow for more scams and bubbles, while doing nothing for American workers or consumers. His promised tax cuts will primarily help corporations and the stock market, with any resulting increase in investment going largely toward the tech sector and automation. 

More broadly, the next four years of technology policy could turn out to be a disaster for workers. While Biden issued a major executive order on AI, this was merely a first step. If not regulated properly, AI will not only wreak havoc on many industries; it will also lead to pervasive manipulation of consumers and citizens (just look at social media), and its true potential as a tool that can help workers will go unrealised. By supporting large companies and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, the Trump administration will fuel the trend toward labour-replacing automation. 

Trump’s threat to US institutions also poses a big risk for workers. It is no secret that he will further weaken democratic norms, introduce uncertainty into policymaking, deepen polarisation, and undermine trust in institutions like the courts and the Department of Justice (which he will try to weaponise). This behaviour will not lead immediately to economic collapse, and it may even encourage some investment by his favoured companies (including the fossil-fuel industry) in the short run. But in the medium term (say, ten years or so), weaker institutions and loss of public trust in the courts will take a toll on investment and efficiency. 

Such institutional weaknesses are always economically costly, and they could prove truly disastrous in an economy that depends on innovation and complex, advanced technologies, which require greater contractual support, trust between parties, and confidence in the rule of law. Without expert-led regulation, much of the economy – from health care and education to online business and consumer services – will be awash in snake oil, rather than high-quality products. 

If the economy can no longer foster innovation and productivity growth, wages will stagnate. Yet even in the face of such adverse outcomes, many workers will not return to the Democrats unless the party truly takes their interests on board. That means not only adopting policies that support workers’ incomes, but also speaking their language, however foreign it may be to the coastal elites who have run the party aground.

[Fulham Broadway 16,894]

3 hours ago, Fernando said:

I got a question for you, you often have said that what Israel is doing is genocide? 

Well I'm not one to debate that because I always say war is horrible no matter what side you are. 

Now the question I have is this. That term genocide is thrown but what it really means? If I'm not mistaken I think it was coined after Hitler try to destroy the Jewish race. Is that correct? 

And if that's correct then I have a question. To constitute genocide based on that past history then a genocide is destroying of a race/ethnicity etc etc for no apparent reason other then that you don't like them, is that correct? 

And last question if someone is label "genocide" and they show mercy, is it still genocide? 

Can mercy and genocide be in the same context? Or mercy will never show up in a genocide event? 

Apparently its not just the quantity of deaths -it's the intention.

I was quoting the UN -

Israel’s  conduct in Gaza “is consistent with genocide,” including mass civilian casualties, using starvation as a weapon, removing water and electricity, bombing every scool, and hospital, and every church including Christian churches. according to a new United Nations Special Committee report released Thursday.

“Through its siege over Gaza, obstruction of humanitarian aid, alongside targeted attacks and killing of civilians and aid workers, despite repeated UN appeals, binding orders from the International Court of Justice and resolutions of the Security Council, Israel is intentionally causing death, starvation and serious injury, using starvation as a method of war and inflicting collective punishment on the Palestinian population,” the UN committee said in a press release

“The Israeli military’s use of AI-assisted targeting, with minimal human oversight, combined with heavy bombs, underscores Israel’s disregard of its obligation to distinguish between civilians and combatants and take adequate safeguards to prevent civilian deaths,” the committee said.

The UN committee added that Israeli officials have publicly supported policies to destroy “vital water, sanitation and food systems” in Gaza as well as prevent access to fuel.

UN committee says Israel warfare in Gaza 'consistent with genocide'

UN committee says Israel's actions 'consistent with characteristics of genocide' | Middle East Eye

I mean at the end of the day people can make up their own minds - but guaranteed it will go down as genocide. 

 

btw I asked you a question a while back about whether Trump had accepted global climate change ? - because migration is set to be a hundred fold by 2050 - eg Bangladesh 200m people living below sea level - when they have no homes to go back to because of half a meter sea level rises - they will all be on the move, and that is just one country

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Fernando 6,477]

15 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

it's the intention.

I agree with this, but then your wrong with Israel then because they warn people to get out. Intention is not there when you warn people. 

16 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Israel’s  conduct in Gaza “is consistent with genocide,” including mass civilian casualties, using starvation as a weapon, removing water and electricity, bombing every scool, and hospital, and every church including Christian churches. according to a new United Nations Special Committee report released Thursday.

 

Now you have to ask why? Is it because Hamas terrorist are there? Our just because they want and are evil?

17 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

“Through its siege over Gaza, obstruction of humanitarian aid, alongside targeted attacks and killing of civilians and aid workers, despite repeated UN appeals, binding orders from the International Court of Justice and resolutions of the Security Council, Israel is intentionally causing death, starvation and serious injury, using starvation as a method of war and inflicting collective punishment on the Palestinian population,” the UN committee said in a press release

 

But how come Hamas is not starve? Why are they still fighting? Where they getting their food? Unless they stealing from the people?

 

18 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

“The Israeli military’s use of AI-assisted targeting, with minimal human oversight, combined with heavy bombs, underscores Israel’s disregard of its obligation to distinguish between civilians and combatants and take adequate safeguards to prevent civilian deaths,” the committee said.

 

War is ugly and no one side will look pretty. 

 

18 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

I mean at the end of the day people can make up their own minds - but guaranteed it will go down as genocide. 

 

First you need to understand what geneocide is. If the intention of evil of just wiping people then I agree. 

But if there's mercy then I don't agree. Warning people to leave before they attack is mercy. 

Heck I wish I would get that kind of warning before a bomb drops on me. 

Now I agree war is bad and innoncent lives get lost. Especially when your not fighting army but terrorist organization that hides with regular people. 

20 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

btw I asked you a question a while back about whether Trump had accepted global climate change ? - because migration is set to be a hundred fold by 2050 - eg Bangladesh 200m people living below sea level - when they have no homes to go back to because of half a meter sea level rises - they will all be on the move, and that is just one country

 

Nope Trump is wrong on this. I don't have to agree with everything that Trump says or do, but climate change is real. 

But the problem is not just that but China. China don't follow no regulation and no one will do nothing because it's China as well. 

[Fulham Broadway 16,894]

4 minutes ago, Fernando said:

but then your wrong with Israel then because they warn people to get out. Intention is not there when you warn people. 

The UN have highlighted how they tell people to move to 'safe' area then bomb the civilians. This has happened many times. So I think you are wrong about this.

 

6 minutes ago, Fernando said:

Now you have to ask why? Is it because Hamas terrorist are there? Our just because they want and are evil?

Is that rhetorical ? I dont believe in evil, but its basically a land grab and to save Netanyahus arse. he has zero intention of saving or caring about peace or the 'hostages' Dont forget he bolstered Hamas to annul the chance of a two state solution.

9 minutes ago, Fernando said:

But how come Hamas is not starve? Why are they still fighting? Where they getting their food? Unless they stealing from the people?

Maybe they are =but there were 350 lorries a day of aid, now reduced to 29 a day 

A supplementary question for you - why are there no IDF videos of them actually fighting with Hamas ?? None at all. But there are plenty of videos of them wearing Palestinian womens underwear, smashing up kitchens and schools and destroying every building ?? That is not 'war' it is genocide.  And dont forget no International journalists have been allowed into Gaza for one year

12 minutes ago, Fernando said:

War is ugly and no one side will look pretty. 

 

War usually involves  TWO armies

15 minutes ago, Fernando said:

But if there's mercy then I don't agree. Warning people to leave before they attack is mercy. 

On numerous occasions people have been warned to go to another area, then slaughtered. Mostly women and children. To me and most normal people that is disgusting

17 minutes ago, Fernando said:

But the problem is not just that but China. China don't follow no regulation and no one will do nothing because it's China as well. 

Apparently China is the biggest emission culprit because of their size, but on the positive they have done the most out of nations to reduce pollution, eg they produce by far the most electric vehicles

[Vesper 28,967]

Liz Cheney Was an Electoral Fiasco for Kamala Harris

Conservatives backed Trump by bigger percentages than in 2020. And time spent with Cheney prevented Harris from reaching out to the voters she needed.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/liz-cheney-electoral-fiasco-kamala-harris/

Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a moderated conversation with former US Representative Liz Cheney on October 21, 2024. (Kamil Krzaczynski / AFP)

Kamala Harris made her first campaign appearance with Liz Cheney in Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party, one month and two days before the 2024 election. The point of the visit was to signal to conservatives that they could split with Donald Trump’s Republican Party over their concerns about the former president’s election denialism, authoritarian rhetoric, and embrace of global strongmen. Republicans could, Cheney argued, cast a “Country Over Party” vote for the Democratic presidential nominee—just like the former chair of the House Republican Conference, who broke with Trump over his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, planned to do.

The media loved the story. Lavish attention was paid to the event. Cable channels went live. Ponderous essays were written in the great newspapers of the nation about the prospect that Harris would attract enough Republican votes to upend Trump’s bid for a second term.

Unfortunately, while many Democratic tacticians were enthusiastic about Cheney’s jumping on board as a Harris backer, Republican voters couldn’t have cared less. The Cheney strategy was an abject failure that added few if any votes to the Democratic total, alienated voters who have no taste for the former GOP representative’s neocon extremism, and stole precious time from an agonizingly short campaign schedule.

While it is certainly not the sole explanation for why Democrats fared as poorly as they did, the Cheney detour was a political fiasco.

This reality is most apparent in the election results from Ripon. The east-central Wisconsin city where abolitionists, land reformers, and utopian socialists founded the Republican Party in 1854 seemed ripe for a cross-party appeal. Ripon has been a Republican stronghold for 170 years, but the city is also a college town that in the past has shown a good measure of enthusiasm for Democrats such as Barack Obama. But that’s not how things played out on Election Day.

On November 5, Trump won 53.8 percent of the vote (2,097 ballots) in the city of Ripon, while 45 percent (1,753 ballots) voted for Harris.

That was a worse finish for the Democratic ticket than in 2020, when Joe Biden won 46.6 percent (1,820 ballots), while 51.7 percent (2,019 ballots) voted for Trump.

But, surely, Ripon was an anomaly.

No. Definitely and unequivocally no.

After the Ripon rally, Harris returned to Wisconsin for an event with Cheney in Waukesha County in the vote-rich Milwaukee suburbs. The historically Republican county had seen some movement toward the Democrats in 2020 and 2022, and the Harris campaign imagined that a visit to the region by their candidate and Cheney—on a day when the pair also appeared together in Pennsylvania and Michigan—might yield benefits this year. It didn’t.

Despite the fact that much attention was paid to the prime-time visit, Trump’s percentage of the vote held steady in Waukesha County, at 59 percent.

In a state where Trump lost by around 20,000 votes in 2020 and won by around 30,000 votes in 2024, his Waukesha County advantage in each year was around 54,000.

So all that time spent hanging around with Liz Cheney moved few if any votes. And it was even worse nationwide.

In 2020, according to the NBC News assessment of exit polling date, 14 percent of self-identified conservatives said they voted for Biden, while 5 percent of self-identified Republicans said they did the same.

In 2024, 9 percent of conservatives said they voted for the Democratic ticket, while just 4 percent of Republican voters said they backed Harris.

The notion that spending day after day with Liz Cheney—who publicly trumpeted an endorsement from her father, former vice president Dick Cheney, and other right-wing Republicans—would benefit Harris turned out to be a damaging distraction for Democrats.

Even before Harris began making appearances with Cheney in key battleground states, conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg, an astute observer of Republican Party patterns, observed, “The universe of undecided and persuadable voters in the relevant swing states is small. Those who have been swayed by Cheney’s well-known arguments about Trump’s unfitness for office have probably already been swayed. How many voters might yet be persuaded by her formal endorsement of Harris? Dozens? Hundreds? Maybe.”

Goldberg’s skepticism was proven right by the exit polls. But that wasn’t the worst of it for the Harris campaign.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, the embrace of the Cheneys came at a cost that has been too rarely noted in the postelection analyses of the party’s defeat on November 5.

Because President Biden delayed his decision to end his reelection bid until late July, at a point when Democratic poll numbers had collapsed, Harris was left with just 107 days to mount a presidential bid.

Every day was precious, and every signal sent to potential voters was significant. The days spent with Cheney, and the resources expended to promote endorsements from neoconservative Republicans, cost the Democrats in significant ways. They sent a signal to potential Democratic voters, many of who recalled the Iraq War and other Cheney projects, that the focus of the campaign was on outreach to the right, They ate up time that could have been spent campaigning in union halls in working-class communities with figures such as United Auto Workers union president Shawn Fain and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. They burned up time that could have been devoted to sincere, if difficult, conversations about Gaza. They foreclosed opportunities to reach out to Latino communities in swing states. The list goes on and on.

But the bottom line is constant: Every minute that Kamala Harris spent with Liz Cheney was a colossal waste of the candidate’s time.

[Vesper 28,967]

Bernie Sanders Is Right: Democrats Have Abandoned the Working Class

The party chased former Republicans and rich donors, while alienating the working-class majority.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/bernie-sanders-democrats-working-class/

 

Senator Bernie Sanders speaks during a primary night rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Tuesday, February 11, 2020.(Adam Glanzman / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has quickly emerged as the most important and polarizing voice in the struggle over the future of the Democratic Party. In response to Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential contest, Sanders on Wednesday penned a scathing analysis in which he noted,

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them…. Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy, which has so much economic power?

Answering his own questions, Sanders declared, “Probably not.”

Sanders’s analysis was shared by many, not only labor leaders such as Painters Union president Jimmy Williams Jr. but also unexpected sources such as Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who started his political career as a moderate Democrat. In an X thread on Sunday, Murphy acknowledged that the radical critique of mainstream Democrats was accurate, writing that “when progressives like Bernie aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists. Why? Maybe because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base.”

In contrast to Murphy, other party leaders and pundits remained in deep denial. Responding to Sanders’s comment, Representative James Clyburn, whose endorsement of Joe Biden was crucial for his becoming the party’s presidential nominee in 2020, said, “I do not agree that we are not a party of working men and women…We ought to just chill out for a while…don’t worry about blaming anybody.” Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi was even more curt, saying, “I don’t respect saying that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class.”

Sanders responded to Pelosi by noting,

“We have not even brought forth legislation to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, despite the fact that some 20 million people in this country are working for less than $15 an hour in America today…if you’re an average working person out there, do you really think that the [D]emocratic party is going to the mats, taking on powerful special interests and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no.”

One frequent objection to Sanders was that Biden had actually done a great deal for the working class—and also that Bidenomics was a success. This was the tack taken by Will Stancil, a Minnesota attorney who recently failed in his congressional primary campaign but who nonetheless enjoys a large liberal audience on social media. Stancil has been adamant throughout the Biden presidency that any claim that workers are suffering economic distress is merely a creation of biased media coverage. Stancil tweeted, “There’s no actual empirical evidence that workers suffered greatly in the last few years, and a ton of evidence workers prospered.”

Empirically, the vast majority of voters don’t share Stancil’s opinion. On the eve of the election, according to CBS News, 60 percent of Americans rated the economy as “fairly bad” or “very bad.” To dismiss all these voters as victims of brainwashing might be emotionally satisfying—but it is bad politics. In contrast to the empathetic Bill Clinton of the 1990s, Stancil and his ilk are saying, “I don’t feel your pain.”

A more extended version of the Stancil argument was made by Michael A. Cohen—a centrist journalist who frequently and insistently reminds people that he is not Donald Trump’s former lawyer. Writing on MSNBC, Cohen argued that Sanders was flatly wrong. Biden, Cohen contended, has been “staunchly pro-labor”; he also claimed that that Kamala Harris made a concerted effort to foreground economic populism in her political campaign. According to Cohen, “the Harris campaign poured $200 million into ads that focused on her economic message. In fact, she outspent the Trump campaign by around $70 million on ads about the economy.”

Strangely, Cohen ended his article by claiming that, although the Democrats haven’t abandoned the working class, maybe they should do so now. If there is any path for Democrats to return to national power, Cohen suggests, it might lie in “doubling down on what produced such significant political gains for the party in 2018, 2020 and 2022—college-educated suburban voters.” Conversely, Cohen insists that working-class voters are too socially conservative to ever vote for the Democrats, concluding that “if Democrats think they can win back the loyalty of the working class, they likely should think again.”

Cohen apparently agrees with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who in 2016 infamously declared: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

Normally, the electorate selects political leaders—but it is also the case that political parties sometimes select their electorate. Democrats like Schumer and Cohen have been eager to make the Democrats into the party of well-to-do, college-educated former Republicans, even at the expense of alienating the working class. Suburban college-educated voters are wealthier, so more able to fill the party’s coffers—and they are less likely to demand economic policies that might alienate even wealthier donors.

What of the claim that Biden was strongly pro-worker, and that Harris did run on economic populism? There’s an element of truth to both, but the reality is that is that both Biden and Harris were compromised figures.

In a clarifying analysis, Stephen Semler, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, documented that Biden’s focus on economic populism waned in the spring of 2022. According to Semler, “Once Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden ditched his progressive domestic agenda and rebranded as a deficit hawk.” Even as a rhetorical focus, economic populism became less important to Biden than his attempt to revive Cold War liberalism, with the United States pitted against autocratic foes on the international stage and an authoritarian menace at home. As a hawk, Biden started talking much more about the threats to democracy—and much less about how he could improve the lives of ordinary Americans. Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein reports, “Ron Klain, former chief of staff, wanted President Biden to acknowledge the pain the Fed’s high interest rates were causing families and businesses through higher costs. The push was met with resistance from a White House wary of even the appearance of criticizing the Fed.”

Harris was even more tone-deaf on economic pain than Biden. On Saturday, The New York Times reported that the Harris campaign watered down its economic message and policies in order to please wealthy donors—an effort headed by Harris’s brother-in-law, Tony West, an Uber executive. According to the newspaper:

The result was a Democratic candidate who vacillated between competing visions for how to address the economic problems that voters repeatedly ranked as their top issue. Ms. Harris neither abandoned nor fully embraced key liberal goals for confronting corporate power and raising taxes on the rich. Instead, she adopted marginal pro-business tweaks to the status quo that both her corporate and progressive allies agreed never coalesced into a clear economic argument.

Bernie Sanders was right: The Democrats have betrayed the working class. This is not just a matter of one election but goes back to the triumph of neoliberalism within the party’s elite, which started with Jimmy Carter’s winning the presidential nomination in 1976. This process has never been unchallenged: Resistance to the neoliberal turn came from many insurgent campaigns—notably those of Jesse Jackson and Bernie Sanders himself.

The only way out of the neoliberal trap remains the path Sanders laid out in his two primary runs in 2016 and 2020: a small-donor-funded campaign that rejects corporate control and is stridently pro–working class. Sanders is, alas, too old to run again. But the real question for the Democrats is who can emerge as the next Bernie Sanders—and win the 2028 nomination.

[Fulham Broadway 16,894]

8 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Bernie Sanders Is Right: Democrats Have Abandoned the Working Class

The party chased former Republicans and rich donors, while alienating the working-class majority.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/bernie-sanders-democrats-working-class/

 

Senator Bernie Sanders speaks during a primary night rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Tuesday, February 11, 2020.(Adam Glanzman / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has quickly emerged as the most important and polarizing voice in the struggle over the future of the Democratic Party. In response to Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential contest, Sanders on Wednesday penned a scathing analysis in which he noted,

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them…. Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy, which has so much economic power?

Answering his own questions, Sanders declared, “Probably not.”

Sanders’s analysis was shared by many, not only labor leaders such as Painters Union president Jimmy Williams Jr. but also unexpected sources such as Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who started his political career as a moderate Democrat. In an X thread on Sunday, Murphy acknowledged that the radical critique of mainstream Democrats was accurate, writing that “when progressives like Bernie aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists. Why? Maybe because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base.”

In contrast to Murphy, other party leaders and pundits remained in deep denial. Responding to Sanders’s comment, Representative James Clyburn, whose endorsement of Joe Biden was crucial for his becoming the party’s presidential nominee in 2020, said, “I do not agree that we are not a party of working men and women…We ought to just chill out for a while…don’t worry about blaming anybody.” Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi was even more curt, saying, “I don’t respect saying that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class.”

Sanders responded to Pelosi by noting,

“We have not even brought forth legislation to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, despite the fact that some 20 million people in this country are working for less than $15 an hour in America today…if you’re an average working person out there, do you really think that the [D]emocratic party is going to the mats, taking on powerful special interests and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no.”

One frequent objection to Sanders was that Biden had actually done a great deal for the working class—and also that Bidenomics was a success. This was the tack taken by Will Stancil, a Minnesota attorney who recently failed in his congressional primary campaign but who nonetheless enjoys a large liberal audience on social media. Stancil has been adamant throughout the Biden presidency that any claim that workers are suffering economic distress is merely a creation of biased media coverage. Stancil tweeted, “There’s no actual empirical evidence that workers suffered greatly in the last few years, and a ton of evidence workers prospered.”

Empirically, the vast majority of voters don’t share Stancil’s opinion. On the eve of the election, according to CBS News, 60 percent of Americans rated the economy as “fairly bad” or “very bad.” To dismiss all these voters as victims of brainwashing might be emotionally satisfying—but it is bad politics. In contrast to the empathetic Bill Clinton of the 1990s, Stancil and his ilk are saying, “I don’t feel your pain.”

A more extended version of the Stancil argument was made by Michael A. Cohen—a centrist journalist who frequently and insistently reminds people that he is not Donald Trump’s former lawyer. Writing on MSNBC, Cohen argued that Sanders was flatly wrong. Biden, Cohen contended, has been “staunchly pro-labor”; he also claimed that that Kamala Harris made a concerted effort to foreground economic populism in her political campaign. According to Cohen, “the Harris campaign poured $200 million into ads that focused on her economic message. In fact, she outspent the Trump campaign by around $70 million on ads about the economy.”

Strangely, Cohen ended his article by claiming that, although the Democrats haven’t abandoned the working class, maybe they should do so now. If there is any path for Democrats to return to national power, Cohen suggests, it might lie in “doubling down on what produced such significant political gains for the party in 2018, 2020 and 2022—college-educated suburban voters.” Conversely, Cohen insists that working-class voters are too socially conservative to ever vote for the Democrats, concluding that “if Democrats think they can win back the loyalty of the working class, they likely should think again.”

Cohen apparently agrees with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who in 2016 infamously declared: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

Normally, the electorate selects political leaders—but it is also the case that political parties sometimes select their electorate. Democrats like Schumer and Cohen have been eager to make the Democrats into the party of well-to-do, college-educated former Republicans, even at the expense of alienating the working class. Suburban college-educated voters are wealthier, so more able to fill the party’s coffers—and they are less likely to demand economic policies that might alienate even wealthier donors.

What of the claim that Biden was strongly pro-worker, and that Harris did run on economic populism? There’s an element of truth to both, but the reality is that is that both Biden and Harris were compromised figures.

In a clarifying analysis, Stephen Semler, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, documented that Biden’s focus on economic populism waned in the spring of 2022. According to Semler, “Once Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden ditched his progressive domestic agenda and rebranded as a deficit hawk.” Even as a rhetorical focus, economic populism became less important to Biden than his attempt to revive Cold War liberalism, with the United States pitted against autocratic foes on the international stage and an authoritarian menace at home. As a hawk, Biden started talking much more about the threats to democracy—and much less about how he could improve the lives of ordinary Americans. Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein reports, “Ron Klain, former chief of staff, wanted President Biden to acknowledge the pain the Fed’s high interest rates were causing families and businesses through higher costs. The push was met with resistance from a White House wary of even the appearance of criticizing the Fed.”

Harris was even more tone-deaf on economic pain than Biden. On Saturday, The New York Times reported that the Harris campaign watered down its economic message and policies in order to please wealthy donors—an effort headed by Harris’s brother-in-law, Tony West, an Uber executive. According to the newspaper:

The result was a Democratic candidate who vacillated between competing visions for how to address the economic problems that voters repeatedly ranked as their top issue. Ms. Harris neither abandoned nor fully embraced key liberal goals for confronting corporate power and raising taxes on the rich. Instead, she adopted marginal pro-business tweaks to the status quo that both her corporate and progressive allies agreed never coalesced into a clear economic argument.

Bernie Sanders was right: The Democrats have betrayed the working class. This is not just a matter of one election but goes back to the triumph of neoliberalism within the party’s elite, which started with Jimmy Carter’s winning the presidential nomination in 1976. This process has never been unchallenged: Resistance to the neoliberal turn came from many insurgent campaigns—notably those of Jesse Jackson and Bernie Sanders himself.

The only way out of the neoliberal trap remains the path Sanders laid out in his two primary runs in 2016 and 2020: a small-donor-funded campaign that rejects corporate control and is stridently pro–working class. Sanders is, alas, too old to run again. But the real question for the Democrats is who can emerge as the next Bernie Sanders—and win the 2028 nomination.

He's right, not that he would have represented them much better. Trump tapped into that vacuum, talked their language and gave them immigrants, woke and people of colour to blame when seeking scapegoats is the Pavlov dog reaction to uncertainty.

[Vesper 28,967]

 

The Future of Public Health—or Lack Thereof—Under Trump

Any significant influence of RFK Jr. in Trump’s orbit would represent a recklessness never before seen in America’s public health history.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/future-of-public-health-under-trump/

Republican presidential nominee former president Donald Trump welcomes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the stage at a Turning Point Action campaign rally at the Gas South Arena. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)

 

Most of what “public health” does for Americans is taken for granted. Before the Covid pandemic, most people probably didn’t think about it at all.

 

Yet the fact that, in most places in the United States, we can count on the water we drink to be safe, that the food we buy is not contaminated with e-coli or listeria, and that we don’t have to deal with dreaded childhood diseases that ripped through our communities only a few decades ago, is a testament to the tireless work of many, unheralded, often unknown heroes.

 

This invisible safety net has been built up over the years, always underfunded and understaffed, always not-enough, but it’s all we’ve got.

 

And now comes the wrecking ball. If Trump’s first term was a disaster for public health—and his response to Covid, from blocking agencies from rolling out testing and recommending masking early on to embracing the idea that we should let people get infected with the virus is the prime case in point here—at least there were institutionalists at key posts: Scott Gottlieb at FDA, Alex Azar at HHS, even the odious Robert Redfield at CDC, and Francis Collins hanging on at NIH.

 

Each of these men at least had experience in federal agencies or relevant health experience of some kind.

 

The avatar of Trump 2.0’s public health policy will altogether be something else.

 

Whether or not Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is given a cabinet post, an agency to run, a desk in the West Wing or the Old Executive Office Building or even just remains as an unofficial adviser to the president-elect, he represents a know-nothing, conspiracy-addled future destined to make us sick.

 

Any significant influence of RFK Jr. in Trump’s orbit represents a recklessness that we have never seen in public health in any federal administration in this country’s history.

 

By now, we’ve heard Kennedy’s views on everything from fluoride in drinking water to childhood vaccines, to threats to recreate the NIH and FDA in the image of his own quackery. Let’s be clear: Kennedy’s views are not “alternative” to orthodoxy, meant to shake up the system—they are verifiably false. They are nonsense.

 

Let’s take his claims on fluoride as an example. RFK Jr. wrote on X in early November: “Fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.”

 

Um—no. In high doses over prolonged periods of time—as with many other substances (even water and oxygen!)—exposure to fluoride can be a problem, but not in the small concentrations we see in drinking water.

 

Lest we forget: Fluoride has been a bugaboo of the far right since the 1950s, when fluoridation was supposed to be part of a communist plot to take over America.

 

And since conspiracy theories know no borders, we can also look at a natural experiment up in Calgary, Canada, for further evidence. In 2011, Calgary’s’s city council banned fluoridation, and now is set to reintroduce it next year.

 

Why? Because since fluoridation ended, cavities in children’s teeth have become more numerous and larger, often requiring treatment under general anesthesia and/or intravenous antibiotic therapy to fight infections associated with tooth decay.

 

As one researcher at the University of Calgary has said, the decision to ban fluoridation had a clear result: It was a source of “avoidable and potentially life-threatening disease, pain, suffering, misery and expense…especially [for] very young children and their families.”

 

As for vaccination, Kennedy’s views are long-standing and well-known. He has suggested that “there is no vaccine that is safe and effective,” and he still clings to the long-debunked idea that vaccines cause autism. More recently, during the Covid pandemic, he created a multimillion-dollar anti-vaccine juggernaut to dissuade people from getting vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2.

 

There is no person right now more vital to the anti-vaccine movement than RFK Jr., and his impact has been deadly.

 

By convincing people to forgo routine pediatric vaccinations, he has endangered the lives of thousands of kids, stoked fear in families with autistic children, and in at least once instance was partially responsible for a devastating outbreak of measles.

 

In 2019, 83 people, mostly children, died of the preventable disease in Samoa. While Kennedy has denied that his words and actions were responsible for the outbreak, he has supported anti-vaccination efforts on the islands, written to the nation’s prime minister about the dangers of vaccines, and visited Samoa to meet with anti-vaxxers and subsequently praised them for their work.

 

As Derek Lowe, a columnist from the United States’ leading scientific journal, Science, has said: “Kennedy’s views on science and medicine are not only wrong, they are actively harmful and destructive. He has used them to make a great deal of money, and he has lied about them to interviewers and reporters whenever he finds it convenient.”

 

Legal experts have suggested that Trump and Kennedy may not have the authority to do many of the things that Kennedy has proposed and that public health in the US is largely a matter of state and local control outside of the federal remit. But Trump and Kennedy can do a lot of damage without changing a single law, through appointments, executive action, rule-making and the like. 

 

Schedule F is an executive order that would allow Trump to shift the status of civil servants to political appointees by fiat, fire them, and then replace them with incompetent apparatchiks. How would this work?

 

Well, if the new president wanted to fire the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a post Anthony Fauci previously held, the position’s status as a civil service job would make this difficult to do.

 

But with the bureaucratic magic of Schedule F, the directorship could be reclassified as a political appointment, the director fired, and the role filled by a loyalist without any qualifications.

 

Now think of the effect of reclassifications, removals, and new hires up and down the public health civil service: It’s a recipe for chaos and destruction, where friends of Trump and Kennedy could be put in place in agency after agency, disposing of decades of experience and expertise in an instant.

 

In addition to these dangers, with the bully pulpit of the White House, Trump and Kennedy could also, for instance, discourage fluoridation and vaccination and push GOP governors to take up the worst of their terrible ideas.

 

Ron DeSantis would be happy to oblige and already has a head start in dismantling public health in his state. This doesn’t require any federal action, besides the willingness to sow misinformation and lies.

 

RFK Jr. is the poster boy for the new Trump administration, a rich man who never has had to worry about a thing in his life, putting the lives of ordinary Americans in jeopardy because he thinks he knows better than scientists.

 

In fact, the man who thought it was a good idea to stage a hit-and-run with a dead baby bear and a bicycle in Central Park has shown a lack of judgment across the board for a long while.

 

But he is part of an emerging kakistocracy-in-waiting that will be run by plutocrats and zealots.

 

Our public health system in America is fragile and shouldn’t be a plaything. Once he’s done with his games, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men may not be able to put our public health infrastructure back together again. The damage may be lasting and profound.

 

But we are not powerless.

 

So much of public health happens locally—and we can protect this precious national resource by speaking up and speaking out, at our city or town council meetings, calling and writing our state representatives, our mayors and our governors.

 

This is going to be necessary work. As my Yale colleague Timothy Snyder has said: “Defend institutions.… Institutions do not protect themselves.

 

So choose an institution you care about and take its side.” This may be your local public health department or Planned Parenthood clinic, a mental health clinic or needle exchange program, or services for LGBTQ+ or immigrant populations in your neighborhood.

 

These are all part of what makes public health happen day in and day out in our communities. Deprive RFK Jr. and Donald Trump of their power; take it away from them with focus and tenacity.

 

Chip away at their campaign to destroy public health in America. These kinds of small acts will add up and will make a difference. If these men are the disease, let us be the cure.

Edited November 16 by Vesper

[cosmicway 1,333]

WILL TRUMPISM BE SUCCEEDED BY MORE TRUMPISM OR BY COMMUNISM ?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The political centre stands for democracy, peace and progress, ideologically though not necessarily behaviourally by the various centrist political leaders.
The political centre believes in freedom, liberal economy, private enterprise, workers rights, the welfare state and in race equality.
It is however about to become extinct.
In America and in the western European nations it appears the next step is towards the right:
Limited freedom, no welfare state, blind nationalism (chauvinism) and racism. Limiting workers rights appears to be lower in the agenda of the present generation of right wingers, whereas it used to be topmost.
At the same time communists-fellow travelers are squeezing the centrists into a tight corner.
So the 50% centrist majorities or near majorities of the past have become 15%.
Under Trumpism the leftists will suffer, they may even start visiting desert islands once again, like Guantanamo.
But since the Trump system has its obvious flaws and drawbacks, they may eventually win the day.
This is the game they are playing. They believe Stalin will be back and Che also - in his role as executioner of the LBGTQists.
It may work either way in the long run.

 

Edited November 16 by cosmicway

[Vesper 28,967]

 

Welcome to the Department of Government Idiocy

Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency or “DOGE” will comprise of two clueless tech bros. What targets, exactly, will Musk and Ramaswamy try to hit?

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/welcome-to-the-department-of-government-idiocracy/

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., joins former US president Donald Trump during a campaign event at the Butler Farm Show in Butler, Pennsylvania (Justin Merriman / Getty Images)

 

Give the incoming Trump administration this much credit: Faced with the potentially devastating burden of a maximally entitled tech bro inserting himself into government business, the president-elect has dispatched Elon Musk to a powerless bureaucratic backwater. What’s more, he’s paired Musk off with another, though differently entitled tech bro: biotech executive and once-failed GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

 

The nominal charge of the group the pair will captain—the Department of Government Efficiency—is to eliminate wasteful government spending. But as Trump’s announcement carefully stipulated, their collaboration—though “government” exists in its title—will occur “outside of government,” which loosely translates to “outside of earshot and the field of vision of White House personnel actually trying to get their jobs done.”

 

The eternally oblivious Musk, who as you might remember funneled more than $200 million in super PAC support to Trump’s campaign, exulted in the announcement of the new gig, promptly posting a piece of fan art with a mockup of a logo featuring the new group’s acronym, DOGE, to his website X.

 

Doge, you see, is the name of a crypto product in which Musk holds a major stake. Its logo, which also briefly replaced Twitter’s bird symbol on X, is a crude version of a dog mascot. (Following Trump’s announcement, Dogecoin instantly boomed in investment markets, replicating the same trend across the whole shady crypto sector, which anticipates a deregulatory bonanza after donating fully half of all corporate money to the 2024 campaign.)

 

In addition to extending Musk’s amazing run of never once being funny for a single moment in his life, the post on X also registered something more ominous: The main chieftain of the cost-cutting agency sports a massive array of economic conflicts of interest, having accrued a good deal of his centibillion-dollar fortune on a foundation of government contracts.

 

In addition, the Musk enterprises that are more strictly private-sector concerns, such as his electric car company, Tesla, and his now-flailing social media platform, X, often stand athwart the regulatory mandates of a host of federal agencies. However toothless DOGE may be on the White House organizational chart, it will still be positioned to intimidate administrators pursuing Musk’s self-interested agenda.

 

Still, the shared gig no doubt comes as a blow to the recently anointed MAGA fanboy, who’s been muscling into a host of preelection confabs with lawmakers and foreign leaders alongside Trump, as well as swanning around the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort as his self-advertised “first buddy.”

 

Yet a second Trump White House will be anything but a buddies’ playground. As any cursory acquaintance with the Trump family history will readily confirm, wannabe White House intimates who fasten themselves too closely to the former business mogul are often subject to swift exile. (See Don Jr.’s tour as a third-tier influencer on Rumble, and Eric’s career, well, doing whatever it is that Eric does.)

 

On top of that, Musk, a raging egomaniac incapable of sustaining many close relationships, is facing the additional humiliation of sharing authority over the new gig with Ramaswamy. A far more practiced Trump sycophant, he was briefly touted on lists for more substantial, grown-up appointments in the cabinet, but fell swiftly to earth as a make-believe spending wonk.

 

Ramaswamy’s comically inept presidential run culminated with his vow to be “unhinged” in his final debate. That promise could have doubled as the mission statement for his campaign, which trafficked mostly in warmed-over tirades on the menace of wokeness, alongside conspiracy-mongering over January 6, and the periodic call to invade Mexico and possibly Canada.

 

On one level, the Musk-Ramaswamy collaboration could almost double as an inspired plotline from Mike Judge’s HBO satire Silicon Valley. Take two of the most incorrigibly batshit, self-enamored figures in contemporary right-wing tech politics, and force them to work together.

 

Better yet, tee up the mandate for responsible government spending by matching up the vaporware magnate who upped the share price he paid for the white-elephant acquisition of Twitter so that it contained the talismanic pot-smokers’ number 4.20 with a biotech hustler who profiteers on drugs that rarely make it past the testing phase.

 

What could possibly go wrong?

 

Indeed, the very act of designating two chairs to direct an inquiry into the misapplication of government resources is the sort of self-canceling flourish that would be conveyed in, say, a musical conservatory called “the Kenny G Institute of Free-Jazz Improvisation.”

 

It’s already painfully clear that the swaggering Musk has little grasp of just what the job would actually entail.

 

During the campaign homestretch, when he wasn’t skipping around like a dipshit in a red hat behind Trump, Musk confidently pronounced that it wouldn’t be too great a lift to identify and eliminate “at least $2 trillion” in wasteful spending, when all discretionary spending in the 2024 fiscal year was $1.6 trillion, and overall spending clocked in at more than $6.75 trillion.

 

For Musk to hit his target, many critical outlays and income supports, such as Social Security and Medicare, would have to be eviscerated. That’s likely why, in a later X flourish, Musk endorsed a user’s view that rapid spending cuts, along with other proposals like power-boosted tariffs would trigger “a severe overreaction in the economy” ahead of a “tumble” in financial markets. “Sounds about right,” the dipshit replied.

 

Indifference to the social costs of his vanity projects is par for the course for Musk, as it is for his presidential benefactor. But since Trump is always capable of overruling his past commitments on a dime, and ghosting a whole slew of actual cabinet flunkeys—up to and including his former vice president—it’s hard to gauge when and whether Musk’s fiscal hobbyhorse could turn into a real and present threat to the well-being of millions of Americans.

 

There is, I suppose, some consolation in recalling the fate of the two high-profile special White House commissions that Trump unveiled in the early days of his first term.

 

In 2017, the White House launched the Victims of Immigrant Crime Engagement Office under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security, the highly publicized panel devoted to documenting and investigating runaway rates of immigrant violent crime.

 

The commission was an early indicator of the MAGA movement’s lurch into fascism, since it sought to depict an ethnic group as the source of a scourge of dangerous criminal behavior. It also rapidly proved to be a bust, since there was in fact no such immigrant crime epidemic.

 

Meanwhile, Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, captained a Trump-sanctioned inquiry into the parallel moral panic over voting fraud, and came up empty as well.

 

Then again, fearmongering over immigration and rampant election denial remain the two principal calling cards of the current MAGA movement, even after Trump’s first administration face-planted in its efforts to document both.

 

Even if Musk and Ramaswamy dither away at DOGE meetings discussing the baleful proportions of the woke mind virus gnawing away at oligarchic impunity, swapping memes, or playing hacky sack like they do at Google HQ, there’s no small likelihood that they could give birth to another nihilistic MAGA crusade.

 

After all, as we saw in the final episode of Silicon Valley, a meltdown of coding and greed can come perilously close to destroying the world.

[KEVINAA 105]

 

The Pentagon fails its seventh consecutive financial audit, unable to account for $824 billion of its budget.