• 0 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: October 4th, 2023

help-circle


  • I have a really hard time staying cool and collected when I discuss politics with people who hold right-wing positions. As a result, I never do volunteer work for political campaigns, because it seems like the only positions available are phone-banking and door-knocking. It’s frustrating; I want to help, but I feel strongly that I’d do more harm than good, doing either of those things.



  • While this is true, people still bear responsibility for the media they choose to consume. People wake up every day and decide to get their information from liars and grifters, because they prefer the way lies feel. It isn’t as if they don’t have options. Now, media literacy is definitely a problem. But the only solution is education, and that’s a silver bullet too slow to save us from all the extant ill-educated mooks.









  • Yeah, I think there’s also a lot of tone-deafness among economists, that seems to reflect a lack of understanding (or at least acknowledgment) that the economy is built on—and designed to perpetuate—massive inequality. The average person derives comparatively little benefit from an economy which is—on paper—booming, because the profits are overwhelmingly siphoned off by the wealthy. This is probably mostly a problem with the way the economy is reported on by the media, but economists are the face of that.


  • Economics is a soft science. Economics is not about describing how things should work, economics is about describing how things do work.

    I mean, tell that to economists? In my experience, they are extremely dogmatic. With vanishingly few exceptions, every economist I’ve ever heard, seen, or read in any media acts as though whatever model they subscribe to is gospel, and that any issues you might have with it must therefore stem from a lack of understanding, rather than from the faulty assumptions underlying it.

    ETA a recent example: Harvard economics professor and former Obama economic adviser Jason Furman on Jon Stewart’s podcast.



  • Whataboutisms aside, if you’re going to claim an article is libelous, you ought to at least be able to refute one of the assertions made by it. You haven’t actually done that here. Jill Stein’s defense is that she’s naive to the point of idiocy. So she’s either a witting catspaw of Putin and the GOP, or an imbecile that has no business being president.

    Furthermore, I was unable to find any language in the senate intelligence committee’s report to indicate that she’d been cleared of wrongdoing— merely the absence of an indictment. Regardless of whether she’s committed any crimes, she is objectively a spoiler candidate. She could be as pure as the driven snow, and it wouldn’t change the fact that the only thing her campaign stands to accomplish is to elect donald trump.

    If she really wanted to further her purported agenda, she would use her candidacy to get concessions from Harris in exchange for dropping out and endorsing her. Stein could actually effect change that way. Instead, she parrots Russian talking points, exclusively attacks Democrats, and consequently is completely counterproductive with regard to her stated goals.





  • But your proposed course of action clearly doesn’t align with your stated goal, for reasons that have already been pointed out to you. I don’t see you engaging with that argument. This leads me to believe that you don’t actually care about what happens to Palestinians; you just want to feel like you’re taking a moral stand. People that actually give a shit tend to care about what the consequences of their actions will be.