A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 219 of 725
In a 2005 article in Science, Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov showed individuals two pictures side by side of competing congressional candidates and asked them to rate their competence solely based on their appearance. Their judgments, which they were capable of forming within a second, predicted with almost 70 percent accuracy which candidate went on to win the election.
“We decide very quickly whether a person possesses many of the traits we feel are important, such as likeability and competence, even though we have not exchanged a single word with them,” Todorov said at the time. “It appears that we are hard-wired to draw these inferences in a fast, unreflective way.” Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, Todorov demonstrated snap judgments carry a powerful emotional charge, as they are associated with activity in the amygdala, a primitive brain structure, the seat of the fight-or-flight response.
Jochen Menges, a lecturer in organizational behavior at the University of Cambridge, terms the emotional impact of charisma the “awestruck effect.” He came up with the concept as a doctoral student in 2008, when he traveled to Berlin to hear Barack Obama speak in the hopes he might glean some new insights about how charismatic alchemy worked. When Obama bounded onto the stage and announced he was not just a citizen of the United States, but a citizen of the world, Menges himself was taken in. For a few minutes, Menges forgot why he was there — he was taken out of himself, became a follower.
When he looked around, he was fascinated. Everything he had read on charisma implied leaders worked their magic by making people feel good emotions. But this was not an animated, energized crowd. The entire crowd seemed frozen in place, entranced. Afterward, a woman next to Menges gushed that Obama’s speech was “amazing,” “wonderful,” and “awesome.” Yet when Menges asked her to name three things she liked about the speech, she couldn’t.
More at http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/the-anatomy-of-charisma
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
and they say the Left has moved very far from centrist position, some might even say Libertarians are the truer Democrat these days, Democrats changed and became Neo-Liberal?
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
THE PREDATOR STATE
How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, 2008
by James K. Galbraith
This book got under way right after Hurricane Katrina, the destruction of New Orleans, and the dispersion of several hundred thousand refugees across the American South, including to my hometown of Austin, Texas. It seemed clear immediately that Katrina had been the Chernobyl of the American system. That is, beyond the natural calamity and the human tragedy, it was—like that Soviet reactor meltdown nineteen years before—a disaster that exposed and laid bare the fallacies of an entire governing creed.
But where the Soviet creed was of central planning, ours was its polar opposite, a cult of the free market. And as I charted my way through this book, I came to realize that the relationship between actual policy in the United States and the doctrines of policy is not simple. In uncanny ways, this relationship has come to resemble its counterpart in the old Soviet Union: actual policies were (and are) in no principled way governed by official doctrine. Rather, the doctrine serves as a kind of legitimating myth—something to be repeated to schoolchildren but hardly taken seriously by those on the inside.
. . .
The catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina pointed to two types of damage. One was an erosion of capability, evinced in this case by the failure by the Army Corps of Engineers to maintain the levees protecting New Orleans to a standard sufficient to withstand a Category Three hurricane, which is all that Katrina actually was by the time it came ashore. This kind of erosion presupposes nothing about intent. It can and does happen simply because of resource constraints, misjudgments, accidents of politics, and history. We see this sort of erosion far and wide in American government, but repairing it is characteristically thought to be mainly a matter of dedication, competence, time, and money.
But Katrina, and especially the aftermath of the disaster, also illustrated a second and more serious sort of rot in the system. This I will call predation: the systematic abuse of public institutions for private profit or, equivalently, the systematic undermining of public protections for the benefit of private clients. The deformation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency into a dumping ground for cronies under the government of George W. Bush—“Heckuva job, Brownie”—captured the essence of this phenomenon. But so too does the practice of turning regulatory agencies over to business lobbies, the privatization of national security and the attempted privatization of Social Security, the design of initiatives in Medicare to benefit drug companies, and trade agreements to benefit corporate agriculture at the expense of subsistence farmers in the Third World. In each case, what we see is not, in fact, a principled conservative’s drive to minimize the state. It is a predator’s drive to divert public resources to clients and friends. This seemed to me to have become the reality underlying the myth, and the second part of the book is devoted to sketching it out.
https://1337x.to/torrent/2988114/The-Predator-State-by-James-K-Galbrai
th-EPUB/
www.amazon.com/Predator-State-Conservatives-Abandoned-Liberals/dp/1416
56683X/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
and they say the Left has moved very far from centrist position, some might even say Libertarians are the truer Democrat these days, Democrats changed and became Neo-Liberal?
Yup.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Nope.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
and they say the Left has moved very far from centrist position, some might even say Libertarians are the truer Democrat these days, Democrats changed and became Neo-Liberal?
Yup.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Give you something:(Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020.
Americans want outsiders, reformers, and fresh faces, not politicians with decades of baggage.)
www.vox.com/2019/1/10/18173132/joe-biden-hillary-clinton-2020
Quote:
Trump, in debates, sensibly assailed Clinton’s record on Middle Eastern interventions.
“Take a look at Libya. Take a look at Iraq,” he said. “She gave us ISIS because her and Obama created this small vacuum. A small group came out of that huge vacuum. We should have never been in Iraq.”
In fact, Trump was significantly overstating his degree of opposition to the war. But that's neither here nor there — a well-known Iraq War supporter who, unlike Trump, was actually in the Senate at the time was very poorly positioned to argue against him. And by 2020, there’s simply no reason to do that again. Most of the party’s bench consists of people like Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker, who are young enough not to have participated in the war debate in Congress.
But what’s Biden’s excuse? He was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time — the guy with privileged access to top officials in the American government and around the world. The guy who, though he surely couldn’t have stopped Bush’s folly, certainly could have warned about it.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The crisis of globalisation
www.socialeurope.eu/crisis-of-globalisation-mark-blyth
What were essentially national labour markets and national financial markets that were relatively closed — homogenous states that looked the same, made the same stuff and occasionally traded with each other but kept their finances separate — became one big market in the sense of integrated finance and capital movements etc.
Interesting things begin to happen:
1) The first one is labour’s ability to command its share of the surplus declines to zero. The strike becomes a meaningless weapon. Strikes decline to function — like to zero — in the western world. And you get prolonged wage stagnation, because essentially all the surplus goes to capital. There’s no reason for it not to. Labour’s ability to push up wages goes to zero.
2) But there’s also something interesting that’s happening in financial markets and product markets at the same time. It’s like the second-order effect of neoliberalism. We dumped about 17 trillion dollars—yen, euros and everything else we could get our hands on—and we’re continuing to do so in Europe through QE-type programmes, through central banks, because of the financial crisis. And the weird thing is there’s no inflation anywhere. In fact, Europe is still deflating. It hasn’t hit its 2 per cent target in almost a decade. So there’s no structural inflation, despite a massive, absolutely unprecedented monetary injection.
3) Then think about the third section, which is competitive product markets. Think about the price of a computer. Think about the price competition going on in all sectors. If you look at words called ‘mark-up’ and ‘margin data’ across firms, what you find, particularly in the US but not exclusively, is that if you’re a digital monopoly you’re making 50 per cent to 60 per cent profits. But if you’re a small or medium-sized firm and you’re in global competition, your margins are tiny, your profits are tiny and you’re very resistant to pushing up wages, because that literally could drive you out of business.
Add this all together and you’ve got a very, very strange world that we haven’t experienced before. One in which you’re going to have structurally low interest rates because there’s no inflation to combat. Then you’ve got a world in which labour markets can have full employment but it does nothing for wages, which means sustaining and perhaps making worse the inequalities that are already there. Then in product markets you have a winner-takes-all dynamic, whereby quasi-monopolists get monopoly rents and everybody else gets to return to perfect competition.
That seems, in a very abstract sense but in a very real sense, to characterise a world we haven’t been in before, and the consequences of thinking through that world are quite profound.
Question: Do you see any significant differences in how this pans out in the United States and how it pans out in Europe? What would you say is maybe specifically characteristic of the United States and what is a European thing?
Well, let’s start with the fact that Europe still has significant welfare states and welfare transfer. If you look at Ireland, for example, which is a very small unrepresentative country admittedly — because it basically lives off American FDI stocks and them being a trans-shipment point into Europe — but Ireland has a very high pre-tax Gini inequality coefficient yet comes among the lowest when they do post-taxes.
So government policy matters and Europe still has policies. It actually wants to do something on climate change. It’s finding out the distributional politics of that: in France in particular they are more tough than we thought. But there’s effective governance and an attempt to basically deal with these agendas.
In the United States you have a governing class which is utterly in denial about the challenges that it faces. So in a sense what you see in the United States is the most accelerated version of these pathologies.
Question: What can be done? If you wanted to come up or sta
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Interesting article. Alot to think about there.
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com .
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Washington loves imaginary problems that give it an excuse for not solving an actual one.
Especially when that hypothetical is some kind of long-term issue that lets pundits and politicians flatter themselves for having the wisdom to look past what’s happening today toward what is really going to matter tomorrow. All of which is to say that it should be no surprise that the — entirely wrong! — idea that unemployment could not come down because workers simply did not have the skills needed was able to take over the policy conversation the way it did the past decade.
Now, like most successful falsehoods, this one seemed to have at least some basis in reality. It is true, after all, that American students have not done that well on international tests compared to kids in other rich countries. And it is also true that American companies have said that they can’t find enough qualified workers for all the positions they have. Couldn’t these two things be related? And, more to the point, explain why unemployment stayed so high for so long? Well, it certainly seemed that way to, among many others, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and economist Tyler Cowen, who, back in 2011, had speculated that unemployment might stay around 10 percent forever because the people who had lost their jobs during the crash allegedly lacked the skills to add any value in the marketplace.
What made this story so seductive to Washington was that it depoliticized the economy. It said that unemployment was high not because we did not have enough stimulus — which, of course, really was the case — but rather because workers did not have enough education. It was something that, whether or not you fully agreed with it, gave Democrats like President Barack Obama and Republicans like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) a chance to come together over the most uncontroversial of issues.
There was only one problem. This was — or at least should have been — obviously wrong. Now, that’s not to say that trying to help workers keep up with the demands of an ever-changing economy is not a good idea. It is. But rather that acting like our failure to do so was a big part of the reason millions of people could not find work was as bad as ideas get. For one thing, it did not explain why people who were skilled enough to have a job in 2007 supposedly were not in 2008. And for another, it did not show up in any of the data, either. Indeed, if certain types of workers were in short supply, then the ones that existed should have seen their employment, hours, and wages all go up even in the face of the slow recovery. In other words, businesses should have been in a bidding war over them, and only them. But, as the liberal Economic Policy Institute has taken pains to point out, nothing of the sort was going on. What was happening instead was that all of these labor market indicators were falling for every profession, no matter how skilled they were. Which — surprise, surprise — is exactly what you would expect if our problem was one of inadequate demand rather than inadequate training.
None of this is hindsight bias. All of it was clear enough as it was going on. But in case it wasn’t, the fact that unemployment has now fallen to 3.9 percent is a pretty good sign that workers had enough skills all along. Unless, that is, you think it’s more likely that they mysteriously gained and lost them as economic growth went up and down.
More at www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/14/skills-gap-is-fixed-because
-there-was-no-skills-gap/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Washington loves imaginary problems that give it an excuse for not solving an actual one.
It's still early, but I nominate this sentence for post of the year.
Couldn't tell you about the rest of the post that I didn't bother reading though.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Remember when Trump announced he wanted the US Government to work on a “Space Force”? Turns out, someone at Netflix thought this was the PERFECT thing to build a new series around.
Steve Carell and Greg Daniels are reuniting — but not to reboot “The Office.” The star of the workplace comedy and the creator of said workplace comedy are reteaming to bring you a new workplace comedy for Netflix called “Space Force.”
www.thewrap.com/space-force-steve-carell-greg-daniels-office-netflix-c
omedy-trump-video/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME