Also, speaking to the right: DHS kicking in the doors of people for making jokes online? Not a threat to free speech. College students being dumb? Stalinism!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/11/rakem-balogun-interview-black-identity-extremists-fbi-surveillance

Let's not forget the activist who never advocated violence getting arrested by the FBI, their financial life ruined and thrown in jail for 6 months.

The worst part? The FBI learned about him through an Alex Jones video.

White men raising arms against an oppressive government = American heroes

Black men raising arms against an oppressive government = terrorists

Are there any articles associated with this? Did it ever make the news that BLM leaders had committed suicide?

The sad thing is that the whole incident is really more like the United States in the 1960s.

https://www.theroot.com/ferguson-activists-are-dying-and-it-s-time-to-ask-quest-1794955900

There are more, too, if you look.

It's true, remember that time the NRA supported gun control?

wtf

[quote=Steven Mnuchin]We’re putting the trade war on hold[/quote]

Is this some kind of joke to him?

He was born rich. Everything is a joke when you've never known consequence.

what the **** is the secretary of the treasury doing talking about trade sanctions, anyway? get back in your lane, ****wad.

i just saw a headline that said "Democrats' newest midterm pitch: A crackdown on corruption" and it made me chuckle

it's like SF_GoldG_01 cracking down on Mexican scammers

So is it weird that the president's administration has been mired in scandal and investigations literally since day 1 of Trump's presidency, but I know very little about any of what's actually happening with that?

No.

Is it weird that I'm starting to suspect the US government of inflaming Canadian internal economic tensions in order to boost the Alberta statehood movement?

Not really, the people at the helm of this nation are psychopaths, so they'd probably try something like that.

I'm curious to know what you're talking about though.

There's a lot of dark money flowing into both sides of this dispute from the US, whether it's linked to the US government or not. Don't get me wrong here - both sides are legitimate, and believe what they believe. But the signal's also being boosted by US money. Canada has long had a problem with US money flowing into our politics, particularly party leadership campaigns, so it also wouldn't surprise me if the two provincial governments (from the same party) are prosecuting this issue as indignantly as possible because they're being extrinsically motivated to do so.


It doesn't help that Alberta has a history of secession tendencies, and is economically and demographically the only province the United States would want. Alberta statehood would make the US energy independent overnight. It's the youngest Canadian province, and would be one of the best-educated and richest states (our per-capita GDP would put us between Massachusetts and New York, even assuming no further investment and development).

wait wtf would that make Jon`C a US citizen??

top ****ing kek

Obviously not.

I wonder what's happening in the alternative timeline where Romney won in 2012. I wonder if we'd somehow be better off. Maybe the Republican party would be less extreme (because it wouldn't have spent 2012-2016 fuming while out of power), the Democrats would be more unified... we'd have a Republican government from 2012 to at least 2016, which would be bad, but it probably would've been better and more humane than what we have now.

Maybe the economic recovery would've been faster under Romney so populism wouldn't have been a thing..?

Obama and Romney never understood the problem. Or, at least, if they did understand the problem they refused to publicly discuss it. Given that the US economy never actually recovered, I find it hard to imagine Mitt Romney would have been any more successful at repairing the economy or the people.


On the other hand, I find it quite easy to imagine how Mitt Romney might have made things worse. Mitt Romney wanted to eliminate capital gains and earned interest taxes for people making less than $200k a year. That would have put a 20% premium on savings incomes from speculation over consumption and productive investment, in the economic stratum that has historically been responsible for almost all of that. A policy like this might be okay in a vacuum, but the US already disincentivizes that archetypal "middle class behavior" in a variety of ways. The financial industry recovery probably would have ended at the same time, but at best white youths and the working class would have been equally alienated, if not slightly moreso.

I wonder if Republican governance, with its clear favoritism of the wealthy, actually would've helped maintain the unity of the Democratic party. In 2010-2012, Americans who saw a major disparity in power saw income inequality as the primary fault line. That's one of the reasons why in 2012 Obama presented himself as the defender of labor, and depicted Romney as a defender of capital: because economic inequality was able to be a unifying, galvanizing issue for the Democratic party. (Since then, it has almost become a divisive issue. Just see the economic anxiety vs racial animus debate). Perhaps Republican governance from 2012 onward would've kept Democrats and the Democratic base focused on income inequality.

If you Google "middle class article 2012", for instance, you'll find countless articles about the diminishing of the middle class. It's representative of where the discourse was for a brief time, around 2011 and 2012: during that time, our public discourse was actually focused on the problem, but then it got diverted. We stopped seeing economic inequality as the most salient issue, and began to see inequality that falls on racial, gender and other fault lines as the most salient forms of inequality.

The Democrats are actually worse than the Republicans here, they just happen to choose super rich companies that people have been socialized to find inoffensive, while the Republicans keep buddying up with mincing coal-mining pedophiles and other lesioned, herpetic corporate monsters. Metaphorically speaking. And the discourse changed because the career liberals don't want to talk about the middle class. They don't mind economic inequality, actually, but they don't honestly want to discuss the middle class because of what it actually means.

For my good friends among the liberals and the business right: Rich people don't build successful companies. They built successful companies. That's why they're rich. Starting a business is a lot of work, and by the time you're a rich Job Creator(tm) you're too damn old and too damn busy to create jobs. That's why rich people don't build companies, they buy them. It's the middle class that builds.

That's why economic conditions and government policies that discourage middle class investment are so damning. It's so bad that people don't even know what investment means anymore, they think investment is buying stock on the stock market. It isn't. Buying a factory is an investment. Buying stock is high-risk savings. Can you blame them? You can't get employer matching when you buy a factory. You can't put it in a tax-free savings account, or buy the factory pre-tax by deferring that income. But at least, thanks to Obama, you can work at that factory and keep your health insurance - as long as you can afford to pay for it. At least until the Republicans get around to axing that, too. Thanks to all of that and more, US small business starts are down 50% since 1980 and continuing to drop.

"Declining middle class" => reduced business starts => reduced competition for workers => depressed wages => reduced demand => lower prices => production offshoring => trade deficit

When economists talk about the declining middle class, this is the kind of thing they're talking about. They certainly aren't talking about you, at least not unless you'd totally buy a factory if only you were more liquid. When liberals talk about the middle class, they deflect it to you and how to get you to buy more luxuries. But that's only natural, because liberal (Democratic) and business conservative (center Republican) mean literally the exact same thing. They don't want you starting a business and getting rich any more than Coca-Cola and Pepsi want you inventing a new cola.

Like, I can appreciate the alt history stuff and the questions about whether things might have turned out better if people had voted differently. I just don’t see these problems as being either political or short term. In the end, it’ll probably just be the obvious consequence of designing an economic system based on resource competition and insufficient production.

There are long term economic trends, and I'm sympathetic to the argument that those are what is "really important" (as some say). But so many of those economic trends are invisible to most of us, and only become visible at moments of crisis, and so our ideas about the defining factors within society aren't economically informed as much as their socially, culturally or politically informed. In large part, the stories we tell about what America's situation is, what the problems are, who the culprits are, how it needs to be fixed, etc, have their own history that's largely independent of or even runs counter to a lot of the economic factors. There can be a large chasm, in other words, between the ideological factors and the economic, materialist ones (or in Marxist language, between the superstructure and the base). I mean, why did racial inequality and gender/sexual inequality become the most salient fault lines of inequailty in the past 5 years? I expect there's no way to give a satisfying answer to that question, but if there were, the story probably wouldn't an exclusively economic one (although undoubtedly it'd play a role).

In general I think alt-history is pretty dumb, given the role that contingency and chance play in history. Usually alternative histories are just ways to blame the present's problem on some pivotal moment in the past, and to read one's own fanciful wishes for the present into some alternative timeline. Whatever, I suppose I'm guilty of that.

While we're talking about long-term trends, any low birth rate takes? (Here's one that very whatever, although obviously the fact that birth control has become more widely accessible is significant: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/22/17376536/fertility-rate-united-states-births-women)

I'm kind of surprised that only so few on the left are attributing low fertility to the precarious economic situation of millenials (high student debt, low home ownership, low marriage rates, low job security, lower paying jobs than generations that preceded at this stage in their life, etc. etc.), especially given that now millenials make up the largest share of the population in its prime child bearing years. Also notable, although perhaps not surprising, is that the left is keen to avoid talking about how immigration bears on the issue.

It's especially amusing that most of the headlines I've seen are something to the effect of, "the birthrate is falling and nobody knows why", as if there weren't perfectly good reasons for why it's been happening, and as if the declining fertility rate is anomalous and doesn't square with the rest of the facts.

Of course everybody knows why, there's just a culture of silence because nobody feels we can actually solve the problem, i.e. is too scared to build a guillotine.

It'll be okay, though. Fallout has prepared people for what America will be like in the future. There won't be nuclear war, it's just as America drives itself to becoming a 3rd world country, most places won't have any infrastructure repairs so it'll all look the same anyway, and substitute rads for lead poisoning or whatever.

^



Liberals think it's good because of course they do, they're liberals. They have to assert people are having fewer kids because they choose to have fewer kids, otherwise they lose the moral argument the same way they've lost the economic one. That's why lower birth rates happened because women have more control over reproduction (rather than less, because they aren't allowed to have as many kids as they'd like anymore), because they're now free to choose a career over family (rather than being forced to do so), because people are becoming enlightened and choosing against children for the environment (but you simply must offset that choice with increased consumption), because every other capitalist ****hole on the planet is going through the same thing and somehow that makes it a sign of progress (rather than decadence).

At least the social conservatives are honest about their psychotic, anti-christian social darwinism. The liberals even lie to themselves about it.

I agree that the media is purposely downplaying the economic issues in a way that is very conspicuous. But I think focusing on the healthcare dimension is actually ideologically consistent with liberalism generally. In general, the core principle of liberalism is the maximization of individual freedom (at least when it comes to social issues). And generally, in the US, that means maximizing the choices available to individuals, often at the expense of obligations to others. Burkean conservatives can talk about an unspoken covenant that exists between generations (between those alive, those dead, and those those yet unborn), and can cite it as a moral injunction on citizens to reproduce and have children and carry on the next generation. Liberals generally eschew such an injunction, because they generally reject any such obligations as a constraint on individual liberty.

It also does seem as if there a decline in unwanted pregnancies is contributing to the lower birthrate. Given that a large portion of those pregnancies are teen pregnancies, which have dropped by more than 50% in the past ten years, if I recall correctly, that does seem like a genuine achievement. But, yeah, there's also plenty that's ****ed up about this. When you start talking (as they do in the Vox article) about ways to address this problem, and at top of the the list is demanding that people work even later into life, something's wrong.

I don't really have a massive problem with the conservative argument that people owe it to the next generation to have children. I think it's fine to want to produce more people who are like you, and I don't think it's an inherently racist idea. (Although it would be a bad reason if it were your only reason to have children.)

The teen pregnancy statistics sure do sound like an improvement, but I'm suspicious of their methodology. Does it include 17-19 year olds? Married, unmarried? Today we automatically assume all teen pregnancies are unwanted, even those from 60 years ago, but the reproduction calculus would have been different in a world where you could credibly build a family, buy a home, and enjoy a perfectly satisfactory lifestyle right out of high school without any savings.

Median age at first birth is skyrocketing for other reasons. Obviously teen pregnancies would decrease too.



Edit: That reveals the lie in



because "maximization of individual freedom" is not happening. By all indications liberalism has made us less free to choose when and how we reproduce. Technology has only made it easier to avoid an outcome that capital has made adverse.

I think it's telling that the Social Democrat answer to this problem is to have the state pay for daycare. The purpose of Social Democracy being, after all, to blunt the brutality and excess of capitalism, in order to stave off eventual societal collapse or violent revolution. They won't go so far as to make child-rearing a rational economic choice again, but they're totally on board with making pregnancy and child care as non-disruptive for employers as they possibly can.

...in 2007?

The trend

Sooooorta... I mean, bearing more children than one can support financially was a problem before capitalism stepped onto the scene. Capitalism didn't make having children adverse, because it many cases it already was adverse. But it has provided a technology that enables women/families to have more control over their medical and financial futures.

Also, everyone can have way more sex this way!!! (Except incels. Suckers!)

Family planning is not a new idea.

Right; it makes sense that there'd be more desired 18-19 pregnancies in the 60s and 70s because people could start families immediately after graduating high school. It makes less sense that the same would be happening in 2007, because the financial burden of having a child was much more similar to what it is now. I don't see the case where the decline by approx. 50% in 10 years is the result of a radical shift in the ability to be financially independent rather than wider access to birth control.