Well yeah, he’s a Republican.

v. enjoyable, interesting video

It's humanities; pure bull****, blocked.

In all seriousness though it was interesting.

Have the Clintons actually suicided a Republican?

At least as many as non-Republicans.

Figures the lame stream media would ignore them too.

He’s gotten better at being comprehensible to economically illiterate folk such as myself. To be honest though while I enjoyed his ad hoc arguments here and there I didn’t quite understand what the general thrust was.

This talk was part of a two-day get-together at McMaster University with a bunch of other academics working on similar problems (broadly: issues of social cohesion). This was his attempt to briefly survey the question "can we have it all", i.e. what's the end point of socialism and other -isms, how/who can achieve it, how can we achieve it without giving up the nice things provided by the 'commanding heights', etc. Like along the lines of "can we have the society socialists want, while also having the commerce that capitalists want."

For background, Blyth is currently working on "r for everyone" (r = return to capital). That is one way to "have it all". (Or at least most of it all, assuming it were that easy. Which it certainly isn't. This has never been a math problem, it's a political problem, and I can't imagine capital accepting "r for everyone" just because it's achieved through a Fed backdoor instead of tanks rolling up to the factories. But it's fun to discuss.)

This one may be more accessible.

If you do watch his talks, you'll note that he (repeatedly) points out that the purchasing power generated for Americans by foreign demand for USD means the US isn't ever punished for faffing about economically. Then you see things like,

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/09/america-ignored-trump-mediate-kashmir-dispute/

and if you haven't figured it out yet, here's another clue that US political instability and naked self-interest are very dangerous for the United States.

Edit: I've posted about this before, yes? Oh, many times? Great.

Remember the Mueller report? lol

No, but since it was released all coherent discussion of economics and politics has been effectively shut down anywhere left/liberal Americans post.

****'s gonna get wild when the Trump recession* hits.

oh yeah well

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/chris-mcdonald-and-mark-taylor-agreed-that-hurricane-dorian-is-a-false-flag/

How so?

Did someone call for hors d'oeuvres?

That's the best I'm capable of contributing to a politics thread. Sorry!

Let me give you an example. About two years ago, I used r/economics for some well-moderated Real Deal academic economics news aggregation. There was always a liberal slant, but that’s fine because economics has a liberal slant; outside of obvious externalities the field is opposed to state intervention almost as rule. Blatantly political stuff got banned.

Now, it’s basically a Democrat pity party, each one breathlessly hoping the US will die under Trump’s leadership (not to be confused with economists prognosticating the same, a reasonable intellectual position whether you want it to happen or not). Two years ago the weirdos were alt right trumpers insisting mainstream economics was political because their supreme overlord disagreed with the consensus of the field. Today it’s been taken over by something I can only describe as a sort of liberal populism, something that I never would have thought possible in 2016.

The same thing happened pretty much everywhere else. Even in the media. Even in late night talk shows, which I now consider unwatchable, and all of the US based general news podcasts I used to find entertaining are now well beyond partisan dreck.

Maybe I’d be ok with all of this if I’d let myself get gradually radicalized along with them, but I didn’t take the time for that. Or maybe I stopped paying attention because I subconsciously saw the direction it was going. Dunno.

What do you mean by liberal populism? Like, #resistance folk? I’m thinking Hillary Clinton, when at the height of the debates about civility, she said something like, “we can’t be civil now, but once Democrats are back in power we can.” But it seems like there’s also a despairing, even nihilistic element to what you’re describing.

I wonder if the Daily Show spin offs and the other late night shows are as tedious to make as they are to watch. The hosts all look so unhappy.

I watched Jon Oliver at some point in the past year and I’d clearly forgotten how to watch the show. The jokes just seemed like unnecessary distractions getting in the way of the guy laying out his editorial perspective. Didn’t occur to me that that jokes were supposed to be the substance of the show/the reason to tune in.

Or maybe it’s not me, it’s them, they’ve gotten worse at making the show comedic, and it’s creeping into journalism.

I watched the first season or two of John Oliver when it started back in 2014, but his lame jokes and annoying voice grated on me too much.

I watched quite a bit of Bill Maher in 2015-2016, but once Trump got elected I became extremely fatigued from the constant Russia jokes, and stopped watching in mid 2017 or so. I do very much remember enjoying that he had conservative guests on, and I also liked the spontaneous and very often vulgar character of the show (especially when it made a conservative guest blush-Rick Santorum was even a regular guest). That said as I've gotten older I don't relate very much with Maher, who is a classic sort of atheist/libertarian character who shoots from the hip and believes a few too many wacky things (maybe like a 'Joe Rogan' of the left, if you will).

I never really gave Trevor Noah a chance, mostly because I feel he got his start in the age of social media and related social justice stuff, which always made me cringe more than laugh, maybe because it seemed like he was constantly harping on things his audience was supposed to agree on. Looking back at very old Jon Stewart clips from the Daily Show, I feel that those early years of the show during the Bush presidency were more about mocking conservatives writ large, in a way that made me feel like I was sitting in my living room and having a good time, rather than fuming about something on Twitter. On the other hand, Jon Stewart also paused a lot just like Trevor Noah does, where the audience is supposed to laugh at something we're supposed to hate about conservatives, so maybe it's just that I've gotten older and more skeptical of this kind of entertainment.

Also speaking of Joe Rogan: I used to be more drawn to his show (along with Sam Harris), although I never really was a regular listener. Nowdays he creeps me out, and in retrospect many of the episodes I watched of his in 2016 were in the aftermath of gamergate and/or the ~2015 wave of atheist vloggers/podcasts, and were precursors to the current resurgence of the 'culture wars' and the alt. right, contra 'campus liberalism / feminism', so I keep my distance from his ilk.

I counted 25 articles in the first ~3 pages of r/politics all about Donald Trump saying the hurricane was gonna hit Alabama. Some of them alleged that it was a Federal Crime. Could this be what finally gets him impeached? RUSSIA?

I just went to r/economics to find an example of what I consider "liberal populism", and the first comments section I clicked on:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/czpttp/trump_recession_isnt_possible_because_everyone_is/ez1suyq/



whew, I'm glad I'm not the only one!

Assume a spherical firm enters a frictionless market

Assume a perfectly competitive market at price equilibrium,

I can finally exhale now that this thread is rolling again. Keep it going, you ****s, I need this.

I don’t really get the Joe Rogan backlash. He seems harmless enough. Sometimes he says things that are a little, I don’t know, antiquated, but it seems like the sort of thing that should fall under disagreement not dismissed as bigotry. His podcast is often more listenable than a lot of the other stuff I’ve gotten into the habit of regularly checking in on.

Oh, I didn't mean it like that. I guess I phrased it a little too strongly, since I also am annoyed by the backlash. I just don't really take him too seriously, which is fine, since he's just the host. It's just that a lot of his guests are pretty dumb. Like how he let Tom DeLonge rant about UFO conspiracies for an hour, although Rogan himself is into that kind of stuff himself.

The five hour long Alex Jones episode was pretty awesome. Rogan was trying to remain respectable, which meant that he often disagreed with Jones conspiracies if they were too “hot”, but he sometimes couldn’t resist.

Well, I did see this on /sci a few months back:

My favorite Joe Rogan guest was John Carmack, because he says crunch is good.

It's like jazz

And he's a jazz master

Joe Rogan just sort of has an "every man" way of talking about things that just makes him relatable. I've actually not watched very many of his podcasts, he's one I look at on YouTube, don't recall if I'm subscribed on my phone or not, but I did watch the Alex Jones one. I'm not a fan of his but I'm not a fan of this deplatforming and demonitization tactic either.

yo why do you hate freedom so much?

Are you saying the government has a duty to tell owners what they can and cannot do with their private property???

Are you saying private ownership of essential infrastructure leads to the censorship of opinions contrary to the interests of those owners??????