barry-cotter

The story this is discussing. https://github.com/catedra-literatura-norteamericana-unlp/Te...

Whether or not the Brits need our advice, we need to have our own internal discussion about what’s going on over in the UK and how we can use it to inform our own choices. And although there are still a few things to admire across the pond, the UK mostly now functions as a cautionary tale for the U.S. — yes, despite Trump, and guns, and high health care costs.

Whether you think the UK has been falling behind America economically for a decade or for two decades depends on which set of prices you use to measure living standards. If you use the two countries’ national price indices, the UK has been growing slower than the U.S. since the financial crisis of 2008; if you use PPP prices, as Paul Krugman prefers, the UK’s relative stagnation has come only since Brexit in 2016:

You have not made any attempt as an argument. That’s a pure assertion without even an attempt at a causal chain. Being resilient to non-problems is a cost with no benefit.

The war in Ethiopia is often cited as the immediate cause, but people have always managed to farm through wars, usually at least enough to avoid the Ethiopian situation.

This isn’t true. See the Thirty Years War. There have been many wars in the past that have led to mass starvation by making the work of agriculture impossible. See also the depopulation of Sichuan during the Ming- Qing transition.

Separately the Ethiopian war was subsidised by western food aid and other aid to the Dengists.

And it doesn't work there, so why would it work for impaired driving?

It does actually. See how thieves resident in Florida travel to New York to work because of the different enforcement regimes for one of the clearest possible examples[1].

Even if deterrence didn’t work at all putting people in prison is good because of incapacitation. Committing crimes is stupidly right tailed[2]. Every career criminal in jail for a year is a year society doesn’t suffer their crimes.

[1] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/02/02/cnns_john...

[2] https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/the-sage-encyclopedia-of-e...

Sorry, what I should’ve said was that it was illegal for them to try and do it since they’re supposed to be non-partisan as a condition of their tax status. Same way as the Brookings Institution maintains the tissue thing pretence that it’s not a Democratic organisation. It is some other kind of thing that just happens to always do what the Democrats want to do. There’s nothing illegal about trying to send her and ruin the lives of your political opponents as long as you stay with the law but it is illegal for SPLC to be part of a partisan political campaign.

People who think their opponents are Evil with a capital E generally think that way, yes. See the prevalence of “Punch a Nazi. Lots of Republicans don’t see Democrats as legitimate political opponents and the opposite is very very much true.

This is completely irrelevant to the article. The SPLC committed wire fraud to subsidise the supply of and activities of the kinds of people they told their supporters they were against. Separately, they worked hard over a period of years to censor their political opponents in a partisan fashion. Those are illegal acts. If you want to defend their actions as such by all means do so. But if you’re just pointing out that the motivating factor behind this particular prosecution might not have been entirely apolitical so what?

No one expects the US court system or US attorneys general to act apolitically. The Obama administration extensively used the IRS to target Republicans as such. If you don’t want to be prosecuted for illegal conduct, you should not do illegal things. Alternatively, you could arrange to never lose elections so that your friends are always in power.

What are the likely long-term consequences of this? Destruction of the SPLC and imprisonment of several officers for wire fraud? Slap on the wrist? End of the widespread use of their censorship product?

What would the maximally charitable but in contact with reality [Republican|Democrat] expect or want out of this?

In Washington, D.C.’s history, there were three superlative predominantly black public schools. Two of them were destroyed, one by negligence, one by malice. The third was almost stillborn, strangled in its infancy and neglected in its adolescence, but it persisted.

Depends on what they’re studying and where. If you’re a PhD student English Literature at Directional State University most of your compensation is consumption value, not the promise of a career[1] or pecuniary compensation.

[1] For the huge majority of PhD students in the Arts and Humanities there are virtually no jobs in their fields and it’s not that much better in the social or exact sciences, though there is at least some extra academic demand for their skills. There are very, very few fields outside academia where a doctorate is a necessary qualification or close to it and those are ~all a terrible investment if what you want is a remunerative career; things like biomedical research where you do a doctorate, then a postdoc and then get a job paying what an MBA from a top tier business school gets their first year out.

Across the Western world, appointed administrators have gained power at the expense of elected legislators. More and more of the most consequential political decisions are made by bureaucrats and judges, while fewer are made by congresses and parliaments. This trend has been slowly underway since the World Wars, and especially in this millennium.

In the US, Congress has quietly walked away from most of its former duties. Major policy changes once came through legislation like the Social Security Act of 1935, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Clean Air Act of 1970, or the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, or the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. There have been no bills like these for a generation. Today, to the extent that policy changes, it is a result of executive agencies using powers granted by these 20th century laws, or federal judges reinterpreting their meaning. The most significant bills of my adult lifetime were the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, both of 2010, and both were marginal updates to preexisting 20th century bureaucracies.

European policymakers are so convinced of Australia’s offshore processing success that Britain’s government appointed an Australian official to help draft its Rwanda plan. It even copied Australia’s ‘Stop the boats’ slogan. Meanwhile, officials from Denmark’s immigration ministry traveled 13,000 kilometers in 2024 for a fact-finding trip to a processing site on Nauru, the small island nation off Australia’s northeast coast.

There is just one problem with this narrative: offshore processing did not stop asylum seekers from trying to reach Australia. Instead, Australia’s success lay in turning boats back to their country of origin before they reached Australian shores.

Many readers will disagree that it is ever right to discourage people from seeking asylum in safe, developed countries. Nevertheless, there are three reasons to take Australia’s example seriously. The first is that many European voters want to reduce the number of asylum seekers coming to their countries, and their elected officials are looking for ways to do that. If they misunderstand the example they are trying to follow, they will spend billions of euros on an approach that is both less effective and less humane than it should be.

Before I had a baby I was pretty agnostic about the idea of daycare. I could imagine various pros and cons but I didn’t have a strong overall opinion. Then I started mentioning the idea to various people. Every parent I spoke to brought up a consideration I hadn’t thought about before—the illnesses.

A number of parents, including family members, told me they had sent their baby to daycare only for them to become constantly ill, sometimes severely, until they decided to take them out. This worried me so I asked around some more. Invariably every single parent who had tried to send their babies or toddlers to daycare, or who had babies in daycare right now, told me that they were ill more often than not.

Trump being a censorship happy abuser of power in no way detracts from Obama and Biden being cut from the same cloth.

In Joe Biden’s presidency, two great forces pushed the information state to the limits of its power. The first came from the administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The second came from its decision to use the arsenal of counterinsurgency against American citizens accused of domestic extremism. Both relied on the vast public-private apparatus of censorship and surveillance, originally built to combat foreign disinformation, to wage political battles at home.

[…]

Back in 2017, two academics affiliated with Harvard had created a novel category to describe speech that was factually true, but undermined official interests. They called it malinformation and defined it as speech “based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organization or country”. Could constitutionally protected criticism of the US government be classified as malinformation? Only the information regulators could say for sure since all power rested in the authority to define the terms. The government seized the opportunity. In the very first month of the Biden administration, CISA rewrote its mission from focusing on foreign disinformation “to focus on general MDM”, an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — a three-part classification developed by the 2017 Harvard paper that coined “malinformation”. The machinery of the information state had completed its inward turn. Rather than defensively protecting critical infrastructure from outside attack, the agency would now “be responsive to current events” inside the US.

https://unherd.com/2026/04/how-censorship-seized-america/?ed...

What’s the point of lying this blatantly? You don’t believe it and neither does anyone else; who’s it for?

They’re responsible for the existence of scribd. Not aware of any other obviously socially net negative companies.

It is productive to decline to use propaganda terms. If, every time someone says they support affirmative action they are asked if they support having higher standards for Asian applicants to medical school than for white applicants that’s good because forcing people to defend their support of racist policies reduces support for them. By the same token pointing out that affordable housing doesn’t mean housing people can afford, it means politician allocated housing paid for by the general taxpayer, reduces support. Reducing support for bad things is good.

When my son was in first grade, he came home from school in tears saying that he hated math. My wife and I are both engineers, so this was the sort of all-hands-on-deck shock that demanded our immediate attention. Before this my son had loved math. He would demand that we challenge him with math problems to do in his head in the car and over dinner. He loved doing flashcards. He played math games on his tablet unsupervised for hours. Even now, years later in 4th grade, he has decided he wants to learn calculus, so he insisted I start explaining it to him as best I could in the car, and started working through pre-algebra in Khan Academy on his own. How is it possible that a kid like this had decided he hated math?

His misery was all due to i-Ready, the software product our district had purchased for math work and testing. During that period my kids’ happiness at the end of the school day was entirely determined by how much time their school had made them spend on i-Ready. If they hadn’t touched i-Ready, they were happy. If they were forced to do it, they were sad. If they had to spend an unusual amount of time on it, they were in tears. I started asking around to the other kids’ parents, and I heard similar stories from all of them. Their kids described it as torture. Some of them would hide in the bathroom to avoid it. None of the parents felt that their kids were learning anything at all from it.

Executive Summary Citizens’ Assemblies, in which a representative selection of members of the public are invited to consider policy on contentious areas, are increasingly in the news. Supporters claim they will enhance public confidence in democracy, and could also break the deadlock on issues from assisted dying to climate change. They are claimed to give politicians and policy makers insight into what an informed common ground might look like. This paper examines the case for these claims. We have reviewed over 700 initiatives covered in an OECD database, focusing in particular on 17 examples from Ireland, several US states and two Canadian provinces where the deliberation of a citizens’ assembly was followed by a public vote on the same subject. We have then analysed the results in the light of academic literature on political behaviour and opinion forming. Our conclusion is that citizens’ assemblies are a poor predictor of what the public is likely to decide if asked. With the recommendation of citizens’ assemblies rejected on 10 out of 17 occasions, they are worse at forecasting the public mood than tossing a coin. Even in cases where assemblies were praised for anticipating the popular vote, like on abortion or gay marriage in Ireland, the winning margin at the assembly was around 40 percentage points higher than at the referendum. The error is consistently in the same direction - assemblies were more supportive than the general public of progressive policies on 15 of 17 occasions1 and the proportion of people who voted for the progressive option was, on average, 25 percentage points higher in the citizens’ assembly than in the subsequent referendum. Even when every effort is made to conduct them robustly, the structure of these assemblies seems highly vulnerable to a series of biases, in particular selection bias, issue framing and ‘polarization effects’ – a type of group think. There is good evidence that the contentious issues for which they are most often proposed, like assisted dying, might be the very ones for which citizens’ assemblies are least suited.

America has more murders because we make murder easy. No other country is awash in guns.

Switzerland, Canada. The US has more illegal guns but ~every adult male Swiss citizen has access to a gun and training in how to use it. Hunting is as popular in Canada as it is with similar demographics in the US and having plenty of guns around does not make them anomalously murderous.

Depressing to realise that soon most people will not even have second hand experience with children being useful.

In the nineteenth century, cities grew quickly. Between 1800 and 1914, the population of Berlin’s metropolitan area grew twenty times, Manchester’s twenty-five times, and New York’s a hundred times. Sydney’s population grew around 240 times and Toronto’s maybe 1,700 times. Between 1833 and 1900, Chicago’s population grew around five thousand times, meaning that on average it doubled every five years.

Raw population growth understates the speed of expansion. The number of people per home fell, and, in Britain and America, the size of the average home roughly doubled. At the same time, those homes fit on a smaller share of land, with huge swaths given over to boulevards, parks and railways. The expansion in surface area was thus often several times greater than the expansion in raw population. Meanwhile, real house prices remained flat, while incomes doubled or tripled, generating a huge improvement in housing affordability. Far more people were enjoying far larger homes for a far smaller share of their income.

Net loss of €2.8 billion not gain of €1 billion.

The ISF was controversial; critics claimed it drove away wealthy individuals from the country, resulting in financial loss. A report by senator Philippe Marini estimated that 843 people left France in 2006 because of the tax, resulting in a net loss of €2.8 billion.[2][3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_tax_on_wealth

The quality of economic research from an advocacy organisation with no commitment to the truth as such is about as good as you’d expect.

https://iea.org.uk/media/impractical-outrage-iea-economist-r...

Oxfam’s perspective is global, but we don’t have a world government, so all wealth taxes would have to be national. Very few countries have wealth taxes of the kind Oxfam seems to be seeking. One which does is France. Its imposition – at much lower rates than Oxfam seems to be advocating – raises comparatively little, and has driven many rich people abroad. And as in any country the super-rich are a vanishingly tiny minority, wealth taxes will inevitably catch people who are very far from being billionaires. The French wealth tax hits assets in excess of just €1.3 million. The most recent figures suggest that, of 350,000 households liable to the tax, 250,000 paid less than €5,000.

If taxes could be devised which would catch much larger amounts of billionaires’ wealth, how would it be redistributed, with no world government in prospect?

Without a plausible plan for practical redistribution, the annual Oxfam report has become simply an opportunity for the left’s performative outrage, as pointless in its own way as the World Economic Forum which they bemoan. No political party in Britain should take it seriously and neither should the public.

If you want critique from a committed Democrat look here. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/oxfam-serves-up-a-lot-of-dodgy...

South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world. Its population is (optimistically) projected to shrink by over two thirds over the next 100 years. If current fertility rates persist, every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them.

This disaster has sources that will sound eerily familiar to Western readers, including harsh tradeoffs between careers and motherhood, an arms race of intensive parenting, a breakdown in the relations between men and women, and falling marriage rates. In all these cases, what distinguishes South Korea is that these factors occur in a particularly extreme form. The only factor that has little parallel in Western societies is the legacy of highly successful antinatalist campaigns by the South Korean government in previous decades.

That is not by any reasonable definition a monopoly. 12 landowners owning more than 50% of the property isn’t even an oligopoly.

The author of Imagined Communities was a nationalist, not a post-nationalist.

All violence is physical violence and any non-metaphorical attempt to define anything else as really violence is Orwellian.