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washparkhorn

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Everything posted by washparkhorn

  1. Contrary to dummy-dum-dum conventional wisdom, the NYT poll indicates Biden has problems with the fence sitting moderates. The brunch crowd is sleepwalking the nation into an autocracy.
  2. Orthodox economics is a political ideology costumed in mathematical nonsense to rationalize the anarchy of entrenched wealth. Always has been; and always will be. Jevons and Walras used pseudo mathematics to hide their affiliation to wealth and the political class. EK Hunt’s observed “externalities” are pervasive (the rule, not the exception) and thus render orthodox economics entirely unreliable outside the classroom. Reliance on orthodox economic theory creates “snowballing inefficiency” and “warped human development.” We live in that economic reality today. Thus the US pays interest on money we borrow, when we have no need to borrow as an issuer of our own fiat currency not pegged to any other currency or commodity. Those who profit from this inefficiency will not give it up without a fight.
  3. Edit—”chartalism” not “mercantilism”
  4. The United States, as the issuer of its own fiat currency, (the U.S. dollar, which is not pegged to any commodity or other currency), "borrows" money by issuing interest-bearing securities like U.S. Treasury bonds, notes, and bills, even though it can create money to finance its spending without borrowing. The question is why we borrow when we can just create USD’s. To answer that question requires one to understand who benefits from the choice to borrow. For the entrenched dependent on the spice that flows from the USG’s choice to borrow, any threat the system that supplies their risk-free spice stream is ridiculed as heretical. MMT is merely a lens—not policy, strategy or ideology. MMT recognizes excess USD creation will cause inflation if there is insufficient supply of goods and services for those dollars. Taxes, payable in USD’s, can drain off excess dollars. Adequate supply of goods and services for the dollar will also temper inflation. MMT is more accounting than economic theory. It is not new—its roots are in mercantilism. It describes the reality of monetary conditions once the Bretton Woods system was abandoned in 1971.
  5. Pelosi and Clyburn rallied for Henry (an anti-choice conservative) against a progressive pro-choice Latina—while knowing he was under Federal investigation. AIPAC spent $2 million to defeat the progressive Latina. Centrist dumdums claim it's a conservative district—so they ran a corrupt conservative against a hard-right conservative. Dummies.
  6. A fundamental contradiction of the US criminal justice system is that it places a high premium on law and order, yet those charged with upholding law and order repeatedly engage in illegal and unethical practice. Let the kids protest.
  7. Why orthodox economic theories fail: they pretend externalities do not exist,
  8. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-08/us-inflation-is-actually-being-driven-by-higher-interest-rates-jpmorgan-says
  9. We elect the best and brightest.
  10. Indulge me with an answer. The Socratic Method can be illuminating for all (and may promote healthy cognitive plasticity)
  11. Let’s test your intelligence with this thought experiment. It is well understood that “intelligence IS cognitive flexibility,” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9397005/ Demonstrate your cognitive flexibility by arguing why right wing conservative beliefs indicate less cognitive flexibility and lower intelligence. Take all the time you need. “I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over.”
  12. In the “no shit” category - lower IQ related to conservative beliefs: Predicting political beliefs with polygenic scores for cognitive performance and educational attainment Tobias Edwards, Alexandros Giannelis , Emily A. Willoughby , James J. Lee A B S T R A C T Intelligence has been found to be associated with a range of political beliefs including liberalism (Carl, 2014), anti-racism (Deary, Batty, & Gale, 2008), support for the EU and NATO (Oskarsson et al., 2014), free speech (De Keersmaecker, Bostyn, Van Hiel, & Roets, 2021), tolerance (Lasker & McNaughton, 2022) and anti-authoritarianism (Choma & Hanoch, 2017). Intelligence is correlated with a range of left-wing and liberal political beliefs. This may suggest intelligence directly alters our political views. Alternatively, the association may be confounded or mediated by socioeconomic and environmental factors. We studied the effect of intelligence within a sample of over 300 biological and adoptive families, using both measured IQ and polygenic scores for cognitive performance and educational attainment. We found both IQ and polygenic scores significantly predicted all six of our political scales. Polygenic scores predicted social liberalism and lower authoritarianism, within-families. Intelligence was able to significantly predict social liberalism and lower authoritarianism, within families, even after controlling for socioeconomic variables. Our findings may provide the strongest causal inference to date of intelligence directly affecting political beliefs. Our results imply that being genetically predisposed to be smarter causes left-wing beliefs.
  13. For those missing this one, here is the lineup for future opportunities:
  14. Greed-flation continues its meteoric rise
  15. Bush league mistake by the DA. Stupid unforced error. Sloppy as fuck. Mediocrity will be the death of our experiment in democracy.
  16. Chickens come home to roost. . .
  17. Citizens United ensures elections can be rigged in this nation. Schiff is a blue dog Dem (Republican lite) who promoted a Republican candidates with no real campaign of his own to ensure he would not face eiter Barbara Lee or Katie Porter (traditional Democrats) in the general, Tech billionaires who loathe the reform-minded Porter spent $10 million in attack ads against Porter, as she threatened their continued domination of efforts to contain their power and control. Schiff’s pied-piper gambit in promoting Garvey is the inability for the Dems to take back the House of Reps. Blue Dogs have no problem with a divided Congress--it suits their wealthy benefactors. Frankly—Porter went too easy on Schiff, she should have been whiteboarding the fuck out of the Blue Dog scheme--and raising the specter of a 2016 when another Blue Dog deployed a pied-piper strategy. The chickens always come home to roost.
  18. “Post-truth politics has been diagnosed as harmful to both knowledge and democracy. I argue that it can also fundamentally undermine epistemic autonomy in a way that is similar to the manipulative technique known as gaslighting. Using examples from contemporary politics, I identify three categories of post-truth rhetoric: the introduction of counternarratives, the discrediting of critics, and the denial of more or less plain facts. These strategies tend to isolate people epistemically, leaving them disoriented and unable to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources. Like gaslighting, post-truth politics aims to undermine epistemic autonomy by eroding someone's self-trust, in order to consolidate power. Shifting the focus to the effects on the victim allows for new insights into the specific harms of post-truth politics. Applying the concept of gaslighting to this domain may also help people recognize a pernicious dynamic that was invisible to them before, giving them an important tool to resist it.” https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/episteme/article/posttruth-politics-and-collective-gaslighting/88BDC6B5D1540817086E1027A0FF1B5A
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