ndawg

Don't defeat, delete! Don't defeat, delete! Has a nice ring to it.

OMG Texags. Does "rig for red" mean what I think it means?

Also, Trump doesn't really hatch plans like this. He's an improvisational asshole, not a schemer. If he tried to fake COVID, he wouldn't take the necessary measures to ensure things like preventing staff leaks.

Ah, damn. Sorry about that! That's on me.

Mine and hayden_horn's. Am I in error? I suppose it could have been a coincidence, if so, I apologize.

I don't think you understand the point you're criticizing. Unions aren't inherently necessary for management and labor to get along; many corporations have provided far better working conditions for their labor force without them. But they are made necessary by bad management. When management and labor don't get along, you have a dysfunctional company, and any competitor that doesn't also suffer from that dysfunction will eat your lunch. Which brings me to my next point... ... we have pervasive dysfunction. The invisible hand isn't correcting our companies fast enough (GM took 60 years to fail). Our management types are sociopathic short term thinkers who put their own enrichment above the company as a whole. They aren't looking to grow a long lasting enterprise that creates public value profitably. They are mercenaries. We have certainly been regressing back to the kind of exploitative conditions where labor unions were originally made necessary; wealth inequality seems like a clear indicator of that. But we live in a different world now, where our economy has to compete in a global one. Our systems of management have to get up to speed quickly, or else we'll be left with the blue collar and white collar castes fighting over slices of a pie that's ever-decreasing. Unions won't somehow give us better managers (and they won't give us better workers, in the long run). And better management is the only way our position in the world economy can remain secure. I think we are far better off leveraging regulation to incentivize long term profitability and sustainability over short term gains, and to build a safety net around workers so that management can set higher standards for their labor force.

Yep. You need a motivated workforce to compete against another motivated workforce, i.e. you need every employee to be the kind of person that takes the trash out when they notice it's full, rather than wait for somebody else to do it. Globalization pitted our companies against competition they weren't prepared to face. GM never caught up, and went belly up. Unions establish a baseline minimum that guarantees employees get to keep their jobs so long as they do the bare minimum. That kind of company is helpless against competition staffed with people going all out and relentlessly doing the maximum. I'm a fan of AOC and Bernie style progressives, but I have to hold my nose at a lot of the commentary about labor unions. I think our progressive left has a blind spot around unions, because they hearken back to a time when workers seemed more empowered. A lot more sustainable progress will be made if we address the rampant individualism endemic to American workforces and management structures. When Trump rattles of stats that make him look good, and blames everyone else for stats that make him look bad, he's doing exactly what American managers do routinely. He really is our deepest flaws, personified.

Indeed. Unions are an important countermeasure to a specific problem, but often get in the way of progress. I was just listening to a really good episode of This American Life from 2010 about the closing of GM's NUMMI plant in Californa that goes into pretty good detail of how unions got in the way of modernization. (I believe this is the one: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015) Basically, if you want any kind of enterprise to operate at a peak level, you cannot have the kind of adversarial relationship between management and labor that unions essentially depend on permanently for their survival. Instead, you need management and labor to find a way to cooperate, and for everyone to win, so that everyone is motivated to stay fully engaged in the work (I'm oversimplifying, but it's a difficult thing to summarize). That particular episode of TAL brings a lot of insight into the overall decline of American manufacturing. Americans are too individualistic and thus suck at teamwork and trust, which puts a hard constraint on the extent that we can be competitive against countries who are better at it. A crazy point in that episode is when one of the interviewees talks about how American managers at one plant threatened to quit over having their preferred parking spot taken away. The Greatest Generation did a fantastic job of working together to win WW2. After that, we've been a bunch of spoiled, selfish brats. Baby boomers especially.

Okay that is awesome.

It's astonishing to still see folks surprised by Trumpist friends and family going silent after Trump lays a really stinky one. Trumpists are Trump. Trump is the Trumpists. They're all the same disgusting creature.Trump refuses to admit he ever makes a mistake, and Trumpists refuse to admit they make any mistakes. Trump refuses to hold himself accountable, Trumpists refuse to hold themselves accountable. Trump brushes aside legitimate criticism with deflection and distraction, Trumpists brush aside legitimate criticism with deflection and distraction. Trump lays low for a few days after he drops a giant deuce on national TV, Trumpists lay low for a few days after he drops a giant deuce on national TV. They're all human trash. I get that it sucks that they're also related to many of us, and I think it's noble to keep the line of communications open so that they might get deprogrammed some day -- providing no one forgets that they have become entitled, narcissistic assholes, just like their deal leader. I hope each and every Trumpist wakes up and realizes what's happened to them, but I won't hold my breath. Conditioned sociopathy is a bitch.

We will not look back on tonight as the night that Democracy died. We’re going to look back on it as the night nobody could any longer avoid noticing her festering corpse stinking up our living rooms.

I agree with all that, but I think there's more at play. I see Dunning-Kruger come up a lot here on this board, so using that as a frame of reference. I think ready access to the vast amount of information that's on the internet leads many people to become very overconfident in their opinion in the DK sense. One of the many stupid things that conspiracy theorists trot out all the time is the line "do the research!" Like, they think that their cursory google search constitutes actual research. Conspiracy theorists are a really dumb minority, obviously, but I think there's been a more subtle shift across the entire bell curve. On the whole, I think people have more unjustified confidence in their political stance than they used to have. Being in possession of facts about something makes us feel more informed about it -- and our increased proximity to facts is making us feel like we're more informed about everything.

Likewise, I appreciate your reply. I think something really awful has happened to humans in the last 50 years. Our brains are more capable than ever at storing massive inventories of information (and quickly accessing an even larger inventory on the internet), but are worse than ever before at actually doing anything intelligent with all that data. As a result, we get suckered into adopting a mindset that's entirely ideological, and not at all practical. After all, ideologies have names, and names are search terms, so you can look them up on Wikipedia. We're becoming smarter in all the ways that computers are already smart (retrieving information quickly), and stupider in all the ways that computers are already stupid (making decisions in situations we've never encountered before). So, today's capitalists have conditioned themselves to believe that the solution to any economic problem is more capitalism. Today's socialists believe that the solution to any deficiency in standard of living is more socialism. Every bit of rationale people give is nonsense manufactured on-the-spot to address a particular challenge posed by someone else. Need some evidence or rationale to support your position? Google it! People don't engage in political discourse anymore, they engage in a video game about political discourse.

I'm a bit embarrassed to admit it, but I've never heard of "progressive conservatism." I'm sure now that I have been exposed to it, I'll start spotting it everywhere. My main criticism of the political left in this country (and I'm definitely a lefty myself) is that they can talk about what outcome they want all day long, and usually have reasonable plans for bringing it about, yet they often don't really think through unintended consequences. I don't think today's conservatives are a really good example of a helpful "conservative" perspective, but if we had good conservative thinkers, they would serve an important function of raising the bar for selling policy change. I'll take a slower rate of progress in exchange for a drastically lower likelihood of missteps. The wrong approach to solving the right problem doesn't help anybody, and eliminating waste (bureaucracy, budget, etc.) creates net value for the citizens. Basic management theory, really. Plus, the term "progressive conservatism" throws a metaphorical bucket of ice water on the heads of people who are stuck inside gross oversimplifications.

Ah social media, they built a village of idiots out of village idiots...

What would happen is that the GOP behavior would not noticeably change. The are already willing to do anything in the name of power.

Trump isn't very smart, but he has mastered basic cons. This con is one of the simplest: make a demand that sounds reasonable, but which you can ensure will work out in your favor. That's it, that's the entire con. It's so simple that it can even fit in Trump's puny attention span. In this case, either Joe Biden agrees to his drug test, and they manipulate the results to show a false positive, or Biden does not agree to Trump's drug test, and Trump wins. This is as far as Trump probably thinks this through before he decides to employ it, but we can extrapolate some of the obvious benefits, such as Trump getting to walk away from the debates without consequence, or being emboldened to now escalate his accusations of Biden's drug abuse. But it's really important to note while Trump probably gleefully basks in all of these possibilities after the con is underway, he really is too much of a complete idiot to actually manipulate any particular outcome out of the situation. Another con he's used for years: plant a story. "Wouldn't it be really nice if someone planted a story for us alleging that Biden's son engaged in corruption in Ukraine?" Yet another con: launch a wild accusation way out of left field, i.e. birtherism. His lackeys, many of whom are much smarter than he is, probably relish the mental gymnastics involved with conjuring support for his preposterous nonsense. All of this to say two things: 1. Trump doesn't have the mental capacity, nor the people skills, to gauge the reaction people who aren't his cult worshippers will have to his actions. He doesn't bother with that. So, he probably doesn't even consider ahead of time whether he thinks this kind of thing will "land punches" on Biden. 2. These tactics nevertheless consistently work. Maybe Joe Biden doesn't end up with egg on his face here, but if Trump gets to avoid a debate he can't win, and continue the "Biden is senile and propped up with drugs" angle, it's a net positive for him.

I was a big fan of Al Franken, and am still beyond pissed about what happened to him. He could be doing a lot of good right now.

Egads, hearing this from my parents made me die a little inside: "I definitely think something happened to her. I believe it's possible that somebody raped her. I just don't think it was Kavanaugh."

I'm agnostic, and certainly don't mind when any politician holds religious beliefs, so long as they demonstrate the capability of reasoning from within our shared secular framework. That means, among other things, being able to consider a point of view that you disagree with. I would not mind if an atheist nominee were asked to provide a rebuttal of Roe v. Wade, and I would not mind if a religious nominee were asked to provide a defense of it.

Except other countries still have to accept us. And we have consistently not reciprocated in that regard. Our xenophobic chickens have come home to roost, and liberal Americans are now discovering that conservative Americans have burned our bridges with other countries.

True, but a free society is largely built upon a population's ability to detect the boy who cried wolf and... well... the boy definitely cried wolf this time.

I am convinced that the deplorables want an imposter -- a no-talent assclown that makes it to the highest office in the land validates them, and kindles their narcissistic hope that they can rise in the world in spite of their ignorant stupidity. So, Ivanka on the ticket in 2024 sounds like a good bet.

I've met similar dingbats who assume that they will always be protected from any negative fallout that happens. Sociopaths are all the same. No ability to think ahead to the future. But when it's their own smug privilege that's up next to continue fueling the furnace of Trump's crazy train, they *might* realize they were wrong. But not a moment before.

"Y'all can't have it both ways" absolutely sways everyone who is willing to think critically about it.