Political Red Pill Thread: wtf, 'Murrica

I agree with this, but mostly because politics is kinda like global warming or evolution in that it is a field comprised of dozens of sub-topics.

It would be very unusual to find someone online who is truly an “expert” in the field of politics as a whole, much in the same way it would be very unusual to find someone online who is truly an “expert” in the field of medicine as a whole. I’d be surprised if anyone here has heard of a single doctor treating someone’s Crohn’s disease, leukemia, and schizophrenia after also performing their heart transplant.

The people who can, probably don’t hang out online. They are busy getting paid for that kinda expertise. The rest of us just do what we can per our individual time/inclinations, and hopefully remain attentive to the obvious limitations each imposes on our grasp of the issues.

I felt the same way when LeBron crushed GS in the finals last year.

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On the subject of Politics and the Cult of Personality: as we head into our Thanksgiving festivities and loosen our belts for the generous serving of familial horror at a reality TV star being elected to POTUS, has there been much discussion on the ways in which Obama might have opened the door that Trump eventually blew off the hinges?

For the past 8 years, 'Murica has been celebrating how cool their president is. The “rock star.” The pop culture icon. The one with the Twitter account. The guy who gives ESPN his NCAA brackets, the guy who appeared on Between Two Ferns, the guy who rode with Seinfeld on Comedians in Cars, the guy who did a phone drop after reading a Mean Tweet (from Trump, no less!) on Kimmel, the SNL appearances, etc.

Did the pop culture blitz of the Obama administration desensitize America to the idea of a Trump campaign? One guy is from The Apprentice, the other guy does fist bumps and shoulder brushes in between Fallon or Daily Show appearances. He is also, I believe, the first sitting president to appear on a late-night talk show (with Leno).

So, what gives? Is it really a surprise that 'Murica’s acceptance of integrating politics with pop culture resulted in the acceptance of integrating pop culture with politics? Maybe sooner than expected, sure, but we’re talking about a guy with a penthouse built with 24k gold. You don’t sign off on a work order like that without having a penchant for pushing boundaries.

I’m not saying POTUS can’t crack a joke, but where do (or should) we draw the line?

Once we start soliciting opinions from celebrities on what oughta be done politically, aren’t we conferring upon them some semblance of credibility? Once it becomes important to us who George Clooney endorses as a candidate, aren’t we conferring upon him some semblance of economic or sociopolitical acumen? Why wouldn’t these insulated Hollywood egomaniacs try taking matters into their own hands after years of 'Murica begging like children for them to spoon feed us their opinions on this stuff?

It’s easier to make sense of fanaticism in nutrition when you consider the myriad number of roles food assumes in our lives. It would be easier if food was just fuel, but it’s also intertwined with culture, religion, spirituality, personal identity, community, and status. It’s one of our most intimate connections to nature. We eat when hungry, but we also eat to celebrate, to mourn, to bond, to escape, when stressed, when bored. What we eat (or don’t), the way we eat (or don’t), is a way of expressing our values or beliefs. Food can harm, food can heal. Food hits all of our 5 senses. It’s how we show love. Etc.

I can’t defend the GMO survey except to say that reading textbooks is hard, and one wouldn’t want facts getting in the way of sculpting a personal identity around the adherence to a chic nutritional doctrine.

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That being said, I wouldn’t defend Ms. Paltrow even if I could.

JT[quote=“anonym, post:243, topic:222723”]
I agree with this, but mostly because politics is kinda like global warming or evolution in that it is a field comprised of dozens of sub-topics.
[/quote]

This is very true.

As an aside, I’ve taken cracks at Climate Change and GMOs because they are these very science heavy topics that get discussed in very simple terms and soundbites. Fear and crisis sells. This kind of thing drives me crazy. Even more so, the misquoting of the junk science 97% number, repeatedly, and recently by President Obama and others. In fact, they have further imbued meaning to it and taken it out of context. It’s used as justification for any and every environmental related policy.

On the other side we have people claiming climate change is a complete hoax. Anyway, the truth is in the middle. We don’t know as much as we’d like. We aren’t great at predicting the impact of our efforts. And “the deniers” are often just people who don’t agree that windmills are going to be effective, or that tightening restrictions on fossil fuels for example, WILL make a real impact on the situation. Anyone who talks about the economic impacts of some of this is a heretic. The public doesn’t realize that many of these people are being called “deniers” while being counted as one of the 97%. It’s just incredibly ugly. There is no 97% consensus on how dangerous this all is, much less on what we can do about it. Wide swaths of scientists in climate-related fields were excluded from this number entirely.

BTW, my husband often sits in the neighborhood hot tub with one of the country’s leading climate change researchers. I’d be a little worried about him “making lots of friends” in the hot tub, wink. It turns out they’re mostly a bunch of middle-aged guys with desk jobs, complaining about how their backs hurt. Haha.

I hope you like the Haidt book!! Let me know. Still on Free to Choose over here, so I haven’t started Hillbilly Elegy yet.

Edited

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You’re a much more industrious non-offensive noun than I am for wanting to tackle climate change at all. Maybe one of the reasons “they” have been able to imbue it with such broad spectrum meaning is that no one really has a firm grasp of climatology, glaciology, biology, ecology, anthropology, geology, oceanography, solar/atmospheric physics, biochemistry, geochemistry, etc… much less the fields involved in understanding how to develop/implement solutions if needed.

Or maybe the assured terror of drowning in the boiling glacier water that will inevitably flood Kansas if we don’t fund the appropriate programs and appoint the appropriate experts RIGHT NOW is enough of an argument. Either way, we’ll be quizzing you on all of the above next time the topic rolls through here.

And I wasn’t even aware that GMOs are that hot of a topic outside of the connection to organic (i.e., pesticide-free) and sustainable (i.e., hippy) movements. Has GMphObia surpassed vaccines as THE silent, establishment-backed threat to our childrens’ health, or has Monsanto not yet found a way to splice anything worse than thimerosal into their brussel sprouts?

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And I’m sure that the Haidt book will be worth the read. I liked The Happiness Hypothesis (didn’t realize it was the same guy), so he’s off to a good start. I’ll keep you posted.

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Well, that’s a lot of ground to cover, I cannot cover all of it in a short amount of time but first I will address minimum wage because I want you to understand why I oppose it. First it’s philosophical and rational.
No matter how high you try to make the bottom, it’s still the bottom. A rising tide raises all ships, but it doesn’t make a small ship bigger. In other words the first problem with minimum wage hikes is that it devalues the dollar. There is a small period of time between the raising of the minimum wage and the economy catching up where it is beneficial, once the economy catches up, though, your $10 dollar minimum wage will have the same purchasing power as the previous $7 dollar minimum wage. The only way to combat that is to constantly raise it, but you cannot do that. The number does not matter, the number in proportion to what it’s worth is what matters. The higher you make the bottom, the less the dollar is worth.
The people who get screwed the most by this is the middle class because their salaries do not go up proportionally.
Further, employers get more and more creative on how to live without employees. You know those self service checkouts at the grocery store? They don’t exist because they are a greater benefit to the customer they exist to replace employees. When employees get to expensive employers find other ways to get the job done. Fast food chains are already flirting with kiosks that take your order instead of a person.
Then there is trade, a weaker dollar is actually beneficial for trade which is why China consistently devalues the Yuan to keep trade favorable, save for the way they do it is illegal, but who is to stop them? (That’s where the whole ‘China screws us on trade’ stuff comes from).But it also inspires nations to tax our goods and make trade harder for us.
Inflation is a necessary evil but we want to keep that as low as possible. Raising minimum wage always increases inflation. And when purchasing power goes down, the poor stay poor and the middle class gets poorer and the rich stay rich.
There is no absolute solution to poverty, somebody will always be at the bottom. The best we can do is lower the the percentage of poor as much as we can, but raising minimum wage does not do that.

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Thanks, Pat.

Sorry for the confusion. I wasn’t saying that “I personally” believe those things. I was using those statements as examples of the kinds of things people say. General belief statements, often layered with emotion. But usually when you get to talking about the issue in any depth, there’s little to no knowledge base. Like statements about minimum wages that have zero basis in any really understanding of the economics. These are things that journalists say, or soundbites or catch phrases that politicians like. Agree with you in that wages are part of a dynamic system, as are things like tax hikes. Prices adjust. People change their behavior in response to these kinds of policies, whether that’s hiring fewer people, spending less, whatever.

I was just using those things as an example. I had a discussion with my neighbor about climate change after the election. She was doing a lot of hand-wringing about what Trump might do about global warming since it’s “TIME TO ACT!!!” I’m not an expert on the climate, but I’ve tried to read about it, follow research, watch lectures, etc… It became pretty clear immediately that she knows less about it than I do, but she’s very, very concerned. That’s all fine, but I’m trying to avoid having really strong emotionally based opinions about things that I really don’t understand, if that makes sense.

LOL! That wasn’t your confusion, that was mine… Sorry.
And you are absolutely right.
With ‘Climate Change’ I think everybody needs to take a deep breath. The Earth’s climate ebbs and flows and the fact of the matter for over it’s 4.5 billion years history we have an infinitesimal data set in which to work with 110, to 150 years max of temperature data and not of the whole Earth. I am not saying man does not effect it, everything in an ecosystem affects the ecosystem. There are millions if not billions of variables that affect the environment.
In 2004 a neutron star, which had a ‘star-quake’ 50,000 years ago, sent a jet of gamma rays and particles that stripped away some 20% of the Earth’s upper atmosphere. We get his with an average 30 CME’s (Coronal Mass Ejections) a year. These are events that when magnetic loops on the sun snap, send out a rush of charged particles that strip away part of the atmosphere despite our magnetic field. And those are just 2 events from space that have massively affected our environment.

That being said, I don’t want to live dirty either. I want clean air and I do not want a whole lot of pollution around. But if every nation doesn’t play nice on a global level, very little will come from just us making the effort.

Further, lots of environmental legislation has passed. Does it no make sense to see if it had any effect at all, before we do anymore? I don’t see a single study where it says the measures we have already put in place has made a difference. If we want to make a difference in the right way, lets make sure we are at least on the right track. I mean, if all the legislation and the global efforts have yielded a net zero effect, then there is no point in continuing a failing strategy.

I remember geology class. It’s amazing what the earth can recover from. We cannot break it, it can break us though and it arrogant to think about it the other way. We need a civil relationship with Mother Earth. We be nice to it and it’s nice to us.

But nothing lasts forever. No matter what, in 1 billion years, the earth will no longer be able to sustain life. The sun is getting hotter and when it hits a certain threshold, it’s going to fry the Earth and all the Prius’s and bicycles cannot do a damn thing to stop it.

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@pat, regarding the Minimum Wage. It came up in another thread not long ago, and I posted this. You might like the video. It’s an economics professor talking about the research related to the minimum wage, and talking about what the data means and doesn’t mean. BTW, he’s not taking a stand that we should never raise the minimum wage. Worth watching. Its really nice to find non-partisan sources where someone is talking about their area of specialty, without a political slant. This is the kind of thing I’m trying to do more of. I can’t be an expert on everything, but trying to find the experts is a start!

Minimum Wage: Part II - #263 by anon71262119

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We’ve talked about how to find quality news sources in this thread, and about political slant in the news.

This article is about kids, but I think most adults can use the reminder.

There isn’t a paywall on this today, but let me know if you have trouble accessing it. Polo says he can google just about any article title and find it on the web, but I don’t think you’ll have to work around to get to this.

“Some 82% of middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website…”

@idaho - We were talking about people getting “the news” from their FB feed the other day. This made me think of you. From the article, By age 18, 88% of young adults regularly get news from Facebook and other social media, according to a 2015 study of 1,045 adults ages 18 to 34 by the Media Insight Project. This risks creating an “echo chamber effect,” because social media tends to feed users news items similar to those they’ve read before

@The_Myth, and @The_Mighty_Stu - Just tagging you guys since you’re teachers. A nice article to talk about with your kids.

[quote=“pat, post:254, topic:222723”]
The Earth’s climate ebbs and flows and the fact of the matter for over it’s 4.5 billion years history we have an infinitesimal data set in which to work with 110, to 150 years max of temperature data and not of the whole Earth.[/quote]

If I can be that guy for a second, does anyone really care what sort of shenanigans Earth’s climate was up to 3 billion years ago?

I can see how it might be academically illustrative, but since I don’t plan on huffing ammonia in a renovated supervolcano anytime soon, shouldn’t we prioritize our understanding of the temperatures observed on the planet we grew up on?

The planet survived getting wrecked by an asteroid 6 miles in diameter, but I would still recommend sending Bruce Willis to blow the next one up if need be. Let’s worry about the multi-million-year temperature cycles as we traverse the next multi-million years.

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Sure you can be anybody you want. What is important is exploring the cycling of the Earth’s environment since at least the dawn of life. We have some estimates with large margins for error on the status of the Earth’s environment at various points in history, but historical data gives us information that can be used as to more accurately determine how the Eath’s environment reacts to things.
Okay, so we are in a warming stage now. Does that mean it’s going to warm perpetually or is it going to follow that a cooling stage will then precipitate. Does the warming stage indicate a run-away warming stage where the temperature is only going up and never down? I do not think we have enough data to make an accurate prediction on that.
Does man play a role, absolutely, everything in an ecosystem affects the ecosystem. Are the measures taken made any positive difference and do we want it to cool and by how much?
I am not against preserving the environment, in fact I am for it in as much as it makes sense to do. I am not for symbolic measures though, only effective. I am for clean energy, I am for no litter, I am for preserving natural spaces, I am for preserving as much rainforest as possible.
I am not for taxing the piss out of someone because of perceived violations, or excessive regulation. Like in most matters a cool head and a measured way forward, followed by an analysis of measures taken to ensure they are proper is the correct way to think about this in my opinion.

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I wish there was a dislike button haha. Man that disturbs me. So sad, and very much true. For that matter a lot of adults that grew up at the same time I did can’t distinguish the two either. Even more sad.

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I’m down with Bruce Willis. But only if we can get Stallone with him instead of Ben Affleck.

On a serious note why pat is exaggerating some for effect the past does rather matter for scientific understanding of current climate cycles. It’s like history with human events–if you don’t know what caused it, it’s doomed to repeat.

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Yes, but assuming all of this, there’s plenty of good evidence that we are at least accelerating that process. I’m not saying we shut down the coal industry yesterday like the Obama administration has been doing, or putting ourselves at a competitive disadvantage with our military enemies (or any trading partners), but we need to also be taking it a hell of a lot more seriously than dreaming of windmills in everyone’s yards

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How many times has someone quoted an Onion article as fact, lol. This is why we try to teach the rhetorical triangle - speaker, audience, subject - to use context to determine the author’s message and to determine what their goal is.

Thanks for the tag!

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