I’m probably going to be allowing most of my streaming subscriptions to lapse over the next year or two. Gonna stick with Dropout and PBS, but that might be all.

My apologies, I thought you were making the opposite argument. But I still disagree.

All other things being equal, educated people are statistically less susceptible to disinformation and fallacious arguments. If they weren’t, the fascists wouldn’t be trying to eliminate public education, and the electoral map wouldn’t correlate so strongly with education.

Foucault wasn’t wrong about right-wingers using educational systems for indoctrination, but that’s not the current GOP playbook. Their strategy relies on people being too anxious and uneducated to separate fact from fiction, and to provide the propaganda another way (specifically, via carpet-bombing media, social and otherwise, with disinformation). Why bother wasting time at the school district level when there are nationwide platforms where people line up voluntarily to get their ration of AI-generated, foreign-actor-crafted lies delivered straight into to their eyeballs?

Yeah, we’ve gotta fix the education system. And yeah, we’ve gotta get people to recognize where they’re being controlled. But I don’t think that eliminating the former is going to accomplish the latter; and clearly the other side knows it, too.

Right-wing propaganda nonsense. Education teaches you how to evaluate sources and interrogate assumptions.

I think we overemphasize water and should talk more about people’s hydration.

It’s definitely getting broader than that, with the way that wealth stratification continues to skyrocket. But I don’t mean “actually rural,” I really do mean “more rural.” A good amount of city real estate prices have priced lower-income folks out of the urban core in many (most?) cities, gentrifying the downtown and resulting in a reversal of 1980s White Flight as the working class move to now-cheaper suburban and rural communities.

I didn’t mean just farmers or whatever. I just mean people who haven’t got the money to live in the Trader Joe’s district.

Working class people tend to be less-educated, live in more rural areas, be a part of less-diverse communities, and be prone to accept authority figures. And the GOP has spent a half-century trying to convince that exact group that every problem they’re experiencing is actually the opposite. So they vote against their best interests in election after election, and then the people they voted for successfully convince them that the Democrats actually torpedoed it all and they could’ve actually made everything better if they just had one more term…rinse and repeat across 25+ election cycles.

Interesting. That’s potentially a really valid point. And then, does the Gore presidency mean that there’s no Obama presidency (since he campaigned on a much more moderate platform as reaction to Bush) and thus no Trump presidency?

Hmmm.

I think it’s the fact that he has a recognizable username that gives me pause on that, though. For a lot of people, his position is naturally going to afford him some level of deference and authority.

If the people making decisions spent time as normal editors anonymously, I agree definitely that that would be a good way to get to know the community more.

Looks to me like that link is broken. Must be something going on.

Honestly I kinda feel like “Multiple governments, NGOs, and legal bodies have described or rejected the characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide” sounds more damning than just “Israel perpetrated a genocide.”

Still, Jimbo, you should probably stay out of this. Wikipedia’s whole thing is that no one person is in charge.

I believe that’s always been the case, officially. It certainly was about fifteen years ago, when I worked in pharmacy. I know there are some ways that hospitals had of getting around it (like charging the full amount and putting it on a payment plan, but then immediately forgiving the remaining balance after one payment), but I don’t think those loopholes have been closed even still.

C. G. P. Grey’s “Rules for Rulers” is illuminating on that front, but I don’t think you mean soft power. I think you mean gangsters. And I think that most US presidents avoid such a thing by virtue of being the C in C of the biggest military on the planet. Though maybe they get a little bit of it from the Pentagon, I dunno.

I’ve been in a lot of blue collar environments in a previous career, and this is definitely something that happens. It’s not normative, but you’ll usually find a few construction companies or factories or warehouses in an area that employ a much more equally-gendered workforce.

Unironically yes, and it’s sad that that’s the case. However, he did issue a similar EO in 2019 which didn’t do much; the administration claims that it lowered costs on the most expensive procedures by 6%, but whether that’s true or not the cheapest procedures became about 3% more expensive. Something like 20% of hospitals and insurers were ever in compliance, which Trump of course blames the Biden administration for; and attempts to make the EO a law went nowhere on the Hill.

But yes, healthcare price transparency is a good thing. Still, I’m a bit suspicious; because the insurance companies actually welcomed the EO when it was first signed. I can’t figure that one out.

Because the tax preparation companies paid them a lot of money.

Definitely. If New York City (just the city) were to secede from the United States, it would be the 101st largest nation in the world; almost as big as Switzerland, and bigger than New Zealand, bigger than Singapore, and bigger than every Nordic country except Sweden. They can really throw their weight around.

And as a part of the US, they can honestly do even more. Most companies don’t want to have a “New York” version of their product and an “all the other states” version, so they’re pretty likely to fall in line with whatever New York asks for. Especially if California follows suit; that’s a sixth of the US’s population in just those two jurisdictions.

I think it’s everyone’s problem that the world is too awful for sarcasm to be obvious.

Probably. I mean, I’m super interested in alternate history as a storytelling concept, but I recognize that it’s probably not a super helpful thing to get caught up in unless you’re actively looking for fiction. The Butterfly Effect is just too strong to be certain about anything.

Would 9/11 have actually happened? Or is there someone who died in 1999 due to lack of healthcare access who might’ve been able to stop it, had the ACA come a decade earlier? If 9/11 is a “canon event” a la Spider-verse, would having a few years where the political “heat” was a bit lower first have helped us maintain that solidarity that was so brief in our actual version of history? Would history have proceeded more or less as it did in reality, but with Republicans abandoning their attempts to kill health care in the late-00s because by that point it was too established and “from the before times?” Would they have replaced those legislative attacks with something worse? (Almost certainly yes)

I’m intrigued by the possibilities. To some extent because we can learn for the future by thinking about the past; but mostly just in a “huh, that’s interesting” way.

1. Capitalism is also a failure. Choose one.

2. Mamdani is not a communist, but a socialist. There’s a difference, and even though you can apparently be the President without knowing that, it’s worth being clear about it.

And he was right. Still, I wonder how things would’ve been different had Clinton accepted the counteroffer and tried to iterate on it afterwards. The 2004-and-beyond GOP playbook has been to keep the Republican base spiked with anxiety and fear, blame Democrats for it, and use that cortisol to bring out the vote; but if the fear and anxiety about health care had been toned down and reduced their overall fear, maybe maga would’ve had more trouble gaining traction.

Or maybe it would’ve been successfully repealed in 2016. Who knows.