radiofreeeuropa

Capturing the Supreme Court so completely was the turning point, in terms of ability to enact their agenda quickly. It's been conservative my entire not short any more life, but it's strongly packed with disingenuous, ideologically-motivated jurists vetted and guided by the "correct" organizations, now.

I wish anyone with even a little power were talking about ditching the position of "Supreme Court Justice" and just drawing for the role by lot from the "lower" federal courts each term. That could be done with a law, not an amendment-there has to be a Supreme Court, and federal judgeships are "during good behavior" (de facto "for life") but Supreme Court Justice per se doesn't have to be a permanent role. The closest I hear anyone talking about is court expansion, but that's a less-effective fix, and one more likely to draw strong push-back and to be unpopular, I think.

My "holy shit, we're in for... interesting times, and like, soon" moment was when Trump suggested his supporters might shoot Hillary if she won ("If she wins, I can't do anything about it. But the 'Second Amendment people'...."), and didn't see a huge hit to his popularity, and supporters in his own camp distancing themselves, immediately.

Norms are dead, you can just suggest assassination of your opponent and still win a Presidential election now, the batshit crazy stuff's not just for races in rural Montana or whatever. Like, IDK how this reads to younger folks, but I assure them that things are now happening practically daily that would have been unthinkable 15 years ago, let alone farther back. Things got visibly weirder fast.

This has been a project under way since the friggin' John Birchers and the postwar "think-tank" boom. They've (this specific set of interests, not conservatism in general) been successfully ratcheting things toward authoritarianism since their Chicago school pals got the right people in the right places to radically change how we enforced anti-trust in the '70s (that is, they made it impossible for us to enforce in all but the most egregious cases, period) and have been winning one boring but effective battle after another ever since (plus the occasional headline-grabbing one).

Often these victories have contributed to further momentum—concentration of wealth means more money for the cause; death of the "fairness doctrine" opens up the possibility of wholly partisan media for propagandizing, which was instantly capitalized on with a boom in right wing AM radio; Citizens United decision de facto ending campaign finance regulation, well that's sure convenient; all kinds of things.

This has been more than a half-century in the making.

Most of NPR's news programming has been terrible for many years.

Pay attention to how many segments—even that are sort-of connected to an actual news event, which, many aren't—revolve around political strategy, poll numbers, and (in season, which is now like three years out of four) electoral race polling.

It's, like... a lot of them, outside the human-interest and arts coverage stuff. They consistently divert into talking about political media messaging strategy and poll numbers and crap, and they do it so very much that it's got to be something they're doing on purpose. This isn't news reporting, it's lazy, safe (because you don't have to engage with substantive questions of policy and outcomes, nor even questions of fact) horse-race bullshit. It's a complete waste of the listener's time, if they're there for actual news reporting.

On the flip side, though, I'm not seeing a lot of "sink or swim in the market" US media doing much better, so I wouldn't bet on them shifting to anything better (though shift they might).

Sorry, I was contributing the painfully-well-backed scientific perspective. If we're doing public-politics kayfabe here, too, then yes that was a faux pas. I'm not trying to campaign though, I'm trying to inform.

If one mistakes the kayfabe for genuine, an awful lot of observed behavior and outcomes remain confusing... the science is there if anyone wants it (reading lists for relevant courses are widely available, journals are not that hard to come by, or just grab Democracy for Realists and follow up with reading criticism of it and checking its sources) and at least the basic fact that very few voters think or behave remotely like anyone hoping for a well-informed, rational, and empathetic electorate might hope, is depressingly solid.

This is understood by everybody operating at a level of importance in media and politics, so a bunch of what they do (and its efficacy) will also be confusing if one disregards it. Even when they talk about how they believe in the voters, and blah blah—that's part of the kayfabe, that's a marketing message, they 100% don't believe that because not only is it definitely not true, you also lose elections (or viewership, or whatever) more often if you act like (not say—act like) it's true. It's not a lie they can afford to hold on to past the lowest levels of their professions, as they'll be concretely punished for the gap between their belief and reality and replaced by others who get it.

They're usually better for the deficit (yes, really, if you just looked at the data and not rhetoric Republicans are who you'd vote for if you wanted to make the deficit worse) and sometimes do stuff like effective consumer protection enforcement, do a lot less of things like trying to sell off public land to extractive industries, haven't tried to use the civil service as a captured partisan tool & loyalist-reward program since like the 19th century, and occasionally get us at least baby-steps in the right direction like this now-removed direct filing program and the ACA (god knows what they might accomplish if those baby steps didn't keep getting completely wiped out every few years, perhaps they'd move beyond that! But I guess we'll never know because we keep electing Republicans)

I'm convinced a bunch of things like this, which create expense and nickel-and-diming and wasted time for tons and tons of ordinary people, are why the US feels a lot poorer than it is on paper.

Like, Intuit and Turbotax contribute to GDP but their existence, at least at the size they are and in some of their roles, is purely a drag on QOL.

(of course, the biggest part of this is the healthcare system, which is great at making sick people and their families, not to mention HR folks and such, waste tens to hundreds of hours on things that aren't about healthcare itself at all, while also costing far more than it ought to—but there are lots of other things like this, see also the tipping-culture thread today, it's all part of that, little bits of bullshit that make life worse)

The history of the last ~100 years of the study of democracy by basically pro-broad-franchise-democracy academics has been a journey from:

"Well, the masses must not be stupid, as restricted-franchise and anti-democratic folks have suggested, because this seems to kinda work. Let's study voter behavior to learn more about this."

to

"Uh. OK so we checked a hundred different ways, several times each to be sure, and they're in-fact incredibly poorly informed and have awful reasoning skills and their behavior, in aggregate, isn't driven by what we might hope it is at all. But, uh... I really want there to be a good outcome here, so, um, let's make some fuzzy guesses at how some kind of Wisdom of Crowds thingy and some sort of system-equilibria-seeking effects might save us? And let's keep double-checking those studies that kept proving voters are really dumb, because maybe... maybe we got something wrong?"

to

"Yeah all that was bullshit cope on our parts, it's all wrong. It's amazing this works at all. Voters are amazingly stupid, to a degree that's so hard to believe we spent decades and decades making sure—like it's proven about as surely as is the law of universal gravitation; cannot practically be educated out of that, maybe at all, and especially not if we first have to get them to vote to make that happen; and everything's basically held together by noise and circumstance and social norms, until it isn't. Go ahead and make that whisky a double. And line up another."

> I do well in interviews, but I detest having people look over my shoulder while I code, and it absolutely tanks my performance.

Yeah, I basically forget how to use all the basic tools I use all the time and my mistake rate shoots up 10x when I'm just screen sharing in a chill context. I'm (told I'm) quite good at all the social side of the job, at keeping my cool in rough situations (social or technical), and all that, but specifically being watched while I work turns me into a sort of foolish klutz.

Which makes these kinds of interviews absolute hell, because that's their entire deal.

Not while performing in front of an audience, no, very, very little of that.

You know the trope of almost all students dreading going up in front of the class to solve a problem on the blackboard/whiteboard? A thing that I think I personally only actually did a countable-on-fingers number of times ever, and only in lower grades?

It's a trope for a reason, and it's because the vast majority of people do in fact hate having to get in front of an audience and perform. Hell, it's often a component of recurring nightmares.

It's like that but way worse because it's also far more high-stakes than that, the problems are far more complex, the point is explicitly for everyone in the audience to judge you and not just your assumption that they all are causing the stress, et c.

It's more like the stress from getting up at an open mic night, than any kind of stress I've ever actually encountered on the job. Even the dynamic in a meeting with clients where you have to diagram something out on a whiteboard or something is totally different—for one thing, you generally have people in there who are very much "on your side", and you don't have to worry if you misspell something that you're personally about to be/remain unemployed, or lose out on a huge raise, or whatever (nobody generally cares about minor mistakes on a whiteboard in an ordinary context, and maybe they don't in some interviews, but they do in others, and candidates worry they might in all of them).