Politics Is Complicated

News and commentary with a strong lean toward how to either repair or abandon the sinking ship that is the United States.

[politicsiscomplicated]

Watching Platner supporters implode in real time over the rape allegations against their candidate. They're absolutely sure that this is propaganda from the Democratic Party to lose the election on purpose and/or propaganda from Israel to prop up Congressional support for Trump, and knee-jerk assume the allegation itself can't possibly be true.

An isolated accusation against a public figure should be treated with caution, I think, because there are sometimes attempts to torpedo campaigns through outright lies, but dudes. This isn't the first time he's been accused of somethig like this. Or the second. Or the third. Your guy is not a good human being.

Meanwhile, it's unclear whether progressive independent Tim Rich, who doesn't have all this baggage, is even still running, because he appears to have failed to get ballot access.

Maine is fucked as long as he's on the ballot. I'm so sorry, your state deserves better than a choice between its incumbent disingenuous Trump-enabler and the dumbest asshole to ever wander accidentally into a Democratic nomination post-realignment.

Platner should drop out of the race and let the Maine Democratic Party nominate a replacement. And that replacement should not be Janet Mills, who he beat in the primary, because that is going to look like sabotage even if it's their honest opinion.

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Hundreds of masked white nationalists march in Washington on Fourth of July

Neo-fascist group Patriot Front parades banners, including Confederate flag, chanting ‘Reclaim America’ in US capital

People parading around in the US capital with the Confederate flag could not be any clearer: they are violent enemies of America, and we should treat them now the same way we treated them in the 1860s.

There are few things that make me feel nationalism for America, but when I see people like this, I want to remove them from my country.

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We Owe Allegiance to No Crown John Archibald Woodside, 1812

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Ethnic Nationalists Don't Actually Care About Culture, They Just Like to Lie to the Media About It

Fascist terrorist Enrique Tarrio, talking about the recent pogrom in Northern Ireland: "Yes, the violence was about mass expulsion. But you're not going to change them. How to get this to stop? Stop mass migration. Try to get [migrants] to assimilate."

You hear this a lot from xenophobes, at least the type we're currently subject to in the US and UK, but it's always empty. People like Tarrio -- ethnic nationalists -- believe that a nation is not defined by a shared culture or participation in shared institutions, but by ancestry. They claim to be concerned about the threat of foreign cultures, but can't point to any aspect of any culture that allegedly threatens them that isn't something that is also part of their own culture. Case in point: the flashpoint for this mob violence was a stabbing with a kitchen knife, which is a very British type of crime.

The problem that the participants in the pogrom actually have with the attacker is not that he's insufficiently British, it's that he's black. Tarrio and people like him will never consider people who don't look like them part of their nation, no matter what their culture is. They talk and act in terms of contamination, not disagreement. I have little positive to say about the allied but distinct strain of dangerous nationalism, the Christian Nationalists, but at least they have the decency(?) to make it clear that their problem is people who don't share their religion, and so they try to convert them. The ethnic nationalist can't convert anyone, even in theory. There's no way to assimilate when your actual objection is to race-mixing.

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Americans love scams. We love the idea that there's "One Weird Trick" or "thing THEY don't want you to know" that will fix everything, and every few years, the forces of marketing, absolute crackpottery, and wild misunderstanding of research converge to convince Americans there's a new trick.

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5 million have dropped ACA insurance after Trump and the GOP let prices skyrocket

The number of people who signed up for a health plan and then didn't pay their premium fell much more sharply than it has in years past. Tru

Republicans: "We're the party that understands economics."

Economists: "In many situations, when the price of a thing goes up, people will either seek cheaper alternatives or buy less of the thing."

Republicans: "Sounds fake. Must be fraud."

Seriously, though, this is the intersection of several different failures of American healthcare policy that both parties deserve blame for.

Countries with universal healthcare implement it in many different ways, including universal private insurance. But the ACA, as is typical of US policies, is a corporate-friendly and convoluted implementation that doesn't learn from what works elsewhere. For universal insurance to work, there need to be clearly-defined plans available everywhere in the country with stable prices. We have none of those features. Insurance companies are local monopolies, they spam you with dozens of "different" plans with tiny subtle differences that may just disappear from year to year if they feel like it, and the prices change unpredictably. Now, since the anti-public-services party is in charge, the situation is managing to get worse for both patients and insurance companies at the same time, which is a very strange sentence to write.

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The Trump Regime won't last forever, and whatever comes next must free its political prisoners and purge its enforcers.

Alarm over ‘extreme’ sentences for anti-ICE protesters convicted of terrorism

First amendment groups call 50-to-100-year prison terms chilling as legal experts say sentences unusually long

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Trump's Plans for Institutionalization are Still Evil Even If They're Not the Start of Something Worse

The DOJ is now arguing that home care for people with disabilities is not the government's responsibility, jeopardizing some people's ability to be part of their communities at all. The regime is also expanding who can be declared incompetent to make their own medical decisions as part of implementing an executive order from last year blaming homeless people for the imaginary "surge" in crime.

Some people are immediately fearing the worst: that this is manufacturing consent for a Holocaust. They have reasons to fear this. It's important to remember that the Nazis targeted the disabled and the homeless early on before expanding to other victims, and while I don't think Trump is himself an actual believer in Nazi ideology, he sure has no problem with them being his strongest supporters and advisors. I would not be surprised at all if this is, say, what Stephen Miller wants.

But we don't need to extrapolate past what Trump has explicitly said he wants to get to something horrible that's worth stopping. He's been saying since his first term that he wants to bring back the pre-Reagan insane asylum system. On a related theme, HHS Secretary RFK Jr. ran for president on a platform that included bringing back work farms, a "punishment for your own good" that, while tied to eugenics, very definitely predates fascism. These two shit tastes that taste shitty together are a scheme to stick people in abuse warehouses while loudly pretending it counts as "healthcare".

That's why it's important that advocacy organizations and journalists are sounding the alarm on this and using the term "institutionalization". You don't need to even approach Nazi policies to get deep into violation of civil rights. We can't risk moving the Overton Window such that "merely" abusing people instead of literally murdering them comes off as a "reasonable" choice.

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A review of major Google changes over the past 25 years.

Google searches for other terms they deem similar to or synonyms of the ones you wanted.

Google "corrects" your search terms to other, more common ones in the name of "helping" you, so that even if you entered a legitimate and correctly-spelled search term, they assume you meant something else.

Google places ads at the top of the search results instead of genuine matches.

Google turns Chrome's URL bar into a search bar so any time you typo a URL it Googles it instead, and other browsers follow suit.

Google pays makers of other browsers to pretty please make their search engine the default.

Google puts a search bar on the background of Android OS, implying that it's the default way to do things (similar to what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer, but the US has capitulated to monopolies since then and would never consider telling them to stop).

Google adds a dropdown menu of previous and suggested search terms to both the search bar on the website and the URL/search bar in the browser that is really easy to misclick (especially with a touchscreen).

Google adds a voice assistant that treats everything you say to it as a search.

Google adds a whole separate "shopping mode" based on inferring whether your search term is something you might want to buy, which buries your results more and looks like you've made a mistake in your search term.

Google introduces AI summaries that are often wrong or irrelevant.

Over this period, the number and percentage of "no-click searches" -- searches that don't result in the user clicking a link in the search results -- steadily increased. The message Google and others get from this is somehow "Google is doing a good job of getting people the info they asked for". Have they even considered the possibility that no-click searches are an indicator that people either didn't intend to search for that or are trying different search terms because the results are obviously wrong? I think Google is chasing the wrong metric of success and everyone else is just sort of taking them at their word that it's a good idea (and often imitating them because they think that's just how you be a search engine).

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Happy Tennis Court Oath Day

In the 1700s, the Kingdom of France was an absolute monarchy, a state where all power was centralized in one person: the hereditary and un-removable King. Unlike neighboring England and Spain, which had legislatures, France's Estates-General was as a consultative body -- the King had the power to make law, and these were just people he could choose to ask for advice about it. The Estates-General consisted of representatives of three distinct "estates": the Catholic clergy (the first estate), the aristocracy (the second estate), and the commoners (the third estate).

On June 17th, 1789, the Third Estate voted to seize true legislative authority, not to settle for being advisors to a king who clearly did not care about their interests, and adopted the name The National Assembly. On June 20th, they arrived at their usual meeting place to find it was locked and surrounded by soldiers. Rather than FAFO about what the king might do to them, they reconvened at a tennis court at Versailles and voted almost unanimously to Do Something about him. This resulted first in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, then in writing a constitution that abolished the monarchy, and then abolished the monarch.

Just something for Americans to learn and reflect on.

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If the American economy rewarded innovation, then executives and investors would not be the people getting rich. Artists, engineers, designers, researchers, anyone who actually invents would.

[politicsiscomplicated]

Tim Rich for U.S. Senate

Tim Rich is running for U.S. Senate as an independent to challenge political corruption, lower costs for families, and put Maine ahead of pa

Hello, people who have reached this post by following #graham platner. Let me start off by saying, the point of this post is not about policy, it is about trust. I agree with a lot of Platner's stated policies, but I am asking you to consider whether he is the best spokesman you can put forward for those policies.

Graham Platner is being treated as the latest progressive superstar, a new Bernie Sanders or AOC speaking for that same mix of a very plugged-in and committed left and those who aren't so ideological but rightfully feel neglected by our mainstream political system. But things keep coming out about him that you'd see as reasons not to trust him in any other context. His fans are rallying to his defense, and I get it. He's running as the anti-establishment candidate where your establishment is Susan Collins, that perpetual disappointment who pays hollow lip service to opposing Trump while still supporting him when it matters. Of course you want someone different, and Platner fits that bill. But he's not the only one you can pick.

You have instant runoff. You have the ability to rank candidates instead of picking just one and perpetuating the two-party system. And you have an independent candidate, Tim Rich, who is also claiming that position of the populist outsider here to un-fuck your state but without Platner's baggage. Please, use your unique political situation to take on the system. Take a chance on putting another independent in the Senate instead. And hey, you can still rank Platner second just in case.

[politicsiscomplicated]

Teen takeover arrests should remind us that the US is far too punitive

I haven't been a teenager for a long time, and am also not yet the parent of one, so I admit I'm not familiar with a lot of details of the whole "teen takeover" phenomenon. But the news articles I've seen about it paint it as inherently dangerous that teenagers are organizing events online where they... go to the beach? Really? The actual impact on others is vague and implicit, and really just comes off as cops scaremongering over the grave public threat of people existing in public. It sounds like the vast majority of the people attending these things aren't bothering anyone.

The majority, but not all. So what's up with the participants who have been making problems? Well, there were some criminal charges for fighting and drunk driving at the takeovers I've seen hit the news. Those do physically endanger other people, so yes, someone should step in to stop them, but the US really needs to stop its one-size-fits-all idea that public order requires prosecution.

I think that, most of the time, things like fights should be dealt with in the "real world" the way they were dealt with by school authorities when I was a kid: break up the fight, interview the people involved to figure out what was going on, tell them to stay away from each other, maybe suspension. But we give out punishments measured in years, not days, and hold it against people for their whole lives, branding them "criminals" as if that's their personality instead of a situational bad idea or an actual interpersonal conflict with a specific other person.

In high school, I got into a fight on the bus. Nobody was arrested, nobody was prosecuted, instead the school identified and interviewed everyone involved, and when confronted again by the specific person I was fighting, I told him that I had jumped in to protect someone else without knowing how it had started, and he said that he had too and we went on our way peacefully respecting each other and understanding that we actually had no personal conflict at all. I want other people to get that kind of opportunity to resolve their problems.

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Followup from PBS: according to researchers and, y'know, teenagers themselves, the reason these "takeovers" are happening is because of a distinct (and deliberate) lack of any activities for them to do.

[politicsiscomplicated]

Remote work -- not AI -- has sidelined recent college graduates, research finds

Research from the New York Fed finds that younger college graduates have been sidelined by remote work in recent years, as companies may be

This article mentions two very different things but doesn't seem to get that they are different. Working remotely reduces the feedback you get from your peers within the company, which isn't the same thing as formal on-the-job training. The lack of formal training isn't a side-effect of remote work, it's a deliberate choice. I have been working remotely for 6 years. I was trained remotely for my current job, and I have trained several other people remotely. I work for a small company with an unstable income year to year. Remote training and remote work work for us because we actually try to do it.

These profit-maximizing megacorps who hire managers who don't know how to do the jobs they manage and who are constantly looking for ways to use AI are just creating excuses for the fact that they don't want to train anyone. The current fads for how to do that are automating away "junior" positions and lying about remote work. The last time I was on the job market, the fad was "entry-level" job listings that required experience doing the same job. The underlying problem is the same: rampant mismanagement. Some will call this a failure of capitalism, but I believe it can exist under any ownership structure, and that we need to cultivate mentorship as the baseline of running any organization.

[politicsiscomplicated]

Teen takeover arrests should remind us that the US is far too punitive

I haven't been a teenager for a long time, and am also not yet the parent of one, so I admit I'm not familiar with a lot of details of the whole "teen takeover" phenomenon. But the news articles I've seen about it paint it as inherently dangerous that teenagers are organizing events online where they... go to the beach? Really? The actual impact on others is vague and implicit, and really just comes off as cops scaremongering over the grave public threat of people existing in public. It sounds like the vast majority of the people attending these things aren't bothering anyone.

The majority, but not all. So what's up with the participants who have been making problems? Well, there were some criminal charges for fighting and drunk driving at the takeovers I've seen hit the news. Those do physically endanger other people, so yes, someone should step in to stop them, but the US really needs to stop its one-size-fits-all idea that public order requires prosecution.

I think that, most of the time, things like fights should be dealt with in the "real world" the way they were dealt with by school authorities when I was a kid: break up the fight, interview the people involved to figure out what was going on, tell them to stay away from each other, maybe suspension. But we give out punishments measured in years, not days, and hold it against people for their whole lives, branding them "criminals" as if that's their personality instead of a situational bad idea or an actual interpersonal conflict with a specific other person.

In high school, I got into a fight on the bus. Nobody was arrested, nobody was prosecuted, instead the school identified and interviewed everyone involved, and when confronted again by the specific person I was fighting, I told him that I had jumped in to protect someone else without knowing how it had started, and he said that he had too and we went on our way peacefully respecting each other and understanding that we actually had no personal conflict at all. I want other people to get that kind of opportunity to resolve their problems.

[politicsiscomplicated]

Mona Charen of anti-Trump conservative site The Bulwark has a good breakdown of just how corrupt Trump is. There's so much so often on such a large scale, some dressed up in nonsense legal justifications, that it's just hard to keep up with it.

(She's wrong about pre-Trump corruption, though. She seems to think questionable policy choices and contractors overcharging the government are the only form of "corruption" in an environment full of insider trading and self-dealing. But it's fine to partially agree with someone.)

And you can follow that up with Robert Reich spelling out exactly what that means for Trump's defenders: the Republican Party is a criminal enterprise. Its job is not to advance a set of policies, it's to be accomplices to this one guy.

[politicsiscomplicated]

Endorsed by Trump, Ed Gallrein defeats Rep. Thomas Massie in GOP House primary

In a major victory for President Trump, his hand-picked challenger, Ed Gallrein, beat out U.S. House Rep. Thomas Massie in a Kentucky House

And the criminal enterprise makes another bold move, as it convinced voters to throw out the Republican who helped get the Epstein files released because the goal is always and only to help Trump commit crimes.

[politicsiscomplicated]

U.S. government to drop tax claims against Trump in broadening of IRS settlement

As part of the settlement agreement, the U.S. is "forever barred and precluded" from examining or prosecuting President Trump, his sons and

It's hard to even keep up with this shit. The Mafia at their peak could only dream of pulling off a promise to not prosecute them for tax crimes.

[politicsiscomplicated]

Mona Charen of anti-Trump conservative site The Bulwark has a good breakdown of just how corrupt Trump is. There's so much so often on such a large scale, some dressed up in nonsense legal justifications, that it's just hard to keep up with it.

(She's wrong about pre-Trump corruption, though. She seems to think questionable policy choices and contractors overcharging the government are the only form of "corruption" in an environment full of insider trading and self-dealing. But it's fine to partially agree with someone.)

And you can follow that up with Robert Reich spelling out exactly what that means for Trump's defenders: the Republican Party is a criminal enterprise. Its job is not to advance a set of policies, it's to be accomplices to this one guy.

[politicsiscomplicated]

Endorsed by Trump, Ed Gallrein defeats Rep. Thomas Massie in GOP House primary

In a major victory for President Trump, his hand-picked challenger, Ed Gallrein, beat out U.S. House Rep. Thomas Massie in a Kentucky House

And the criminal enterprise makes another bold move, as it convinced voters to throw out the Republican who helped get the Epstein files released because the goal is always and only to help Trump commit crimes.