Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, July 21, 2025
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49 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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BlueSky.
I came across this the other day, and I remain baffled that this seems to be a position taken by persons in some corners of STEM:
Is this an example of a student absorbing a pedagogical metaphor as identical to the concept being taught? Or a student missing part of the lesson—that this is an assumption necessary for examination and may not always hold?
Faith in Bayesian analysis as the ideal of scientific rationality akin to ‘the Rationalists’ subculture?
Is this being taught in stats courses?
To my ear it sounds like the method of aggregating survey data to reduce sample-based errors. Of course, it doesn’t necessarily reduce all sources of error, but it is often portrayed as if it does.
I should note, too, that the idea about objective beauty expressed in the quote is hardly limited to CS boys.
The cruelty is the point of the Trump Administration. How far and how fast we fallen, with no bottom in sight. Guardrails gone. All pretensions of Christian morality an embarrassing, shameful joke.
@Kurtz:
Depends on the context. It maybe the phrase was used deflect, preempt anticipated criticism to what might be considered a shallow comment. A take on the “hey, everybody does it” excuse. Camouflaging one’s opinion in purported group behavior.
See my post above. If and when we come to a public reckoning for our ongoing inhumanity towards migrants (and transexuals and other “out groups”), we will hear a lot of rationalizing from the perps that “objectively” everybody was doing it. We wash our sins by spreading guilt, and diluting personal responsibility. To quote a DeNiro character, “we’re building a ship of rats. “
Another aviation accident in South Asia. From BBC-
A couple of general comments
The worst plane crash within Bangladeshi borders took place in 1984. Bangladesh has had only a few major aviation accidents.
Military plus general aviation accidents are much more common than commercial ones.
@Kurtz:
Opening up quite the can of worms on a Monday morning. Against my better judgment, I’ll sit down and have a nibble.
That quote is a classic example of conflating statistical centrality with objectivity, confusing inter-subjective consensus with objectivity. It’s an epistemological category error. Just because many people agree on something doesn’t make it objectively true(r). It just makes it widely agreed upon. That distinction often gets blurred where quantification is mistakenly equated with truth.
This could stem from a kind of pedagogical misfire where students internalize statistical metaphors (like aggregating subjective ratings) without absorbing the deeper lesson about their limits. Some people (students, instructors, humans) pervert methods like Bayesian reasoning into a kind of epistemic ideal to apply across all domains — including aesthetics and social life — where they may not fit.
It’s also telling that the quote treats survey aggregation as if it somehow purifies subjectivity, which overlooks the fact that aggregation doesn’t eliminate bias, framing effects, or cultural context. Rather, it merely flattens them into averages. The result is a seductive but deeply flawed sense of certainty.
You’re right to note that the impulse to overextend technical reasoning to human complexity shows up well beyond computer science. It is, however, a broader cultural pattern that is especially dominant in some parts of STEM and rationalist communities. Methodological overreach that flattens nuance in the name of rigor. #methodolatry
I’ve got more thoughts on this wrt “objectivity” and allowances for colloquial uses of the term. But my governor is signaling, and I should heed it.
I was writing up some household bills and noticed that a lot of stuff has gone up in price. My lawn service, the tree pruners, my car insurance (no claims), my house insurance (no claims/big events in my area), the local trash hauler have all gone up. Further things like ground beef are up https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000703112
For believers in objective items, gold is up 39% in the past year. For believers in immaterial things, Bitcoin is up 76% in one year.
We are told that inflation is not a problem; the President wants the Fed to cut, cut, cut. I know that a price increase in a few items is not inflation, but I have the feeling that based on the price of hamburger, bitcoin, gold, and services that the value of the dollar is eroding more than the three percent that we are told. Am I being gaslit?
@Kurtz: I have a vague recollection of an exchange here at OTB where one of our commenters described someone as “objectively hot” or “objectively beautiful” or something along those lines, and I remarked that I’d prefer the adjective conventionally since there was no objective standard of beauty. I can’t remember the context of the conversation or who we were talking about.
@Slugger:
Yup the horse of inflation has left the barn and is getting up to full gallop. Expect inflation and long term interest rates to sky rocket.
Radley Balko has a nice piece on some follow up from the George Floyd case. A couple of medical examiners from other states testified that Floyd was not murdered. one of them being the chief medical examiner (recently retired) from Maryland. All deaths occurring in police custody were examined by that guy’s team. A group of examiners got together to review 87 deaths in police custody in Maryland and found…
“Of the 87 deaths the auditors examined, they found 36 in which the Maryland Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) should have classified the manner of death as a homicide, but instead classified it as something else. The audit also found that OCME pathologists were less likely to classify deaths in police custody as a homicide when the decedent was black. The auditors, who again were initially blinded to the race of the decedent, had no statistically significant racial disparity in their manner of death determinations.”
AS is pretty well known, many examiners develop relationships with police departments that end up favoring the police. This seems the most likely way to understand why these same examiners largely seem determined to believe that there is no such thing as positional asphyxia as occurred with Floyd. Positional asphyxia is well known, accepted and seen in practice in other fields of medicine like ICU care, ED and OR. Some people do not breathe well on their stomach, especially the obese, and it can become fatal if they have a weight on their back. Hell, I was a corpsman working on a psych ward in the 70s and we knew you didnt sit on someone’s back when retraining them and we were mostly restraining healthy young Marines. However, if you are an ME dedicated to protecting your police, you apparently dont have to believe what everyone else in medicine accepts as fact.
Steve
@steve222: Floyd had very recently recovered from Covid. He mentioned it outright to the cops then and there, and it was later corroborated by the autopsy. Covid can affect people’s breathing even after the illness is finished (it’s one of the possible symptoms of Long Covid).
@Kurtz: I’m not sure I understand your point.
People in the wild can and will make comparisons. I don’t particularly endorse this, but it does happen. This one is more attractive than that one. The comparisons don’t typically align perfectly, but there is a fair amount of correlation. And notions of beauty are culturally transmitted, as well as changing over time.
So one could hypothetically create a web page where you ask viewers to rate photos, for instance, and aggregate the ratings and you will find correlation. (I recall having seen something like this, but I don’t remember where). Some types of looks will get higher ratings than others. This is definitely a thing.
I think that the phrase “objectively good looking” points to something that is similar to “matches up well with standard cultural norms of attractiveness”. This is probably some abuse of the word “objective” but it isn’t a complete non sequitur.
@Slugger:
@Sleeping Dog:
I’m reminded of Mike Duncan’s Great Idiot Theory of Revolution*: most revolutions could have been avoided if the man in power had listened to reason and made some changes.
In the John Stuart podcast recently, Duncan expanded a bit: revolution becomes more certain when the Great Idiot does something stupid enough to antagonize or hurt the elites.
IMO, this is what’s going on with the shole Epstein clusterf*ck. It did start an adverse reaction among the deplorable** base. But it’s some among the elites who are taking advantage of this, like Prince Ruppert allowing the WSJ to publish stuff damaging to El Taco.
My guess is that despite the tax cuts, the elites don’t like the tariffs, and they’ll like it even less if he sacks Powell and, possibly, triggers an Effing BIG Financial Crisis(TM).
*He might have covered this in the appendices to the Revolutions podcast. I really need to listen to those again.
** Where does Hillary Clinton need to go to get her apology.
@Mimai:
Worms gross me out. But I sure love opening cans of them.
No, your judgment is sound. When I describe something like this and ask for opinions, I am broadly looking for different perspectives. But that does not mean I do not have specific people in mind.
Methodolatry…is that yours? Fire.
I’ve made similar points here in the past, without the erudite presentation.
Thank you.
@Kylopod:
As always, I immediately wonder if I said something like that. Doesn’t seem like I would. But, ya know. 😉
@Rob1:
Sometimes, you and I are like two horses in a harness.
Context:
It was in a discussion on the Y Combinator forum. Link.
The topic was a blog post, “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny Modern Action and Superhero Films Fetishize the Body, Even as They Desexualize It”.
According to the commenters bio, they are a software engineer at Big Tech.
You may be correct, but even in context it sure seems like an expression of belief:
Even if that person doesn’t believe it, the comment acknowledges that some people do indeed think that way, and I suspect highly concentrated in certain disciplines within STEM.
I would like to extend your “wash” language to include an aspect of @Mimai’s post above. That presenting statistics often has the effect of washing away the subjective judgment often required, whether it is quantifying qualitative data or processing/cleaning qualitative data, or model selection/design.
@Kurtz:
From what I’ve seen, the concept of objective beauty seems to be something most often promoted by right-wing reactionaries. Nowadays you see it whenever they freak out over a woman who’s a little more ethnic-looking or on the heavier side doing a photoshoot, but it goes back a long way in reactionary belief systems (it was a core tenet of the Nazis), as it is connected with fears of “pure” white/Aryan women being defiled by men of other races.
I get that some people may be using the term “objective” to suggest what objectively exists within the culture, but even that is pretty hard to quantify in practice and is often based more on personal assumptions than any sort of empirical data.
@Kylopod: I remember once reading that one of the few objective standards of beauty, found across most cultures, is high cheekbones. Here’s AI’s explanation:
While individual preferences for facial features vary, some features, including high cheekbones, are often considered attractive across cultures. This is often due to their association with traits like symmetry, youthfulness, and genetic fitness, which are considered universally appealing
@Kurtz:
Re worms, you familiar with worm grunting? It’s more of a thing in the panhandle than down your parts.
Re methodolatry, alas, I cannot claim it. Though I do invoke it on the regular, and I’m (kinda, not really) ashamed to say that I sometimes allow people to attribute it to me.
I can, however, claim* “methodist” in this context. My lab uses a lot of different research methods and designs, including RCTs. I frequently warn against becoming enamored with any one. “Let us not become a congregation of methodists!” The cheek is that I grew up in the methodist church.
*By which I mean, I had not seen/heard it used in this manner before I first did so myself. At least, I cannot recall having done so. Selective forgetting to elevate my self-regard?
@Kylopod:
“Conventionally attractive” sounds like a backhanded compliment. Attractive, but only in the most basic way, and lacking all distinction. Attractive, sure, but definitely not striking. Or maybe even “other people probably find you attractive.”
Telling someone they are conventionally attractive would be akin to saying “You rise to the level of a good meatloaf.”
It’s a great phrase.
@Mimai:
I’m going to take an otherwise superfluous shower now.
@Mimai:
I think your governor is my governor, and that he uses he/him pronouns, and we should respect that. I know of no states that have elected someone who uses it/its pronouns.
Also, I wouldn’t use someone’s it/its pronouns — people aren’t inanimate objects, and the very small number who use those pronouns are idiots helping the right wing dehumanize them and all queer folks.
(I have no idea whether that was a colloquialism I don’t know, or a weird autocorrect artifact, but apparently this is the mood I’m in today)
@Jay L. Gischer:
Hotornot. But perhaps more famously, Facemash which was the seed for what became Facebook. In The Social Network, there is a discussion about the advantage of setting photos of two different individuals and having the user mark their preference. Aggregating the data then applying the ELO algorithm. The phrasing used was “more implicit” than aggregating from a 1-10 scale like used on hotornot.
That specific line of reasoning applies to the broader discussion. As, it makes the data gathering process more ‘objective’ than a system using a scale with no stated rubric. But it also obscures that the new system is also gathering subjective data. It also introduces an algorithm that may or may not result in distortions.
—
I think you got my point better than you think. And you put it more succinctly than I did, as I left it implicit.
It is an abuse of the word “objective”. Here’s why:
If one is trying to describe current standards of beauty in America, then one can say the method as objective. But care must be taken, as you did in your reply, to qualify that it is descriptive of cultural norms in a particular time period in a particular locale. And that it is not universal even within that context. It merely describes what some undefined “vast majority” sees as beautiful. Moreover, it is unlikely that any individual’s idea of beauty conforms exactly to whatever definition is provided—indeed the likelihood that the individuals surveyed would be able to identify a ‘beautiful’ person who does not conform to the generalized description derived from the surveys.
Note that even if that qualification is made clear, it does not necessarily convey that the process may be a developed objective protocol,* but the object of study itself is still rooted in temporal and cultural contexts.
This is why the washing language describes my point so well. To use a relevant recent example of a different domain from a recent thread:
I do not know, in fact, I doubt, that Connor is intentionally employing a sleight of hand here, but it takes a trained eye to see the problem with the bolded portion. It takes an empirical observation wrt to total goods produced (dead weight loss). But, crucially, leaves out that his conclusion is not empirical—it belongs to moral philosophy.
Sure, it is acknowledged at the beginning via invocation of utilitarianism, but it ends up conflating it with the “clear” empirical data. Meaning it makes a moral claim as if it is directly derived from an observation. IOW, it presents the moral claim as if it is the only possible moral course of action that accounts for the empirical observation. Worse, It does it with an observation that does not specifically address the purpose of government intervention—it’s a question of distribution, not production. (Note that it treats pricing, production, and distribution as if they are animate, rather than controlled by decision-makers. Thus, humans are absolved of responsibility.)
Embedded within that position are a series of assumptions that would take a lot of effort and words to tease out. Indeed, the whole point of government intervention is to correct systemic shortfalls in the distribution of goods and services. The most we get is a handwave at that argument and an appeal to one datapoint that does not directly address distribution, only aggregate production.
To return to today’s topic, it creates a similar issue. For one thing, it arguably commits the appeal to authority fallacy. In this case, the authority is the wisdom of the crowd. That same fallacy exists implicitly in the utilitarian arguments Connor makes.
Secondly, the (ab)use of “objective” exacerbates the cultural reproduction of toxic standards of beauty. It takes an already difficult, possibly intractable, problem, and fortifies the positive feedback loop that sustains the toxic standard—indeed painting it as Truth rather than contextual truth that is unlikely to be universal even within the delimited domain claimed. (This is stipulated in the comment in question.)
What would be a possibly useful descriptive study instead becomes a prescription for self-ID outgroups. Just as the descriptive observation of society-wide dead-weight loss becomes a prescriptive guide for economic policy wrt to distribution, a topic it can only touch with additional, separate observations. But
That is one of the ways we end up with the family of Vindicta subreddits in which one of the rules is:
*though, see previous posts for how this is not exactly true 100% of the time.
I was demonstrating the “-noai” hack to someone. I typed the query “Why did the minbari cross the road?” in the Google search box, to illustrate the AI automatically generates an answer.
Here’s the gem it came up with:
I wonder if it was going for unintentionally funny.
@Lucys Football: Part of the problem is the slippery word “beauty,” which in this context is being applied to standards of human appearance, but it can also be applied to other things, such as a sunset or a garden. And when it is applied to humans it is hard to separate from standards of sexual attractiveness that we presume to have been written into our genetic code over millions of years to incentivize the creation of more and healthier offspring. The size and shape of a person’s butt isn’t necessarily going to be beautiful for the same reason a sunset is.
@Kurtz: That was a very eloquent and thoughtful reply, and I thank you for it.
I think it is far more important to address ideas, than to address word use. Word use signals social class (among many other things, of course). If you police word use, you are policing class. You are asserting class dominance. This is why it doesn’t work, generally speaking.
It is the idea that there is a clearly-defined standard of beauty that applies to everyone everywhere at all times of human history that is the problem. It is an idea that is a tool of oppression. I am happy to challenge that idea.
In the first comment you made, you appeared to challenge someone for using the word “objective” as opposed to “normative” like I did. I knew that you would accept “normative” here, because you belong to a certain group. I also know that there are plenty of places where using “normative” would get you looked at funny, and people would suspect you of “putting on airs” – and this would be true EVEN WHEN they knew that beauty was subjective and used as a way to put them down (how they would put it, rather than “oppress”).
I am code switching. I am trying to make you aware of code-switching.
In your citation of Connor, I would submit the problem is not with language, but with the idea that Connor takes his own measure of value to be universal. He is the yardstick. Things are useful or not according to his values.
Now people are completely entitled to their values – I am democratic in my leanings – and those values might lead them to consider expenditures as valueless. They can do that, just as people can view supermodels as beautiful. It is the expectation that everyone should have the same valuation that is the problem. Not whatever words someone might employ while advancing or expressing that expectation.
This is the exact thing that has us writhing in conflict on the national scale. It is authoritarian to the core. Let’s address that.
There is some empirical basis for the idea that certain features, eg facial symmetry, are widely preferred* and may tap into evolved mechanisms for assessing fitness. Facial symmetry tends to correlate modestly with attractiveness ratings across cultures.
Some studies also suggest that very young children (infants?) orient more quickly toward and gaze longer at more symmetrical faces. Though we should be cautious in interpreting such findings — they don’t confirm an objective nature of beauty in the strong philosophical sense, but rather point to shared perceptual tendencies that may be partly hardwired.**
*A loaded term that I don’t have the time/interest in unpacking.
**I dislike this term but it’s useful here in conveying the point.
Another point just occurred to me. People have a much easier time describing a cat or a bird as beautiful than describing a chimpanzee that way. Is it because chimps have an intrinsically less aesthetically pleasing appearance by human standards than those other animals? Well, my thought is that whenever we look at a chimp, at some level we recognize a creature that looks very similar to us, but is sufficiently different and alien to fall short by our standards, whereas with animals that are a lot more distant from us evolutionarily (but not too distant–it’s when we get to invertebrates that the “ick” factor starts to kick in), we don’t feel the need to apply the same standards of beauty as we do to ourselves. It’s kind of an ancient version of the uncanny valley.
I hate that our fates are shackled to these retrogrades hell bent on serving up a Darwin award to our entire species. And we had so much promise.
The leopard is eating their faces.
https://newrepublic.com/post/198157/lisa-murkowski-donald-trump-budget-bill
@Daryl:
What is the world coming to? If you can’t trust a lying, cheating grifter, whom can you trust?
@Gustopher:
Don’t believe everything you think. 😉
I agree that we should respect pronouns. And I am very much against dehumanization. (needless throat clearing is fun)
As for the governor, I was referring to my own internal mechanism that occasionally signals when I am approaching a worm hole.
That does make me wonder though… I am a human, I have parts. Is it dehumanizing to refer to one of these parts as “it”? Similarly, what would it mean to refer to the collective as “them”?
I’m getting here late but we aren’t actually debating whether there is an objective standard for beauty, are we? Beauty has to be subjective or else there is no such thing as beauty. It can only be subjective. So, since we all like beauty (apparently except for Connor) let’s leave it be subjective and be glad we’ve got some of it.
@Jay L. Gischer:
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
I’ve been banging that drum for a long time ’round these here parts.
@Daryl: as a Senator in a closely divided Senate, Murkowski could use the power she has to pressure the Trump administration to alter those executive orders she objects to.
Announcing that she will be voting against judicial nominations, or will be holding things up in committee until the orders are modified.
She won’t be doing any of that, or anything else, not even as a delaying tactic. She’s just being performative.
Not sure why she would want to perform the role of dumb schmuck who got cheated by a known cheater, but I’m not here to police her humiliation kink.
The price of beef is not going to be going down anytime soon. Today was the start of the Northern Ag Video Sale, 167,000 head of calves will be sold over the next three days. Today’s average price was $4.41 a pound. That’s a full dollar over what it was last year.
As a cattle producer, while I am appreciative of the prices, I do not see prices like this as sustainable. Soon consumers will not be able to afford to buy beef, even in it’s cheapest form as ground beef.
@Kurtz, quoting turd droppings on a warm sidewalk says:
Our health insurance system is what happens when you try to deliver a public good like a business. The interests don’t align, and you get perverse outcomes.
@Gustopher:
I have sinking feeling that Connor read Ayn Rand and never grew out of it.
I used the analogy last week or whenever, that he was looking at the world though a straw, and we are watching it on IMAX. It’s solipsism, the inability or refusal to look beyond one’s self. He’s shrunk the world down to nothing but money, dismissed everything else, and justifies it with some 17 year-old’s Objectivism.
On QI they had a thing about the 19th century fad of having yourself buried in a coffin. The champion, IIRC was a nun who went 101 days, eating from a tube, shitting in a hatch and once a day playing remote bridge. Connor’s mind reminds me of that, but with golf in lieu of bridge.
@Mimai:
Even if we limit the parts to just the brain, we are a collection of very different independent processes working at cross purposes and in cooperation at different moments, with a “thinking” brain trying to create a narrative to explain what just happened after we act. (Split brain experiments are wild, and really undermine the notion of “self”).
So, “they” seems appropriate.
Walt Whitman was right when he wrote “I contain multitudes,” and he wasn’t just referring to his gut biome and other infestations.
The Ed Yong book of that title is fascinating by the way, but the Bob Dylan song is forgettable which is probably the worst thing you can ever say about a Dylan song.
The Dylan song should have been about the symbiotic relationships at a cellular level. I can now clearly hear a late Bob Dylan growl of “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.”
@Kurtz:
Re: Conner’s comment of:
And despite the usual comment about how govt shouldn’t be a business, it is a drain on resources. A dead weight loss. The empirical evidence is clear.
What it reflects is a lack of understanding and education.
The way to address this is to point out the case of Teddy Roosevelt who believed something similar, but when confronted by the objective truths of what that was producing, the abject poverty of the working class, he responded in a utilitarian way with government action…because nothing else would serve to fix it. Empirical evidence.
This is the essence of “utilitarian”, which doesn’t mean what he thinks it does, or perhaps wishes it would.
Is anyone else experiencing a mysterious OTB slowdown when accessing the site?
ETA: Never mind. It seems to be back to normal.
FYI. Just to show where your tax dollars are going.
https://www.defense.gov/News/Contracts/Contract/Article/4250988//
@Michael Reynolds: @Jay L. Gischer:
The biggest mistake I made (that I have caught) is including the Connor quote, because a.) it is a lightning rod, and b.) it dragged econ into an already potentially fraught discussion.
Michael is correct that we are not arguing about beauty standards, but epistemology, scientific method, and the question of where one draws the line between objective science and the study of behavior (from mass down to the individual).
Allow me to galvanize Jay’s reply a bit: the initial quote is from an internet forum, not necessarily intended to be a place of rigor.
But I would say that only goes so far. It is not a general platform like Reddit or Twitter or Facebook. It isn’t a walled garden in the sense that one must be participating in Y Combinator to post, but it is a pretty specific site. It’s unlikely to draw participation from the general public in large numbers.
I also have to point out this isn’t pedantic in the sense of whether one should say that people were evacuated rather than a building. The word objectivity, even in everyday discourse carries meaning of significant weight.
Jay’s points about code switching fascinate me, because if this were a case of policing language as a mark of social class, it should be the other way around.
It should be the vaguely vegabondish internet commenter being lectured about word usage by the Big Tech engineer. After all, the only way I could ever hope to move in that social circle is to become a drug dealer.
I am not a grammar fetishist, and am perfectly fine with using words loosely as long as authorial intent is clear. But there are lines that once crossed, result in substantive errors. Indeed, in this case, the claim made is specific enough and clear enough that I am comfortable criticizing it. So this is not merely nitpicking rhetoric, but responding to the idea expressed by the commenter.
Accounting for the context, the use of the word in question, in reply to a claim of subjectivity, it seems obvious that the reply was meant to convey a specific meaning. Indeed, this commenter also claimed to be improving accuracy. If I had nitpicked the usage of that word, this discussion would apply. But I am not and would not.
We can trace this category error to a specific culture—Silicon Valley. Exactly the cohort that includes the commenter and a bulk of Y Combinator forum participants.
Whether it was wise or not, I included the Connor quote, because the same error is made in support of economics as a study of the Immutable patterns in nature rather than a social science.
Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful discussion. I didn’t expect it would get this much discussion.
@Kurtz:
Of course not, because the “empirical evidence is clear” that economic data is weaker under Trump than under Democrats.
Five charts compare Democrats and Republicans on job creation (The Economist, 19 March 2024)
How Trump’s three years of job gains compares to Obama’s (CNN Business – 7 Feb 2020)
How GDP Growth Under Trump Compares To Clinton, Obama And Other Presidents (Yahoo Finance, 29 Oct 2020)
The Next President Inherits a Remarkable Economy (Wall Street Journal, 31 Oct 2024)
US economy shrank 0.5% in the first quarter, worse than earlier estimates had revealed (AP, 26 June 2025)
So, twice now a Democratic president has left Trump a growing economy. Twice, job and GDP have slowed and faltered under Trump — even before he worsened economic outcomes dramatically with his COVID mismanagement, lies, and incompetence.
Because:
a) Irrational, erratic, dishonest, immature behavior from a purported leader are not good for institutions, including the US executive branch.
b) Trump’s reckless, unfocused, back-and-forth blanket tarriff trade warring is bad for business and has increased prices.
c) Setting policy on the fly daily by contradictary, poorly written, lie-filled, and often deranged social media ranting and raving is an economic disaster.
d) We now have a half century of real world outcomes to know that supply-side, trickle down, tax-cuts-for-billionaires vodoo economic voodoo does not work.
Numerical objectivity shows recent Republican presidents have created fewer jobs, bigger deficits, more recessions, and less growth overall than Democratic presidents.
People like Connor have sold their souls to an incompetent, Hitlerian, criminal, amoral Epstein-bestie rapist and pedophile who incited and terror attack on Congress and who throws migrant workers into prison camp torture without due process –all of which is anti-American, undemocratic, and evil.
Trump apologists have not signed on to these disgrace because of their utilitarian reading of economic data. Only they know why they are compelled to lie to themselves and the world about their real reasons for MAGA sycophancy, but numbers put the lie to their grand delusions of objectivity. Nice try, but no.
@dazedandconfused:
In Trumpers’ case, utilitarian means “self-aggrandizing lies I have to tell myself in a desperate and lame attempt to justify my amoral enabling of that which is unjustifiable.”
Many in 1930s Germany engaged in this shameful behavior.
@Gustopher:
Maybe she’s just playing herself, like Gary Cooper or Joan Crawford.
@Kylopod:
I am in the middle of something here, but I will make two points:
The centrality of statistical methods, to use Mimai’s framing, is applied far more broadly than this particular subject.
One of the other rules of the Invicta subreddits: no men.
I need to find where I read it over the weekend, but if the comment I read is accurate, Invicta was started by ‘femcells’. (Using the language from the comment.)
This is not surprising considering the similar origin of the term incel—coined by a feminist blogger, eventually overrun and dominated by angry reactionaries.
@DK:
Like this? 😉
My POV is that the government does often cause deadweight loss, but it also does some good things. So there is some deadweight loss in regulations but OTOH the regulations that keep food safe or the ones that require people people to get vaccines save millions of lives. It’s all about trade offs. Besides, at this point our government is largely an insurance company with an army.
Steve
I need to do the math and verify the numbers carefully, but for now it seems very likely that 33 months > 1 day.
@Kathy:
What’s the over/under on a presidential pardon?
@Kurtz: Class is not about money. This is of paramount importance to understand.
In America, the assertion of “real Americans” is a class slur. There are daily class slurs against tech workers uttered in general on internet blogs and comment sections, and yes, class tech bros hit back. “Objective beauty” is a phrase they use. Some use it understanding what they are asserting, that’s it’s about normativity, others don’t. But they all use it. Because it is a sign of the class that they belong to. And they need to belong to that class in order to work together, to be part of an “us”.
Every group has those things. Every. One. They have “uniforms”, too. Things they wear or don’t wear. Or wear “ironically”.
Mocking the “other” is a fundamental of human life. I don’t like it. It’s my windmill to tilt at. It’s probably a bad idea to take on this battle, but sometimes I can’t help it.
@Jay L. Gischer:
I didn’t make a financial class argument—I made a social one. Tongue in cheek—I could never be invited to the party unless I sold drugs (to them).