[pilowsky]

kenberg, on 2022-August-20, 08:36, said:

I have been thinking a bit about how society has changed during my lifetime, partly for the better, but in other ways not at all better. Genetically speaking, I suppose humans today are not that much different from humans of the previous century. Still, things are different and probably that affects our politics.

An example of change. I talked to a granddaughter yesterday on the phone. She had been playing soccer and we talked about how much fun she had. Her father thinks maybe she can get a soccer scholarship. Perhaps so. She will have her fourth birthday in a couple of months. I focused on her enjoyment. When I was 3 I had never heard of soccer and I played tag and other games with the kids across the street. Her mother had signed her up for soccer somewhere that was far enough away so that she had to be driven there.

My mother took me and other neighborhood kids to the circus and my father took me and other neighborhood kids to watch baseball (St. Paul Saints, a farm club of the Dodgers) but otherwise the other kids and I mostly organized our own activities and walked or biked to get there. A particularly weird part of this, when you think about it, is that both of my granddaughter's parents work, my mother didn't, but still, childhood activities today seem to require much more parental involvement than when I was young.

This is just one small piece of how the world has changed and I don't claim that it explains our current political mess, but maybe life was once more relaxed and maybe that does have something to do with today's extremism.

I realize this is just sort of random thinking.

People are people for sure, but...

The USA of today bears absolutely no resemblance to the USA the founders were organising.

The population of the USA in 1776 was less than 3 million.
It was somewhat larger in 1861.
In any event, in 1787 neither California, Wyoming nor Minnesota were states.
Women, Slaves and First nations people were not permitted to vote.
So the voting population in 1776 may have been well under 1 million.
Washington was elected with less than 40,000 votes.
To put that in context there are 200,000 members of the British white nationalist party attempting to replace Boris Johnson.


The constitution that the revered founders put together was fit for purpose if the purpose was to run the ACBL.
Basically a small country club.
The irony of Trump running the USA out of a small country club in Florida is not lost on me.

[Winstonm]

pilowsky, on 2022-August-20, 17:08, said:

People are people for sure, but...

The USA of today bears absolutely no resemblance to the USA the founders were organising.

The population of the USA in 1776 was less than 3 million.
It was somewhat larger in 1861.
In any event, in 1787 neither California, Wyoming nor Minnesota were states.
Women, Slaves and First nations people were not permitted to vote.
So the voting population in 1776 may have been well under 1 million.
Washington was elected with less than 40,000 votes.
To put that in context there are 200,000 members of the British white nationalist party attempting to replace Boris Johnson.


The constitution that the revered founders put together was fit for purpose if the purpose was to run the ACBL.
Basically a small country club.
The irony of Trump running the USA out of a small country club in Florida is not lost on me.

The important thing to understand about the US constitution is that it is the result of compromise.

[kenberg]

pilowsky, on 2022-August-20, 17:08, said:

People are people for sure, but...

The USA of today bears absolutely no resemblance to the USA the founders were organising.

The population of the USA in 1776 was less than 3 million.
It was somewhat larger in 1861.
In any event, in 1787 neither California, Wyoming nor Minnesota were states.
Women, Slaves and First nations people were not permitted to vote.
So the voting population in 1776 may have been well under 1 million.
Washington was elected with less than 40,000 votes.
To put that in context there are 200,000 members of the British white nationalist party attempting to replace Boris Johnson.


The constitution that the revered founders put together was fit for purpose if the purpose was to run the ACBL.
Basically a small country club.
The irony of Trump running the USA out of a small country club in Florida is not lost on me.

Wait, wait. I was speaking of my childhood. I have been around for a while but my childhood was not in 1776.
Joking aside, I sometimes feel that my childhood was in a completely different era. I think childhood was more fun back then. And politics? For the most part, not always but for the most part, Democrats and Republicans were perfectly happy to be sitting at the same dinner table. Now it is the exception rather than the usual. I have had various thoughts about what has gone wrong, some of them I have posted.

There are some basics, some things are not just a matter of opinion. The 2020 election is over, and Biden won. That's that. Very unfortunately there are many who do not accept this truth. But, for example. Liz Cheney does accept it Liz Cheney and I could disagree about many things while enjoying dinner together.

We have to find a way back. It will be best for all of us if we can. Not easy.

[y66]

The world has changed in other ways.

From Stephen Metcalf's March 2020 take on Ezra Klein's "Why We're Polarized":

Quote

The parties are dividing over fundamental identities that tend to generate intolerance and hostility,” Klein writes. But, in fact, the parties are dividing because of hostility and intolerance, as encouraged by one party in particular. Perhaps Klein is oblivious to cynicism because he himself is so uncynical. But I think something else may be going on here. At one point in the book, Klein, who briefly worked on Howard Dean’s Presidential campaign, in 2004, cites an anti-Dean TV ad that featured a counterfeit man-on-the-street interview. In it, an older couple, played by actors, are asked what they think of Dean. “Well,” the fake husband begins, “I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading”—and here the fake wife picks up the beat—“body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.” The ad is a showpiece of Orwellian cynicism. Yet Klein is so devoted to a morally neutral framework that the most he can say is, “And, that, my friends, is pure, un-cut mega-identity politics.” Maybe the appeal, in the ad, is to the selfish gene, but the spot was made by specific selfish rich people—the anti-tax zealots at Club for Growth. Lost in Klein’s gloss is not just the staggering amount of money that has been spent turning people like me into reprehensible bogeymen, but why it has been spent.

The normative framework of transparency and reason, a broader humanistic appeal to values, a faith in institutions: these constitute the “liberal” in “liberal democracy.” Living on the coast, owning a Subaru, dicing scallions to NPR: these comprise the “lib” in “libtard.” The cynical confusion of liberal democracy with a well-heeled social type that is easy to despise is an attempt to undermine the very civic virtues that Klein cherishes. But the more one relies on Darwinian explanations for the decisions that people make, the less room is left for the motivations of conscious, rational agents.

In January 2021, Stephanie Kirchgaessner observes at The Guardian:

Quote

An anti-tax group funded primarily by billionaires has emerged as one of the biggest backers of the Republican lawmakers who sought to overturn the US election results, according to an analysis by the Guardian.

The Club for Growth has supported the campaigns of 42 of the rightwing Republicans senators and members of the House of Representatives who voted last week to challenge US election results, doling out an estimated $20m to directly and indirectly support their campaigns in 2018 and 2020, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2022-August-21, 06:54, said:

The world has changed in other ways.

From Stephen Metcalf's March 2020 take on Ezra Klein's "Why We're Polarized":


In January 2021, Stephanie Kirchgaessner observes at The Guardian:

The difficulty is that the mega-rich see themselves as world citizens so if the US is ruined it is of little matter.

[kenberg]

Oh my. I might have to read Klein's book. I have read articles by Klein and somewhere along the way I decided he should be read with caution. But probably read.

I often think that anonymity is a problem We all get to post things without anyone knowing much about us. But then I remember that The Federalist Papers were anonymous. But then again, Hamilton would not have suggested killing FBI agents if the FBI had been around at the time. But he did agree to a duel. But he threw away his shot. Ah me.

It's a god-awful mess. Really it has to be broadly (universally except for the craziest of crazies) acknowledged that Biden won the 2020 election. If we cannot get that far down the road to reality this will not end well.

More later, I have a bridge game to play. Have to keep our priorities in order.

[barmar]

kenberg, on 2022-August-20, 08:36, said:

My mother took me and other neighborhood kids to the circus and my father took me and other neighborhood kids to watch baseball (St. Paul Saints, a farm club of the Dodgers) but otherwise the other kids and I mostly organized our own activities and walked or biked to get there. A particularly weird part of this, when you think about it, is that both of my granddaughter's parents work, my mother didn't, but still, childhood activities today seem to require much more parental involvement than when I was young.

I'm a generation or 2 after you (I was a child in the 60's), but my experience wasn't too different from yours, I mostly just played with my friends, and so did my sisters. But I also remember my mother taking one of my sisters (3 years younger) to lots of organized activities like gymnastics and ice skating. We all took swimming lessons in the summer.

Lots of kids played Little League baseball. I wasn't into sports, so I didn't, but I could have if I'd wanted to.

One of the biggest differences I notice these days is parents taking their kids to/from school. I don't think I ever saw that when I was a kid. We took the bus to school when I was in the early grades, and there were no parents at the bus stop. In later grades the school was a little closer, so we mostly walked to school, again with no parents tagging along. Now I live a few blocks away from an elementary school, and if I drive past it when school lets out there are dozens of parents walking their kids home. I do see school buses as well, though.

[y66]

Matt Yglesias said:

First Brandon got Mexico to pay for the wall, then he got companies to bring the jobs back home, and now Fauci's out the door.

Trump could never.

https://twitter.com/...731906923798534

[y66]

For the candidate quality file:

Senate candidate Herschel Walker said:

They continue to try to fool you that they are helping you out. But they’re not. Because a lot of money it’s going to trees. Don’t we have enough trees around here?

[kenberg]

barmar, on 2022-August-21, 20:35, said:

I'm a generation or 2 after you (I was a child in the 60's), but my experience wasn't too different from yours, I mostly just played with my friends, and so did my sisters. But I also remember my mother taking one of my sisters (3 years younger) to lots of organized activities like gymnastics and ice skating. We all took swimming lessons in the summer.

Lots of kids played Little League baseball. I wasn't into sports, so I didn't, but I could have if I'd wanted to.

One of the biggest differences I notice these days is parents taking their kids to/from school. I don't think I ever saw that when I was a kid. We took the bus to school when I was in the early grades, and there were no parents at the bus stop. In later grades the school was a little closer, so we mostly walked to school, again with no parents tagging along. Now I live a few blocks away from an elementary school, and if I drive past it when school lets out there are dozens of parents walking their kids home. I do see school buses as well, though.

I had to walk down half a block and cross one street to be at the playground, and walk up a half block and cross both streets to be in the schoolyard. So no bus to take me, nor did my mother, I took me. Older kids were crossing guards at the intersection, they would tell us when to cross, we obeyed. But I had been crossing to the playground for a year or so before that. Yes, Becky and I often talk about kids, even if 8 or 9, who are not trusted to get to the school near us on their own. It's just different.

It's not that I had no supervision, of course I was told things. Past the playground there was a great hill for sledding that ended near train tracks. I was told to keep well back from the tracks. I obeyed, Further on there were some inviting sand pits to play in. I was told to stay away from them. I disobeyed. A favorite: The girl across the street wanted to walk to the shops where her father worked and asked me to go with her. We were 4 or maybe 5. We walked about a mile and then she decided her father might not be happy with seeing us so we turned around. We got about half-way back when a car drove up with both our mothers inside, scared, relieved and, after a bit, very angry.

Anyway, it's just different. It probably is an over-simplification to say that our current problems all go back to kids not sledding unsupervised down hills ending near railroad tracks.

My parents bought me a bike, the older kids taught me to ride it. My parents bought me ice skates, the older kids taught me to skate. A nice community feeling.

[PassedOut]

I grew up in the same generation as Ken, but mostly in Washburn, Wisconsin, a small town on the Lake Superior shore. In kindergarten I walked 7 blocks to school, most of the time with a girl the same age who lived a few doors down. After kindergarten, though, I walked alone because Linda started Catholic school at first grade and we non-Catholic kids went to public school.

I was the oldest of (eventually) seven kids and so took the lead in showing my siblings around town. When I was five years old and my sister three, we walked downtown to buy ice cream cones (at 5 cents apiece) and back home. Once the county sheriff picked us up and gave us a ride home, but it wasn't a problem -- he was a friend of our family and his daughter was often our sitter.

Our town was located on a steep hill overlooking a bay, and we got lots of snow. Each winter the city closed two streets (they were unpaved in those days) to automobile traffic -- one street on each side of town -- and converted them for sledding. Cross traffic was allowed but we sledders had the right of way and saw-horses at the intersections reminded the drivers of that. The city put gravel at the bottom of the hill to prevent us from sliding over the main street, which was also the highway along the lake.

Our main family rule, in effect always, was to be home in time for evening dinner. That left lots of time for adventures of all sorts -- playing games with friends, hiking along the railroad tracks to waterfalls and rugged shore areas, ice skating in the winter (skating rinks were maintained on each side of town), going to the one movie theater in town, and sometimes visiting the Carnegie Library. I remember when I was ten, the librarian -- Mrs. Greenwood -- asked me for a suggestion on what new chess book she should get for the library as I had read the ones on the shelf.

Bicycling was big with us too. It was great exercise pedaling up the hill, and I used my bike on my paper route whenever the weather allowed. The summer before I was in 6th grade, I bought a power lawn mower at Sears and put an ad in the local paper offering my lawn mowing services. That turned out to generate a lot of business, with me mowing and my sister trimming and edging folks' lawns.

When we were done with our lawn jobs, we'd walk down to one of the city parks by the water and go swimming with the kids already there. Sometimes there were tourists from the deep south (usually the Chicago area) asking whether the water was warm enough for a comfortable swim. We'd always assure them that it was -- "it feels like soup!" -- and sometimes they'd dive right in. When they felt how cold it was, they'd try to swim after us to drown us, but they never could catch any of us before they hightailed it back to their towels.

It was definitely a different time...

[kenberg]

I once sledded into one f those gravel areas. Oops.

Anyway, does all this matter? I think maybe it does. Our childhoods affect how we look at the world. There are times that I listen to today's politics and think the speaker must not have had a childhood.

[Winstonm]

Trying to keep up with Mar-a-Lago-gate I have found that in law corrupt does not equal criminal.

[pilowsky]

Winstonm, on 2022-August-23, 07:47, said:

Trying to keep up with Mar-a-Lago-gate I have found that in law corrupt does not equal criminal.

Our (recently) former Prime Minister Scott Morrison was so concerned about his cabinet that he secretly swore himself into an additional 5 (five) ministries.
Without telling the parliament (to which he is constitutionally responsible) or the public.
He was described by one commentator as being like herpes - just when you thought you'd got rid of him...

In any event, wrong but not illegal - apparently.

[Winstonm]

pilowsky, on 2022-August-23, 08:07, said:

Our (recently) former Prime Minister Scott Morrison was so concerned about his cabinet that he secretly swore himself into an additional 5 (five) ministries.
Without telling the parliament (to which he is constitutionally responsible) or the public.
He was described by one commentator as being like herpes - just when you thought you'd got rid of him...

In any event, wrong but not illegal - apparently.

I think the French made corruption punishable once upon a time.

[pilowsky]

Winstonm, on 2022-August-23, 11:03, said:

I think the French made corruption punishable once upon a time.

Well they sure punished Morrison.

[kenberg]

pilowsky, on 2022-August-23, 08:07, said:

Our (recently) former Prime Minister Scott Morrison was so concerned about his cabinet that he secretly swore himself into an additional 5 (five) ministries.
Without telling the parliament (to which he is constitutionally responsible) or the public.
He was described by one commentator as being like herpes - just when you thought you'd got rid of him...

In any event, wrong but not illegal - apparently.

This sounds awful on general principles but otoh I don't really grasp what happened. Could you elaborate?

[hrothgar]

kenberg, on 2022-August-24, 05:52, said:

This sounds awful on general principles but otoh I don't really grasp what happened. Could you elaborate?

From what I heard, he was grifting

(These positions had $$$ attached to them)

[pilowsky]

Morrison appears to have a fixed belief that only he knows the difference between right and wrong.
To give a bit of insight into the way his thinking works, he's also a member of a fringe Evangelical Christian movement that is very happy and likes to clap a lot, called Hillsong founded by his 'mentor' Brian Houston.
This Church is so happy and clappy that they also found a home in the USA and other places.

Morrison's approach to life does little harm when insisting that one Bridge convention is important and that others are silly, but when working as a politician in the Westminster system where the Constitution is just the start and convention is vital it is very harmful.

In Australia the group (one or more parties) that wins the most seats in the lower house of parliament AND has the confidence of the house (meaning that they can win a simple majority vote) sends their leader to see the Governor-General (GG) who "swears him/her in" as Prime Minister.
GG's are eminent persons from outside politics who get a nice house in Canberra called "Yarralumla" - the PM gets "The Lodge" (and another place in Sydney called "Kirribilli").
The others have to rent.

The Prime Minister then selects a group of people, who are members of the House of Representatives or the Senate, to be the other ministers of the Crown (we're still a constitutional monarchy).
The GG then swears the other Ministers into their portfolios.
Same as taking the Oath in the USA.

What is a Minister I hear you ask? In the our system of government each Minister (including the PM) is "responsible" for all the decisions taken in their Department.
Each Department exists by virtue of the various Acts of Parliament that it is "responsible" for.
Here the term "responsible" means that they are not only responsible for deciding what happens from day to day (eg the Health Minister decides how much money from the amount allocated to their Department goes to aged care, or to research or to subsidising pharmaceuticals). They are directly responsible to the Parliament.
If they mislead Parliament it is a career-ending event.

It also means that if they stuff up by making a bad decision (or as was made clear in the report in the matter NOT making a decision when one ought to have been made) then the Parliament (the ultimate governing body) can ask them questions about it.
This is what is meant by "responsible government" - the government is responsible to the Parliament.

But if the PM secretly takes on a bunch (=5) portfolios and doesn't tell the Parliament then where is responsible government? AWOL.

In the US context its a little bit like an ex-President taking vital documents to his country club.
The vital documents are needed for the management of responsible government.
If some unelected person takes charge of an aspect of government then what you have is chaos.

This is what happens when you get a Morrison/Trump in Government. Their actions suggest that they don't understand what they're there for.

The really bizarre thing is that he seemed to gain nothing from it.
He didn't get any extra money or perks - it was just silly, unconventional and wrong.

[kenberg]

Thanks. There is no way around a simple fact: Even a good government structure can be abused by determined jerks.