Red Mosquito

tragabigzanda wrote:

Self wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:I come at this stuff as a former liberal -- my wife and I were democratic county precinct reps when we first moved to MT! -- who's watched their policies obliterate cities I care about (my hometown, Boston, Portland).

It goes against my better judgement posting in this forum, but Boston has been obliterated? Compared to the quality of life in the reddest/poorest states? Educate me.

Oh definitely not compared to the poorest states. But compared to its former self? Where to begin?

Mass & Cass, for starters. Truly horrific. And it's spilled into other popular areas, like the Commons -- woof.

The MBTA is crumbling; the roads aren't far behind.

The metro area housing market is a complete disaster; yet living in the suburbs is a non-starter for young couples, unless you want to embrace a commute that somehow gets a little longer every single day.

It's always been a segregated city, but the pandemic and the MIT/Kendall biopharma industrial complex have colluded to exacerbate those problems.

Harvard Square is all chain retail now, while Davis Square seems to be seeing steady commercial vacancies (last I knew, but the latter could be out of date).

Just an incredibly challenging place to live if you're trying to start a family or a career without generational wealth behind you. It's a city built on legacy capital and provincial politics that will never be able to get out of its own way. Mayor Wu seems like a good egg, though.

We've always had a homeless problem, but I can't disagree there. Still, the city on the whole is much safer and cleaner then when I was young. To say it's been obliterated to vilify liberal policy or defend the right seems like a bit of hyperbole. What republican policy would help? State mandated health insurance?

tragabigzanda wrote:As for the second bold part, well therein lies the rub, right?

that was a Mitt Romney joke

tragabigzanda wrote:

Self wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:I come at this stuff as a former liberal -- my wife and I were democratic county precinct reps when we first moved to MT! -- who's watched their policies obliterate cities I care about (my hometown, Boston, Portland).

It goes against my better judgement posting in this forum, but Boston has been obliterated? Compared to the quality of life in the reddest/poorest states? Educate me.

Oh definitely not compared to the poorest states. But compared to its former self? Where to begin?

Mass & Cass, for starters. Truly horrific. And it's spilled into other popular areas, like the Commons -- woof.

The MBTA is crumbling; the roads aren't far behind.

The metro area housing market is a complete disaster; yet living in the suburbs is a non-starter for young couples, unless you want to embrace a commute that somehow gets a little longer every single day.

It's always been a segregated city, but the pandemic and the MIT/Kendall biopharma industrial complex have colluded to exacerbate those problems.

Harvard Square is all chain retail now, while Davis Square seems to be seeing steady commercial vacancies (last I knew, but the latter could be out of date).

Just an incredibly challenging place to live if you're trying to start a family or a career without generational wealth behind you. It's a city built on legacy capital and provincial politics that will never be able to get out of its own way. Mayor Wu seems like a good egg, though.

I’m sure an oligarchy led by a real estate mogul are best suited to fix all this in our country’s metropolises.

yeah, you know, consistently ranked in the top 5 for quality of life, health care, education...what a dump

tragabigzanda wrote:QoL... Yikes, not even close. Mountain West crushes Massachusetts.

yikes, ok. I'll be in the gearhead thread

tragabigzanda wrote:

spike wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:

Self wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:I come at this stuff as a former liberal -- my wife and I were democratic county precinct reps when we first moved to MT! -- who's watched their policies obliterate cities I care about (my hometown, Boston, Portland).

It goes against my better judgement posting in this forum, but Boston has been obliterated? Compared to the quality of life in the reddest/poorest states? Educate me.

Oh definitely not compared to the poorest states. But compared to its former self? Where to begin?

Mass & Cass, for starters. Truly horrific. And it's spilled into other popular areas, like the Commons -- woof.

The MBTA is crumbling; the roads aren't far behind.

The metro area housing market is a complete disaster; yet living in the suburbs is a non-starter for young couples, unless you want to embrace a commute that somehow gets a little longer every single day.

It's always been a segregated city, but the pandemic and the MIT/Kendall biopharma industrial complex have colluded to exacerbate those problems.

Harvard Square is all chain retail now, while Davis Square seems to be seeing steady commercial vacancies (last I knew, but the latter could be out of date).

Just an incredibly challenging place to live if you're trying to start a family or a career without generational wealth behind you. It's a city built on legacy capital and provincial politics that will never be able to get out of its own way. Mayor Wu seems like a good egg, though.

I’m sure an oligarchy led by a real estate mogul are best suited to fix all this in our country’s metropolises.

definitely not. But apart from a couple of weird recent matrix glitches where Republicans have controlled the Boston city government or the Governor's office, it's been a deep blue state forever. And they've gotten very little done of sustainable value.

Who destroyed the middle class again?

A majority of Americans seem to agree that the Federal government is not working for the benefit of their individual households

The conservative lens focuses entirely on the middle of the sentence ("the federal government is not working"), and the result is the dismantling of the federal apparatus. I think the most important part, in terms of understanding the American electorate, is actually the last ("is not working for the benefit of their individual households"). And the discrepancy there is exactly the thing to focus on.

Centering the entire solution around the middle part skips over something that is true: a majority of Americans want to feel that the federal government is in some way working for the benefit of their household.

They want this because although...

the left has spent the last 20 years identifying the problem (roughly) as “Capitalism has never worked for minority groups and it’s up to the Federal government to fix that.”

....is a conservative framing of a liberal ideal, the actual proposal you are referring to is quite popular. It goes:

"Capitalism is a system that naturally exacerbates social and economic inequities. Therefore, inequity supports are an essential service of government."

Individual programs and policies are just sub-conversations of that idea. "How does this exacerbation of inequities affect farmers? What about farmers in specific geographical areas? How does it affect the learning outcomes of children below the poverty line? What can we do about that?" Etc.

But the fact of the matter is, the maintaining of relief programs to balance capitalistic inequities is incredibly popular. The big picture is popular. Unemployment. Supplemental Nutrition. Housing assistance. The ACA. SNAP. Rural development programs. Social Security. Medicaid.

Creating a solution that only hears the middle of the sentence ("the federal government is not working") instead of the rest ("is not working for the benefit of their individual household") misunderstands what people want. And as a result, it mistakes "the system currently isn't working for me" for "tear it all down, I don't want it to work."

Think back to the public reaction to the ACA repeal. The entire Republican logic was, "the ACA polls VERY poorly right now, so this is a good time for us to dismantle it."

It turned out people didn't want it dismantled at allllll. They had specific grievances, and they wanted specific solutions. And the reason Republicans didn't see that...the reason they didn't see that the conversation was one that centered around improvement solutions rather than dismantling...was that they interpreted the situation through the lens of their own internal conservative skew. THEY didn't like the ACA, and THEY wanted it gone...so it never occurred to them that other people wouldn't jump to the same conclusion.

tragabigzanda wrote:If the "maintaining of relief programs to balance capitalistic inequities is incredibly popular," then why did a majority of voters double down on a chaos administration, of focusing on the middle part?

Their stated top issues, by historic margins, were the economy and immigration.

Post-election polling showed that 72% of Trump supporters said they wanted the federal government to provide fewer social supports. But in the same polls, 77% of those voters opposed any reductions to Social Security. Strong majorities opposed cutting federal funding for Medicaid. A recent post-election Siena poll found that 80% of Americans support increasing SNAP benefit levels, and only 12% support reducing them.

I simply don't think people really expect Donald Trump to do all the things he says he wants to do. Just like they consistently favored candidates who talked about ending the ACA, and then freaked out because those people tried to end the ACA.

I've never understood this, but I accept it because the evidence is always there. Voters were pretty clear that the number one problem they wanted solved was the increasing economic pressure faced by the working class....so they voted for the tariffs and trade wars guy. I suppose my personal suspicion is that they like it when someone is willing to threaten wild, outlandish things, because they mistake those threats for strong-armed negotiation tactics. But we just poured water out of crucial aquifers in our nation's highest producing agricultural sector ahead of a hot summer, because when he says "there's a magic spigot that California could be ending the fires," it's not a negotiation tactic. It's dead serious.

I don’t believe that people are dumb, but I do believe that most people avoid politics because politics is a bummer. Combine that with the clickbaitization of the media economic model, the resulting explosion of anger-engagement content, with the increased reliance on podcasts and YouTube and shit like that for information, and you have a much greater information gap than anybody yet realizes.

I think you’re gonna find soon enough that this election came down to “the economy isn’t working for me, and I’m mad at the government about it.” And having a president who is dismantling the government’s ability to provide any check on capitalism, while simultaneously pursuing actions that will increase the economic pressures on the working and middle class, is going to have very potent ramifications.