Just saying this because someone needs to: Reich is not a brilliant economist. He's as dumb on economics as he is on free speech. You guys just don't know that much about economics, so it's much more Gell-Mann amnesia effect on your part than it is "how is a guy so smart on one topic and so dumb on another." For example, he believes that rising prices cannot be explained by anything related to insane COVID stimulus policies or money printing and are just because corporations recently discovered greed. For a solution, he prescribes sweeping price controls, something that has been tried and failed more times than bloodletting. This is as valid as when your conservative uncle says "Global warming?? But it's snowing right now as we speak." Pure vibes, no science, but people who agree culturally think it's smart.
Thanks for pointing this out! To go further, he is not an economist at all. He is a lawyer and activist/public intellectual who has focused on labor issues, but his “analysis” often shows ignorance (perhaps feigned ignorance) of no-controversial economic concepts. While there is a ton of debate and disagreement within economics, basic agreement on the core concepts (supply/demand) and empirical realities (inflation and money supply) is pretty widespread. Admittedly, arguments about how to structure a bear tax system, maximizing revenue and efficiency, while limiting deadweight loss, is a lot more boring than pushing for “tax cuts which pay for themselves” and “taxing the rich,” with rich somehow defining as slightly more than whatever a married couple of NYT columnist make. Paul Krugman’s actual economics work, before he became a partisan columnist, was extraordinary, but hardly partisan bomb throwing.
Yes, in Paul Krugman's old work he knew, like everyone else, that price controls don't work. Now, he spends his days trying to figure out how to say Kamala is actually right to implement price controls.
The Paul Krugman trajectory is kind of tragic, for public discourse. He is far too smart and actually knows economics to actually believe. Given his perch, his reputation and respect among the kind of people who read the Times, he could use his reach to provide some reality and nuance. But economics is about tradeoffs, and that’s a lot harder than saying “Republicans can’t be good people.”
Now, if he was saying "politicians can't be good people," I could get on board. Economists, more than anyone else, should be able to say "They're lying to you. They're either lying or stupid." Economists supporting politicians is like journalists supporting censorship. That's not your job.
Maybe people more familiar with the economics world can answer this, but is Krugman's Nobel Prize legit? I mean it seems like he was a prominent George Bush critic at the height of anti-George Bush hysteria in liberal circles so wasn't there the feeling that the Nobel Prize committee gave it to him because of his fashionable political views at the time? His economics commentary is cartoonishly partisan so it's hard to imagine him doing dispassionate work that would justify a Nobel Prize, although maybe he was more reasonable when he was younger?
The ‘Nobel Prize’ in economics was invented 70 years after the others by the Swedish central bank because economists are so full of themselves that they *had* to have their own Nobel prize, whereas other fields like mathematics have just made their own top prizes and moved on. Make sure to mock them for this at every opportunity.
When people say that the Economics Nobel isn't a "real" Nobel, what I hear is "a 19th-century arms merchant remains, to this day, the ultimate authority on which areas of human endeavor are most worthy of honoring."
The economists rather undercut this line of thinking when they went out of their way to invent a Nobel prize for themselves so they could have the prestige of the name.
Thank you!! I've been saying this for years. Not to say that perhaps some smart or deserving individuals haven't won the prize, but it's emphatically *not* the same as the Norwegian Nobel prizes.
Remember when Claudia Goldin won the Nobel peace prize in 2023 for the GROUNDBREAKING discovery that the wage gap is more complicated than discrimination? A fact that the rest of us have been pointing out for, I dunno, decades?
The same "peace" prize that's been awarded to Yassir Arafat and Henry Kissinger? How could anyone not take it seriously?
Obama won it for outstanding achievement in the field of not being named George Bush. I wonder if they'd have done it if it had been known how much Obama would ultimately expand the worst of the Bush administration policies?
To actually answer your question: yes, Krugman's Nobel Prize is legit. He was awarded it for basically re-inventing the theory of international trade; the work he did is hugely influential to this day.
"Yes, in Paul Krugman's old work he knew, like everyone else, that price controls don't work."
The US in WWII would be interested to learn about this. :)
"Price controls never work" is an example of what's known as the Ricardian fallacy in economics: prove something in a stylized model, and then act as if you've established some fact about the real world. It is very much the case that in a typical micro theory model price controls don't work. But these models simply do not describe the real world.
Of course it's also the case that in the real world price controls often do not work (for whatever definition of work you're, err, working with). But it's also the case that sometimes they do! The world is messy and complicated in a way that economic theory often doesn't handle very well.
n.b.: I was an econ Ph.D. student, dropped out before finishing my doctorate tho.
During World War 2, price controls led to rationing and shortages, to the point that people started making their own clothes and growing their own food because they couldn't get it from a store. Meatpackers filled sausages with beans and potatoes in order to eke out a profit. And of course, there was a rampant black market for basic goods. I personally don't know how to make my own clothes from scratch and I have nowhere to start a garden in my apartment, so I'm going to oppose that policy.
Ya, it’s like someone asking why someone without a parachute falls faster than someone with one and answering “gravity”. Gravity is why both are falling but it’s a constant that can’t explain the difference.
It warms my heart to see people dunking on America's dumbest public intellectual.
Also, it's really not in Robert Reich's interest to promote a norm of imprisoning people for spreading lies and hatred on social media. That's his whole schtick!
Reminds me of Patrick Condon, an urban planner who started calling himself an economist so he could say building more homes doesn’t reduce prices. I heard people called him out and said he can’t just call himself a housing economist.
Came here to say that but yes, hopefully that was not a Freudian slip revealing Jesse to have more *complicated* views regarding racial issues than he's been willing to let on. It's probably more likely that he just doesn't know his bars from his stripes
I never knew that. I've heard stars and bars a lot and I always thought it was the American flag, synonymous with stars and stripes. If as a Texan I didn't know that, I can guarantee Jesse didn't. Though I do live in a part of Texas that never really flew the Confederate flag after the 19th century.
Another thing to consider with climate activists, especially the ones who are more out there and tend toward being rich, is that normal people get really darn tired of hearing these people say we should be limited to mass transit, when they fly around in private jets. If they practiced what they preach, it would probably be different. But they're hypocrites who want to tell us what to do, and they get to be high and mighty and elite and do whatever they want. Thanks, but no thanks. I'm not going to listen to someone like that, ever.
Sadly, working climate scientists who know what they're talking about, and aren't paid to slant research one way or another, are drowned out by the activist class who try to preach at us like pastors schooling bad children.
The problem with allowing people to listen to the scientists is that the scientists aren't reliable enough at parroting what the activists claim is proved by "the science".
While there's probably almost no credible scientist who would say that human activity doesn't affect the world around us, there are a great many who would debunk the claim that "97% agree" that what's happening is primarily or solely caused by human-generated CO2. At least 40% of the authors whose work is referenced in the report that claim is based on have said that the papers cited aren't about topics relevant to such an interpretation.
I don't think banning air travel is either realistic or a good idea, but this complaint is on par with the people who respond to any suggestion that taxes should be increased with "well, how come you're not paying more than you owe to the government yourself, huh? Huh?" Because it's not the law, is why. If it was the law I would comply with it.
It would be genuinely hypocritical if, having succeeded in banning something, a group of elites went on using that thing illegally themselves. But there's nothing morally or logically wrong with saying "this thing should be outlawed, but as long as it's legal I'm going to use it for my own purposes."
Being a hypocrite is taking a limo yourself, while you tell everyone else they have to ride a bus or they don't care about the environment. Being a hypocrite is taking a private jet while telling everyone else that they aren't allowed to even use a public jet, or they don't care about the environment. Your example does not negate mine.
I think you're unobservant. Right off the top of my head, Greta Thunberg does this. She is not the only one. Try doing research before spouting. You just sound ignorant.
I was interested enough to actually do a google search, and this poster is completely full of shit. The only "evidence," and I use the term entirely sarcastically, that I could find for that claim is an obvious joke that dozens of Musk-promoted bluechecks immediately assumed was serious:
Aside from further proving my point that Twitter should be confiscated for reasons of political self-defense, this entirely made-up claim is a classic case of inventing things to be mad at when the people you want to be mad at haven't done you the courtesy of actually doing the things you want to be mad at them for doing.
On geoengineering, Jesse and Katie should be much more optimistic. We already have a certain group of people who made space lasers. I know they can tackle space mirrors.
Ha! There's the question I should have asked during the AMA!
I genuinely don't know how it started. I'm sure there was some exogenous prompt, like Katie being muslim, but I have no idea what it was. Primos! Help!
I have always wanted to ask, but also never wanted to ask, this question. I subscribed right when this was a rampant thing and basically had to will myself to enjoy the comments for awhile.
Yep. Generally speaking, t's the Western term for the 3-beat gait between trot and gallop. Canter is the English term. Given both of their embrace of their East Coast Elitism, my guess is that this is a horrible example of cultural appropriation. They should (insert clap emojis) Do Better! :)
posted this in the open thread but really curious so asking again here, what was the vibe in the recent victor david Hansen TFP comment section? Weee they pro Tucker?
Not really pro Tucker. Much more "what about the Nazis on the left" and a lot of downplaying Tucker's relevance. Which is pretty lol he spoke at the RNC and is extremely influential in the GOP.
I got a kick out of you guys trying to pronounce "Justice" with an exotic accent as if was Moraes' first name. It's actually Alexandre; "justice" was the piece's author using the equivalent SCOTUS title for his role in the Brazilian supreme court.
Generally most of them. Brazilians generally don’t speak unaccented English. Neither do most Europeans.
The idea that Americans are uniquely poor at pronouncing foreign languages is frankly silly.
Americans do tend to be less bilingual than euros, because in the US a foreign county is typically a transoceanic away, not 20 miles.
But the idea that it is hilarious Jesse and his bad case on honky-mouth is some special American phenomenon is hilarious. I have a super common super bog standard name. One that most countries have a version of (even Chinese). I would generally say foreigners more often mispronounce it than get it right. Are they all hicks too?
No people just speak with the speech patterns of the place they are from. It’s not some big mystery.
I never said Americans were uniquely bad at foreign languages, but the fact that their language and country are the dominant ones + geography do explain the difficulties they might encounter. And they are not the only Anglophones in this situation, foreign language proficiency in the UK was pretty abysmal last time I checked.
I asked which "foreigners" because such a use of the term is a sweeping generalization and smacks of complacent ethnocentrism. People in multilingual areas like West Africa typically speak several languages, even at the level of a lingua franca and with an accent. Btw speaking with an accent in and of itself does not demonstrate a poor command of a specific language. As a language teacher, I do emphasize the importance of pronunciation right from the start, but as long as people communicate efficiently and are understood by the natives, there is no reason to ask of them a perfect accent (and from where in the country? upper or middle class? etc.) which some people will never be able to attain anyway.
If you look at Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, and, to a lesser extent, Germany, you will see that these cultures are usually much better at English than, say, people from southern Europe, because their languages are more closely related to English and they're literally bombarded with English-speaking media, especially in northern Europe. These are countries with tiny populations at the periphery of an empire that are totally dependent on the outside. The speakers of minority languages have no other choice but to "be good at foreign languages" or be condemned to provincial isolation, notwithstanding the class factor. And while everyone is influenced by the speech patterns of the place they are from, some do need foreign languages more than others, which isn't some big mystery either.
The quality of a country's school system is another topic entirely, but it does matter a great deal as well. As far as the US is concerned, I don't think its extreme levels of economic and academic inequality are conducive to foreign language proficiency among monolingual natives.
You guys need to get some perspective and read Bjorn Lomborg. Cheaper to flex with climate than try to change it (by orders of magnitude). Fewer people die of heat than cold, fewer acres burning by wildfire than 100 yrs ago, etc.
Also while some places will be drier, generally there will be a fair bit more rain. So the constant whining about "droughts" drives me nuts. Generally flooding and more storms will be a much bigger problems globally and in the US than drought.
Problem is in dry places where drought is expected, but extreme drought is catastrophic to quality of life and commerce (like west Texas, the Sonoran desert, etc). We shouldn't have so many people living in those places, but tell that to Phoenix. Fucking insane that the sunbelt is where most people seem to have moved in the last few years.
However, due to states like Arizona greatly reducing their amount of agriculture, they actually use less water today than they did in the 1950s. People don't use that much water to live; it's plants that do, so we actually can sustain a lot more people in desert places than it seems if we don't have lawns and farms there.
I used to debate my liberal former roommate about this a decade ago. He would often repeat that "climate change will make dry places drier and wet places wetter." I asked how he knew this exactly, and he seemed annoyed that it wasn't obvious to me. There seems to be an assumption that climate change will only be bad and not have both good and bad effects, and it strikes me more as an article of faith than proven science.
That is exactly it and I have done a bunch of reading on it and it is basically a lie. Things will generally be wetter. Yes things will change from place to place, and in some places that will be helpful, and in others not.
But generally the world will be more like Brazil/India and less like Russia/Canada. Now I am not saying climate change is good. I agree it will likely be net quite bad. But it also isn't going to turn the earth into some unlivable hellscape and in many places (particularly in the northern hemisphere) might make things more pleasant since so much land there is very cold.
But no one is interested in the story of "X place will be nicer after climate change", so those areas never get spoken about. Only the places where is likely to cause problems (granted it is a lot of them) are ever discussed.
Effective or ineffective rainfall is the relevant measure here. Our water systems are fucked globally from dams and desertification, which is a far more dangerous symptom of industrial civilization than climate change.
Right because your uneducated roommate speaks for everyone.
There is no such assumption. Climate change will bring chaos as both ecosystems and humans try to adapt. The Pentagon and the defense think tanks know what's up, they have also been sounding the alarm for years now. Chaos brings war.
My roommate was very educated, thank you very much - he taught environmental science to high schoolers, and he said exactly what you just said here, that Climate change is an unalloyed bad thing, and every scientist and important thinker on the issue agrees. I asked him how he knew that, and it was something about the climate models, which have predicted chaos and war for the past few decades, and have been updated to be right this time, and it's going to happen very very soon.
Did you ever ask him when the time was that the climate of the Earth was ever static?
North Africa supposedly turned from a savannah grassland to a vast expanse of nearly uninhabitable desert millenia before there was a large enough human population on the planet to be doing anything of consequence. This isn't to say that we can't be having an impact now, but it seems unquestionable that major changes can and do happen for other causes unrelated to humanity as well.
is... is that the Brunching Shuttlecocks guy?? also, yeh, it's all about the infrastructure. Natural disasters kill far fewer people these days. Because of better houses, water systems and roads.
Stories like this keep feeding my getting lazier and lazier assumption that anyone who insists on being referred to as "Doctor" outside specific, appropriate context, even beyond the obvious insecurity, is either throwing down with an honorary degree (or degree with similar provenance) or is trying to claim expertise in an area outside of their degree.
My state medical society had a resolution to adopt a statement about climate change that one of these activists would probably approve of, and it didn’t really have much to do with human health. So I spoke up and said that even as a public health physician with an MPH in environmental health, that really only qualifies me to talk about things like the effect of environmental conditions on human health. It does not actually make me an expert on energy policy. My conclusion was “we are doctors of people, not planets”.
A lot of my bias comes from my dad's attitude that experts and expertise are important, but expertise by its definition is very narrow and some of the last people to recognize that are experts.
The counterpoint would be that PhD’s (doctors of philosophy) are that for a reason. There is no “doctor of English” or “doctor of environmental science”. A PhD is supposed to teach you about thinking. The thesis is in a specific content area, but you’re supposed to have skills and knowledge that will translate to other things.
But clearly, some people go off the rails very quickly. And frankly, the quality of academia has declined so precipitously, a lot of PhD’s aren’t even good thinkers within their own niche. The person they keep banging on about in this episode might well be a terrible analyzer of English literature, in addition to being a Twitter troll.
A humanities professor told me college is significantly less rigorous now than it was in the 60s and prior, when he was in, because they are heavily incentivized to just pass their classes through. This was undergrad. Not sure if that applies to the medical and science PhD students, but I worry it does.
One of Colin Wright’s new obsessions (besides pointing out the number of sex categories that exist in humans) is describing bullshit PhD theses that people got signed off on, mostly in humanities.
It’s a weird dynamic, because on one hand it’s very difficult to actually get a job in these fields, but on the other it’s easy to get the PhD.
It would be worth an investigator's time to to really look at how all of the various forms of inflation from high school to the PhD create a new code to distinguish between the old metrics of success to the new (no really, this person is exceptional). I teach mostly undergrads and MA/MFA students (my private university does not have a PhD program), and this is something I really think about communicating when I write letters of recommendation. How do I convey that this 4.0 is unbelievably amazing given any standards at any time versus the general acceptance of accomodations/equity language that ostensibly wants to eviscerate such differences? John McWhorter, please help us out :)
Does anybody remember a popular meteorologist in Seattle named Cliff Mass? I think he was *canceled* in around 2021 for debunking a climate study that predicted a huge amount of deaths in the Pacific Northwest if the climate trajectory wasn’t halted.
Anyway, his response was that that might happen if people didn’t think to install an AC window unit or two in their homes. So that made me laugh out loud until I read that he was horribly ostracized and then fired for denying climate change. I live in Texas, so that was the only story I read about him and have no idea if he’s been redeemed. Could look it up, I guess.
Thank you Katie & Jesse for bearing the psychic cost of having to defend E**n in service of advocating for free speech, I know that it was painful for you both (but also that's why you get paid the big bucks)
I'm a little concerned about Jesse's name for the American flag at 8:20. I'm also a little surprised Katie didn't say something, because the "stars and bars" was the nickname of the original flag of the Confederacy.
For real, if the hypothetical 'solar flare that takes out all humans' that Katie mentioned were to occur... the rest of life on Earth would adapt. Not dependent on land-clearing agriculture/ polluting energy supplies for their very existence, most species would adapt/survive.
And honestly I'd be fine with that. But I would like someone to feed my cats. The fluffy one is not a hunter.
Just saying this because someone needs to: Reich is not a brilliant economist. He's as dumb on economics as he is on free speech. You guys just don't know that much about economics, so it's much more Gell-Mann amnesia effect on your part than it is "how is a guy so smart on one topic and so dumb on another." For example, he believes that rising prices cannot be explained by anything related to insane COVID stimulus policies or money printing and are just because corporations recently discovered greed. For a solution, he prescribes sweeping price controls, something that has been tried and failed more times than bloodletting. This is as valid as when your conservative uncle says "Global warming?? But it's snowing right now as we speak." Pure vibes, no science, but people who agree culturally think it's smart.
Thanks for pointing this out! To go further, he is not an economist at all. He is a lawyer and activist/public intellectual who has focused on labor issues, but his “analysis” often shows ignorance (perhaps feigned ignorance) of no-controversial economic concepts. While there is a ton of debate and disagreement within economics, basic agreement on the core concepts (supply/demand) and empirical realities (inflation and money supply) is pretty widespread. Admittedly, arguments about how to structure a bear tax system, maximizing revenue and efficiency, while limiting deadweight loss, is a lot more boring than pushing for “tax cuts which pay for themselves” and “taxing the rich,” with rich somehow defining as slightly more than whatever a married couple of NYT columnist make. Paul Krugman’s actual economics work, before he became a partisan columnist, was extraordinary, but hardly partisan bomb throwing.
Yes, in Paul Krugman's old work he knew, like everyone else, that price controls don't work. Now, he spends his days trying to figure out how to say Kamala is actually right to implement price controls.
The Paul Krugman trajectory is kind of tragic, for public discourse. He is far too smart and actually knows economics to actually believe. Given his perch, his reputation and respect among the kind of people who read the Times, he could use his reach to provide some reality and nuance. But economics is about tradeoffs, and that’s a lot harder than saying “Republicans can’t be good people.”
Now, if he was saying "politicians can't be good people," I could get on board. Economists, more than anyone else, should be able to say "They're lying to you. They're either lying or stupid." Economists supporting politicians is like journalists supporting censorship. That's not your job.
Maybe people more familiar with the economics world can answer this, but is Krugman's Nobel Prize legit? I mean it seems like he was a prominent George Bush critic at the height of anti-George Bush hysteria in liberal circles so wasn't there the feeling that the Nobel Prize committee gave it to him because of his fashionable political views at the time? His economics commentary is cartoonishly partisan so it's hard to imagine him doing dispassionate work that would justify a Nobel Prize, although maybe he was more reasonable when he was younger?
The ‘Nobel Prize’ in economics was invented 70 years after the others by the Swedish central bank because economists are so full of themselves that they *had* to have their own Nobel prize, whereas other fields like mathematics have just made their own top prizes and moved on. Make sure to mock them for this at every opportunity.
When people say that the Economics Nobel isn't a "real" Nobel, what I hear is "a 19th-century arms merchant remains, to this day, the ultimate authority on which areas of human endeavor are most worthy of honoring."
The economists rather undercut this line of thinking when they went out of their way to invent a Nobel prize for themselves so they could have the prestige of the name.
Thank you!! I've been saying this for years. Not to say that perhaps some smart or deserving individuals haven't won the prize, but it's emphatically *not* the same as the Norwegian Nobel prizes.
Ha, that's interesting considering Danny Kahneman, a psychologist, won the Economics Nobel.
Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize. Without knowing much about it, I'm prepared to say we shouldn't always take those prizes seriously.
Remember when Claudia Goldin won the Nobel peace prize in 2023 for the GROUNDBREAKING discovery that the wage gap is more complicated than discrimination? A fact that the rest of us have been pointing out for, I dunno, decades?
They gave Bob Dylan a Nobel Prize for literature. It still makes me laugh and shake my head.
The same "peace" prize that's been awarded to Yassir Arafat and Henry Kissinger? How could anyone not take it seriously?
Obama won it for outstanding achievement in the field of not being named George Bush. I wonder if they'd have done it if it had been known how much Obama would ultimately expand the worst of the Bush administration policies?
To actually answer your question: yes, Krugman's Nobel Prize is legit. He was awarded it for basically re-inventing the theory of international trade; the work he did is hugely influential to this day.
"Yes, in Paul Krugman's old work he knew, like everyone else, that price controls don't work."
The US in WWII would be interested to learn about this. :)
"Price controls never work" is an example of what's known as the Ricardian fallacy in economics: prove something in a stylized model, and then act as if you've established some fact about the real world. It is very much the case that in a typical micro theory model price controls don't work. But these models simply do not describe the real world.
Of course it's also the case that in the real world price controls often do not work (for whatever definition of work you're, err, working with). But it's also the case that sometimes they do! The world is messy and complicated in a way that economic theory often doesn't handle very well.
n.b.: I was an econ Ph.D. student, dropped out before finishing my doctorate tho.
During World War 2, price controls led to rationing and shortages, to the point that people started making their own clothes and growing their own food because they couldn't get it from a store. Meatpackers filled sausages with beans and potatoes in order to eke out a profit. And of course, there was a rampant black market for basic goods. I personally don't know how to make my own clothes from scratch and I have nowhere to start a garden in my apartment, so I'm going to oppose that policy.
Fair tax system, not bear
But what if...?
Let the bears pay the bear tax! I pay the Homer tax!
I have a graph that proves Reich is correct: https://i.redd.it/vosn9khfj0vc1.jpeg
It's got labels and all. I'm convinced.
lol, like
This is great.
He is one of those people that seems real smart if you are a HS student, but once you know anything about the world, is just hilariously bad.
If you know economics, tell me who controls the greed level of corporations? 😉
Corporations are always about as greedy as they can get away with, which makes greed a very poor explanation for economy-wide price increases.
Ya, it’s like someone asking why someone without a parachute falls faster than someone with one and answering “gravity”. Gravity is why both are falling but it’s a constant that can’t explain the difference.
It warms my heart to see people dunking on America's dumbest public intellectual.
Also, it's really not in Robert Reich's interest to promote a norm of imprisoning people for spreading lies and hatred on social media. That's his whole schtick!
Reminds me of Patrick Condon, an urban planner who started calling himself an economist so he could say building more homes doesn’t reduce prices. I heard people called him out and said he can’t just call himself a housing economist.
Jesse… the “Stars and Bars” is the Confederate flag.
Came here to say that but yes, hopefully that was not a Freudian slip revealing Jesse to have more *complicated* views regarding racial issues than he's been willing to let on. It's probably more likely that he just doesn't know his bars from his stripes
He just hasn't spent enough time in the former Confederacy.
I never knew that. I've heard stars and bars a lot and I always thought it was the American flag, synonymous with stars and stripes. If as a Texan I didn't know that, I can guarantee Jesse didn't. Though I do live in a part of Texas that never really flew the Confederate flag after the 19th century.
But not the one most people know. That is the battle flag. Stars and bars flag has has three fat bars red-whit-red and blue field like US flag.
I was a little relieved when I heard that mistake. Now I know he's not _just_ willfully ignorant on Jewish issues.
And also a really bad 80s movie staring Daniel Day-Lewis’ ass and Harry Dean Stanton.
Oh, I thought he was saying the frat was flying Confederate flags to troll the protestors.
To be honest, I found that whole couple of minutes very hard to parse. I guess I'm not Online enough.
Well, they weren’t.
I was about to say that, then saw your post
Another thing to consider with climate activists, especially the ones who are more out there and tend toward being rich, is that normal people get really darn tired of hearing these people say we should be limited to mass transit, when they fly around in private jets. If they practiced what they preach, it would probably be different. But they're hypocrites who want to tell us what to do, and they get to be high and mighty and elite and do whatever they want. Thanks, but no thanks. I'm not going to listen to someone like that, ever.
That's why people should listen to working climate scientists instead of activists, which is becoming a bad word to me on all fronts.
Sadly, working climate scientists who know what they're talking about, and aren't paid to slant research one way or another, are drowned out by the activist class who try to preach at us like pastors schooling bad children.
Activism has always been a broken clock. But much like journalism, it's a necessary evil, because the good ones are the ones who get things done.
The problem with allowing people to listen to the scientists is that the scientists aren't reliable enough at parroting what the activists claim is proved by "the science".
While there's probably almost no credible scientist who would say that human activity doesn't affect the world around us, there are a great many who would debunk the claim that "97% agree" that what's happening is primarily or solely caused by human-generated CO2. At least 40% of the authors whose work is referenced in the report that claim is based on have said that the papers cited aren't about topics relevant to such an interpretation.
I don't think banning air travel is either realistic or a good idea, but this complaint is on par with the people who respond to any suggestion that taxes should be increased with "well, how come you're not paying more than you owe to the government yourself, huh? Huh?" Because it's not the law, is why. If it was the law I would comply with it.
It would be genuinely hypocritical if, having succeeded in banning something, a group of elites went on using that thing illegally themselves. But there's nothing morally or logically wrong with saying "this thing should be outlawed, but as long as it's legal I'm going to use it for my own purposes."
Being a hypocrite is taking a limo yourself, while you tell everyone else they have to ride a bus or they don't care about the environment. Being a hypocrite is taking a private jet while telling everyone else that they aren't allowed to even use a public jet, or they don't care about the environment. Your example does not negate mine.
I think you're making these people up.
I think you're unobservant. Right off the top of my head, Greta Thunberg does this. She is not the only one. Try doing research before spouting. You just sound ignorant.
Greta Thunberg flies on private jets? I'm confused.
I was interested enough to actually do a google search, and this poster is completely full of shit. The only "evidence," and I use the term entirely sarcastically, that I could find for that claim is an obvious joke that dozens of Musk-promoted bluechecks immediately assumed was serious:
https://x.com/RebelNewsOnline/status/1616658419036950528?lang=en
Aside from further proving my point that Twitter should be confiscated for reasons of political self-defense, this entirely made-up claim is a classic case of inventing things to be mad at when the people you want to be mad at haven't done you the courtesy of actually doing the things you want to be mad at them for doing.
Also? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypocrite
I need to know: Were GOC (goats of color) disproportionately affected?
You don't need to know or do any research. Just assert it!
I'm seeing a lot of this online bleating!
On geoengineering, Jesse and Katie should be much more optimistic. We already have a certain group of people who made space lasers. I know they can tackle space mirrors.
"Autistic people are always galloping."
I think loping would technically be more of a canter. Is Jesse a fake horse fan?
My autistic son does not run like a horse.
He runs like Sonic the Hedgehog.
And now we know why it didn't work out with his horse girl.
What’s the origin of Jesse and all the horse stuff?
Ha! There's the question I should have asked during the AMA!
I genuinely don't know how it started. I'm sure there was some exogenous prompt, like Katie being muslim, but I have no idea what it was. Primos! Help!
I really wanted it to be that Jesse was secretly dating Megan Thee Stallion, but that's just something I made up.
From what I recall it was just a random joke that carried on for a very long time. It's been awhile but I don't really think it's based on anything.
I have always wanted to ask, but also never wanted to ask, this question. I subscribed right when this was a rampant thing and basically had to will myself to enjoy the comments for awhile.
Yep. Generally speaking, t's the Western term for the 3-beat gait between trot and gallop. Canter is the English term. Given both of their embrace of their East Coast Elitism, my guess is that this is a horrible example of cultural appropriation. They should (insert clap emojis) Do Better! :)
As an autistic horse girl, I did a lot of loping/cantering as a child, so it’s not technically wrong in my case…
I love how deranged the TGIF comment section is, truly a menagerie of psychosis
I collected all of the funniest TGIF comments here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/corsonfinnerty/p/tgif-hates-katie?r=ql3e4&utm_medium=ios
(For anyone hitting TFP’s paywall)
Well done.
posted this in the open thread but really curious so asking again here, what was the vibe in the recent victor david Hansen TFP comment section? Weee they pro Tucker?
Not really pro Tucker. Much more "what about the Nazis on the left" and a lot of downplaying Tucker's relevance. Which is pretty lol he spoke at the RNC and is extremely influential in the GOP.
Reich is such a loathsome apparatchik. Just one deceptive, bad faith argument after another, can’t stand him.
Yeah the hilarious thing is under his own suggestion he should absolutely be arrested.
I got a kick out of you guys trying to pronounce "Justice" with an exotic accent as if was Moraes' first name. It's actually Alexandre; "justice" was the piece's author using the equivalent SCOTUS title for his role in the Brazilian supreme court.
As for the legality of his decision, it's been hotly debated in Brazil. Especially since some leaked conversations between his subordinates revealed some, ahem, "bold" legal strategies (https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2024/08/moraes-usou-tse-fora-do-rito-para-investigar-bolsonaristas-no-supremo-revelam-mensagens.shtml). Like, literally working his way backwards from the ruling. I think it's appalling and should be grounds for impeaching him.
That’s a funny and honest error.
Ah, Americans and foreign languages…
I mean foreigners generally aren’t very good at foreign languages either.
Which foreigners and which languages? 😂
Generally most of them. Brazilians generally don’t speak unaccented English. Neither do most Europeans.
The idea that Americans are uniquely poor at pronouncing foreign languages is frankly silly.
Americans do tend to be less bilingual than euros, because in the US a foreign county is typically a transoceanic away, not 20 miles.
But the idea that it is hilarious Jesse and his bad case on honky-mouth is some special American phenomenon is hilarious. I have a super common super bog standard name. One that most countries have a version of (even Chinese). I would generally say foreigners more often mispronounce it than get it right. Are they all hicks too?
No people just speak with the speech patterns of the place they are from. It’s not some big mystery.
I never said Americans were uniquely bad at foreign languages, but the fact that their language and country are the dominant ones + geography do explain the difficulties they might encounter. And they are not the only Anglophones in this situation, foreign language proficiency in the UK was pretty abysmal last time I checked.
I asked which "foreigners" because such a use of the term is a sweeping generalization and smacks of complacent ethnocentrism. People in multilingual areas like West Africa typically speak several languages, even at the level of a lingua franca and with an accent. Btw speaking with an accent in and of itself does not demonstrate a poor command of a specific language. As a language teacher, I do emphasize the importance of pronunciation right from the start, but as long as people communicate efficiently and are understood by the natives, there is no reason to ask of them a perfect accent (and from where in the country? upper or middle class? etc.) which some people will never be able to attain anyway.
If you look at Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, and, to a lesser extent, Germany, you will see that these cultures are usually much better at English than, say, people from southern Europe, because their languages are more closely related to English and they're literally bombarded with English-speaking media, especially in northern Europe. These are countries with tiny populations at the periphery of an empire that are totally dependent on the outside. The speakers of minority languages have no other choice but to "be good at foreign languages" or be condemned to provincial isolation, notwithstanding the class factor. And while everyone is influenced by the speech patterns of the place they are from, some do need foreign languages more than others, which isn't some big mystery either.
The quality of a country's school system is another topic entirely, but it does matter a great deal as well. As far as the US is concerned, I don't think its extreme levels of economic and academic inequality are conducive to foreign language proficiency among monolingual natives.
When they need to talk to us, they'll learn how.
Or just expect every single person on this planet to speak their dialect of English.
Not at all. You can have a silly accent if you want.
You guys need to get some perspective and read Bjorn Lomborg. Cheaper to flex with climate than try to change it (by orders of magnitude). Fewer people die of heat than cold, fewer acres burning by wildfire than 100 yrs ago, etc.
Also Roger Pielke and Judith Curry.
Also while some places will be drier, generally there will be a fair bit more rain. So the constant whining about "droughts" drives me nuts. Generally flooding and more storms will be a much bigger problems globally and in the US than drought.
Problem is in dry places where drought is expected, but extreme drought is catastrophic to quality of life and commerce (like west Texas, the Sonoran desert, etc). We shouldn't have so many people living in those places, but tell that to Phoenix. Fucking insane that the sunbelt is where most people seem to have moved in the last few years.
However, due to states like Arizona greatly reducing their amount of agriculture, they actually use less water today than they did in the 1950s. People don't use that much water to live; it's plants that do, so we actually can sustain a lot more people in desert places than it seems if we don't have lawns and farms there.
https://www.gpec.org/water/#:~:text=Arizona%20uses%20roughly%20the%20same,methods%20and%20reduced%20agriculture%20demand.
They pay me well to work here in West Texas. It is quite hot. Builds character
I used to debate my liberal former roommate about this a decade ago. He would often repeat that "climate change will make dry places drier and wet places wetter." I asked how he knew this exactly, and he seemed annoyed that it wasn't obvious to me. There seems to be an assumption that climate change will only be bad and not have both good and bad effects, and it strikes me more as an article of faith than proven science.
That is exactly it and I have done a bunch of reading on it and it is basically a lie. Things will generally be wetter. Yes things will change from place to place, and in some places that will be helpful, and in others not.
But generally the world will be more like Brazil/India and less like Russia/Canada. Now I am not saying climate change is good. I agree it will likely be net quite bad. But it also isn't going to turn the earth into some unlivable hellscape and in many places (particularly in the northern hemisphere) might make things more pleasant since so much land there is very cold.
But no one is interested in the story of "X place will be nicer after climate change", so those areas never get spoken about. Only the places where is likely to cause problems (granted it is a lot of them) are ever discussed.
So like look at this map:
https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report/our-changing-climate/precipitation-change
Arizona looks to be a problem, but other than that, mostly looks pretty green.
Effective or ineffective rainfall is the relevant measure here. Our water systems are fucked globally from dams and desertification, which is a far more dangerous symptom of industrial civilization than climate change.
Right because your uneducated roommate speaks for everyone.
There is no such assumption. Climate change will bring chaos as both ecosystems and humans try to adapt. The Pentagon and the defense think tanks know what's up, they have also been sounding the alarm for years now. Chaos brings war.
In their 95% worst-model, in which year does the IPCC say that human standards of living start falling?
My roommate was very educated, thank you very much - he taught environmental science to high schoolers, and he said exactly what you just said here, that Climate change is an unalloyed bad thing, and every scientist and important thinker on the issue agrees. I asked him how he knew that, and it was something about the climate models, which have predicted chaos and war for the past few decades, and have been updated to be right this time, and it's going to happen very very soon.
Did you ever ask him when the time was that the climate of the Earth was ever static?
North Africa supposedly turned from a savannah grassland to a vast expanse of nearly uninhabitable desert millenia before there was a large enough human population on the planet to be doing anything of consequence. This isn't to say that we can't be having an impact now, but it seems unquestionable that major changes can and do happen for other causes unrelated to humanity as well.
Yes yes, keep beating up your imaginary strawman roommate and misrepresenting what I said.
Well you didn't say anything specific other than an appeal to authority. Feel free to elaborate if you want!
Tell that to the Obamas when the rising oceans swallow up their $14Million beachfront estate on Martha's Vineyard.
Better yet, ask them why they spent $14Million on a house they believed was destined to end up literally underwater.
is... is that the Brunching Shuttlecocks guy?? also, yeh, it's all about the infrastructure. Natural disasters kill far fewer people these days. Because of better houses, water systems and roads.
I've been having to refill my bird feeder more frequently of late, which is probably due to climate change.
My hummingbirds left for the season earlier than anticipated, which I hope isn't due to climate change. (weeping emoji)
Stories like this keep feeding my getting lazier and lazier assumption that anyone who insists on being referred to as "Doctor" outside specific, appropriate context, even beyond the obvious insecurity, is either throwing down with an honorary degree (or degree with similar provenance) or is trying to claim expertise in an area outside of their degree.
My state medical society had a resolution to adopt a statement about climate change that one of these activists would probably approve of, and it didn’t really have much to do with human health. So I spoke up and said that even as a public health physician with an MPH in environmental health, that really only qualifies me to talk about things like the effect of environmental conditions on human health. It does not actually make me an expert on energy policy. My conclusion was “we are doctors of people, not planets”.
A lot of my bias comes from my dad's attitude that experts and expertise are important, but expertise by its definition is very narrow and some of the last people to recognize that are experts.
The counterpoint would be that PhD’s (doctors of philosophy) are that for a reason. There is no “doctor of English” or “doctor of environmental science”. A PhD is supposed to teach you about thinking. The thesis is in a specific content area, but you’re supposed to have skills and knowledge that will translate to other things.
But clearly, some people go off the rails very quickly. And frankly, the quality of academia has declined so precipitously, a lot of PhD’s aren’t even good thinkers within their own niche. The person they keep banging on about in this episode might well be a terrible analyzer of English literature, in addition to being a Twitter troll.
A humanities professor told me college is significantly less rigorous now than it was in the 60s and prior, when he was in, because they are heavily incentivized to just pass their classes through. This was undergrad. Not sure if that applies to the medical and science PhD students, but I worry it does.
One of Colin Wright’s new obsessions (besides pointing out the number of sex categories that exist in humans) is describing bullshit PhD theses that people got signed off on, mostly in humanities.
It’s a weird dynamic, because on one hand it’s very difficult to actually get a job in these fields, but on the other it’s easy to get the PhD.
It would be worth an investigator's time to to really look at how all of the various forms of inflation from high school to the PhD create a new code to distinguish between the old metrics of success to the new (no really, this person is exceptional). I teach mostly undergrads and MA/MFA students (my private university does not have a PhD program), and this is something I really think about communicating when I write letters of recommendation. How do I convey that this 4.0 is unbelievably amazing given any standards at any time versus the general acceptance of accomodations/equity language that ostensibly wants to eviscerate such differences? John McWhorter, please help us out :)
Does anybody remember a popular meteorologist in Seattle named Cliff Mass? I think he was *canceled* in around 2021 for debunking a climate study that predicted a huge amount of deaths in the Pacific Northwest if the climate trajectory wasn’t halted.
Anyway, his response was that that might happen if people didn’t think to install an AC window unit or two in their homes. So that made me laugh out loud until I read that he was horribly ostracized and then fired for denying climate change. I live in Texas, so that was the only story I read about him and have no idea if he’s been redeemed. Could look it up, I guess.
Ahem
https://open.substack.com/pub/blockedandreported/p/episode-26-a-grand-unspurling-of-8ca?r=7enhd&utm_medium=ios
Ha! I should have known. I’m pretty new to B&R. Thank you!
Thank you Katie & Jesse for bearing the psychic cost of having to defend E**n in service of advocating for free speech, I know that it was painful for you both (but also that's why you get paid the big bucks)
I'm a little concerned about Jesse's name for the American flag at 8:20. I'm also a little surprised Katie didn't say something, because the "stars and bars" was the nickname of the original flag of the Confederacy.
I honestly didn’t notice this at all. It’s not just the same as Stars and Stripes? A bar is the same thing as a stripe…
https://www.latimes.com/visuals/graphics/la-na-g-confederate-flag-history-20150623-htmlstory.html
Oh good, I thought maybe I was going crazy.
Habitat destruction and human use of the natural environment remains a 10 times larger issue for the flora and fauna than climate change is.
Yep. I’m all for cleaning plastic out of the oceans and protecting rainforests. Building wind turbines (that massacre bats and raptors) not so much.
Raptors? Like velociraptors?
Like birds of prey
Well now I'm sad.
Oh ok, didn’t know the term. Thanks!
For real, if the hypothetical 'solar flare that takes out all humans' that Katie mentioned were to occur... the rest of life on Earth would adapt. Not dependent on land-clearing agriculture/ polluting energy supplies for their very existence, most species would adapt/survive.
And honestly I'd be fine with that. But I would like someone to feed my cats. The fluffy one is not a hunter.