TossedAccount [he/him]

What kind of social-chauvinist loser highly ranks the opportunists (e.g. Vaush, Cody, Natalie) who went full popular-frontist, critically endorsing Biden and tarring independent socialist supporters with the same ultraleft brush as the strict electoral abstentionists (while still putting the anarchist Thought Slime in a mid-high tier)?

Who puts women with much better politics (e.g. Mexie, and Lily Orchard to a lesser extent) in bottom tiers with Peter Coffin?

What the fuck is Jreg doing here at all when he’s the Political Compass subreddit in YouTuber form and known magnet for fascist recruiters?

Which pride flag is on the pin of the person on the upper right? It looks like purple-orange colors. Nvm it’s lesbian pride.

Awful take. For starters, GOP-dominated counties tend to have smaller populations, which means less available labor to exploit for profit, and fewer jobs - of fucking course their GDPs are going to be smaller! What is even the point of looking at aggregate GDP (which corresponds to local capitalist profits more than anything worker-related with the post-1970s wage-productivity divergence), and then drawing a conclusion about the work ethic of the average person in each county? This person isn’t even citing per capita data, which would control for the fact that there are just more people in the dense urban counties where, of course, Dems tend to do better!

(Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1138/)

If they wanted to make a point like “Republican voters don’t work”, they should have looked at unemployment insurance claims by county, or any of the U3, U6, or labor force participation rate. Most of these data should be available from the BLS.

Regarding the Brookings Institute article that produced this infographic, which has its own different problems, they use this statistic to comment on the same old portrait of a rural-urban economic divide manifesting in divergent propensities to support different parties, aka shit we knew already (with some classic conflation between Dems/libs and the left-leaning voters they hold hostage):

The problem—as we have witnessed over the past decade and are likely to continue seeing—is not only that Democrats and Republicans disagree on issues of culture, identity, and power, but that they represent radically different swaths of the economy. Democrats represent [sic] voters who overwhelmingly reside in the nation’s diverse economic centers, and thus tend to prioritize housing affordability [sic], an improved social safety net [sic], transportation infrastructure [sic], and racial justice [sic]. Jobs in blue America also disproportionately rely on national R&D investment, technology leadership, and services exports.

By contrast, Republicans represent an economic base situated in the nation’s struggling small towns and rural areas. Prosperity there remains out of reach for many, and the party sees no reason to consider the priorities and needs of the nation’s metropolitan centers.

Probably because she’s a lot younger and still has plenty of time for her politics to get much worse.

But yeah, Bernie deserves more criticism for many of the same reasons. Both are Dem entryists presenting themselves as “democratic socialists” when the limits of their imaginations are somewhere in the neighborhood of FDR New Deal liberalism and the right wing of social democracy. Bernie deserves even more shit than AOC does for promoting a sort of US-American social imperialism, consistently supporting the growth of the military-industrial complex.

Something about the combination of “fuck you, got mine” and “if I had to suffer/struggle, so should you” strikes me as almost uniquely American.

AOC undermines the socialist movement by encouraging would-be socialists to vote for and therefore compromise with Democrats, which is class-collaborationist because the Democrats are a 100% bourgeois-controlled party with no mass membership or internal democracy. Her and Bernie’s entryism has allowed us to draw important conclusions about the Democrats being ghoulish libs at their core, but this entryism was an avoidable mistake. We should have already learned this lesson from the Jesse Jackson campaign in 1988 that eventually turned Black and Rainbow Coalition Dem-entryists (some with even Maoist and Black Panther backgrounds!) into Obama-supporting liberals and Democrats. Even Angela Davis critically endorsed Biden!

If AOC and The Squad remain in the Democratic Party, they will follow the same trajectory and repeatedly betray their working class supporters, misleading the masses into thinking they can have any consistent or meaningful control over Democratic Party policy the whole time.

For those wondering what the hell Acemoglu et al. actually mean by “institutions”:

“As we discuss in more detail below, we hypothesize that a cluster of institutions ensuring secure property rights for a broad cross section of society, which we refer to as institutions of private property, are essential for investment incentives and successful economic performance. In contrast, extractive institutions, which concentrate power in the hands of a small elite and create a high risk of expropriation for the majority of the population, are likely to discourage investment and economic development. Extractive institutions, despite their adverse effects on aggregate performance, may emerge as equilibrium institutions because they increase the rents captured by the groups that hold political power.”

In the historical context, Acemoglu and friends correctly consider feudalism and chattel slavery to be “extractive” and forms of rent-seeking, and yet wage-capitalism (or, at least, competitive wage-capitalism), rooted in private property “rights”, is somehow not. Never mind that the above-quoted definition of “extractive institutions” perfectly describes oligopolistic late-stage capitalism which still retains protection of private property as a core feature. This paper is taught to first-year grad students, by the way.

Let’s not get it twisted: if the headline were something to the effect of “the Colombian government paid its soldiers to murder whomever they could credibly claim were rebels” and the econometric analysis were the same, this wouldn’t necessarily be so dunk-worthy (that said AEA decided to be dicks and paywall the paper so I haven’t had a chance to read it yet). Without a penalty for killing false positives, of course that’ll result in an awful incentive structure with a horrible outcome!

Of course since we’re talking about a paper coauthored by Acemoglu - an MIT economist who famously described the European settlers’ rape and pillage of the Americas and Africa as a “reversal of fortune”, euphemistically and underwhelmingly describing colonization and slavery as “changes in institutions” - interpreting the spike in the state-murder outcome in Colombia as the result of mere incompetence producing “bad incentives” is hardly surprising.

Do liberals not realize that “bot” implies an algorithm is the one tweeting the anti-Dem agitprop? At least calling you a “Russian shill” or accusing you of having fallen for Russian propaganda would actually make sense.