The correlates of Trumpism: early mortality, lack of education, unemployment, offshored jobs

[NickSay]

Privilege is a two-way mirror.

[NickSay]

@GlyphGryph

@themadpoet

All that we seem to get are more platitudes about how someone who isn’t doing well enough obviously didn’t work ‘hard’ enough.

Worse, I’ve been seeing this sort of rhetoric gain significant traction even in the far left, shooting down anyone who complains about off-shoring taking their jobs, or free trade and illegal immigration pushing down wages.I’ve seen more than one Democrat respond with: “They must be lazy and stupid if they’re letting their jobs get taken by illegals and foreigners lol.”

“Democrat” and “far left” are two very different things.

[lolipop_jones]

Bernie Sanders, like Trump, has financial plans that exhibit clear unawareness of how actuarial math functions.

They both claim that the economy can be quickly fixed, and that prosperity will quickly return, and it will all be paid for by people that their respective voting bases don’t like very much.

Doubtless Bernie is more likeable than Trump. But likeability won’t do much for the Social Security trust fund once the income fails to meet the outgo.

[SeamusAMurphy]

I can understand the logic in that thinking. If you insist on removing the supporting structures of a building, the top most floors increase pressure on the remaining lower supports. If i’m on the lower level, I’m all for burning the whole thing down so the top gets crisped just like everyone else.
I guess it’s better to not take out the supports, eh?

[anon15383236]

@NickSay

Privilege is a two-way mirror.

Interesting metaphor, but I’m not sure how it works. What do you mean?

[anon15383236]

@lolipop_jones

They both claim that the economy can be quickly fixed, and that prosperity will quickly return, and it will all be paid for by people that their respective voting bases don’t like very much.

Citation needed for Sanders.[quote=“lolipop_jones, post:83, topic:74631”]
Doubtless Bernie is more likeable than Trump. But likeability won’t do much for the Social Security trust fund once the income fails to meet the outgo.
[/quote]

If that’s true, maybe there’s a way to shuffle some of the great deal of money we’d save with universal health care over to Social Security (not to mention other programs that address our disgraceful negligence of the elderly).

[NickSay]

It’s maybe a bad metaphor

Those without privilege have no trouble seeing others enjoying it, but it blinds the privileged to others’ experiences - they can’t see others not enjoying that privilege.

[anon15383236]

Okay thanks, that works for me. Come to think of it, another way it works for me is that inspires a form of narcissism. The privileged tend to think that their point of view is the same one that others have, and if those others don’t, there’s something wrong with them.

[NickSay]

Their own perspective is reflected back at them, not the view from outside (which penetrates a two-way mirror just fine).

They can criticize people for having been held back by poverty, homophobia, ethnic prejudice and systemic racism because those forces are not visible in their mirror.

[anon61221983]

No, none of us understood that word salad. It’s not just you.

[anon61221983]

Sarah Palin, is that you?

[anon61221983]

Holy crap, what if that’s true. What if the clintons asked him to run and to be as batshit as possible to make her look good? That would be utterly bonkers and scary as hell!

[anon73629133]

@anon61221983

What if the clintons asked him to run and to be as batshit as possible to make her look good?

The flaw in this theory is that it presumes that Drumpf would do anything to let a woman get ahead of him.

[hello_friends]

@Wanderfound

An unconsidered factor in this equation: the likely attempts of Trump supporters to “discourage” opposition voters from attending the polls through intimidation and violence.

Ruy Teixeira considered it here:

@hello_friends

“I find it just so implausible that we could have this massive white nativist mobilization without also provoking a big mobilization among minority voters,” Teixeira said. “It is kind of magical thinking that you could do one thing and not have the other.”

@hello_friends

If you think that something like that can’t happen in modern America, you haven’t been paying attention to the last decade of voter suppression across the Confederacy.

We might say we haven’t paid enough attention since 1877 — across the U.S. and elsewhere. True.

Maybe we’ll all join the dsa and organize with colleagues to reduce risk for that problem?

Caucus with the dems and organize locally. That’s basically what conservatives did and school board and municipal and county offices have been embattled ever since.

Why not engage locally on an issue that resonates and use the pushback by conservatives to organize an opposition network?

Many on the left forgot how to do that work and stopped teaching it to each other.

[anon67050589]

To be fair, I think the majority of animosity toward Round-Up is about the proprietary nature of being required to buy Monsanto seeds every season as part of the process, and the very heavy-handed way farmers are treated (even neighbors) if they attempt to use any other seed.

[anon67050589]

@lolipop_jones

But likeability won’t do much for the Social Security trust fund once the income fails to meet the outgo.

That old canard? The long-term health of the Social Security fund is well established.

And that is despite the fact that the current ceiling on paying into the system ($118,500 income/year) is so artificially low that a keeping-up-with-reality bump to, say, a ceiling of $150,000 income/year would dispel all doubt about the solvency of the fund.

Business Insider article stating that $150,000 is necessary to live a “good life” in the middle class, which BTW would put the earner in the top 10% of the country.

[roomwithaview]

@Wanderfound

For example: the last one I read involved looking at an area of Central America where glyphosate is routinely aerially sprayed as an anti-drug measure. They looked at the rates of around twenty different types of cancer in the affected population.

I found your answer informative and well presented, and I thank you for the time taken to write it!

I have two nits to pick with it though.

The first being the bit quoted above, as that’s the only specific countering study referenced, and having lived in Central America for over a decade, I know that in the rural farming areas the vast majority of the workers (who would have been most exposed) do not have the resources to go to a hospital. They simply die. So any “official” numbers being pulled in that environment regarding cancer are almost certainly off by an order of magnitude, if not more. (That’s not a number pulled out of me arse either, that’s based on the typically high worker to landowner ratio).

The other nit is simply the rather astounding correlation between the two curves. If they were simple curves I wouldn’t be that impressed, we could tie it to cell phone use as easily but the brief cessation of Roundup use partway through and the mirroring drop on cancer some years later, with resurgence tied to Roundup reintroduction is the real smoking gun. Of course I realize that correlation is not causation, but at the same time we’ve yet to find anything else which fits the curves so perfectly.

At one point I tried to use Washington state as a test case for numbers to prove one way or the other as there are only two main crops under Roundup use, apples and cherries. Unfortunately most of the workers are migrant (insufficient healthcare stats again), and there are too many layers of distribution (including imported crops when they are out of season) to get a good handle on the long-term effects in any meaningful local sense.

Now, one set of numbers which could be gathered and studied would be incidence of cancer in workers of smaller organic farms, as they are more likely to be local and have healthcare options. I think that population has been around in enough numbers for long enough at this point that we could at least spot a divergence over time as compared to the overall population.

[roomwithaview]

@lolipop_jones

Bernie Sanders, like Trump, has financial plans that exhibit clear unawareness of how actuarial math functions.

They both claim that the economy can be quickly fixed, and that prosperity will quickly return, and it will all be paid for by people that their respective voting bases don’t like very much.

Doubtless Bernie is more likeable than Trump. But likeability won’t do much for the Social Security trust fund once the income fails to meet the outgo.

trolley much? Would be nice if you could cite something there, (anything).

[roomwithaview]

@funruly

The flaw in this theory is that it presumes that Drumpf would do anything to let a woman get ahead of him.

One word: “money”

[Wanderfound]

@anon67050589

To be fair, I think the majority of animosity toward Round-Up is about the proprietary nature of being required to buy Monsanto seeds every season as part of the process, and the very heavy-handed way farmers are treated (even neighbors) if they attempt to use any other seed.

You only need Roundup-Ready seeds if you’re planning on broadcast spraying glyphosate over everything. Doing that can make sense in some circumstances, but it very much isn’t the only way to farm with glyphosate.

The herbicide I use is carried in a 100mL bottle, and dispensed a drop at a time. Cut weed with secateurs, dab a tiny amount of glypho onto the cut stem to ensure that it doesn’t grow back.

We add coloured dye to our herbicide, so we can more easily see where it’s been used. The dye is substantially more dangerous to humans (mildly carcinogenic) than the glyphosate is.

I’m with y’all on disliking Monsanto, BTW. They’re just as evil and destructive as every other big multinational corporation. But there’s a serious baby & bathwater situation involved.