P.O.S.S.E.
“That’s another dimension of the problem. Some proportion of people who a decade or two ago might have written a substantial book are now instead dabbling in podcasts, newsletters, or YouTube channels. Some of them find the work as satisfying as writing—the feedback is instantaneous—although it’s equally unremunerative. The new platforms are as susceptible to blockbuster economics as the publishing world. They, too, lack a middle class”
“They really are angry that the Conservatives have the brass neck to attack them for the early release of prisoners, a decision whose alternatives were, broadly speaking, “invent a time machine” or “legalise crime”. They might be wrong. But they do mean it. The best – the true – answer to “why is your messaging so gloomy?” is “We really are gloomy”. Sometimes, it’s not about tactics at all.
Starmer’s genuine anger about the state of the nation was behind what was, for me, the most effective part of his Conference speech: a dividing line about populism as “the politics of easy answers” and the need to be honest about trade-offs: providing more prison places means building prisons, cheaper electricity means overground pylons, having more houses means putting them in actual places, processing asylum seekers means granting asylum, and so on”
“Or if you don’t like the Silver Bulletin or 538 or RealClearPolitics averages, I’ll offer another alternative. Make your own average. Seriously, it’s not that hard. But I do have one stipulation: you have to publicly specify the rules ahead of time. I think you’ll find that when you’re forced to be consistent, to set standards that aren’t governed by your ad hoc sense of the vibes or by your partisan preferences, you’ll have a lot more sympathy for the polling aggregators — and you won’t be as surprised when one of the outliers turns out to be right”
https://www.natesilver.net/p/trust-a-pollster-more-when-it-publishes
“The Constitution’s framers worried that individual states might try to grab too much power in the House by creating dozens and dozens of congressional districts, so they specified that a district could not be smaller than 30,000 people. But they put no upper limit on district sizes. After the 1920 census revealed that urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans, the House in 1929 capped its numbers at 435 to keep power away from those urban dwellers, including immigrants, that lawmakers considered dangerous, thus skewing the Electoral College in favor of rural America. Today the average congressional district includes 761,169 individuals—more than the entire population of Wyoming, Vermont, or Alaska—which weakens the power of larger states”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-20-2024
“On average, the public thinks asylum seekers make up a third of total immigration. The more sceptical about migration they are, the higher the percentage they think it is. People who hold liberal views on immigration think asylum seekers make up 19% of the total. People who hold critical views of immigration think they make up 47%. They’re all wrong, although needless to say the anti-immigration lot are most wrong of all. The actual figure is seven per cent.
More than five times as many people come to the UK to study each year than claim asylum. But the public thinks there are twice as many asylum seekers as international students.
Whichever way you look at it, that is a failure of journalism. Politicians must take some responsibility too, of course, but it’s basically their job to lie to the public”
https://iandunt.substack.com/p/farage-and-his-mortifying-dimwit
“Over the last 15 years, movies and television have been obsessed with moral ambiguity. Walter White was pushed to break bad because of an unjust system, everyone in Game of Thrones had their ideals compromised by the realities of the world, and you can’t throw a rock in the Marvel Cinematic Universe without hitting a villain that we’re supposed to believe made a few good points. There was a time when these blurry lines between right and wrong felt like a sign of maturity, an indicator that what we were watching was for adults rather than kids. But now that this has become the default state for most shows and movies, it’s too often hollow and obligatory. Moral ambiguity has become a cheap way to paper over a story that doesn’t have anything meaningful to say, and superficial flaws have become camouflage for characters too flat to make concepts like morality feel relevant at all”
https://www.polygon.com/lotr-rings-of-power/446640/rings-power-trop-morality-lord-rings
“It is my hypothesis that, back in the 2000s, everybody’s activation energy was a bit lower. More of us were bloggers, back then. Linking felt more natural, somehow. Now, in the 2020s, the algorithms do most of that work.
You must lower your activation energy again.
When a thoughtful reader shares a link, it’s not intrusive. It’s not annoying. You have to imagine the integral: all the readers, all the links. If the World Wide Web has any hope at all — and it might not — this is it”
Not really the residents of Newham, Hackney and Waltham Forest, thousands of whom have been waiting years for social housing while luxury developments stud the skyline. Of the 33,000 new homes that will be built on or near the Olympic site by 2036, just over a third will be affordable, against the original bid pledge of 50%. And this in itself is a kind of sleight, given that the redefinition of “affordable housing” under the coalition government leaves it beyond the means of most lower-income families. Only around 1,000 social housing units have been constructed.
On the other hand if you are an affluent young professional, perhaps one of the many tech workers priced out of Clerkenwell and Shoreditch, this is your playground. And of course this is a more familiar Olympic story, from Rio de Janeiro to Tower Hamlets: gentrification under the guise of regeneration, a revolution for the moneyed classes that also effectively locks marginalised groups out of their own city. In the two decades to 2021 the Black population of Stratford fell from 31% to 17%. Perhaps, from a certain viewpoint, this is what sparkling success looks like.
“Studies like this are why I get supremely annoyed by folks who like to talk about the “size of government” as if it’s meaningful measure of anything. Government should have the resources necessary to do the jobs it has to do and do them well.
Are there too many people and dollars sloshing around the Department of Defense? Almost certainly! Can we eliminate the billions of dollars and large bureaucracies at the state level doling out corporate subsidies? Yes, we can!
But as this study shows, the prudent thing to do for the public — in terms of dollars and service — is to have more public transportation employees, to ensure that states can fulfill their core function of building infrastructure without blowing money on consultants and mistakes”
https://boondoggle.substack.com/p/the-secret-thats-driving-up-highway
“And really, have you noticed anyone from the anti-regulation, small state-ist, let-the-market-rip side of politics questioning their beliefs or publicly considering the links between those and this disaster? The silence, as Ian Dunt has noted, is deafening.
We’ve been here before. The financial crisis happened under a Labour government – but the decades of deregulation that allowed it was an ideology of the right (albeit one which too many on the centre-left had acquiesced to, too). That crash wasn’t followed by much soul-searching of the “are we the baddies” sort, either. It was followed instead by yet more deregulation, and the dismantling of the state”