NY Times outlines what election rules reform is needed to stop the kind of potential coup Trump was pressing for.
"Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it."
He's obviously going to try again and the USA is going to let him.
Democrats in the USA has seem to be remarkably relaxed about Trump stealing the 2024 election. If the 2022 midterms go badly for the Democrats, it's on like Donkey Kong.
To be fair I think Congressional Dems are suitably concerned, the lack of concern by certain Dem Senators about this is absolutely suicidal.
The GOP may only need 5 gains to take the House in 2022 but in the Senate they need to gain seats in an election year when 20 of the 34 Senate seats up are already held by the GOP.
If the GOP win both chambers in a midterms landslide, then there is a strong chance Trump would win the 2024 election anyway even without needing both chambers to object to the EC results
It seems to me entirely possible that next year the Democrats lose the House but gain an actual (but not filibuster proof) majority in the Senate. Having control of one of the houses will be key to preventing shenanigans counting the 2024 electoral votes.
NY Times outlines what election rules reform is needed to stop the kind of potential coup Trump was pressing for.
"Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it."
He's obviously going to try again and the USA is going to let him.
Democrats in the USA has seem to be remarkably relaxed about Trump stealing the 2024 election. If the 2022 midterms go badly for the Democrats, it's on like Donkey Kong.
To be fair I think Congressional Dems are suitably concerned, the lack of concern by certain Dem Senators about this is absolutely suicidal.
Joe Manchin is an odd one, his voting goes way beyond what his Trumper constituents care about (Guns (In favour of), abortion (Against), climate change (Against)), . I expect the average W Va voter would probably be in favour of big Gov't spending in fact, yet because the GOP opposes it he votes that way. Sinema is even worse - she doesn't need to vote with the GOP on anything in particular; she could vote the same way as Kelly on everything and probably get back in.
Yeah, Manchin seems to be actively voting against things that would be good for West Virginia at this point - but at least they seem to be consistent with a set of principles.
Sinema is just an absolute WTF! She stood on a platform of reducing Medicare prices by allowing medicare to negotiate with drugs companies. She is now saying she will vote against exactly that if it is the Reconciliation package.
It makes absolutely no sense unless she is doing it for pure narcissism to show show she has the power to blow anything up.
Sinema is from small state, libertarian Arizona, a state that even voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964 over LBJ.
Biden only won Arizona in 2020 by 0.3% over Trump by squeezing the 4% Libertarian Party vote from 2016 down to 1.5% in 2020 and Sinema knows that. To be re elected she needs Libertarian Party voters and fiscally conservative Independents to vote for her.
Manchin is from West Virginia, a state that voted for Trump even in 2020.
I'm sorry, but by electing two Dem Senators in Georgia the American People as a whole clearly signalled that they were in favour of big state socialism. That is the agenda they want.
Nope.
In 2016 Georgia voted 50% Trump, 45% Hillary and 3% Libertarian.
In 2020 Georgia voted 49.4% Biden and 49.2% Trump and 1% Libertarian. So without gaining votes from the small state Libertarian Party Biden would have lost Georgia.
The American people did not give the Democrats a landslide in the Senate either for socialism, they only gave the Democrats control via the casting votes of Manchin and Sinema
Weird I remember this brilliant analysis that said Georgia voting for 2 dem senators would implicitly be a endorsement of far left politics having power.
On topic, I remember Ben Lauderdale saying the MRP is only worth doing 12 months before an election and gets more accurate when we're six months or fewer away from election day.
NY Times outlines what election rules reform is needed to stop the kind of potential coup Trump was pressing for.
"Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it."
He's obviously going to try again and the USA is going to let him.
Democrats in the USA has seem to be remarkably relaxed about Trump stealing the 2024 election. If the 2022 midterms go badly for the Democrats, it's on like Donkey Kong.
To be fair I think Congressional Dems are suitably concerned, the lack of concern by certain Dem Senators about this is absolutely suicidal.
Joe Manchin is an odd one, his voting goes way beyond what his Trumper constituents care about (Guns (In favour of), abortion (Against), climate change (Against)), . I expect the average W Va voter would probably be in favour of big Gov't spending in fact, yet because the GOP opposes it he votes that way. Sinema is even worse - her state is a blue state now, she doesn't need to vote with the GOP on anything in particular.
Manchin and Sinema are right.
Remember Trump actually got a higher voteshare in 2020 than 2016, Biden only won by squeezing the over 3% Libertarian vote in 2016 to 1% in 2020 with almost all those fiscally conservative Libertarian voters voting for him.
If Biden had not won those 2016 Libertarian voters he would have lost Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia and the EC so the Democrats cannot afford to be too tax and spend or they will lose them again
Trumpism is about many things, a small state is not one of them.
No but Biden didn't win by winning Trump voters from 2016, as I said Trump even increased his voteshare on 2016 in 2020.
Biden only won in 2020 by getting small state voters who voted Libertarian Party in 2016 to vote for him in 2020
Is their polling to back that up? Because instinctively it feels more likely that those voters went back to Trump or split fairly evenly (third party voters in the US often being more general protest-y than their votes superficially suggest) and Biden took a few votes from suburban Republicans. So Trump gains vote share, but Biden (who gets some GOP votes and some Green voters coming 'home') gains more.
But there may be polling I've forgotten about which strongly suggests otherwise. Our intuitions about how voters behave are often wrong in my experience.
Even so suburban Republicans are fiscally conservative, socially moderate.
If they voted for Biden they did so to remove Trump not for socialism.
It was Democratic overreach after their wins in 1992 and 2008 which saw the GOP midterm landslides of 1994 and 2010 as fiscally conservative suburbanites revolted
Again, do you have evidence for this? Because in polls the bill does very well. Even pretty well among Trump 2020 voters.
It depends on the question asked, other polls find 75% of Americans are worried about the debt and that too much debt could hurt the economy. We also know most Americans never vote to raise their taxes to fund extra spending even if they may support extra funding on certain projects in theory
FPT @Selebian. I think you're blind to the issue here - I'll highlight two main points the article makes:
(1) "In a recent report on academic freedom in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, I found that 40 percent of American academics would not hire a known Trump supporter, and 33 percent of British academics would avoid hiring a known Brexit supporter. When it comes to refereeing papers, grant bids, and promotion applications, my own work and that of others indicates that the likelihood of an academic’s discriminating against an openly conservative submission is as high as 45 percent. On a four-person panel, that makes discrimination a near certainty."
(2) "In the 1960s there were only one and a half journalists and academics on the left for every one on the right. Today that ratio is between four to one and six to one, and considerably higher among political journalists and social-science and humanities academics. In a report on academia for the Manhattan Institute, I noted that left-leaning social-science and humanities academics now outnumber those on the right in Britain by nine to one, and in the U.S. by 14 to one. Work by Mitchell Langbert using voter-registration data for the top liberal-arts colleges and universities (for five disciplines) also shows lopsided ratios. At Harvard, for instance, a recent inquiry reported a $250-to-$1 Democrat-to-Republican donation ratio among the staff."
It's not enough for there to be "legal" protections - hard to access, prove and leverage - because an institutional culture of intolerance creates an environment that is suffocating to those already employed and inhibits any future recruitment to correct it. This means even fewer conservatives apply in the first place and thus reinforces a monoculture.
Those that are employed (like my friend at the University of Bath, for example, or me at the Woke firm I've just left) "fear losing (their) job or missing out on job opportunities if (their) political views became known.” And so, as in authoritarian regimes, dissenters keep their views to themselves through preference falsification. This has been precisely my experience.
It's a problem for all of us because these institutions form a large part of our civic society - arbitrating between the citizen and the state - and thus contributes to polarisation within it.
It needs to be addressed.
The website would only let me read the opening few paragraphs of the article, sadly, but the overall tone struck me as dishonest. It started with this dramatic statistic from the dating site, then extrapolated this to discrimination in hiring, despite these being completely different and indeed unrelated things (for instance, I wouldn't date a man but I would hire one). In my own field of economics there is a range of political views. In academia there is a left wing skew, in markets there is a right wing skew. This seems entirely understandable when you think of the likely difference in motivations and values between the two industries. Academia has got more left wing over the years, but then it has also become much worse paid, in relative terms, and those facts are probably related (we might argue over the direction of causation!). As a left wing person working in the markets I don't complain about the dearth of ideological soulmates, I don't know why right wing academics are so snowflakey about it. I have collaborated in academic research with people of various political stripes including Conservative US Republicans. In my experience, research with a clear ideological skew, left or right, is most likely bad research. The goal should be uncovering the truth, not advancing an agenda. Of course, if I were an ideological hack flogging policy-based evidence-making I might feel like I was getting discriminated when my research got rejected by top journals - but the likelihood is that the research was just bad. I do recall attending a very right-leaning conference where there was a lot of moaning about the Liberal bias in US academia, but the conference was lavishly funded by Conservative benefactors and hosted at a top Ivy League school so the whole complaint rang a little hollow to me. It had a strong whiff of privileges being defended.
NY Times outlines what election rules reform is needed to stop the kind of potential coup Trump was pressing for.
"Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it."
He's obviously going to try again and the USA is going to let him.
Democrats in the USA has seem to be remarkably relaxed about Trump stealing the 2024 election. If the 2022 midterms go badly for the Democrats, it's on like Donkey Kong.
To be fair I think Congressional Dems are suitably concerned, the lack of concern by certain Dem Senators about this is absolutely suicidal.
Joe Manchin is an odd one, his voting goes way beyond what his Trumper constituents care about (Guns (In favour of), abortion (Against), climate change (Against)), . I expect the average W Va voter would probably be in favour of big Gov't spending in fact, yet because the GOP opposes it he votes that way. Sinema is even worse - her state is a blue state now, she doesn't need to vote with the GOP on anything in particular.
Manchin and Sinema are right.
Remember Trump actually got a higher voteshare in 2020 than 2016, Biden only won by squeezing the over 3% Libertarian vote in 2016 to 1% in 2020 with almost all those fiscally conservative Libertarian voters voting for him.
If Biden had not won those 2016 Libertarian voters he would have lost Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia and the EC so the Democrats cannot afford to be too tax and spend or they will lose them again
Trumpism is about many things, a small state is not one of them.
No but Biden didn't win by winning Trump voters from 2016, as I said Trump even increased his voteshare on 2016 in 2020.
Biden only won in 2020 by getting small state voters who voted Libertarian Party in 2016 to vote for him in 2020
Is their polling to back that up? Because instinctively it feels more likely that those voters went back to Trump or split fairly evenly (third party voters in the US often being more general protest-y than their votes superficially suggest) and Biden took a few votes from suburban Republicans. So Trump gains vote share, but Biden (who gets some GOP votes and some Green voters coming 'home') gains more.
But there may be polling I've forgotten about which strongly suggests otherwise. Our intuitions about how voters behave are often wrong in my experience.
Even so suburban Republicans are fiscally conservative, socially moderate.
If they voted for Biden they did so to remove Trump not for socialism.
It was Democratic overreach after their wins in 1992 and 2008 which saw the GOP midterm landslides of 1994 and 2010 as fiscally conservative suburbanites revolted
Again, do you have evidence for this? Because in polls the bill does very well. Even pretty well among Trump 2020 voters.
It depends on the question asked, other polls find 75% of Americans are worried about the debt and that too much debt could hurt the economy. We also know most Americans never vote to raise their taxes to fund extra spending even if they may support extra funding on certain projects in theory
Sure, but I think the question 'Do you support this specific bill which does these specific things' is a better judge than 'Do you generally worry about a related issue'.
NY Times outlines what election rules reform is needed to stop the kind of potential coup Trump was pressing for.
"Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it."
He's obviously going to try again and the USA is going to let him.
Democrats in the USA has seem to be remarkably relaxed about Trump stealing the 2024 election. If the 2022 midterms go badly for the Democrats, it's on like Donkey Kong.
To be fair I think Congressional Dems are suitably concerned, the lack of concern by certain Dem Senators about this is absolutely suicidal.
Joe Manchin is an odd one, his voting goes way beyond what his Trumper constituents care about (Guns (In favour of), abortion (Against), climate change (Against)), . I expect the average W Va voter would probably be in favour of big Gov't spending in fact, yet because the GOP opposes it he votes that way. Sinema is even worse - she doesn't need to vote with the GOP on anything in particular; she could vote the same way as Kelly on everything and probably get back in.
Yeah, Manchin seems to be actively voting against things that would be good for West Virginia at this point - but at least they seem to be consistent with a set of principles.
Sinema is just an absolute WTF! She stood on a platform of reducing Medicare prices by allowing medicare to negotiate with drugs companies. She is now saying she will vote against exactly that if it is the Reconciliation package.
It makes absolutely no sense unless she is doing it for pure narcissism to show show she has the power to blow anything up.
Sinema is from small state, libertarian Arizona, a state that even voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964 over LBJ.
Biden only won Arizona in 2020 by 0.3% over Trump by squeezing the 4% Libertarian Party vote from 2016 down to 1.5% in 2020 and Sinema knows that. To be re elected she needs Libertarian Party voters and fiscally conservative Independents to vote for her.
Manchin is from West Virginia, a state that voted for Trump even in 2020.
I'm sorry, but by electing two Dem Senators in Georgia the American People as a whole clearly signalled that they were in favour of big state socialism. That is the agenda they want.
Nope.
In 2016 Georgia voted 50% Trump, 45% Hillary and 3% Libertarian.
In 2020 Georgia voted 49.4% Biden and 49.2% Trump and 1% Libertarian. So without gaining votes from the small state Libertarian Party Biden would have lost Georgia.
The American people did not give the Democrats a landslide in the Senate either for socialism, they only gave the Democrats control via the casting votes of Manchin and Sinema
Weird I remember this brilliant analysis that said Georgia voting for 2 dem senators would implicitly be a endorsement of far left politics having power.
If it was a Democratic landslide then Trump would have lost voteshare not gained it and the Democrats would have won 57 Senators as they did in 2008 not only half the chamber and been reliant on Harris' casting vote.
Note too even in the House the Democrats only have a majority of 9
NY Times outlines what election rules reform is needed to stop the kind of potential coup Trump was pressing for.
"Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it."
He's obviously going to try again and the USA is going to let him.
Democrats in the USA has seem to be remarkably relaxed about Trump stealing the 2024 election. If the 2022 midterms go badly for the Democrats, it's on like Donkey Kong.
To be fair I think Congressional Dems are suitably concerned, the lack of concern by certain Dem Senators about this is absolutely suicidal.
Joe Manchin is an odd one, his voting goes way beyond what his Trumper constituents care about (Guns (In favour of), abortion (Against), climate change (Against)), . I expect the average W Va voter would probably be in favour of big Gov't spending in fact, yet because the GOP opposes it he votes that way. Sinema is even worse - her state is a blue state now, she doesn't need to vote with the GOP on anything in particular.
Manchin and Sinema are right.
Remember Trump actually got a higher voteshare in 2020 than 2016, Biden only won by squeezing the over 3% Libertarian vote in 2016 to 1% in 2020 with almost all those fiscally conservative Libertarian voters voting for him.
If Biden had not won those 2016 Libertarian voters he would have lost Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia and the EC so the Democrats cannot afford to be too tax and spend or they will lose them again
Trumpism is about many things, a small state is not one of them.
No but Biden didn't win by winning Trump voters from 2016, as I said Trump even increased his voteshare on 2016 in 2020.
Biden only won in 2020 by getting small state voters who voted Libertarian Party in 2016 to vote for him in 2020
Is their polling to back that up? Because instinctively it feels more likely that those voters went back to Trump or split fairly evenly (third party voters in the US often being more general protest-y than their votes superficially suggest) and Biden took a few votes from suburban Republicans. So Trump gains vote share, but Biden (who gets some GOP votes and some Green voters coming 'home') gains more.
But there may be polling I've forgotten about which strongly suggests otherwise. Our intuitions about how voters behave are often wrong in my experience.
Even so suburban Republicans are fiscally conservative, socially moderate.
If they voted for Biden they did so to remove Trump not for socialism.
It was Democratic overreach after their wins in 1992 and 2008 which saw the GOP midterm landslides of 1994 and 2010 as fiscally conservative suburbanites revolted
Again, do you have evidence for this? Because in polls the bill does very well. Even pretty well among Trump 2020 voters.
It depends on the question asked, other polls find 75% of Americans are worried about the debt and that too much debt could hurt the economy. We also know most Americans never vote to raise their taxes to fund extra spending even if they may support extra funding on certain projects in theory
Sure, but I think the question 'Do you support this specific bill which does these specific things' is a better judge than 'Do you generally worry about a related issue'.
Yes but if you look at that polling then it shows the bill is popular. And we can't have that.
NY Times outlines what election rules reform is needed to stop the kind of potential coup Trump was pressing for.
"Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it."
He's obviously going to try again and the USA is going to let him.
Democrats in the USA has seem to be remarkably relaxed about Trump stealing the 2024 election. If the 2022 midterms go badly for the Democrats, it's on like Donkey Kong.
To be fair I think Congressional Dems are suitably concerned, the lack of concern by certain Dem Senators about this is absolutely suicidal.
Joe Manchin is an odd one, his voting goes way beyond what his Trumper constituents care about (Guns (In favour of), abortion (Against), climate change (Against)), . I expect the average W Va voter would probably be in favour of big Gov't spending in fact, yet because the GOP opposes it he votes that way. Sinema is even worse - her state is a blue state now, she doesn't need to vote with the GOP on anything in particular.
Manchin and Sinema are right.
Remember Trump actually got a higher voteshare in 2020 than 2016, Biden only won by squeezing the over 3% Libertarian vote in 2016 to 1% in 2020 with almost all those fiscally conservative Libertarian voters voting for him.
If Biden had not won those 2016 Libertarian voters he would have lost Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia and the EC so the Democrats cannot afford to be too tax and spend or they will lose them again
Trumpism is about many things, a small state is not one of them.
No but Biden didn't win by winning Trump voters from 2016, as I said Trump even increased his voteshare on 2016 in 2020.
Biden only won in 2020 by getting small state voters who voted Libertarian Party in 2016 to vote for him in 2020
Is their polling to back that up? Because instinctively it feels more likely that those voters went back to Trump or split fairly evenly (third party voters in the US often being more general protest-y than their votes superficially suggest) and Biden took a few votes from suburban Republicans. So Trump gains vote share, but Biden (who gets some GOP votes and some Green voters coming 'home') gains more.
But there may be polling I've forgotten about which strongly suggests otherwise. Our intuitions about how voters behave are often wrong in my experience.
Even so suburban Republicans are fiscally conservative, socially moderate.
If they voted for Biden they did so to remove Trump not for socialism.
It was Democratic overreach after their wins in 1992 and 2008 which saw the GOP midterm landslides of 1994 and 2010 as fiscally conservative suburbanites revolted
Again, do you have evidence for this? Because in polls the bill does very well. Even pretty well among Trump 2020 voters.
It depends on the question asked, other polls find 75% of Americans are worried about the debt and that too much debt could hurt the economy. We also know most Americans never vote to raise their taxes to fund extra spending even if they may support extra funding on certain projects in theory
Sure, but I think the question 'Do you support this specific bill which does these specific things' is a better judge than 'Do you generally worry about a related issue'.
Well don't come crying to me then when the usual big spending, debt building Democratic Presidency and Congress leads to another GOP landslide in the midterms in 2022, as it did in 2010, as it did in 1994.
Manchin and Sinema however have better political antennae and know the average American does not want socialism and thus will veto any proposals which lead to a big increase in debt and taxes
'In a separate interview, Nick Allen, the chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, told Sky News that while the government criticised producers for paying low wages, it was happy for meat to be imported from countries that paid low wages. He said:
"What’s interesting is [the government is] happy to ban the import of non-UK labour in this country, but they continue to actually aid and abet imported food from countries that have got access to this labour.
At the end of the day someone has to pay for these increased wages and they somewhat get in the way of that by aiding and abetting imported food."'
The revealing bit of that Boris interview was what he said about this being a transition. We are about to destructively test the drive of the last 20 years where consumers actively choose British products. Frankly a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign is the obvious thing missing from the government's strategy - why aren't they doing so?
Instead we are going to see our stuff get a lot more expensive, making imports more appealing than ever. People want to buy local but if they can't because it costs too much then the choice of import vs nothing will push import for many.
Which will literally fuck farming to death. Philip and some free market ideologues may welcome this, most people won't. The government will try and blame farmers until as with all the other "lets blame industry" attempts the actual numbers get published and the minister is shown up to be an absolute spanner. At which point the government caves in.
Exactly, I can't work out if the government are autarkists (like Germany in 1930s) or free range marketeers (like the UK in the C19 and early C20, which wrecked farming also).
Why the heck should the government get involved in a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign? How is that the government's responsibility? Advertising and marketing is not the government's responsibility, that's not what we pay our taxes for.
Buying British when its economically competitive so why not buy British is easy to do. Buying British when it costs a premium ... that's actually then up to the consumers to make their choice.
If British farming gets fucked to death, then quite frankly I don't see why we should care - any more than when British mining got fucked to death. How are farmers any different to miners?
Farming takes up 70% of this countries land, but agriculture represents 0.59% of GDP. I'm not sure if that includes the 0.1% of GDP that the fisheries represent.
If we import more, we import more, but what we should not be importing is slavesserfspeasants minimum wage employees.
That's what the Tories and free market liberals said until the Great War. Which the UK very nearly lost if the Germans hadn't been so pusillanimous with the U-boats.
Amazing the Brexiters love to go on about Spitfires but forget the Battle of the Atlantic.
Yes and the liberals were right then and even more right now.
We didn't lose the war and we're not at any real risk in the 21st century of being blockaded so get real. We are a wealthy nation, especially if we stop deflating our economy by importing from the third world, or dedicating 70% of land to 0.49% of GDP.
We spent decades relying upon imported coal for our electricity and we didn't get impoverished as a nation or blockaded by U-Boats when that happened. Special pleading by vested interests should be treated with the same amount of respect as the NUM got in the 80s.
Plenty of hostages to fortune there.
Why was it OK to import coal for our electricity but not import meat?
In the modern world electricity is just as important as food.
Miners voted Labour.
Farmers vote Conservative. And put bloody big signs in their fields during election campaigns.
I think PT has forgotten the Tory Party was the party who introduced the Corn Laws in 1815.
Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of the Whigs. Most of his party still backed them and so his fellow free trading Peelites who were a minority in the Tory party ended up forming the Liberal party with the Whigs and Radicals in the 1850s
The Tories implemented them, and the Conservatives repealed them. The old Tory party you back is dead, it died in the 19th century.
I would be a Whig if we had Tory v Whig old-school. But the Conservatives absorbed a lot of the old Whig thinking.
No the Conservatives did not repeal them.
Most Tory MPs voted against repealing the Corn Laws, as I said Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of Whig MPs.
Brexit has revived the protectionist Tory party in terms of the party's core vote. Many middle class professional, pro free trade Remainers who voted for Cameron are now voting LD or Starmer Labour. Most protectionist working class UKIP voters from 2015 are now voting Conservative
Some very interesting content in this series of posts, which has got me thinking more about the journey the conservatives have been on.
Yesterday you made some - seemingly tongue in cheek - remarks along the lines of ladies cycling to holy communion, farms shops and so on. There is a rich and long established mercantilist, anti-free trade tradition in the Tory party dating back to the corn laws and beyond. This is the traditional ideology of the landed class on which the party was based. Some of the rhetoric now (possibly accidentally) coming from ministers could arguably look like a return to the old roots. This would make the politics our version of Gaullism - protect the domestic producers, don't be shy of red tape, and encourage a society of artisan production, with state control over heavy industry.
At the same time other forces are at work in the party too. The populism that sees the EU as the enemy (e.g. Truss neglecting even to mention the bloc among the UK's allies), rails against the urban elites and seeks out a bonfire of regulations. That's a different tradition - to keep with the French theme it's what they would call Poujadisme - the politics of Pierre Poujade. Its British archetype is the White Van Man. That + a hint of cronyism and we're also in the world of Berlusconi. This is a very different tradition from the old Tory one above.
Both of these share one thing in common though which is the protection of the small producer - the artisan, the yeoman farmer, the tradesman - and the skilled manual employee. The trouble is, as people have noted, for this to work for the client group it represents you need protection from both imported labour and imported goods, otherwise the latter will undercut domestic production. At the moment we have one and not the other and that feels inherently unstable. Either you go the free trade route and keep labour on tap, or you go properly protectionist.
There is one magic bullet that would resolve the conundrum, which is automation and technological innovation. Then you see wage growth and margin growth while costs remain competitive. I'm just not sure where and how that will come about here, but we do desperately need it and for that we need major catch up capital investment by business.
Personally I consider myself a British Gaullist to some extent. Trump combined some elements of Gaullist economics with Poujadist populism. That is now largely the conservative coalition in much of the western world.
Automation is effective if it keeps down costs without rising unemployment.
Andrew Neil talking about the new Tory coalition on BBC2 now
No true Tory/Brit would ever compare themselves to any French person, least of all De Gaulle.
Some of my ancestors were French Huguenots, I am a little bit French genetically
After 40 generations, statistically any one ancestor represents 1 trillionth of your DNA. Which is to say, nil.
FPT but I have to point out that that is so unfair to HYUFD - we're not talking about the Norman Conquest but French Protestants in the early modern era
1. For him a generation is 50 years 2. Epping, so probably a Spitalfields Huguenot - who came over here in 1570s or 1680s.
So let's say he's 21 and that gives us 6-8 generations = 1/2exp8 = 3.9 x 10exp-3 at worst = 0.4% say
That also assumes no endogamy within the Huguenot community, but there was in fact, so that could easily be doubled or quadrupled.
The maths of genetic inheritance is considerably more complicated than that. You get half of your DNA from each parent, but this doesn't mean that you have a quarter from each grandparent, because the half of reach parents DNA that you inherit is chosen in large chunks, and so you could inherit a lot more from one grandparent than the other, on each side.
This means that, while we might all be able to trace descent from a common ancestor (Charlemagne for Europeans, say) we won't all have DNA passed down from Charlemagne - and those of us that do might have surprisingly large quantities of it.
NY Times outlines what election rules reform is needed to stop the kind of potential coup Trump was pressing for.
"Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it."
He's obviously going to try again and the USA is going to let him.
Democrats in the USA has seem to be remarkably relaxed about Trump stealing the 2024 election. If the 2022 midterms go badly for the Democrats, it's on like Donkey Kong.
To be fair I think Congressional Dems are suitably concerned, the lack of concern by certain Dem Senators about this is absolutely suicidal.
Joe Manchin is an odd one, his voting goes way beyond what his Trumper constituents care about (Guns (In favour of), abortion (Against), climate change (Against)), . I expect the average W Va voter would probably be in favour of big Gov't spending in fact, yet because the GOP opposes it he votes that way. Sinema is even worse - her state is a blue state now, she doesn't need to vote with the GOP on anything in particular.
Manchin and Sinema are right.
Remember Trump actually got a higher voteshare in 2020 than 2016, Biden only won by squeezing the over 3% Libertarian vote in 2016 to 1% in 2020 with almost all those fiscally conservative Libertarian voters voting for him.
If Biden had not won those 2016 Libertarian voters he would have lost Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia and the EC so the Democrats cannot afford to be too tax and spend or they will lose them again
Trumpism is about many things, a small state is not one of them.
No but Biden didn't win by winning Trump voters from 2016, as I said Trump even increased his voteshare on 2016 in 2020.
Biden only won in 2020 by getting small state voters who voted Libertarian Party in 2016 to vote for him in 2020
Is their polling to back that up? Because instinctively it feels more likely that those voters went back to Trump or split fairly evenly (third party voters in the US often being more general protest-y than their votes superficially suggest) and Biden took a few votes from suburban Republicans. So Trump gains vote share, but Biden (who gets some GOP votes and some Green voters coming 'home') gains more.
But there may be polling I've forgotten about which strongly suggests otherwise. Our intuitions about how voters behave are often wrong in my experience.
Even so suburban Republicans are fiscally conservative, socially moderate.
If they voted for Biden they did so to remove Trump not for socialism.
It was Democratic overreach after their wins in 1992 and 2008 which saw the GOP midterm landslides of 1994 and 2010 as fiscally conservative suburbanites revolted
Again, do you have evidence for this? Because in polls the bill does very well. Even pretty well among Trump 2020 voters.
It depends on the question asked, other polls find 75% of Americans are worried about the debt and that too much debt could hurt the economy. We also know most Americans never vote to raise their taxes to fund extra spending even if they may support extra funding on certain projects in theory
Sure, but I think the question 'Do you support this specific bill which does these specific things' is a better judge than 'Do you generally worry about a related issue'.
Well don't come crying to me then when the usual big spending, debt building Democratic Presidency and Congress leads to another GOP landslide in the midterms in 2022, as it did in 2010, as it did in 1994.
Manchin and Sinema however have better political antennae and know the average American does not want socialism and thus will veto any proposals which lead to a big increase in debt and taxes
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. And also on the definition of 'socialism'. And, for that matter, on the extent to which American voters care about the national debt (Exhibit A: the national debt under both parties for the past 20 years).
I guess my issue is: If the American voters deplore parties acting boldly and raising the national debt then why have the Republicans gotten away with it for so long? And if the answer is 'The swinging of the pendulum has been purely about the national debt for decades' then I just find that a tad implausible.
But isn't calling someone a scumbag different from calling them scum? I mean, a handbag isn't the same thing as a hand. Since scum rises to the top I always assumed it was a compliment, anyway.
Duncan Weldon @DuncanWeldon · 5h Feels like an, erm, “brave” call for the government to go so big on wages as a political dividing line given the short term inflation outlook. Hard not to see real wages falling in the months ahead.
I can definitely see inflation being a thing again in the near future. Boris has essentially given firms cover for passing all manner of price increases onto the consumer, whether they actually need to or not - their excuse now is that they're just doing their bit for the new reality of having a high-wage economy. But the spurious price rises will vastly outweigh those required to fund non-immigrant workers. This could get messy.
It could, but Johnson is already positioning. His latest wheeze is to focus on wages in sectors hit by emergency scale labour shortages and make the claim that Brexit, a project of the reactionary right in politics, is all about raising the living standards of the working class.
"Workers of England unite! You have nothing to lose but your prospects being blighted by cheapo immigrants coming over here and depressing your pay and clogging up housing lists and GP surgeries!"
It's quite the play. Will the base swallow it? What about floaters? We will see.
It may have been a *project* of Dominic Cummings but it was, asyermayrecall, voted on by everyone who could be arsed, and that's what a lot of them voted for. That woman Gordon called a bigot, and so on. Which gives Johnson a chance to frame recent history as: 2016-21 Kampf; 2021-end of time Rückzahlung.
Cummings was key, for sure, but there were also plenty from the ye olde Tory right over the years. The Cashs, the Moggs, the Redwoods, these type of guys. And Nigel Farage, of course, the Big Daddy of Brexit. But, yep, "less immigration = higher wages for the low paid" was a factor in the Leave win. So if we now get less immigration, and it does lead to a rise in the living standards of the low paid, they'll have called this aspect right. Only fair to grant that.
I have to say the dialogue I thought was absolutely horrendous, the worst of the Craig era for that. So clunky and just didn't flow at all. Flat delivery of the lines also did not help.
Still not the worst Craig film, that still goes to QoS for me.
I watched Casino Royale last night, that film is a 10/10 to this day, it's so much better than anything that came after it. I feel like it promised something that the films after never were quite able to match.
I hope they reboot it and bring it back to Casino Royale's gritty realism.
That was a result of Sony pushing for it and bringing back Martin Campbell. Now we've got Amazon in charge so I expect it will be sexed up unnecessarily, the opposite of how you'd want it to be.
Martin Campbell saved Bond twice, GoldenEye and Casino Royale.
I have to say the dialogue I thought was absolutely horrendous, the worst of the Craig era for that. So clunky and just didn't flow at all. Flat delivery of the lines also did not help.
Still not the worst Craig film, that still goes to QoS for me.
I watched Casino Royale last night, that film is a 10/10 to this day, it's so much better than anything that came after it. I feel like it promised something that the films after never were quite able to match.
I hope they reboot it and bring it back to Casino Royale's gritty realism.
That was a result of Sony pushing for it and bringing back Martin Campbell. Now we've got Amazon in charge so I expect it will be sexed up unnecessarily, the opposite of how you'd want it to be.
Martin Campbell saved Bond twice, GoldenEye and Casino Royale.
My estimate for GE2024 as of right now is between Hung Parliament and Tory majority, Labour majority is absolutely out of the question and anyone predicting that is kidding themselves.
FPT @Selebian. I think you're blind to the issue here - I'll highlight two main points the article makes:
(1) "In a recent report on academic freedom in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, I found that 40 percent of American academics would not hire a known Trump supporter, and 33 percent of British academics would avoid hiring a known Brexit supporter. When it comes to refereeing papers, grant bids, and promotion applications, my own work and that of others indicates that the likelihood of an academic’s discriminating against an openly conservative submission is as high as 45 percent. On a four-person panel, that makes discrimination a near certainty."
(2) "In the 1960s there were only one and a half journalists and academics on the left for every one on the right. Today that ratio is between four to one and six to one, and considerably higher among political journalists and social-science and humanities academics. In a report on academia for the Manhattan Institute, I noted that left-leaning social-science and humanities academics now outnumber those on the right in Britain by nine to one, and in the U.S. by 14 to one. Work by Mitchell Langbert using voter-registration data for the top liberal-arts colleges and universities (for five disciplines) also shows lopsided ratios. At Harvard, for instance, a recent inquiry reported a $250-to-$1 Democrat-to-Republican donation ratio among the staff."
It's not enough for there to be "legal" protections - hard to access, prove and leverage - because an institutional culture of intolerance creates an environment that is suffocating to those already employed and inhibits any future recruitment to correct it. This means even fewer conservatives apply in the first place and thus reinforces a monoculture.
Those that are employed (like my friend at the University of Bath, for example, or me at the Woke firm I've just left) "fear losing (their) job or missing out on job opportunities if (their) political views became known.” And so, as in authoritarian regimes, dissenters keep their views to themselves through preference falsification. This has been precisely my experience.
It's a problem for all of us because these institutions form a large part of our civic society - arbitrating between the citizen and the state - and thus contributes to polarisation within it.
It needs to be addressed.
The website would only let me read the opening few paragraphs of the article, sadly, but the overall tone struck me as dishonest. It started with this dramatic statistic from the dating site, then extrapolated this to discrimination in hiring, despite these being completely different and indeed unrelated things (for instance, I wouldn't date a man but I would hire one). In my own field of economics there is a range of political views. In academia there is a left wing skew, in markets there is a right wing skew. This seems entirely understandable when you think of the likely difference in motivations and values between the two industries. Academia has got more left wing over the years, but then it has also become much worse paid, in relative terms, and those facts are probably related (we might argue over the direction of causation!). As a left wing person working in the markets I don't complain about the dearth of ideological soulmates, I don't know why right wing academics are so snowflakey about it. I have collaborated in academic research with people of various political stripes including Conservative US Republicans. In my experience, research with a clear ideological skew, left or right, is most likely bad research. The goal should be uncovering the truth, not advancing an agenda. Of course, if I were an ideological hack flogging policy-based evidence-making I might feel like I was getting discriminated when my research got rejected by top journals - but the likelihood is that the research was just bad. I do recall attending a very right-leaning conference where there was a lot of moaning about the Liberal bias in US academia, but the conference was lavishly funded by Conservative benefactors and hosted at a top Ivy League school so the whole complaint rang a little hollow to me. It had a strong whiff of privileges being defended.
There's some good points in here - including your admirable acknowledgement that research with a clear ideological skew is poor research - but why is your first instinct to attack Eric Kauffman's honesty?
He's a respected Canadian Academic (of mixed Chinese, Hispanic and European ancestry) working in a British university. He cited a variety of studies in making his points, and they're all respectable ones.
We need to get past the ad hominum into the specifics. Far too many of the responses to articles like this run along the lines of "he's making it up" and "I don't see any of this, so it can't be true".
What I'm interested in is everyone feeling able and willing to discuss their views and differences openly. That has to start with less prejudgement, more listening, and more forgiveness, and it's that I'm interested in.
It's the only way to confine polarisation to the fringes where it belongs, rather than it being part of the mainstream, and we have to work harder and harder at it in the social media age, not less.
But isn't calling someone a scumbag different from calling them scum? I mean, a handbag isn't the same thing as a hand. Since scum rises to the top I always assumed it was a compliment, anyway.
Cream, is the compliment (unless you add 'rich, thick and clotted' - Oscar Wilde was it not?).
I have to say the dialogue I thought was absolutely horrendous, the worst of the Craig era for that. So clunky and just didn't flow at all. Flat delivery of the lines also did not help.
Still not the worst Craig film, that still goes to QoS for me.
I watched Casino Royale last night, that film is a 10/10 to this day, it's so much better than anything that came after it. I feel like it promised something that the films after never were quite able to match.
I hope they reboot it and bring it back to Casino Royale's gritty realism.
That was a result of Sony pushing for it and bringing back Martin Campbell. Now we've got Amazon in charge so I expect it will be sexed up unnecessarily, the opposite of how you'd want it to be.
Martin Campbell saved Bond twice, GoldenEye and Casino Royale.
'In a separate interview, Nick Allen, the chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, told Sky News that while the government criticised producers for paying low wages, it was happy for meat to be imported from countries that paid low wages. He said:
"What’s interesting is [the government is] happy to ban the import of non-UK labour in this country, but they continue to actually aid and abet imported food from countries that have got access to this labour.
At the end of the day someone has to pay for these increased wages and they somewhat get in the way of that by aiding and abetting imported food."'
The revealing bit of that Boris interview was what he said about this being a transition. We are about to destructively test the drive of the last 20 years where consumers actively choose British products. Frankly a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign is the obvious thing missing from the government's strategy - why aren't they doing so?
Instead we are going to see our stuff get a lot more expensive, making imports more appealing than ever. People want to buy local but if they can't because it costs too much then the choice of import vs nothing will push import for many.
Which will literally fuck farming to death. Philip and some free market ideologues may welcome this, most people won't. The government will try and blame farmers until as with all the other "lets blame industry" attempts the actual numbers get published and the minister is shown up to be an absolute spanner. At which point the government caves in.
Exactly, I can't work out if the government are autarkists (like Germany in 1930s) or free range marketeers (like the UK in the C19 and early C20, which wrecked farming also).
Why the heck should the government get involved in a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign? How is that the government's responsibility? Advertising and marketing is not the government's responsibility, that's not what we pay our taxes for.
Buying British when its economically competitive so why not buy British is easy to do. Buying British when it costs a premium ... that's actually then up to the consumers to make their choice.
If British farming gets fucked to death, then quite frankly I don't see why we should care - any more than when British mining got fucked to death. How are farmers any different to miners?
Farming takes up 70% of this countries land, but agriculture represents 0.59% of GDP. I'm not sure if that includes the 0.1% of GDP that the fisheries represent.
If we import more, we import more, but what we should not be importing is slavesserfspeasants minimum wage employees.
That's what the Tories and free market liberals said until the Great War. Which the UK very nearly lost if the Germans hadn't been so pusillanimous with the U-boats.
Amazing the Brexiters love to go on about Spitfires but forget the Battle of the Atlantic.
Yes and the liberals were right then and even more right now.
We didn't lose the war and we're not at any real risk in the 21st century of being blockaded so get real. We are a wealthy nation, especially if we stop deflating our economy by importing from the third world, or dedicating 70% of land to 0.49% of GDP.
We spent decades relying upon imported coal for our electricity and we didn't get impoverished as a nation or blockaded by U-Boats when that happened. Special pleading by vested interests should be treated with the same amount of respect as the NUM got in the 80s.
Plenty of hostages to fortune there.
Why was it OK to import coal for our electricity but not import meat?
In the modern world electricity is just as important as food.
Miners voted Labour.
Farmers vote Conservative. And put bloody big signs in their fields during election campaigns.
I think PT has forgotten the Tory Party was the party who introduced the Corn Laws in 1815.
Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of the Whigs. Most of his party still backed them and so his fellow free trading Peelites who were a minority in the Tory party ended up forming the Liberal party with the Whigs and Radicals in the 1850s
The Tories implemented them, and the Conservatives repealed them. The old Tory party you back is dead, it died in the 19th century.
I would be a Whig if we had Tory v Whig old-school. But the Conservatives absorbed a lot of the old Whig thinking.
No the Conservatives did not repeal them.
Most Tory MPs voted against repealing the Corn Laws, as I said Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of Whig MPs.
Brexit has revived the protectionist Tory party in terms of the party's core vote. Many middle class professional, pro free trade Remainers who voted for Cameron are now voting LD or Starmer Labour. Most protectionist working class UKIP voters from 2015 are now voting Conservative
Some very interesting content in this series of posts, which has got me thinking more about the journey the conservatives have been on.
Yesterday you made some - seemingly tongue in cheek - remarks along the lines of ladies cycling to holy communion, farms shops and so on. There is a rich and long established mercantilist, anti-free trade tradition in the Tory party dating back to the corn laws and beyond. This is the traditional ideology of the landed class on which the party was based. Some of the rhetoric now (possibly accidentally) coming from ministers could arguably look like a return to the old roots. This would make the politics our version of Gaullism - protect the domestic producers, don't be shy of red tape, and encourage a society of artisan production, with state control over heavy industry.
At the same time other forces are at work in the party too. The populism that sees the EU as the enemy (e.g. Truss neglecting even to mention the bloc among the UK's allies), rails against the urban elites and seeks out a bonfire of regulations. That's a different tradition - to keep with the French theme it's what they would call Poujadisme - the politics of Pierre Poujade. Its British archetype is the White Van Man. That + a hint of cronyism and we're also in the world of Berlusconi. This is a very different tradition from the old Tory one above.
Both of these share one thing in common though which is the protection of the small producer - the artisan, the yeoman farmer, the tradesman - and the skilled manual employee. The trouble is, as people have noted, for this to work for the client group it represents you need protection from both imported labour and imported goods, otherwise the latter will undercut domestic production. At the moment we have one and not the other and that feels inherently unstable. Either you go the free trade route and keep labour on tap, or you go properly protectionist.
There is one magic bullet that would resolve the conundrum, which is automation and technological innovation. Then you see wage growth and margin growth while costs remain competitive. I'm just not sure where and how that will come about here, but we do desperately need it and for that we need major catch up capital investment by business.
Personally I consider myself a British Gaullist to some extent. Trump combined some elements of Gaullist economics with Poujadist populism. That is now largely the conservative coalition in much of the western world.
Automation is effective if it keeps down costs without rising unemployment.
Andrew Neil talking about the new Tory coalition on BBC2 now
No true Tory/Brit would ever compare themselves to any French person, least of all De Gaulle.
Some of my ancestors were French Huguenots, I am a little bit French genetically
After 40 generations, statistically any one ancestor represents 1 trillionth of your DNA. Which is to say, nil.
FPT but I have to point out that that is so unfair to HYUFD - we're not talking about the Norman Conquest but French Protestants in the early modern era
1. For him a generation is 50 years 2. Epping, so probably a Spitalfields Huguenot - who came over here in 1570s or 1680s.
So let's say he's 21 and that gives us 6-8 generations = 1/2exp8 = 3.9 x 10exp-3 at worst = 0.4% say
That also assumes no endogamy within the Huguenot community, but there was in fact, so that could easily be doubled or quadrupled.
The maths of genetic inheritance is considerably more complicated than that. You get half of your DNA from each parent, but this doesn't mean that you have a quarter from each grandparent, because the half of reach parents DNA that you inherit is chosen in large chunks, and so you could inherit a lot more from one grandparent than the other, on each side.
This means that, while we might all be able to trace descent from a common ancestor (Charlemagne for Europeans, say) we won't all have DNA passed down from Charlemagne - and those of us that do might have surprisingly large quantities of it.
But doesn't that even out? Regression to the mean and all that.
@MehreenKhn France's finance minister has arrived at the #Eurogroup fuming at the state of EU energy market rules calling them "unfit for purpose" after energy price rises have "become unbearable for our citizens and businesses"
NY Times outlines what election rules reform is needed to stop the kind of potential coup Trump was pressing for.
"Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it."
He's obviously going to try again and the USA is going to let him.
Democrats in the USA has seem to be remarkably relaxed about Trump stealing the 2024 election. If the 2022 midterms go badly for the Democrats, it's on like Donkey Kong.
To be fair I think Congressional Dems are suitably concerned, the lack of concern by certain Dem Senators about this is absolutely suicidal.
Joe Manchin is an odd one, his voting goes way beyond what his Trumper constituents care about (Guns (In favour of), abortion (Against), climate change (Against)), . I expect the average W Va voter would probably be in favour of big Gov't spending in fact, yet because the GOP opposes it he votes that way. Sinema is even worse - her state is a blue state now, she doesn't need to vote with the GOP on anything in particular.
Manchin and Sinema are right.
Remember Trump actually got a higher voteshare in 2020 than 2016, Biden only won by squeezing the over 3% Libertarian vote in 2016 to 1% in 2020 with almost all those fiscally conservative Libertarian voters voting for him.
If Biden had not won those 2016 Libertarian voters he would have lost Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia and the EC so the Democrats cannot afford to be too tax and spend or they will lose them again
Trumpism is about many things, a small state is not one of them.
No but Biden didn't win by winning Trump voters from 2016, as I said Trump even increased his voteshare on 2016 in 2020.
Biden only won in 2020 by getting small state voters who voted Libertarian Party in 2016 to vote for him in 2020
Is their polling to back that up? Because instinctively it feels more likely that those voters went back to Trump or split fairly evenly (third party voters in the US often being more general protest-y than their votes superficially suggest) and Biden took a few votes from suburban Republicans. So Trump gains vote share, but Biden (who gets some GOP votes and some Green voters coming 'home') gains more.
But there may be polling I've forgotten about which strongly suggests otherwise. Our intuitions about how voters behave are often wrong in my experience.
Even so suburban Republicans are fiscally conservative, socially moderate.
If they voted for Biden they did so to remove Trump not for socialism.
It was Democratic overreach after their wins in 1992 and 2008 which saw the GOP midterm landslides of 1994 and 2010 as fiscally conservative suburbanites revolted
Again, do you have evidence for this? Because in polls the bill does very well. Even pretty well among Trump 2020 voters.
It depends on the question asked, other polls find 75% of Americans are worried about the debt and that too much debt could hurt the economy. We also know most Americans never vote to raise their taxes to fund extra spending even if they may support extra funding on certain projects in theory
Sure, but I think the question 'Do you support this specific bill which does these specific things' is a better judge than 'Do you generally worry about a related issue'.
Well don't come crying to me then when the usual big spending, debt building Democratic Presidency and Congress leads to another GOP landslide in the midterms in 2022, as it did in 2010, as it did in 1994.
Manchin and Sinema however have better political antennae and know the average American does not want socialism and thus will veto any proposals which lead to a big increase in debt and taxes
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. And also on the definition of 'socialism'. And, for that matter, on the extent to which American voters care about the national debt (Exhibit A: the national debt under both parties for the past 20 years).
I guess my issue is: If the American voters deplore parties acting boldly and raising the national debt then why have the Republicans gotten away with it for so long? And if the answer is 'The swinging of the pendulum has been purely about the national debt for decades' then I just find that a tad implausible.
17 of the last 30 years in the US have seen divided government ie a Democratic President and GOP control of at least part of Congress or the reverse and a Republican President and Democratic control of at least part of Congress.
That is precisely because the average American does not trust one party to do the right thing if they have all the power
Tom Tugendhat speaking to the TRG described looking at Labour’s public programme…
“I looked at some of the policies: nationalising the railways – sorry we’ve already done that. Raising taxes – err we’ve already done that one too. Well I’m sure we’ll come to some Conservative policies in a minute…”
FPT @Selebian. I think you're blind to the issue here - I'll highlight two main points the article makes:
(1) "In a recent report on academic freedom in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, I found that 40 percent of American academics would not hire a known Trump supporter, and 33 percent of British academics would avoid hiring a known Brexit supporter. When it comes to refereeing papers, grant bids, and promotion applications, my own work and that of others indicates that the likelihood of an academic’s discriminating against an openly conservative submission is as high as 45 percent. On a four-person panel, that makes discrimination a near certainty."
(2) "In the 1960s there were only one and a half journalists and academics on the left for every one on the right. Today that ratio is between four to one and six to one, and considerably higher among political journalists and social-science and humanities academics. In a report on academia for the Manhattan Institute, I noted that left-leaning social-science and humanities academics now outnumber those on the right in Britain by nine to one, and in the U.S. by 14 to one. Work by Mitchell Langbert using voter-registration data for the top liberal-arts colleges and universities (for five disciplines) also shows lopsided ratios. At Harvard, for instance, a recent inquiry reported a $250-to-$1 Democrat-to-Republican donation ratio among the staff."
It's not enough for there to be "legal" protections - hard to access, prove and leverage - because an institutional culture of intolerance creates an environment that is suffocating to those already employed and inhibits any future recruitment to correct it. This means even fewer conservatives apply in the first place and thus reinforces a monoculture.
Those that are employed (like my friend at the University of Bath, for example, or me at the Woke firm I've just left) "fear losing (their) job or missing out on job opportunities if (their) political views became known.” And so, as in authoritarian regimes, dissenters keep their views to themselves through preference falsification. This has been precisely my experience.
It's a problem for all of us because these institutions form a large part of our civic society - arbitrating between the citizen and the state - and thus contributes to polarisation within it.
It needs to be addressed.
The website would only let me read the opening few paragraphs of the article, sadly, but the overall tone struck me as dishonest. It started with this dramatic statistic from the dating site, then extrapolated this to discrimination in hiring, despite these being completely different and indeed unrelated things (for instance, I wouldn't date a man but I would hire one). In my own field of economics there is a range of political views. In academia there is a left wing skew, in markets there is a right wing skew. This seems entirely understandable when you think of the likely difference in motivations and values between the two industries. Academia has got more left wing over the years, but then it has also become much worse paid, in relative terms, and those facts are probably related (we might argue over the direction of causation!). As a left wing person working in the markets I don't complain about the dearth of ideological soulmates, I don't know why right wing academics are so snowflakey about it. I have collaborated in academic research with people of various political stripes including Conservative US Republicans. In my experience, research with a clear ideological skew, left or right, is most likely bad research. The goal should be uncovering the truth, not advancing an agenda. Of course, if I were an ideological hack flogging policy-based evidence-making I might feel like I was getting discriminated when my research got rejected by top journals - but the likelihood is that the research was just bad. I do recall attending a very right-leaning conference where there was a lot of moaning about the Liberal bias in US academia, but the conference was lavishly funded by Conservative benefactors and hosted at a top Ivy League school so the whole complaint rang a little hollow to me. It had a strong whiff of privileges being defended.
There's some good points in here - including your admirable acknowledgement that research with a clear ideological skew is poor research - but why is your first instinct to attack Eric Kauffman's honesty?
He's a respected Canadian Academic (of mixed Chinese, Hispanic and European ancestry) working in a British university. He cited a variety of studies in making his points, and they're all respectable ones.
We need to get past the ad hominum into the specifics. Far too many of the responses to articles like this run along the lines of "he's making it up" and "I don't see any of this, so it can't be true".
What I'm interested in is everyone feeling able and willing to discuss their views and differences openly. That has to start with less prejudgement, more listening, and more forgiveness, and it's that I'm interested in.
It's the only way to confine polarisation to the fringes where it belongs, rather than it being part of the mainstream, and we have to work harder and harder at it in the social media age, not less.
Like I said, I can judge the whole article because I couldn't read it. But it felt like he was using people's dating preferences as evidence for a bias in hiring decisions and the like without showing any correlation between the two, which just felt dishonest to me. It also felt a bit too close to gaslighting educated women, whose rationale for not dating a Trump supporter would I think be pretty obvious if you look at Trump's attitudes towards women. I should put it on the record that I have never been on a 'date' so cannot report on any ideological screening I would do beforehand. I did however attend my first ever dinner party on Saturday night so I feel like I have finally achieved metropolitan Liberal elite Nirvana.
I have to say the dialogue I thought was absolutely horrendous, the worst of the Craig era for that. So clunky and just didn't flow at all. Flat delivery of the lines also did not help.
Still not the worst Craig film, that still goes to QoS for me.
I watched Casino Royale last night, that film is a 10/10 to this day, it's so much better than anything that came after it. I feel like it promised something that the films after never were quite able to match.
I hope they reboot it and bring it back to Casino Royale's gritty realism.
That was a result of Sony pushing for it and bringing back Martin Campbell. Now we've got Amazon in charge so I expect it will be sexed up unnecessarily, the opposite of how you'd want it to be.
Martin Campbell saved Bond twice, GoldenEye and Casino Royale.
Bring him back please.
Couldn't agree more.
What's your favourite Bond film?
The Living Daylights
Good choice. The green DBV8 that Dalton drives was on display in the foyer of the Odeon Cardiff on Saturday. The second Dalton film was pants though.
@MehreenKhn France's finance minister has arrived at the #Eurogroup fuming at the state of EU energy market rules calling them "unfit for purpose" after energy price rises have "become unbearable for our citizens and businesses"
What did our country ever do to deserve such a totally sh*t government, at the same time as a sh*t opposition and a sh*t third party too?
Apart from voting for Brexit, obvs.
My response to this reaction is that you and HMG opponents have failed to make your case to the voting public and it is no good shouting from the sidelines, you need to look at why you failed and what you are going to do about it
Just listened to Ed Davey saying he would increase taxes as part of their manifesto commitment and expand visas, ie go back to bringing in cheap labour
I despair at the lib dems, who cannot even be honest enough and openly say that they will rejoin the EU no ifs no buts
If you cannot be honest yourself then maybe people in glass houses should not throw stones
My estimate for GE2024 as of right now is between Hung Parliament and Tory majority, Labour majority is absolutely out of the question and anyone predicting that is kidding themselves.
I'm pretty much here too, but with more of a lean to Tory majority. I don't think it's massively above 50% likelihood though.
I have to say the dialogue I thought was absolutely horrendous, the worst of the Craig era for that. So clunky and just didn't flow at all. Flat delivery of the lines also did not help.
Still not the worst Craig film, that still goes to QoS for me.
I watched Casino Royale last night, that film is a 10/10 to this day, it's so much better than anything that came after it. I feel like it promised something that the films after never were quite able to match.
I hope they reboot it and bring it back to Casino Royale's gritty realism.
That was a result of Sony pushing for it and bringing back Martin Campbell. Now we've got Amazon in charge so I expect it will be sexed up unnecessarily, the opposite of how you'd want it to be.
Martin Campbell saved Bond twice, GoldenEye and Casino Royale.
Bring him back please.
Couldn't agree more.
What's your favourite Bond film?
The Living Daylights
Good choice. The green DBV8 that Dalton drives was on display in the foyer of the Odeon Cardiff on Saturday. The second Dalton film was pants though.
I think they took it too far with Licence to Kill. It was just a good thriller and, with a British agent but mainly set in the Americas, didn't really sit well.
I liked the chemistry between Timothy Dalton and Robert Davi though; great face-off.
FPT @Selebian. I think you're blind to the issue here - I'll highlight two main points the article makes:
(1) "In a recent report on academic freedom in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, I found that 40 percent of American academics would not hire a known Trump supporter, and 33 percent of British academics would avoid hiring a known Brexit supporter. When it comes to refereeing papers, grant bids, and promotion applications, my own work and that of others indicates that the likelihood of an academic’s discriminating against an openly conservative submission is as high as 45 percent. On a four-person panel, that makes discrimination a near certainty."
(2) "In the 1960s there were only one and a half journalists and academics on the left for every one on the right. Today that ratio is between four to one and six to one, and considerably higher among political journalists and social-science and humanities academics. In a report on academia for the Manhattan Institute, I noted that left-leaning social-science and humanities academics now outnumber those on the right in Britain by nine to one, and in the U.S. by 14 to one. Work by Mitchell Langbert using voter-registration data for the top liberal-arts colleges and universities (for five disciplines) also shows lopsided ratios. At Harvard, for instance, a recent inquiry reported a $250-to-$1 Democrat-to-Republican donation ratio among the staff."
It's not enough for there to be "legal" protections - hard to access, prove and leverage - because an institutional culture of intolerance creates an environment that is suffocating to those already employed and inhibits any future recruitment to correct it. This means even fewer conservatives apply in the first place and thus reinforces a monoculture.
Those that are employed (like my friend at the University of Bath, for example, or me at the Woke firm I've just left) "fear losing (their) job or missing out on job opportunities if (their) political views became known.” And so, as in authoritarian regimes, dissenters keep their views to themselves through preference falsification. This has been precisely my experience.
It's a problem for all of us because these institutions form a large part of our civic society - arbitrating between the citizen and the state - and thus contributes to polarisation within it.
It needs to be addressed.
The website would only let me read the opening few paragraphs of the article, sadly, but the overall tone struck me as dishonest. It started with this dramatic statistic from the dating site, then extrapolated this to discrimination in hiring, despite these being completely different and indeed unrelated things (for instance, I wouldn't date a man but I would hire one). In my own field of economics there is a range of political views. In academia there is a left wing skew, in markets there is a right wing skew. This seems entirely understandable when you think of the likely difference in motivations and values between the two industries. Academia has got more left wing over the years, but then it has also become much worse paid, in relative terms, and those facts are probably related (we might argue over the direction of causation!). As a left wing person working in the markets I don't complain about the dearth of ideological soulmates, I don't know why right wing academics are so snowflakey about it. I have collaborated in academic research with people of various political stripes including Conservative US Republicans. In my experience, research with a clear ideological skew, left or right, is most likely bad research. The goal should be uncovering the truth, not advancing an agenda. Of course, if I were an ideological hack flogging policy-based evidence-making I might feel like I was getting discriminated when my research got rejected by top journals - but the likelihood is that the research was just bad. I do recall attending a very right-leaning conference where there was a lot of moaning about the Liberal bias in US academia, but the conference was lavishly funded by Conservative benefactors and hosted at a top Ivy League school so the whole complaint rang a little hollow to me. It had a strong whiff of privileges being defended.
There's some good points in here - including your admirable acknowledgement that research with a clear ideological skew is poor research - but why is your first instinct to attack Eric Kauffman's honesty?
He's a respected Canadian Academic (of mixed Chinese, Hispanic and European ancestry) working in a British university. He cited a variety of studies in making his points, and they're all respectable ones.
We need to get past the ad hominum into the specifics. Far too many of the responses to articles like this run along the lines of "he's making it up" and "I don't see any of this, so it can't be true".
What I'm interested in is everyone feeling able and willing to discuss their views and differences openly. That has to start with less prejudgement, more listening, and more forgiveness, and it's that I'm interested in.
It's the only way to confine polarisation to the fringes where it belongs, rather than it being part of the mainstream, and we have to work harder and harder at it in the social media age, not less.
All great points but I think you cut too much slack to Trumpery. It shouldn't be viewed like, say, being a Tory, a Brexiter, a social democrat, a "classic liberal", a small state libertarian, or whatever. He's a hate monger and those who lap that up can't expect it not to be held against them by those who don't.
But isn't calling someone a scumbag different from calling them scum? I mean, a handbag isn't the same thing as a hand. Since scum rises to the top I always assumed it was a compliment, anyway.
@MehreenKhn France's finance minister has arrived at the #Eurogroup fuming at the state of EU energy market rules calling them "unfit for purpose" after energy price rises have "become unbearable for our citizens and businesses"
Re the article, in almost all the midlands and north of England there are exactly two relevant parties, except lots of them where there is only one. Leaving aside safe seats those two parties are Labour and Tory. When the government is having a hard time Labour is where you go. There is nowhere else.
Which is why while SKS has no chance of a Labour government in 2023/4, he has as good a chance as the Tories of forming an (alliance) government. As these polls show. I still put it at 40%, but current trends suggest it maybe should be higher.
Unlikely I will actually read it though, I haven't finished a book in a long while. Not even "The Old Man & The Sea" which is less than 100 pages long and I started 3 months ago
FPT @Selebian. I think you're blind to the issue here - I'll highlight two main points the article makes:
(1) "In a recent report on academic freedom in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, I found that 40 percent of American academics would not hire a known Trump supporter, and 33 percent of British academics would avoid hiring a known Brexit supporter. When it comes to refereeing papers, grant bids, and promotion applications, my own work and that of others indicates that the likelihood of an academic’s discriminating against an openly conservative submission is as high as 45 percent. On a four-person panel, that makes discrimination a near certainty."
(2) "In the 1960s there were only one and a half journalists and academics on the left for every one on the right. Today that ratio is between four to one and six to one, and considerably higher among political journalists and social-science and humanities academics. In a report on academia for the Manhattan Institute, I noted that left-leaning social-science and humanities academics now outnumber those on the right in Britain by nine to one, and in the U.S. by 14 to one. Work by Mitchell Langbert using voter-registration data for the top liberal-arts colleges and universities (for five disciplines) also shows lopsided ratios. At Harvard, for instance, a recent inquiry reported a $250-to-$1 Democrat-to-Republican donation ratio among the staff."
It's not enough for there to be "legal" protections - hard to access, prove and leverage - because an institutional culture of intolerance creates an environment that is suffocating to those already employed and inhibits any future recruitment to correct it. This means even fewer conservatives apply in the first place and thus reinforces a monoculture.
Those that are employed (like my friend at the University of Bath, for example, or me at the Woke firm I've just left) "fear losing (their) job or missing out on job opportunities if (their) political views became known.” And so, as in authoritarian regimes, dissenters keep their views to themselves through preference falsification. This has been precisely my experience.
It's a problem for all of us because these institutions form a large part of our civic society - arbitrating between the citizen and the state - and thus contributes to polarisation within it.
It needs to be addressed.
The website would only let me read the opening few paragraphs of the article, sadly, but the overall tone struck me as dishonest. It started with this dramatic statistic from the dating site, then extrapolated this to discrimination in hiring, despite these being completely different and indeed unrelated things (for instance, I wouldn't date a man but I would hire one). In my own field of economics there is a range of political views. In academia there is a left wing skew, in markets there is a right wing skew. This seems entirely understandable when you think of the likely difference in motivations and values between the two industries. Academia has got more left wing over the years, but then it has also become much worse paid, in relative terms, and those facts are probably related (we might argue over the direction of causation!). As a left wing person working in the markets I don't complain about the dearth of ideological soulmates, I don't know why right wing academics are so snowflakey about it. I have collaborated in academic research with people of various political stripes including Conservative US Republicans. In my experience, research with a clear ideological skew, left or right, is most likely bad research. The goal should be uncovering the truth, not advancing an agenda. Of course, if I were an ideological hack flogging policy-based evidence-making I might feel like I was getting discriminated when my research got rejected by top journals - but the likelihood is that the research was just bad. I do recall attending a very right-leaning conference where there was a lot of moaning about the Liberal bias in US academia, but the conference was lavishly funded by Conservative benefactors and hosted at a top Ivy League school so the whole complaint rang a little hollow to me. It had a strong whiff of privileges being defended.
There's some good points in here - including your admirable acknowledgement that research with a clear ideological skew is poor research - but why is your first instinct to attack Eric Kauffman's honesty?
He's a respected Canadian Academic (of mixed Chinese, Hispanic and European ancestry) working in a British university. He cited a variety of studies in making his points, and they're all respectable ones.
We need to get past the ad hominum into the specifics. Far too many of the responses to articles like this run along the lines of "he's making it up" and "I don't see any of this, so it can't be true".
What I'm interested in is everyone feeling able and willing to discuss their views and differences openly. That has to start with less prejudgement, more listening, and more forgiveness, and it's that I'm interested in.
It's the only way to confine polarisation to the fringes where it belongs, rather than it being part of the mainstream, and we have to work harder and harder at it in the social media age, not less.
All great points but I think you cut too much slack to Trumpery. It shouldn't be viewed like, say, being a Tory, a Brexiter, a social democrat, a "classic liberal", a small state libertarian, or whatever. He's a hate monger and those who lap that up can't expect it not to be held against them by those who don't.
I would judge Trump very differently from one of his voters, who include plenty of ordinary Americans, and give them the benefit of the doubt.
But isn't calling someone a scumbag different from calling them scum? I mean, a handbag isn't the same thing as a hand. Since scum rises to the top I always assumed it was a compliment, anyway.
A scumbag is, apparently, a condom
Wow, I didn't know that. Isn't Dorries against contraception? In which case maybe scumbag is a worse insult for her than scum. Clearly she should resign.
Casino Royale is my favourite, I think it's a great film, period.
I find Skyfall entertaining but not as good as CR, I like GoldenEye. I enjoy License to Kill, I thought it was a bit ahead of its time
Yes David Niven was awesome in Casino Royale.
Great film
I thought I was going to die during the Daniel Craig Casino Royale film, I laughed so much during this scene, which my friends are convinced I wrote this scene.
NY Times outlines what election rules reform is needed to stop the kind of potential coup Trump was pressing for.
"Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it."
He's obviously going to try again and the USA is going to let him.
Democrats in the USA has seem to be remarkably relaxed about Trump stealing the 2024 election. If the 2022 midterms go badly for the Democrats, it's on like Donkey Kong.
To be fair I think Congressional Dems are suitably concerned, the lack of concern by certain Dem Senators about this is absolutely suicidal.
Joe Manchin is an odd one, his voting goes way beyond what his Trumper constituents care about (Guns (In favour of), abortion (Against), climate change (Against)), . I expect the average W Va voter would probably be in favour of big Gov't spending in fact, yet because the GOP opposes it he votes that way. Sinema is even worse - her state is a blue state now, she doesn't need to vote with the GOP on anything in particular.
Manchin and Sinema are right.
Remember Trump actually got a higher voteshare in 2020 than 2016, Biden only won by squeezing the over 3% Libertarian vote in 2016 to 1% in 2020 with almost all those fiscally conservative Libertarian voters voting for him.
If Biden had not won those 2016 Libertarian voters he would have lost Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia and the EC so the Democrats cannot afford to be too tax and spend or they will lose them again
Trumpism is about many things, a small state is not one of them.
No but Biden didn't win by winning Trump voters from 2016, as I said Trump even increased his voteshare on 2016 in 2020.
Biden only won in 2020 by getting small state voters who voted Libertarian Party in 2016 to vote for him in 2020
Is their polling to back that up? Because instinctively it feels more likely that those voters went back to Trump or split fairly evenly (third party voters in the US often being more general protest-y than their votes superficially suggest) and Biden took a few votes from suburban Republicans. So Trump gains vote share, but Biden (who gets some GOP votes and some Green voters coming 'home') gains more.
But there may be polling I've forgotten about which strongly suggests otherwise. Our intuitions about how voters behave are often wrong in my experience.
Even so suburban Republicans are fiscally conservative, socially moderate.
If they voted for Biden they did so to remove Trump not for socialism.
It was Democratic overreach after their wins in 1992 and 2008 which saw the GOP midterm landslides of 1994 and 2010 as fiscally conservative suburbanites revolted
Again, do you have evidence for this? Because in polls the bill does very well. Even pretty well among Trump 2020 voters.
It depends on the question asked, other polls find 75% of Americans are worried about the debt and that too much debt could hurt the economy. We also know most Americans never vote to raise their taxes to fund extra spending even if they may support extra funding on certain projects in theory
Sure, but I think the question 'Do you support this specific bill which does these specific things' is a better judge than 'Do you generally worry about a related issue'.
Well don't come crying to me then when the usual big spending, debt building Democratic Presidency and Congress leads to another GOP landslide in the midterms in 2022, as it did in 2010, as it did in 1994.
Manchin and Sinema however have better political antennae and know the average American does not want socialism and thus will veto any proposals which lead to a big increase in debt and taxes
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. And also on the definition of 'socialism'. And, for that matter, on the extent to which American voters care about the national debt (Exhibit A: the national debt under both parties for the past 20 years).
I guess my issue is: If the American voters deplore parties acting boldly and raising the national debt then why have the Republicans gotten away with it for so long? And if the answer is 'The swinging of the pendulum has been purely about the national debt for decades' then I just find that a tad implausible.
17 of the last 30 years in the US have seen divided government ie a Democratic President and GOP control of at least part of Congress or the reverse and a Republican President and Democratic control of at least part of Congress.
That is precisely because the average American does not trust one party to do the right thing if they have all the power
Perhaps, but I think it's also somewhat caused simply by having staggered elections. If the whole House and Senate were elected every 4 years along with POTUSs I suspect we'd have seen a lot less divided years.
In any case, ticket-splitting is much rarer now than 30 years ago. I think there was a fair bit of deliberate divided government in the past, but these days it seems like voters want one party over the other, not a blend. The divided government is caused by staggering elections and the slightly different electoral systems for House, Senate, and POTUS meaning you can quite plausibly elect a Dem House and GOP Senate even if each voter votes for the same party in both elections.
Unlikely I will actually read it though, I haven't finished a book in a long while. Not even "The Old Man & The Sea" which is less than 100 pages long and I started 3 months ago
Read 'Moon' as a teenager and I remember loving it. Very funny. Don't know if I'd still think that now. Never reread it. Found 'Sea' a struggle. Ditto the other 2 Hemmingways I've read. Can't quite see what others do in him. My fault, no doubt.
FPT @Selebian. I think you're blind to the issue here - I'll highlight two main points the article makes:
(1) "In a recent report on academic freedom in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, I found that 40 percent of American academics would not hire a known Trump supporter, and 33 percent of British academics would avoid hiring a known Brexit supporter. When it comes to refereeing papers, grant bids, and promotion applications, my own work and that of others indicates that the likelihood of an academic’s discriminating against an openly conservative submission is as high as 45 percent. On a four-person panel, that makes discrimination a near certainty."
(2) "In the 1960s there were only one and a half journalists and academics on the left for every one on the right. Today that ratio is between four to one and six to one, and considerably higher among political journalists and social-science and humanities academics. In a report on academia for the Manhattan Institute, I noted that left-leaning social-science and humanities academics now outnumber those on the right in Britain by nine to one, and in the U.S. by 14 to one. Work by Mitchell Langbert using voter-registration data for the top liberal-arts colleges and universities (for five disciplines) also shows lopsided ratios. At Harvard, for instance, a recent inquiry reported a $250-to-$1 Democrat-to-Republican donation ratio among the staff."
It's not enough for there to be "legal" protections - hard to access, prove and leverage - because an institutional culture of intolerance creates an environment that is suffocating to those already employed and inhibits any future recruitment to correct it. This means even fewer conservatives apply in the first place and thus reinforces a monoculture.
Those that are employed (like my friend at the University of Bath, for example, or me at the Woke firm I've just left) "fear losing (their) job or missing out on job opportunities if (their) political views became known.” And so, as in authoritarian regimes, dissenters keep their views to themselves through preference falsification. This has been precisely my experience.
It's a problem for all of us because these institutions form a large part of our civic society - arbitrating between the citizen and the state - and thus contributes to polarisation within it.
It needs to be addressed.
Thanks for the detailed response. I'm getting the X characters too long error, so will try replying in two posts
On point 1: I've posted before that I find Kaufmann's research - at leas the bits I've looked at in detail - of very dubious quality. You can get almost any answer you like from that kind of study if you plan it right. Doing a good study is hard and expensive, to be fair. Frankly, I don't believe it (to the extent that he argues it) and I'm pretty sure I could design a study to show the exact opposite. If he's right, 33% of British academics need to be sacked. In most cases I have no idea about someone's views on Brexit, even among my colleagues. Because, you know what? We're not obsessed about it. Real life, research, funding, the department's policy on free tea, coffee and milk and not free sugar - that's what real people actually care about. - In hiring, there's no question on the application form about Brexit; I don't ask about it in interviews. Someone would need to have a really high profile public position on Brexit for me to even know. - On grant applications, what is 'an openly conservative submission'? One that sets out the (conservative) answer to the question that's supposed to be researched? An openly biased submission in either direction should have a very high chance of rejection because it is not good science. Or a submission from an openly conservative person? Again, how do the panel even know, generally? I have no idea of the politics of the submitters of just about every application I review - even among high profile academics I know the politics of very few. I'm be barred from reviewing applications from my institution/colleagues, where I might have a better idea, but for the more obvious reasons of other potential biases (liking/disliking them, favouring my institution etc).
FPT @Selebian. I think you're blind to the issue here - I'll highlight two main points the article makes:
(1) "In a recent report on academic freedom in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, I found that 40 percent of American academics would not hire a known Trump supporter, and 33 percent of British academics would avoid hiring a known Brexit supporter. When it comes to refereeing papers, grant bids, and promotion applications, my own work and that of others indicates that the likelihood of an academic’s discriminating against an openly conservative submission is as high as 45 percent. On a four-person panel, that makes discrimination a near certainty."
(2) "In the 1960s there were only one and a half journalists and academics on the left for every one on the right. Today that ratio is between four to one and six to one, and considerably higher among political journalists and social-science and humanities academics. In a report on academia for the Manhattan Institute, I noted that left-leaning social-science and humanities academics now outnumber those on the right in Britain by nine to one, and in the U.S. by 14 to one. Work by Mitchell Langbert using voter-registration data for the top liberal-arts colleges and universities (for five disciplines) also shows lopsided ratios. At Harvard, for instance, a recent inquiry reported a $250-to-$1 Democrat-to-Republican donation ratio among the staff."
It's not enough for there to be "legal" protections - hard to access, prove and leverage - because an institutional culture of intolerance creates an environment that is suffocating to those already employed and inhibits any future recruitment to correct it. This means even fewer conservatives apply in the first place and thus reinforces a monoculture.
Those that are employed (like my friend at the University of Bath, for example, or me at the Woke firm I've just left) "fear losing (their) job or missing out on job opportunities if (their) political views became known.” And so, as in authoritarian regimes, dissenters keep their views to themselves through preference falsification. This has been precisely my experience.
It's a problem for all of us because these institutions form a large part of our civic society - arbitrating between the citizen and the state - and thus contributes to polarisation within it.
It needs to be addressed.
Thanks for the detailed response. I'm getting the X characters too long error, so will try replying in two posts
On point 1: I've posted before that I find Kaufmann's research - at leas the bits I've looked at in detail - of very dubious quality. You can get almost any answer you like from that kind of study if you plan it right. Doing a good study is hard and expensive, to be fair. Frankly, I don't believe it (to the extent that he argues it) and I'm pretty sure I could design a study to show the exact opposite. If he's right, 33% of British academics need to be sacked. In most cases I have no idea about someone's views on Brexit, even among my colleagues. Because, you know what? We're not obsessed about it. Real life, research, funding, the department's policy on free tea, coffee and milk and not free sugar - that's what real people actually care about. - In hiring, there's no question on the application form about Brexit; I don't ask about it in interviews. Someone would need to have a really high profile public position on Brexit for me to even know. - On grant applications, what is 'an openly conservative submission'? One that sets out the (conservative) answer to the question that's supposed to be researched? An openly biased submission in either direction should have a very high chance of rejection because it is not good science. Or a submission from an openly conservative person? Again, how do the panel even know, generally? I have no idea of the politics of the submitters of just about every application I review - even among high profile academics I know the politics of very few. I'm be barred from reviewing applications from my institution/colleagues, where I might have a better idea, but for the more obvious reasons of other potential biases (liking/disliking them, favouring my institution etc).
On point 2: Well, given conservatives in the States frequently trash academia as a terrible anti-Trump place, does that encourage other conservatives to go into that hell hole? As for social sciences, etc... Well, there probably is a self-selection bias there in that if you're interested in that kind of research, you just might be more left/liberal. What's the mix like in economics? Is it more to the right? Is that a problem? What about mathematicians? Are they all raving lefties? I don't doubt there are some real issues, both in perception ('I won't fit in there') and in reality. But I suspect it's also that people with different politics want to do different things. There's a left-right split between the degree to which we think people control their own destiny and society controls people's destiny - you're perhaps more likely to go into research on social science if you're of the latter view. Perhaps more likely to joing an investment bank if of the former view. How left/right is Goldman Sachs' board? Does it matter? Do you support those who would argue that investment banks need more socialists in high level positions? Or is that just ridiculous? (I think it is).
I know many people in academia (working there) and many people in private businesses (my wife, her colleagues, many of my uni friends). I really don't see a big difference between them. Most thought Corbyn was nutty. They all lean more Lab/LD than Con overall, I'd say, but they're mostly highly educated which means that would be expected anyway.
At work, I know of one woke warrior, for want of a better term, with whom I had the misfortune to co-lead a committee. Complete nightmare, but that was more about her personality than her views. She did want to set up rules that required the co-leaders to be one male and one female and at least one from an ethnic minority. I resisted that, the department head backed me up and so did HR when they eventually got called in (she refused to back down). Sanity prevailed and we had a free vote. Which ended up with two co-leaders of opposite sexes, both from ethnic minorities, as it happened, but not because of their sex or ethnic group, but because they were the best (or at least, most popular) candidates.
As for your friend, maybe Bath is a hotbed of radical socialism. If it is and is biased against talented people with right of centre politics then it will fail and that's good. Your friend is very welcome to come and join me up here. I might tease him/her a bit when Brexit cancels Christmas
Interesting to see the Brexit effect on UK buying properties in Spain - down by half. Lucky my own sale is about to complete! As a permanent resident here I'm actually quite relaxed to see fewer UK buyers now - those that do come are likely to be more prosperous and maybe more open to greater integration.
FPT @Selebian. I think you're blind to the issue here - I'll highlight two main points the article makes:
(1) "In a recent report on academic freedom in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, I found that 40 percent of American academics would not hire a known Trump supporter, and 33 percent of British academics would avoid hiring a known Brexit supporter. When it comes to refereeing papers, grant bids, and promotion applications, my own work and that of others indicates that the likelihood of an academic’s discriminating against an openly conservative submission is as high as 45 percent. On a four-person panel, that makes discrimination a near certainty."
(2) "In the 1960s there were only one and a half journalists and academics on the left for every one on the right. Today that ratio is between four to one and six to one, and considerably higher among political journalists and social-science and humanities academics. In a report on academia for the Manhattan Institute, I noted that left-leaning social-science and humanities academics now outnumber those on the right in Britain by nine to one, and in the U.S. by 14 to one. Work by Mitchell Langbert using voter-registration data for the top liberal-arts colleges and universities (for five disciplines) also shows lopsided ratios. At Harvard, for instance, a recent inquiry reported a $250-to-$1 Democrat-to-Republican donation ratio among the staff."
It's not enough for there to be "legal" protections - hard to access, prove and leverage - because an institutional culture of intolerance creates an environment that is suffocating to those already employed and inhibits any future recruitment to correct it. This means even fewer conservatives apply in the first place and thus reinforces a monoculture.
Those that are employed (like my friend at the University of Bath, for example, or me at the Woke firm I've just left) "fear losing (their) job or missing out on job opportunities if (their) political views became known.” And so, as in authoritarian regimes, dissenters keep their views to themselves through preference falsification. This has been precisely my experience.
It's a problem for all of us because these institutions form a large part of our civic society - arbitrating between the citizen and the state - and thus contributes to polarisation within it.
It needs to be addressed.
The website would only let me read the opening few paragraphs of the article, sadly, but the overall tone struck me as dishonest. It started with this dramatic statistic from the dating site, then extrapolated this to discrimination in hiring, despite these being completely different and indeed unrelated things (for instance, I wouldn't date a man but I would hire one). In my own field of economics there is a range of political views. In academia there is a left wing skew, in markets there is a right wing skew. This seems entirely understandable when you think of the likely difference in motivations and values between the two industries. Academia has got more left wing over the years, but then it has also become much worse paid, in relative terms, and those facts are probably related (we might argue over the direction of causation!). As a left wing person working in the markets I don't complain about the dearth of ideological soulmates, I don't know why right wing academics are so snowflakey about it. I have collaborated in academic research with people of various political stripes including Conservative US Republicans. In my experience, research with a clear ideological skew, left or right, is most likely bad research. The goal should be uncovering the truth, not advancing an agenda. Of course, if I were an ideological hack flogging policy-based evidence-making I might feel like I was getting discriminated when my research got rejected by top journals - but the likelihood is that the research was just bad. I do recall attending a very right-leaning conference where there was a lot of moaning about the Liberal bias in US academia, but the conference was lavishly funded by Conservative benefactors and hosted at a top Ivy League school so the whole complaint rang a little hollow to me. It had a strong whiff of privileges being defended.
There's some good points in here - including your admirable acknowledgement that research with a clear ideological skew is poor research - but why is your first instinct to attack Eric Kauffman's honesty?
He's a respected Canadian Academic (of mixed Chinese, Hispanic and European ancestry) working in a British university. He cited a variety of studies in making his points, and they're all respectable ones.
We need to get past the ad hominum into the specifics. Far too many of the responses to articles like this run along the lines of "he's making it up" and "I don't see any of this, so it can't be true".
What I'm interested in is everyone feeling able and willing to discuss their views and differences openly. That has to start with less prejudgement, more listening, and more forgiveness, and it's that I'm interested in.
It's the only way to confine polarisation to the fringes where it belongs, rather than it being part of the mainstream, and we have to work harder and harder at it in the social media age, not less.
Like I said, I can judge the whole article because I couldn't read it. But it felt like he was using people's dating preferences as evidence for a bias in hiring decisions and the like without showing any correlation between the two, which just felt dishonest to me. It also felt a bit too close to gaslighting educated women, whose rationale for not dating a Trump supporter would I think be pretty obvious if you look at Trump's attitudes towards women....
The same thoughts occurred to me. It's probably fair to say that there is a serious problem around free expression in at least a portion of (in particular US) academia, but articles like that do very little indeed to either persuade or enlighten.
Unlikely I will actually read it though, I haven't finished a book in a long while. Not even "The Old Man & The Sea" which is less than 100 pages long and I started 3 months ago
Read 'Moon' as a teenager and I remember loving it. Very funny. Don't know if I'd still think that now. Never reread it. Found 'Sea' a struggle. Ditto the other 2 Hemmingways I've read. Can't quite see what others do in him. My fault, no doubt.
I watched the Hemingway documentaries on BBC recently and loved them, so bought "the Old Man..."
I just don't get it, and I dont know if I will bother to finish it - is there a twist? Does he lose the fish???
I buy lots of books I will never read. Sad but true
NY Times outlines what election rules reform is needed to stop the kind of potential coup Trump was pressing for.
"Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it."
He's obviously going to try again and the USA is going to let him.
Democrats in the USA has seem to be remarkably relaxed about Trump stealing the 2024 election. If the 2022 midterms go badly for the Democrats, it's on like Donkey Kong.
To be fair I think Congressional Dems are suitably concerned, the lack of concern by certain Dem Senators about this is absolutely suicidal.
Joe Manchin is an odd one, his voting goes way beyond what his Trumper constituents care about (Guns (In favour of), abortion (Against), climate change (Against)), . I expect the average W Va voter would probably be in favour of big Gov't spending in fact, yet because the GOP opposes it he votes that way. Sinema is even worse - her state is a blue state now, she doesn't need to vote with the GOP on anything in particular.
Manchin and Sinema are right.
Remember Trump actually got a higher voteshare in 2020 than 2016, Biden only won by squeezing the over 3% Libertarian vote in 2016 to 1% in 2020 with almost all those fiscally conservative Libertarian voters voting for him.
If Biden had not won those 2016 Libertarian voters he would have lost Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia and the EC so the Democrats cannot afford to be too tax and spend or they will lose them again
Trumpism is about many things, a small state is not one of them.
No but Biden didn't win by winning Trump voters from 2016, as I said Trump even increased his voteshare on 2016 in 2020.
Biden only won in 2020 by getting small state voters who voted Libertarian Party in 2016 to vote for him in 2020
Is their polling to back that up? Because instinctively it feels more likely that those voters went back to Trump or split fairly evenly (third party voters in the US often being more general protest-y than their votes superficially suggest) and Biden took a few votes from suburban Republicans. So Trump gains vote share, but Biden (who gets some GOP votes and some Green voters coming 'home') gains more.
But there may be polling I've forgotten about which strongly suggests otherwise. Our intuitions about how voters behave are often wrong in my experience.
Even so suburban Republicans are fiscally conservative, socially moderate.
If they voted for Biden they did so to remove Trump not for socialism.
It was Democratic overreach after their wins in 1992 and 2008 which saw the GOP midterm landslides of 1994 and 2010 as fiscally conservative suburbanites revolted
Again, do you have evidence for this? Because in polls the bill does very well. Even pretty well among Trump 2020 voters.
It depends on the question asked, other polls find 75% of Americans are worried about the debt and that too much debt could hurt the economy. We also know most Americans never vote to raise their taxes to fund extra spending even if they may support extra funding on certain projects in theory
Sure, but I think the question 'Do you support this specific bill which does these specific things' is a better judge than 'Do you generally worry about a related issue'.
Well don't come crying to me then when the usual big spending, debt building Democratic Presidency and Congress leads to another GOP landslide in the midterms in 2022, as it did in 2010, as it did in 1994.
Manchin and Sinema however have better political antennae and know the average American does not want socialism and thus will veto any proposals which lead to a big increase in debt and taxes
FPT @Selebian. I think you're blind to the issue here - I'll highlight two main points the article makes:
(1) "In a recent report on academic freedom in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, I found that 40 percent of American academics would not hire a known Trump supporter, and 33 percent of British academics would avoid hiring a known Brexit supporter. When it comes to refereeing papers, grant bids, and promotion applications, my own work and that of others indicates that the likelihood of an academic’s discriminating against an openly conservative submission is as high as 45 percent. On a four-person panel, that makes discrimination a near certainty."
(2) "In the 1960s there were only one and a half journalists and academics on the left for every one on the right. Today that ratio is between four to one and six to one, and considerably higher among political journalists and social-science and humanities academics. In a report on academia for the Manhattan Institute, I noted that left-leaning social-science and humanities academics now outnumber those on the right in Britain by nine to one, and in the U.S. by 14 to one. Work by Mitchell Langbert using voter-registration data for the top liberal-arts colleges and universities (for five disciplines) also shows lopsided ratios. At Harvard, for instance, a recent inquiry reported a $250-to-$1 Democrat-to-Republican donation ratio among the staff."
It's not enough for there to be "legal" protections - hard to access, prove and leverage - because an institutional culture of intolerance creates an environment that is suffocating to those already employed and inhibits any future recruitment to correct it. This means even fewer conservatives apply in the first place and thus reinforces a monoculture.
Those that are employed (like my friend at the University of Bath, for example, or me at the Woke firm I've just left) "fear losing (their) job or missing out on job opportunities if (their) political views became known.” And so, as in authoritarian regimes, dissenters keep their views to themselves through preference falsification. This has been precisely my experience.
It's a problem for all of us because these institutions form a large part of our civic society - arbitrating between the citizen and the state - and thus contributes to polarisation within it.
It needs to be addressed.
Thanks for the detailed response. I'm getting the X characters too long error, so will try replying in two posts
On point 1: I've posted before that I find Kaufmann's research - at leas the bits I've looked at in detail - of very dubious quality. You can get almost any answer you like from that kind of study if you plan it right. Doing a good study is hard and expensive, to be fair. Frankly, I don't believe it (to the extent that he argues it) and I'm pretty sure I could design a study to show the exact opposite. If he's right, 33% of British academics need to be sacked. In most cases I have no idea about someone's views on Brexit, even among my colleagues. Because, you know what? We're not obsessed about it. Real life, research, funding, the department's policy on free tea, coffee and milk and not free sugar - that's what real people actually care about. - In hiring, there's no question on the application form about Brexit; I don't ask about it in interviews. Someone would need to have a really high profile public position on Brexit for me to even know. - On grant applications, what is 'an openly conservative submission'? One that sets out the (conservative) answer to the question that's supposed to be researched? An openly biased submission in either direction should have a very high chance of rejection because it is not good science. Or a submission from an openly conservative person? Again, how do the panel even know, generally? I have no idea of the politics of the submitters of just about every application I review - even among high profile academics I know the politics of very few. I'm be barred from reviewing applications from my institution/colleagues, where I might have a better idea, but for the more obvious reasons of other potential biases (liking/disliking them, favouring my institution etc).
If you're impugning the integrity of Eric Kauffman and his research then I'm afraid I don't think our discussion can progress much further. He's one of the very best in his field, and his work is highly respected.
I think the issue here is simply that you don't want to believe his findings, and so are finding reasons not to do so.
Unlikely I will actually read it though, I haven't finished a book in a long while. Not even "The Old Man & The Sea" which is less than 100 pages long and I started 3 months ago
Read 'Moon' as a teenager and I remember loving it. Very funny. Don't know if I'd still think that now. Never reread it. Found 'Sea' a struggle. Ditto the other 2 Hemmingways I've read. Can't quite see what others do in him. My fault, no doubt.
Use to love Hemingway when young, not so much now which may say a lot. I think he's been far too influential on US writing. His short stories may be the way to go if you feel you should persevere.
Worth watching the recent Ken Burns documentary series even if you're not keen on him, rather tragic, and depressing actually (not that I want anyone to be depressed!). There's a remarkable clip of him doing his Nobel acceptance speech to camera as he was too messed up to attend; strangely fluting voice and hesitancy, completely contra the public image. The finale is, well, tragic and depressing.
The kind of observations from America that certain parties will just lurve. When will BJ be doing this in Scotland?
The other thing which struck me about that tweet is presumably the photo was taken at the Tory conference. Is Luntz really saying you cannot find photos of Trump/Biden being loved at rallies?
Johnson does have a certain campaigning power which gets him support from a lot of voters, but the idea that he is a 'rock star' to the extent there is no parallel in the UK/America is nonsense.
NY Times outlines what election rules reform is needed to stop the kind of potential coup Trump was pressing for.
"Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it."
He's obviously going to try again and the USA is going to let him.
Democrats in the USA has seem to be remarkably relaxed about Trump stealing the 2024 election. If the 2022 midterms go badly for the Democrats, it's on like Donkey Kong.
To be fair I think Congressional Dems are suitably concerned, the lack of concern by certain Dem Senators about this is absolutely suicidal.
Joe Manchin is an odd one, his voting goes way beyond what his Trumper constituents care about (Guns (In favour of), abortion (Against), climate change (Against)), . I expect the average W Va voter would probably be in favour of big Gov't spending in fact, yet because the GOP opposes it he votes that way. Sinema is even worse - her state is a blue state now, she doesn't need to vote with the GOP on anything in particular.
Manchin and Sinema are right.
Remember Trump actually got a higher voteshare in 2020 than 2016, Biden only won by squeezing the over 3% Libertarian vote in 2016 to 1% in 2020 with almost all those fiscally conservative Libertarian voters voting for him.
If Biden had not won those 2016 Libertarian voters he would have lost Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia and the EC so the Democrats cannot afford to be too tax and spend or they will lose them again
Trumpism is about many things, a small state is not one of them.
No but Biden didn't win by winning Trump voters from 2016, as I said Trump even increased his voteshare on 2016 in 2020.
Biden only won in 2020 by getting small state voters who voted Libertarian Party in 2016 to vote for him in 2020
Is their polling to back that up? Because instinctively it feels more likely that those voters went back to Trump or split fairly evenly (third party voters in the US often being more general protest-y than their votes superficially suggest) and Biden took a few votes from suburban Republicans. So Trump gains vote share, but Biden (who gets some GOP votes and some Green voters coming 'home') gains more.
But there may be polling I've forgotten about which strongly suggests otherwise. Our intuitions about how voters behave are often wrong in my experience.
Even so suburban Republicans are fiscally conservative, socially moderate.
If they voted for Biden they did so to remove Trump not for socialism.
It was Democratic overreach after their wins in 1992 and 2008 which saw the GOP midterm landslides of 1994 and 2010 as fiscally conservative suburbanites revolted
Again, do you have evidence for this? Because in polls the bill does very well. Even pretty well among Trump 2020 voters.
It depends on the question asked, other polls find 75% of Americans are worried about the debt and that too much debt could hurt the economy. We also know most Americans never vote to raise their taxes to fund extra spending even if they may support extra funding on certain projects in theory
Sure, but I think the question 'Do you support this specific bill which does these specific things' is a better judge than 'Do you generally worry about a related issue'.
Well don't come crying to me then when the usual big spending, debt building Democratic Presidency and Congress leads to another GOP landslide in the midterms in 2022, as it did in 2010, as it did in 1994.
Manchin and Sinema however have better political antennae and know the average American does not want socialism and thus will veto any proposals which lead to a big increase in debt and taxes
FPT @Selebian. I think you're blind to the issue here - I'll highlight two main points the article makes:
(1) "In a recent report on academic freedom in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, I found that 40 percent of American academics would not hire a known Trump supporter, and 33 percent of British academics would avoid hiring a known Brexit supporter. When it comes to refereeing papers, grant bids, and promotion applications, my own work and that of others indicates that the likelihood of an academic’s discriminating against an openly conservative submission is as high as 45 percent. On a four-person panel, that makes discrimination a near certainty."
(2) "In the 1960s there were only one and a half journalists and academics on the left for every one on the right. Today that ratio is between four to one and six to one, and considerably higher among political journalists and social-science and humanities academics. In a report on academia for the Manhattan Institute, I noted that left-leaning social-science and humanities academics now outnumber those on the right in Britain by nine to one, and in the U.S. by 14 to one. Work by Mitchell Langbert using voter-registration data for the top liberal-arts colleges and universities (for five disciplines) also shows lopsided ratios. At Harvard, for instance, a recent inquiry reported a $250-to-$1 Democrat-to-Republican donation ratio among the staff."
It's not enough for there to be "legal" protections - hard to access, prove and leverage - because an institutional culture of intolerance creates an environment that is suffocating to those already employed and inhibits any future recruitment to correct it. This means even fewer conservatives apply in the first place and thus reinforces a monoculture.
Those that are employed (like my friend at the University of Bath, for example, or me at the Woke firm I've just left) "fear losing (their) job or missing out on job opportunities if (their) political views became known.” And so, as in authoritarian regimes, dissenters keep their views to themselves through preference falsification. This has been precisely my experience.
It's a problem for all of us because these institutions form a large part of our civic society - arbitrating between the citizen and the state - and thus contributes to polarisation within it.
It needs to be addressed.
The website would only let me read the opening few paragraphs of the article, sadly, but the overall tone struck me as dishonest. It started with this dramatic statistic from the dating site, then extrapolated this to discrimination in hiring, despite these being completely different and indeed unrelated things (for instance, I wouldn't date a man but I would hire one). In my own field of economics there is a range of political views. In academia there is a left wing skew, in markets there is a right wing skew. This seems entirely understandable when you think of the likely difference in motivations and values between the two industries. Academia has got more left wing over the years, but then it has also become much worse paid, in relative terms, and those facts are probably related (we might argue over the direction of causation!). As a left wing person working in the markets I don't complain about the dearth of ideological soulmates, I don't know why right wing academics are so snowflakey about it. I have collaborated in academic research with people of various political stripes including Conservative US Republicans. In my experience, research with a clear ideological skew, left or right, is most likely bad research. The goal should be uncovering the truth, not advancing an agenda. Of course, if I were an ideological hack flogging policy-based evidence-making I might feel like I was getting discriminated when my research got rejected by top journals - but the likelihood is that the research was just bad. I do recall attending a very right-leaning conference where there was a lot of moaning about the Liberal bias in US academia, but the conference was lavishly funded by Conservative benefactors and hosted at a top Ivy League school so the whole complaint rang a little hollow to me. It had a strong whiff of privileges being defended.
There's some good points in here - including your admirable acknowledgement that research with a clear ideological skew is poor research - but why is your first instinct to attack Eric Kauffman's honesty?
He's a respected Canadian Academic (of mixed Chinese, Hispanic and European ancestry) working in a British university. He cited a variety of studies in making his points, and they're all respectable ones.
We need to get past the ad hominum into the specifics. Far too many of the responses to articles like this run along the lines of "he's making it up" and "I don't see any of this, so it can't be true".
What I'm interested in is everyone feeling able and willing to discuss their views and differences openly. That has to start with less prejudgement, more listening, and more forgiveness, and it's that I'm interested in.
It's the only way to confine polarisation to the fringes where it belongs, rather than it being part of the mainstream, and we have to work harder and harder at it in the social media age, not less.
All great points but I think you cut too much slack to Trumpery. It shouldn't be viewed like, say, being a Tory, a Brexiter, a social democrat, a "classic liberal", a small state libertarian, or whatever. He's a hate monger and those who lap that up can't expect it not to be held against them by those who don't.
I would judge Trump very differently from one of his voters, who include plenty of ordinary Americans, and give them the benefit of the doubt.
Of course lots of decent people voted for him. This must be the case given the numbers. Nevertheless he has colonized the Republican party, which is both chastening and frightening to somebody like me who takes a broadly sunny-side-up view of humanity, so I'm afraid I'm the other way around to you in that I'd be a touch wary of a person who I know voted for him until I get some evidence they did it reluctantly and despite the hate he throws out and for want of (in their eyes) a viable alternative. Pls note I do NOT feel this way about Leavers and Tories etc. It's a Trump thing.
@LucasFoxNews BREAKING: Chinese air force sends 52 aircraft, including three dozen fighter jets and a dozen bombers, into Taiwan’s air defense zone—the largest incursion ever: Taipei
NY Times outlines what election rules reform is needed to stop the kind of potential coup Trump was pressing for.
"Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it."
He's obviously going to try again and the USA is going to let him.
Democrats in the USA has seem to be remarkably relaxed about Trump stealing the 2024 election. If the 2022 midterms go badly for the Democrats, it's on like Donkey Kong.
To be fair I think Congressional Dems are suitably concerned, the lack of concern by certain Dem Senators about this is absolutely suicidal.
Joe Manchin is an odd one, his voting goes way beyond what his Trumper constituents care about (Guns (In favour of), abortion (Against), climate change (Against)), . I expect the average W Va voter would probably be in favour of big Gov't spending in fact, yet because the GOP opposes it he votes that way. Sinema is even worse - her state is a blue state now, she doesn't need to vote with the GOP on anything in particular.
Manchin and Sinema are right.
Remember Trump actually got a higher voteshare in 2020 than 2016, Biden only won by squeezing the over 3% Libertarian vote in 2016 to 1% in 2020 with almost all those fiscally conservative Libertarian voters voting for him.
If Biden had not won those 2016 Libertarian voters he would have lost Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia and the EC so the Democrats cannot afford to be too tax and spend or they will lose them again
Trumpism is about many things, a small state is not one of them.
No but Biden didn't win by winning Trump voters from 2016, as I said Trump even increased his voteshare on 2016 in 2020.
Biden only won in 2020 by getting small state voters who voted Libertarian Party in 2016 to vote for him in 2020
Is their polling to back that up? Because instinctively it feels more likely that those voters went back to Trump or split fairly evenly (third party voters in the US often being more general protest-y than their votes superficially suggest) and Biden took a few votes from suburban Republicans. So Trump gains vote share, but Biden (who gets some GOP votes and some Green voters coming 'home') gains more.
But there may be polling I've forgotten about which strongly suggests otherwise. Our intuitions about how voters behave are often wrong in my experience.
Even so suburban Republicans are fiscally conservative, socially moderate.
If they voted for Biden they did so to remove Trump not for socialism.
It was Democratic overreach after their wins in 1992 and 2008 which saw the GOP midterm landslides of 1994 and 2010 as fiscally conservative suburbanites revolted
Again, do you have evidence for this? Because in polls the bill does very well. Even pretty well among Trump 2020 voters.
It depends on the question asked, other polls find 75% of Americans are worried about the debt and that too much debt could hurt the economy. We also know most Americans never vote to raise their taxes to fund extra spending even if they may support extra funding on certain projects in theory
Sure, but I think the question 'Do you support this specific bill which does these specific things' is a better judge than 'Do you generally worry about a related issue'.
Well don't come crying to me then when the usual big spending, debt building Democratic Presidency and Congress leads to another GOP landslide in the midterms in 2022, as it did in 2010, as it did in 1994.
Manchin and Sinema however have better political antennae and know the average American does not want socialism and thus will veto any proposals which lead to a big increase in debt and taxes
Even now is anyone actually offering socialism?
Boris Johnson.
He is hardly nationalising industries is he and he is also now cutting spending on UC, if he was a socialist he would be increasing spending on UC as well as increasing income tax and inheritance tax
@MehreenKhn France's finance minister has arrived at the #Eurogroup fuming at the state of EU energy market rules calling them "unfit for purpose" after energy price rises have "become unbearable for our citizens and businesses"
FPT @Selebian. I think you're blind to the issue here - I'll highlight two main points the article makes:
(1) "In a recent report on academic freedom in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, I found that 40 percent of American academics would not hire a known Trump supporter, and 33 percent of British academics would avoid hiring a known Brexit supporter. When it comes to refereeing papers, grant bids, and promotion applications, my own work and that of others indicates that the likelihood of an academic’s discriminating against an openly conservative submission is as high as 45 percent. On a four-person panel, that makes discrimination a near certainty."
(2) "In the 1960s there were only one and a half journalists and academics on the left for every one on the right. Today that ratio is between four to one and six to one, and considerably higher among political journalists and social-science and humanities academics. In a report on academia for the Manhattan Institute, I noted that left-leaning social-science and humanities academics now outnumber those on the right in Britain by nine to one, and in the U.S. by 14 to one. Work by Mitchell Langbert using voter-registration data for the top liberal-arts colleges and universities (for five disciplines) also shows lopsided ratios. At Harvard, for instance, a recent inquiry reported a $250-to-$1 Democrat-to-Republican donation ratio among the staff."
It's not enough for there to be "legal" protections - hard to access, prove and leverage - because an institutional culture of intolerance creates an environment that is suffocating to those already employed and inhibits any future recruitment to correct it. This means even fewer conservatives apply in the first place and thus reinforces a monoculture.
Those that are employed (like my friend at the University of Bath, for example, or me at the Woke firm I've just left) "fear losing (their) job or missing out on job opportunities if (their) political views became known.” And so, as in authoritarian regimes, dissenters keep their views to themselves through preference falsification. This has been precisely my experience.
It's a problem for all of us because these institutions form a large part of our civic society - arbitrating between the citizen and the state - and thus contributes to polarisation within it.
It needs to be addressed.
I recall having this discussion before, as I recall @Selebian is of the view that it is a non-issue because (they) work in a university, their is viewpoint diversity, and in (their) experience such discrimination relating to political views does not exist. I find this incredibly difficult to reconcile with what is described by people such as Jon Haidt, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose; and indeed the progressive polemics which appear on university websites; but accept it as one persons experience.
Hey, it's my 'lived experience' - you can't question it! As you (or Casino?) point out, maybe I'm blind to it as I'm not right enough to be an alleged target for discrimination.
And, in all fairness, neither do I question the experience of Casinio's friend - there may well be bad bosses who discriminate on this, but it should be kept in mind it can also be personal dislike. It's a tricky one because it's always hard to tell why someone does not get on - is it because they don't tick the boxes, they're not very good or they are held back for some other unfair reason/personality clash. Hard to tell.
I would like to see good research on this. I'm not of the view that Kaufmann's research on this is good research. To be more specific, I would like to see: - Full comparisons fom different viewpoints (if the liberals are biased, why not check if the conservatives are biased too) - Comparisons with other areas - how does academia compare to similarly qualified people elsewhere - Better sampling and non-reponse bias accounted for (it seems to be convenience sampling mostly, which tends to pick up people with strong views over an issue and without steps taken for non-response - akak voodoo poll)
As to your examples of scientists - most are in the US, which I can't comment on. It might be US academia is a libtard hellhole. I'm in public health research/epidemiology and don't tend to work with people from the States due to their lack of useful data given their health system, so I have pretty much zero direct experience (I work with several people from Canada as we can replicate each others' studies with similar data, but I don't know their politics either).
On Pluckrose, I liked the Grievance studies thing. Don't get me started on peer review and junk journals... I just looked her up as I didn't know her relevance to this area and hadn't heard about Counterweight before, but if she wants to do that, then good luck to her. If the alleged problems are real them no doubt we'll see some big stories about Forstater-style victories over stupid over-reaching employers.
'In a separate interview, Nick Allen, the chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, told Sky News that while the government criticised producers for paying low wages, it was happy for meat to be imported from countries that paid low wages. He said:
"What’s interesting is [the government is] happy to ban the import of non-UK labour in this country, but they continue to actually aid and abet imported food from countries that have got access to this labour.
At the end of the day someone has to pay for these increased wages and they somewhat get in the way of that by aiding and abetting imported food."'
The revealing bit of that Boris interview was what he said about this being a transition. We are about to destructively test the drive of the last 20 years where consumers actively choose British products. Frankly a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign is the obvious thing missing from the government's strategy - why aren't they doing so?
Instead we are going to see our stuff get a lot more expensive, making imports more appealing than ever. People want to buy local but if they can't because it costs too much then the choice of import vs nothing will push import for many.
Which will literally fuck farming to death. Philip and some free market ideologues may welcome this, most people won't. The government will try and blame farmers until as with all the other "lets blame industry" attempts the actual numbers get published and the minister is shown up to be an absolute spanner. At which point the government caves in.
Exactly, I can't work out if the government are autarkists (like Germany in 1930s) or free range marketeers (like the UK in the C19 and early C20, which wrecked farming also).
Why the heck should the government get involved in a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign? How is that the government's responsibility? Advertising and marketing is not the government's responsibility, that's not what we pay our taxes for.
Buying British when its economically competitive so why not buy British is easy to do. Buying British when it costs a premium ... that's actually then up to the consumers to make their choice.
If British farming gets fucked to death, then quite frankly I don't see why we should care - any more than when British mining got fucked to death. How are farmers any different to miners?
Farming takes up 70% of this countries land, but agriculture represents 0.59% of GDP. I'm not sure if that includes the 0.1% of GDP that the fisheries represent.
If we import more, we import more, but what we should not be importing is slavesserfspeasants minimum wage employees.
That's what the Tories and free market liberals said until the Great War. Which the UK very nearly lost if the Germans hadn't been so pusillanimous with the U-boats.
Amazing the Brexiters love to go on about Spitfires but forget the Battle of the Atlantic.
Yes and the liberals were right then and even more right now.
We didn't lose the war and we're not at any real risk in the 21st century of being blockaded so get real. We are a wealthy nation, especially if we stop deflating our economy by importing from the third world, or dedicating 70% of land to 0.49% of GDP.
We spent decades relying upon imported coal for our electricity and we didn't get impoverished as a nation or blockaded by U-Boats when that happened. Special pleading by vested interests should be treated with the same amount of respect as the NUM got in the 80s.
Plenty of hostages to fortune there.
Why was it OK to import coal for our electricity but not import meat?
In the modern world electricity is just as important as food.
Miners voted Labour.
Farmers vote Conservative. And put bloody big signs in their fields during election campaigns.
I think PT has forgotten the Tory Party was the party who introduced the Corn Laws in 1815.
Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of the Whigs. Most of his party still backed them and so his fellow free trading Peelites who were a minority in the Tory party ended up forming the Liberal party with the Whigs and Radicals in the 1850s
The Tories implemented them, and the Conservatives repealed them. The old Tory party you back is dead, it died in the 19th century.
I would be a Whig if we had Tory v Whig old-school. But the Conservatives absorbed a lot of the old Whig thinking.
No the Conservatives did not repeal them.
Most Tory MPs voted against repealing the Corn Laws, as I said Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of Whig MPs.
Brexit has revived the protectionist Tory party in terms of the party's core vote. Many middle class professional, pro free trade Remainers who voted for Cameron are now voting LD or Starmer Labour. Most protectionist working class UKIP voters from 2015 are now voting Conservative
Some very interesting content in this series of posts, which has got me thinking more about the journey the conservatives have been on.
Yesterday you made some - seemingly tongue in cheek - remarks along the lines of ladies cycling to holy communion, farms shops and so on. There is a rich and long established mercantilist, anti-free trade tradition in the Tory party dating back to the corn laws and beyond. This is the traditional ideology of the landed class on which the party was based. Some of the rhetoric now (possibly accidentally) coming from ministers could arguably look like a return to the old roots. This would make the politics our version of Gaullism - protect the domestic producers, don't be shy of red tape, and encourage a society of artisan production, with state control over heavy industry.
At the same time other forces are at work in the party too. The populism that sees the EU as the enemy (e.g. Truss neglecting even to mention the bloc among the UK's allies), rails against the urban elites and seeks out a bonfire of regulations. That's a different tradition - to keep with the French theme it's what they would call Poujadisme - the politics of Pierre Poujade. Its British archetype is the White Van Man. That + a hint of cronyism and we're also in the world of Berlusconi. This is a very different tradition from the old Tory one above.
Both of these share one thing in common though which is the protection of the small producer - the artisan, the yeoman farmer, the tradesman - and the skilled manual employee. The trouble is, as people have noted, for this to work for the client group it represents you need protection from both imported labour and imported goods, otherwise the latter will undercut domestic production. At the moment we have one and not the other and that feels inherently unstable. Either you go the free trade route and keep labour on tap, or you go properly protectionist.
There is one magic bullet that would resolve the conundrum, which is automation and technological innovation. Then you see wage growth and margin growth while costs remain competitive. I'm just not sure where and how that will come about here, but we do desperately need it and for that we need major catch up capital investment by business.
Personally I consider myself a British Gaullist to some extent. Trump combined some elements of Gaullist economics with Poujadist populism. That is now largely the conservative coalition in much of the western world.
Automation is effective if it keeps down costs without rising unemployment.
Andrew Neil talking about the new Tory coalition on BBC2 now
No true Tory/Brit would ever compare themselves to any French person, least of all De Gaulle.
Some of my ancestors were French Huguenots, I am a little bit French genetically
After 40 generations, statistically any one ancestor represents 1 trillionth of your DNA. Which is to say, nil.
FPT but I have to point out that that is so unfair to HYUFD - we're not talking about the Norman Conquest but French Protestants in the early modern era
1. For him a generation is 50 years 2. Epping, so probably a Spitalfields Huguenot - who came over here in 1570s or 1680s.
So let's say he's 21 and that gives us 6-8 generations = 1/2exp8 = 3.9 x 10exp-3 at worst = 0.4% say
That also assumes no endogamy within the Huguenot community, but there was in fact, so that could easily be doubled or quadrupled.
The maths of genetic inheritance is considerably more complicated than that. You get half of your DNA from each parent, but this doesn't mean that you have a quarter from each grandparent, because the half of reach parents DNA that you inherit is chosen in large chunks, and so you could inherit a lot more from one grandparent than the other, on each side.
This means that, while we might all be able to trace descent from a common ancestor (Charlemagne for Europeans, say) we won't all have DNA passed down from Charlemagne - and those of us that do might have surprisingly large quantities of it.
But doesn't that even out? Regression to the mean and all that.
If the chunks of DNA were small enough then the law of large numbers would apply, but they aren't, so it doesn't. See this blog post on it, which also mentions a difference between male and female genetic inheritance variability.
FPT @Selebian. I think you're blind to the issue here - I'll highlight two main points the article makes:
(1) "In a recent report on academic freedom in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, I found that 40 percent of American academics would not hire a known Trump supporter, and 33 percent of British academics would avoid hiring a known Brexit supporter. When it comes to refereeing papers, grant bids, and promotion applications, my own work and that of others indicates that the likelihood of an academic’s discriminating against an openly conservative submission is as high as 45 percent. On a four-person panel, that makes discrimination a near certainty."
(2) "In the 1960s there were only one and a half journalists and academics on the left for every one on the right. Today that ratio is between four to one and six to one, and considerably higher among political journalists and social-science and humanities academics. In a report on academia for the Manhattan Institute, I noted that left-leaning social-science and humanities academics now outnumber those on the right in Britain by nine to one, and in the U.S. by 14 to one. Work by Mitchell Langbert using voter-registration data for the top liberal-arts colleges and universities (for five disciplines) also shows lopsided ratios. At Harvard, for instance, a recent inquiry reported a $250-to-$1 Democrat-to-Republican donation ratio among the staff."
It's not enough for there to be "legal" protections - hard to access, prove and leverage - because an institutional culture of intolerance creates an environment that is suffocating to those already employed and inhibits any future recruitment to correct it. This means even fewer conservatives apply in the first place and thus reinforces a monoculture.
Those that are employed (like my friend at the University of Bath, for example, or me at the Woke firm I've just left) "fear losing (their) job or missing out on job opportunities if (their) political views became known.” And so, as in authoritarian regimes, dissenters keep their views to themselves through preference falsification. This has been precisely my experience.
It's a problem for all of us because these institutions form a large part of our civic society - arbitrating between the citizen and the state - and thus contributes to polarisation within it.
It needs to be addressed.
Thanks for the detailed response. I'm getting the X characters too long error, so will try replying in two posts
On point 1: I've posted before that I find Kaufmann's research - at leas the bits I've looked at in detail - of very dubious quality. You can get almost any answer you like from that kind of study if you plan it right. Doing a good study is hard and expensive, to be fair. Frankly, I don't believe it (to the extent that he argues it) and I'm pretty sure I could design a study to show the exact opposite. If he's right, 33% of British academics need to be sacked. In most cases I have no idea about someone's views on Brexit, even among my colleagues. Because, you know what? We're not obsessed about it. Real life, research, funding, the department's policy on free tea, coffee and milk and not free sugar - that's what real people actually care about. - In hiring, there's no question on the application form about Brexit; I don't ask about it in interviews. Someone would need to have a really high profile public position on Brexit for me to even know. - On grant applications, what is 'an openly conservative submission'? One that sets out the (conservative) answer to the question that's supposed to be researched? An openly biased submission in either direction should have a very high chance of rejection because it is not good science. Or a submission from an openly conservative person? Again, how do the panel even know, generally? I have no idea of the politics of the submitters of just about every application I review - even among high profile academics I know the politics of very few. I'm be barred from reviewing applications from my institution/colleagues, where I might have a better idea, but for the more obvious reasons of other potential biases (liking/disliking them, favouring my institution etc).
On point 2: Well, given conservatives in the States frequently trash academia as a terrible anti-Trump place, does that encourage other conservatives to go into that hell hole? As for social sciences, etc... Well, there probably is a self-selection bias there in that if you're interested in that kind of research, you just might be more left/liberal. What's the mix like in economics? Is it more to the right? Is that a problem? What about mathematicians? Are they all raving lefties? I don't doubt there are some real issues, both in perception ('I won't fit in there') and in reality. But I suspect it's also that people with different politics want to do different things. There's a left-right split between the degree to which we think people control their own destiny and society controls people's destiny - you're perhaps more likely to go into research on social science if you're of the latter view. Perhaps more likely to joing an investment bank if of the former view. How left/right is Goldman Sachs' board? Does it matter? Do you support those who would argue that investment banks need more socialists in high level positions? Or is that just ridiculous? (I think it is).
I know many people in academia (working there) and many people in private businesses (my wife, her colleagues, many of my uni friends). I really don't see a big difference between them. Most thought Corbyn was nutty. They all lean more Lab/LD than Con overall, I'd say, but they're mostly highly educated which means that would be expected anyway.
At work, I know of one woke warrior, for want of a better term, with whom I had the misfortune to co-lead a committee. Complete nightmare, but that was more about her personality than her views. She did want to set up rules that required the co-leaders to be one male and one female and at least one from an ethnic minority. I resisted that, the department head backed me up and so did HR when they eventually got called in (she refused to back down). Sanity prevailed and we had a free vote. Which ended up with two co-leaders of opposite sexes, both from ethnic minorities, as it happened, but not because of their sex or ethnic group, but because they were the best (or at least, most popular) candidates.
As for your friend, maybe Bath is a hotbed of radical socialism. If it is and is biased against talented people with right of centre politics then it will fail and that's good. Your friend is very welcome to come and join me up here. I might tease him/her a bit when Brexit cancels Christmas
Self-selection becomes more extreme the more hostile the institution or faculty is perceived to be to dissenting views - it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I note you don't comment on how it's got worse in recent years.
The rest of your post is whatabouttery - quite literally, you even use the phrase "what about?" - and it's clearly not going to be possible to have a sensible discussion with you until you admit there's a problem.
I've pleased to hear you've at least drawn a line around the most extreme nuttiness you've seen, but don't forget there's a lot you don't see either.
The kind of observations from America that certain parties will just lurve. When will BJ be doing this in Scotland?
The other thing which struck me about that tweet is presumably the photo was taken at the Tory conference. Is Luntz really saying you cannot find photos of Trump/Biden being loved at rallies?
Johnson does have a certain campaigning power which gets him support from a lot of voters, but the idea that he is a 'rock star' to the extent there is no parallel in the UK/America is nonsense.
He is a rock star UK PM certainly, only Blair and Thatcher have been similar rock star PMs in my lifetime and indeed only Reagan, Bill Clinton, Obama and Trump have been rock star Presidents in the US in my lifetime. Biden however is not a rockstar leader like Boris is
NY Times outlines what election rules reform is needed to stop the kind of potential coup Trump was pressing for.
"Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it."
He's obviously going to try again and the USA is going to let him.
Democrats in the USA has seem to be remarkably relaxed about Trump stealing the 2024 election. If the 2022 midterms go badly for the Democrats, it's on like Donkey Kong.
To be fair I think Congressional Dems are suitably concerned, the lack of concern by certain Dem Senators about this is absolutely suicidal.
Joe Manchin is an odd one, his voting goes way beyond what his Trumper constituents care about (Guns (In favour of), abortion (Against), climate change (Against)), . I expect the average W Va voter would probably be in favour of big Gov't spending in fact, yet because the GOP opposes it he votes that way. Sinema is even worse - her state is a blue state now, she doesn't need to vote with the GOP on anything in particular.
Manchin and Sinema are right.
Remember Trump actually got a higher voteshare in 2020 than 2016, Biden only won by squeezing the over 3% Libertarian vote in 2016 to 1% in 2020 with almost all those fiscally conservative Libertarian voters voting for him.
If Biden had not won those 2016 Libertarian voters he would have lost Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia and the EC so the Democrats cannot afford to be too tax and spend or they will lose them again
Trumpism is about many things, a small state is not one of them.
No but Biden didn't win by winning Trump voters from 2016, as I said Trump even increased his voteshare on 2016 in 2020.
Biden only won in 2020 by getting small state voters who voted Libertarian Party in 2016 to vote for him in 2020
Is their polling to back that up? Because instinctively it feels more likely that those voters went back to Trump or split fairly evenly (third party voters in the US often being more general protest-y than their votes superficially suggest) and Biden took a few votes from suburban Republicans. So Trump gains vote share, but Biden (who gets some GOP votes and some Green voters coming 'home') gains more.
But there may be polling I've forgotten about which strongly suggests otherwise. Our intuitions about how voters behave are often wrong in my experience.
Even so suburban Republicans are fiscally conservative, socially moderate.
If they voted for Biden they did so to remove Trump not for socialism.
It was Democratic overreach after their wins in 1992 and 2008 which saw the GOP midterm landslides of 1994 and 2010 as fiscally conservative suburbanites revolted
Again, do you have evidence for this? Because in polls the bill does very well. Even pretty well among Trump 2020 voters.
It depends on the question asked, other polls find 75% of Americans are worried about the debt and that too much debt could hurt the economy. We also know most Americans never vote to raise their taxes to fund extra spending even if they may support extra funding on certain projects in theory
Sure, but I think the question 'Do you support this specific bill which does these specific things' is a better judge than 'Do you generally worry about a related issue'.
Well don't come crying to me then when the usual big spending, debt building Democratic Presidency and Congress leads to another GOP landslide in the midterms in 2022, as it did in 2010, as it did in 1994.
Manchin and Sinema however have better political antennae and know the average American does not want socialism and thus will veto any proposals which lead to a big increase in debt and taxes
Even now is anyone actually offering socialism?
Boris Johnson.
He is hardly nationalising industries is he and he is also now cutting spending on UC, if he was a socialist he would be increasing spending on UC as well as increasing income tax and inheritance tax
Yesterday's papers were saying IH tax will be targeted in the budget on the 27th
Unlikely I will actually read it though, I haven't finished a book in a long while. Not even "The Old Man & The Sea" which is less than 100 pages long and I started 3 months ago
Read 'Moon' as a teenager and I remember loving it. Very funny. Don't know if I'd still think that now. Never reread it. Found 'Sea' a struggle. Ditto the other 2 Hemmingways I've read. Can't quite see what others do in him. My fault, no doubt.
I watched the Hemingway documentaries on BBC recently and loved them, so bought "the Old Man..."
I just don't get it, and I dont know if I will bother to finish it - is there a twist? Does he lose the fish???
I buy lots of books I will never read. Sad but true
I've got at least 100 books unread, so I doubt you're alone. I made great progress last year but this was undercut by buying a loaf more too.
Venting but FFS just spent the whole day practically in the Magistrates Court as a witness for the Prosecution waiting to be called for something I witnessed in December 2019. Eventually got the message just before 3pm that the Magistrates won't be reaching the docket I was there for so it got postponed and a new date given for January 2022.
No idea how common this is, but what an absolute waste of a day.
FPT @Selebian. I think you're blind to the issue here - I'll highlight two main points the article makes:
(1) "In a recent report on academic freedom in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, I found that 40 percent of American academics would not hire a known Trump supporter, and 33 percent of British academics would avoid hiring a known Brexit supporter. When it comes to refereeing papers, grant bids, and promotion applications, my own work and that of others indicates that the likelihood of an academic’s discriminating against an openly conservative submission is as high as 45 percent. On a four-person panel, that makes discrimination a near certainty."
(2) "In the 1960s there were only one and a half journalists and academics on the left for every one on the right. Today that ratio is between four to one and six to one, and considerably higher among political journalists and social-science and humanities academics. In a report on academia for the Manhattan Institute, I noted that left-leaning social-science and humanities academics now outnumber those on the right in Britain by nine to one, and in the U.S. by 14 to one. Work by Mitchell Langbert using voter-registration data for the top liberal-arts colleges and universities (for five disciplines) also shows lopsided ratios. At Harvard, for instance, a recent inquiry reported a $250-to-$1 Democrat-to-Republican donation ratio among the staff."
It's not enough for there to be "legal" protections - hard to access, prove and leverage - because an institutional culture of intolerance creates an environment that is suffocating to those already employed and inhibits any future recruitment to correct it. This means even fewer conservatives apply in the first place and thus reinforces a monoculture.
Those that are employed (like my friend at the University of Bath, for example, or me at the Woke firm I've just left) "fear losing (their) job or missing out on job opportunities if (their) political views became known.” And so, as in authoritarian regimes, dissenters keep their views to themselves through preference falsification. This has been precisely my experience.
It's a problem for all of us because these institutions form a large part of our civic society - arbitrating between the citizen and the state - and thus contributes to polarisation within it.
It needs to be addressed.
The website would only let me read the opening few paragraphs of the article, sadly, but the overall tone struck me as dishonest. It started with this dramatic statistic from the dating site, then extrapolated this to discrimination in hiring, despite these being completely different and indeed unrelated things (for instance, I wouldn't date a man but I would hire one). In my own field of economics there is a range of political views. In academia there is a left wing skew, in markets there is a right wing skew. This seems entirely understandable when you think of the likely difference in motivations and values between the two industries. Academia has got more left wing over the years, but then it has also become much worse paid, in relative terms, and those facts are probably related (we might argue over the direction of causation!). As a left wing person working in the markets I don't complain about the dearth of ideological soulmates, I don't know why right wing academics are so snowflakey about it. I have collaborated in academic research with people of various political stripes including Conservative US Republicans. In my experience, research with a clear ideological skew, left or right, is most likely bad research. The goal should be uncovering the truth, not advancing an agenda. Of course, if I were an ideological hack flogging policy-based evidence-making I might feel like I was getting discriminated when my research got rejected by top journals - but the likelihood is that the research was just bad. I do recall attending a very right-leaning conference where there was a lot of moaning about the Liberal bias in US academia, but the conference was lavishly funded by Conservative benefactors and hosted at a top Ivy League school so the whole complaint rang a little hollow to me. It had a strong whiff of privileges being defended.
There's some good points in here - including your admirable acknowledgement that research with a clear ideological skew is poor research - but why is your first instinct to attack Eric Kauffman's honesty?
He's a respected Canadian Academic (of mixed Chinese, Hispanic and European ancestry) working in a British university. He cited a variety of studies in making his points, and they're all respectable ones.
We need to get past the ad hominum into the specifics. Far too many of the responses to articles like this run along the lines of "he's making it up" and "I don't see any of this, so it can't be true".
What I'm interested in is everyone feeling able and willing to discuss their views and differences openly. That has to start with less prejudgement, more listening, and more forgiveness, and it's that I'm interested in.
It's the only way to confine polarisation to the fringes where it belongs, rather than it being part of the mainstream, and we have to work harder and harder at it in the social media age, not less.
All great points but I think you cut too much slack to Trumpery. It shouldn't be viewed like, say, being a Tory, a Brexiter, a social democrat, a "classic liberal", a small state libertarian, or whatever. He's a hate monger and those who lap that up can't expect it not to be held against them by those who don't.
I would judge Trump very differently from one of his voters, who include plenty of ordinary Americans, and give them the benefit of the doubt.
Of course lots of decent people voted for him. This must be the case given the numbers. Nevertheless he has colonized the Republican party, which is both chastening and frightening to somebody like me who takes a broadly sunny-side-up view of humanity, so I'm afraid I'm the other way around to you in that I'd be a touch wary of a person who I know voted for him until I get some evidence they did it reluctantly and despite the hate he throws out and for want of (in their eyes) a viable alternative. Pls note I do NOT feel this way about Leavers and Tories etc. It's a Trump thing.
So, in your eyes they are guilty until proven innocent?
Charming.
The reason you might not feel that way about Leavers and Tories is because you've been engaging with so many of us on here for so long that you realise the world isn't that simple.
Unlikely I will actually read it though, I haven't finished a book in a long while. Not even "The Old Man & The Sea" which is less than 100 pages long and I started 3 months ago
Read 'Moon' as a teenager and I remember loving it. Very funny. Don't know if I'd still think that now. Never reread it. Found 'Sea' a struggle. Ditto the other 2 Hemmingways I've read. Can't quite see what others do in him. My fault, no doubt.
I watched the Hemingway documentaries on BBC recently and loved them, so bought "the Old Man..."
I just don't get it, and I dont know if I will bother to finish it - is there a twist? Does he lose the fish???
I buy lots of books I will never read. Sad but true
Yes, really good doc, that. Amazing how often he bumped his head. In fact has a bloke ever bumped his head as often as old Ernest did? I doubt it.
The fellow doing some odd jobs round our house just got a call from his wife - she has tested positive for Covid
He did an LFT here, and its negative... what next?
Don't worry too much. I tested positive for Covid last week despite being double jabbed. Like a bad cold except that I've lost my sense of smell. Although the isolation is worse than being in lock down last year. I can't go out for exercise and you have to watch everyone else carrying on as normal. Friday is my freedom day.
NY Times outlines what election rules reform is needed to stop the kind of potential coup Trump was pressing for.
"Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it."
He's obviously going to try again and the USA is going to let him.
Democrats in the USA has seem to be remarkably relaxed about Trump stealing the 2024 election. If the 2022 midterms go badly for the Democrats, it's on like Donkey Kong.
To be fair I think Congressional Dems are suitably concerned, the lack of concern by certain Dem Senators about this is absolutely suicidal.
Joe Manchin is an odd one, his voting goes way beyond what his Trumper constituents care about (Guns (In favour of), abortion (Against), climate change (Against)), . I expect the average W Va voter would probably be in favour of big Gov't spending in fact, yet because the GOP opposes it he votes that way. Sinema is even worse - her state is a blue state now, she doesn't need to vote with the GOP on anything in particular.
Manchin and Sinema are right.
Remember Trump actually got a higher voteshare in 2020 than 2016, Biden only won by squeezing the over 3% Libertarian vote in 2016 to 1% in 2020 with almost all those fiscally conservative Libertarian voters voting for him.
If Biden had not won those 2016 Libertarian voters he would have lost Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia and the EC so the Democrats cannot afford to be too tax and spend or they will lose them again
Trumpism is about many things, a small state is not one of them.
No but Biden didn't win by winning Trump voters from 2016, as I said Trump even increased his voteshare on 2016 in 2020.
Biden only won in 2020 by getting small state voters who voted Libertarian Party in 2016 to vote for him in 2020
Is their polling to back that up? Because instinctively it feels more likely that those voters went back to Trump or split fairly evenly (third party voters in the US often being more general protest-y than their votes superficially suggest) and Biden took a few votes from suburban Republicans. So Trump gains vote share, but Biden (who gets some GOP votes and some Green voters coming 'home') gains more.
But there may be polling I've forgotten about which strongly suggests otherwise. Our intuitions about how voters behave are often wrong in my experience.
Even so suburban Republicans are fiscally conservative, socially moderate.
If they voted for Biden they did so to remove Trump not for socialism.
It was Democratic overreach after their wins in 1992 and 2008 which saw the GOP midterm landslides of 1994 and 2010 as fiscally conservative suburbanites revolted
Again, do you have evidence for this? Because in polls the bill does very well. Even pretty well among Trump 2020 voters.
It depends on the question asked, other polls find 75% of Americans are worried about the debt and that too much debt could hurt the economy. We also know most Americans never vote to raise their taxes to fund extra spending even if they may support extra funding on certain projects in theory
Sure, but I think the question 'Do you support this specific bill which does these specific things' is a better judge than 'Do you generally worry about a related issue'.
Well don't come crying to me then when the usual big spending, debt building Democratic Presidency and Congress leads to another GOP landslide in the midterms in 2022, as it did in 2010, as it did in 1994.
Manchin and Sinema however have better political antennae and know the average American does not want socialism and thus will veto any proposals which lead to a big increase in debt and taxes
Even now is anyone actually offering socialism?
Boris Johnson.
He is hardly nationalising industries is he and he is also now cutting spending on UC, if he was a socialist he would be increasing spending on UC as well as increasing income tax and inheritance tax
Yesterday's papers were saying IH tax will be targeted in the budget on the 27th
They did not say IHT would be raised, just some reliefs to offset it like investing in charities or businesses will be ended.
If Sunak actually raised IHT and lowered the threshold for it then the Tory poll rating would plunge
FPT @Selebian. I think you're blind to the issue here - I'll highlight two main points the article makes:
(1) "In a recent report on academic freedom in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, I found that 40 percent of American academics would not hire a known Trump supporter, and 33 percent of British academics would avoid hiring a known Brexit supporter. When it comes to refereeing papers, grant bids, and promotion applications, my own work and that of others indicates that the likelihood of an academic’s discriminating against an openly conservative submission is as high as 45 percent. On a four-person panel, that makes discrimination a near certainty."
(2) "In the 1960s there were only one and a half journalists and academics on the left for every one on the right. Today that ratio is between four to one and six to one, and considerably higher among political journalists and social-science and humanities academics. In a report on academia for the Manhattan Institute, I noted that left-leaning social-science and humanities academics now outnumber those on the right in Britain by nine to one, and in the U.S. by 14 to one. Work by Mitchell Langbert using voter-registration data for the top liberal-arts colleges and universities (for five disciplines) also shows lopsided ratios. At Harvard, for instance, a recent inquiry reported a $250-to-$1 Democrat-to-Republican donation ratio among the staff."
It's not enough for there to be "legal" protections - hard to access, prove and leverage - because an institutional culture of intolerance creates an environment that is suffocating to those already employed and inhibits any future recruitment to correct it. This means even fewer conservatives apply in the first place and thus reinforces a monoculture.
Those that are employed (like my friend at the University of Bath, for example, or me at the Woke firm I've just left) "fear losing (their) job or missing out on job opportunities if (their) political views became known.” And so, as in authoritarian regimes, dissenters keep their views to themselves through preference falsification. This has been precisely my experience.
It's a problem for all of us because these institutions form a large part of our civic society - arbitrating between the citizen and the state - and thus contributes to polarisation within it.
It needs to be addressed.
Thanks for the detailed response. I'm getting the X characters too long error, so will try replying in two posts
On point 1: I've posted before that I find Kaufmann's research - at leas the bits I've looked at in detail - of very dubious quality. You can get almost any answer you like from that kind of study if you plan it right. Doing a good study is hard and expensive, to be fair. Frankly, I don't believe it (to the extent that he argues it) and I'm pretty sure I could design a study to show the exact opposite. If he's right, 33% of British academics need to be sacked. In most cases I have no idea about someone's views on Brexit, even among my colleagues. Because, you know what? We're not obsessed about it. Real life, research, funding, the department's policy on free tea, coffee and milk and not free sugar - that's what real people actually care about. - In hiring, there's no question on the application form about Brexit; I don't ask about it in interviews. Someone would need to have a really high profile public position on Brexit for me to even know. - On grant applications, what is 'an openly conservative submission'? One that sets out the (conservative) answer to the question that's supposed to be researched? An openly biased submission in either direction should have a very high chance of rejection because it is not good science. Or a submission from an openly conservative person? Again, how do the panel even know, generally? I have no idea of the politics of the submitters of just about every application I review - even among high profile academics I know the politics of very few. I'm be barred from reviewing applications from my institution/colleagues, where I might have a better idea, but for the more obvious reasons of other potential biases (liking/disliking them, favouring my institution etc).
If you're impugning the integrity of Eric Kauffman and his research then I'm afraid I don't think our discussion can progress much further. He's one of the very best in his field, and his work is highly respected.
I think the issue here is simply that you don't want to believe his findings, and so are finding reasons not to do so.
In another post I set out my specific issues with his research in this area.
I'm not accusing him of lying/falsification. Doing this research well would be very hard and expensive. It might not really be possible - you have to get people to respond and you can't compel that. Some people would take the view that the limited research that has been done is better than nothing. For me, the limited research points to something that should be looked at in a better way, the findings themselves are not robust, I would say.
NY Times outlines what election rules reform is needed to stop the kind of potential coup Trump was pressing for.
"Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it."
He's obviously going to try again and the USA is going to let him.
Democrats in the USA has seem to be remarkably relaxed about Trump stealing the 2024 election. If the 2022 midterms go badly for the Democrats, it's on like Donkey Kong.
To be fair I think Congressional Dems are suitably concerned, the lack of concern by certain Dem Senators about this is absolutely suicidal.
Joe Manchin is an odd one, his voting goes way beyond what his Trumper constituents care about (Guns (In favour of), abortion (Against), climate change (Against)), . I expect the average W Va voter would probably be in favour of big Gov't spending in fact, yet because the GOP opposes it he votes that way. Sinema is even worse - her state is a blue state now, she doesn't need to vote with the GOP on anything in particular.
Manchin and Sinema are right.
Remember Trump actually got a higher voteshare in 2020 than 2016, Biden only won by squeezing the over 3% Libertarian vote in 2016 to 1% in 2020 with almost all those fiscally conservative Libertarian voters voting for him.
If Biden had not won those 2016 Libertarian voters he would have lost Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia and the EC so the Democrats cannot afford to be too tax and spend or they will lose them again
Trumpism is about many things, a small state is not one of them.
No but Biden didn't win by winning Trump voters from 2016, as I said Trump even increased his voteshare on 2016 in 2020.
Biden only won in 2020 by getting small state voters who voted Libertarian Party in 2016 to vote for him in 2020
Is their polling to back that up? Because instinctively it feels more likely that those voters went back to Trump or split fairly evenly (third party voters in the US often being more general protest-y than their votes superficially suggest) and Biden took a few votes from suburban Republicans. So Trump gains vote share, but Biden (who gets some GOP votes and some Green voters coming 'home') gains more.
But there may be polling I've forgotten about which strongly suggests otherwise. Our intuitions about how voters behave are often wrong in my experience.
Even so suburban Republicans are fiscally conservative, socially moderate.
If they voted for Biden they did so to remove Trump not for socialism.
It was Democratic overreach after their wins in 1992 and 2008 which saw the GOP midterm landslides of 1994 and 2010 as fiscally conservative suburbanites revolted
Again, do you have evidence for this? Because in polls the bill does very well. Even pretty well among Trump 2020 voters.
It depends on the question asked, other polls find 75% of Americans are worried about the debt and that too much debt could hurt the economy. We also know most Americans never vote to raise their taxes to fund extra spending even if they may support extra funding on certain projects in theory
Sure, but I think the question 'Do you support this specific bill which does these specific things' is a better judge than 'Do you generally worry about a related issue'.
Well don't come crying to me then when the usual big spending, debt building Democratic Presidency and Congress leads to another GOP landslide in the midterms in 2022, as it did in 2010, as it did in 1994.
Manchin and Sinema however have better political antennae and know the average American does not want socialism and thus will veto any proposals which lead to a big increase in debt and taxes
Even now is anyone actually offering socialism?
Boris Johnson.
He is hardly nationalising industries is he and he is also now cutting spending on UC, if he was a socialist he would be increasing spending on UC as well as increasing income tax and inheritance tax
Yesterday's papers were saying IH tax will be targeted in the budget on the 27th
The kind of observations from America that certain parties will just lurve. When will BJ be doing this in Scotland?
The other thing which struck me about that tweet is presumably the photo was taken at the Tory conference. Is Luntz really saying you cannot find photos of Trump/Biden being loved at rallies?
Johnson does have a certain campaigning power which gets him support from a lot of voters, but the idea that he is a 'rock star' to the extent there is no parallel in the UK/America is nonsense.
He is a rock star UK PM certainly, only Blair and Thatcher have been similar rock star PMs in my lifetime and indeed only Reagan, Bill Clinton, Obama and Trump have been rock star Presidents in the US in my lifetime. Biden however is not a rockstar leader like Boris is
I'd go for rock star in the strictly Martin Degville sense.
NY Times outlines what election rules reform is needed to stop the kind of potential coup Trump was pressing for.
"Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it."
He's obviously going to try again and the USA is going to let him.
Democrats in the USA has seem to be remarkably relaxed about Trump stealing the 2024 election. If the 2022 midterms go badly for the Democrats, it's on like Donkey Kong.
To be fair I think Congressional Dems are suitably concerned, the lack of concern by certain Dem Senators about this is absolutely suicidal.
Joe Manchin is an odd one, his voting goes way beyond what his Trumper constituents care about (Guns (In favour of), abortion (Against), climate change (Against)), . I expect the average W Va voter would probably be in favour of big Gov't spending in fact, yet because the GOP opposes it he votes that way. Sinema is even worse - her state is a blue state now, she doesn't need to vote with the GOP on anything in particular.
Manchin and Sinema are right.
Remember Trump actually got a higher voteshare in 2020 than 2016, Biden only won by squeezing the over 3% Libertarian vote in 2016 to 1% in 2020 with almost all those fiscally conservative Libertarian voters voting for him.
If Biden had not won those 2016 Libertarian voters he would have lost Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia and the EC so the Democrats cannot afford to be too tax and spend or they will lose them again
Trumpism is about many things, a small state is not one of them.
No but Biden didn't win by winning Trump voters from 2016, as I said Trump even increased his voteshare on 2016 in 2020.
Biden only won in 2020 by getting small state voters who voted Libertarian Party in 2016 to vote for him in 2020
Is their polling to back that up? Because instinctively it feels more likely that those voters went back to Trump or split fairly evenly (third party voters in the US often being more general protest-y than their votes superficially suggest) and Biden took a few votes from suburban Republicans. So Trump gains vote share, but Biden (who gets some GOP votes and some Green voters coming 'home') gains more.
But there may be polling I've forgotten about which strongly suggests otherwise. Our intuitions about how voters behave are often wrong in my experience.
Even so suburban Republicans are fiscally conservative, socially moderate.
If they voted for Biden they did so to remove Trump not for socialism.
It was Democratic overreach after their wins in 1992 and 2008 which saw the GOP midterm landslides of 1994 and 2010 as fiscally conservative suburbanites revolted
Again, do you have evidence for this? Because in polls the bill does very well. Even pretty well among Trump 2020 voters.
It depends on the question asked, other polls find 75% of Americans are worried about the debt and that too much debt could hurt the economy. We also know most Americans never vote to raise their taxes to fund extra spending even if they may support extra funding on certain projects in theory
Sure, but I think the question 'Do you support this specific bill which does these specific things' is a better judge than 'Do you generally worry about a related issue'.
Well don't come crying to me then when the usual big spending, debt building Democratic Presidency and Congress leads to another GOP landslide in the midterms in 2022, as it did in 2010, as it did in 1994.
Manchin and Sinema however have better political antennae and know the average American does not want socialism and thus will veto any proposals which lead to a big increase in debt and taxes
Even now is anyone actually offering socialism?
Boris Johnson.
He is hardly nationalising industries is he and he is also now cutting spending on UC, if he was a socialist he would be increasing spending on UC as well as increasing income tax and inheritance tax
Yesterday's papers were saying IH tax will be targeted in the budget on the 27th
They did not say IHT would be raised, just some reliefs to offset it like investing in charities or businesses will be ended.
If Sunak actually raised IHT and lowered the threshold for it then the Tory poll rating would plunge
Of course it is raised if more income is forthcoming
And I really do not care about ratings, I care about doing the right thing
Unlikely I will actually read it though, I haven't finished a book in a long while. Not even "The Old Man & The Sea" which is less than 100 pages long and I started 3 months ago
Read 'Moon' as a teenager and I remember loving it. Very funny. Don't know if I'd still think that now. Never reread it. Found 'Sea' a struggle. Ditto the other 2 Hemmingways I've read. Can't quite see what others do in him. My fault, no doubt.
I watched the Hemingway documentaries on BBC recently and loved them, so bought "the Old Man..."
I just don't get it, and I dont know if I will bother to finish it - is there a twist? Does he lose the fish???
I buy lots of books I will never read. Sad but true
Yes, really good doc, that. Amazing how often he bumped his head. In fact has a bloke ever bumped his head as often as old Ernest did? I doubt it.
Ernest is another name that I suggested, and was vetoed, for our new baby. Although I don't like "Ernie" and he would get called that I guess. More of a middle name perhaps
I have bumped my head a few times. A couple of drunken falls resulting in 2 new front teeth and 27 stitches in my head. Nothing on old EH though
The kind of observations from America that certain parties will just lurve. When will BJ be doing this in Scotland?
The other thing which struck me about that tweet is presumably the photo was taken at the Tory conference. Is Luntz really saying you cannot find photos of Trump/Biden being loved at rallies?
Johnson does have a certain campaigning power which gets him support from a lot of voters, but the idea that he is a 'rock star' to the extent there is no parallel in the UK/America is nonsense.
Give us the beat boris, free our soul, we all get lost in your rock and roll, while you grift away ...
Comments
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/3132230/#Comment_3132230
Both in 2017 and 2019 the first MRP was more accurate than the final MRP.
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/new-poll-finds-americans-worry-about-debt-and-want-budget-more-balanced-between-generations
In my own field of economics there is a range of political views. In academia there is a left wing skew, in markets there is a right wing skew. This seems entirely understandable when you think of the likely difference in motivations and values between the two industries. Academia has got more left wing over the years, but then it has also become much worse paid, in relative terms, and those facts are probably related (we might argue over the direction of causation!). As a left wing person working in the markets I don't complain about the dearth of ideological soulmates, I don't know why right wing academics are so snowflakey about it.
I have collaborated in academic research with people of various political stripes including Conservative US Republicans. In my experience, research with a clear ideological skew, left or right, is most likely bad research. The goal should be uncovering the truth, not advancing an agenda. Of course, if I were an ideological hack flogging policy-based evidence-making I might feel like I was getting discriminated when my research got rejected by top journals - but the likelihood is that the research was just bad.
I do recall attending a very right-leaning conference where there was a lot of moaning about the Liberal bias in US academia, but the conference was lavishly funded by Conservative benefactors and hosted at a top Ivy League school so the whole complaint rang a little hollow to me. It had a strong whiff of privileges being defended.
Note too even in the House the Democrats only have a majority of 9
Manchin and Sinema however have better political antennae and know the average American does not want socialism and thus will veto any proposals which lead to a big increase in debt and taxes
This means that, while we might all be able to trace descent from a common ancestor (Charlemagne for Europeans, say) we won't all have DNA passed down from Charlemagne - and those of us that do might have surprisingly large quantities of it.
Apart from voting for Brexit, obvs.
https://twitter.com/sf_bac1862/status/1445015986420211714
I guess my issue is: If the American voters deplore parties acting boldly and raising the national debt then why have the Republicans gotten away with it for so long? And if the answer is 'The swinging of the pendulum has been purely about the national debt for decades' then I just find that a tad implausible.
Since scum rises to the top I always assumed it was a compliment, anyway.
The party knows it needs my brilliant canvassing skills to win the GE2024, my knocking up the voters talent is unmatched.
*Cleaned up to avoid being a potty mouth!
This deepens rather than solves the mystery.
There’s a #CPC21 levelling up event at 6pm described simply as: “Gin & tonics will be served to guests.”
https://twitter.com/JoshHalliday/status/1445024888910123021
He's a respected Canadian Academic (of mixed Chinese, Hispanic and European ancestry) working in a British university. He cited a variety of studies in making his points, and they're all respectable ones.
We need to get past the ad hominum into the specifics. Far too many of the responses to articles like this run along the lines of "he's making it up" and "I don't see any of this, so it can't be true".
What I'm interested in is everyone feeling able and willing to discuss their views and differences openly. That has to start with less prejudgement, more listening, and more forgiveness, and it's that I'm interested in.
It's the only way to confine polarisation to the fringes where it belongs, rather than it being part of the mainstream, and we have to work harder and harder at it in the social media age, not less.
https://twitter.com/Douglas4Moray/status/1445002184719015936
France's finance minister has arrived at the #Eurogroup fuming at the state of EU energy market rules calling them "unfit for purpose" after energy price rises have "become unbearable for our citizens and businesses"
https://mobile.twitter.com/MehreenKhn/status/1445015654977970176
That is precisely because the average American does not trust one party to do the right thing if they have all the power
“I looked at some of the policies: nationalising the railways – sorry we’ve already done that. Raising taxes – err we’ve already done that one too. Well I’m sure we’ll come to some Conservative policies in a minute…”
Boris 33/49 (Net down 3)
Sir Keir 32/37 (Net up 1)
Best PM
Boris 32
Sir Keir 26
No change from last time
https://www.opinium.com/resource-center/uk-voting-intention-29th-september-2021/
I should put it on the record that I have never been on a 'date' so cannot report on any ideological screening I would do beforehand. I did however attend my first ever dinner party on Saturday night so I feel like I have finally achieved metropolitan Liberal elite Nirvana.
https://twitter.com/SpittingImage/status/1444678261737508865?s=20
Just listened to Ed Davey saying he would increase taxes as part of their manifesto commitment and expand visas, ie go back to bringing in cheap labour
I despair at the lib dems, who cannot even be honest enough and openly say that they will rejoin the EU no ifs no buts
If you cannot be honest yourself then maybe people in glass houses should not throw stones
I liked the chemistry between Timothy Dalton and Robert Davi though; great face-off.
I find Skyfall entertaining but not as good as CR, I like GoldenEye. I enjoy License to Kill, I thought it was a bit ahead of its time
https://twitter.com/leonardocarella/status/1444751105934700547?s=20
exactly two relevant parties, except lots of them where there is only one. Leaving aside safe seats those two parties are Labour and Tory. When the government is having a hard time Labour is where you go. There is nowhere else.
Which is why while SKS has no chance of a Labour government in 2023/4, he has as good a chance as the Tories of forming an (alliance) government. As these polls show. I still put it at 40%, but current trends suggest it maybe should be higher.
Labour gain 35, LD gain 12. SNP gain 3. Done.
https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1439960035786989570
Unlikely I will actually read it though, I haven't finished a book in a long while. Not even "The Old Man & The Sea" which is less than 100 pages long and I started 3 months ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE1evIbc3mw
In any case, ticket-splitting is much rarer now than 30 years ago. I think there was a fair bit of deliberate divided government in the past, but these days it seems like voters want one party over the other, not a blend. The divided government is caused by staggering elections and the slightly different electoral systems for House, Senate, and POTUS meaning you can quite plausibly elect a Dem House and GOP Senate even if each voter votes for the same party in both elections.
On point 1: I've posted before that I find Kaufmann's research - at leas the bits I've looked at in detail - of very dubious quality. You can get almost any answer you like from that kind of study if you plan it right. Doing a good study is hard and expensive, to be fair. Frankly, I don't believe it (to the extent that he argues it) and I'm pretty sure I could design a study to show the exact opposite. If he's right, 33% of British academics need to be sacked. In most cases I have no idea about someone's views on Brexit, even among my colleagues. Because, you know what? We're not obsessed about it. Real life, research, funding, the department's policy on free tea, coffee and milk and not free sugar - that's what real people actually care about.
- In hiring, there's no question on the application form about Brexit; I don't ask about it in interviews. Someone would need to have a really high profile public position on Brexit for me to even know.
- On grant applications, what is 'an openly conservative submission'? One that sets out the (conservative) answer to the question that's supposed to be researched? An openly biased submission in either direction should have a very high chance of rejection because it is not good science. Or a submission from an openly conservative person? Again, how do the panel even know, generally? I have no idea of the politics of the submitters of just about every application I review - even among high profile academics I know the politics of very few. I'm be barred from reviewing applications from my institution/colleagues, where I might have a better idea, but for the more obvious reasons of other potential biases (liking/disliking them, favouring my institution etc).
I don't doubt there are some real issues, both in perception ('I won't fit in there') and in reality. But I suspect it's also that people with different politics want to do different things. There's a left-right split between the degree to which we think people control their own destiny and society controls people's destiny - you're perhaps more likely to go into research on social science if you're of the latter view. Perhaps more likely to joing an investment bank if of the former view. How left/right is Goldman Sachs' board? Does it matter? Do you support those who would argue that investment banks need more socialists in high level positions? Or is that just ridiculous? (I think it is).
I know many people in academia (working there) and many people in private businesses (my wife, her colleagues, many of my uni friends). I really don't see a big difference between them. Most thought Corbyn was nutty. They all lean more Lab/LD than Con overall, I'd say, but they're mostly highly educated which means that would be expected anyway.
At work, I know of one woke warrior, for want of a better term, with whom I had the misfortune to co-lead a committee. Complete nightmare, but that was more about her personality than her views. She did want to set up rules that required the co-leaders to be one male and one female and at least one from an ethnic minority. I resisted that, the department head backed me up and so did HR when they eventually got called in (she refused to back down). Sanity prevailed and we had a free vote. Which ended up with two co-leaders of opposite sexes, both from ethnic minorities, as it happened, but not because of their sex or ethnic group, but because they were the best (or at least, most popular) candidates.
As for your friend, maybe Bath is a hotbed of radical socialism. If it is and is biased against talented people with right of centre politics then it will fail and that's good. Your friend is very welcome to come and join me up here. I might tease him/her a bit when Brexit cancels Christmas
When will BJ be doing this in Scotland?
Interesting to see the Brexit effect on UK buying properties in Spain - down by half. Lucky my own sale is about to complete! As a permanent resident here I'm actually quite relaxed to see fewer UK buyers now - those that do come are likely to be more prosperous and maybe more open to greater integration.
It's probably fair to say that there is a serious problem around free expression in at least a portion of (in particular US) academia, but articles like that do very little indeed to either persuade or enlighten.
I just don't get it, and I dont know if I will bother to finish it - is there a twist? Does he lose the fish???
I buy lots of books I will never read. Sad but true
He did an LFT here, and its negative... what next?
I think the issue here is simply that you don't want to believe his findings, and so are finding reasons not to do so.
Worth watching the recent Ken Burns documentary series even if you're not keen on him, rather tragic, and depressing actually (not that I want anyone to be depressed!). There's a remarkable clip of him doing his Nobel acceptance speech to camera as he was too messed up to attend; strangely fluting voice and hesitancy, completely contra the public image. The finale is, well, tragic and depressing.
Johnson does have a certain campaigning power which gets him support from a lot of voters, but the idea that he is a 'rock star' to the extent there is no parallel in the UK/America is nonsense.
Taiwan says 52 Chinese warplanes entered defense zone after US expressed 'concern'
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/575142-taiwan-says-52-chinese-warplanes-entered-defense-zone-after-us-expressed
BREAKING: Chinese air force sends 52 aircraft, including three dozen fighter jets and a dozen bombers, into Taiwan’s air defense zone—the largest incursion ever: Taipei
https://mobile.twitter.com/LucasFoxNews/status/1445029426274709515
And, in all fairness, neither do I question the experience of Casinio's friend - there may well be bad bosses who discriminate on this, but it should be kept in mind it can also be personal dislike. It's a tricky one because it's always hard to tell why someone does not get on - is it because they don't tick the boxes, they're not very good or they are held back for some other unfair reason/personality clash. Hard to tell.
I would like to see good research on this. I'm not of the view that Kaufmann's research on this is good research. To be more specific, I would like to see:
- Full comparisons fom different viewpoints (if the liberals are biased, why not check if the conservatives are biased too)
- Comparisons with other areas - how does academia compare to similarly qualified people elsewhere
- Better sampling and non-reponse bias accounted for (it seems to be convenience sampling mostly, which tends to pick up people with strong views over an issue and without steps taken for non-response - akak voodoo poll)
As to your examples of scientists - most are in the US, which I can't comment on. It might be US academia is a libtard hellhole. I'm in public health research/epidemiology and don't tend to work with people from the States due to their lack of useful data given their health system, so I have pretty much zero direct experience (I work with several people from Canada as we can replicate each others' studies with similar data, but I don't know their politics either).
On Pluckrose, I liked the Grievance studies thing. Don't get me started on peer review and junk journals... I just looked her up as I didn't know her relevance to this area and hadn't heard about Counterweight before, but if she wants to do that, then good luck to her. If the alleged problems are real them no doubt we'll see some big stories about Forstater-style victories over stupid over-reaching employers.
https://gcbias.org/2013/10/20/how-much-of-your-genome-do-you-inherit-from-a-particular-grandparent/amp/
The rest of your post is whatabouttery - quite literally, you even use the phrase "what about?" - and it's clearly not going to be possible to have a sensible discussion with you until you admit there's a problem.
I've pleased to hear you've at least drawn a line around the most extreme nuttiness you've seen, but don't forget there's a lot you don't see either.
I don't know how much you know about UK rhyming slang, but only Frank Luntz would think this.
No idea how common this is, but what an absolute waste of a day.
Charming.
The reason you might not feel that way about Leavers and Tories is because you've been engaging with so many of us on here for so long that you realise the world isn't that simple.
That's precisely my point.
If Sunak actually raised IHT and lowered the threshold for it then the Tory poll rating would plunge
I'm not accusing him of lying/falsification. Doing this research well would be very hard and expensive. It might not really be possible - you have to get people to respond and you can't compel that. Some people would take the view that the limited research that has been done is better than nothing. For me, the limited research points to something that should be looked at in a better way, the findings themselves are not robust, I would say.
[and tax inheritances as earned income instead]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Degville
And I really do not care about ratings, I care about doing the right thing
I have bumped my head a few times. A couple of drunken falls resulting in 2 new front teeth and 27 stitches in my head. Nothing on old EH though