Joe Klein joins the panel to discuss Haley's Trump support, Alito's freak flags, and polls showing Americans are deeply misinformed about the state of the economy.
Not to justify Alito's flags but...the flag flying was several years ago--before the revelations about Clarence Thomas accepting gifts and before the Supreme Court passed the Code of Conduct.
Unlike Damon, I see this flag behaviour by Alito as quite aberrant.
Call me old fashioned, but there is accepted etiquette regarding the display of our flag. Hanging it upside down seems grossly disrespectful.
Flying a flag is an undeniable statement of something. If I saw these flags on a house on my block, I would be wary of the people inside & suspect that they are indeed angry.
Ahh, the apocryphal Mark Twain quote: 'What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.'
Your discussion of the recent survey showing widely-believed falsehoods about recession, stock market averages, unemployment, and more - I felt the same hearing about that survey as when I saw 40-some percent of my fellow citizens vote for DJT the 2nd time around: sorta shocked that there are this many people who perceive reality to be so different from what I see it to be. It's almost more distressing about matters of objective fact (e.g., unemployment rate or S&P) than a value issue like commitment to liberal democracy.
Yikes.
How can we as a nation work on a problem - say, inflation - when we can't start from a common reference point about the current rate?
Mere ignorance or inattention doesn't adequately explain this. I don't believe roughly half the country has suddenly gotten more ignorant. I attribute a lot of this to the right-wing media bubble in which some folks choose to cocoon themselves, which omits a lot of positive factual information when that info favors Democrats, small-L-liberalism, or collective action through government.
Further, we have a flood of "information" through social media which is unvetted and consumed by many with little/no critical thinking. Opinion and "fact" are treated as basically the same. If someone says "inflation is going down" (factually true) that's quickly countered with "nuh-uh, I heard it's going up." Point/counterpoint, don't ask me to show my work. Besides, I just paid $3.89 for gas where last week I think it was $3.79 (as if one anecdotal item is the whole market basket of a nation).
I admit to a conspiratorial view about social media: between bot accounts and targeted messages under the guise of advertising, a great deal of misinformation is injected into our body politic by adversaries who've spent decades studying and exploiting Americans' social psychology. Our adversaries recognize the value of encouraging mistaken beliefs & disharmony. It's far cheaper than secret agents and ICBMs, easy to deliver directly into Americans' homes, and as a nation we're not even mounting defenses against it.
Never have so many known for sure so much that just ain't so. That's not an accident.
I have to disagree with Americans not being swayed or don’t care about a dictatorship. I think Republican voters know Trump wants to be a dictator, but they don’t care because he’ll be their dictator and push their agenda through. They don’t understand that once that genie is out of the bottle, all bets are off! Only the left is raising the alarm, so they think it’s just partisanship and so their “tribe” is fine with dictatorship because their guy is pushing it!
I’m amused by the dismissal of Simon Rosenberg, who has more hands-on campaign experience than the entire panel collectively.
Not to justify Alito's flags but...the flag flying was several years ago--before the revelations about Clarence Thomas accepting gifts and before the Supreme Court passed the Code of Conduct.
Unlike Damon, I see this flag behaviour by Alito as quite aberrant.
Call me old fashioned, but there is accepted etiquette regarding the display of our flag. Hanging it upside down seems grossly disrespectful.
Flying a flag is an undeniable statement of something. If I saw these flags on a house on my block, I would be wary of the people inside & suspect that they are indeed angry.
Ahh, the apocryphal Mark Twain quote: 'What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.'
Your discussion of the recent survey showing widely-believed falsehoods about recession, stock market averages, unemployment, and more - I felt the same hearing about that survey as when I saw 40-some percent of my fellow citizens vote for DJT the 2nd time around: sorta shocked that there are this many people who perceive reality to be so different from what I see it to be. It's almost more distressing about matters of objective fact (e.g., unemployment rate or S&P) than a value issue like commitment to liberal democracy.
Yikes.
How can we as a nation work on a problem - say, inflation - when we can't start from a common reference point about the current rate?
Mere ignorance or inattention doesn't adequately explain this. I don't believe roughly half the country has suddenly gotten more ignorant. I attribute a lot of this to the right-wing media bubble in which some folks choose to cocoon themselves, which omits a lot of positive factual information when that info favors Democrats, small-L-liberalism, or collective action through government.
Further, we have a flood of "information" through social media which is unvetted and consumed by many with little/no critical thinking. Opinion and "fact" are treated as basically the same. If someone says "inflation is going down" (factually true) that's quickly countered with "nuh-uh, I heard it's going up." Point/counterpoint, don't ask me to show my work. Besides, I just paid $3.89 for gas where last week I think it was $3.79 (as if one anecdotal item is the whole market basket of a nation).
I admit to a conspiratorial view about social media: between bot accounts and targeted messages under the guise of advertising, a great deal of misinformation is injected into our body politic by adversaries who've spent decades studying and exploiting Americans' social psychology. Our adversaries recognize the value of encouraging mistaken beliefs & disharmony. It's far cheaper than secret agents and ICBMs, easy to deliver directly into Americans' homes, and as a nation we're not even mounting defenses against it.
Never have so many known for sure so much that just ain't so. That's not an accident.
I have to disagree with Americans not being swayed or don’t care about a dictatorship. I think Republican voters know Trump wants to be a dictator, but they don’t care because he’ll be their dictator and push their agenda through. They don’t understand that once that genie is out of the bottle, all bets are off! Only the left is raising the alarm, so they think it’s just partisanship and so their “tribe” is fine with dictatorship because their guy is pushing it!
except the supreme court code of conduct is unenforceable and a complete joke