Each US presidential administration I've been under has always cited cherry-picked, sound-bite US statistics -- and has the gall to take credit for them. It's like someone's constantly watching the metrics, and every positive blip becomes a candidate for being a talking point.
They take cruel advantage of how opaque the connections are between the macroeconomic, political, and social inputs, and the outputs as experienced by individuals.
Even worse, talking points like that prime people to expect the government to be constantly manipulating variables in the economy, which causes inefficiency and necessarily leads to more unelected officials running more of the country -- since constant manipulation is inaccessible to legislators.
Of course the administration uses cherry-picked statistics to get credit. And of course the opponents of the administration use cherry-picked statistics to criticize the administration.
Beyond obvious short-term political goals, the reason for this is simple: in a machine as large and complicated as the government, it's really really hard to accurately ascribe meaningful credit (or guilt) for any change, and especially to do so in a way that is understandable by voters.
Each administration makes changes (positive and negative) that won't be felt by voters for decades, if at all; and under each administration, voters endure the consequences (positive and negative) of previous administrations. But that doesn't get people to the polls, so why talk about it.
> it's really really hard to accurately ascribe meaningful credit (or guilt) for any change
It's a bitter pill to swallow that I not only have to give these people my money to do this work, but they're wasting time trying to ascribe credit or blame for it.
> and especially to do so in a way that is understandable by voters.
This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't buy it. Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit, what politicians want is to market their "success" and to pass off their "failure."
Again.. using our own funds to do it. I find the whole thing inappropriate. If we decide to credit you, you will be re-elected, if we decide to blame you, we will invoke the courts.. and I doubt they will have a "really really hard time ascribing guilt" to the appropriate party.
> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't buy it. Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit, what politicians want is to market their "success" and to pass off their "failure."
It's been studied and is kinda true. You can pretty reliably do something like, over a controversial tax hike that affected 2% of the population, get 30% of respondents to claim it made their taxes go up, if there was a heavy media push about how it'd make everyone's taxes go up, and that's for something they should have direct experience with. You can also do things like get an amusingly-high percentage of people who oppose various social programs by name to tell you they'd support a law to replace them with some other program you describe... that's identical to what the program already does. Then there's all the people who tell you how much more dangerous America is now than when they were growing up in the 1960s or 70s.
I dunno about dumb, but voters' views are rather less connected to reality than one might hope, and seem to have a whole lot more to do with what they're being told by pundits.
Emotions, rather than logic. Irrespective of party, for a sadly large portion of voters. Not everyone in every party, maybe more in some parties than others (I don't have any data for that, this is just a theory / supposition); but even for whatever party you the reader is most aligned with, there will be some who blindly follow that party and do not think for themselves.
While I agree with you, I think it is easy to think of ourselves as “we are not the ones that are emotional, we think logically”. But the thing is, human beings are just emotional to the core and every sensory input is sensed as per the actual emotional state we are in, biased towards our inherent biases.
Party alignment has unfortunately devolved into this “us vs them” pack mentality, and at this point I honestly question the point of parties at all. Why don’t we instead vote on individuals only, and make parties straight up illegal?
Ostensibly the parties are choosing select people through a strict vetting process. I think informing yourself about individuals would be much more difficult than picking a party with a long, presumably representative history.
There's also a considerable barrier to entry. Louis Rossmann had Larry Sharpe on, who had an interesting talking points in the first three minutes:
I think the key point is that the media wouldn't cover him if he didn't buy ads, and the cost of a poll stood at $40,000. How far can you campaign on a shoestring budget? It's a little easier when you can pool resources through an institution or a party while also gaining the immense benefit of a much more robust network of connections.
Those are some of the infrastructural barriers we've got to overcome, and I can't imagine that movement in that direction would go uncontested. It's quite the uphill battle.
You might give Neil Postman's "How to Watch the TV News" a shot. He had some very prescient points regarding media and how it has transformed politics. Chomsky also has some interesting points on partisan politics.
But yeah, I totally agree, it just seems like very narrow minded allegiance. I think in the US it has a lot to do with conflicting interests of people in high-density places and the rural. I've got a population map overlayed on election results right now, and the data seems to fit that conclusion.
"We" are all held, arbitrarily, in the same group, which is... Absurd. It's like a hostage situation and it seems nobody has recognized that we're being held involuntarily.
The US heavily values the protection of speech. I think political speech is among the most deserving of that protection.
“I, candidate for office, align myself to and support the goals of the DNC, GOP, or XYZ” is pretty clearly political speech.
You could nibble away at the edges, maybe eliminate state support for primaries, change funding rules, but I think it’s ultimately not going away and probably not even getting diluted much if we keep the first past the post voting method.
Thinking along, could we perhaps rather vote on things that worry us, instead of people (or sometimes just a color) that may (likely not) do something about it? E.g. salary of teachers, climate change, etc.
And then every law/change has to be derived from that “wishlist”. Because political programs, while originally similar, have been misused greatly. It is still prone to abuse, but perhaps it would increase accountability of politicians and decrease the amount of laws that are only meant to distract the public from something much worse in the background. But surely everyone wants “free beer and immortality” (the program of a joke party where I live), so it would likely fail for other reasons, but a more direct democracy also has the shortcome of.. well, dumb people.
The ballot I filled out a few weeks ago had several such things on it. They are called "ballot measures," or "referenda," and the overall ideology for them is called "Direct Democracy."
Obviously, they are subject to all the typical "push polling" weaknesses, where people can be coaxed into voting a certain way using manipulative wording.
> I dunno about dumb, but voters' views are rather less connected to reality than one might hope.
What voters say is disconnected from reality, because the average voter has average skill at articulating their thoughts and usually only knows how to navigate their own social context. That voter is much more connected to reality than the typical academic, politician or professional though. Because they actually go out and do things in the real world.
You can tell by looking at what the polity does, it is often turns out in hindsight that it is quite an intelligent and practical beast. It is really hard to outdo a democracy when it comes to having a finger on the pulse of what is really going on.
It is a gross unfairness in politics that people so often deal with sound bite caricatures of their opponents rather than being forthright about what motivates their position.
Compare the Chinese response to COVID to democracies like the US. In the US, the COVID pandemic response is basically history. In China, they are still locking places down and you can find videos of people literally fleeing the authorities [0]. This is the difference between a country where official policy is a bit behind the times vs a public that isn't particularly panicked and (correctly) identifies that the threat is minor and they need to get on with life.
> That voter is much more connected to reality than the typical academic, politician or professional though. Because they actually go out and do things in the real world.
I might be off-base here, but I am unsure if you have thought through the ramifications of your statements. What your statement seems to be implicitly saying is that, (a few examples)
- Surgeons who stitch up gunshot wounds in ERs
- Doctors & nurse practitioners who deliver care to communities across the US
- Developers who write the critical code that runs airplanes
- Scientists & engineers who do nanoscale fabrication
- Environmental scientists embedded inside local communities, studying long-term environmental changes
- Developers at Google & DDG writing the code that allows billions of people to do work every day
- Scientists managing the US food supply and researching new ways to protect it,
- Devs at companies like Stripe that power significant parts of the US economy
Your text suggests that all of these people (and the millions more who aren't on the list) are less in tune with "reality" by default as compared to a random plumber or electrician. (I assume that you are referring to working class professions when you say "average voter")
The text also says that they don't "go out and do things in the real world."
It would be deeply wrong to assume that a random plumber or electrician is somehow lesser or incorrect by default. But it's also deeply wrong to say that the people who make important contributions that keep the lights of civilization on aren't somehow connected to reality by default.
Those are roughly the categories of people I was thinking of when I commented. You've put together a list of people who, by and large, are insulated from scarcity - people who either aren't going to have to do without, or are sufficiently confident in their position (academics and poets) that they don't think they need to work a conventional job. Frequently extreme specialists in a specific field that doesn't translate well into broad life experience. They don't have to live their lives in line with the resource constraints that the world works under.
I'm an engineer, I know the perspective well. I'm part of the group of people keeping the lights on. And therefore there is nearly nothing out there that poses any sort of threat to my comfort, because society was built by and for people like me. That isn't an experience that matches up well with the typical experience and it would be very hard to spin as being exposed to 'reality'. I have access to disproportionate resources to solve my problems. And so do all the people you're listing.
I'm having some trouble understanding your perspective. Your original comment said:
> That [average] voter is much more connected to reality than the typical academic, politician or professional though. Because they actually go out and do things in the real world.
Now you're being more specific, saying those people who work outside "the real world," are those who are:
> Frequently extreme specialists in a specific field that doesn't translate well into broad life experience.
Why do you think that a fry cook or janitor has more "broad life experience" than a professor or a doctor? Do you think that there is something more "real" and "authentic" about manual labor, that intellectual labor lacks? Is scarcity the only source of authenticity?
In my experience, most people a born into, and live their entire lives, in a single social stratum. Maybe it's abject poverty, maybe it's menial labor, maybe it's middle-class, or maybe it's educated and professional. The classes live in constant fear and envy of each other, but very few people get to experience more than of them first-hand. There's insulation, as you point out, between the strata, but that doesn't mean that the uneducated and the poor are experiencing more reality, just that they're experiencing it differently.
In this case, what I wanted to say was that politics is deciding what to do next to get the best outcome given a set of constraints. In that context, "real world" to me means the clearest understanding of what the constraints are and what we should do to get the best outcome.
It isn't a question of manual vs. non-manual in my mind. areoform was picking out a list of people who typically aren't exposed to the actual constraints because they are in the top ~10-20% of the social hierarchy, and usually only specialise in one specific area as opposed to understanding the total situation. Someone who has immanent and structural problems putting food on the table or keeping employment will have a much better idea of where the urgent pain points in an economy are than, say, a dev at Stripe.
The people close to the happy tail end of the distribution for comfortable lifestyles aren't going to have a good understanding of the median or hard tail. Some do, most don't. People who live the risk of doing without food have a much better understanding of how bad the current food shortages are than I do, for example. Despite being quite interested in the crisis I have to really go out and look to figure out whether the situation is normal, a little bit worse or immanent threat of large numbers of people who had food last year running out.
Basically, in short, it is easier for someone average to figure out what the experience is for the average person. Which is one of the most important experiences for figuring out whether a policy is working or not. The median voter is quite well connected to the experience of the median voter, much better than people like me who have to use statistics and guess what their experience is.
Thankyou for drawing my attention to the fact that my language was excessively vague.
> You can pretty reliably do something like, over a controversial tax hike that affected 2% of the population, get 30% of respondents to claim it made their taxes go up, if there was a heavy media push about how it'd make everyone's taxes go up, and that's for something they should have direct experience with
I don't think this is necessarily because those voters are stupid. It could be that they oppose the tax, and they will give whatever answer best signals "I oppose this tax", regardless of whether their answer is literally true. This is a reasonable strategy and it makes sense why they'd do it.
> Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit
That is certainly true, but they have a lot of trouble making these kinds of decisions correctly. Much of the time there is an objective fact of the matter regarding the causality between policy and outcome, but discerning it is very hard. In particular, for economic policy the time lag between cause and effect is commonly measured in months or years, and that can be very hard to unwind.
> It's a bitter pill to swallow that I not only have to give these people my money to do this work, but they're wasting time trying to ascribe credit or blame for it.
I agree, it is a bitter pill. The alternative is to live in a society where leaders don't need the goodwill of the people in order to rule, and therefore have no interest in proclaiming their accomplishments. Fortunately, there are lots of dictatorships for you to choose from.
> Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit,
Voters certainly decide, but I see little evidence that they decide accurately. It's not that they're stupid, it's just that (a) they don't understand how the government or the economy work and (b) have no collective memory. So, they decide, if there is inflation under the Biden administration, it must be Biden's fault, QED.
> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea.
I don't think that voters are necessarily stupid. They just happen to act stupidly because they treat politics as entertainment rather than their civic duty. If people dedicated their time trying to learn about policy instead of browse memes and articles that affirm their beliefs, we'd be much better off.
Well, unfortunately I do think that voters are stupid. For every smart people you know there is someone on the other side of the IQ distribution and you are just quite likely to be surrounded with a smarter bunch, biasing you towards thinking that the “average” is better than it actually is.
Not the US, but I have read several reports of “vote counters” in Hungary and the amount of people that had to ask which of the options is (surprise) the right-wind, populist Orban is astonishing. And while illiteracy for example may well be worth in Hungary, the general idea is true of every country.
Sure, the average person could be smarter, but there's nothing you can really do about that. The more concerning thing I'm noticing is that some of my peers who are highly rational when it comes to work but are completely irrational when it comes to politics (e.g. treat a heavily editorialized headline as an objective fact).
> And naturally, most have no clue that has to do with women's voting rights, and asking to repeal them.
“Women’s suffrage” is the right of women to vote. “Suffrage” itself is simply who gets the right to vote. “Repeal women’s suffrage” has a very clear meaning, “repeal suffrage” is vague and unclear what is being repealed. Women’s suffrage? Universal male suffrage? (Once upon a time, most men couldn’t vote, since they didn’t meet the property qualifications.) Abolish elections altogether? (Use sortition? Introduce a dictatorship?)
People aren’t stupid to be confused by a confusing question.
Is abolishing elections and replacing them by sortition (legislative juries) “absurd”? A very radical proposal, but doesn’t seem inherently “absurd” to me. And of course, under such a system, nobody has suffrage (unless one means the suffrage of jurors on a jury.)
Voters are vulnerable to trick questions, is basically what I'm reading in this thread, and by this.. we are to judge that they must be _very_ stupid. Yet.. no one offers any evidence that their elected representatives do a better job at passing these same tests.
How anyone puts this down to anything other than a failing of school systems and the mass media in general is somewhat beyond me. It's easier to poke fun of people than dig into the problems in many spheres, I'm sure, but in this one.. I think you're just enabling a specific class of people to slickly pervert the will of the citizenry while still claiming a moral high ground for having done so.
Still not convinced this is anything other than an elitist trick.
This isn't common just in politics, but in your average big corp, even tech. You need to justify your accomplishments today even if the real benefit won't be seen a few months or few years from now.
It would be good to have sane conversations in this country about what we can learn from the past few years (in which I think both this administration and the previous one could be accused of serious blunders and politicking) but pointing fingers is not a helpful contribution.
It would be nice to have a sane conversation. That however is impossible when one side has decided that the other side should be muzzled, viz. every post even remotely critical of democrats getting flagged here, or until recently getting you banned off twitter.
the problem is voters are uneducated, or rather the distribution of education will always be uneven so there will always be undesirable selection effects that every elected politician must definitionally survive
It's pretty wild how the @whitehouse twitter account is used. If you looked at only the ones about the price of gas you'd get the impression its been a great ride.
Are you implying that the whitehouse twitter only got stupid starting in 2021? Granted, that account was not so loud in 2016-2020 as perhaps now (maybe... I haven't counted tweets) because the president of that time was tweeting 10+ times per day (some really unmatched crazy shit too).
Is the point of bringing up Trump to say that he is a bad person who was doing the same thing, therefore that thing is good? Or are we just making lists of people who have lied?
I'm objecting to the parent post starting with 2021 as the year to note that the whitehouse account was posting stupid things. That implies that it was not being stupid prior to 2021, when in contrast the most historically asinine tweets in existence (at least from people in places of high authority) occurred in the 2015-2020 range.
Tweets in general are not good. Most are pointless, many are stupid, some are evil, and sadly only a few are worth existing. So I'm not suggesting that current White House tweets are good. They are just not remarkable in comparison to the tweets from the previous period.
You're welcome to scroll thru https://twitter.com/whitehouse45 if you can stand it. Granted most of it is about every holiday, the decorations for that holiday, the holiday decoration preparations, and the occasional other redecorating courtesy of the First Decorator.
But you definitely can find BS things similar to the one from the social security topic.
"President @realDonaldTrump
has done more to lower medicine prices than any President in history!" (unsurprisingly it's hyperbolic and almost completely lacking any truth or evidence; the evidence points to an opposite result)
I'm not going to dig thru the pile to prove you wrong. But you're wrong.
Edit: Ok, I just have to add this gem.
"This Administration is "tackling longstanding problems that no other Administration had the guts to do," @SeemaCMS
says."
That period was just chock full of useless tweets or outright false tweets.
> "President @realDonaldTrump has done more to lower medicine prices than any President in history!" (unsurprisingly it's hyperbolic and almost completely lacking any truth or evidence; the evidence points to an opposite result)
That is increasing government payments to insulin sellers on for old people using insulin covered by Medicare.
When most people think of “lowering the price of insulin”, they would not think “increasing subsidies to a select group of the country, that happens to vote heavily, and heavily for the administration’s party”.
Also, the insulin price cap was for older, cheaper forms of insulin. The modern ones are still more expensive. Hence, anytime a politician touts doing something about insulin prices without specifying “all insulin”, I assume they are BSing.
Older people are on average more vulnerable, both to disease and increases in the cost of medication. And so what if only certain insulins are made cheaper? They're still cheaper.
It is always possible to spin anything negatively, but it might be worth considering why you're putting in this much effort.
Because pitting certain tribes of constituents against each other is a big problem in US politics, works against efforts to redistribute wealth for all. Now that the old voters have their healthcare, they have less incentive to vote for plans for others to get it.
Most importantly, it avoids politicians having to address the root problem, which is the lack of taxpayer funded R&D into medicine that would be in the public domain, hence not subject to the high prices of patented medicine. And of course, this helps the businesses that patent medicines.
It is also ridiculous to me how much more my country prioritizes the elderly over children, who are literally the future.
> Because pitting certain tribes of constituents against each other is a big problem in US politics
Doing things for some groups is not the same as pitting groups against each other.
> works against efforts to redistribute wealth for all
You can only steal and reallocate money, not wealth. This will destroy wealth for all.
> the lack of taxpayer funded R&D into medicine that would be in the public domain, hence not subject to the high prices of patented medicine.
Plenty of R&D is at least partially taxpayer funded, but you're underestimating the total amount of R&D (including the cost of completely failed ideas) that goes into drug discovery. Deciding taxpayers should fund the sum total of pharma R&D, and presumably also the production costs, as those would've been funded by the patent-protected profits, seems strange on the face of it.
> how much more my country prioritizes the elderly over children
The elderly aren't always prioritised. But with health, they, along with newborns and pregnant mums, are some of the naturally most at-risk people in your population.
The same way he controls his press officers, who are constantly retracting his statements and retroactively editing out his "gaffes"? I'm highly doubtful.
I believe the point is that, yes what biden did here is bad, but what trump did regularly was significantly worse (especially calling into question the 2020 election)
It is the new Chewbacca defence [1], whenever the discussion deviates from the desired narrative it is enough to bring on a variation on 'but Trump did XXX' or 'at least it was not as bad as Trump' or 'just like Trump' to derail it.
Now that the precedent has been set this is likely to continue with one side using the mentioned but Trump arguments which are countered with at least he was not as bad as Biden. Rinse, repeat, ad infinitum et delirium.
>It's like someone's constantly watching the metrics, and every positive blip becomes a candidate for being a talking point.
I would add "or negative", and I wouldn't qualify it with "it's like". As far as I can tell, this is the one-sentence description of how the public face of politics works, everywhere, always.
It's not 'cruel' for any administration to indicate basic realities without some arbitrary historical and legal context.
While we should be eternally vigilant and skeptical, the lack of very specific context in this case is nowhere near a blatant manipulation.
In fact, I would say the 'problem' is maybe the opposite - I am somewhat more skeptical that this is a 'Musk led personal intervention' to draw arbitrary cynicism towards a political entity he does not like - playing 'moral equivalence' games with people who say "The economy is doing good!" (without nuanced context) and "I won the election!" (without the obvious 'context' that the statement is literally false, or blatantly misleading).
That said, it's just skepticism, I really can't say one way or the other obviously.
There's clearly a grey threshold in what we can tolerate from government and political statements, and it's very hard to fathom where that line is - but this one is not near that line.
If any administration wants to claim "Lowest unemployment ever!" in a Tweet, well then that's fine. They can say that as long as it's true, a history lesson is not needed in this case.
In any case, if they are going to do this, they need a set of publicly stated criteria for it, and they need to apply the criteria objectively and consistently.
You really are having a hard time with the words 'cruel' and 'harm'.
The WH statements are not misleading, and they definitely do not cause 'harm'.
You're using the language of post-modern/post-reality hyperbole politics which frankly, might be our greatest scourge at the moment.
When Donald Trump Tweeted that "The US had the lowest unemployment rate for African Americans" during his tenure, one could argue that's a bit of a stretch in terms of him taking credit.
The press had a lot to say about it.
But it's fully within his purview to say that even if it really does require contextualization.
There's no need to 'fix' a Tweet or statement like that.
When people say things like 'XYZ cures cancer!' - or 'XYZ politician is secretly abusing children in the basement of a restaurant' - then there's a moderation issue.
I too strongly disagree with modern political winds and the postmodern moral and social philosophy, but that doesn't have to mean that kindness and not doing harm aren't important or have no meaning. They're just one moral dimension among several that are fully valid (if disproportionately emphasized).
It is morally wrong when leaders (Democrat or Republican) intentionally lie in such a way as to manipulate people into beliefs and behaviors that cause more problems for those people.
> But it's fully within his purview to say that even if it really does require contextualization.
Not morally, no it's not. I believe he'll answer for it come judgment day, along with the others who have done it. You've heard the phrase "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics" -- the point is: wrongly framed statistics, intentionally presented, are the worst form of lying.
You may not subscribe to care/harm moral philosophy, but surely you value truth -- it's the bedrock of freedom. To lie is to take away people's freedom.
The Soviet Union, Communist China, and the DPRK were built on lies. Those who tolerate lies do everyone a disservice.
Unless I'm not understanding the article, it seems like the tweet was truthful, the payout is the highest it's been. Is that entirely due to Biden, less clear. Could also be just adjusting to inflation, also true. But how many things are not adjusted to inflation, so even if the only reason the payout is highest is because of inflation, well at least they are making it match and not ignoring it like a million other things. There are no lies here, only things which might be hard to attribute. And I think it's reasonable to attribute this to Biden in all but the most narrow of interpretations.
For anyone else that didn't read the first paragraph of the article, here it is:
> The White House deleted a Twitter post on Wednesday touting an increase in Social Security benefits for seniors after the social media platform added a “context” note pointing out that the increase was tied to a 1972 law requiring automatic increases based on cost of living changes.
This is a different kind of statement when it's not hedged in any way as compared to the tweet as quoted in the article.
> “Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership” (emphasis mine)
Of course it's easy to assume that they said "the biggest increase" to make it sound as good as possible and it's easy to assume that they said "in 10 years" because they didn't want to just lie. But then, why did they need to include "through President Biden's leadership"? Isn't that technically false if it happened "through 50-year-old legislation"?
That being said, why do you think that statement isn't intentionally misleading? Or if you do think it's intentionally misleading, why do you think the context shouldn't be added? I don't buy that it's arbitrary; it's clearly relevant to the statement that was made.
Certainly I'd agree that this policy is absolutely ripe for abuse (through arbitrary application) but so far I haven't seen a reason for people to think that it will be or has been abused, barring the assumptions they choose to make.
The statement "Lowest unemployment ever!" is definitely 'hedged' in the same manner as this Tweet about benefits.
Taking credit for the 'lowest employment' especially using the term 'ever' would require an hour of debatable qualifications to make it entirely clear.
Would the President make this statement in his 1st month in office, make this a bit of a nonrepresentational statement? Well, probably. But it's still true.
This understanding that somehow this specific WH statement is hedged or loaded in some kind of special manner just isn't correct. In fact, you could likely delve a bit deeper into it as well to find even more relevant nuance.
"Why do you think that statement isn't intentionally misleading?"
It's true, and it doesn't require any more context than any other statement, so it's fine.
I think it would be naive of us to expect that the statement by the WH or any political body is going to run us down on the details and caveats of their statements unless they are hugely relevant.
Some of the language used here that this causes 'cruelty and harm' etc. is ridiculous.
This language within the scope of normal communications enough that we would not even be having this discussion were Twitter to not have initially marked the Tweet.
The so called 'cruelty and harm' would have gone entirely unnoticed.
And finally, this is not a threshold of content moderation for arbitrary 3rd parties to make arbitrary corrections. I'd love a feature that allowed me to add my favourite 'truthy-meter' to Twitter statements, but I'd loathe to trust Twitter specifically for things that are so mundane. They have a responsibility to call out hard misinformation, such as vaccine or election lies - but not arbitrary quips.
I have mixed feelings about this comment. I can't bring myself to disagree with your premises, but I strongly disagree with the conclusion.
> I think it would be naive of us to expect that the statement by the WH or any political body is going to run us down on the details and caveats of their statements unless they are hugely relevant.
> Some of the language used here that this causes 'cruelty and harm' etc. is ridiculous.
> This language within the scope of normal communications enough that we would not even be having this discussion were Twitter to not have initially marked the Tweet.
> The so called 'cruelty and harm' would have gone entirely unnoticed.
I won't disagree but that's because of what "naive" means. It reads that I should expect this kind of behavior, to which I would say I shouldn't tolerate it. I should be able to expect that these political bodies don't produce this kind of statement.
I do think the "cruelty and harm" would have gone unnoticed because it's so common to see this kind of thing. There are people that won't look into this and will have their vote swayed because of it, despite that it doesn't matter. I don't care that it's true when it's so misleading and I don't think it should be tolerated. I do not think it's hyperbole to use this language, disagreements notwithstanding.
I don't remember what it is but I remember hearing a word for this kind of statement. Specifically in public relations, it's a statement that's true on its face and clearly intended to sound good in a particular way, but also missing key context that takes away from the good.
Anyway, often in such cases I will read the context in some public comment section, rather than having it pinned by the staff of the site I'm reading. I can understand that people do not like that this was decided by Twitter staff (and I do honestly expect that's what happened given the account's profile), and I would also prefer that this sort of thing is decided by the community or even not at all.
But I have to end in defense of "cruelty and harm". You can disagree but it would be naive to think it is simply mistaken thinking.
Your comments make a lot of sense were there material indirection about some material issue, but there isn't.
So in this case none of it really applies; notions 'cruelty and harm' are a bit absurd.
There is a habit among 'thinking people' to escalate the most innocuous thing to an undeserved proportion.
When there are no lingering controversies, the most minor supposed slight - becomes the controversy.
This issue is out of proportion for this level of meaningful dissection.
More objectively ... the Tweet does not involve policy, it's not political, it's not controversial, it's not 'before the courts', it does not involve foreign policy, it's not 'insensitive or offensive', it doesn't delve into economic matters, it's not related to health or elections, it won't move markets or affect business - and most appropriately - it's essentially factual.
It's a banal, truthful statement about some secondary, bureaucratic outcome.
If we were to apply this level of conscientious scrutiny to every Tweet or statement, I don't think anyone would ever agree on what 'reality' is.
So there is no 'there' there. There's nothing to escalate.
We have a free press to add more context, that's their job.
Tweets can cause 'harm' obviously, when influential people lie about material things especially related to health, violence, ultra bigotry/racism, political insurrection etc. but otherwise, Twitter is a random tech company, it's beyond their purview to selectively contextualize arbitrary bits of information.
> the lack of very specific context in this case is nowhere near a blatant manipulation
I disagree. First of all the increase wasn't Biden's administration merit and that's one blatant lie.
Then if the social security benefits have increased only to keep up with inflation, to celebrate this as positive is clearly misinformation. Those receiving the benefits are as poor as they were before, while society as a whole becomes poorer. Nothing to celebrate here.
My question then is, would/will the same fact-checking apply to a different government that Musk does support? He’s been pushing for this equal fact checking and equal platform for both parties, but as far as I can tell we’re not seeing these banners anywhere on politics Twitter besides official government accounts.
Yeah, it's ironic that their claiming responsibility for "inflation-based increase" in social security is correct -- because of their loose monetary policy that caused massive inflation.
Monetary policy is the setting of interest rates by the central bank. Fiscal policy is taxing and spending. Monetary policy has been more or less zero since the GFC.
Not really: inflation is happening all over the world, not just in the US. In fact, the US has some of the lowest inflation among western nations.
The cause of inflation is the economic hit from Covid and our response to it. So my original point stands: the world is complicated, and it's naive to say "Biden caused inflation."
Loose monetary policy is what enabled the US to respond to COVID in the manner it decided to. I don’t think you’re being charitable to the poster you’re replying to when you say “it’s complicated” then place much of the blame on the very factor said poster identified.
But the bulk of the response to COVID (what hackyhacky is arguing) did not happen under the current administration, so wouldn't be due to their policies (what TimTheTinker is arguing).
> Loose monetary policy is what enabled the US to respond to COVID in the manner it decided to.
This still fails to explain why the US is seeing lower inflation than most of the rest of the world, almost none of which has the borrowing capacity of the US federal government.
The US is the world reserve currency, so in uncertain times investors in foreign countries buy dollars. This is the only reason why the US is not currently seeing inflation rates of 20 or 30% per year.
The rest of the world is not uniformly seeing inflation. I heard this morning that Canada is at 3.5%. Korea is at 6%, and this is driven by import prices, since the USD is at high demand.
Domestically to the US, it's more complicated. Boomers are retiring causing a labor crunch, but businesses are attaining record profits which just about match the magnitude of price increases.
The majority of Covid debt originated prior to January 20th 2021, and with a GOP majority in the Senate. Of the $1400 stimulus sent to individuals, the previous President, the previous Senate Majority Leader, and the 2 incumbent Senate candidates (that didn't win) each campaigned on the equivalent of the $1400. The previous administration is also on record as rejecting audit measures for the Payment Protection Program. The previous administration nominated the fed chairman that increased the federal reserve balance sheet and tools well beyond 2008-2009, while also not adjusting the pace despite the federal stimulus above (and other stimulus until Fall 2021)
Monetary policy is the setting of interest rates by the central bank. Fiscal policy is taxing and spending. Monetary policy has been more or less zero since the GFC.
From what I can tell, the US had the highest inflation in the G7 until the Fed started hiking interest rates more aggressively than the rest of the world to get it under control. This was particularly noticable to me since once they did the UK became the G7 member with the highest inflation and our media started pointing at that as proof of our government's economic incompetence in a way that the US media very obviously had not.
Yes - the Fed is (for better or worse) more independent and agile than the ECB. Being responsive to only a single nation’s government (even when you’re the global reserve currency) has its perks.
> They take cruel advantage of how opaque the connections are between the macroeconomic, political, and social inputs, and the outputs as experienced by individuals.
That's why the more transparency and readily-available information there is, the better : )
First, think about the people who work in your marketing department. Now think about them with the reach to influence the entire world. That's politics, and it's terrifying.
They take cruel advantage of how opaque the connections are between the macroeconomic, political, and social inputs, and the outputs as experienced by individuals.
Even worse, talking points like that prime people to expect the government to be constantly manipulating variables in the economy, which causes inefficiency and necessarily leads to more unelected officials running more of the country -- since constant manipulation is inaccessible to legislators.