Taking that attitude you’re showing you’re not here in good faith.

If you want good faith arguments perhaps don’t start with condescending comments about “kindergarten” level civics and have enough charity to at least start from the premise that it might actually be you who’s wrong rather than just assuming that any argument you don’t agree with must be the result of your interlocutor being kindergarten level dumb.

You construct a twisted, narrow interpretation so that you can walk out on it and say look at this very narrow interpretation, explain this narrow interpretation.

Followed by…

Do they lose? Do they win?

Broad and wide-ranging narrative … anyone?

And then you go on to tell a story about what each president ‘would have done’ which, I presume you must have gained from direct personal conversations with them, unless… Oh, you’re not just believing things they tell the newspapers… You sweet summer child…

what would happen if they won consistently and overwhelmingly? They’d move left. They could do left things, without losing the next election. This is pretty simple.

It might seem simple to you. But it contains two hidden premises and two logical flaws.

The first hidden premise is that they actually want to move left (and so would take an opportunity to do so). You’ve not yet made a case that they do. A scattering of slightly-left-of-neocon policies is not very convincing.

The second premise is that each event is a response to the last and not to any of the hundred other factors in American politics at the time. Again, just showing one thing followed another does not prove it was caused by it.

The first logical flaw is that you’ve still not provided a mechanism by which successive democratic campaign teams know somehow why they lost, that it was their slightly leftist policies and not, again one of the other hundred factors in politics at the time.

The second logical flaw is that you’ve still not explained why democrats need an actual election to find out that lots of leftists will vote for them. Why can’t they just poll, like everyone else does? They presumably rely on polls to tell them what policies these non-voters want, so why do they need an actual election victory to learn that in four year’s time these people will likely vote for them. Why can’t they just ask? That’s the normal way all other political strategies are worked out - focus groups, polls, town meetings… You’re singling out willingness to vote as a fact about potential voters which is somehow inaccessible to the democrat strategists without the proof of an actual election win, but assuming other facts, like the policies they’d like, can be ascertained. Why?

Oh. And whilst I’ve got such a golden opportunity to have “kindergarten” level civics so patiently explained to me…

How do the Democrats find out the political leanings of the voters who won them the vote in order to reward? them next time with policies they like? Is there some magic poll they can access, but only after an election? Because any poll which they could access before an election would obviously tell them in advance what a willing and committed set of voters they’d have if only they put in some more left wing policies.

You’re suggesting polling subtle enough to determine policy preferences among different demographics, but somehow incapable of determining voting commitment/apathy. Apparently an actual election is the only way anyone can find that information out. But once done they magically know exactly why everyone voted the way they did.

If the left voters show up, then guess what? More left policies will be adopted.

Why? A left vote is worth 1 (because they wouldn’t have otherwise voted right), a centre vote is worth 2 (because it’s also a vote away from the other party). So it doesn’t matter how many on the left “show up” their votes simply aren’t worth as much as centre voters.

That’s the argument given. Centre votes are worth double. The corollary is that they’ll always be the target demographic.

And also the fact that all arms manufacturers are public companies, invested in by global hedge funds which any wealthy investor from Tehran, to Moscow, to Washington will be heavily invested in.

We live in a global economy of asset management. It doesn’t matter which government invests the tax dollars in which firms, as long as the money flows in the wealthy investors profit, then use those profits to promote more wars (among other things) to drive more profits.

If a centre vote is worth double, then it doesn’t make any difference if the left are mobilised to vote or not.

With a mobilised left it’s left-vote=1 centre-vote=2

With an apathetic left it’s left-vote=0 centre-vote=2

Either way the centre vote is worth more so the party moves to the centre.

But if this is wrong, and the left vote is indeed worth more, then why change policies to court the centre, why not have openly leftist policies to attract this game-changing leftist vote?

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t claim that the democrats have to hide their leftist agenda to gain votes and also claim that the leftist voting block is the make or break of electoral success.

But in a vacuum it wouldn’t be required. It’s about making choices regarding those issues we allow to take media attention, and more importantly, play the role of the ‘enemy’, literally the ‘bringer of death’ in this meme. Not poverty, not corporate greed, not the pathological indifference to suffering of the Big Mac munching consumer…

No. One bloke who’s probably not even calling all the shots and will be dead and gone in a few decades whilst the whole bloody monstrosity carries on because everyone’s attention is just on the next Disneyfied super villain.

The words should all be in here

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/

I’m undone. Have you considered debating for Harvard?

So… we should add poverty deaths in Ukraine and Russia to Putin’s illegal invasion of another country?

Yep. That’s about it. Well done.

1. Do we have infinite media space? No.
2. Do people have infinite resources? No.
3. Do people have infinite capacities to act? No.
4. Do people have infinite attention spans? No.

So it matters which issues are brought to the fore, doesn’t it.

It’s not a question of the non-truth of the first option, but a question about the psychological reality of setting up folk-devils to divert attention from systemic crimes of far greater magnitude.

Focus on Putin, Trump, Biden, …whoever, sucks oxygen from any discussion of the systemic structures causing whole orders of magnitude more death and misery.

half of the people don’t believe it’s an existential that needs addressed and most of the other half are either morally opposed to such political action or feel like it can be managed without resorting to it just yet.

Yeah, pretty much my point. Hardly an ‘existential crisis’. Screaming about the end of civilisation and then starting a leafleting campaign to prevent it is pretty much textbook virtue signalling - the ‘signal’ is out of proportion to the act.

burning those companies to the ground doesn’t do anything to the demand for their product

I can guarantee it would cause more discussion in the (ashes of the) boardroom than a strongly worded letter to The Times. And we don’t have to worry about demand. Just refuse to pay them for it until they provide a better alternative.

Monetarily incentivizing their creation is our primary need

Why ‘monetary’?. Why not violence? Civil disobedience? Strike action? Rude gestures? Not inviting them to your dinner party?

Why does the incentive have to be money? Isn’t that pretty much what got us into this mess?

Killed in Ukraine - around 200,000

Deaths from poverty in the US over the same period - 490,000 https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/how-many-u-s-deaths-are-caused-poverty-lack-education-other-social-factors

Did I miss your scathing post about US presidents?

That’s just not what they are incentivized to do on their own. Consumers can sometimes influence those incentives, but there is not always enough market choice to put that kind of pressure on corporate behavior.

So why doesn’t the same apply to governments? If the alternatives aren’t there we can’t vote for them.

If everyone refused to pay their gas bill. BP would collapse in a week. But of course there’d never be such action because people don’t care it’s all just virtue signalling.

Apparently we’re supposed to be in a ‘climate emergency’ that represents an ‘existential threat’ to humanity, and the best humanity can muster as a response is a very strong leafleting campaign.

If it’s really an actual threat to the survival of humanity then just storm BP headquarters and threaten to burn the place down if they don’t stop funding new oil. No one will, might break a nail.

Yes, because MI5 never lie for the government do they? Famous for telling the absolute truth all the time are MI5… terrible at counterintelligence as a consequence… But at least they’re honest…

Unbelievable. If the government says jump, you say…?

Antibiotics and other prescription medications are more often prescribed to older folks

But https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6996207/

In this study, we also analyzed antibiotic prescription rates according to age. The highest prevalence rates were observed in patients aged 71 years (80.3%) followed by 4-year-old children (60.7%).

Since 71 year olds wouldn’t show any long term effects, that leaves the four year old group.

as a prescriber, I do warn my patients of the dangers of taking antibiotics willy nilly.

Of course you do, I’ve no doubt you’re very diligent. Because now we know they have serious negative consequences. 40 years ago, however, the people this article is about would have merely been told they were “safe and effective”. That’s exactly the point I’m making.

You now have to take precaution with a medicine because of new information about its safety that wasn’t known at the time it was developed.

Same is true for every other factor mentioned in the report. Human innovation is absolutely suffuce with things we thought were safe and effective at the time, but later turn out to be quite unsafe.

Yet taking this unequivocal fact and applying it to a rational scepticism about new medicines has, since 2020, become ‘misinformation’.

Its the one that coincides with a concern of mine, yes.

Do you comment on absolutely everything regardless of whether it interests you or not?

Are you suggesting that the mere fact of being more interested in some issues than others indicates some kind of unreasonable level of fantisicm?

So “no firm conclusions” means what, in terms of the other comments here?

As far as I can tell, people are understandably a bit troubled, and a bit cross (since some of the proposed causes probably should have been dealt with a lot earlier). They’re maybe hastily jumping to theories about a few likely candidates. Do you blame them?

Or should we just do nothing? Wait, and put all our faith in…? What?

The vast majority of the things mentioned would do us absolutely no harm at all to avoid, or even legislate against as a precaution. So is there a good reason we should wait for “firm” conclusions?

Seemed as good a place as any.

I assume the report wasn’t posted in the spirit of “oh well, nothing we can do about it”. I assume the message was, “let’s try not to let this happen again”.

But maybe im assuming too much basic human compassion.

No, not at all.

I’m pointing out that concern about vaccine safety is legitimate given that many treatments thought “safe and effective” at the time later turn out to have been harmful. The effect antibiotics have on the gut biome being just the latest example.

People concerned about the safety of the drugs they are told to use are not all “lunitic conspiracy theorists” as often branded. Some simply have a completely reasonable caution about the hubris of the medical establishment.