Millions signed up overnight on government's new student debt cancellation portal, but the connection between better policy and voting still has to be made.
On the 30 progressives and the Ukrainian war issue, sorry you aprear to have drunk the moralistic, good-guy/bad-guy, WWII vs. WWI international relations thought-model of international relations, but you might want to look beyond your current world-view before dissing the relatively few reps on the left who dare to counter the group-think on such issues. And then we wonder why the MAGA types get such an audience from those unimpressed by the argument that our interest is in seeing Ukraine bombed to smithereens to be a battleground for a "great-power/tribalistic conflict. I'm sure you get plenty in your in-box, Micah, as do we all, so no need to reply. But if you want to get a sense of where I'm coming from, google my first and last names, and keep up the good work in any case. dee wernette
On this issue I'm with Timothy Snyder, who I'm pretty sure is also a progressive, and who I believe correctly situates the conflict with Russia over Ukraine in the larger conflict between open democratic societies and closed oligarchic ones. I see the alignment between Trumpists (like Tucker Carlson) and Putin, Orban et al as indicative. And yes, I worry about the risk of a nuclear exchange--mostly because of how hair trigger nuclear deterrence is--but, again, per Snyder, I don't think Putin will use nukes, he just wants to scare us into submission by making exaggerated threats.
I appreciate Snyder, who like I studied and published on the Nazi rise, but differ from him on the larger picture here. I think it's a mistake to frame the issue as between open and closed societies/political systems for two reasons. First, I'd suggest, based on Gamson's findings in "The Strategy of Social Protest" (which I worked on), and Gitlin's "The Whole World is Watching" (I was in SDS in the 60s) that the U.S. is hardly open, although it is not a completely closed society either. But in any case, our "open" society/political system has hardly a non-interventionist history - Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Chile, etc. So I see the "competing tribalism" thesis as having much more evidence supporting it than the "open-closed society" thesis. (See Mearsheimer's 2014 YouTube talk on Russia/Ukraine for more on the tribalism aspect, although he also falls into the moralistic, good-guy/bad-guy mindset at times.)
And second, - the macro-picture is that when cross-national boundaries overlap with ethnic boundaries (Germans in -Sudetenland/Czech, Russians in E. Ukraine, how many more?) we're very likely to find cross-national conflicts/war! It's been a long time since I looked at the empirical peace research literature, but I remember reading that the highest factor leading to war between two countries is having a common border. These are my main reasons for applauding and supporting the 30 reps who called into question the emperor's ideological clothes. I'm a now-old, 60s "new-left' radical and been around the block way too many times to look at this from the one-dimensional vantage point of yes/no on nukes or open/closed political systems. Group think and confirmation bias are among our greatest epistemological dangers/weaknesses, so sorry to call you to task on this but them's my 2-cents worth.
Student Debt relief ? I'll believe it when it happens. I read about people who started with $ 30,000 debt, paid off about 20,000 and now owe around 40,000. I am an immigrant and I do not understand why the US made education into something too expensive for many and a dead-albatross around the neck for others. A country that does not believe in its young people is a country that does not believe in its future is a country that is dead already.
On the 30 progressives and the Ukrainian war issue, sorry you aprear to have drunk the moralistic, good-guy/bad-guy, WWII vs. WWI international relations thought-model of international relations, but you might want to look beyond your current world-view before dissing the relatively few reps on the left who dare to counter the group-think on such issues. And then we wonder why the MAGA types get such an audience from those unimpressed by the argument that our interest is in seeing Ukraine bombed to smithereens to be a battleground for a "great-power/tribalistic conflict. I'm sure you get plenty in your in-box, Micah, as do we all, so no need to reply. But if you want to get a sense of where I'm coming from, google my first and last names, and keep up the good work in any case. dee wernette
On this issue I'm with Timothy Snyder, who I'm pretty sure is also a progressive, and who I believe correctly situates the conflict with Russia over Ukraine in the larger conflict between open democratic societies and closed oligarchic ones. I see the alignment between Trumpists (like Tucker Carlson) and Putin, Orban et al as indicative. And yes, I worry about the risk of a nuclear exchange--mostly because of how hair trigger nuclear deterrence is--but, again, per Snyder, I don't think Putin will use nukes, he just wants to scare us into submission by making exaggerated threats.
I appreciate Snyder, who like I studied and published on the Nazi rise, but differ from him on the larger picture here. I think it's a mistake to frame the issue as between open and closed societies/political systems for two reasons. First, I'd suggest, based on Gamson's findings in "The Strategy of Social Protest" (which I worked on), and Gitlin's "The Whole World is Watching" (I was in SDS in the 60s) that the U.S. is hardly open, although it is not a completely closed society either. But in any case, our "open" society/political system has hardly a non-interventionist history - Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Chile, etc. So I see the "competing tribalism" thesis as having much more evidence supporting it than the "open-closed society" thesis. (See Mearsheimer's 2014 YouTube talk on Russia/Ukraine for more on the tribalism aspect, although he also falls into the moralistic, good-guy/bad-guy mindset at times.)
And second, - the macro-picture is that when cross-national boundaries overlap with ethnic boundaries (Germans in -Sudetenland/Czech, Russians in E. Ukraine, how many more?) we're very likely to find cross-national conflicts/war! It's been a long time since I looked at the empirical peace research literature, but I remember reading that the highest factor leading to war between two countries is having a common border. These are my main reasons for applauding and supporting the 30 reps who called into question the emperor's ideological clothes. I'm a now-old, 60s "new-left' radical and been around the block way too many times to look at this from the one-dimensional vantage point of yes/no on nukes or open/closed political systems. Group think and confirmation bias are among our greatest epistemological dangers/weaknesses, so sorry to call you to task on this but them's my 2-cents worth.
Student Debt relief ? I'll believe it when it happens. I read about people who started with $ 30,000 debt, paid off about 20,000 and now owe around 40,000. I am an immigrant and I do not understand why the US made education into something too expensive for many and a dead-albatross around the neck for others. A country that does not believe in its young people is a country that does not believe in its future is a country that is dead already.