Here is our November 2024 election flier. Note that the official state website has not updated our polling location to the Lingelbach School. This will be done by October 25, 2024. Click here to read full-screen or download. Continue reading
I heard a fascinating podcast on my drive to Philly: Ezra Klein talking to Richard Reeves who wrote Of Boys and Men in 2022. It’s perhaps the most detailed / data focused book on the problems of men. I have not read it yet but now will do so soon. The main outlines of the “male malaise” are probably well known to you: boys do worse in school than girls, are less likely to go to college, and less likely to graduate. They are less likely to hold full-time jobs in their 20s or be on career tracks. As Reeves say, they tend to zig-zag more than women. And then there are the psychological issues: Men are less happy, lonelier, more likely to become substance abusers, more likely to commit suicide, and even more likely to die of COVID women. What is not clear to me is the causes… Continue reading
The controversy about the Khelif-Carini fight is, I believe, a terribly missed opportunity for learning something about not just gender and sexuality but about how human practice and thought fits the world. Or at least, that’s my conclusion after reading and thinking a lot about it yesterday and writing down some of my thoughts today. Given that I think I have learned something from some of that thinking, I want to share it here. Four preliminary points First, some of what I Iearned—about the biology of sex differences–comes from a post by the biologist Rebecca R Helm. You should read it. I don’t know much more about those issues so some of what I say can be a misinterpretation of what she wrote. Second, this post is not about the Khelif-Carini case. At the end of it I make some suggestions about general rules for determining when women with an… Continue reading
I hope this is my last long post on the Democratic candidate for president. I’m going to do something here that may surprise some of you. I’m going to make the best argument I can for why I think Biden should step down. And in doing so, I’m going to respond to some of the claims I made the other day against him doing so. I’m doing this for a few reasons. One is that this is how I think. I always look at issues from a number of sides. Another related one is that I’m still remain unsure about what the right path forward is and the only way I’m going to be sure is by making the best case on both sides. And frankly, none of you who have been arguing with me the post has done a very good job of making that case or responding to… Continue reading
In an earlier piece, I argued that the debate about whether Biden should remain the Democratic nominee for President is missing the point. It’s based on the false premise that Biden’s age is why he is not running in front of a deeply flawed Donald Trump whose movement is fascist and whose economic and cultural plans for the US are terrifying. As I pointed out in that piece, there is just no reason to think the Biden’s age is the problem or that replacing him with any of the likely other candidates would make it easier to defeat Trump. Here is a rough, first draft attempt to figure out what the problem is. Look at elections around the developed world, in France, the UK, and the EU. What do you see? It’s not that the left is losing. The Left won in the UK. It’s not that the right is… Continue reading
Since some of you asked, I’m going got to sum up my thoughts about whether Biden should continue as our presidential candidate with links to my earlier posts. The most important point I want to make is that this is not an easy call. So I would simply discount the views of anyone who thinks it’s obvious one way or the other. If they are adamant that he be replaced they either have an agenda or they are ignorant. If they are adamant that he stay they are taking loyalty to someone who has been in most respect been a very good president to an extreme—or they are ignorant. There are a couple of critical questions. First, is Biden demented or incapable of being president. I think the answer to this pretty clear. As I pointed out here https://marcstier.com/blog2/?p=10999 he’s not demented. He had a bad night which, as I… Continue reading
One reason I think Biden has been such a good president. He doesn’t get swept up in the last moment but thinks ahead. He did that in getting out of Afghanistan early. I know many of you disagree but I think his policy in the Israel-Gaza war has been setting the stage for a new push to a peaceful settlement. (If only an Israel government would arise willing to grasp that possibility!) And on domestic policy he has been just brilliant . The way he maneuvered Manchin into support the inflation reduction act was absolutely and totally masterful, not just as a matter of political strategy but in adopting a very different policy strategy that Manchin would accept. He challenged his policy people to figure out a way to attack climate change with tax credit carrots instead of regulatory sticks in the IRA. By doing that he won over Manchin.… Continue reading
Is it really going to be hard to convince people leaning to our side to vote? Here are eight lines of argument. 1. Tump’s threat to democracy. 2. Trump’s threat to abortion and other basic rights including to contraception. 3. Trump’s embrace of deep tax cuts for the rich. 4. Trump’s promise to repeal the ACA. 5. Trump’s threat to social security if he keeps deepening deficits through tax cuts. 6. Trump’s threat to student debt relief and Republican efforts to block of the student debt relief Biden promised. 7. Trump demanded that Republicans blocked their own immigration reform bill because Trump demanded it. 8. Trump’s threat to our climate and the earth as a whole. I know how deeply entrenched the Trump movement is and how insane the Republicans are. But it’s still hard for me to believe that these 8 lines of argument aren’t enough to give Democrats… Continue reading
Next time you are in a conversation at a meeting, listen to how other people talk. Very few people talk in complete sentences and coherent paragraphs. Most of us start sentences, double back, often get a bit lost in the middle and then find our way to the end. We stumble over words. And our sentences don’t track in full paragraphs. Some of us, especially if we have had experience public speaking can do better. I can do pretty well most of the time, unless I’m a little tired and then it is really hard. Even Obama was not perfect much of the time. (You know who was perfect? Paul Warnke, the foreign policy specialist in the 70s and 80s. He spoke slowly and deliberately in complete paragraphs. And G.D.H. Cole, the British Socialist. That’s about the only two I’ve ever seen or heard who could do that.) Biden is… Continue reading
Part I: Why it’s so hard to debate a gaslighting moron. I was on the debate team in high school. (I know, you are shocked!) And I was pretty successful in my first varsity year as a junior. I left high school so I never had a second year, but my former teammates were extremely successful that year. The hardest debates I had were not with the well prepared teams that made sensible, plausible arguments. I knew how to question and rebut them. Sometimes we couldn’t quite overcome them. Far more often we did. The really hard debates were the ones with teams who had no idea what they were doing. They would put forward a number of seemingly random, outlandish ideas backed not by reasons evidence but by absurd notions and false claims they pulled out of the air. Sometimes debaters who did this actually had a nice speaking… Continue reading