Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Ailes:
Don’t wander into that nymag article vyshka links if you have a weak stomach. It’s graphic enough to sicken pretty much anyone. Good fucking grief.
They probably could have titled it “50 Shades of Pale Ailes”
I dunno… that’s not so much “Mad Men”-era sexual harassment as it is straight-up serial rape. Not a subject many will have a sense of humor about.
Does she have any legal recourse? It is disgusting to think he will get away with that
Obama’s legacy to me is avoiding the 2nd Great Depression (which I truly believe would have happened if Obama hadn’t been in charge- the 2008 financial stuff was that scary- enough that I chose to move away from my economics degree because of it), the CFPB (I think this is criminally underrated- it’s done a lot of good), the ACA (a mixed bag, but a start), gay marriage and the beginning of the trans equality movement (I think this was accidental, but Obama’s on the right side of history here), combined with passivity on foreign affairs (which was understandable given how bad Bush Jr bungled it), and the beginnings of a new era of societal tension (which I think was inevitable thanks to the rise of cable news and internet bubbles).
Overall, his legacy is going to be decent at worst, and near-great at best- much depends on how bad Obama’s foreign policy missteps truly are and how the winners write history.
Yeah, this is a hard argument to really make on concrete facts though, as it involves a huge amount of speculation regarding extremely complex economic forces.
Like automotive companies and banks going tits up. And then either a supply chain getting fucked from the ground up. Or banks defaulting. Weird vague things like that.
That’s the thing about preventing bad things from happening-if they don’t happen then there’s nothing to get credit for. A person who assassinated Adolf Hitler in 1924 in some alternate universe would hardly even rate a footnote in today’s history books. If you’re really in it for the fame and glory then you’re better off allowing the bad thing to happen and then ride in and save the day.
That the stimulus averted a Depression-level catastrophe is the analytical conclusion of most economists, though. It is perhaps not as settled a scientific view as, say, evolution or global warming, but it’s a lot more concrete than “a huge amount of speculation.” There’s plenty of argument to be had over Obama’s role, the role others might have played, and the hypothetical of what a McCain presidency would have looked like, but arguing about that is like arguing what it would have been like if the other guy (Breckinridge) had beaten Lincoln in 1860. Obama supported policies that directly contributed to saving the economy from a much worse fate. More could probably have been done (though it’s not clear Obama himself could have gotten more to happen through a reluctant Congress).
You have evidence to back up your assertion here, showing that most economists think this?
Or do you have evidence that certain economists believe this to be the case?
Because those are two very different things.
Well that because the study of economics is not a hard science. You can’t hold economics to a hard science standard. It’s social science, and you can’t take the economy at micro or macro level and just experiment with it. You’ll never find the hard kind of evidence you’re looking for to support or dispel your personal beliefs if that is what you think is required.
I should add if someone is speaking with a huge degree of certainty on something like that, they’re more than likely functioning as a politician than an economist.
You can always skew the distinction between these points by broadening your definition of “economists”. The more vaguely you ask the question, the more likely the response is to be colored by tribal affiliations. But the reality is that there was broad agreement that we were headed for a second Great Depression prior to the stimulus and there is now near-unanimous agreement that the stimulus had a positive effect on unemployment and was worth the cost.
You can’t do these things with evolution or climate change either. All you can do is micro experiments to prove principles, jump on the occasional natural experiment, and create massive simulations to examine possible futures. The point is that science can proceed without perfectly-controlled experiments and closed-form mathematical solutions, and it does that through reaching near-consensus among experts.
Climate change and evolution are not considered social sciences.
I never claimed they were.
If you know they are not social sciences, then you should know why it doesn’t make sense to compare their methods to a social science like Economics. It makes absolutely no sense for you to do that comparison at all.
Did you read what I said? Your complaints about the inability to do experiments in economics apply equally well to evolution and climate change. You can’t do direct experiments in those fields, the best you can do is micro-experiments (which are possible in econ, also), and simulations based on those micro-experiments. But the full system is far more complex than that and so making actual predictions is really hard to do, except under idealized conditions or when predicting extremely high-level aggregates with big time windows.
To clarify why this applies: economists will argue over details non-stop because there is no good way to prove their predictions and no running the experiment again. They do, however, tend to agree about large-scale effects, just like scientists agree that species evolve or that the earth is being warmed because of human actions. One of those large-scale effects is that the stimulus was necessary and effective.
Yeah, that constitutes some evidence, more than I would have expected.
Yeah I read what you said. It doesn’t sound like your experience in either field you’re talking about though.
Let’s take carbon dating for example. We obviously can’t fast forward a 1,000 years and read an experiment, but you can certainly come up with a methodology and test or simulate what would happen within a certain degree of certainty right? That’s how we do a lot of things in science, at a basic level, come up with a reasonable test and simulate timed results.
Social sciences don’t work that way. You can’t isolate a single period of time, pick out one piece of what occurred at that time and try and come up with some sort of calculation based on math to predict would could have happened. Economist aren’t even that great at predicting say more than 6 mos out very often. Even the most sound simulations often can’t account for something like a hurricane Katrina or Sandy or just basically natural disasters. Hell the insurance companies aren’t that great at calculating those and that’s the business their in. They adjust for some reasonable amount of uncertainty, but the big ones nothing really accounts for.
So for you to say hey, these other hard sciences can’t simulate anything perfectly either and look at what they can do… when you’re referencing a social science just signifies that you’re trying to compare an apple to an orange by shaping the orange into an apple and then say here… what’s the problem… they’re not similar enough to compare. Hell they’re not even two fruits with your comparison, certainly not two apples.
It’s a terrible example. A true economists isn’t going to point out that if you take this tiny piece out of the equation then there this beautiful explanation is available to support this guy’s theory or this gal’s agenda because, this is what you would have had, although there are plenty of politicians and agendas that do that.