NEWS FLASH: Paul Krugman is Finally Worried About America
NY Times Columnist and Nobel Laureate in Economics Paul Krugman has an article in today’s New York Times entitled, “Why I Am Now Deeply Worried For America.”
What took him so long?
The cause of his dismay is that so many Americans are now saying that Joe Biden should step down because he is losing it in terms of his mental capacity…..which is, of course, complete bullshit. Krugman says that he knows Biden and speaks with him privately, and that there is is nothing wrong with Biden’s brain.
Most of us have never met Joe Biden, and most of us never will, but we think we have because we see Joe Biden all the time. Most of us have never met Donald Trump, and mot of us never will, but we think we have because we see Donald Trump all the time.
Who would you rather have dinner with? Joe Biden or Donald Trump? Who would you rather leave alone with your sixteen year old daughter? Who would you rather have in charge of that briefcase that contans the nuclear codes that could set off a nuclear war?
Well, if you aren’t completely insane, your answers would be Joe Biden, Joe Biden and Joe Biden but our collective mass media are painting a picture of Joe Biden as a befuddled old man and we are letting them get away wit it.
The Democratic party is absolutely incompetent when it comes to advertising and public relations….but the Republications are past masters of those skills.
Let’s face facts: Major corporations control mass media in the United States, not because they own the means of production (although, of course, all major media outlets are owned by major corporations) but rather because major corporations control the advertising budgets that support all mainstream media….and Republicans control the vast majority of advertisers whose dollars keep television, radio, cable, and print communications outlets afloat.
Notice that I called them communications outlets, not news organizations,. That because the garbage they produce and publish bears only the slightest resemblance to the actual facts.
Even worse, a majority of Americans are no longer capable of understanding the increasing complexity of the “news” these communications outlets produce because the American educational system is in a shambles precisely because of the Republican party’s largely successful effort to dismantle high quality free public education in the United States, working at the state and local levels to re-write public school curricula to lower the bar so that everyone can think that everyone is getting an education.
But, in his article, Krugman makes a serious blunder: He cites no authoritative evidence that a majority of Americans are concerned about Joe Biden’s mental acuity. That’s an assertion based on anecdotal evidence rather than statistical data.
Oh, sure, there are polls indicating that there are a lot of people who are worried about Joe Biden’s mental state….but those polls are bullshit. They are bullshit, first of all, because they were designed to ask that question. If I ask you if you think that Donald Trump is a rude son of a bitch, you would probably say, “Yeah, sure,” even if you are wearing your MAGA Hat (because that’s one of the things that the Maga Maggots like about Trump) but the chances are that you weren’t sitting there worrying about Donald Trump’s rudeness before I asked you the question.
The same is true about Joe Biden. Americans aren’t sitting around thinking that Joe Biden should resign because he’s senile…until you ask that question in a poll.
Therefore, any poll that is specifically designed to ask that particular questi0n is invalid before the results are even tabulated.
This is a classic case of confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out, interpret, and favor information that supports one’s prior beliefs or values…but it is difficult to argue against because, as Paul Krugman points out, Joe Biden has struggled against stuttering throughout his life.
When you are a stutterer (and I was one once), you are taught to pause before you speak and to mentally rehearse the words you are about to speak before you say them. Unfortunately, this technique only works for sentence fragments, not for whole sentences or long, complicated paragraphs of thoughts. That’s why rehearsing an entire speech doesn’t improve the speaker’s performance.
Instead of telling his readers that Joe Biden is in trouble because more and more Americans are thinking that he’s too old for the job (despite being in better health, both physically and mentally, than Donald Trump, Paul Krugman should have spent some of his precious space on the New York Times homepage explaining exactly how Joe Biden has so successfully combatted his stuttering problem throughout his life.
Unfortunately, most of what you read about how to treat stuttering and stammering – which are really the same thing – is wrong. For example, a search on the internet will turn up articles that suggest that you should slow down your speech and to notice when you are stuttering.
Noticing when you are stuttering makes the stuttering worse, not better. Slowing down your speech doesn’t help either because the process of stuttering is actually something your brain does to speed up your speech to match the speed of your thoughts. The trick that I was taught was to so slow down YOUR THOUGHTS by thinking them through before you speak them, which, come to think of it, is good advice for anyone who wants to avoid verbal blunders in order to be understood.
The relative slowness with which Joe Biden speaks has nothing to do with a loss of mental acuity. It is actually the exact opposite because thinking before you speak (a practice that Donald Trump clearly doesn’t practice) makes you seem dumb but helps you to talk smart.
Joe Biden thinks in paragraphs, but he speaks in sentence fragments quite deliberately because that’s what works for him. Donald Trump is the exact opposite. He thinks in sentence fragments that, once they are put together, make little or no sense. Joe Biden thinks about what he’s saying. Donald Trump talks about what he thinks.
In order to listen to Joe Biden, you have to listen with your own intelligence engaged. In order to listen to Donald Trump, you have to be stupid enough to accept his stupidities.
02/14/2024 @ 6:26 am
I read Krugman’s column, and I agree with it, but I don’t think he means to say that he hasn’t worried before. I think he means that we ( American voters) could be preparing to make a big decision on bad reasoning. Preparing. That decision won’t come until November, and serious focus on it, as usual, begins when Summer vacations end, after Labor Day.
Until then, the US has an ever improving economy, and the best economy in the world. While that economy is improving, while Hunter Biden has not demonstrated that the Biden’s are a family of criminals, a panoply of challenges hang over Donald Trump, and the GOP. The Democratic Party’s counterpart has cast its lot with Donald Trump. The GOP is being crushed in raising funds, and the Trumps are taking control over that weakened GOP as his family metastasizes over the GOP’s control. (Lara Trump will be the co-chair). The Democratic Party won another special election last night, closing the gap in the House. The fund raising advantage helped.
While the GOP besmirches Biden on his age, you know what they are not doing? They are not claiming victories in races. They are not leading the money race. They are not making gains in anything that will matter in an election. Who is incompetent?
Not convinced? Last night in Arizona, Keri Lake, a Trump acolyte was booed by a convention of GOP voters. Lake, of course, is an election denier. Arizona GOP voters know that election deniers lose, and they don’t want to go through that again, but Trump, controlling the party, has forced her on them. Trump is driving the party to accept candidates that it does not want. In that election will be Kyrsten Cinema, and a Democrat. Cinema is now an Independent. Opposition to the Democrat will likely be split because of this. Trump’s demented ego is forcing this situation. Which party is incompetent?
And back on funding again, as Trump gains greater control of the party apparatus, he is also siphoning away funds for his increasing legal jeopardy. Once his trials begin, his spending goes up. The GOP must fund that. This will happen entirely in the real world of criminal and civil courts. It would not serve the Democratic Party one whit to spend anything on this while it is happening. And this will all happen before the serious focus begins on the Presidential election. The Democrats have a healthy lead, and a successful candidate. The GOP has a corrupted organization facing its greatest structural issues in its history. Which party is incompetent? I address this as a zero sum game because it is.
Finally, if the voters fail to notice or care about these issues, and choose for diaper wearing Donald Trump, then this country actually ceased to exist already. The election will be a lagging indicator. At this point it makes no sense to worry about it. The change has either already happened, or it is not going to happen. With the economy functioning as it is, the party fundraising functioning as it is, and special election victory streak being maintained, everything that should be done is being done. Steady as she goes!
02/14/2024 @ 1:57 pm
Bill, I agree with everything you wrote….but who else is hearing you? While many rank and file Republicans – and quite a few of their leaders – are fed up to the bursting point with the Trumps, much of this disgruntlement is not getting through to the Maga Republicans who are quite willing to go down with the sinking ship because they believe they are backing their savior.
The Trumps and the Republicans have their own communications outlets that are presenting a completely different picture of reality to their audiences….and they are hearing a very different story from the one we are telling.
It’s my opinion that we have to keep pounding away, saturating the media with our story, not to convince the Maga Maggots, but to make sure that “none of the above” doesn’t fuck up the whole process. Morons like JFK Jr have to be canceled out because third-party candidates changed the outcomes of the elections of 2000 and 2016 against us, when Ralph Nader put George Bush into the White House and Jill Stein helped Trump over the finish line.
02/14/2024 @ 7:56 am
Just two things.
Lots of people don’t pay all that much attention to politics. They don’t follow every day as we do. Most of my friends will vote for Biden in November, but are not reading op eds or watching MSNBC. My students follow specific issues, i.e. climate change and Gaza, but most of them will vote for Biden in November. They’re learning, same as we did, that elections rarely offer a perfect choice. We’re going to hear hand wringing like Krugman’s for months, and the pitch will only increase. We can count on Trump to spout some new mean awful twisted thing each and every day. We can give him our precious attention and feel miserable, or not. F*ck him.
I’m going to be seventy this summer and I refuse to spend my last chapter contorted in political agony. I want to relish things I love, beauty, nature, making art, my purple chair and a good book, conversations with people I love. An eighty-something woman in one of my Haystack sessions said a great day was when she ate something delicious, had a good beer and a bm. At the time, I thought she was old. Now though, you and I both know she was right. It’s about relishing those small things.
tl;dnr today began at 5 a.m. with a thermos of fragrant assam tea and cranberry toast from the local bakery. I’m going to log off now and draw frog belly until lunch.
P.S. Margaret Renkl also writes op eds for NYTimes. I never miss one. Maybe check her out, you’ll see why 🙂
02/14/2024 @ 8:09 am
Just now saw Bitey had responded, much better than I did. Maybe he should write op eds for the NYT. I am tired of reading the same daily doom and gloom there.
I agree with everything Bitey said, and especially with the last paragraph, that if the country elects Trump, then democracy has been dead for awhile.
One of my colleagues is Russian, lived here for the last ten or so years. “You will get used to it, Suzanne,” he told me in the elevator with a smile.
02/14/2024 @ 2:01 pm
I don’t want to get used to it. The Palestinian situation has driven a wedge between the far left and the mainstream Democratic party, and that far left includes a lot of younger people who don’t really understand what’s going on in Israel, or don’t care. The rising tide of antisemitism is a symptom of an impending schism in the Democratic party that I never thought I would see…but more and more people are beginning to believe the ancient lies about the Jews…and that doesn’t make me very happy at all.
02/14/2024 @ 3:08 pm
I didn’t say I’d gotten used to it Alan. I said my Russian colleague had. He got wired that way. I have the luxury of taking care of my aging soul. Consuming too much alarming media bait will kill faster than cigarettes or hot dogs. If we let Trump, maga, et. al. make us crazy, they’ll be delighted. I refuse to give them the win.
Re: college kids. How many do you talk with Alan? I talk with lots, and they are not turning into mobs of antisemites, despite whatever you read. They are the same as we were at their age, naively believing in peace during a bloody war. They hate needless death, as all humans should, and thousands upon thousands of Gazan innocents have suffered needless deaths, while the rest are starving and homeless. That doesn’t mean that liberal bleeding hearts suddenly begin to hate Jews. Thems that do, always did; they weren’t bleeding heart liberals to begin with.
P.S. I won’t be getting into an argument, in case you were wanting to build one. Reason is, well, see my earlier comment. Frog toes won’t draw themselves, and that’s what I’d rather do.
02/17/2024 @ 10:07 pm
A sane aggregate would consider inclusion of a Jeopardy-like contest proofing our Presidential debate. Right now I am bingeing John Wayne’s Iowa Jima … (six below freezing here in Roosevelt’s Rust Belt … oh yeah just like an old time movie …) with the supposition that today Marshall McLuhan would say Medium is the Meme not the Massage. Also, I am thoroughly chagrined to see that Herbert Marcuse published something like three dozen books in addition to One Dimensional Man. Yeah sure I’ve got friends in low places, and must conclude with a supposition that our Silicon Sisters and Brothers ought simulcast our champion A. robotics I. focused upon world peace. Right now John Wayne is in the kitchen and tending a beautiful lady friend and her baby who’s mobile boxing in his crib … learning to love … ‘mellow in my old age’ John Stryker said. Which inspires me to focus on my Santiago Sound thesis. Maybe ‘Amazon’ Bernie Sanders’ ‘Its Ok to be Angry about Capitalism’ {LO;} Or (first of all I am a free man) maybe don my San Jose Sharks cap and find out where the music and near beers karaoke. Hey now that it’s dunn I don’t need to remind you that it’s 9hrs and 3 minutes until sunlight.
02/18/2024 @ 11:56 pm
I’m glad to hear about the ins and outs of stuttering, and I’m glad that Biden’s approach is sensible.
You’re right about the question influencing the answer. My primary major was sociology, and we were taught to go through any lengths possible to get bias out of survey research because bias affects validity but, as you pointed out in another recent post, people now aren’t likely to understand concepts like validity.
While I agree that Democrats can’t communicate to voters worth a damn, and I’ve thought that for years, I listen to what Bitey says and so much of the indicators he points to are substantive. Seats are changing to the party the President belongs to. The Republicans are having fundraising/money problems. The Republicans are booing each other. Trump is going to suck more money out of the party with his legal troubles. That’s not wishful thinking, it’s accurate reporting. That doesn’t mean the next election is a fair accompli, but it does say there are reasons for optimism.
Suzanne,
I’m not concerned about the character of the kids. I’m concerned about what they don’t know, and I’m concerned about the Israelis being at least as bad at public communications as the Democrats are. The kids are being fed narratives with all sorts of myths. When it comes to the subject matter, they’re frighteningly uneducated. They follow Gaza but they don’t have a clue what they’re seeing and they really don’t have a clue how we got there. I don’t know what to do about that. I do know where it leads, including on campuses, and from where I sit it’s scary as Hell.
04/07/2024 @ 4:45 pm
‘Lil bit funny
As time
‘tis not
money