That's violent misogyny, not a bad experience with affirmative action.

Tomato, tomato.

Really, misogyny is the thing holding it together.

I was coming in to say what Moby said. "A bad experience with affirmative action" sounds like someone who lost a job opportunity because it was being given to a less qualified woman or minority. This is a guy who couldn't keep from acting out aggressively when faced with women or minorities in the workplace.

The hidden downside of openly wishing death on management at your job. There's no way someone could have known that was a problem back in the 80s.

I keep thinking of that Stormfront kid who was coaxed out of the movement by the consistent kindness of the Jewish kids at his college. All I can think is "that doesn't scale. We do not have the capacity for that much emotional labor for all the assholes." I mean, I don't have capacity for even a little emotional labor for assholes, but even the good people couldn't do that now. People sour so quickly, especially with online radicalization, but it is such work to bring them back.

Any solution that doesn't deal with the source of propaganda - and I don't think it's Trump so much as Russia plus Fox - is just moving deck chairs around on the Titanic.

Completely agree.

And the online platforms.

Just because everyone is going to die doesn't mean we can't put our chairs in the right place first.

10: Excessively pessimistic! 38% of the passengers on the Titanic survived.

But the crew is in charge of the chair placement. Only 24% of them survived.

I just listened to a podcast on the Killdozer guy. Feels like 1970's grievance politics, probably because of the baroque use of technology, but it was 2004. Was there a thread on him at the time?

Anyway, people are paying for propaganda that tells violent, disaffected white nationalists and misogynists that what is rightfully their was stolen from them by minorities, women, and liberals. They are doing this deliberately to win political power because they know it could very well work.

All I can think is "that doesn't scale.

Me too.

There's only one the apostropher.

The scrap of the article cited was pretty East Coast-centric. A big chunk of the insurrectionism comes from the underpopulated, mostly white West (Alaska, E Oregon and E Washington down to Wyoming and over to the Dakotas. Taking the NYC fiirefighter as typical strikes me as far off. The westerners are probably mostly racist and they may blame POC for problems they're having, but few of them have the firefighter's long-term single-minded obsession on affirmative action .

And it gets old blaming EVERYTHING on racism after Obama was re-elected twice. That was the knee-jerk Hillary excuse the day after the election (along with Comey and Putin). Obama's response to the 2008 crash saved the perps in finance but gave everyone else the longest and deepest recession since 1938 or so. EWhether or not people give this as their reason, that kind of thing has its effect.

Lots of people can make more Jewish kids, but letting all the Stormfront members into college seems like a bad idea.

It's probably simplest just to have enough liberal people move to the Dakotas and Wyoming to flip their senate seat.

Great project for a billionaire. How do you keep conservatives from moving to Pritzkerville? There are only charter schools and they all teach the homosexual agenda?

19 We're currently running that experiment over in the Gallatin. The dominionist assholes are running the opposite experiment up in the Flathead.

I went to school with the director of South Dakota's state housing agency.

Because you'd have to house many tens of thousands of new residents.

One thing about the unpopulated states is that they're cheap to buy. How much does a Wyoming Senate election cost compared to a California Senate election? Rotten boroughs.

It's more or less true in the East too. Delaware, Rhode Island, Maine, NH, can provide convenient political protection for interest groups. And probably Hawaii.

And yeah, Vermont.

Oil did produce a demographic shift in ND. Oil workers were not like the usual ND types. didn't improve things politically, but they ruined my joke about ND as a paradise WRT longevity, HS education rate, poverty rate, crime rate, etc.

I paired this article with reading about Hitler's rise to power a few days ago. I suppose it yielded insight but that also seems like rearranging deck chairs. IIRC Gellman notably doesn't end with a call to action and itemized list of tasks for readers, just rage at Biden and a certain implicit fatalism. That definitely seemed like a symptom of something.

How fatalistic is everyone feeling? A lot? A whole lot?

I suppose grammatically that should be "how much fatalism is everyone feeling? A lot?" etc.

How do Sinema and Manchin feel about legislative solutions? If I'm following correctly, that means weakening filibuster, maybe just for this kind of legislation, following McConnel's precedent for supreme court noms.
Sinema's a greedy opportunist, right? In principle can be bought off?
I went to wikipedia for current status, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Voting_Rights_Act

Is there less ambitious legislation that would preserve status quo ante?

How fatalistic is everyone feeling? A lot? A whole lot?

Not all that fatalistic, really. Not because it can't get a lot worse; it can and may. But it's been a whole lot worse in my lifetime than it is now, and was a lot worse yet for much of US history, and I just don't see the project of rolling back the clock being very successful long term. They're angry reactionaries because they see, correctly, that the culture has moved pretty definitively and they're not getting 1953 back.

They can get the arresting political opponents part of 1953 back, that's coming next if they win, as well as more robust physical intimidation. Also less public health and less public education, both secondary and tertiary. A little of that and they keep power for decades.

29: That sounds reasonably fatalistic, but not pessimistic. I'm trying more to get a sense of how much or little control people feel over the election outcome, the possibility of victorious opposition, that sort of thing. (I know people have a range of views on how good or bad the future is likely to get for them personally, for the whole country, for the most vulnerable people, and so on, but I'm less clear on how those views motivate people to action or inaction.)

I have been feeling completely fatalistic for the last few months -- the right is going to solidify undemocratic control over the federal government, and I don't have any clear idea of how that ends. I am ashamed of myself that I'm not more immediately emotionally disturbed by this. Instead I just feel kind of numb about it.

26/27:
Pessimism: belief in the likelihood of bad outcomes.

Fatalism: belief in inability to influence or control outcomes. Particularly my own inability or that of people like me.

The distinction isn't huge but I still think it's meaningful. Obviously, in this sense a lot of fatalism is normal and logical. National politics is big and our institutions are very slow to change, etc. But on the other hand democracy requires that people should be able to influence government policy; fatalism implies a failure of democracy. The percentages below are calibrated for fatalism where 0 is the amount possessed by the producers of "How a Bill Becomes a Law" and 100 is the amount possessed by a sane person in 1984. Finally, I'm not sure how much fatalism is a matter of a rational assessment of what's going on and how much it increases naturally with age. I don't believe people get more conservative (as in, more right-wing politically) as they age, but the idea that they get more fatalistic sounds more logical to me. So anyways, some numbers for my mental state:

August 2016: 50 percent pessimistic, 50 percent fatalistic.

February 2017: 80 percent pessimistic, 70 percent fatalistic.

December 2020: 70 percent pessimistic, 75 percent fatalistic.

Jan. 10, 2021: 75 percent pessimistic, 80 percent fatalistic.

Today... I don't know, 80/90? 70/85? It doesn't look good, but we passed several points where this could have gone worse and they didn't, so that's good. I think progress will have more to do with demographic trends and luck than with hard work or good choices by people who agree with me though.

The hard core Trumpies are about 10% and the hard core Republicans maybe 30%. But a big part of the 70% is sort of inert, and the politically active part of the 70% is not united.

And of course, the lesson from this is that the Sanders people should do what they're told and shut up, not that the Clinton people should back off.

28 Smart and motivated people are trying every trick in the book to get Manchin/Sinema on board. They have agency, though, and have their own reasons for allowing the administration's agenda to flounder, at least in part. People who are mad at Biden because they won't fall in line are dumb, but then a whole lot of people are dumb, and we have to get the votes of plenty of dumb people too in order to win.

I'm feeling a lot of fatalism, I guess, because I think the voters are going to fuck us in the House. Senate is an ok map, but we still need ordinary people on Pennsylvania to do whatever they have to do to register, despite obstacles, and then actually show up and vote. Ditto Wisconsin. And if people don't think preventing fascism is a good enough reason to vote, well, congratulations, you can have the fascism you couldn't be bothered to prevent.

29, 32 and 35 are particularly resonant for me. I think we may be getting more of 1953 back than DaveLHI supposes, though. The "arc of the moral universe" and the "liberal ratchet of history" are busted in profound ways. I mean, the Supreme Court can't bring itself to laugh the crazy Texas abortion law out of court. We are in for some grim times.

Lithwick has it right, I think, that we're not going back to pre-Roe, even if we're not going to enact the literal Handmaid's Tale.

Charley offers this:

And if people don't think preventing fascism is a good enough reason to vote, well, congratulations, you can have the fascism you couldn't be bothered to prevent.

I think it has been amply demonstrated that antifascism is an insufficient motivator in our sort-of-democratic country.

I always used to wonder why the opposition couldn't unite against a guy like, for example, Putin. I get it now. How could authoritarians thrive in countries that practice some of the key elements of democracy? I get it now.

I'm tremendously disappointed in the mainstream media. I genuinely thought an actual fucking coup attempt would get more media coverage than the FBI finding new copies of emails that they'd already read and weren't illegal in the first place, but no the NYTimes has different priorities.

36.2 It has always been crystal clear to me that 'return to the states' was going to be a bait and switch. As soon as the Republicans have a trifecta, they'll pass a federal law criminalizing abortion nationwide. (And in the interim period when there's a patchwork, it'll be obvious that there's an interstate market for abortion services.) And without Roe and the filibuster, this will be so easy that they won't politically be able to avoid doing it even if they wanted to. Which they don't.

35: I'm annoyed with Biden for things that he has more control over - like using COVID recovery money to make rapid Covid tests cheap and easily obtained rather than requiring insurance reimbursement, or standards for masks for consumers or OSHA standards for healthcare workers and people in high risk occupations like meatpAcking requiring adequate PPE and even improved ventilation.

Yeah - that's when I realized it was all over -- when the media couldn't work up any sincere concern about the end of democracy. Jamelle Bouie has been very good on all of this, within the confines of NYT commentary -- so he can't criticize the media itself. But here he is now, proposing optimistically that some unspecified deus ex machina can turn it all around.

For as much as there are patterns and precedents, for as much as the past can be a guide to the future, it is also true that history turns on a dime, that something might happen -- a crisis or a conflict or something else entirely -- that sweeps the pieces from the board and begins the game anew.

I do not know how we get from the current morass to a healthy, robust democracy. But whatever force or event that brings us there, I do not think we'll be able to see it in advance.

There will be real surprises, no doubt. But when Bouie says that in 1928, nobody could imagine what would happen in the next 20 years, that's not as comforting as he seems to think.

37 NYT has shown their colors repeatedly, and I'm surprised if anyone is surprised. The interesting counterfactual is what would they have done if Gov. Cuomo rather than Gov. Clinton had been the 1992 nominee. How much is class and how much is culture? My guess is that it would've been the same, but maybe not?

As soon as the Republicans have a trifecta, they'll pass a federal law criminalizing abortion nationwide.

And if Congress doesn't act, I'm not sure I understand what would keep the court from doing so. You can see the court laying the groundwork to declare that zygotes are constitutionally protected citizens.

41: My guess is that Cuomo would have been set upon relentlessly by the press and loses. In 1992, Clinton flattered the media's desire to get inside the heads of the common clay of the New West. (But yeah, who knows?)

38 gets it exactly right, but somewhere in there a whole lot of people who thought they were voting for leopards to eat other people's faces start getting rude awakenings. That seems already to be happening to John Roberts, which would be fun to watch if the causes weren't so appalling.

It's more or less true in the East too. Delaware, Rhode Island, Maine, NH, can provide convenient political protection for interest groups.

The libertarians already did this, moving en mass (~10,000 to 20,000 of them) to New Hampshire. They haven't captured a Senate seat yet, but they got the State Legislature.

I keep thinking that it has to matter that Republicans are getting COVID and dying in droves. And that it also has to matter that all the Trump resistance groups (Sister District, Swing Left, Indivisible, etc) are now up and running. No, I do not think they're going dormant with Biden in the White House.

Also, Trump still destroys everything he touches and that has to drag down the Republican party as well. All the infighting and mixed messaging on voting and shit. I love love love that Trump is (appropriately) afraid of De Santis running in 2024.

I'm not convinced Republicans are the invincible machines in 2022 that everyone says. That said, I sure wish the Dems would do some popular stuff and then talk about it a lot.

Newsom is saying that CA is going to use the same bounty method for guns that the Texas abortion law does and I've never had a good feeling for Newsom, but he could win me over by showing some actual fight against Republicans.

I'd feel better if he went to a barber and said, "make me look like less of an 80s movie villain," but that's not the kind of thing I'll say publicly.

45: But they had a basically limitless supply of massholes nearby.

Newsom? Governor Fingerguns with his slicked back hair? I know. He just looks like such a tool.

You can't go to a barber and say "make me look like less of a tool" because they have barber friends and it will get back to the barber you use now.

Okay, fifty comments and the OP article is in the Atlantic, so dragging the Atlantic is on-topic:

There is an article about "why Real Americans don't care about Covid" or something similar that you can surely find by navigating to The Atlantic dot com or by, you know, opening Twitter. A commentator wonders why these pieces get published: "I have never seen evidence it makes money." Is there an answer?

(My only take is that there's tremendous wishful thinking involved in this particular case. Covid not a problem? SOUNDS FUCKING AMAZING, sign me up.)

They're going to try to recapture the high of the butt-chugging article.

I am not at all optimistic about the Democratic Party's chances in 2022. I really hope I am wrong.

51: I don't know much about the history of the Atlantic as a business, but these publications, in their modern incarnation, aren't really meant to make money. They are prestige vehicles, and people who can afford to cover losses to pay for prestige aren't like you and me. Wikipedia provides a list of editors, including the last four:

Michael Kelly, 1999-2003
Cullen Murphy, 2003-2006 (interim editor, never named editor-in-chief)
James Bennet, 2006-2016
Jeffrey Goldberg, 2016-present

I don't know anything about Murphy, but the other three are well-known assholes. They aren't the worst people in the world, but in the interest of open-mindedness -- and again, prestige -- they are occasionally willing to provide a platform to the worst people in the world.

54 is correct, and the article mentioned in 51 is a garbage take. I don't know why the Atlantic does this shit -- maybe hate clicks are as good as regular clicks, maybe it's the same reason for Bret Stephens -- but prestige media featuring bad faith is just demonstrably bad for civilization. Isn't that part of how Rome fell?

I thought it was German's bearing gifts. Or something.

Moby: I was told there would be no Latin on the exam.

The incorrect apostrophe is in memory of the legions lost in the Teutoburg Forest.

Are Manchin and Sinema forcing the Biden administration to restart student loan payments? This is such a stupid own goal, one of several by Biden.

58: The real gifts are the Teutons who massacred your legion along the way.

Making sure the young are miserable is really the only thing that keeps people going.

Look, the young aren't just going to immisserate themselves.

We overestimate the degree to which the culture has shifted in a way that's meaningful and protected against regression. Historically, there are tons of examples of societies that have gone from open and decent towards closed and cruel. It that unfolds here, and I think there's every reason to think it does, its probably by means of a the plausibly emerging communitarian solidarity being fractured by the difficulty of obtaining the needs of life under the corrupt oligarchy; exemplary physical violence and legal sanction meted out on those that resist or are just unlucky; ceaseless infighting in the political coalition caused by the structural inability to use the political system to achieve our goals.

Everything will become more fraught if and as scarcity becomes more common as the environment degrades and the hollow consumer economy crumbles. It might be somewhat to the good if it actually prompted a popular revolt against the wealthy, but in America, white racial solidarity seems more likely.

Maybe it's some protection that the white people most eager for white racial solidarity have gone so far out of their way to make white identity as negatively defined as possible.

We've gone from "white people are developed advanced science and this great culture" to wherever we are now.

59 Yeah, I don't understand what they're doing on that. There has to be legislation, I'm pretty sure (on the tax side even if not on the collection side), and maybe loan cancellation polls weakly in West Virginia?

65. They don't even believe in the advanced science any more.

They believe the scientists are trying to kill them.

Are they?

Not yet.

The media (and a lot of liberals) continue to be unwilling to discuss what's actually going on in this country. Liberals accuse Rand Paul of hypocrisy for suddenly seeing a need for federal disaster relief. It's like they never spent three seconds thinking about the principles Rand Paul espouses. But his constituents get it.

We're seeing a lot of glee about the Fox News texts to Meadows begging him to intervene to get Trump to call off the insurrection. Ingraham, Hannity and Don Jr. are getting called out for being hypocrites, but that's not true at all: They made a mistake, and now they realize that Trump was right. Autogolpe was the winning play, and with the benefit of hindsight, the dissenters have fallen in line behind him.

The first step in recovery is admitting the problem. We're not there yet.

You mean, Moby in 70?

71: yeah, when I said we passed several times things could have gone worse and didn't, that kind of thing is what I was thinking of. If Trump and certain key followers had magically gained 10 IQ points on Jan. 6 or just been luckier, they could have won then. Killed or taken hostage enough Congresspeople or to change the math on the certification vote, and made it confusing enough that moderates would feel like they had to go along with it (or didn't have any obvious way to oppose it). Maybe Jake Angeli and people like him would have gone to jail but Trump could still be in office today.

73: I didn't agree with much of the content of Megan's 46, but she makes one key point that I think you're not accounting for here: These people are fucking morons necessarily. If you've got your shit minimally together, you're not invading the Capitol.

Even if you're Laura Ingraham, you don't understand the insurrection until after the dust has settled. It took an idiot of Donald Trump proportions to truly have a finger on the pulse of American society. A Donald Trump capable of sophisticated artifice isn't Donald Trump.

I am convinced that physically, Trump is a coward, and I am extraordinarily grateful for that. If he had a bit of courage at all, he'd be calling for Biden's assassination. ("Some people are saying we ought to be looking for a Second Amendment solution ...") And there is some significant portion of the population who would see a Biden assassination as support for the idea that we need a strong man in charge.

Honestly, I think we'd be in a much better position if the mob had killed Pence or a senator or two. Then we could flog that every time someone tried to downplay Jan 6.

I wish I had more faith in my own 46. But I'll put it out there nevertheless, in case the midterms come back more blue than expected and the reason turns out to be a bunch of small things, like Republican COVID deaths and improved Dem electoral activism leftover from Trump.

If invading the Capitol is insufficient to elicit sustained outrage, I'm not sure what kind of mayhem would have sufficed. In the moment, I certainly thought that setting up a gallows and literally shitting in the halls of Congress would motivate the media, at least, to start taking this stuff seriously.

Corporate advertisers have zero to negative incentive to take a strong stand on anything even remotely political. Dark money wealth perceives an interest in promoting the right-wing. A decisive minority of news consumers are strongly attached to right-wing friendly narratives. An upsetting minority of citizens enthusiastically dogpile on news producers who promote left-wing views, and a frightening minority of them threaten, harass, attack, and murder journalists who offend them.

Hard to see how the media could have arrived at any other place than where they are now, given this environment.

A Donald Trump capable of sophisticated artifice isn't Donald Trump.

This bears repeating.

"Honestly, I think we'd be in a much better position if the mob had killed Pence or a senator or two. Then we could flog that every time someone tried to downplay Jan 6"

They shot Gaby Giffords (and Jo Cox) already and everyone just ignores it because you don't want to politicise the tragedy. Same would have happened if they'd killed Pence.

"These people are fucking morons necessarily. If you've got your shit minimally together, you're not invading the Capitol."

I've made this point before about the Nazis. "Lucky for the Allies that Hitler was such an idiot" - well, first, on a lot of decisions he was right and his generals, who were also idiots, were wrong, and second, if he hadn't been an idiot who made terrible decisions he wouldn't have been Hitler. Stupidity is inherent in evil. The evil genius mastermind is a fictional character. Stephen King understands this and it makes him much better at understanding the nature of evil than, say, Thomas Harris (or indeed Hannah Arendt).

Isn't Rupert Murdoch our evil genius mastermind?

Per Ajay, idiots can be pretty fucking smart in hindsight. For instance, Trump's not using email (or texting?) has helped him quite a bit. And he has the knack in general of the vaguely-worded "order" (also good at getting people to anticipate what he wants) like any good mob boss. For instance was he in contact much with the late-term ringers he installed at a few places in DoD? Almost certainly nt on the 6th and probably not much before. But they weren't unclear as to why they were there.

On the whole I am much more pessimistic about an American populace (and system) that elected Trump than Trump per se. But if he gets in again it will be much more destructive than last time.

There are evil geniuses, and there are (dumb) political masterminds, and it's true that those sets do not generally overlap. Still, I feel Karl Rove deserves some kind of special commendation for his comic-villain "reality-based community" speech: the hubris, the at-least-it-was-an-ethos, the fact that few people remember or "study" it now. I definitely still remember it, and can't decide if it's a distorted mirror of the Trump years or vice versa.

when Bouie says that in 1928, nobody could imagine what would happen in the next 20 years, that's not as comforting as he seems to think.

I'm generally a Bouie fan too, but holy shit.

They really needed an antifa/BLM counterdemonstration to bring the thing off, and that's the thing that wasn't in their control. They needed it so badly they tried making it up out of thin air, but somehow it didn't stick for anyone but the truly nutso.

And they had the same problem our left revolutionary cosplayers frequently have: you have to organize your revolution so that it works on TV. Instead of the Q Shaman, the only people in either chamber should have looked and acted like an organized swat team. With a clear leader barking orders, or better yet signaling them silently, and the other squad members crisply executing them. Instead, it was a redneck festival, because that's what a lot of that movement is. No one had the authority to tell confederate flag guy, Q Shaman, Nancy Pelosi's desk guy, and the rest of the revelers to stay off camera, and make that order stick.

66: I'd guess that loan cancellation polls poorly in most of the country.

82: If Trump doesn't text, that might explain why so many people inside the Capitol on 1/6 were texting to the Chief of Staff and not to Trump himself.

PPP loan cancellation probably polls just as poorly if not moreso and yet.

When the political elite choose to defy public opinion and when they purport to follow it (ignoring the fact that they literally help shape it) tells you a lot about what they really value.

or indeed Hannah Arendt

I'm curious to have you elaborate on this. "Banality of evil," and the little else I know about Arendt seems to make her more like King and less like Harris.

Stupidity is inherent in evil.

This is an interesting claim. I guess a lot depends on how stupid counts as stupid (bottom quartile of IQ?) and who counts as evil as opposed to merely misguided or a product of their time and culture.

E.g., Thomas Jefferson doesn't seem to have been stupid, but he owned slaves and raped them, which by our standards is shockingly evil. Stalin was a fairly intelligent guy from what I've read, and he did many things we would consider evil, but from his POV he had a tremendously difficult job and may have been defending the USSR and the idealistic goal of world communism from forces even worse than he was, so does he count as stupid or evil or both or neither?

Stalin was evil. Mike Pence can go down in history as better, if not less banal, than Eichmann.

so does he count as stupid or evil or both or neither?

Is this a joke?! Who the hell cares about how intelligent he was? He committed mass murder, fer f*ck's sake. Jesus Christ.

87.1 I doubt that. And it's a bad example for your point because forgiveness was built in from the beginning, and if it had not been lots of PPP borrowers, and lots of banks, wouldn't have played.

With student loans you have people who paid them off, people who paid for their kids education so they wouldn't have debt, people who decided to do something other than college because they didn't want loans, people who think your degree in underwater basketweaving is a personal choice that need not be further subsidized etc etc. None of those people -- at least none of them acting in good faith -- has a problem with cancellation programs set up for people who go into public service and the like: that was the deal, and people made it or didn't. Here we have college educated people who want a new deal, and they're just not at the top of a lot of lists of people who aren't in the boat of who need substantial public investment.

I think student loan cancellation is worth doing nonetheless, but I don't think the people who disagree are necessarily fools or knaves.

Was Thomas Jefferson a geek, dweeb, or spaz?

I think of him as more like Ferris.

Like a wheel.

Staying was both stupid and evil. His strategic instincts in 1941-43 were moronic and got large parts of his army killed for no reason, and his unshakable belief that Hitler wouldn't double cross him is probably the single greatest moment of stupidity in the entire 20th century.

(Arendt went to cover the trial of Eichmann and didn't bother turning up for a lot of it, so missed the fairly important fact that Eichmann was actually a committed and fanatical Nazi rather than just a banally evil technocrat.)

I don't think that "committed and fanatical Nazi" and "banally evil technocrat" are mutually exclusive. I've known a number of committed and fanatical communists who were in their day jobs banal technocrats -- not evil only because their jobs offered them limited opportunities for this. It is at least possible to read Arendt's point as being that ideologies allow us to commit evil acts bloodlessly while that actual killing is to a large extent carried on by the rather different kind of people who enjoy killing for its own sake.

One illustration of this (in which the animating ideology is anti-communism) would be a CIA (or British) case officer in Indonesia in 1965 at a time when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese were slaughtered as Communists by the ethnic Indonesians with the tacit support of our governments and the explicit encouragement of these diplomats/spooks.

And, at the risk of further derailment, I think we should distinguish stupidity from being wrong about things. Tony Blair is not stupid as a person. Tony Blair's decision that the future of British foreign policy lay in "crawling up the arse of the White House" was not stupid either. It turned out to be wrong -- and evil in its effects -- but it was a reasonable bet for an intelligent and well-informed person to make in 1997.

There is such a thing as moral luck. Many of us are not evil, or not very evil, partly because the opportunity has never presented itself.

92: I managed to get my loan cancelled through public service. The final process could have been a nightmare. People who did everything right (especially teachers who had their grants converted to loans) got screwed so badly by Fedloan.

Allowing people to get half of the loans cancelled after 5 years is a good policy, especially if people find themselves in a position where their next job is not at a qualifying employer. Getting put into forbearance and losing qualifying payments etc. The forums on Reddit are just amazing, and there was so little oversight from the Department of Ed. Most people had to get assistance from their Senators, because FedLoan was set up to delay the process by several months.

I was really lucky in that Maura Healey had sued them on behalf of MA borrowers. I did not qualify for compensation, but part of the settlement was that they would have an identified point person at Fed Loan, so the AG's office expeditiously solved my problem.

They were also supposed to pay cash damages to people who lost qualifying payments because of FedLoan or whose TEACH grants were screwed up, but now that FedLoan is exiting the business, I'm wondering what will happen.

92: There are also be who got bamboozeled into degrees at for-profit schools in things they thought would be super practical at places like ITT technical which turned out to be useless. A lot of those are people from historically marginalized groups.

98: There is such a thing as moral luck. Many of us are not evil, or not very evil, partly because the opportunity has never presented itself.

Ships, certainly, are liable to casualties, which sometimes make terribly evident some flaw in their construction that would never have been discoverable in smooth water; and many a "good fellow," through a disastrous combination of circumstances, has undergone a like betrayal.

- George Eliot, Adam Bede

99 last -- Exactly, and that's who should be front and center in the whole thing, not whiny privileged kids performatively promising never to vote for any Democrat again ever. It's the Q Shaman problem: when anyone can jostle into the camera's glare, no one gets to pick the face of their movement.

The polling I've seen on student loan forgiveness puts it at a hair over 50% for blanket forgiveness. I haven't been able to find polling on the PPP per se, but I stand by my assessment in 87.