“Progressives’ mobilization delusion” [Matt Yglesias, Slow Boring]. “One of the biggest problems with mobilization theory is that in politics (and also other spheres of life), there are a lot of opportunists. And by moving from a straightforward question like ‘is this popular?’ to something harder to measure like ‘does this mobilize voters?’ a lot of people who have specific agendas can make up hazy reasons why you need to prioritize their issues.”
“Why Democrats’ climate goals may test their Latino appeal” [Associated Press]. “Last year, Biden won Cameron County, which encompasses Brownsville and is about 90% Hispanic. But Trump’s margin of the vote increased there by 20 percentage points over 2016. Farther north, Trump flipped oil- and gas-producing, but still heavily Hispanic, Jim Wells and Kleberg counties. ‘We are very dependent on oil and gas. That’s the reason you saw those numbers,’ said [said Mayra Flores, a 35-year-old respiratory care practitioner and organizer for Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign], who was born in Mexico, came to the United State at age 6 and picked cotton every summer growing up after age 12. ‘That’s what people do. That’s where they work.'”
neoliberal playbook:
(1) Degrade public health by underfunding and corruption,
(2) watch it
fail in a very public test, and
(3) replace it with coercion. Best of
all, in future you can go directly to coercion!
05/10/2021
left’s favorite floating signifier: neoliberalism.[Vulgar Marxism].
To grease the wheels of accumulation, every president from Jimmy Carter through George W. Bush helped build out a new model of governance that
cut corporate taxes,
dismantled welfare,
deregulated industry,
broke labor power, and
promoted financialization.
This is the original meaning of what is now the left’s favorite floating signifier: neoliberalism. In George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, a preacher explains the emergence of the undead by intoning: “When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.” Well, when there is no more labor to profitably exploit in the periphery, capital will deepen exploitation in the core. If capitalism is a vampire that “only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,” as Marx described it, then neoliberalism is a zombie, returning to feast on the flesh of loved ones after picking the bones of strangers clean.
Do children reading about particular moral characteristics absorb those traits as a building block for their own morality? The findings, which appear in the Journal of Media Psychology, suggest so, and further support how this indirect approach to socializing children's morality can supplement the direct teaching of moral principles kids might receive through formal instruction.
...
"When parents are considering what media they might want to select for their children, they can take into account
- what particular moral value is being emphasized by the main character, and
- how the main character is treated because of those actions," she says.
...
Hahn is first author of the new study, which adds critical nuance to a body of literature that explores how media content affects children. While many previous studies have focused on broad conceptualizations, like prosocial or antisocial effects that might be associated with specific content, Hahn's study looks at how exposure to content featuring specific moral values (care, fairness, loyalty and authority) might influence the weight kids place on those values.
...
For the study, Hahn and her colleagues took the main character from a young adult novel and edited the content to reflect in each version the study's focus on one of four moral values. A fifth version was manipulated in a way that featured an amoral main character. Those narratives were shared with roughly 200 participants between the ages of 10 and 14. This is a favorable range for media research because it's more difficult to introduce narrative comprehension in younger kids, while equally challenging to hold the attention of older adolescents, who become bored with rudimentary storylines, according to Hahn.
