Rage, can YOU explain why the “adjustment”was 281k last year and 426k this year? (And no, jobs are NOT always lost in December, which you would know if you had bothered to look at the data I linked to.)
Warren – BLS changes the basis for the Seasonal Adjustment every year. They do that in December. So one should not expect the same seasonal adjustment this year as in the prior year. It will always change YoY. The BLS has a complete description of this year’s SA (wonkish):
HOW THE REAGAN-THRU-TRUMP ERA ENDS — BY A SANE AND SAVVY NATIONAL REVIEW FELLOW:
Will Donald Trump Be FDR or Jimmy Carter?
We’re on the cusp of either a transformative presidency or a party-killing failure.
By Reihan Salam
” … political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s influential “political time” thesis. The basic idea is that there is a recurring pattern in presidential history, which starts when a transformative presidency creates a new political order out of the ashes of an older one (think the transition from Hoover to FDR). This transformative president is typically followed by a loyal disciple (Harry Truman, for example), and then by a president of the opposite party who has little choice but to operate within the existing political order (Dwight Eisenhower). As long as a given political order persists, power rotates between presidents who are devoted to the reigning political orthodoxy (John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson) and those who resist that orthodoxy but can’t quite dislodge it (Richard Nixon). Skowronek’s cycle ends with a president who seeks to uphold a political order that is on the verge of collapse due to internal conflicts and contradictions that grow ever more difficult to reconcile. In the cycle that began with FDR, the unlucky president left holding the bag was Carter. The Georgia governor tried to keep together a New Deal coalition that united Northern liberals and Southern conservatives via his idiosyncratic mishmash of Christian moralism and technocratic wonkery, but he instead triggered intense intra-party opposition, up to and including a formidable primary challenge from Ted Kennedy. These “disjunctive” presidencies inevitably fail and pave the way for the next transformative presidency.”
“One can imagine a party built around the white middle class growing more ethnically expansive, by bringing growing numbers of native-born Hispanics into the fold, especially those living outside ethnic enclaves and in fast-growing, low-cost suburbs. FDR pulled off a similarly ambitious feat in his era. Might Trump pull off the same feat in ours?”
“So far, Trump is staffing his administration with pretty much the same Reaganites who would have served under Jeb Bush, his favorite globalist foil. You could say that Trump won a premature political victory. Republican voters were ready for a cross-class, nationalist appeal, but today’s elite Republicans, who cut their teeth in the makers and takers era, appear to be completely uninterested in giving it to them.”
I’m going to ask regular readers of this blog to read my just-posted response to a comment by Mike Kimel in the Comments thread to his latest post. My response replies to a sentence in his comment that addresses me by name.
What laws protect the right to collective bargaining?
The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is the federal statute that grants most private sector employees the right to join a union and engage in collective bargaining. Employees of state or local governments only have collective bargaining rights if their state legislature has granted them such rights in statute or the governor has done so by executive order. Many states do have such statutes, which are typically modeled on the NLRA.
Public employees’ right to engage in collective bargaining can be taken away by their state governments [???] ; the collective bargaining rights of private sector employees lies in Congress’s hands.
My understanding: any ad hoc group has a First Amendment protected right — meaning the government cannot prohibit — to band together to bargain collectively.
The ACLU question is: What laws protect the bargaining rights? Okay, protects the rights — not create or confer. But the ACLU answer is framed to sound like the laws are solely responsible for creating the rights. ???
I want state government employees in the 20 states that bar most gov employees from unionizing and the 10 states where only some may unionize (typically teachers and first responders) to make a big play at asserting their constitutional collective bargaining rights …
… as part of a Democratic Party showing of (actually in this case) supporting what the blue collar (whites? — no, and blacks and all colors in between) voters need to take back control of their country and their lives.
NYT’s Nate Cohn reports — well, let me quote:
“”At every point of the race, Mr. Trump was doing better among white voters without a college degree than Mitt Romney did in 2012 — by a wide margin. … Just as Mr. Obama’s team caricatured Mr. Romney, Mr. Trump caricatured Mrs. Clinton as a tool of Wall Street … ”
Just switch places back from Trump to Democrats (like Trump switched off with Obama) and take our world back.
Of course a lot more ploys in the works for more progressive states where we can be more aggressive (read make a lot louder noises) but I’m just wondering if there isn’t some hole somewhere in asserting state employees constitutional bargaining rights. ANYBODY? ???
“And plainly the right to join a union in the public sector is a right protected by the First Amendment.
Int’l Ass’n of Firefighters Loc. 3808 v. Kansas City, 220 F.3d 969 (8th Cir. 2000).
“That said, there is no overarching right to bargain a collective bargaining agreement, even if there is a right to form and join a union. The right to bargain a contract is governed by state law, and the laws of the states vary from prohibiting public sector bargaining altogether at the one end to requiring public sector bargaining at the other end.”
“A public employer, unlike his private counterpart, is not guided by the profit motive and constrained by the normal operation of the market. Municipal services are typically not priced, and where they are[,] they tend to be regarded as in some sense “essential” and therefore are often price-inelastic. Although a public employer, like a private one, will wish to keep costs down, he lacks an important discipline against agreeing to increases in labor costs that in a market system would require price increases. A public-sector union is correspondingly less concerned that high prices due to costly wage demands will decrease output and hence employment.”
+ two more para
Not an easy idea: the Constitution forcing the state to bargain. Sounds definitely like contract law area. OTH, if the state wont bargain — even makes a rule against it — that totally evaporates the economic association rights of the employees.
Who else can simply refuse to bargain and tell the employees go get lost?
Seems to me the state cannot categorically — by legal definition yet — refuse to bargain: violating First Amendment via process of elimination. Not a very clean, clear situation but the courts have to look at the disaster the refusal to bargain visits on state employees too.
Answer: BINDING ARBITRATION (as a First Amendment right)?
http://www.empirecenter.org/publications/police-and-fire-pay-keep-rising-benefits-sticky-under-arbitration/
“For nearly 40 years, unions representing police and firefighters in New York State have been entitled to seek compulsory binding “interest arbitration” of contract impasses, a form of dispute resolution not available to most public employees outside the public safety field. County and municipal government leaders have sought to end or reform this system on the grounds that arbitration unduly favors unions, resulting in unaffordable salary increases while perpetuating costly work rules and benefits.”
News to me. In 1974, NYPD yearly was about $65,000 in 2008 dollars. By 2008, it hadn’t risen — 60% per capita income increase later. All of a sudden, in the midst of the Great Recession, NY raised it about $20,000. Meaning the money had indeed been there all along. Also meaning the the police union leadership in typical slipshod American fashion hadn’t even been aware of what was being done to them. Ditto for fire and sanitation.
Surely be a valid constitution issue to go to court over in 30 anti-bargaining states — banging the union density pots and pans as loudly as we can as we go — hoping to switch places with the Republicans once and forever, if nothing else.
Sigh. Hydrology CAN be the study of Hydric Processes in general but is more often used to describe the SPECIFIC processes of a given contained system.
Same with Methodology. It is not precisely parallel to Geology, indeed it is difficult to conceive of a generic study of ‘methods’ outside the particular system involved.
Definition of methodology
plural methodologies
1
: a body of methods, rules, and postulates employed by a discipline : a particular procedure or set of procedures
2
: the analysis of the principles or procedures of inquiry in a particular field
Bruce again: the only thing worse than a grammar/spelling/syntax/semantics nazi is one that is simply wrong most of the time. Comic Opera Mussolini.
‘method’ and ‘methodology’ are both substantives, with the latter taking on more the appearance and usage of a collective but also suggesting some specific design connecting the various methods.
Perhaps you could adopt a hampster and name him Peeve. Or a family of Hampster Peeves. And then you could nurture one of your Pet Peeves without bothering others.
“Just want to point out that while Kimel’s post on Sowell from a decade ago was unrelated to Sowell’s race and didn’t mention it, he verifies in his comment directed to me that his purpose in posting this post isn’t to highlight rightwing hackery but instead to suggest that Sowell’s career success was due to de facto affirmative action. Only African Americans with successful careers as winger hacks are winger hacks, see. The rest of huge winger-hack crowd are deserving of their success.
“Apparently, a decade ago Kimel and his wife had not yet started their real estate business buying and renovating and then renting homes in northeastern Ohio. So that earlier post was pre-racist/xenophobe-obsession Kimel.
“But this is a decade later, he and his wife now have a successful real estate business buying and renovating and then renting homes in northeastern Ohio and perhaps in LA as well, and he now spends an awful lot of time writing bizarre blog posts whose purpose is to use the euphemism “culture” to assure readers that STATISTICS—DATA!—prove the legitimacy of categorical racism as a matter of economics.
“How likely is it that were there an announcement of the retirement of some big-name winger hack who is white and whom Kimel called a hack back in the day would write a blog post about his earlier post? My guess: roughly zero.”
Methodology is the study of methods? Funny, but I was pretty damn sure that methodology is not a study of anything, but is instead the way a particular result, conclusion, whatever, is arrived at.
As in: “Mr. Expert Witness, can you describe your methodology in arriving at your conclusion that the defendant pharmaceutical company’s pharmaceutical that my client’s family alleges caused his death did in fact cause his death?”
Silly me. Guess I had that all wrong all these years.
“The other day on Twitter, a man posted a picture of my coloring book he’d given his daughter for Christmas. He was excited to give her a coloring book full of badass intersectional feminists. He wanted to thank me for creating it.
“I don’t know,” chimed in a random stranger (because Twitter), “Sounds like identity politics to me.”
Hell yeah it does.
“Identity Politics” is now thrown about as an insult at many progressive activists. Critics say that Identity Politics make everything about gender, everything about sexuality, and everything about race. And to this I say: yes, yes, and hell yes.
Call it what you want. I don’t care. Complain that we’re making shit about race — you know what? We are. Complain that we’re keeping the left from focusing only on class — yup, and proudly so. Complain all you want because I am not and will never be ashamed of focusing on the politics of identity. I will not feel a moment’s guilt for slowing this whole train down to make sure that everyone can get on and we’re on the right track. I will proudly own up to making shit hard for you.
Thank god for Identity Politics.
* * *
You know why? Because you know what we had before Identity Politics? I’ll tell you.
We had White Dudes.
We had white dudes as the pinnacles of power. We had white dudes on all our TV screens, we had white dudes reporting all our news, we had white dudes writing all our books. Sometimes they were accompanied by attractive white ladies (as all the white dudes were straight). But mostly, we had white dudes.
And if you were not a white dude? You didn’t exist. Laws were not written for you, infrastructure was not built for you, history was not written about you. You did not exist in film, television, or novels. You were not a part of the American dream.”
Beverly, what is the difference in meaning between these two questions:
“Mr. Expert Witness, can you describe your methodology in arriving at your conclusion that the defendant pharmaceutical company’s pharmaceutical that my client’s family alleges caused his death did in fact cause his death?”
“Mr. Expert Witness, can you describe your method in arriving at your conclusion that the defendant pharmaceutical company’s pharmaceutical that my client’s family alleges caused his death did in fact cause his death?”
Actually, EMichael, the complaint—at least mine, Bernie Sanders’, Elizabeth Warren’s, Keith Ellison’s, and many others’—is not that it kept the left from focusing only on class, but that the left for so many decades saw them as mutually exclusive focuses, and chose only identity politics.
I’m pro-choice, but it would be hard to explain how angry and dismayed I was to see abortion become the only issue that the people who captured “the left” in the ‘80s and ‘90s focused on. In Illinois, for example, a group from NARAL took control of the state’s ACLU chapter, and flatly turned it into an abortion-rights organization. I remember at one point being literally shocked to hear that the Illinois ACLU had actually agreed to handle a case challenging random police checkpoints on the south side of Chicago, I think in maybe the mid ‘90s. That was stunning; something other than abortion rights somehow had broken through. Meanwhile, the Indiana ACLU next door was beating the Illinois chapter’s butt on traditional civil rights and civil liberties cases.
Spiraling income inequality, the dramatic loss worker bargaining power, the crazily spiking college tuition at state universities when states stopped be the primary funders, the dramatic reduction of socioeconomic mobility? The left barely said “Boo.” Uh-uh. It was, win on identity politics or bust. Election cycle after election cycle after election cycle. Going back to that well a few times too often.
They didn’t win. Instead, they busted. And only now, since Nov. 9, 2016, has it sunk in that they can chew gum AND walk backwards at the same time. And that they’d damn well better start.
Waste of time to tell me about the problems created, or that have surfaced, the last couple of decades, “Spiraling income inequality, the dramatic loss worker bargaining power, the crazily spiking college tuition at state universities when states stopped be the primary funders, the dramatic reduction of socioeconomic mobility”, when that is the result of losing elections at the state and federal level.
And that the sole reason that elections have been lost by Dems is that whites have voted GOP since the Civil Rights Act.
Now, if you can explain to me why white working class people have voted for the GOP all of these years(and especially why white union workers have overwhelmingly voted GOP all of these years), then I will listen.
I’ve got my answer, identity politics. There are fifty years of examples of the truth of this.
And letting these people off the hook for these actions is insanely stupid. Will not be long before whites are a minority and we can let these old racist die away, but they are not dead yet.
We just had a president elected whose appearance in politics was due to his racist rants against Obama. Who won the election solely due to his periodic racist rants.
And I am supposed to talk class with the people that voted for him?
NOUN
1. (method for/of)
a particular form of procedure for accomplishing or approaching something, especially a systematic or established one:
“a method for software maintenance” ·
meth·od·ol·o·gy
NOUN
1. a system of methods used in a particular area of study or activity:
“a methodology for investigating the concept of focal points” ·
As in: “Here’s my method for opening tightly sealed bottles.”
vs.
“The chemical compound in X pharmaceutical consists of (whatever), and the epidemiological studies I reviewed show that pharmaceuticals that are similar in composition except that X includes (something particular) and Y includes instead (something else particular) have a significant differential, of (some numbers), in causing stroke among people who have no history of high blood pressure.”
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
The BLS statisticians took 270k jobs LOST and “seasonally adjusted” them into 156k jobs GAINED (see Table B-1).
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_01062017.pdf
Perhaps you should educate yourself on how and why the employment numbers are seasonally adjusted before you critique them.
Lies, damned lies, and Warren.
I’d love for someone to educate me on how they “seasonally adjusted” an extra 281,000 jobs for December, 2015 (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_01082016.pdf), but 426,000 for December, 2016.
Stop whining Warren, the acceleration in wages consist with what we see in other reports. Your almost getting Orwellian in your denial.
Jobs are always lost around the holidays you fool.
Rage, can YOU explain why the “adjustment”was 281k last year and 426k this year? (And no, jobs are NOT always lost in December, which you would know if you had bothered to look at the data I linked to.)
Warren – BLS changes the basis for the Seasonal Adjustment every year. They do that in December. So one should not expect the same seasonal adjustment this year as in the prior year. It will always change YoY. The BLS has a complete description of this year’s SA (wonkish):
https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cps-seas-adjustment-methodology.pdf
HOW THE REAGAN-THRU-TRUMP ERA ENDS — BY A SANE AND SAVVY NATIONAL REVIEW FELLOW:
Will Donald Trump Be FDR or Jimmy Carter?
We’re on the cusp of either a transformative presidency or a party-killing failure.
By Reihan Salam
” … political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s influential “political time” thesis. The basic idea is that there is a recurring pattern in presidential history, which starts when a transformative presidency creates a new political order out of the ashes of an older one (think the transition from Hoover to FDR). This transformative president is typically followed by a loyal disciple (Harry Truman, for example), and then by a president of the opposite party who has little choice but to operate within the existing political order (Dwight Eisenhower). As long as a given political order persists, power rotates between presidents who are devoted to the reigning political orthodoxy (John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson) and those who resist that orthodoxy but can’t quite dislodge it (Richard Nixon). Skowronek’s cycle ends with a president who seeks to uphold a political order that is on the verge of collapse due to internal conflicts and contradictions that grow ever more difficult to reconcile. In the cycle that began with FDR, the unlucky president left holding the bag was Carter. The Georgia governor tried to keep together a New Deal coalition that united Northern liberals and Southern conservatives via his idiosyncratic mishmash of Christian moralism and technocratic wonkery, but he instead triggered intense intra-party opposition, up to and including a formidable primary challenge from Ted Kennedy. These “disjunctive” presidencies inevitably fail and pave the way for the next transformative presidency.”
“One can imagine a party built around the white middle class growing more ethnically expansive, by bringing growing numbers of native-born Hispanics into the fold, especially those living outside ethnic enclaves and in fast-growing, low-cost suburbs. FDR pulled off a similarly ambitious feat in his era. Might Trump pull off the same feat in ours?”
“So far, Trump is staffing his administration with pretty much the same Reaganites who would have served under Jeb Bush, his favorite globalist foil. You could say that Trump won a premature political victory. Republican voters were ready for a cross-class, nationalist appeal, but today’s elite Republicans, who cut their teeth in the makers and takers era, appear to be completely uninterested in giving it to them.”
” Republican voters were ready for a cross-class, nationalist appeal…”
BS.
Rep voters were ready for their racist views, which had been held in their closet, to be front page news.
The policies that followed were unimportant compared to the idea to Make America Whit Again.
I’m going to ask regular readers of this blog to read my just-posted response to a comment by Mike Kimel in the Comments thread to his latest post. My response replies to a sentence in his comment that addresses me by name.
The comments exchange is at http://angrybearblog.strategydemo.com/2017/01/i-still-think-thomas-is-a-hack.html#comment-2890851.
Thanks, Krasting. I will read it, but they start off — the FIRST WORD — with one of my pet peeves: METHODOLOGY.
METHODOLOGY is the STUDY of METHODS. But buzzword happy bureaucrats and middle managers thinks it sounds more sophisticated than METHOD.
CORRECT ME IF I’M WRONG
https://www.aclu.org/other/collective-bargaining-and-civil-liberties
What laws protect the right to collective bargaining?
The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is the federal statute that grants most private sector employees the right to join a union and engage in collective bargaining. Employees of state or local governments only have collective bargaining rights if their state legislature has granted them such rights in statute or the governor has done so by executive order. Many states do have such statutes, which are typically modeled on the NLRA.
Public employees’ right to engage in collective bargaining can be taken away by their state governments [???] ; the collective bargaining rights of private sector employees lies in Congress’s hands.
My understanding: any ad hoc group has a First Amendment protected right — meaning the government cannot prohibit — to band together to bargain collectively.
The ACLU question is: What laws protect the bargaining rights? Okay, protects the rights — not create or confer. But the ACLU answer is framed to sound like the laws are solely responsible for creating the rights. ???
I want state government employees in the 20 states that bar most gov employees from unionizing and the 10 states where only some may unionize (typically teachers and first responders) to make a big play at asserting their constitutional collective bargaining rights …
… as part of a Democratic Party showing of (actually in this case) supporting what the blue collar (whites? — no, and blacks and all colors in between) voters need to take back control of their country and their lives.
NYT’s Nate Cohn reports — well, let me quote:
“”At every point of the race, Mr. Trump was doing better among white voters without a college degree than Mitt Romney did in 2012 — by a wide margin. … Just as Mr. Obama’s team caricatured Mr. Romney, Mr. Trump caricatured Mrs. Clinton as a tool of Wall Street … ”
“Mr. Obama would have easily won both his elections with [this election’s] level of black turnout and support. (He would have won Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin each time even if Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee had been severed from their states and cast adrift into the Great Lakes.)”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/upshot/how-the-obama-coalition-crumbled-leaving-an-opening-for-trump.html
Just switch places back from Trump to Democrats (like Trump switched off with Obama) and take our world back.
Of course a lot more ploys in the works for more progressive states where we can be more aggressive (read make a lot louder noises) but I’m just wondering if there isn’t some hole somewhere in asserting state employees constitutional bargaining rights. ANYBODY? ???
THIS LOOKS LIKE THE ANSWER FOR NOW
http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/labor_law/meetings/2009/ac2009/151.authcheckdam.pdf (p. 6)
“And plainly the right to join a union in the public sector is a right protected by the First Amendment.
Int’l Ass’n of Firefighters Loc. 3808 v. Kansas City, 220 F.3d 969 (8th Cir. 2000).
“That said, there is no overarching right to bargain a collective bargaining agreement, even if there is a right to form and join a union. The right to bargain a contract is governed by state law, and the laws of the states vary from prohibiting public sector bargaining altogether at the one end to requiring public sector bargaining at the other end.”
HOW TO WORK AROUND THAT?
https://www.mackinac.org/14734
“A public employer, unlike his private counterpart, is not guided by the profit motive and constrained by the normal operation of the market. Municipal services are typically not priced, and where they are[,] they tend to be regarded as in some sense “essential” and therefore are often price-inelastic. Although a public employer, like a private one, will wish to keep costs down, he lacks an important discipline against agreeing to increases in labor costs that in a market system would require price increases. A public-sector union is correspondingly less concerned that high prices due to costly wage demands will decrease output and hence employment.”
+ two more para
Not an easy idea: the Constitution forcing the state to bargain. Sounds definitely like contract law area. OTH, if the state wont bargain — even makes a rule against it — that totally evaporates the economic association rights of the employees.
Who else can simply refuse to bargain and tell the employees go get lost?
Seems to me the state cannot categorically — by legal definition yet — refuse to bargain: violating First Amendment via process of elimination. Not a very clean, clear situation but the courts have to look at the disaster the refusal to bargain visits on state employees too.
Answer: BINDING ARBITRATION (as a First Amendment right)?
http://www.empirecenter.org/publications/police-and-fire-pay-keep-rising-benefits-sticky-under-arbitration/
“For nearly 40 years, unions representing police and firefighters in New York State have been entitled to seek compulsory binding “interest arbitration” of contract impasses, a form of dispute resolution not available to most public employees outside the public safety field. County and municipal government leaders have sought to end or reform this system on the grounds that arbitration unduly favors unions, resulting in unaffordable salary increases while perpetuating costly work rules and benefits.”
News to me. In 1974, NYPD yearly was about $65,000 in 2008 dollars. By 2008, it hadn’t risen — 60% per capita income increase later. All of a sudden, in the midst of the Great Recession, NY raised it about $20,000. Meaning the money had indeed been there all along. Also meaning the the police union leadership in typical slipshod American fashion hadn’t even been aware of what was being done to them. Ditto for fire and sanitation.
Surely be a valid constitution issue to go to court over in 30 anti-bargaining states — banging the union density pots and pans as loudly as we can as we go — hoping to switch places with the Republicans once and forever, if nothing else.
Bev,
I have interacted with Mike Kimel since before pgl and Kash left AB.
I have never gotten the racist marker thing you toss out.
However, seeing EM agree suggests there is a bit of ‘Obama can do no wrong’ and any dissent is sexism (in the case of being in neocon) or racism.
Ad hominem aside.
Warren: “METHODOLOGY is the STUDY of METHODS.”
Sigh. Hydrology CAN be the study of Hydric Processes in general but is more often used to describe the SPECIFIC processes of a given contained system.
Same with Methodology. It is not precisely parallel to Geology, indeed it is difficult to conceive of a generic study of ‘methods’ outside the particular system involved.
There are such things as ‘Dictionaries’
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/methodology
Definition of methodology
plural methodologies
1
: a body of methods, rules, and postulates employed by a discipline : a particular procedure or set of procedures
2
: the analysis of the principles or procedures of inquiry in a particular field
Bruce again: the only thing worse than a grammar/spelling/syntax/semantics nazi is one that is simply wrong most of the time. Comic Opera Mussolini.
‘method’ and ‘methodology’ are both substantives, with the latter taking on more the appearance and usage of a collective but also suggesting some specific design connecting the various methods.
Perhaps you could adopt a hampster and name him Peeve. Or a family of Hampster Peeves. And then you could nurture one of your Pet Peeves without bothering others.
Bruce,
LOL
“I just posted another comment in the Comments thread to Kimel’s last post, at http://angrybearblog.strategydemo.com/2017/01/i-still-think-thomas-is-a-hack.html. It reads:
“Just want to point out that while Kimel’s post on Sowell from a decade ago was unrelated to Sowell’s race and didn’t mention it, he verifies in his comment directed to me that his purpose in posting this post isn’t to highlight rightwing hackery but instead to suggest that Sowell’s career success was due to de facto affirmative action. Only African Americans with successful careers as winger hacks are winger hacks, see. The rest of huge winger-hack crowd are deserving of their success.
“Apparently, a decade ago Kimel and his wife had not yet started their real estate business buying and renovating and then renting homes in northeastern Ohio. So that earlier post was pre-racist/xenophobe-obsession Kimel.
“But this is a decade later, he and his wife now have a successful real estate business buying and renovating and then renting homes in northeastern Ohio and perhaps in LA as well, and he now spends an awful lot of time writing bizarre blog posts whose purpose is to use the euphemism “culture” to assure readers that STATISTICS—DATA!—prove the legitimacy of categorical racism as a matter of economics.
“How likely is it that were there an announcement of the retirement of some big-name winger hack who is white and whom Kimel called a hack back in the day would write a blog post about his earlier post? My guess: roughly zero.”
Methodology is the study of methods? Funny, but I was pretty damn sure that methodology is not a study of anything, but is instead the way a particular result, conclusion, whatever, is arrived at.
As in: “Mr. Expert Witness, can you describe your methodology in arriving at your conclusion that the defendant pharmaceutical company’s pharmaceutical that my client’s family alleges caused his death did in fact cause his death?”
Silly me. Guess I had that all wrong all these years.
“The other day on Twitter, a man posted a picture of my coloring book he’d given his daughter for Christmas. He was excited to give her a coloring book full of badass intersectional feminists. He wanted to thank me for creating it.
“I don’t know,” chimed in a random stranger (because Twitter), “Sounds like identity politics to me.”
Hell yeah it does.
“Identity Politics” is now thrown about as an insult at many progressive activists. Critics say that Identity Politics make everything about gender, everything about sexuality, and everything about race. And to this I say: yes, yes, and hell yes.
Call it what you want. I don’t care. Complain that we’re making shit about race — you know what? We are. Complain that we’re keeping the left from focusing only on class — yup, and proudly so. Complain all you want because I am not and will never be ashamed of focusing on the politics of identity. I will not feel a moment’s guilt for slowing this whole train down to make sure that everyone can get on and we’re on the right track. I will proudly own up to making shit hard for you.
Thank god for Identity Politics.
* * *
You know why? Because you know what we had before Identity Politics? I’ll tell you.
We had White Dudes.
We had white dudes as the pinnacles of power. We had white dudes on all our TV screens, we had white dudes reporting all our news, we had white dudes writing all our books. Sometimes they were accompanied by attractive white ladies (as all the white dudes were straight). But mostly, we had white dudes.
And if you were not a white dude? You didn’t exist. Laws were not written for you, infrastructure was not built for you, history was not written about you. You did not exist in film, television, or novels. You were not a part of the American dream.”
http://www.alternet.org/i-will-never-apologize-my-identity-politics
Beverly, what is the difference in meaning between these two questions:
“Mr. Expert Witness, can you describe your methodology in arriving at your conclusion that the defendant pharmaceutical company’s pharmaceutical that my client’s family alleges caused his death did in fact cause his death?”
“Mr. Expert Witness, can you describe your method in arriving at your conclusion that the defendant pharmaceutical company’s pharmaceutical that my client’s family alleges caused his death did in fact cause his death?”
“Never use a big word when a diminutive one will do.”
Actually, EMichael, the complaint—at least mine, Bernie Sanders’, Elizabeth Warren’s, Keith Ellison’s, and many others’—is not that it kept the left from focusing only on class, but that the left for so many decades saw them as mutually exclusive focuses, and chose only identity politics.
I’m pro-choice, but it would be hard to explain how angry and dismayed I was to see abortion become the only issue that the people who captured “the left” in the ‘80s and ‘90s focused on. In Illinois, for example, a group from NARAL took control of the state’s ACLU chapter, and flatly turned it into an abortion-rights organization. I remember at one point being literally shocked to hear that the Illinois ACLU had actually agreed to handle a case challenging random police checkpoints on the south side of Chicago, I think in maybe the mid ‘90s. That was stunning; something other than abortion rights somehow had broken through. Meanwhile, the Indiana ACLU next door was beating the Illinois chapter’s butt on traditional civil rights and civil liberties cases.
Spiraling income inequality, the dramatic loss worker bargaining power, the crazily spiking college tuition at state universities when states stopped be the primary funders, the dramatic reduction of socioeconomic mobility? The left barely said “Boo.” Uh-uh. It was, win on identity politics or bust. Election cycle after election cycle after election cycle. Going back to that well a few times too often.
They didn’t win. Instead, they busted. And only now, since Nov. 9, 2016, has it sunk in that they can chew gum AND walk backwards at the same time. And that they’d damn well better start.
Bev,
We could not disagree more.
Waste of time to tell me about the problems created, or that have surfaced, the last couple of decades, “Spiraling income inequality, the dramatic loss worker bargaining power, the crazily spiking college tuition at state universities when states stopped be the primary funders, the dramatic reduction of socioeconomic mobility”, when that is the result of losing elections at the state and federal level.
And that the sole reason that elections have been lost by Dems is that whites have voted GOP since the Civil Rights Act.
Now, if you can explain to me why white working class people have voted for the GOP all of these years(and especially why white union workers have overwhelmingly voted GOP all of these years), then I will listen.
I’ve got my answer, identity politics. There are fifty years of examples of the truth of this.
And letting these people off the hook for these actions is insanely stupid. Will not be long before whites are a minority and we can let these old racist die away, but they are not dead yet.
We just had a president elected whose appearance in politics was due to his racist rants against Obama. Who won the election solely due to his periodic racist rants.
And I am supposed to talk class with the people that voted for him?
meth·od
NOUN
1. (method for/of)
a particular form of procedure for accomplishing or approaching something, especially a systematic or established one:
“a method for software maintenance” ·
meth·od·ol·o·gy
NOUN
1. a system of methods used in a particular area of study or activity:
“a methodology for investigating the concept of focal points” ·
As in: “Here’s my method for opening tightly sealed bottles.”
vs.
“The chemical compound in X pharmaceutical consists of (whatever), and the epidemiological studies I reviewed show that pharmaceuticals that are similar in composition except that X includes (something particular) and Y includes instead (something else particular) have a significant differential, of (some numbers), in causing stroke among people who have no history of high blood pressure.”
Does that suffice, Warren?
Bev – the second sentence does to use either “method” or “methodology”.
What am I missing?
No, Beverly, it does not. I asked what the difference was between the two questions.