The internet accelerated the decline by 1) destroying media business models, leading to seasoned editors and fact checkers being replaced by cheaper twenty-something Twitter addicts, and 2) driving consumers into filter bubbles and feeding their confirmation bias.
It did not. Even a Republican-led investigation didn't find any wrongdoing [1]. Not every bullshit conspiracy claim of the far right warrants an investigation - their entire modus operandi is running a continuous "firehose of falsehood" stream [2], and media reporting on each and every of their claims like a bunch of flies swarming around a pile of poo is actually dangerous to society.
When the far right manages to create absurd amount of media attention for nothing substantial every time they open their mouths, then there's no airtime left to report on stuff that actually matters.
Those facts don't support your conclusion. The popular vote is not even close to "a majority of Americans". Something like 120 million American adults didn't even vote in 2016, versus around 66 and 63 million who voted for Clinton and Trump respectively. Clinton winning would still have been "minority rule" by this measure.
Also, broadly speaking, being progressive means wanting change and being conservative means being more comfortable with the status quo. It seems obvious that of the 120 million people who weren’t motivated to vote, more of those would be latent conservatives. Or at least, it’s very hard to see a progressive majority in there.
> It seems obvious that of the 120 million people who weren’t motivated to vote
Could be true, but it's certainly not "obvious". There are myriad reasons (especially in the USA) why people might not vote that nothing to do with their political opinions (ideology or intensity). I am sure that a significant number of the 120 million non-voters were "not motivated", but not all of them. And of the "not motivated", it is hard to know the real reasons why and what it means. Some of them, for example, would never vote, regardless of who ran or what the platforms were. Maybe some of them would vote for radical progressive if there was one with credible chance of winning. Maybe some of them would vote for a blatantly Mussolini-inspired candidate. Either way, it isn't obvious that motivation was the reason to not vote for all of them and it certainly isn't clear that they are more likely to be "latent conservatives".
You’re right, it’s not obvious. And perhaps to strengthen your point, countries with compulsory voting (e.g. Australia) don’t seem to show any particular skew.
Regarding the original point, Pew published some interesting stats on voter preferences:
The Pew study is interesting, but I feel that it's whole approach manages to elide the more important question of what specific policies a majority of the population would support. It is clear (in general, and in the Pew report) that there are many policies that both the "progressive left" and "conservative right" will never agree on. But it is less clear what might be the support for policies like e.g. government industrial policy involving investment in US-based businesses which can be spun either way but are generally "populist".
Alas, we appear unlikely to find out, since no presidential/senate candidate is going to do anything truly populist with economic policy for fear of pissing off the big donors.
Yes, that’s the big unknown. It’s hard for any sort of anti-establishment populist to emerge. Trump is an example of this: he basically ran against both parties, was rendered ineffective, and they haven’t stopped trying to bury him. Ross Perot, Ron Paul & Bernie Sanders covered similar ground (albeit from different angles) and hit the same wall.
According to Pew, the wall they ran into is that their policies are not popular enough.
But anyway, I do not consider Trump as having been rendered ineffective, and he certainly isn't buried.
More centrally, there's no obligation of those with the (literal or metaphorical) printing presses to spread the good word Our Favorite Populist of the moment. In the USA, we ceded control of "the press" to the private sector, without any expectation that they would ever act against the interests of their owners. There's no reason why any multi-(m|b)illion corporation is ever going to champion Bernie Sander's policies. On the other hand, Trump's policies (from day one) were just fine for the largest news organization on the planet, precisely because they were never threatening to the status quo.
If people actually want to hear populist policies, they're going to have to pay attention to something other than corporate owned media, regardless of its nominal political orientation.
Wow...who needs friends with enemies like that. But jeez...you'd think they would have at least learned their lesson.
I was pretty convinced 2 years ago (around the time of the injecting hydrochloric acid comments) that Trump would be almost universally be considered a national embarrassment by now. If there weren't powerful people running around deliberately trying to inflate support for him hoping it will somehow work out in their own interests I'm still pretty sure he would be.
Well no, he technically didn't advocate injecting bleach either but I gather he did seriously suggest a task force should investigate it as a possible covid treatment. HCl is used as a bleaching agent even if it's not commonly an ingredient in commercial bleaches - I conflated the two in my head.
He initially referred to UV light as a disinfection agent, and then to the "bleach". He was rambling about use inside the body and did mention "injection", but he wasn't specifically advocating something, and when asked to clarify a few moments later he explicitly said he didn't think it should be injected.
Was it loose talk and pretty dumb? Absolutely. Did the media exaggerate and lie about it for years as a political talking point? Of course! Such is life in modern America.
Wealth Management is not the same as retail banking.
"The Wealth Management division offers comprehensive wealth management and investment solutions and tailored financing and advisory services to ultra- high-net-worth (UHNW) and high- net-worth (HNW) individuals and external asset managers"
How is that relevant? You said: "It does not have a significant retail presence." Meanwhile, CS does have a massive retail presence, in Switzerland, and has done for 150+ years.
CS operates in 50+ countries. All the largest entities have resolution/winddown plans agreed with their regulators. In reality they probably won’t be used because the SNB and Fed will fear contagion.
Wikipedia is okay for some topics, particularly if they're completely uncontroversial and lots of people edit the article (note: both conditions are necessary, just one is insufficient).
However, for anything even remotely controversial, Wikipedia is a real crapshoot. A lot of subjects are controlled by motivated cabals of editors. They may list sources, but there's no guarantee that those sources are representative, chosen in an unbiased way, etc.
If you know how the sausage is made, your trust in Wikipedia will plummet.
generally i find the opposite: controversial articles are rigorously pruned of anything even slightly dubious, while errors in uncontroversial articles remain for many years
this is because the motivated cabal includes people on opposing sides of the controversy, watching like a hawk for their opponents to make errors they can correct
I have rarely seen a balanced pair of opposing cabals. One side usually wins out, at least on individual articles.
> watching like a hawk for their opponents to make errors they can correct
This is a very idealistic view of how these battles are actually fought. Just settling for correcting the opposing side's errors would be very magnanimous. In reality, cabals usually try to get the opposing cabal's editors banned. The types of errors they look out for are violations of editing rules. Usually, both cabals are in violation of the rules, so it's really a question of which side is more effective at gaming the system. It's very common for both sides to try to bait their opponents into violating the 3-revert rule, for example.
Once one side wins, they can do pretty much anything with the article. Most articles about controversial subjects end up under the control of one side or another.
There are a lot of cases where a small minority is heavily invested in a topic at the individual level, while the majority (who have an opposing view) are not. The small minority has the incentive, the energy, and the time to keep fighting for their narrative, while nobody in the majority makes the same effort as none of them individually have as much skin in the game. This dynamic plays out all the time on Wikipedia.
Thanks for this. My biggest pet peeve is "Wikipedia is just some random dudes" given that it's so trivially easy to see where Wikipedia sources their info.
Where Wikipedia _says_ it gets its references from. You still have to double check that the links work, the content hasn't changed, and that the actual reference is referring to statements that actually agree with the argument or context ( to say nothing of the facts) in the corresponding wiki text.
If there's ever a good use for an AI in Wikipedia it would be vetting citations for at least a first order correspondence with text indexing the citation and flagging things that seem to diverge beyond some threshold.
They are a bit less important than they once were in terms of volume, but they are still massively interconnected with the rest of the system. There is zero chance they‘re just left to implode without governments and central banks stepping in.
They'll just disappear and the pieces of it be sold off. They're not that interconnected anymore since they've been selling everything the past few years.
I think the AUM comparison is something everyone needs to be careful of. Vanguard has a lot of AUM from me (from my point of view anyway), but it’s (hopefully) 100% passed through to security issuing organizations. They only get to rake a fraction of a percent from me for their operations.
Wayyyyy different than a bank with $billions in checking and savings accounts where they can do ??? with it.
