You knew this ad was bullshit. I know this ad is bullshit. However, so many people don’t know this and that’s the problem. I have found that most of the people I know that voted for Trump and will vote for him in the next election are some of the least informed people on this planet. It’s like RFK Jr’s brainworm ate their brains too, but I’m no conspiracy theorist.
The Super Tuesday political TV ads in Alabama told some of the most bold-faced lies I have ever heard, yet people here ate them up like ice cream and parroted them back to anyone that would listen from the doctor’s office waiting room to the gas station.
I am all for free speech, but Trump has made lying an art form. Politicians have always lied since the dawn of time, but the lies that are told now are so far beyond “a little white lie”. Trump and his MAGAs have built a campaign of lies that could potentially end our democracy. The media, instead of fact checking these lies, plays right into their hands by nationalizing their dangerous propaganda. I am now at the point where I question most of what I read and hear even when it’s something that I agree with.
Trumper’s failure to use their critical thinking skills when they hear/read something that supports their political/religious/social views willingly accept this data. If the info doesn’t support these views, then it must be all lies. That’s the extent of their thinking. In the internet age, this is inexcusable. Look it up and discern for yourself. Maybe it helps that I have a degree in pharmacy and had to learn how to critically interpret studies. First rule, never take anything at face value.
I know a woman who believes every lie told about Biden but swears, even in the face of video evidence, that things said about Trump have been doctored.
Surely if you're questioning even the things you agree with, that's avoiding confirmation bias and exercising critical thinking? It's yet another of your admirable qualities. Have you read Daniel Kahneman's excellent book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’? One of its lessons is not too take things at face value. Apologies if you have read it, but in case you haven't, basically it describes two types of thinking which he calls System 1 & 2 (the originators of those terms have since amended them to Type 1 & 2). Type 1 is the fast, intuitive response, Type 2 the slow, deliberate but also ‘lazy’, it doesn't get involved unless it has to our you make a conscious effort. For instance, a bat and ball cost $1.10, the bat costs $1 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost? Many people come up with the answer 10¢, which is Type 1 fast thinking. However, that's wrong: if the bat is $1 and the ball 10¢ the bat is 90¢ more than the ball. The correct answer is 5¢ (which makes the bat $1.05). Type 2 is reluctant to overrule Type 1 thinking. Type 1 is what enables us to react to threats, to assess situations quickly, which has obvious evolutionary advantages, but also often leads us to make false assumptions and errors. Type 2 is involved in memory retrieval and thinking about problems such as 18×23, for which Type 1 doesn't have a quick answer. You could estimate by saying it's going to be around 400 (20×20. The answer is actually 414), but to come up with the answer requires slow, Type 2 thinking (I'm fairly good at maths and have learnt tricks like the 20² approximation and working it out by calculating 20×23 - 2×23 = 460 - 46, which I can do fairly quickly without pencil and paper. It's much easier than working out 10×23 + 8×23 = 230 + 184 but you get the idea). Kahneman, despite being a psychologist actually won a Nobel prize for economics for his work in ‘Behavioural Economics’! Anyway, the gist of his book is to try and exercise your Type 2 thinking more, be careful about your Type 1 assumptions, taking things at face value, jumping to conclusions &c. Type 1 leads us to make very contradictory decisions. Another for instance, we give more weight to losses than gains which leads us to make entirely contradictory choices about risks depending on whether they're framed as losses or gains: when given two choices, one a safe bet the other risky we tend to favour the safe bet when the options are framed as gains but favour the risky option when framed as losses, ie we gamble more on minimizing a loss than maximising a gain despite identical outcomes for either choice.
Sorry, I've gotten a bit carried away. I hope I didn't bore you! 🙂
Thank you Nicholas! I have not read Kahneman’s book, but I love his explanation for the two types of thinking. I find I used to be more of a Type 1 thinker, but I am definitely more of a Type 2 thinker now. I guess I can attribute this to getting older lol. Maybe instead of attributing wisdom to old age, we should attribute it to the fact our brains get slower forcing us to be Type 2 thinkers.
It’s so easy to fall into the trap of confirmation bias, because it’s the lazy approach to thinking (Type 1). We all do it. However, Trump and corporate right-ring billionaires have turned our media into a joke. Even if I hear something that supports my beliefs, I usually dig deeper, because the headlines today are usually misleading click bait of the worst kind.
Excuse my ignorance, but finance is a subject that makes my eyes glaze over when it comes up, so please correct me if I'm wrong. I thought these losing gambles were sub-prime mortgages, or mortgages given to people who couldn't afford them so the banks got a load of cash and then got the real estate when the borrowers defaulted. Only that the collapse of the housing bubble meant the houses weren't worth what the poor were paying for them. So why did we bail out the banks rather than the people with the mortgages? That way the banks would have got their money, the people conned into mortgages they couldn't afford would have kept their homes instead of being made homeless, the money would have circulated in the economy rather than on industrial strength braces (I think you call them suspenders in the US) so that the avaricious bankers' trousers wouldn't fall down with the weight of all that cash they've just been given. Basically it was mostly the poor who paid those greedy tosspots, because they're the ones who pay their taxes. The thing that really infuriated me, nay, incensed me was that those bankers still got their bonuses (which is just another tax dodge, really). Heads you win, tails I lose. I'm sure it wasn't as simple as that, or am I? I've never heard anyone explain to me why that wouldn't have worked and I have asked. It looks suspiciously like ‘we had to bail them out because they're rich/we couldn't bail them out because they're poor’. That's (un)just the shitstem the Great Orange Party are gaslighting us to accept.
It reminds me of a joke: you know the aphorism about giving a man a fish you feed him for a day, teach him to fish… Well, give a man a gun and he can rob a bank, give a man a bank and he can rob anybody 😉.
We definitely should have bailed out the mortgages but that wouldn't have saved the banks from the bad bets they made. I'm serious, watch "The Big Short" and you'll see just how out of control they were. It explains the really complicated stuff in amazingly intuitive ways without slowing down the narrative. It's just genius and every actor is just perfect in their role.
"So why did we bail out the banks rather than the people with the mortgages?"
Damned good question.
It's the exact same mindset that gave us "trickle down" economics. "Give help directly to those who need it? Nah! Instead we'll give help to those who DON'T need it and cross our fingers that somehow that will benefit the ones in actual need."
Some people did get a token bail-out, but they had to file a lawsuit to get what probably amounted to peanuts. A sad situation. On the other hand there were people who knew they really couldn’t afford a McMansion but did it anyway. I worked on a few of these cases and what I saw would make your eyes pop.
You know how I knew this ad was bullshit.? No explanation on any of the claims, who were the supposed villains (besides “Washington”) and who was funding this ad (unless I missed it). All red flags.
The 2008-2008 melt down screwed most Americans: houses became worth less than what was owed, IRA’s and 401ks took a bath, people who were set to retire after bleeding for their employers for years couldn’t. Too big to fail means “we can’t fail but fuck you and yours”
And what was another case Trump was charged with and whining about - having to pay that huge fine for lying about the valuation of his properties. I had a real estate license before the 2008 plunge. In a continuing Ed class the instructor told us that he was receiving calls from students telling him that they were being forced to write mortgages on properties that didn’t exist. The properties were bundled and sent on. The regulators knew but nothing happened. No one acted on the information. Then the economy crashed. Oops! And there’s Donnie - right back at it - again. “Make the numbers fit” - no big deal. And there are the big banks again - trying to get us to forget what they pulled,
Yes, I understand that, and appreciate that, but substack is not going to reach the folks who have their tv’s on 24/7 or are on FB or TikTok the same amount. I saw the ad while my husband was watching tv. Whoever has the most 💵 and has the most motivation to brainwash is going to influence minds the most.
Sadly, I see it in real life in rural red America. I make a concentrated effort to push back wherever I can in the balance of all things. Maybe I’m just feeling more defeated than usual today
Shit like this can’t fly, too many of us are not the nerd you are. I say that with love in my heart. I happen to think nerds are really cool 😎.
I want to be able to turn on the boobtube and be able to believe the dribble they feed us. Chi Need to clean this crap up. I have this stupidly expensive, really big black rectangular box, that doesn’t even make a good mirror and it has only been turned on about ten times in 8 years.
I am not happy with Joe. I think Joe could be doing better. I tolerate Joe because he is NotTrump. But student debt forgiveness and fucking Wall Street are always good calls, regardless of some of his others.
He would do more if he were not blocked by the Republicans at every turn. They even blocked funding for curing cancer, b/c they can’t let Biden have a win.
Yeah but then he goes and saves Johnson anyhow who is an open enemy of democracy. In exchange for nothing donestically. Sure Ukraine needs the help but what about our sick and poor and starving? What about me being worth less than nothing?
Republicans are shitting on him daily and he's still playing softball. Trump is criming on the daily. Joe has access to every law enforcement and anti-terrorism unit in the country. What's he doing about MAGA terrorism and poll watchers?
You're being played. There's two parties. Rich and poor. Joe and Biden both play for the Rich.
The House saved Johnson and it wasn’t because they like him but for strategic reasons. As for our poor sick and dying, this is still capitalist America and while Biden has a good heart he’s not Superman or God, but even God hasn’t done anything for the poor and sick. Can I ask what past presidents have done everything right by you?
We can knit pick all day about an American President but if you want to know what he’s done and trying to do for the American people I invite you to read Heather Cox Richardson nightly letters. I personally don’t expect politicians to do much for me personally but even if they are merely trying to save us all from fascism and scorched earth politics of the Right *to the best of their ability* that’s good enough for me.
And Johnson had repaid them by screwing them, like any other Johnson.
Obamacare is the only thing a President has done in my lifetime that benefitted me. I mean, I enjoy roads and fire departments and stuff - infrastructure - but they keep taking more and more of our money and rights away.
I spent way too much time homeless as in and now my disability (after being worked to medical, literal , clinical DEATH) income is $470 a month and my meds are $1,700 a month.
Tell me more about how good the government is for me, please. I am ALL eyes.
Yes. Because I am doing my best to avoid topics I don't wish to engage in flame wars about. But while he throws the poor bones, he's also still ultimately in the tank for the rich.
And Merrick still has a job when he's utterly incompetent.
Joe may be great for "the economy" but "the economy" is rich people's yacht money.
I'm still getting $470 a month with meds that cost $1700 a month and my mandatory doctor visits to keep my insurance aren't free either.
Joe ain't done shit for me, nor has he stopped Huckabee-Slanders from fucking me like a two-dicked billy goat.
He's NotTrump and that's good enough, but he's not my choice, not my friend, and not my ally.
You don’t mention corporate greed, monopolies because all the regulations destroyed by republicans, the house shooting down every bill that may be good for America and the fact that this house of representatives has not passed one bill, not one.
Yup, I am still paying for what happened in the U.S. In 2008 and I live in Finland... we bought a bigger apartment in May 2008 when house pricing was at it's peak. Then everything crashed and nobody wanted to but our old apartment...
What a great explanation of a complex financial issue which most people have given up on trying to understand.
You knew this ad was bullshit. I know this ad is bullshit. However, so many people don’t know this and that’s the problem. I have found that most of the people I know that voted for Trump and will vote for him in the next election are some of the least informed people on this planet. It’s like RFK Jr’s brainworm ate their brains too, but I’m no conspiracy theorist.
The Super Tuesday political TV ads in Alabama told some of the most bold-faced lies I have ever heard, yet people here ate them up like ice cream and parroted them back to anyone that would listen from the doctor’s office waiting room to the gas station.
I am all for free speech, but Trump has made lying an art form. Politicians have always lied since the dawn of time, but the lies that are told now are so far beyond “a little white lie”. Trump and his MAGAs have built a campaign of lies that could potentially end our democracy. The media, instead of fact checking these lies, plays right into their hands by nationalizing their dangerous propaganda. I am now at the point where I question most of what I read and hear even when it’s something that I agree with.
Trumper’s failure to use their critical thinking skills when they hear/read something that supports their political/religious/social views willingly accept this data. If the info doesn’t support these views, then it must be all lies. That’s the extent of their thinking. In the internet age, this is inexcusable. Look it up and discern for yourself. Maybe it helps that I have a degree in pharmacy and had to learn how to critically interpret studies. First rule, never take anything at face value.
I know a woman who believes every lie told about Biden but swears, even in the face of video evidence, that things said about Trump have been doctored.
This would be most of my family sadly.
I believe this is called confirmation bias by journalists.
Surely if you're questioning even the things you agree with, that's avoiding confirmation bias and exercising critical thinking? It's yet another of your admirable qualities. Have you read Daniel Kahneman's excellent book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’? One of its lessons is not too take things at face value. Apologies if you have read it, but in case you haven't, basically it describes two types of thinking which he calls System 1 & 2 (the originators of those terms have since amended them to Type 1 & 2). Type 1 is the fast, intuitive response, Type 2 the slow, deliberate but also ‘lazy’, it doesn't get involved unless it has to our you make a conscious effort. For instance, a bat and ball cost $1.10, the bat costs $1 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost? Many people come up with the answer 10¢, which is Type 1 fast thinking. However, that's wrong: if the bat is $1 and the ball 10¢ the bat is 90¢ more than the ball. The correct answer is 5¢ (which makes the bat $1.05). Type 2 is reluctant to overrule Type 1 thinking. Type 1 is what enables us to react to threats, to assess situations quickly, which has obvious evolutionary advantages, but also often leads us to make false assumptions and errors. Type 2 is involved in memory retrieval and thinking about problems such as 18×23, for which Type 1 doesn't have a quick answer. You could estimate by saying it's going to be around 400 (20×20. The answer is actually 414), but to come up with the answer requires slow, Type 2 thinking (I'm fairly good at maths and have learnt tricks like the 20² approximation and working it out by calculating 20×23 - 2×23 = 460 - 46, which I can do fairly quickly without pencil and paper. It's much easier than working out 10×23 + 8×23 = 230 + 184 but you get the idea). Kahneman, despite being a psychologist actually won a Nobel prize for economics for his work in ‘Behavioural Economics’! Anyway, the gist of his book is to try and exercise your Type 2 thinking more, be careful about your Type 1 assumptions, taking things at face value, jumping to conclusions &c. Type 1 leads us to make very contradictory decisions. Another for instance, we give more weight to losses than gains which leads us to make entirely contradictory choices about risks depending on whether they're framed as losses or gains: when given two choices, one a safe bet the other risky we tend to favour the safe bet when the options are framed as gains but favour the risky option when framed as losses, ie we gamble more on minimizing a loss than maximising a gain despite identical outcomes for either choice.
Sorry, I've gotten a bit carried away. I hope I didn't bore you! 🙂
Thank you Nicholas! I have not read Kahneman’s book, but I love his explanation for the two types of thinking. I find I used to be more of a Type 1 thinker, but I am definitely more of a Type 2 thinker now. I guess I can attribute this to getting older lol. Maybe instead of attributing wisdom to old age, we should attribute it to the fact our brains get slower forcing us to be Type 2 thinkers.
It’s so easy to fall into the trap of confirmation bias, because it’s the lazy approach to thinking (Type 1). We all do it. However, Trump and corporate right-ring billionaires have turned our media into a joke. Even if I hear something that supports my beliefs, I usually dig deeper, because the headlines today are usually misleading click bait of the worst kind.
“people complaining are some of the greediest people on the face of the earth”
Excuse my ignorance, but finance is a subject that makes my eyes glaze over when it comes up, so please correct me if I'm wrong. I thought these losing gambles were sub-prime mortgages, or mortgages given to people who couldn't afford them so the banks got a load of cash and then got the real estate when the borrowers defaulted. Only that the collapse of the housing bubble meant the houses weren't worth what the poor were paying for them. So why did we bail out the banks rather than the people with the mortgages? That way the banks would have got their money, the people conned into mortgages they couldn't afford would have kept their homes instead of being made homeless, the money would have circulated in the economy rather than on industrial strength braces (I think you call them suspenders in the US) so that the avaricious bankers' trousers wouldn't fall down with the weight of all that cash they've just been given. Basically it was mostly the poor who paid those greedy tosspots, because they're the ones who pay their taxes. The thing that really infuriated me, nay, incensed me was that those bankers still got their bonuses (which is just another tax dodge, really). Heads you win, tails I lose. I'm sure it wasn't as simple as that, or am I? I've never heard anyone explain to me why that wouldn't have worked and I have asked. It looks suspiciously like ‘we had to bail them out because they're rich/we couldn't bail them out because they're poor’. That's (un)just the shitstem the Great Orange Party are gaslighting us to accept.
It reminds me of a joke: you know the aphorism about giving a man a fish you feed him for a day, teach him to fish… Well, give a man a gun and he can rob a bank, give a man a bank and he can rob anybody 😉.
We definitely should have bailed out the mortgages but that wouldn't have saved the banks from the bad bets they made. I'm serious, watch "The Big Short" and you'll see just how out of control they were. It explains the really complicated stuff in amazingly intuitive ways without slowing down the narrative. It's just genius and every actor is just perfect in their role.
Thank you, I'll try to get hold of a copy.
"So why did we bail out the banks rather than the people with the mortgages?"
Damned good question.
It's the exact same mindset that gave us "trickle down" economics. "Give help directly to those who need it? Nah! Instead we'll give help to those who DON'T need it and cross our fingers that somehow that will benefit the ones in actual need."
Some people did get a token bail-out, but they had to file a lawsuit to get what probably amounted to peanuts. A sad situation. On the other hand there were people who knew they really couldn’t afford a McMansion but did it anyway. I worked on a few of these cases and what I saw would make your eyes pop.
Love the joke…
"And why would I? That would ruin the flavor of the marshmallows I was roasting, wouldn’t it?"
Literal ROFL!
You know how I knew this ad was bullshit.? No explanation on any of the claims, who were the supposed villains (besides “Washington”) and who was funding this ad (unless I missed it). All red flags.
The 2008-2008 melt down screwed most Americans: houses became worth less than what was owed, IRA’s and 401ks took a bath, people who were set to retire after bleeding for their employers for years couldn’t. Too big to fail means “we can’t fail but fuck you and yours”
Read “The Big Short” book, too. The movie is really well done. The book gives you the super-nerdy details.
There’s blood in the water, and these guys can’t wait for the CryptoLibertarian Fascist takeover that WILL wipe out the middle class.
https://ips-dc.org/billionaire-enabler-states/
https://fee.org/articles/the-sovereign-individual-how-to-survive-and-thrive-during-the-collapse-of-the-welfare-state-by-james-dale-davidson-and-lord-william-rees-mogg/
“The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein.
And what was another case Trump was charged with and whining about - having to pay that huge fine for lying about the valuation of his properties. I had a real estate license before the 2008 plunge. In a continuing Ed class the instructor told us that he was receiving calls from students telling him that they were being forced to write mortgages on properties that didn’t exist. The properties were bundled and sent on. The regulators knew but nothing happened. No one acted on the information. Then the economy crashed. Oops! And there’s Donnie - right back at it - again. “Make the numbers fit” - no big deal. And there are the big banks again - trying to get us to forget what they pulled,
When I saw the ad, I also looked up FSF to see who was promoting 💩💩
Most people won’t be bothered. Most people will eat that 💩 for lunch, and vote accordingly.
What can we do about propaganda and folks that are vulnerable?
I write these articles. It's my contribution to the push back.
Yes, I understand that, and appreciate that, but substack is not going to reach the folks who have their tv’s on 24/7 or are on FB or TikTok the same amount. I saw the ad while my husband was watching tv. Whoever has the most 💵 and has the most motivation to brainwash is going to influence minds the most.
Sadly, I see it in real life in rural red America. I make a concentrated effort to push back wherever I can in the balance of all things. Maybe I’m just feeling more defeated than usual today
CORRUPT CORPORATE EXECUTIVES ALL. NO SURPRISE.
Shit like this can’t fly, too many of us are not the nerd you are. I say that with love in my heart. I happen to think nerds are really cool 😎.
I want to be able to turn on the boobtube and be able to believe the dribble they feed us. Chi Need to clean this crap up. I have this stupidly expensive, really big black rectangular box, that doesn’t even make a good mirror and it has only been turned on about ten times in 8 years.
This should be sent out in a mailer as required reading for everyone with a bank account.
Excellent job of breaking down this elephant we all gotta eat into tasty, bite sized morsels.
It's what they pay me the big bucks for. :)
TY!
I am not happy with Joe. I think Joe could be doing better. I tolerate Joe because he is NotTrump. But student debt forgiveness and fucking Wall Street are always good calls, regardless of some of his others.
He would do more if he were not blocked by the Republicans at every turn. They even blocked funding for curing cancer, b/c they can’t let Biden have a win.
Yeah but then he goes and saves Johnson anyhow who is an open enemy of democracy. In exchange for nothing donestically. Sure Ukraine needs the help but what about our sick and poor and starving? What about me being worth less than nothing?
Republicans are shitting on him daily and he's still playing softball. Trump is criming on the daily. Joe has access to every law enforcement and anti-terrorism unit in the country. What's he doing about MAGA terrorism and poll watchers?
You're being played. There's two parties. Rich and poor. Joe and Biden both play for the Rich.
The House saved Johnson and it wasn’t because they like him but for strategic reasons. As for our poor sick and dying, this is still capitalist America and while Biden has a good heart he’s not Superman or God, but even God hasn’t done anything for the poor and sick. Can I ask what past presidents have done everything right by you?
We can knit pick all day about an American President but if you want to know what he’s done and trying to do for the American people I invite you to read Heather Cox Richardson nightly letters. I personally don’t expect politicians to do much for me personally but even if they are merely trying to save us all from fascism and scorched earth politics of the Right *to the best of their ability* that’s good enough for me.
And Johnson had repaid them by screwing them, like any other Johnson.
Obamacare is the only thing a President has done in my lifetime that benefitted me. I mean, I enjoy roads and fire departments and stuff - infrastructure - but they keep taking more and more of our money and rights away.
I spent way too much time homeless as in and now my disability (after being worked to medical, literal , clinical DEATH) income is $470 a month and my meds are $1,700 a month.
Tell me more about how good the government is for me, please. I am ALL eyes.
Yep, our healthcare system sucks. No arguments there, but Biden had a hand in ACA and has fought to save and expand it.
I mean that reaffirms the one thing I did know. I was looking for ideas.
It’s hardly softball to keep Americans from dying
Trump and Biden* last sentence
You didn’t say what you are not happy about. Policy?
Yes. Because I am doing my best to avoid topics I don't wish to engage in flame wars about. But while he throws the poor bones, he's also still ultimately in the tank for the rich.
And Merrick still has a job when he's utterly incompetent.
Joe may be great for "the economy" but "the economy" is rich people's yacht money.
I'm still getting $470 a month with meds that cost $1700 a month and my mandatory doctor visits to keep my insurance aren't free either.
Joe ain't done shit for me, nor has he stopped Huckabee-Slanders from fucking me like a two-dicked billy goat.
He's NotTrump and that's good enough, but he's not my choice, not my friend, and not my ally.
You don’t mention corporate greed, monopolies because all the regulations destroyed by republicans, the house shooting down every bill that may be good for America and the fact that this house of representatives has not passed one bill, not one.
It gets tiring adding "the reich wing is terrible" to every post.
Yup, I am still paying for what happened in the U.S. In 2008 and I live in Finland... we bought a bigger apartment in May 2008 when house pricing was at it's peak. Then everything crashed and nobody wanted to but our old apartment...