One Approach for Dealing with Vague Verbal Attacks

Notice the simple technique used by this Canadian politician. He asks for examples. He asks the attacker to clarify what he is trying to say. Relentlessly asking for clarity does two things: It reveals the empty rhetoric and it shows that what is really going on is that the attacker is calling other people "bad." The politician was faced with an emotional feeling wrapped up in incomprehensible rhetoric. Not that emotional concerns are invalid. That said, things that look like an analytical argument should always be fair game for testing. We should always be invited to kick the tires and see what's under the hood.

This technique is non-partisan, however. Any person can use this technique to derail any conversation if used to an extreme. All language is inherently rickety, laden with conceptual metaphors. Using this technique incessantly will end almost every conversation. The only conversations that have any chance of surviving will be those involving only basic math and logic propositions (2 + 2 = 4) and "basic level categories," as described by Eleanor Rosch: Conversations like "I have a dog" or "It's raining outside." See also here, here and here.

There is balance to be had in the use of such inquisition and people of good faith do work together to make their conversations understandable and thus meaningful. If only there were more good faith and less suspicion in the world . . .

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California Judge Allows Case to Proceed Against Social Media Company for Addicting Children

From Bloomberg:

Meta Platforms Inc., Snap Inc., TikTok Inc., and Google LLC can’t invoke the First Amendment or the Communications Decency Act’s Section 230—a decades-old legal shield for online services—to block allegations that they designed their platforms to addict young people causing depression and anxiety, Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl ruled in an 89-page order.

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Suicidal Class War

Is suicide a major casualty of American class war? Yascha Monk interviews Angus Eaton at Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: . . . What helps to explain why it is that, for centuries, life expectancy went up in the United States and now, suddenly, we're seeing this really quite striking aberration from that?

Angus Deaton: . . .We don't really know why life expectancy improved so much for so long. But if you go into that literature, it's amazingly diverse and controversial. Was it nutrition? Was it drugs? . . . A lot of what Anne [Case] and I have done is just to document this fact that there's three years in a row when overall life expectancy fell: you've obviously got what happened during COVID (which doesn't require a lot of explanation by itself) and also these horrible deaths of despair, which are suicides, drug overdoses, and alcoholism—a huge increase during the pandemic of deaths from alcoholism.

Suicides have always been a big clue in this story, because of Durkheim and the story that when society is really not working for people, that's when you begin to get suicides. Suicide is just an indicator that something is gone terribly wrong. But I think it’s getting almost no attention among policymakers and very little in the press that the increase in deaths during this period is almost entirely among people who don't have a four-year college degree. For the third of the popular adult population that has a four-year college degree, they're pretty much exempt from all these horrors. And in fact, if you look at life expectancy at age 25 for people with a college degree, it's like the best out of all the other rich countries in the world; it looks like Japan or Switzerland. What's pulling us all down—and making us, really, the sick man of all the rich countries—is this increasing mortality among, if you like, the working class, and I think that cuts across race. This is not a black–white issue, not a poor–rich issue, but an issue between people who have a college degree and people who don't.

There's something gone wrong with working class America. And it's not hard to list a bunch of things. Democracy is not working very well for them. The neoliberal consensus wasn't good for them. The share of profits in GDP is rising at the expense of working people. It's sort of like an old fashioned class war.

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