mozz

It was 1 year earlier; 1932

An 84-year-old incumbent party-line centrist was running against Hitler, and the left party at the time spent all its time attacking the centrists (they called the establishment left party “the main enemy”), and ran their own third-party candidate in the election, siphoning votes away from the center.

A few years later, Hitler had managed to seize power and most of the leftists were in the camps or dead. They were the first of his targets, even before he started working for real against the Jews.

I’m being a little bit selective about it to emphasize the similarity with today, and glossing over some important differences in the situations. But also, the situations are eerily similar, at the core.

5/6

What do you think about inflation? I don't think it's really that high, to be honest. I looked at the numbers on the Federal Reserve page, and they seem pretty reasonable to me except for the spike in 2022. What do you think about it, though?

• Saying "well I'm not doing okay, how dare you say I'm not struggling" and getting all fucked up and angry about it, so that anyone that tells you that millions of low-income workers are making more now than they were a few years ago, like way more, and that's a good thing, looks like an asshole

You're up to 4 out of 6 but I don't feel like playing anymore. Some other time

Like I say, someone struggling, I have sympathy for. Someone lying, to try to misrepresent the economy with the ultimate goal of encouraging the election of someone who will hurt those struggling Americans in ways that will make the current struggle life look like sunshine and roses, I don't have sympathy with. Don't try to pretend you are one when you're the other.

• Replying to "the economy is getting better" with "how DARE you say the economy is good and all the problems are fixed, clearly that's not the case" as a way of reframing away from the conversation of whether things are getting better, or worse, and why that is. Basically interfering with the effort to understand the policies that help or hurt by simply asserting that everything's bad, so nothing being talked about can possibly be a good thing.

Let’s see if we can get through literally all of the bullet points if you want to keep the conversation going long enough; we have 3 so far I think

It’ll be an easy way to get your hours in at least

I don’t want to play the debunking game all night. I read your link, and here’s their rent increases:

Rent in the area went from $582 to $907, or a 55.8% increase.

Rent for 1-bedroom apartments increased 49.5% from $646 to $966 from 2019 to 2024.

And so on. It looks like they sorted every metro area in the US by percentage increase, which yields a whole bunch of individual metro areas with oddball markets where some super-cheap pandemic pricing ended and so the percent increase in places where it had been $582 for a 1 bedroom apartment during the pandemic, was pretty high. That doesn’t mean the price of housing in general went up by that same high percent.

Like I say, someone who’s actually struggling, I have sympathy for. You, I don’t, because you’re just out here lying with statistics to try to hurt the people you are claiming to have all this sympathy with.

Yeah. I think their interpersonal communication style involves dictating insane terms to people who can’t fight back so they have to accept them, or else try to resist and get punished. They’re literally just incapable of dealing with people they don’t have dominant power over, so they just keep pretending they do like a demanding teenager, thinking it makes them look “strong” or else just doing it from force of habit and because they don’t know what else to do.

Yeah, fair play. I didn't even see the demilitarize thing.

Honestly, it doesn't really matter. They already know Ukraine's going to tell them to go get fucked; they just want to be able to say that they're the party that presented a peace proposal which Ukraine would have loved to sign but the West vetoed, knowing that no one of consequence will believe that. Why they are doing that is becoming less and less clear to me as time goes on.

Got it. So, back in November of 2021, someone wrote a story with a clickbaity headline about 40% rent increase in the future from back then, and now to you that's reality you are citing to me. Great stuff.

Anyway, here's the actual numbers. The median rent went from $1,102 to $1,340 in those 3 years - 21.5% cumulatively. That's what happened. So someone who's low income who's making 32% more comes out ahead. Does that mean that can afford their rent, when it's $1,700 because they're in a metro area and they make $16/hr? Fuckin A, man, maybe not. I'm being an asshole to you in this conversation a little bit, just because I know that you're deliberately twisting things to make Biden look as bad as possible (as confirmed by you which was what got you temp banned already). But I'm not trying to be unsympathetic to someone who's actually struggling and being honest about how they're struggling.

But maybe we should keep doing more of the stuff that gave them the 32% increase, and in a few years they'll be able to afford the $1,700 or whatever it is by then. Right? Or not? What would your solution be, instead, if not that?

You're right, I missed a couple

• Insisting that when cumulative inflation is 20%, and 10th percentile wages have gone up 32%, wages aren't keeping up with inflation, simply because you insist that they aren't. If anyone tries to say numbers, just say they don't count.
• Focus on the 20% inflation, because it feels real. People can see it in grocery prices, it's tangible. It rings true. The wage growth is mostly at the low end (truck drivers, housekeepers, manufacturing) where most Lemmy users can't see it, and even when someone's wage has gone up, it's easy to decide it happened because of some other factor, whereas $7 for a carton of eggs is right there in your face and memorable. And universal.

This is also a little bit of the getting angry or fucked up tactic, too. See? I look like an asshole now, with all my numbers.

Just making up a number of 40% inflation I haven't seen before. I don't think that's common enough to warrant an entry of its own. Want to show me where you got 40% from?

So there's a pretty concerted effort to make "the economy is actually getting better" stories sound untrue with some particular talking points - it's actually really effective. Here are some of the big ones. You can see why they work.

• Replying to "the economy is getting better" with "how DARE you say the economy is good and all the problems are fixed, clearly that's not the case" as a way of reframing away from the conversation of whether things are getting better, or worse, and why that is. Basically interfering with the effort to understand the policies that help or hurt by simply asserting that everything's bad, so nothing being talked about can possibly be a good thing.
• Saying "well I'm not doing okay, how dare you say I'm not struggling" and getting all fucked up and angry about it, so that anyone that tells you that millions of low-income workers are making more now than they were a few years ago, like way more, and that's a good thing, looks like an asshole
• Bringing up that the CPI excludes some categories, and implying that if it did include them, it would show more inflation than what it does (including the pretty significant spike in 2022). This one is actually a really clever subterfuge, because of how complicated it gets to explain why it is wrong (whereas if you just say "CPI doesn't include housing costs" or whatever, people can grasp that instantly and make the connection and assume that housing costs would change the value if they were included).
• Saying "well who cares about the stock market, I just know I'm struggling" when no one said anything about the stock market or the rich-person economy metrics, and everyone's talking about inflation-adjusted wages and nothing about the stock market

They're all tricks. There are more but those are some of the main ones

And you see the same 4 or 5 of them, over and over again, if you start looking

You'll see some of them in comments nearby to this one, I guarantee it

Edit: More

• Insisting that when cumulative inflation is 20%, and 10th percentile wages have gone up 32%, wages aren't keeping up with inflation, simply because you insist that they aren't. If anyone tries to say numbers, just say they don't count.
• Focus on the 20% inflation, because it feels real. People can see it in grocery prices, it's tangible. It rings true. The wage growth is mostly at the low end (truck drivers, housekeepers, manufacturing) where most Lemmy users can't see it, and even when someone's wage has gone up, it's easy to decide it happened because of some other factor, whereas $7 for a carton of eggs is right there in your face and memorable. And universal.

Those two numbers you are asking about ("true rate" or the abstraction), for the recent past, pretty much work out to the same value.

The CPI excludes some volatile categories, but it's not a trick, in this case.

The tactic of bringing up that the CPI excludes some categories, and implying that if it did include them, it would show more inflation than what it does (including the pretty significant spike in 2022)... that actually is a trick, actually a pretty subtle and clever one. To make people think the economy is getting worse, when it's getting better.

Edit: I made a top level comment with the guidebook to some of the other tricks

"As soon as Kyiv agrees to fully withdraw from Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia and starts this process, we are ready to start negotiations,” Putin said on Friday.

Putin also demanded that the West lift all sanctions against Russia, and that Moscow's claims to the territories of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson be recognized internationally.

Is that all?

You assholes don't even hold Kherson. And you want Ukraine to withdraw and give it to you, after having chased you out of the capital already, as part of the peace agreement? (Did it get recaptured and I missed it or something? This honestly sounds like I must be missing something.)

I can see why they didn't bother inviting Russia.

Edit: No, I didn't miss anything. They want Ukraine to retreat from their advancing front line (or, well, advancing as of a year and a half ago and then stalled) and give them back again the territory that Ukraine already un-stole, in exchange for stopping shooting back against Ukraine's advance. Good luck gentlemen.