Non-paywall link: https://archive.ph/Gt4z1

Having watched Joe Biden retain most of the tariffs he inherited, America’s trading partners have been fond of complaining the US president is “continuity Trump” and wondering whether Kamala Harris will be continuity Biden. The first epithet was never entirely fair: Trump’s focus was on closing trade deficits and gaining negotiating leverage, Biden’s mainly about industrial policy. Now Trump is threatening a massive and damaging escalation of trade protection, Harris only has to keep Biden’s policies in place, as she probably will, and she will look positively free-trade Clintonesque (Bill not Hillary) in comparison.

[...]

At any rate, her launch of the price control plan last week was accompanied by an explicit repudiation of Trump’s new tariffs: “These actions stand in stark contrast to Trump, who would increase costs for families by at least $3,900 with what is, in effect, a new national sales tax on imported everyday goods.”

The consumer-focused critique is not new from this administration — Biden made similar comments about Trump’s 10 per cent across-the-board proposal — but it does illustrate the gulf in policy and messaging opening up with the Republicans.

[...]

Let’s be clear: Harris hasn’t repudiated the trade and industrial policy elements of Bidenomics, and is unlikely to. But the Democrats are at least charting a steady course that balances their desire to protect industries they deem strategic with the need to hold down economy-wide inflation. Meanwhile, Trump is sailing off towards areas of the trade policy map marked “Here Be Dragons”. Clear blue water is emerging between the Republicans and Democrats, and the idea that second-term Trump trade policy would resemble that of a Harris administration is rapidly receding.

NIMBYs' excuses are becoming more and more elaborate.

When asked about Trump's attitudes to climate change and the environment, literal tumbleweed emerged from the mouth of famed environmental lawyer and lifelong environmentalist RFK Jr.

Sky invented football in 1992.

It's YouGov. The partisan split of the polling industry in the US is an unusual feature for me as a Briton. It comes up as a note of caution in political betting communities as it's not something we really have here - all the major UK pollsters (including YouGov, who I assume subject their US operations to the same standards as they do at home) have been signed up to the British Polling Council for decades and have to adhere to various standards of transparency around their questions and methodologies. (Unusually, YouGov are the one UK polling outfit that sometimes get claims of partisanship thrown at them, but that's because their founder later became a senior Conservative politician rather than because of any genuine evidence of partisan bias in their numbers!)

I was amazed by this for example:

But this thread is a reminder that without the equivalent of the British Polling Council some American pollster have a partisan skew which means when analysing the polls and betting on them that should be taken into consideration.

It is possible for an American pollster to ask this question

‘Are you planning on voting for the man God wishes was his son Donald Trump or the whore of Babylon Kamala Harris?’

and all we’d ever see from the pollster is ‘Trump 50%, Harris 50%’ as they don’t have to publish the question or data tables

Never heard of him. Do you mean Stephen Yaxley-Lennon?

I was disagreeing with you perpetuating the lump of labour fallacy that one can be anti-immigrant for pro-worker reasons.

When nativists use this argument, it's usually shit-stirrers deliberately trying to pit people against each other. They rely on the fact that the average person probably hasn't taken the time to conduct a literature review of the economic studies of immigration, but might be able to be seduced by a superficially easy argument that all their ills can be blamed on some minority and drawing on some cherry-picked anecdotes.

The reality of immigration bears little relation to the skewed narrative the nativists are trying to sell. Irregular migration represents only a tiny fraction of UK immigration. Immigrants are no more likely to commit crime than natives. Immigration grows the economy and has little or no effect on jobs and wages. Immigrants are net contributors to the NHS and public services. Once you knock away all the far-right's factual lies, it's hard to find the nugget of a 'legitimate' reason why people might consider immigration to be one of the major 'problems' facing this country that doesn't start and end with xenophobia.

I too predict that the election will be won by either the Democrats or the Republicans :)

The idea that the unions would legitimately oppose immigration is nonsense. Economic analysis of the actual impact of immigration has consistently shown that immigration has little-to-no negative impact on the incomes of native workers - immigrants don't undercut the wages of native workers so the unions shouldn't be worried about them.

A large part of that is because of the 'lump of labour' fallacy. Unthoughtful people assume there's a fixed number of jobs to be filled, but the reality is that immigrants don't just fill jobs but also create jobs through their own demand for goods and services. But there are other factors too like entrepreneurialism and business start ups - immigrants, as evidenced by them being part of the small subset of people who are prepared to pack up their lives and move to another country, tend to be more entrepreneurial than the general population in either their home or host countries. Some of our biggest high street names like Tesco and M&S have immigrant origins.

The small caveat to this is that immigration in recent decades has been shown to have a tiny negative impact on the incomes of the lowest paid 20% of the population (of about -0.5%) but this is dwarfed by the positive impact it has on those further up the income spectrum (e.g. +1.7% for the richest 10%). Obviously +1.7% of a very rich person's income is a lot more than -0.5% of a poor person's income. So if the unions are rational and actually want to improve the lot of the poorest in society then they should be campaigning for a lot more immigration and a very small increase in taxes on the richest to fund redistribution of this income, which will more than compensate the poorest for the fraction of a percentage point of lost income from over two decades worth of immigration.

I would expect the same, and yet the polling shows that Trump was consistently leading Biden on the economy. The random person on the street probably sees the guy is rich and ostentatious with his money, and assumes that means he knows something about the economy.

The fact Kamala is leading on this seems like a big deal given the state of the US economy was perceived as the Democrats' most vulnerable issue going into this election.

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/XVcL6

I am grateful to the people, institutions and nations that supported the democratic aspirations of the Bangladeshi people during the dark years under Sheikh Hasina. Human-rights organisations such as Amnesty International and the Clooney Foundation for Justice have been especially helpful. Citizens around the world have made their voices heard in advocating justice, democracy and freedom of expression for our people. Members of the Bangladeshi diaspora, especially students and other young people, have worked tirelessly from abroad to bring justice and liberation to their native land. I hope some of them will return to help revitalise our democracy and build our economy.

Although some countries, such as India, backed the ousted prime minister and earned the enmity of the Bangladeshi people as a result, there will be many opportunities to heal these kinds of rifts and to resume bilateral alliances and close friendships soon. In fact, I hope that our liberation can revive the suspended South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation and make it a powerful force for integration in our region and beyond.

For too long, Bangladesh’s politics have been backward-looking. Starting today, let us focus on building a future together that springs from the second liberation that occurred on August 5th. A new generation of young leaders should emerge from among those who led us to this important new victory. Their energy and vision for the nation can help sanctify the sacrifices of those who gave their lives for this new opportunity—an opportunity that we must not squander.

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/ZcfbY

The survey, conducted for the Financial Times and the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, is the first monthly poll to show the Democratic presidential candidate leading Trump on the economy since it began tracking voter sentiment on the issue nearly a year ago.

Although 41 per cent of Americans still trust the former president more on economic issues — unchanged from the two previous monthly polls — the survey found 42 per cent of voters believe Harris would be better at handling the economy. That is a 7 percentage point increase compared to Biden’s numbers last month.

The claim that the criminal justice system is generally biased against white people is baseless. It is black Britons, not white ones, who are most likely to be victims of discriminatory policing: in 2021 to 2022 they were 2.4 times more likely to be arrested than white people and 3.5 times more likely to be victims of police violence.

Why, then, is the myth of “two-tier” policing spreading? Many Britons feel let down by the police—less than half think their local force is doing a good or excellent job, down from 63% a decade ago. Far-right influencers are happy to exploit that feeling. Selective presentation of evidence, vitriolic argument and the shareability of memes buoy their claims on social media and messaging apps. Mainstream politicians and media outlets who echo the far right’s language lend their claims legitimacy. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, a populist right-wing party, has spoken of two-tier policing, as has Suella Braverman, a Conservative former home secretary. Ill-informed interventions by the likes of Mr Musk only amplify the idea.

But when experts viewed clips from 2024 and compared them to clips from 2017, they noted that Trump’s speech included more short sentences, a confused order of words, repetition and extended digressions. The causes could vary, some worse than others, including mood changes, trying to win over a certain group of people, natural aging or it could be the start of a cognitive condition such as Alzheimer’s disease, the experts said.

In an analysis for STAT, fellow University of Texas social psychologist James Pennebaker reviewed transcripts of interviews with Trump from 2015 until 2024. He found a major rise in “all-or-nothing thinking” which is signified by the use of words such as “completely,” “never” and “always.”

That trend could indicate depression, Pennebaker said, which also connects to his use of fewer positive words than earlier, and also his many references to negative emotions following his departure from the White House.

A rise in all-or-nothing thinking is connected to cognitive decline. Pennebaker told STAT that Biden’s all-or-nothing thinking has also increased.

Pennebaker noted that a linguistic metric of analytic thinking reveals that Trump’s levels of complexity are remarkably low – most presidential candidates range between 60 and 70 in the metric, while Trump ranges from 10 to 24, something Pennebaker called “staggering.”

Non-paywall link: https://archive.ph/70tuV

Not sure if people are following the betting markets but I can see Kamala is now the narrow favourite. On Betfair, the mid-odds pricing equates to a 51% probability for Kamala vs 46% for Trump. That compares to Trump's win probability peaking just above 70% in the immediate aftermath of the debate.

The Harris campaign seem to be enjoying themselves!

Based af!

What I find so dumb about naming children Khaleesi is that:

a) It's not the name of a character anyway. Apparently a lot of casual fans thought Dany's actual name was Khaleesi because several other characters often addressed her by her title. So there's a good chance that either these parents are casual fans who nonetheless then misnamed their child after a character, or they are serious fans who named their child in a way that will lead other people to infer her parents were casual fans. (Nothing wrong with being a casual fan, but I'd find it a bit dumb to name my child after an IP that I was only loosely into...)

b) The child is six years old. The final episode aired only five years ago. That means they named their child before Dany's story had even concluded. George RR Martin had been dropping hints throughout the book series that Dany might or might not end up as a genocidal mad queen like her father (the TV show had laid the groundwork for this less effectively, which is in part why the abruptness of her turn was so unpopular) and I find it bizarre that a parent would name a kid after a character who might still end up as a murderous tyrant

I think about the amount of thought and research that many of my friends have conducted when naming their children (including looking up famous real and fictional people with that name, doing word associations, etc). Then these guys come along and just say 'fuck it, let's just call her after that blonde girl off TV, Khaleesi I think?'

March.