Dec 29, 2023 02:05 AM
(This post was last modified: Dec 29, 2023 02:38 AM by C C.)
Ten predictions for labor in 2024
https://inthesetimes.com/article/labor-2...cks-amazon
(excerpt) 7. Biden’s labor coalition splinters. Though it is a low bar, Joe Biden can rightfully claim to be the most pro-union president in three generations. The AFL-CIO endorsed him for reelection earlier than ever, hoping to keep that ball rolling.
Unfortunately, it ain’t so simple. Biden crushed the railroad strike in December 2022, puncturing his pink cloud on the labor left. His policy towards Israel and Gaza has enraged even more of the left, and has prompted a number of unions to push for a cease-fire.
On the right, his big happy coalition is going to be sniped by union Trump supporters in 2024. His ability to take labor for granted as a solid power base, in other words, is going to be threatened — and he has no one to blame but himself. Of the many reasons to worry about this, one is… (MORE - missing details)
The rise of the sectarian university
https://compactmag.com/article/the-rise-...university
EXCERPT: . . . what really is the peril that these elite universities confront? Unlike lesser-resourced institutions, they face no real prospect of financial catastrophe, even if they lose some big donors.
[...] Acknowledging a few exceptions among conservative commentators and public officials, we can still say that universities are to Republicans what guns are to Democrats: an issue they are certain is at the root of great evils, but about which they face a massive knowledge gap that hampers their ability to do anything effective, even within the limited space our legal order allows.
The real peril to elite higher education, then, isn’t that these places will be financially ruined, nor that they will be effectively interfered with in their internal operations by hostile conservatives. It is, instead, that their position in American society will come to resemble that of The New York Times or of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Which is to say that they will remain rich and powerful, and they will continue to have many bright and competent people working within their ambit. And yet their authority will grow more brittle and their appeal more sectarian.
As recently described by former opinion editor James Bennett, the Times has seen the crumbling of the distinction between news and opinion; the acceptance of double standards for those espousing certain views and the tolerance of intimidation of some employees by those with more favored beliefs; and the end of the traditional routes of meritorious promotion through the ranks.
But the paper has hardly collapsed; if anything, it looms larger in our national life than ever. It has transcended the position of a mere reporting service and opinion clearinghouse and attained something like the status of an oracle for, say, a fifth of the population (and a much higher percentage of the credentialed class).
That is real power—from a certain angle, it is more power than the Times has ever possessed. At the same time, trust in the mainstream media has plummeted, and the paper has lost its ability to wield influence over those who see it as anything other than infallible.
Citing the words of the Times to a normal, not especially partisan person is about as meaningful as a Calvinist citing the Institutes to a nonbeliever. For those still influenceable by the Times, its impact is more totalizing than ever; to this faction, it now claims the remarkable capacity to separate the clean from the unclean, the sayable from the unsayable. But the vast majority of Americans dismiss any work of the Times it finds inconvenient, without the slightest compunction.
Things have gone similarly with the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, and the highest reaches of the public-health apparatus. For my whole life, these were broadly trusted institutions, if ones that lay deep in the background of our lives.
But with Covid, they seized their moment to assert that their dictates were coextensive with science itself. Again, this constituted an undoubted augmentation of power. A not insignificant portion of the left, consisting of people who likely never gave these agencies an hour’s thought before March 2020, would still jump off a bridge if the CDC director told them doing so would mitigate the next surge; they retain the conviction that the only reason we didn’t eliminate Covid was that the public was culpably indifferent to expertise.
Yet trust in science is reaching new lows, and even President Biden has no trouble mocking the public-health overlords when he thinks it’s a good look.
The inability of public-health organizations and spokespeople to distinguish between value judgments and scientific assessments; their refusal to admit when their modeling was mistaken; their transparent adjustment of “the Science” to suit important constituencies like the teachers’ unions; their unwillingness to acknowledge frankly that nonpharmaceutical interventions made little difference in outcomes; their encouragement of censorship; and their pattern of “noble lies”—all of these have led a sizeable part of the population, hitherto willing to assume the best about what public-health experts had to say, to be permanently resistant to anything these bodies might wish to convey in the future, no matter how crucial these messages might be.
If universities continue to operate as they have been doing, a similar fate will be their destination... (MORE - missing details)
https://inthesetimes.com/article/labor-2...cks-amazon
(excerpt) 7. Biden’s labor coalition splinters. Though it is a low bar, Joe Biden can rightfully claim to be the most pro-union president in three generations. The AFL-CIO endorsed him for reelection earlier than ever, hoping to keep that ball rolling.
Unfortunately, it ain’t so simple. Biden crushed the railroad strike in December 2022, puncturing his pink cloud on the labor left. His policy towards Israel and Gaza has enraged even more of the left, and has prompted a number of unions to push for a cease-fire.
On the right, his big happy coalition is going to be sniped by union Trump supporters in 2024. His ability to take labor for granted as a solid power base, in other words, is going to be threatened — and he has no one to blame but himself. Of the many reasons to worry about this, one is… (MORE - missing details)
The rise of the sectarian university
https://compactmag.com/article/the-rise-...university
EXCERPT: . . . what really is the peril that these elite universities confront? Unlike lesser-resourced institutions, they face no real prospect of financial catastrophe, even if they lose some big donors.
[...] Acknowledging a few exceptions among conservative commentators and public officials, we can still say that universities are to Republicans what guns are to Democrats: an issue they are certain is at the root of great evils, but about which they face a massive knowledge gap that hampers their ability to do anything effective, even within the limited space our legal order allows.
The real peril to elite higher education, then, isn’t that these places will be financially ruined, nor that they will be effectively interfered with in their internal operations by hostile conservatives. It is, instead, that their position in American society will come to resemble that of The New York Times or of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Which is to say that they will remain rich and powerful, and they will continue to have many bright and competent people working within their ambit. And yet their authority will grow more brittle and their appeal more sectarian.
As recently described by former opinion editor James Bennett, the Times has seen the crumbling of the distinction between news and opinion; the acceptance of double standards for those espousing certain views and the tolerance of intimidation of some employees by those with more favored beliefs; and the end of the traditional routes of meritorious promotion through the ranks.
But the paper has hardly collapsed; if anything, it looms larger in our national life than ever. It has transcended the position of a mere reporting service and opinion clearinghouse and attained something like the status of an oracle for, say, a fifth of the population (and a much higher percentage of the credentialed class).
That is real power—from a certain angle, it is more power than the Times has ever possessed. At the same time, trust in the mainstream media has plummeted, and the paper has lost its ability to wield influence over those who see it as anything other than infallible.
Citing the words of the Times to a normal, not especially partisan person is about as meaningful as a Calvinist citing the Institutes to a nonbeliever. For those still influenceable by the Times, its impact is more totalizing than ever; to this faction, it now claims the remarkable capacity to separate the clean from the unclean, the sayable from the unsayable. But the vast majority of Americans dismiss any work of the Times it finds inconvenient, without the slightest compunction.
Things have gone similarly with the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, and the highest reaches of the public-health apparatus. For my whole life, these were broadly trusted institutions, if ones that lay deep in the background of our lives.
But with Covid, they seized their moment to assert that their dictates were coextensive with science itself. Again, this constituted an undoubted augmentation of power. A not insignificant portion of the left, consisting of people who likely never gave these agencies an hour’s thought before March 2020, would still jump off a bridge if the CDC director told them doing so would mitigate the next surge; they retain the conviction that the only reason we didn’t eliminate Covid was that the public was culpably indifferent to expertise.
Yet trust in science is reaching new lows, and even President Biden has no trouble mocking the public-health overlords when he thinks it’s a good look.
The inability of public-health organizations and spokespeople to distinguish between value judgments and scientific assessments; their refusal to admit when their modeling was mistaken; their transparent adjustment of “the Science” to suit important constituencies like the teachers’ unions; their unwillingness to acknowledge frankly that nonpharmaceutical interventions made little difference in outcomes; their encouragement of censorship; and their pattern of “noble lies”—all of these have led a sizeable part of the population, hitherto willing to assume the best about what public-health experts had to say, to be permanently resistant to anything these bodies might wish to convey in the future, no matter how crucial these messages might be.
If universities continue to operate as they have been doing, a similar fate will be their destination... (MORE - missing details)
