Enthusiastic Reader > Recent Status Updates

264 - "Remember: those who called for the abolition of slavery, for suffrage for women, and for same-sex marriage were also once branded lunatics. Until history proved them right."

263 - "I'd like to offer two final pieces of advice for everybody who is ready to put the ideas proposed in these pages into action. First, realize that there are more people out there like you... second, my advice is to cultivate a thicker skin. Don't let anyone tell you what's what."

262 - "Calling my ideas 'unrealistic' was simply a shorthand way of saying they didn't fit the status quo."

262 - "The first and major hurdle lies in being taken seriously at all. This has been my own experience over the last three years as I argued the case for a universal basic income, a shorter working week, and the eradication of poverty. Time after time, I was told that these ideas were unrealistic, unaffordable, or downright dumb."

258-260 needs to be published separately as a manifesto. I'm not typing the whole thing out though XD

256 - "Underdog socialists have a surfeit of compassion and find prevailing policies deeply unfair. Seeing the welfare state crumbling to dust, they rush in to salvage what they can. But when push comes to shove, the underdog socialist caves in to the arguments of the opposition, always accepting the premise on which the debate takes place."

255 - "Historically, Politics was the preserve of the left. BE REALISTIC, DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE! rang the rallying cry of the Paris demonstrators in 1968. The end of slavery, the emancipation of women, the rise of the welfare state—all were progressive ideas that started out as crazy and "irrational" but were ultimately accepted as basic common sense."

255 - "Donald Trump in the US, Boris Johnson in the UK, and the Islamophobic Geert Wilders in my own country have all mastered this art to perfection. If they are not always taken seriously, they have certainly pulled the Overton window into their camps."

255 - "The Overton window can shift. A classic strategy for achieving this is to proclaim ideas so shocking and subversive that anything less radical suddenly sounds sensible. In other words, to make the radical reasonable, you merely have to stretch the bounds of the radical."

254 - "Overton realized that politicians, provided they want to be reelected, can't permit themselves viewpoints that are seen as too extreme."

False choice fallacy here - fits and starts doesn't mean not gradual; it means not linear. It IS still gradual change, when looked at with an eye toward history. Additionally, it has nothing to do with rationality. Gradual change is still governed by experience and emotion.

237 - "Researchers at Yale University have shown that educated people are more unshakable in their convictions than anybody... an education gives you tools to defend your opinions."

236 - "We tend to dig in our heels when someone challenges our opinions about criminal punishment, premarital sex, or global warming. These are ideas to which people tend to get attached, and that makes it difficult to let them go. Doing so affects our sense of identity and position in social groups—in our churches or families or circles of friends."

p 236 - "When reality clashes with our deepest convictions, we'd rather recalibrate reality than amend our worldview. Not only that, we become even more rigid in our beliefs than before."

235 - "4:45 AM: Mrs. Martin gets another message: God has decided to spare the Earth Together, the small group of believers has spread so much 'light' on this night that the Earth is saved."

234 - "On the morning of December 20, 1954, Mrs. Martin was beamed a new message from above: 'At the hour of midnight you shall be put into parked cars and taken to a place where ye shall be put aboard a porch [flying saucer].'"

Psychologist Leon Festinger investigated "what happens when people experience a crisis in their convictions" by infiltrating a group of people who believed that the world would end in 1954 and they would be saved by aliens.

229 - "The average american thinks their federal government spends more than a quarter of the national budget on foreign aid, but the real figure is less than 1%."

226 - "there's no evidence that immigrants are more likely to apply for assistance than native citizens. Nor do countries with a strong social safety net attract a higher share of immigrants. In reality, if you correct for income and job status, immigrants actually take LESS advantage of public assistance."

226 - "immigration has virtually no effect on wages."

225 - "Productive women, seniors, or immigrants won't displace men, young adults, or hardworking citizens from their jobs. In fact, they create MORE employment opportunities. A bigger workforce means more consumption, more demand, more jobs."

223 - "The correlation between ethnic background and crime, it turns out, is precisely zero... Youth crime, the report stated, has its origins in the neighborhood where kids grow up. In poor communities, kids from Dutch backgrounds are every bit as likely to engage in criminal activity as those from ethnic minorities."

222 - "people making a new life in the US commit fewer offenses and less frequently end up in prison than the native population. Even as the number of illegal immigrants tripled between 1990 and 2013 to over eleven million, the crime rate reversed dramatically."

222 - "research from the University of Warwick on migration flows between 145 countries shows that immigration is actually associated with a DECLINE in terrorist acts."

219 - "In developed countries, employees are expected to be flexible. If you want a job, you have to follow the money. But when ultraflexible labor heads our way from the world's developing countries, we suddenly see them as economic freeloaders. Those seeking asylum are allowed to stay only if they have reason to fear persecution at home based on their religion or birth."

217 - "Billions of people are forced to sell their labor at a fraction of the price that they would get for it in the Land of Plenty, all because of borders... the richest 8% earn half of all the world's income, and the richest 1% own more than half of all wealth."

This paragraph kind of conflates wages and income and wealth. They're SOOO not the same.