Hank Green’s A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is the sequel to <a href=”https://www.jonathansimeone.com/2021/05/09/reviewing-an-absolutely-remarkable-thing/”An Absolutely Remarkable Thing.”> As with An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, I enjoyed reading A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor.
politics
The Left is Losing
The verdict for this episode is: if the left doesn’t have better messaging, the left will never win.
Transcript
Below is my latest effort to produce a textual representation of my podcast episodes. It’s not where I want it to get, but it’s better than my previous effort.
Hello, and welcome to Jonathan’s Verdicts. I’m Jonathan Simeone.
The title of this episode: is The Left is Losing. The verdict for this episode is: If the left doesn’t have better messaging, the left will never win.
As always, I don’t edit these podcast episodes, and I do not have a script. They are just a chance for me to talk about whatever is on my mind
.
Before getting into the substance of this episode, I want to discuss my attempts to create a transcript. So folks who are deaf or hard of hearing can follow along. I would give last week’s effort, a solid b minus. Recording without a script, and then turning that into a transcript,
even with the captions from Zoom, is not particularly easy. I think I have to have a more realistic goal, at least for now. I hope to find a better solution to this than I’m doing now, but for now, my goal is simply going to be to take the captions and turn them into a usable piece of text.
With that being said, let’s get into the substance of the podcast.
The left is losing.
As a leftist, it hurts me to say that. But we have to be honest. And the reality of it is Joe Biden’s approval ratings are around 60% in most, if not all of the major polls. In some of them he’s over 60%.
About a third of the country would still vote for Donald Trump.
Maybe one or 2%, if that, would vote for a Green Party candidate or some other real leftist candidate.
So, the left is taking a beating.
The reason we are taking a beating is the messaging. And I’m going to be really blunt here. The vast majority of Americans have health insurance. Maybe they don’t like it. Maybe it doesn’t meet all their needs. Maybe they know it’s too expensive. But they have health insurance.
They don’t care about Medicare for All in the way it is being sold to them by the left. They have insurance. They’re afraid of higher taxes. They’re afraid of losing what they have.
If the messaging doesn’t encompass what they get from Medicare for All, and that is insurance not being tied to their jobs, cheaper, insurance, potentially more money in their pocket, if their employer chooses to reinvest some of that money in the workforce. There are many other benefits. No deductibles, not really very many copays, and more services and benefits.
But that is the message that has to be sold in a country where 30 or 40 million people are uninsured and roughly 300 million people are insured.
Even if most of it is crappy.
You have to speak to the insured population to sell the idea of completely overhauling the health care that people have come to know.
It’s that simple.
The same thing is true with things like student loan forgiveness. You know even Biden is out there talking about forgiving Ivy League debt. Just total nonsense. So many of us, including me, did not go to an Ivy League school. We racked up 10s of thousands in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt to better ourselves. The messaging has to change on that.
We have to figure out how to sell these ideas to a much cross section of society. The left has to imagine the leftist coalition, as being broader and more inclusive than it does today. What that means is we have to look at not just including people who want to do things because the changes we are talking about benefit them directly or because the changes we want to see make society a better place. The left has to understand that most people are motivated by fear and by selfishness, way more than they are motivated by altruism and doing the right thing. The messaging from us has to acknowledge and address that reality.
The Democrats and the Republicans are spectacular at this. The republicans sell irrational fear better than anyone could. That’s their whole thing. They get people to believe truly lunatic stuff.
Democrats scare to a lesser extent, But the Democrats also buy into the w’ere protecting you from them. You know, we’re not going to ask you to sacrifice for them.
Why, because they know that sells more then help your neighbor.
That sucks. It truly does, but it’s true.
The left is losing by a lot. If the left does not change its messaging, the left will never win.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Jonathan’s Verdicts. I appreciate your support.
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Biden Ignores Science Too
The verdict for this episode is: corporate profits matter more than lives.
Transscript
Below is my first attempt to use Zoom to help me create a transcript for a podcast episode. Obviously, I need more practice.
Hello, and welcome to Jonathan’s verdicts. I’m Jonathan Simeone.
The title of this episode is: Biden ignores science too. The verdict for this episode is: corporate profits matter more than lives.
Before getting into the substance of this podcast,
I want to address a long standing issue that I have talked about before.
And honestly, one that has prevented me from recording more podcast episodes than I have.
That is a way to make the podcast episodes accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing
.
It has really frustrated me that I have never been able to solve that problem.
So today, I’m trying something new.
I’m using the Zoom platform to record this podcast, and also to make a transcription of what I’m saying.
My plan is to then edit the transcription file and post it to my website with the podcast episode.
If this works, it will solve my problem and make the podcast episodes accessible to more people.
So if you have any comments about this new way I’m doing the podcast, please let me know.
You can contact me at Jonathan@JonathanSimeone.com. Or you can find me on Twitter at Jonathan_Ufi.
As always, I don’t edit these podcast episodes, and I don’t have a script. They are just a chance for me to talk about whatever is on my mind.
So to refresh, the title of this episode is: Biden ignores science too. The verdict for this episode is: corporate profits matter more than lives.
Now, obviously, people who are at all familiar with my content know that corporate profits mattering more than lives is a constant theme in my communication.
Because I truly believe it.
That being said, I think what happened this week really highlights how true that is. Because here’s the straight up truth.
There is no scientific justification to advise vaccinated people to stop wearing masks. There is no rational reason to do that, especially if your primary concern is saving lives and keeping people from getting sick.
Because here’s the thing.
There are breakthrough cases, people who become vaccinated, And then get the virus.
An interesting case was reported this week where New York Yankee shortstop Gleyber Torres, had the virus last year, became fully vaccinated, and now has the virus again.
So, this is a person who’s fully vaccinated, whose body presumably generated antibodies from his first infection, and yet he’s infected again.
Although the chances are much smaller, it is undeniably true that vaccinated people can get, can transmit, and can even become sick and die from the virus.
So why is this happening? Why is someone who ran on we respect science, I’m going to listen to the scientists. Why is this happening?
There’s a very simple reason.
Companies are having trouble making money.
Businesses are having trouble staying open. Yes, there’s the political concern that people really are tired of this, and they just want to go about what they remember as their lives.
That’s true.
But this is about money. Offices need to open up.
People need to go back to work. People need to earn money so they can buy stuff and pay their rent.
And because the government has adopted a vaccine or bust strategy,
it must get as many people vaccinated as possible. That’s just the truth of it.
But again, if you are truly interested in keeping yourself safe.
If you are truly interested in protecting the people around you.
Whether you are vaccinated or not, whether you have waited two weeks past your second dose or not, you really should wear a mask.
Yeah, it sucks.
It’s not the most comfortable thing. I don’t like doing it either.
But that’s the reality of it. Biden’s CDC is ignoring science because it puts profits over the value of our lives.
That’s just a fact. It may be an uncomfortable fact for people.
But here’s the bottom line.
I would love to see someone ask the CDC, ask Biden’s press secretary, and Biden himself,
can you tell people that this new policy around vaccinated people not wearing masks will not result in additional deaths?
The problem is if they tell the truth,
they can’t say that.
What they have decided is that they are comfortable with losing a certain amount of lives with a certain amount of potentially serious illness.
That’s what they’ve decided. It’s up to each and every one of us as individuals to decide if that’s the game we want to play.
Do we want to risk our safety, even for those of us for whom this risk is small. Do we want to risk the safety of those around us.
Just because the government is irresponsible and quite frankly doesn’t care about all lives the same way.
The last point I want to make is
this is another example of how the work done by essential workers is essential,
but so-called essential workers are expendable.
They are truly expendable to the ruling class, restaurant workers, grocery workers, and the like.
They will experience more death and more illness,
because of what Biden and his CDC have done.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Jonathan’s verdicts.
I appreciate your support.
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Responding to People on Twitter After Constant Mocking Biden for his Fall
Below is a series of tweets I made responding to the many people on Twitter engaging in ableism after Joe Biden’s fall.
I have only edited the tweets for the web format. Each tweet is the start of a new paragraph.
Reviewing the Nazzi Menace
Benjamin Carter Hett’s The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and the road to war paints interesting pictures of what was happening in all four nations in the years leading ups to World War II.
Reviewing a Game as Old as Empire
A Game as Old as Empire builds on Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Edited by Stephen Hiatt, A Game as Old as Empire is a collection of essays by people who are confessing their participation in the abuse of people around the world committed by governments and corporations working together.
Over a decade old, some of the data presented in A Game as Old as Empire is no longer accurate. Some of the programs described have been changed or deleted. But the book is a critical contribution to our understanding of the ways governments, especially the United States, abuse and exploit people at the behest of multinational corporations.
Reviewing The Death of Democracy
Benjamin Carter Hett’s The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic isn’t the first book I have read trying to explain how Hitler came to power, but it’s the best. Reading it as too many Americans pretend that Biden’s victory saved American democracy was particularly sobering.
Reviewing the Edge of Anarchy
Jack Kelly’s The Edge of Anarchy: the Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America tell the story of the Pullman strike of 1894. This is another of those books that shows exactly how little progress has been made in America over the last 127 years. Reading it in the context of the wealth gap increasing during a pandemic also struck a cord. Still,Kelly did a great job telling a critical story.
If you like history and/or you want to learn more about the real America, The Edge of Anarchy will not disappoint. It will upset you though.
Politicians Don’t Care About Their Grandchildren
The verdict for this episode is: the deficit of the United States doesn’t matter.
I discuss how each president for the last 92 years with the exception of Clinton has added to the deficit. I also show how the drivers of deficits are military spending and tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.
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AOC Represents her District
This post is a follow-up post to the one I wrote about Pelosi representing her district. As you will see, the demographics of AOC’s district make it an excellent one for her.
My hope is that by sharing posts like these, I can demonstrate that there is data to support what Congress does–even if it’s terrible–and that we could use that data to understand how to replace a number of those not adequately serving us.