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This time, it seems like TrumpCare may really be dead.

On Monday night, Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) officially jumped ship from the Senate health-care bill. That brought the official "no" vote count to four, which is two more than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) could afford to lose. Then, on Tuesday, McConnell's "plan C" to simply repeal ObamaCare also met a swift defeat when three Republican moderates announced they couldn't support it.

Watching all this go down, I keep coming back to one of MSNBC host Christopher Hayes' favorite phrases: "political gravity."

Democracy is supposed to be a feedback loop between voters and politicians: The politicians try to pass bills, those bills actually affect voters' lives, voters respond with activism and votes, and politicians respond by changing course. But a lot of political reporting implicitly assumes that the consequences of bills don't affect their fates. All that matters is legislative and political strategies: the most inventive partisan games, the cleverest salesmanship, the most creative deal-making. It can take real work to pause and remind yourself that, as Hayes puts it, "the basic political gravity of whether you make people's lives better or worse matters."

TrumpCare has been one of the most dramatic tests of Hayes' thesis in years.

Washington insiders love to say that it's virtually impossible to cut or eliminate big entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid once they've been established. If you give people generous cash aid or affordable health care, you're going to make their lives meaningfully better. Spread those benefits over a large enough portion of the population, and no politician will touch them. They may make a lot of noise about cutting them. They may even get overly enthusiastic and try to cut them, like the GOP did with Social Security privatization back in 2005. But they'll inevitably chicken out when they see how their constituents would be affected.

Ever since its creation, it's been unclear if ObamaCare's subsidies were enough to cross this threshold into political invincibility. But in its zeal, the Republican Party decided to go beyond just repealing the health-care law and tried to massively cut pre-ObamaCare funding for Medicaid as well. So it looks like Hayes' political gravity theory checks out.

But there's a wrinkle.

If the human destruction wreaked by cutting Medicaid and ObamaCare's subsidies is ultimately what killed TrumpCare, you'd expect Republican moderates to be the ones who stuck the knife in. But three of the four hard "no's" Lee, Moran, and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) sit on the Republicans' extreme right. They scuttled the bill because it didn't cut and destroy enough.

Does this overturn the political gravity thesis? I don't necessarily think so. The key is understanding what the Republican base wants.

The GOP is actually fairly fractured. Its white working-class voters sign up for the party's culture wars, but dislike its economic platform in practice. Meanwhile, its rich supporters salivate over its economic platform and donate accordingly but find some of its cultural excesses off-putting. The real Republican base the voters on board with both the party's economic and cultural agendas consists primarily of well-off, socially right-wing older white people. But that's a group that's becoming a smaller and smaller portion of the electorate. Meanwhile, Americans who lean left on economics have always been a majority, and Americans who lean left on culture are expanding their share of the population. So the Democrats' natural base is expanding, while the GOP's natural base is shrinking. The Republican base knows this and so they're becoming increasingly angry and more extreme.

The political gravity that Hayes speaks so eloquently about made sure the GOP couldn't scrap ObamaCare and replace it with nothing. Even TrumpCare, cruel as it may be, is just a badly designed adjustment to ObamaCare. But this other big political force the increasingly radical impulses of the GOP also played an important role in the end of TrumpCare. The Republican base knew TrumpCare was just ObamaCare-lite, and they weren't willing to settle for it.

That second force was pushing up as political gravity was pulling down. And TrumpCare got crushed in between.

Read the original:
The political forces that destroyed TrumpCare - The Week Magazine

BUFFALO, N.Y. Bioethical arguments related to abortion and embryonic stem cell research often depend on first answering questions of origins. When do humans come into existence? Does fertilization represent creations flash point? Or does existence require the glow of consciousness or perhaps separation from the birth mother?

These questions of our origins, along with discussions pertaining to personal identity, represent the dual themes of this years Romanell Conference (formerly the PANTC Conference) presented by the University at Buffalo Department of Philosophy.

Three preeminent philosophers will visit UB to defend their positions on these issues as part of the two-day event on Friday, July 28, and Saturday, July 29, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day in 280 Park Hall on the universitys North Campus, a space unofficially renamed the Theresa Monacelli Conference Room in appreciation of the retired philosophy staff members contributions to previous conferences.

John Lizza, professor of philosophy at Kutztown University; Don Marquis, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Kansas; and Marya Schechtman, professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago; will each deliver a separate keynote address.

The Romanell Conference, the fifth annual event exploring bioethics and the philosophy of medicine, is free and open to the public. A complete schedule of presenters and their topics is available online.

These issues go right to the heart of the culture wars abortion, control over ones body, sexual identity, personal identity, the social construction of the self and hastening death, says David Hershenov, a professor in the UB Department of Philosophy who joined the keynoters on a panel about personal identity and death at the American Philosophical Associations national meeting last year in Chicago.

This conference will not be a dry philosophical debate.

There is no philosophical consensus on when a human being comes into existence, according to Hershenov.

If we persons were never early mindless embryos, then we couldnt have been harmed by an abortion or embryonic stem cell research that destroys an embryo, he says. Early abortion would be more akin to contraception in that it prevents someone from coming into existence rather than killing an existing individual, preventing them from having a valuable future.

Some philosophers think existence begins two weeks after fertilization when twinning can no longer occur.

If we came into existence before identical twins were formed, then twinning might have involved our deaths as the embryo that we were identical with splits in two.

Other philosophers believe persons are essentially thinking entities, so there is no existence without consciousness. Fertilization in this case cant represent existence since the fetal brain requires 20 weeks of post-fertilization development before it can support consciousness.

There are even some philosophers who believe we dont come into existence until we are separated or at least separable from our mothers, he says. They dont think we could ever have been a part of another human being. That would mean there is a larger human being composed of a smaller human being.

Marquis, author of the seminal article, Why Abortion is Immoral believes existence occurs two weeks after fertilization. Schechtman, the most famous promotor of the narrative account of personal identity has a more fluid belief on existence and is exploring the idea that our origins stretch across the entire pregnancy. Lizza, an expert on death and a proponent of the constitution idea, uses the analogy of a sculptures differences from that of unformed clay. He sees humans as minded beings that dont exist until weve formed the capacity for thought.

The conference will be entertaining for many reasons, including the fact that many of the participants are long-term philosophical rivals and so quite willing to bluntly and sarcastically express their criticism of each other, says Hershenov.

Other conference highlights include a talk on the transgender category of personal identification by Barry Smith, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and director of the National Center for Ontological Research. In addition, Catherine Nolan, affiliate assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas, will discuss intersex children; and Stephen Kershnar, SUNY Fredonia professor of philosophy will discuss whether physicians deserve the high compensation they receive.

Kershnar is a libertarian, says Hershenov. I suspect he will answer they are entitled to that money and should hardly be taxed.

Read more here:
Philosophers to discuss origins and identity during two-day UB conference - UB News Center

Joanna AndreassonIn a new online feature, Mike Riggs looks at the decades-long effort to legalize MDMA and other psychedelic drugs for medical use:

In January 1967, roughly 20,000 young people gathered at Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In, a kind of outdoor conference for hippie counterculture. The event introduced the word "psychedelic" to the American mainstream, and the psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary to San Francisco.

California and Nevada had banned LSD a year earlier, following New York, which banned it in 1965. Leary, a psychologist who'd recently been canned from his faculty gig at Harvard for sharing psychedelic drugs with undergraduates, believed there was no longer any point in negotiating with the powers that be. His message was blunt: "Drop out of high school, drop out of college, drop out of graduate school."

The Manmostly government, but also society and authority figures of all kindswas attempting to eradicate psychedelic drugs and the liberation they bestowed. That required a proportionately rebellious response: "Turn on, tune in, drop out." Students around the country heard Leary's words, and many did as he exhorted. The Man heard him, too, and doubled down on its efforts to bury the psychedelic drug era under a mound of criminal sanctions and red tape. Within a few years, psychedelic drugs were completely regulated out of recreational settings, then therapeutic settings, and finally research settings.

Fifty years and a few months later, at a Marriott hotel 14 miles from Golden Gate Park, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) hosted nearly 3,000 researchers, students, and enthusiasts for Psychedelic Science 2017, a six-day conference on what's being done to turn illegal psychedelic drugs into legal pharmaceutical products. Once again, the avatars of psychedelic culture had gathered to compare notes, share their experiences, and talk strategy.

This time, the message was different: Stay in school. Apply for research grants. Design clinical trials. Show your work.Evangelize, yes, but with a new audience in mindnot the counterculture, but the Man himself.

"Regulators, governments, health economists, health systems, insurers, health-care professionals, andmost importantlypatients," said George Goldsmith, the former CEO of McKinsey & Company's TomorrowLab, and an advocate for the kind of therapeutic innovation psychedelic researchers are hoping to achieve. "That's the next community that actually needs to be engaged here."

Sitting onstage next to Goldsmith was Thomas Insel, a psychiatrist and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Insel, who's spent a lot of time in recent years bemoaning the paucity of effective psychiatric drugs, was blunter still. "I would encourage you to be more Catholic than the Pope. You've got to be more rigorous than the people working in the pharmaceutical industry studying more traditional compounds that aren't controlled [substances]." One adverse patient reaction for which clinical investigators were not prepared, he argued, could "poison the well."

"I know you don't want to hear that," he added. "But it's really easy to mess things up."Today's psychedelic drug community is fiercely committed to avoiding a repeat of the 1960s' culture wars, in no small part because their tie-dyed predecessors lost. Insel and Goldsmith, while not psychedelic researchers themselves, reflect the current movement's willingness to work with more staid actors in the field of medicine.

Read the original post:
New at Reason: Medical Researchers Are Steps From Legalizing Ecstasy. Here's How They Did It. - Reason (blog)

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - A group of Texas business leaders urged state lawmakers on Monday to abandon plans to pass a bill to restrict bathroom access for transgender people, calling such a measure bad for the economy.

The Republican-dominated legislature begins a 30-day special session on Tuesday with 20 items on the agenda, including one of the "bathroom bills" that have been a flashpoint in U.S. culture wars.

Supporter of the legislation have said it is a common-sense measure that protects public safety. Critics call it discriminatory.

Texas, the most powerful Republican-controlled state, could lose about $5.6 billion through 2026 and businesses could find it difficult to recruit top talent if such a measure is enacted, according to the state's leading employer organization.

"The distraction of a bathroom bill pulls us away from being competitive as a state," Jeff Moseley, chief executive of the Texas Association of Business, told a rally outside the Capitol.

"On this discussion, conservatives can disagree with conservatives," said Moseley, whose group has typically aligned itself with the state's Republican leaders.

The legislation restricts access to places like bathrooms and locker rooms based on the gender listed on people's birth certificates and not the gender with which they identify.

A similar law in North Carolina, partially repealed in March, prompted the relocation of sporting events and economic boycotts that was estimated to have cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars.

The stakes are higher in Texas, which has an economy larger than Russia's.

A bill similar to North Carolina's passed the Texas Senate in the regular session and was killed by pro-business Republican leaders in the House, who ran out the clock on the measure.

The bathroom bill's main backer, Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a social conservative who sets the state Senate's legislative agenda, has said economic losses would be inconsequential.

"(The Texas Republican majority) want to maintain separate restrooms, locker rooms and shower facilities for men and women and boys and girls, and they dont care if the media thinks it is politically incorrect," his political campaign said in a statement on Monday.

Republican House of Representatives Speaker Joe Straus and companies including IBM, American Airlines, Apple and Southwest Airlines have spoken out against the bill.

"On the bathroom bill, there is no real compromise because even the most mild bill is going to be interpreted as discriminatory," said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston.

Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Peter Cooney

View original post here:
Texas business leaders call on lawmakers to drop 'bathroom bill' - Reuters

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BY: Micah Meadowcroft July 16, 2017 5:00 am

In Kill All Normies Angela Nagle has done us all a service at what one must imagine is great psychological cost, surveying the dampest and most deranged corners of the internet. It seems self abuse surpassed in scale only by the onanism of her subjects.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right is a much needed book, though for lack of editing not a particularly good book as such. Nagle is an insightful analyst, and the Irish writer has documented the internet's final breaking of the anglophonic world's brain, beginning with the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. From that "leaderless digital counter-revolution," Nagle traces a meandering history up to the appalling present of life online, the latest theater in a long culture war.

Two of Nagle's topics stand out, the origins of a self-conscious internet right in "Gamergate" and the sterile politics of performative transgression. Both of these, and really all of the intersecting subjects of this book, Nagle demonstrates, are rooted in responses to the sexual revolution.

"Gamergate" describes the Japan-inspired, porn-fueled, anonymous message board 4chan's first major foray into the public consciousness. With a rallying cry calling for "ethics in gaming journalism" young men putrefying in their own filth harassedin a manner too obscene to detail herewomen who had the gall to not only write about video games but to express concerns about misogyny in that community. The threat of feminist influence on gaming and game culture was treated as existential, and was responded to with promises of sexual violence.

"Gamergate brought gamers, rightist chan culture, anti-feminism, and the online far right closer to mainstream discussion and it also politicized a broad group of young people, mostly boys, who organized tactics around the idea of fighting back against the culture war being waged by the political left," Nagle writes.

It was the faceoff that launched a thousand digital ships, including the career of Milo Yiannopoulos. Nagle, who is a remarkably sympathetic and intellectually charitable observer, writes of Gamergate's participants:

"Ultimately, the gamergaters were correct in their perception that a revived feminist movement was trying to change the culture and this was the front, their beloved games, that they chose to fight back on. The battle has since moved on to different issues with increasingly higher stakes, but this was the galvanizing issue that drew up the battle lines of the culture wars for a younger online generation."

While Nagle does not attempt further explanation of Gamergate's causes, contenting herself with accounting for its consequences, the question why young men might indulge in such inhuman extremes is worth a brief examination.

Books such as Putnam's Bowling Alone and Nisbet's The Quest for Community have detailed the advancing loss of the vital intermediary institutions between a citizen and state. Paired with declining male employment and the age of computers, is it any wonder that the decline of these predominantly male social spacesfraternal organizations, clubs, unions, and even bowling leaguesshould lead to men seeking to make spaces for themselves online?

In the uncivilized chaos of contemporary society, video games and online subcultureswhich all have esoteric and enforced bywords and bylawsprovide a sense of order and belonging not found elsewhere. The crisis of masculinity is a civilizational one; many young men cannot fit into the civilization in which they find themselves, and they have retreated to the internet to build a virtual one. In a world where little seems controllable and people feel caught in the current and eddies of economic and social forces, video games and life online are a simulacrum of self-determination and individual responsibility.

Briefly surveying the 60s counterculture and America's culture war as waged by Pat Buchanan, Nagle argues convincingly that the liberal left has ceded Gramscian and critical theory's tactics to the alt-righta term she uses as a bigger tent than Richard Spencer would like it to betrading Marxianism for Judith Butler. She contends, further, that the alt-right's oft-feuding coalition has abandoned conservatism's traditional foundations for the writings of Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade:

"The Sadean transgressive element of the 60s, condemned by conservatives for decades as the very heart of the destruction of civilization, the degenerate and the nihilistic, is not being challenged by the emergence of this new online right. Instead, the emergence of this new online right is the full coming to fruition of the transgressive anti-moral style, its final detachment from an egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the right."

Sex and power are inseparable for both this online left and online right in a strange codependency. For the male-dominated rightist subculturesespecially and explicitly in what is called the "manosphere"the idea of, desire for, and act of sex becomes the primary currency of power and status.

Meanwhile, as Nagle explains, in feminized spaces like Tumblr and the contemporary education system an economy of victimization has been created through intersectional theory. Here, limitless self-defined gender identities (e.g. "Omnigay Genderfluid, with one's attraction to other genders changing with one's gender, so that the individual is always attracted to the same gender) allow bourgeois white kids, who would not normally have currency to spend in such a market, to compete with minorities and the poor through marginalized sexuality.

Nagle observes that contemporary reactionaries are driven to using the trolling tactics of online life by Tumblr-liberalism's victim fetish. For those of this alt-right who claim a modicum of conservatism, trolling is a paradoxical attempt to protect the interior of the Overton Window by smashing its frame. And for all trolls it is a gleeful display of the "if you are going to cry I will give you something to cry about" mindset. Comparative disadvantage, safespaces, trolls, harassment, antifa, and the rest work together to create a vicious cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nagle, who describes herself as a "French revolution hipster" on Twitter, and would prefer the left focused on economic and material systems, has no patience for this cycle. Writing of Yiannopoulos's much-disrupted college tour:

"When Milo challenged his protesters to argue with him countless times on his tour, he knew that they not only wouldn't, but also that they couldn't. They come from an utterly intellectually shut-down world of Tumblr and trigger warnings, and the purging of dissent in which they have only learned to recite jargon."

As a religious conservative, I appreciate Nagle's observations of the alt-right's abandonment of conservatism's priors. And as just illustrated, she has much to say, and critically, about the left in Kill All Normies, as well as in her essays and interviews. I've enjoyed reading and listening to Nagle since last year, when she began writing for the Baffler and other American leftist publications. Her project is worth paying attention to. It is unfortunate then, that Kill All Normies suffers from whatto be charitable to its authorwe shall call a truly calamitous and utterly woeful lack of editing, which has left it messy, often disjointed, and riddled with typos and formatting errors, and the reader disappointed, often perplexed, and bewildered by how variable the writing is.

Kill All Normies is a short book, howeveronly 120 pagesand with an attentive editor and expansion in light of ongoing developments a fruitful second edition could be produced. This investigation, considering the abuse anonymous wretches are surely subjecting Nagle to, was a courageous one, and I hope it continues.

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After Conservatism, Sadists and Lost Boys - Washington Free Beacon