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[sebastian_dangerfield]

That's not actually how the economy usually works. The bigger problem is that economists have a hard time predicting what will happen, which undermines their credibility. And....

There is no "how the economy works." But economists' and their adherence to tired theories do impact investment and business decisions which drive the economy.

I know tons of old fart investors who lost tons of money making silly investments on the predicate that interest rates would go sky high after their artificial depression was eased. That didn't happen. But if you followed a lot of conservative economists, and even many liberal ones, that was a reasonable prediction.

If you want to pick three economists not beholden to corporate benefactors, those are not the three to start with. Are you picking Democrats instead of Republicans just to troll me?

Picking Laffer would undercut my point because he's too laughably in the can for corporate benefactors. So was Friedman. Even Goolsbee, however, will hew to neoliberal doctrine if pressed. And every one of them will profess that the business cycle is a law like gravity. Why? Because if you massage data to fabricate these laws, you make it seem like risk can be managed, which businesses and investors seek to do.

And that leads you to laws like, "The housing market does not go down."

Another neat one of the moment: "We'll never see anything like 2008 again."

We were talking about race. You pivoted to right-wing grievances about the media. Do those ideas connect in some way in your brain?

The right wing is significant contributor to institutional racism. A significant reason that the right wing ignores information about institutional racism is because it thinks the media that tells them about such racism is full of shit.

I'm not arguing for it. But I assure you I'm exposed to more righties than you are, by a long shot (I just left a meeting full of them), so take this knowledge and do what you will with it. But arguing to me that I shouldn't be telling you what I hear from righties in a discussion where we're trying to understand why righties do what they do is a tad counterproductive.

Bullshit to the sentiment here, and bullshit to the notion that when I'm talking about what the right says (which you made the subject, not me), you need to point to the left. Enough whatabboutism. So tired.

All I said there was that the left and right do not understand what the other side is thinking? How is that whataboutism? Unless you're of the naive belief that the left understands the right, but the right does not understand the left. (You have psychoanalyzed the right as though you know this in the past, so maybe that's the case, in which case, absorb this: You're half right, and half deeply wrong.)

A good bit of what irks righties is listening to people like you tell them what they think. You simply don't know. I don't know. But here's the difference between what I'm saying and you're saying: I'm simply repeating what I hear and guessing at the thinking behind it. You flip off these pompous and often clueless pronouncements ("they're all reactionary") as if you know. You don't. That's why we're having the discussion. What makes the right wing tick is a complex subject.

We were talking about what they say about race. What they say about race, according to you, shows a repeated tendency to ascribe false consciousness to people talking about racism rather than to deal in any way with the fact that our country is, as you said recently, systematically discriminates.

I don't know what a false consciousness would be, but I do think the right has a very unlearned view of racism. The question is why. I suspect from what I have heard, some of it is intentional ignorance of the subject. Some of it unintentional. And some of it stems from the left lumping racism in with a million other grievances.

You know very well what eating the elephant means. The systemic inequities in our country are myriad, from wealth inequality to racism to sexism. I could fill 300 lines of text with valid complaints many different groups legitimately hold.

When you try to discuss all of these issues at once, the conversation becomes incoherent. It does not resonate the way a single conversation about racism does. You can point at racism, offer innumerable irrefutable facts showing its rotten impacts on minorities and society generally.

You cannot, as the left often does, mix racism into a stew of other issues which are not as pressing and expect any change. If our huge list of problems in this country is an elephant, then as the saying goes, you must eat the elephant in bites. Not in one bite. If systemic racism is the most important problem of the moment, and I think along with our economy it is, the left should frame it as priority #1. Like Obama framed health care as his priority #1.

Nothing about what you said about what the right actually says about race suggests there is any reason to think this. I admire your optimism, and I want to be an optimistic guy, but seriously?

Corey Booker, Rand Paul, and Trump just pushed through the biggest crim justice reform in the past 30 years. And when it was done, Booker and Paul both said it's not enough. The Kochs' and their foundation, which has $500mil dedicated to electing people with their free trade conservative mission, is pushing for crim justice reform in statehouses right now. Florida just passed a bill giving felons the right to vote, and Rick Santorum campaigned for it.

Yeah, it confuses the hell of me, too. But as I said, I'm not looking that gift horse in the mouth.

Why? If people on the right think comprehensive justice reform is the right thing to do and have an appetite for it, why would the broader conversation derail it?

Because as noted above, when it's mixed in with a dozen other issues, it gets lost. Have you any idea how to strategize messaging? You've conducted a meeting, I know that much. Ever notice how the chance of getting anything done is inversely proportional to the number of items on the agenda?

Ever seen an effective ad campaign for 40 disparate products?

Must every conversation with race move towards a discussing of addressing the feelings of white America? I guess so.

White people are half the country. And they're the major cause of racism historically. If you want to tackle the problem, dealing with what's in their heads is necessary. Or you can ignore them, pretend you know what the right wing of them is thinking, and talk to fellow travelers. In which case you'll get nowhere most of the time, with an occasional modest bit of progress here and there, largely despite your own self-defeating actions.