This is true, and applies to me too:

A lot of what folks are now referring to as resistance is really just basic civic engagement.

— Alyssa Rosenberg (@AlyssaRosenberg) January 27, 2017

Here’s why Firefox will die.

I use one of those extensions. More than half of the extensions I use (and all of the most important ones) will no longer work after Firefox 57 is released.

I plan to switch to Chrome then as it’s faster in most ways and has fewer strange issues. Most people will do the same since the reason most continue to use Firefox is because of the extensions model.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is bad idea traps and the inability to see them. It’s a multiscalar problem — it happens at every societal level as with the housing boom and crash of 2008 down to the relatively-minor issue of the Mozilla organization clearly determined to exterminate itself, but failing to understand how it’s now just baked in.

I find it interesting that as with army ants driven by pheromones circling until they die, humans and their organizations can do the same, despite the fact that to anyone standing outside it’s immediately obvious what’s gone wrong and how to fix it.

If you want to see some really excellent acoustic guitar playing, you should watch this.

Reminds me of Deb Talan’s playing.

Kevin Drum claims that NAFTA is not really a big deal.

Not really a big deal — unless your job was shipped off or you were forced to work for starvation-level wages.

And read all of this, but particularly the middle section about the effects of NAFTA on Mexican farmers.

Contrary to what you might believe from reading what I write here, I am for trade deals and open trade — but only in the rubric of full protection of worker’s rights, the environment (NAFTA also caused devastation here) and quite a lot of redistribution of the shared gains. Without this, all “free” trade does is to make some corporations and individual richer and impoverishes everyone else.

By the way, these treaties are designed to do this. It’s not some side effect.

Drum’s typical blithe dismissal of the fortunes of millions of Americans’ and Mexicans’ plights angers me to no end.

The problem — or at least the main one — with Drum’s “not really a big deal” is that he’s looking at a spreadsheet. Some numbers on a graph.

The real world does not give a fuck about a graph produced in some think tank from bogus data provided by an economist trained to cogitate exactly in the prescribed ways that guarantees his or her salary gets paid.

Don’t get me wrong — having real data is important. What Drum cites probably is not, most of the time. But the data doesn’t actually tell you in many cases what you need to know even if it is accurate. Drum seems to think that having some numbers is as good as knowing the truth, when the truth is a completely separate entity. (The liberal version of truthiness or “alternative facts” if you will is that the numbers work out, the math looks good.)

As I observed the other day, one in the chamber during Russian roulette. On average, I am alive. This is Kevin Drum’s spreadsheet reality. It is also completely beside the point.