Linkage

The two new working papers use novel methods to isolate Walmart’s economic impact—and what they find does not look like a progressive success story after all. The first, posted in September by the social scientists Lukas Lehner and Zachary Parolin and the economists Clemente Pignatti and Rafael Pintro Schmitt, draws on a uniquely detailed dataset that tracks a wide range of outcomes for more than 18,000 individuals across the U.S. going back to 1968. These rich data allowed Parolin and his co-authors to create the economics equivalent of a clinical trial for medicine: They matched up two demographically comparable groups of individuals within the dataset and observed what happened when one of those groups was exposed to the “treatment” (the opening of the Walmart) and the other was not.

Their conclusion: In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a given community, the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them. Low-income, young, and less-educated workers suffered the largest losses.

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But their analysis has a potential weakness: It can’t account for the possibility that Walmarts are not evenly distributed. The company might, for whatever reason, choose communities according to some hard-to-detect set of factors, such as deindustrialization or de-unionization, that predispose those places to growing poverty in the first place. That’s where the second working paper, posted last December, comes in. In it, the economist Justin Wiltshire compares the economic trajectory of counties where a Walmart did open with counties where Walmart tried to open but failed because of local resistance. In other words, if Walmart is selecting locations based on certain hidden characteristics, these counties all should have them. Still, Wiltshire arrives at similar results: Workers in counties where a Walmart opened experienced a greater decline in earnings than they made up for with cost savings, leaving them worse off overall. Even more interesting, he finds that the losses weren’t limited to workers in the retail industry; they affected basically every sector from manufacturing to agriculture.

Democracy is a way of personal life controlled not merely by faith in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished. I have been accused more than once and from opposed quarters of an undue, a utopian, faith in the possibilities of intelligence and in education as a correlate of intelligence. At all events, I did not invent this faith. I acquired it from my surroundings as far as those surroundings were animated by the democratic spirit. For what is the faith of democracy in the role of consultation, of conference, of persuasion, of discussion, in formation of public opinion, which in the long run is self-corrective, except faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with commonsense to the free play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees of free inquiry, free assembly and free communication? I am willing to leave to upholders of totalitarian states of the right and the left the view that faith in the capacities of intelligence is utopia. For the faith is so deeply embedded in the methods which are intrinsic to democracy that when a professed democrat denies the faith he convicts himself of treachery to his profession.

When I think of the conditions under which men and women are living in many foreign countries today, fear of espionage, with danger hanging over the meeting of friends for friendly conversation in private gatherings, I am inclined to believe that the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. Intolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences of race, color, wealth or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life. For everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life. Merely legal guarantees of the civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail if in daily life freedom of communication, the give and take of ideas, facts, experiences, is choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred. These things destroy the essential condition of the democratic way of living even more effectually than open coercion which- as the example of totalitarian states proves-is effective only when it succeeds in breeding hate, suspicion, intolerance in the minds of individual human beings.

A typically incandescently brilliant barnstormer from Abigail.

There is a clash going on in Britain between two fundamentally irreconcilable ideologies.

The NHS, DHSC, and many other official institutions like courts view transition as a response to a medical problem they call ‘gender dysphoria’ or ‘gender incongruence.’ From this starting point it seems appropriate that trans people have to get permission to transition: transness is a medical matter with inherent risks that ought to be controlled by “specialists.” Sometimes those specialists delay or deny permission, but that’s just part of the job. It also makes sense to ask which treatments are “most effective at treating dysphoria” and explore alternative treatments through trials, reviews, consultations, etc. I call this view ‘Pathologization.’

According to Pathologization, past treatments like electric shocks simply failed to alleviate patients’ dysphoria. These days we have more effective methods, and one day we might discover a cheap way of treating it without transition- a silver bullet conversion therapy. Doctors and managers will determine when and whether adjustments to the system are needed. Ideally they’ll engage with trans people in “stakeholder groups” but if those groups don’t get what they want that’s not a dealbreaker. Patients who suffer or die waiting are unfortunate but hey, the NHS can’t save everyone.

On the other hand, the view of an increasing number- especially young people and trans people ourselves- is that transition is a bit like pregnancy. It’s a process that may require professional assistance to bring to the happiest possible conclusion (whether completion or termination), and for this reason it is appropriate and necessary that the NHS is involved. But whether, how, and when to do it should be up to you. From this starting point there should be as few obstacles as possible: the role of doctors and managers is to facilitate and advise but never delay or deny. Prompt, reliable access to transition is a civil rights matter.

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It is vital to realise that organisations can embody an ideology even if nobody working in them believes it. I think sometimes when people hear “Organisation X is institutionally discriminatory” they interpret that as “The leaders of Organisation X are bad people.” For example;

“The Metropolitan police are institutionally racist.”

“I’ve met some police officers and they’re lovely!”

This is a mistake. To say that an organisation is institutionally discriminatory makes no comment on the character of its employees, merely the pattern of its outputs. Not everyone who controls trans healthcare is a frothing bigot; again, I have no animosity towards Colonel Korn or his colleagues. My issue is with the outputs of the system they manage.

Depending on the title, public libraries may pay two or three times more for an e-book than they pay for its print edition. In some cases, the e-book may be up to six times the price, librarians told CBC.

Calls for cheaper e-books are longstanding.

In 2014, Coun. Tim Tierney led a group of municipalities asking the federal government to investigate the publishing industry for e-book pricing. At the time, OPL was spending about 11 per cent of its materials budget on electronic content.

By 2023, that share had grown to about 40 per cent.

While the library's spending on e-books is trending upward, the number of copies in its collection has declined slightly since reaching a peak in 2020.

The library is getting less for more — and readers are left waiting longer.

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In addition to high prices, Chevreau said the "big five" multinational e-book publishers "throttle" access to e-books by selling them to libraries for either a limited time or a limited number of circulations — sometimes both.

Those publishers — Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster — will often license copies of e-books for just 12 or 24 months. Once that licence expires, libraries must repurchase access to the same book.

Even as many East Coast Straussians such as The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol have become vocal Never Trumpers, West Coast Straussians are obsessed with the Founding and the idea that America is good because the Framers based the country on certain natural rights and timeless laws of nature, enshrining these eternal laws and morals in the country’s founding documents. In this interpretation, progressivism is the key enemy: A relativistic project of adapting laws and morals over time, thereby alienating America from the timelessly pure essence it once embodied. This, to West Coast Straussians, puts progressivism in the same category as fascism or communism—ideologies that seek to remake humankind and the world in defiance of the natural order through totalitarian government intervention. That is what Vought invokes here: When “the left” started to “modernize” the constitutional order, they were in fact destroying all that was good and noble about America—they were deviating from the “natural order” itself.

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The American right today has become dominated by forces and factions that are convinced that the answer is that our moment requires not restraint and preservation but radicalism and counter-revolutionary force. As the major institutions of American life are supposedly in the grip of anti-American, leftist, “globalist,” “woke” forces that desire to tear the moral fabric of the nation apart, as the “natural order” is supposedly under siege, those who used to call themselves “conservatives” need to do whatever is necessary to defend a particular kind of “freedom”: the freedom to live in accordance with the “natural order,” which necessitates imposing it on the whole country.

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Many people get caught up in Trump’s nomination of clowns and buffoons to key positions. That’s invariably bad. But something even scarier awaits us: Trump also empowers competent radicals like Vought who pursue goals like “rehabilitating Christian nationalism” and “pursuing the largest deportation in history,” as an undercover video caught him saying. And unlike in the first go-round, there won’t be the moderating presence of “adults in the room” in Trump’s second term. That’s the whole point of Project 2025, of the Center for Renewing America, of handing Vought the policy keys from the beginning. Vought’s “radical constitutionalism” is about to be elevated to a position of immense influence and power, unbothered and undisturbed by inconvenient guardrails like moral and legal accountability, for the next four years. Somehow, he’s convinced himself that this is just what the Founders would have wanted.

This quote is just so telling:

A few miles away, another prison employee, Crystal Minton, accompanied her fiancé to a friend’s house to help clear the remnants of a metal roof mangled by the hurricane. Ms. Minton, a 38-year-old secretary, said she had obtained permission from the warden to put off her Mississippi duty until early February because she is a single mother caring for disabled parents. Her fiancé plans to take vacation days to look after Ms. Minton’s 7-year-old twins once she has to go to work.

The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things.

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

It's pure nihilism. Nobody expects anything good. They just want to see people they don't identify with hurt more.

“We have shifted this conversation so incredibly far in the direction of restrictions on trans people’s autonomy and rights in a way that was completely unfathomable to many of us even just three or four years ago,” said Chase Strangio, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Legislation in Oklahoma and South Carolina would make it a felony to provide hormonal or surgical transition treatment to transgender people younger than 26 — an uncharted incursion into adults’ health care. Other bills in both states, and in Kansas and Mississippi, would ban such care up to age 21. And bills in more than a dozen states would ban it for minors, which Arkansas was the first to do in 2021, against the consensus of major medical organizations.

A bill in Mississippi — declaring that “separate is not inherently unequal,” an allusion to Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 ruling in which the Supreme Court upheld segregation — would define sex as immutably set at birth, denying transgender identities under state law. A measure in West Virginia would define “any transvestite and/or transgender exposure, performances or display” as obscene, potentially outlawing transgender people’s presence around children.

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But the bills arriving in legislatures show a movement expanding beyond what it pitched itself as.

The 25-year-olds who would be unable to receive transition care in Oklahoma and South Carolina are not, after all, children. An Arizona bill would ban drag shows on Sunday mornings whether or not minors were around. (The lawmakers who introduced those bills did not respond to requests for comment.)

Matt Sharp, senior counsel and state government relations national director for the Alliance Defending Freedom, said his group believed “gender ideology attacks the truth that every person is either male or female.”

And Mr. Schilling, of the American Principles Project, confirmed that his organization’s long-term goal was to eliminate transition care. The initial focus on children, he said, was a matter of “going where the consensus is.”

Cathryn Oakley, the state legislative director and senior counsel at the Human Rights Campaign, said the bills disproved the notion that protecting children had ever been the motivation.

“Under His wings,” one lobbyist wrote in an email. “The Devil never sleeps,” another person sent in an email chain about the distinction between gender and sex. “I pray for the 2nd coming more and more.”

These missives are part of a trove of leaked emails between South Dakota GOP Rep. Fred Deutsch, anti-trans lobbyists, and other state lawmakers about anti-trans policies that are filled with language so deeply religious that, at times, the communications read like scripts from The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s the language, one expert told VICE News, of Christian nationalists who believe they’re engaging in a holy war.

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“Know that many have prayed and are praying for you this day. Do not back down, nor should you be afraid. Know that the Lord is with you. The children of South Dakota belong to him. He is jealous over them. Let his jealousies be spoken forth in the House of Representatives of South Dakota today so that his children would be made safe. Know you are HIS representative today. Do not be afraid. Stand firm in what is right,” wrote Vernadette Broyles, a lawyer and president of the Georgia-based Children and Parental Rights Campaign, which mobilizes against “gender ideology,” in 2020.

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“It is the language of Christian nationalism,” Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University focusing on apocalyptic religion and political violence. “It is the language of people who very much believe they are doing God’s will, and it is the language of people who very much believe that they are engaged in a holy war.”

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“Stopping the existence of transgender people and the acceptance of trans people in the public sphere is to them some sort of religious imperative,” Lecaque told VICE News.“It’s particularly fascinating that this group that has all this money, control in state legislatures, control of the house, they had a presidency, is acting like somehow they are David in the struggle.”

None of this is particularly surprising, and none of it is new. Today’s Christian nationalists believe that America is an inherently holy, Christian land, and that it’s their duty to restore God’s kingdom in order for Jesus to return. Part of this means that they think the country’s laws, policies and cultural institutions should reflect evangelical Christian values, VICE News previously reported. As a result, contentious cultural and political issues, like drag queen story hours and “critical race theory” are perceived as Satanic. Indeed, the Devil came up in the leaked emails.

See also.

On the 14 December 2024, housing advocates and people experiencing homelessness occupied three adjoining empty properties in Brunswick, an inner-city suburb in Melbourne, Australia, which have cumulatively been empty for almost 25 years.

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Government reforms since colonisation have created a landscape where housing in Australia is now treated as a commodity rather than a basic necessity for living. When the area now known as Brunswick was first colonised and the land privatised, only 1 out of the 10 allotments sold for speculation at a Sydney auction was actually lived on by the purchaser, a legacy that continues today.

In 2023, nearly 100,000 homes in metropolitan Melbourne, or 5.2% of all dwellings, were found to be either empty or underused. This number exceeds the 48,620 households currently on the Victorian social housing wait-list, suggesting vacant homes could house everyone on the list twice over.

With 540,000 rental properties in Melbourne, utilising vacant homes would increase rental stock by nearly 20%. The number of vacant homes also equals more than two and a half years’ worth of new construction, based on the annual average of 37,000 new homes built.

This action is not without historical precedent. Dr. Iain McIntyre, Historian and research fellow at The University of Melbourne has written extensively on the historical role of squatting in the housing crisis following the end of World War 2. According to Iain, squatters “had the most impact in Victoria where three days after the house in Hawthorn was squatted the Premier announced that the state government would introduce its own legislation to give councils and municipal shires the power to install tenants in disused houses, with the state government to guarantee the payment of rent”.

“For a medieval historian, they’re really obvious red flags,” she says, and all the experts interviewed expressed similar unease and anxiety. “If you told me that it was some random proud boy, I wouldn’t be surprised for a second. But given his position it is pretty shocking,” Elley says. Lodder echoes this exact feeling: “It’s both absurd and terrifying; terrifying that … someone with such prominent and worrying tattoos on their body is getting a Cabinet position in the U.S., but also absurd, because it’s all very cosplay.” 

When it comes down to it, there are some undeniable features of Hegseth’s collection of tattoos. “It’s all very specifically violent,” summarizes Jannega. “There is no way of reading this that isn’t about violence, when you have guns and swords all over you. He’s telling you this. He cannot play the misunderstood Christian — he’s violent.” What a medievalist finds particularly troubling in the real history of the Crusades is what happened before Crusaders got to the Holy Land. “One thing that happened was horrific violence here in Europe,” Janega continues. “There were so many knights so keyed up — why would they bother waiting for the Holy Land when there were non-Christians in their backyard?” Lecaque, too, is anticipating increasing oppression at home — already seen in Hegseth’s book “American Crusade,” which, in its own words, “lays out the strategy we must employ in order to defeat America’s internal enemies,” as well as more violence abroad, especially in the Middle East.