there's no position on "the issues" that could win my support for Donald Trump or JD Vance. their flaws, in my mind, go beyond what "issues" can remedy. i think most of the electorate behaves this way, although a substantial faction has diametric views about *who* is beyond support. 1/
yet so much electoral analysis insists on explaining results by issue positions. if only we'd moderated on this, doubled down on that, the polls say they'd like that! 2/
it has come to seem a bit bizarre to me. /fin
to people who know anything about Argentinian politics (not me!), how much do you think Trump’s suggestion that American support was dependent upon Milei’s electoral success affected the results?
i didn’t get interested in software to build shopping carts. i get so turned off when that’s the example.
i just watched “a house of dynamite” and it’s the latest in a string of defense, intelligence, and military themed thrillers where my overwhelming reaction is sadness for a lost world, a sense the film is suspended in an alt-timeline. 1/
this film depicts the worst possible events, but its protagonists are basically sane and decent. all the iconography of patriotism, for me often an effective filmic device, i’ve sometimes been quite the nationalist, hits different. like grief. /fin
so it's not Massachusetts or California he thinks is well governed. it's Florida. (where i live, but not for very much longer. its climate and physical geography are wonderful, but it is careening towards social catastrophe, and its misgovernment has destroyed the human thing i most loved here.)
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Chesterton's bedroom. ht @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com
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Whatever you might think of other controversializing, no one one the planet understands and presents more clearly the basic economic mechanisms of social democracy than @mattbruenig.bsky.social. from www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/10/26/d... ht @jdcmedlock.bsky.social
Text: Ultimately, I don’t think Lazardi and I even diverge in our understanding of how to deal with inequality. When you look at the basic math involved in these questions, it’s clear what you have to do: 1. Compress the wage scale, such as through unionization and collective bargaining. 2. Redistribute capital’s share, either socially (as in Alaska) or through a higher labor share. 3.Provide income to nonworkers via the welfare state. What often happens in this debate is just that some people have various ideological hang-ups that make them think that (1) and (2) are real hardcore anti-capitalism and (3) is not. And downstream of that, they go about trying to prove that (1) and (2) matter more than (3). But, at least when it comes to overall inequality, this just isn’t true.
an irony is that elites support a “strong man” precisely when they think they can have their way with him. they sell the public on an untrammeled genius who will overthrow the obstacles and just fix things. but it’s the things that fear otherwise being fixed who in fact elevate him!
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i think the argument over housing and private profits is not about whether it’s legitimate that there should be private profits in building housing — of course there should! as with any sphere in which private contractors are engaged. 1/
but questions of to what degree housing supply should be *directed* by private profit incentives are, i think, legitimately much thornier. /fin
Stein’s Law needs a corollary. The law is, what cannot go on forever will stop. The corollary is, before the fall, people will extrapolate its continuance to long past the time that it will stop.
building a giant golden ballroom while cutting SNAP has very Marie Antoinette vibes.
until you take down all your scurrilous posts that are not praising me, i hereby impose a 10% surcharge on your skeets.
americans decided they would test the proposition “nothing matters.” though i understand how the evidence for the proposition sometimes appears considerable, i remain skeptical it will ultimately prove correct.
strangers in a familiar land.
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an automated system demands your urgent attention.
i don’t think this plan to force a divorce between yin and yang is going to work out very well.
virtue shames our leaders and is therefore a crime against the state.
i agree the gilded age analogies are overwrought. the era we are living through is much worse than the gilded age.
We know better than this, but we’re doing it anyway.
what would an intellectual capital strike look like?