it’s not the choices per se made by organs like NY Times that delegitimates them, as much as the sense they are triangulating — btw thr audience’s prejudices, risks of blowback from disingenuous operatives, desire to retain access, privilege, bodily freedom regardless of the next administration. 1/
that’s all understandable, but quite a different basis for decision-making than disinterested evaluations of truth, importance, and the public interest. /fin
Much more than a polymath, @t0nyyates.bsky.social is kind.
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i remember in the 1980s angst over the “coarsening” of the American mind. i guess that was about obscenity and cuss words and pop-culture rather than classics and stuff. 1/
wherever you site yourself, whomever you vote for, contemporary political polarization has coarsened minds much more insidiously than all of that shit. 2/
we can’t think properly, can’t consider and weigh ideas, because we know the political valence or implication of every claim, and can’t avoid prejudging or overcompensating for prejudging it all. /fin
It’s absurd of Trump to pretend the incidence of tariffs falls entirely on foreign sellers of goods, but it is also disingenuous to claim the incidence would be solely on domestic consumers.
“Beijing has directed several key state-owned automakers, including VW partner FAW Group, to prioritize technology and market share over profitability. That’s hardly an option for Germany’s publicly-listed carmakers” www.bloomberg.com/news/feature... // rents to shareholders are simply unaffordable
VW, BMW and Mercedes Are Getting Left in the Dust by China’s EVs
Link Preview: VW, BMW and Mercedes Are Getting Left in the Dust by China’s EVs: After falling behind on tech trends, German carmakers are scrambling to recover in their biggest and most lucrative market.
from Branko Milanovic branko2f7.substack.com/p/russias-ap...
Text: “The mission of the Russian people is to realize social justice within human society, not just in Russia but in the entire world” (my translation). The salvation is accompanied by destruction. The two elements, as in John’s apocalyptic writings, go together. There can be no salvation without the destruction of all that is false, rotten and built on lies. Apocalyptic thinking is, Berdyaev writes, the most important part of the Russian idea. It is characterized by asceticism, dogmatism, and acceptance (or perhaps, search?) of suffering.
every plutocrat is a temporarily embarrassed alpha warlord.
[new draft post] A Westphalian order is project enough drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/10/15/a...
True or false? “Joe Biden’s Israel/Palestine policy has been a catastrophe for liberal internationalism and American soft-power hegemony on par with George W. Bush’s Iraq War.”
before you posit NASA vs SpaceX as exemplary of public vs private sector performance, consider that the private sector has also given us Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and Boeing. 1/
a better model is that extraordinary achievement is hard, most organizations will fail, a stable is far better than a champion, whether public or private. /fin
autumn is when we get kids all excited about a legume literally named after incest.
“When voters say they want more economic policy from Kamala Harris, I don’t think they mean they want to see white papers or hear about tax credits. They want a worldview.” ~Zephyr Teachout www.nybooks.com/online/2024/...
Harris’s Chance on Trade | Zephyr Teachout
Link Preview: Harris’s Chance on Trade | Zephyr Teachout: In 2016, during the surreal presidential race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, I was the Democratic nominee for Congress in a swing district in
we are all Cassandra now.
“it’s a non-judiciable political question whenever we support the politics that would prevail if we don’t judiciate it.”
are the heat gradients that power hurricanes exploitable by lesser heat engines? people discuss putting geothermal plants around the yellowstone basin to disperse heat that might someday provoke a supervolcano eruption. could we build little heat engines that sap the energy that powers hurricanes?
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the easiest way to become misinformed is to imagine you can discern who is trustworthy by how people present themselves over youtube (or tiktok, reels, whatev).
it comes around on public media as a leak, inside information from a credible source. but if it’s on public media it isn’t inside information. it’s outside information intentionally presented as inside information in order to shape or fabricate a narrative.
angels are empirical.
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“War is atrocity. Except when we are winning.”
the most exciting announcements tonight since the hyperloop.