1. Cut social services to the point people who’ve relied upon them become desperate; 2. Protests that can be characterized as disorderly, perhaps even violent, riots emerge; 3. Use the riots as pretext for a crushing response that deters future opposition of any sort.
Trying to contact my Congresspeople. I want to write them. I mistrust their webforms. I want an e-mail address. So I phone to ask. 1/
I call Representative Anna Paulina Luna's office. Someone answers, but informs me that there is no e-mail, just the webform. Postal mail it will have to be. 2/
I try to call Senator Rick Scott's office. There's no phone number on his site, so I call his contact number listed on the official Florida delegation page of the US Senate. www.senate.gov/states/FL/in... Straight to voicemail, at 13:20-ish on Wednesday. 3/
On the same page, I find the phone number for my newly Senator, Ashley Moody. Again, straight to voicemail. 4/
I'm going to be producing a lot of postal mail, I think. Very old school. Very time consuming. Our democracy in action. /fin
* 12:30-ish, not 13:20-ish!
for people who excuse Google's — and now Apple's — capitulation on the orwellian renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as *of course they just use the official name*, please read Google's explicit policy on this question, from 2008. publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2008/04/how-... ht @dangillmor.bsky.social
Text: When our policy says that we display the "primary, common, local" names for a body of water, each of those three adjectives has an important and distinct meaning. By saying "primary", we aim to include names of dominant use, rather than having to add every conceivable local nickname or variation. By saying "common", we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage. Finally, by saying "local", we aim to reflect the primary and common names used by countries that actually border the body of water, as they are the countries recognized under international law as having a special sovereign stake in it.
perhaps worse than a US withdrawal from NATO would be a US that sowed chaos from within the alliance. Europe still requires functional security arrangements.
one day a Russian prisoner is freed (Marc Fogel, great news). the next day the US Secretary of Defense concedes Ukraine’s territorial integrity and aspiration to join NATO. our transactional President sure knows how to strike a deal.
he loves that truth won’t ever matter to the 99% who never check and the ones who do and say anything can’t be trusted they’re on the other side. nothing matters it’s funny!
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the calculus is simple. by default, senators get reelected. incumbency bias is extraordinary. but if you put a target on yourself by defying the MAGA-ists, you very well might not. go along to get along. and fewer death threats. the world’s greatest deliberative body.
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conceding in advance. the art of the deal. peace through strength.
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the ghost stories / horror films write themselves. weird shinings in glitzy golden towers. new cultural frontiers for the tired indian burial ground cliché.
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no one told us how entertaining the apocalypse could be. or alternatively, the road to hell is paved with engaging content!
if we think of Musk/Trump as PE-style takeover artists, won’t they sacrifice long-term value embedded in tacit competences and relationships in favor of extracting short-term cash? asks @csissoko.bsky.social (Musk’s approach to expenditures sure seems to rhyme with how PE raiders squeeze prey.)
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without comment. www.thetimes.com/world/europe...
Russia asks Elon Musk to hand over names of dissidents
Link Preview: Russia asks Elon Musk to hand over names of dissidents: MPs in Moscow wants a list of Russians funded by USAid, the American aid scheme shut down by Donald Trump, to be given to the security services
i wonder when Musk reads a story like this, does he feel anything? does he have any regrets about how he went about things? “There’s nothing wrong with a review of aid spending – this happens regularly. But existing programming should have been allowed to continue while the review is carried out.”
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DOGE is a rootkit.
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someone needs to write a novel, speculative fiction, describing how it all goes down from the perspective of a young man overcoming trauma, unwinding to his therapist what it was like observing it all from the shoulders of the special government employee who exuberantly provoked the cataclysm.
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Yes. Excellent.
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under this definition, hasn't Congress — the most important branch of the Federal government — been under "competitive authoritarianism" for decades? from Steven Levitsky, @lucanway.bsky.social www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state... ht @williamcb.bsky.social @casmudde.bsky.social
Text: But authoritarianism does not require the destruction of the constitutional order. What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. Most autocracies that have emerged since the end of the Cold War fall into this category, including Alberto Fujimori’s Peru, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, and contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey. Under competitive authoritarianism, the formal architecture of democracy, including multiparty elections, remains intact. Opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they contest seriously for power. Elections are often fiercely contested battles in which incumbents have to sweat it out. And once in a while, incumbents lose, as they did in Malaysia in 2018 and in Poland in 2023. But the system is not democratic, because incumbents rig the game by deploying the machinery of government to attack opponents and co-opt critics. Competition is real but unfair.
See e.g. www.opensecrets.org/elections-ov...
Text: It is reasonable to ask if this is the right approach at all. Should we be building tools to try and moderate at huge scale, even though moderating at scale has generally proven to be an impossible task to get fully right, and the training of models is expensive and bad for the climate? Hasn't the last decade proven to us that moderating at massive scale isn't just a technical problem but a market capture one? Once we have big scale and standard tools these platforms no longer are reliably on the side of the people subject to them. The incentives for both the users and the owners no longer align with good moderation. I suspect that others, like myself, can't help but imagine a better use for the money standing up Roost. Especially when money for media and community is tighter than it has ever been and getting more sparse with each executive order. Would it be a better use of this money to support and fund smaller online communities? Ones who might not even need these types of tools?
honestly at this point what i wouldn't do to live in graceland.
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if you wanna know why current US authorities may come after Internet Archive, here's an example of the kind of history they might like erased www.muskwatch.com/p/doge-teen-...
DOGE Teen Ran Image-Sharing Site Linked to URLs Referencing Pedophilia and the KKK
Link Preview: DOGE Teen Ran Image-Sharing Site Linked to URLs Referencing Pedophilia and the KKK: The site launched by Edward Coristine in 2021 promised to protect the privacy of its users, stating, “All your images are encrypted. We do not log IP addresses, device agents or anything else.”