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
(i still like my crazy "what if we did transfers by lottery when demand is deficient" kind of ideas. but Bruenig has me pretty much convinced that tried and true social democracy might be enough, if we could get ourselves to try it.)
at least the self-styled smarter progressives have "what if we deregulate?"
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
eg fossil fuel corps, tech surveillance and control monopolists, many others
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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It's like everyday is Halloween at an old-school showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show!
i love this. we did a "lunch and a movie" party for my kid's birthday. (training his cohort for a future, i hope, with lots of brunches!) but the kids did have to behave in the theater. alas.
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
samizdat shittiness.
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.
How would you characterize or describe the networking-networking level? I guess I’d interpret it broadly as being more intentional about using what happens on social media to build deeper personal or professional relationships off social media?
i’d have a hard time decoding what exactly that would mean. are we not networking? would networking networking mean being more explicit about discussing, coordinating on, reverting to private communication about professional and career matters?
our absolute condition has definitely improved, mostly as a matter of technology. we have vaccines, electricity, indoor plumbing. we are still not overtly as caste based a society as we once was, though we are in danger of a lot of reversion there. 1/
i think you are much too complacent. technology will not revert, but it can immiserate as well as help. we are more surveilled, and along a variety of basic dimensions (like being able to skip town and start over) much more unfree than people in the past. 2/
pretty soon, technology may well be enforcing laws over which we have little democratic control with overt violence. it may start with armed drones surveilling the border, but it won't end there. 3/
we are not going to bring back full jim crow racial distinctions, but a multiracial precarious underclass is expanding and may be surveilled and policed and immiserated. we are bringing back the Fritz Lang Metropolis world that the New Deal averted. 4/
UAE is the model, but here as there, most people would have the status of guest worker. It wouldn't be confined to immigrants. 5/
You can always argue absolute condition is better, because technology. Unless we nuke ourselves (far from out of the question), we're likely in continuity to have less actual caloric deficiency than we had in the Gilded Age. 6/
But in welfare terms, I don't know that a decently fed (if ever insecure ex ante about just how) serf class (no doubt with formal but meaningless and unenforceable equality) qualifies as absolute improvement, at least relative to the non-serfs of that era. 7/
Even with the fucking HUGE tailwind of technological advancement, we are toying with shapes of society that would mean in absolute terms, one might prefer the outhouse and drafts of a 19th C New England town to the surveilled, climate controlled, propagandized present. 8/
Dignity and freedom matter a great deal to human welfare, and the path we're on erases it all. As I said, yes, I think you are too whiggish, too complacent. All the Kuznets curves — the original re inquality, the environmental version, the arc of justice version — have undone themselves. 9/
If we don't repair the direction, I think we may well be quite worse off in absolute terms, with technological change offset by various forms of crisis, conflict, or quiet coercion and subjection. /fin