if you’ll tolerate the self-promoting… drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/03/09/v...

you don’t want news organizations optimizing for viewership or subscriptions. what should they optimize for? that’s a hard question. but definitely not viewership or subscriptions.

“Liberals often refer to right-wing lies, misinformation, disinformation, or conspiracy theories, but what they are identifying are myths in the Sorelian sense.” @lioneltrolling.bsky.social ht @devinnn.bsky.social

i'd usually agree, a great virtue of PR is parties can build their identities on their priorities and let inevitable divisions on contentious other issues get sorted out over time. but this research seems to suggest that there's less need for that kind of strategy than i might have expected?

a majority of people who voted voted against Donald Trump. if you are going to make claims about the will of a supernatural "we" based on outcomes of flawed procedures, perhaps at least rely on procedures that yield a supermajority of assent. (50.1% is not magically more meaningful than 49.81%.)

that is to say, it could be that as a matter of proportionately represented public support, there are not serious tradeoffs, but in the 50/50 2-party electorates FPTP encourages even tiny wedges can have big consequences. as can the weather, or a well-timed scandal, etc.

Maybe! But Europeans are inheritors of a brutal feudalism. Not racialized and perhaps not quite as brutal as US chattel slavery, but still not a heritage of equality or liberty.

when websites do something annoying and you reward them with your e-mail address or whatever, think of the incentives you are creating.

a bit surprising, and a challenge to @mattyglesias.bsky.social-style centrism, perhaps. a European context. perhaps the US is different. and this is within a sample that identifies as social-democrat persuadable or left, perhaps moderation on culture could bring in outsiders? read the full thread.

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is America a retrofuture?

i think the tech pronatalists ought to shift a few shillings from their life extension institutes fund a Manhattan Project in pursuit of male pregnancy.

we can bring back the semicolon! accuse LLMs of overusing them, say writing with a lot of semicolons is usually AI slop, then watch writers and editors race to deploy them to defend their honor.

what if grok is really Adrian Dittmann?

i want to start the rival "Party in the USA"

much more when Rs are in control than Ds! (although Obama was very proud of the fracking boom on his watch.) politically, the US is split, the voters are very sensitive to gas prices, but donors (oil interests) prefer high gas prices, so outcomes are hard to predict.

least popular, least charismatic plutocrat burns cash to start a new political party without attending to the structural (especially electoral) factors that cement two party dominance in America.

it’s more than a bit pathetic that a *Gulf petrostate* like UAE sees the writing on the wall and dives headlong into EVs + solar, while the “good ol’ USA” clings nostalgically to coal, oil, and monster trucks. see @katemac.bsky.social @70sbachchan.bsky.social www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/bri...

they call alchemy a pseudoscience, then they invent a machine that turns bullshit into gold.