I'd rather we engineered circumstances that render careerism irrelevant to people above a certain level in politics. But all that stuff seems like pipe dreams at the moment, dreaming of better pistons for the Titanic while it sinks.
Kamala getting a speaking gig was irrelevant, she hadn't done it then. But it plays into a sense that Democratic electeds are malleable careerists, not reliable fighters on "our" behalf. 1/
It's not fair that Trump gets to be an absolute self-dealing piece of shit openly, and his fans admire him for that while much of the D coalition would condemn and never vote for someone who played it that way. It's not fair but it's real. /fin
yes, certainly. these hypotheses are not mutually exclusive.
look. before i made the promise you advised me not to make the promise. so why are you acting like i'm doing something wrong if now i break the promise?
the marginal voter is not policy centered. the marginal voter has to be excited by the candidate on an emotional, "gut" level. 1/
the policy stuff sets a bias — the election was in a sense Kamala's to lose because her policies were more popular and policy-focused voters gave her a lead. 2/
but that lead was small. it always is — each party concedes the other party's position if it weighs them down too much. Trump became pretty close to pro-choice to neutralize the issue of abortion. 3/
policy differences create a bias towards one candidate or another, but usually a pretty small one. then the election is actually decided by enthusiasm, "vibes", "beer primares", "gut", emotion. 4/
that's the way our Presidential contests are structured. ask any campaign operative and they'll tell you it's the emotion stuff, not the policy stuff, that ultimately decides. 5/
perhaps we should restructure how we elect presidents, or the role of the presidency, all kinds of stuff. but here we are. /fin
no. they stay home. this election was lost not because more people voted for donald trump than previously, but because people who tend to vote for democrats if they vote shrugged instead.
all things are possible now in America.
why do voters mistrust Democrats? despite all the talk about bread and butter issues, why do many working class people feel like Democratic elected just don't get them, might sell them out without even knowing it? why do they find it hard to get excited and turn out? xcancel.com/Variety/stat...
Screenshot of tweet from Variety. "Former Vice President Kamala Harris has signed with CAA for representation in all areas, with a focus on speaking engagements and publishing."
"The United States has no need to 'partner' with Russia economically. But President Trump wants to partner with Putin’s Russia morally and politically—against Ukraine, and against liberal democracy. The…president is on Putin’s side." @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social www.thebulwark.com/i/157461733/...
The Cruelty Isn’t the Point. It’s the Pleasure.
Link Preview: The Cruelty Isn’t the Point. It’s the Pleasure.: Trump 2.0 is a shared sensual experience in hurting other people.
"Never underestimate the destructive power of stupidity." Or perfidy. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.
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remarkable how mild the editorial is. what is the word for "rule by the pathetically thin-skinned"? apparently it's our new system of government, at state + national as well as local levels. they are all free speech advocates, suing and threatening to jail you for speech. ht @smtuffy.bsky.social
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it's all "hard data", but up is down, depending on the deflator you use. "hard data" can't speak for itself, but it can whisper lies and pretend it does. @ernietedeschi.bsky.social and @ericvannostrand.bsky.social make a strong case that up is in fact up. ht @mtkonczal.bsky.social
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Fukuyama's end of history was kind of the magazine cover curse, but for a centuries-long historical cycle rather than years-long business cycle. It marked a top. I hope we don't have to wait centuries for the bottom.
“Law always points beyond itself, toward the principle of justice, and that principle means that law can always be called into question. When law claims to be fully self-sufficient, it betrays itself and becomes a tool of injustice” // excellent and true
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a polity that periodically elects a king is no democracy, even if the elections are competitive. it’s not a state in a meaningful sense. either it devolves to “competitive authoritarianism” (one king always wins), or it falls to waste due to vertiginous schizophrenic reversals.
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hospitalized for cancer, waiting to see which of your caregivers will survive the random firings and whether there will still be care to be given. everything our new, um, competent leadership does everything they do with professionalism and kindness.
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from Hannah Arendt, via @eliasisquith.blog, via @resnikoff.bsky.social grattoncourses.wordpress.com/wp-content/u...
Text: In these terms, the nonparticipators in public life under a dictatorship are those who have refused their support by shunning those places of "responsibility" where such support, under the name of obedience, is required. And we have only for a moment to imagine what would happen to any of these forms of government if enough people would act "irresponsibly" and refuse sup-port, even without active resistance and rebellion, to see how effective a weapon this could be. It is in fact one of the many variations of nonviolent action and resistance-for instance the power that is potential in civil disobedience—which are being discovered in our century. The reason, however, that we can hold these new criminals, who never committed a crime out of their own initiative, nevertheless responsible for what they did is that there is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters. The only domain where the word could possibly apply to adults who are not slaves is the domain of religion, in which people say that they obey the word or the command of God because the relationship between God and man can rightly be seen in terms similar to the relation between adult and child. Hence the question addressed to those who participated and obeyed orders should never be, "Why did you obey?" but "Why did you support?" This change of words is no semantic irrelevancy for those who know the strange and powerful influence mere "words" have over the minds of men who, first of all, are speaking animals. Much would be gained if we could eliminate this pernicious word "obedience" from our vocabulary of moral and political thought. If we think these matters through, we might regain some measure of self-confidence and even pride, that is, regain what former times called the dignity or the honor of man: not perhaps of mankind but of the status of being human.
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i can't tell what's serious and not-serious anymore, so i do my best to write things that work either way.