Oh, I don't have any delusions about the "agency" people have when they vote. The amorphous public is an amorphous public, whether it is voting or buying. 1/

We need to build institutions under which governments are likely to emerge that are capable of organizing collective action intelligently. Part of that is voting, both to inform and discipline that government. 2/

But what matters is whether the institutions confer both political legitimacy and quality, to establish capable collective agency. Our status quo political institutions, including how you and I vote now, plainly aren't doing that. 3/

Somehow out of the mess of broken institutions we need to enact changes that will undo and reform those institutions. Not easy. Perhaps not probable, if you are a betting man. But neither impossible nor unprecedented either. 4/

We'll have to see how we survive the next few years to see whether we get another shot. Or maybe we in some sense we don't survive (perhaps for many of us we literally don't survive), and something new has a shot of growing from the corpse. Or perhaps armageddon. 5/

I'm hoping for the easiest, least armageddon-ish path. /fin

No offense, but I think that's dumb. These things thrive because of coordination equilibria. Humans almost never break coordination equilibria by spontaneously, in isolation, bearing switching costs and hoping others do the same. 1/

Coordinated collective action is required, and in a world where most people are and mean to stay busy and rationally ignorant of things like local maxima as traps, imagining mere communication by the concerned will deliver is also dumb. This is what state action is for. /fin

A hand gesture that culminates remarkably like a Nazi salute but begins with a hand on the heart might have been some novelty, something not intended as a Nazi salute. 1/

A longstanding fascination with the number 420 is pretty weak tea as evidence, even if 4/20 is Hitler's birthday. 2/

Support of AfD in Germany doesn't mean you are a Nazi sympathizer, even if that party has neonazi connections. 3/

Circumstantial evidence could always be coincidental. But as circumstantial evidence piles up, the probability of coincidence declines. 4/

Sure it could all be a gag! Trigger the libs! 5/

But that's just a different interpretation of the basic claim, that jokingly or not Musk has some longstanding interest in communicating support of Nazi-ish things. (And the support of AfD doesn't seem too jokey?) /fin [corrected, originally mistakenly referred to Trump rather than Musk]

yeah, i guess the people i'm interested in wouldn't be so excited about, and the people you are interested in would find the domain already monopolized. 1/

mostly my question was about industrial policy. EU politicos are idiots if they are not subsidizing (financially, or with privileged access to government services) domestic communications platforms. that's been true for a decade, more true now that they are politically weaponized. /fin