whatever “centrist” conveys, it has nothing to do with supporting enlightenment ideas. maybe liberal, in its original sense. or progressive in its original sense. but all these words get tainted by use, come to refer to things other than what you might mean them to.
i think it is kind of a permanent feature unless we change something. didn’t used to be, but that’s because “all politics was local” and the parties weren’t ideologically sorted. but are nationalization and sorting are likely to reverse under current institutions? www.interfluidity.com/v2/7687.html
(i guess the closest “on the left”would be Bernie/Warren/Lina-Khan/Katie-Porter-style identification of oligarchs and corporations as conspiratorial enemies, “left populism”. stories which are often pretty true!)
right. i don’t think adopting an “infowars” model is ever going to work for the pro civilization side of things. the way is to create an ecosystem in which the infowars model just comes off as the propaganda that it is and so becomes ineffective.
the point is US state media wouldn’t be “Dem messaging”. it’d constitute a diverse slate of high quality noncommercial media—think Voice of America, BBC, CBC, etc. i hesitate to say NPR because it has such particular pathologies, pathologies that derive from the fact it is mostly *donor* financed 1/
to break down the problem a bit, there are (at least) two approaches to our present media catastrophe: 1. fight fire with fire, our propaganda to counter theirs; or 2. reshape the media to be environment to be tendentious and propagandistic. 2/
obviously both are likely necessary, but in the longer term i think only the second project can save us. 3/
(i think “democrats make you richer”, while it has the virtue by certain measures at least of being true, is messaging that has been tried quite a lot and proven easily countered by negativity-biased messaging that calls attention to people’s hardships and blames enemies.) /fin
i don’t love the state level in the US, it’s true. (i think there should be maybe 500 or 5000 states rather than 50.) but i do love the idea of a diverse publicly funded media ecosystem. i don’t hate state governments per se, just want them structured to be more meaningfully democratic. 1/
i don’t think virtue can compete with vice in ecosystems dominated by bot swarms. fascism offers compelling accounts that can fit on a bumper sticker and in a tweet. truer stories won’t fit their. i think we want to reduce the scope and importance of bot swarm media, not compete in manipulation. 2/
the late, great-even-if-i-often-disagreed @kdrum.bsky.social has made the case that fox news alone accounts for basically everything. 3/
like yeah, the specific disfigurations of soul that inflict eg JD Vance come from “too online” edgelording, but the main reason all that matters is because organs like Fox and Newsmax amplify it to less informed, less political audiences. 4/
i’m not sure i’m persuaded that’s right, but it’s worth taking seriously, and reminding ourselves that most people try to avoid rather than immerse themselves in online political content. 5/
whether its the absence of more better quality media or the presence of putinbots all over social media that’s the bigger problem is hard to tease out. but we should do our best to encourage the former and make the world less hospitable to the latter, i think. 6/
i don’t think we can compete on bots, but well funded, social-democratically inclined media can absolutely create great material that can flow onto tiktok, great podcasts that develop parasocial followings, etc. /fin
i think it ought to be a public project. the idea that liberalism requires ceding the information sphere to private actors in the name of neutrality in practice means ceding the information sphere to oligarchs, under contemporary levels of wealth concentr8n. drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/03/09/v...
“Until someone, be it progressives or centrists, can build a media apparatus to counter right-wing agitprop and make a case for humane immigration policy, this cycle is likely going to repeat.”
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govern so incompetently you create a real emergency, then assume extraordinary powers by declaring a state of emergency.
despite a perfectly reasonable inference. that’s okay. it’s the first good news i’ve seen today.
i thought this was parody, teasing the author. no, it is a direct quote from David Brooks.
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“ICE detainer” on a US citizen whose mom has presented his birth certificate to a judge. The judge acknowledges the birth certificate and its authenticity, but claims she lacks jurisdiction to release him. Presumably ICE releases him when they review the certificate. But it’s hard now to presume.
U.S.-born man held for ICE under Florida's new anti-immigration law • Florida Phoenix
Link Preview: U.S.-born man held for ICE under Florida's new anti-immigration law • Florida Phoenix: Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a 20-year-old U.S. citizen, was being held in the Leon County Jail Thursday, charged with illegally entering Florida as an “unauthorized alien” — even as a supporter waved his...
all so-called independent agencies are fully accountable to Congress, the only meaningfully democratic branch of our govt. also the most dysfunctional branch of our govt. but there’s no saving American democracy without curing that dysfunction. see David Andolfatto xcancel.com/dandolfa/sta...
kind of emblematic of what DeSantis and Rufo have done to New College.
Google news headlines: “Former New College marketing director drove naked around Lakewood Ranch” “Former spokesperson for Gov. DeSantis arrested, charged with exposure of sexual organs” “New College of Florida marketing director arrested, fired from job”
if the Supreme Court really wanted to encourage compliance by the Trump Administration, it might in a majority opinion include, Clarence-Thomas-style, an off-hand remark about how perhaps the Court's reasoning in Trump v United States bears a second look in light of more recent jurisprudence.
Text: It would be easy to assign malice to this nonsense, and there is a degree of it. There is also indeed self-interest on behalf of the oligarchs backing Trump, who might still hope they can get their tax cuts while holding onto Trump's populism (though I suspect they realize their losses aren't worth it). However, Trump isn't doing something that every political movement does in one way or another. He's trying to create a narrative and set of common reference points that transform issues associated with complex systems into digestible ones with easy solutions. To give him his credit, that's his greatest talent. The man is a master ideologist in a world where ideologies have fewer stable reference points in "big ideas." However, I suspect that the contradictions and unexpected consequences of trying to take as complex a system as global trade and payment out of homeostasis with blunt tools will create feedback loops that even he can't paper over.
very much agreed.
yes. it can simultaneously be true that good things could potentially be done by developing Federal land, and there’s no reason to imagine this administration would do anything good.
or rather the oldest.
hawkish fed did nothing to gold though.