At a basic level, USD's special status has been anchored by a security arrangement. Allied governments (except sometimes France) don't try to diversify out of it in part bc it finances the US military umbrella. Change the arrangement, and others might become curious abt say what the BRICs are up to.
it might be a hard sell for Republicans would risk three Canadian states, even if Alberta would in all likelihood be red.
"The ultimate function of the entrepreneurial ethic was (and is) to reconcile workers to precarity." ~Becca Rothfeld reviewing @erikmbaker.bsky.social's "Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America" www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0... ht @steveroth.bsky.social
Review | The can-do spirit that undermines American workers
Link Preview: Review | The can-do spirit that undermines American workers: In “Make Your Own Job,” Erik Baker argues that we have been tricked into regarding personal resilience as the solution to structural injustice
the genius move would be to use the anti-Denmark animus he is ginning up to justify compulsory licensing of Ozempic / Wegovy at generic prices. he'd become the most popular President in history.
the area should be delineated in the traditional Sharpie.
It's an ugly situation for sure.
from Fiona Hill, just after the start of the Ukraine war www.politico.com/news/magazin...
Text: I’ve kind of quipped about this but I also worry about it in all seriousness — that Putin’s been down in the archives of the Kremlin during Covid looking through old maps and treaties and all the different borders that Russia has had over the centuries. He’s said, repeatedly, that Russian and European borders have changed many times. And in his speeches, he’s gone after various former Russian and Soviet leaders, he’s gone after Lenin and he’s gone after the communists, because in his view they ruptured the Russian empire, they lost Russian lands in the revolution, and yes, Stalin brought some of them back into the fold again like the Baltic States and some of the lands of Ukraine that had been divided up during World War II, but they were lost again with the dissolution of the USSR. Putin’s view is that borders change, and so the borders of the old Russian imperium are still in play for Moscow to dominate now.
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i'm whimsically suggesting i'd be okay with Canada taking over the United States, which would be the effect of this variation.
i'd be more positively disposed if the plan was to divide Canada into states, each with the population of Wyoming. Republicans like small states, right?
fifty-something, probably two or three more than CA.
fifty-something yeah. and two whole senators!
people act like Trump is trying to strong-arm Canada or something, but actually he's offering them a sweetheart deal with two whole senators.
democracy depends upon collective cognition, and we cannot cogitate well or sanely while dopamine machines owned and manipulated by Musk and Zuckerberg constitute the public and coordinate the effort.
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i think in almost every context the premise racism is bad is taken for granted. there are some subcultures that dispute that, but they remain very marginal. my point about “leftist” is i think it’s explicitly used to personalize and dramatize critique, make it about bad people rather than policies.
i think neither “right” nor “left” is pejorative (without modifiers like “hard” or “far”). i think people often do identify as left or right (or just as ofter prefer other words, “conservative”, “social democrat”). but “leftist” mostly is pejorative, while “rightist” is more rarely deployed.
i see it used to pretend there’s some policy relationship while mostly functioning to personalize and demonize its targets. compare “Warren’s focus on antitrust alienated tech leaders.” to “Leftists intentionally kicked tech out of the coalition.”
i think racist is probably closer in symmetry, because throwing around “leftist” as an epithet is not discrediting of the thrower as overwrought in the way that throwing around Nazi often is, in ideologically mixed company. racist OTOH is not treated as disqualifyingly inflammatory.
the first two are hardly epithets, as they are embraced by those they attach to. (I guess some people identify as “leftist”, but mostly not, mostly it’s a derisive attribution from the other side.) racist, sure. that’s a fine example.
“fascist” and “communist” are used and abused pretty symmetrically. what are some other favorite terms of derision for right-wingers?
some of the extra money MA games out of the Federal government may go to benefits, but I suspect most goes to executive and shareholder pockets. 1/
it’s great MA plans provide vision, hearing, dental, which base Medicare should but does not. but on the other side of that, MA brings into Medicare the narrow networks and denials of low-cost private health insurance plans. 2/
a person might be very happy to have chosen MA while they are reasonably healthy and get medical, vision, hearing coverage, but come to regret it when they are less healthy and find limitations on basic medical coverage. /fin