mastodon.social/@BenRossTran...

i can’t believe that they’re hypocrites!

i think that’s what we’re in, and all bets are off. this is the Death card in Tarot, meaning not death, but profound change. our role is to do our best as the wheel careens in spin to bias where it lands toward something decent. i wrote this a few yrs ago, holds up www.interfluidity.com/v2/9122.html

(he puts his thumb on the scale pretty hard with his use of “real” for his good Elon, but “evil” for the bad Elon. as he says, he has friends in the tech industry eager for Musk’s intercessions. he belongs to a community.)

maybe! but we should actually experiment a bit, try to develop means of effective governance at scale, before giving up, because in addition to governance challenges, there are profound benefits of scale that propound to large nation-states capable of governing themselves well.

what is the Magdeberg killer talking about when he accuses Germany of “chas[ing] female Saudi asylum seekers all over the world… chas[ing] Saudi girls who have never been to Germany and had no intention to seek asylum in Germany?” x.com/tim_roehn/st...

the UK has first-past-the-post, not proportional representation. israel’s system fails to filter tiny parties from parliamentary roles, allowing weird kingmakers. these are pathologies most parliamentary systems avoid. the US system leaves many voters almost entirely unrepresented. “homeless.”

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what ultimately is the status of the Francis Scott Key Bridge reconstruction funding?

“Donald Trump, alleged leader of…populist Republicans, scuttled a spending bill primarily to shield the richest man in the world’s investments in China and the profits of UnitedHealth Group, owners of the second-largest pharmacy benefit manager.” @ddayen.bsky.social prospect.org/politics/202...

break ‘em up.

that’s a problem.

i mean, you might think very old dudes understand that the sliver of living we have left is much less important than the world we cede to our children. but i guess my back aches. i'd like some mashed potatoes.

do we have no one in government who understands the stakes of government are much larger than their own careers and personal lives?

it seems like ceding Donbas without much of a fight. we think Musk's behavior and intercession here was reprehensible, dangerous. he broke important norms and put effective governance at risk. but they stop being norms when others cease to enforce them. why on Earth wouldn't Musk pull this again?

so Musk interceded as a chaos monkey (as @pkrugman.bsky.social put it), but the end result is he + Republicans have a deal they'd prefer to the original, that we disprefer? we spent the last 24 hrs mocking thr incompetence. we're the sensible ones. but if chaos outplays us that seems, well, wrong.

"your subscription will renew" is such a nice way of saying "we will take your money".