from Biden's we hate what we see in Gaza but won't actually do anything about it for reasons to Trump's we want to do that too. ht @bananapantz.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/w...
Iran Condemns Attacks on Its Universities, Warns of Retaliation
Link Preview: Iran Condemns Attacks on Its Universities, Warns of Retaliation
so much. i wish it were merely sisyphean. at least he knew which direction uphill was.
someday i'd like to meet you, then we can deserve to get bombed in an entirely different way. in the meantime i think i speak for zillions of us in seconding @bananapantz.bsky.social's wishes for your safety and all around well-being.
very cool indeed! god bless 'em. the world we've shoved them into has so much work to live up to them.
omg sorry for the deleted response. i hadn't seen the quoted tweet and misinterpreted.
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
I think there's a flaw here, in imagining what we need are better people. Most people will individually be rationally ignorant. People as masses will be susceptible to all kinds of malign influence. Democracy is not a matter of abstractions but of concrete institutions. 1/
US democracy worked reasonably well when we had "100 political parties", e.g. when state parties predominated and governance was a matter of actual negotiation among non-ignorant specialist representatives. 2/
The problem now is not that people are worse. It's that the parties have nationalized, and with only two political parties competition becomes zero-sum, negotiation fruitless, and people qua masses, rather than sensibly arranged organizations, govern. 3/
Things are not so impossible. Universal enfranchisement is great! (I'm for compulsory voting, rather than limiting the franchise.) 4/
We just need to make the task of voting tractible by supplying a menu of membership institutions to which people can have meaningful connections, in which they can accurately recognize their own interests and expect the party to behave expertly and predictably in service of them. 5/
Neither you nor I nor anyone are informed enough under the present system to know what we are voting for when we vote for Democrats, beyond not the current Republicans. (Which, admittedly, should be enough! But it's not meaningful democratic representation.) /fin
I think that's probably a stronger example than any traditional European city. But it is N=1. (Maybe there are some new towns in Europe that might be relevant, e.g. Milton Keynes?)
That is amazing. I am jealous.
This branch of the thread is not about free fare regimes, but tap-to-pay with ordinary payment cards vs requirement of a special transit card or ticket.
I did not say urban Paris never had race or class segregation. I said their transit systems had not become perceived as solely the province of an underclass by race or class or anyone else. Paris' trains and buses remained in middle class use (like NYC's in the US) despite those phenomena. 1/
I think I am not so wrong, not least in trying to extend some charity to my interlocutors. /fin
Constanța, Romania now has it for its buses, which dramatically increased my usage of the buses. I was always running out of the bus tickets, forgetting to stop at the kiosks, etc. Montevideo where I am now still uses a dedicated bus card, which I have to remember to refill, alas.
When I lived in the US I owned a car. Now I do not, and do not. 1/
Paris and urban Holland never had "full motordom" in the sense of midsized US cities. Their transit systems had never devolved into class segregation, perceived as only a resource for the underclass. They've made great choices since. But they also did start from a much better place. /fin
And as long as you've socialized most of the costs of roads and parking and fossil fuel extraction and protection of the fossil fuel supply and… 1/
The US subsidizes the hell out of what we ought to be able to agree is way of organizing ourselves not worth its cost in the ways that it's good, harmful to the environment, also actively harmful to us in some respects (e.g. social isolation). 2/
Until we do come to agree to at least start reducing our subsidy to all of that, which includes massive quantities of space devoted public and private to parking lots, yeah, it's gonna be hard to get people to switch out of the lives they are literally paid to live. /fin
There is no country in the world in which decent transit has emerged out of a status quo as automobile-centric as most of the United States. The evidence you think you have is not strong evidence. (Nor is mine, which is why I recommend not pretending one can pull rank.)
I'm all for it! But it can't help us by definition with increasing transit usage under the current built environment, which also would be desirable, and would make repurposing existing parking to higher value uses more likely.
i think it elides tremendous differences in circumstance from "typical" colonialisms, but the basic claim is that Israel is founded by invading Europeans who displace and subjugate an indigenous population. again, i think this account misses more than it captures, but that's the account.
the wars—Ukraine and Iran—are such mirror images. wars of aggression, planned impetuously, prosecuted by fascist militarist leaders who thought they could attain military glory on the cheap, against governments galvanized by attack to become more resilient than most would have predicted ex ante. 1/
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
in so many ways, the Iran War is great for Putin. yeah, there's the oil revenue pouring into empty coffers. but also, what vestiges of a righteousness against which its aggression could be held in contrast the US can now lay no claim whatsoever to. /fin
israel/palestine is supposed to serve as an object lesson against colonialism, but to me it's the opposite, a case for the necessity of a strong state qua empire whose legitimating ideology is not attached to any particular ethnos or religion, but that insistently and actively subsumes many.
keynesian ugly contest.