i think there's something a bit new here. the US killed people, more of them and sometimes just as wantonly, in Indochina and Korea, but the media environment was such that the US public only understood that slowly, only understood it fully long after the fact. 1/
one can believe that is the scale and brutality of US actions had been fully public in real time, they would have been politically impossible. 2/
during the Gulf and Middle East wars, the US was carefully attentive to perceptions of atrocity. again, of course there was atrocity anyway. there always is in war. 3/
but the scandals of the period, perhaps paradoxically, suggest a great deal of success. the biggest scandal of the Iraq War, the one that basically ended any possibility of "success" nation-building a democratic demonstration project, was Abu Ghraib. 4/
it was one facility, a relatively small number of perpetrators and victims, and it was a profound, earthshocking, incredible scandal that completely overthrew an epistemological deference, domestically, about how we were conducting the war and what our role was there. 5/
perhaps I am being unfair here, but my perception is that Abu-Ghraib-level torture and mistreatment of Palestinian detainees and worse is routine conduct in some Israeli facilities, and that this is something US publics basically know and now tolerate. 6/
(again, to distinguish, this is not waterboarding of high-level intelligence targets or the kind of ticking-time-bomb scenarios sold to the public to blur black and white views about torture. these are low-level, mass detainees.) 7/
there have been incidents not so far from Gaza that the US perpetrated — Mosul, Raqqa. but real time information about whatever degree of atrocity occurred was largely suppressed, and even ex post, one can distinguish their characters, no population was trapped. 8/
US publics have swallowed something quite different with Gaza and now Lebanon, a style of warfare promising to a certain degree to pay some attention to civilian life, but visibly offering a very high threshold for "proportionality", and intentionally eliminating civilian infrastructure. 9/
We've swallowed it with little more than a shrug. Which I understand given particulars about particular political realities, domestically and diplomatically. You could say it's only happening because the stars are particularly (mis)aligned. 10/
But it is happening. It's a kind of precedent. Hypocrisy was always at best the tribute vice pays to virtue, but I'd much rather we keep at least that tribute. A more "honest" embrace of atrocity we never completely eschewed does not strike me as a positive development going forward. /fin
A scary thing abt Gaza is, when considering future contingencies or policy changes and gaming out potential abuses, we'd clip a lower tails with remarks like, "It'd be too overt, too egregious, the public simply wouldn't tolerate it." After Gaza, that kind of implausibility claim seems implausible.
That's an interesting point: Subnational legislations as "feeder leagues" for parties that compete to join the national legislature.
@leedrutman.bsky.social's suggestion of using single-transferable-vote multiwinner districts lets the number of winners serve as an elegant filter of parties with little support in a district, although if districts are v heterogenous, you could get some small delegations from locally popular parties
after reading Lee Drutman (and thinking about eg Israel), i think it's probably best to design a system so it gravitates to something like six parties, plus or minus.
oh, he's here! @leedrutman.bsky.social
(i think fusion voting would be a great reform, perhaps more plausible than others in the current US system. and i'm jealous of all those extra parties you have where you live.)
a democracy is a China shop. a billionaire is a bull.
[new draft post] Rule-of-law is incompatible with a sharply polarized two-party system drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/10/21/r...
“We're handing so much money over to owners of prime residential or commercial land…of oil and gas fields, intellectual property and infrastructure…there isn't enough left to create…demand for dynamic sectors of the economy.” @chrisdillow.bsky.social stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_an...
regardless of who becomes the next President, nothing is a Federal crime unless this Supreme Court agrees that it is.
here’s to quicksand, my friend!
the main case people make for capitalism is that it gets incentives right to encourage people to act, to produce. but a capitalism under which the key to wealth is riding number-go-up by owning the right assets engenders very different incentives than to act, to produce.
am i misreading the joke, or was Trump not the first major figure to allude to genital size during this campaign? www.cnn.com/2024/08/21/p...
Obama mocks Trump about his ‘weird obsession with crowd sizes’ | CNN Politics
Link Preview: Obama mocks Trump about his ‘weird obsession with crowd sizes’ | CNN Politics: At the Democratic National Convention, former President Barack Obama mocked former President Donald Trump and said he had a “weird obsession with crowd sizes.”
slurring on about how all this is just a thimulaaaation. it might have been charming, in a sad way.
or the supreme court just legalizes his behavior ex post. no need to drag things out when you can clear the way for the next cycle.
It's arguably becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy.
maybe i am crediting him with too much, that he might game out a probability 0.5 alternative scenario in addition to his baseline scenario.
probably not. but even if Trump loses and the DOJ of course prosecutes, this may be the result. it follows pretty naturally from Citizen's United logic. unless of course we manage to reform the Court. we are a dead democracy barking unless and until we manage that.
I wonder if Musk’s game plan is to break black letter election law then run the case to the Supreme Court, so it can declare that much of that longstanding body of law is unconstitutional. 1/
Since, according to this abomination of a Court, spending is speech, paying voters to register is like encouraging voters to register. Encouraging voters to register is your protected free expression. 2/
It is also your protected free expression to restrict your encouragements to register only to people who sign your petition. So any prohibition of paying people, or even paying a restricted class of people, to register is unconstitutional. 3/
Of course it follows that since encouraging restricted classes of people to vote is also free expression, paying only people in restricted classes only if they turn out to vote would also be protected by the First Amendment. /fin
the regulatory community openly regretted prosecuting Enron because it drove Arthur Anderson out of business turning the Big Five accounting firms into the Big Four. you see, impunity for the rich and powerful was just their version of antitrust.