absolutely. we are left with nothing more objective than mind, judgment, persuasion. that is our actual condition. when we pull rank about what's objective, we are usually wrong, often destructively so.

yes. lots of conditions were objectively worse. and yet, we were a much stronger society. because society is a word. we are not merely a collection of individual circumstances. we are better off poorer + well-knit as a society than fabulously rich and fraying. of course, best would be knit + rich!

from a baseline when income and wealth was much more compressed. from a US 1960s-1970s baseline. from a contemporary Nordic baseline, although they let income and wealth stretch much too far at the top. there are societies in which "we are all in it together", and absolute wealth matters much less.

is it the bottom 50%? come on. aggregate economic numbers tell you about the animal spirits of the affluent.

yes. not impossible, or at least not impossible for everyone. excuse the hyperbole. impossible for a lot of people, who do not understand why the goods that came free with what seemed like the ordinary, middle class lives of their upbringings, are things they fail to reliably secure.

collapse, civil war, the cause of these things won't be ennui. but even as the machetes bite, they will tell themselves it was.

data has become the opiate of the professionals, inkblots only they can properly interpret, from which they weave accounts of the world in which everything is fine for everybody if only they wouldn’t change anything serious, and anything who says otherwise is objectively, mockably wrong.

insufficient stimulus, “financial reform” that saved and cemented the role of extractive incumbents rather than restructuring anything, a health reform that i have to admit is better than what preceded it, but from my own experience of it i admit that only through the angriest, most gritted teeth.

case in point. things that at very close range seem extraordinary feats—and they were, i don’t mean to diminish the work!—but in the sweep of history fade to ordinary. perhaps Pelosi was just dealt a terrible hand. but for all her “greatness”, she accomplished nothing other than a holding action.

it’s such a straitened sense of greatest. yes, she whipped like no one else, got things done despite minuscule margins, over impossible objections. but what, pray, did she actually get done? what extraordinary feat of legislative jujitsu will history bother to remember?

i read people on here describing a crisis of affluence and i tell you i don’t know what country we’re sharing. i live in a country where the crisis is cost of living, where the burden of securing “ordinary” goods like safety, shelter, decent peers for ones kids, health care has become impossible.

people who quietly know the community they’ve joined up with is not right. but who are making good money, and feeling so fulfilled by great projects membership in that community helps get funded.

i suppose one shouldn’t be surprised to find that capital is on the side of an autocracy of capital.

in general on bluesky i don’t understand how to control or even know who is in the “canoe”, who going to be notified if i write a reply.

“data” tells you much less than you think. the odds that you interpret it in the way that accurately addresses the question rather than in the way that provides an answer you have some interest in is not so great. “data” says nothing without interpretation, and we are all unreliable interpreters.

remember JD Vance?

it's right there, just after the part about Presidential immunity, and before the part about major questions.

i think events over the last week or so really put a nail in the coffin of the thesis of this one.

he’s got much more sympathy, and so is much more dangerous. plus, we didn’t carry around our own personal stasi devices back then.