i think one way of putting it is most of the world is increasingly overlooking what is, um, disagreeable about the Chinese social and political model, because it is delivering on a technological future, and, for now, outsiders can enjoy Chinese tech without too much of the ugly political control. 1/

that may not be sustainable, and there are iconic exceptions like when China goes publicly medieval on foreign firms or nations over some symbolic claim about Taiwan. 2/

but for the most part, for now, non-Chinese can experience China as a Westphalian power whose internal political economy is its own business, technologically delivering on a hopeful future. 3/

elites in countries that mean to compete on eg automobiles, batteries, etc have less rosy view of China, but most people and most countries are and will always be on the sidelines of those questions. /fin

so traveled in and out of brooklyn, briefly crossing lower manhattan, following Apple Maps, and was twice congestion-priced-by-mail. might be good policy, but i gotta say i don’t love the surprise! i don’t know why my FL sunpass didn’t pay, so i’m stuck with a 50% premium for toll-by-mail.

(i think there’s supposed to be some kind of bundle pricing with the tunnels? but doing sunpass for the tunnels but toll-by-mail for the congestion pricing breaks the bundle? it feels very screw-the-outsider. i guess as a person who lives in Florida, what’s good for the goose, i shouldn’t complain.)

"Extension of individual rights amounts to an extension not an attenuation of coercion: it calls for a reinforcement of the police function to contain the consequences of inequality…

"Communitarian empowerment of 'ethnic' and gender pluralities presupposes and fixes a given distribution of identities' in a radically dynamic society…

"'Empowerment' legitimises the potential tyranny of the local or particular community in its relations with its members and at the boundary with competing interests. It is the abused who become the abusers…

"no one and no community is exempt from the paradoxes of 'empowerment'." ~Gillian Rose via @poetryforsupper.bsky.social