he was doing politics the right way.

he says so. if he really believed it, i don’t think we’d be decimating medical research in the US. maybe he thinks he’s too close for it to save him. Xi might believe it — he got caught on hot mic discussing organ transplants and shit with Putin. time.com/7314433/xi-p...

if you want a manhattan project pursuing life extension, persuade your rulers — so that they really believe it — that good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell.

if your theory of politics requires as “discipline” that people can not publicly say what they actually believe, what kind of theory of politics is that? what is its relationship to democracy in any meaningful or substantive sense?

ick.

“the ultimate goal of democratizing Venezuela, and the resulting investment benefits, are front and center in investors’ minds.” “democratizing” you don’t have to be a fan of Maduro to think this is a funny word for what a Trump intercession might accomplish. www.semafor.com/article/11/0...

details of apportionment and (especially) districting can explain changes to the House, but not the Senate.

i post, and look for evidence of my existence in the ratio.

“Democracy persists as a legacy interface— maintained for stability, while being systematically hollowed out and replaced.”

only $1GZ?

Given what is happening to CBS News, I'l re-up this… drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/03/09/v...

there should be a whole genre of sloppish AI videos for Talking Heads’ “Television man” 🎵And everything is real / Do I like the WAYYY I feel. 🎵

if Harris had won, would AI build out be as central to our economy as it now is?

i love your mom.

With most of our Big Politics conversations among nonfascists, it’s not so much which faction is right or wrong, it’s that whoever is right or wrong the question we are addressing is irrelevant, simply does not rise to the scale of the problems they purport to address.

Stein’s Law is the law now in America.

This is excellent, by @leedrutman.bsky.social. (i think the piece suggests fusion voting would not do enough more than that it’s a particularly hopeful way forward. but the analysis of where we are, and how futile much of our factionalizing is, has never been presented more clearly.)

is there anything in the modern world like the yellow pages, where i might ignore the ads and just get an exhaustive list of all the businesses of a certain type in a geographic area?

one of my most illiberal views is that every form of ad personalization and targeting (beyond the targeting implicit in advertisers’ choice of context) should be straight up banned.

he’s just a remarkable figure. how well he has aged relative to Trump, Biden is a small piece of anecdata that suggests karma is real. (he’s older than both of them.) www.nytimes.com/2025/11/03/o...