“Constitutionally, Congress is a superior branch of government to the presidency, and it is explicitly designed to check the president.” @davidfrenchjag.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/06/01/o... // yes.
Opinion | Why Trump Is Mad at the ‘Sleazebag’ Leonard Leo
Link Preview: Opinion | Why Trump Is Mad at the ‘Sleazebag’ Leonard Leo
never kind enough.
they’re talking about you, @poetryforsupper.bsky.social
Text: With respect to capital, our starting point is the tension between the conception of it as a mass of concrete means of production, on the one hand, and of a quantity of money, on the other. While economic theory treats capital as a quasi-physical substance that grows through the accumulation of savings, in reality, we argue, long run changes in measured capital are almost entirely due to changes in the value of existing assets. These in turn are explained by liquidity and financial conditions, on the one hand, and shifts in the relative social power of asset owners as against workers and the broader society, on the other.
I guess I’d think it almost great, if it were a norm applied consistently. Let’s credit Chuck Schumer’s frump! I have to say “almost” only because with the credit comes a sense of advertisement, of sponsorship, and i increasingly worry about the corrosive effect of that across many domains.
i don’t mean to be insulting anyone. i find it jarring. to me it is an interview with a political figure i admire very much. i’m not opening a magazine. i am clicking a link to a major news publication. perhaps it is old-fashioned of me, second-wave somehow, to worry it is trivializing.
(Vogue is a fashion magazine, though, a bit more understandable there. And Mayor Pete is openly gay, I wonder how often one would find such credits attached to a straight male politician. And why would a publication be providing an interviewee’s clothes?!? That’s perhaps even more bizarre to me.)
this is a good interview of a remarkable leader. i find it jarring that some of the photographs are captioned by credits of what she is wearing. would that ever be done with a male politician? it’s strange to me.
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Boo! It is possible to live in a place called Boo?!
📌
you know how they say every accusation is a confession?
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cynicism and wisdom are not synonyms.
i think it's fair both to say that nastiness is ethically discreditable to the individuals who embrace it even though the circumstances under which they embrace it are social, structural, and aggravated by the encouragement of much more discreditable power-seeking auteurs.
Excellent.
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I agree that depopulation problems can be worse! But that doesn't mean challenges to social cohesion are bullshit. Immigration and depopulation bring different problems, including effects on social cohesion. Whichever a polity chooses, they'll have to address those problems.
all i care about Katie is she does not revert to her maiden name. it's bad enough what her husband has done to the once sleek and breezy name Steve Miller.
In Nordic(-ish) countries, immigration is plainly a challenge (to social cohesion, those norms of reciprocity) but morally desirable (to some). In the US, immigration does not so much challenge cohesion (ha!), has economic virtues, but our brutal economy *requires* racist scapegoating for stability
There are growing political formations with those views! That is not a permanent fact of these societies. There has been a recent, profound, upswing of people embracing "sewer-racist" tropes and ideologies. That's the unfortunate set of facts my thread is trying to make sense of.
"fundamentally what they believe is that immigrants poison their blood" is the kind of statement that i'm very skeptical of as a generalization—it is itself a pretty racist claim, at least an ethnonational essentialism—and provides little insight about how to move forward if we take it at face value
I don't think "racism" is the same phenomenon everywhere. There are similarities, and the humans are predisposed to divide the world into "us" and "other", but the justification and basis for that varies tremendously. 1/
I won't try to dispute claims like "nasty", "comfortable", or "spiritually impoverished", just say that I don't find such claims all the useful in helping us devise ways of responding to problems. Trying to make people in the Nordics less comfortable, for example, would do the opposite of help. 2/
What I would say is that the basis for the mass appeal of racism in the Nordics is quite different from its basis in the United States. 3/
In the United States, I think it's because we often revert to an antebellum social contract in which absolute immiseration of sizable populations is as ordinary, necessary, result of our Way Of Life, and… 4/
social stability is purchased by granting half the immiserated relative status over and access to the free labor of the other half. 5/
As we've abandoned the New Deal, allowed debilitating gulfs in relative status to widen, replenished the ranks of the precarious and immiserated, the US political system, which seeks to stabilize the status quo, is reaching backward to its toolkit for stabilizing this sort of order. 6/
I don't think this is anything like the basis for widespread popular racism in the Nordics, even though there is widespread popular racism in the Nordics, and a kind of convergent evolution makes the worst of the racists look pretty similar and ally with one another. 7/
In the Nordics, the chink in the armor of civilation through which racists ply their creed is a profoundly strong set of norms in favor of reciprocity and social cohesion, which is the basis for these societies' remarkable success. 8/
The Nordics may have generous universal benefits, but they are not societies full of people who live on the dole, even though their system would let them live on the dole! *Homo economicus* they ain't. Labor force participation is higher there than in the mean, mean, mean USA. 9/
Political entrepreneurs who successfully deploy racism in the Nordics (it is always political entrepreneurs, not some organic "nastiness" of the general public) portray non-ethnonationals as incapable of acquiring these norms of reciprocity and participating in the cohesive social unity. 10/
For the US, becoming more Nordic would in fact address many of the root causes of American racism. 11/
For the Nordics, they genuinely have to address issues of balancing a real social imperative to assimilate and the moral dilemmas, from the perspective of US-advanced liberal values, that might result from insisting upon assimilation. 12/
(the US — due in many respects to its economic flaws! — can tolerate strong multiculturalism more than societies that function well due to an extraordinary sense of belonging and reciprocity. we are in pieces already, our welfare state presumes everyone a shirker, so sure, be another fragment!) 13/
So yes, there is racism in the US and there is racism in the Nordics, and they sometimes look pretty similar, but it is a logical and policy error to presume that means, in a US context, a genuinely more economically sane society could not help remedy our susceptibility to racism. /fin