the ethnonational reaction to liberalism, a backlash to the sense that important, protective, culturally important identities are dissolved under atomistic liberalism, will eventually occasion recourse to a more aggressively identity-undermining liberalism as the only way out of cycles of vengeance.
i’m imposing a 100% tariffs on your posts.
the miracle i want from a medbed is just a good night’s sleep.
would you really prefer an immoral panic?
am i the only one who worried for a moment that ICE was coming for this guy? youtu.be/ZcJjMnHoIBI
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(i read the jasmine sun piece as very anthropological, explaining but from a distance.)
i feel like we are all, on every side, living through our villain origin stories.
“Neo-hustle-culture is a modern twist on Weber’s Protestant ethic: if the world is soon to be divided into the blessed and the damned, the techno-kings and the techno-peasants, anxious technologists should work as hard as they can to prove they deserve to end up on the right side of that divide.”
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( excerpt from the excellent quoted piece, by @jasmine.bsky.social )
sometimes people say “citizens” when what they mean is “subjects”.
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but if you are openly instrumental about what and how you choose to speak, that instrumentalism is what you will project, untrustworthiness. of course you want to be appealing and not divide your own coalition. 1/
the art, though, is to find a way to be that is appealing that people understand as reflecting stable commitments they can understand, share, or condemn. if you are protean, a schmoo (dating myself) your “messaging” is meaningless, unworthy even of evaluating. /fin
there should always be lots of discussion of the issues! a party can win an advantage from less swingy voters that way. 1/
but in a two party system where the other side can copy, issues contestation will leave us at 50% ± some bias. a bias can help, but the deciders will be people orthogonal to the parties’ main issues. 2/
and if your mode of issues politicking alienates these orthogonal deciders, it’s likely to more than undo the small bias you can realistically hope to pick up from issues politicking. 3/
this is why “popularism” is such a terrible idea. of course you should try to adopt and message popular ideas. Trump does a massive u-turn on abortion, would have lost if he hadn’t. 4/
but the trick is you have to reconcile your strategic chameleonings with projecting some center of principle, of a stable core, that people can affiliate with. it’s a thing you do carefully, at the margins, and do a lot of work to justify and reconcile with your core identity. 5/
making chameleonings openly the heart of public process is just self-sabotage in the name of consultant-branded science. /fin
people who style themselves political realists have such unrealistic views about how swing voters behave. it's not the issues, or at least not the issues our two parties elevate as objects of political contestation. it's a sense of affiliation, or of shared resentments, or just personal respect.
eventually all prompts just generate an image of a crab.
why are they referred to as “scare quotes”? who is supposed to be scared?
“only in America!”
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it feels like the new york times is looking for opinion writers who can, in the most indirect way possible, buttress a perspective that might be summarized, “selling out is not so bad.”
i feel like maybe it’s a little bit better to post one’s conspiracy theories ex ante than ex post so i’ll say i worry this would be a good occasion for a false-flag reichstag fire. hopefully this is as stupid as it sounds.
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do you think the internal dysfunctions of US state governments (blue or red) mean they can’t put together decent media operations? the idea isn’t for the media organizations to cheerlead every blemish of their funders’ status quo. 1/
Voice of America was funded and organized by a Federal government shot through with lobbying and graft. Do you think it was much better than CA or MD’s governments are? Still did profoundly important work, and was an important source of quality journalism. /fin
don’t be alarmed. just put a tariff on it.
🥴