at least in parliamentary democracies the political elites who decide often represent supermajority coalitions. in FTPT systems with strongly sorted parties, the coalitions become electorally cynical median voter chasers, largely detaching elections from governance. 1/
that said, we could keep a popularly elected executive and escape the curse of the orthogonal marginal voter if we adopted a spoiler-resistant electoral system like approval voting for posts where individual electeds must serve the whole community, rather than representing part of a minipublic. /fin
the arsonists run on being tough on fire. that is their whole trick. to those who take them at their word, every fire they set strengthens the case for their necessity.
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this is an artifact of how we do democracy, not inherent to democracy. in a system with two-strongly sorted parties, the people most indifferent to the dimensions of party contestation become the incoherent deciders. that isn’t true of other ways democracy can be and has been organized.
it’s kind of a commonplace in American discourse that no faction actually identifies as fascist, so (the next claim always is), the label amounts to a slur. 1/
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but this faction fully and openly embraces fascist aesthetics and directly resuscitates slogans of historical fascists. though they may try to split hairs, i think that in substance they do rather proudly identify as fascists. /fin
i wonder about the incentives we’re creating here.
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leaving on a jet plane.
for a minute there, it seemed he was a lame duck rather than a horseman of the apocalypse.
morons learn lessons.
come spring the ice melts.
the fundamental mistake the contemporary right makes is to confuse the product of successful institutions with personal characteristics of the people that perform them. since they think good outcomes are about good people, they happily dismantle the institutions under which people become good.
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gm!
(you said participation trophy, and pointed me to the quoted tweet, so, hat tip 🎩!)
i will accept your straight-A report card if you give it to me. ht @kagrox.bsky.social
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it’s worth pointing out that which abstract, polled issues the public cares about and what *stories* the public cares about may be entirely different things, and the stories may matter much more. 1/
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popularists of course will say that’s cope people use as an excuse to claim the public shares their priors. 2/
but popularists themselves don’t have a great track record or much evidence at all that their intuitions, *their* priors about how things work, are correct or useful. /fin
just waiting for the argument, “if they don’t burn down portland it shows how racist the left is against white people.”
Gotta get down to it ICE agents are gunning us down.
the masculine energy on X is all men playing dress-up of their favorite dolls via grok.
it’d be nice to have a few days when something impossibly horrible doesn’t happen.
a change of administration would not be sufficient. the united states needs a refounding, something on par with the post-Civil-War amendments (hopefully in the instance more effective than those amendments) signaling that a durable change in the nature of the polity has occurred.
does anybody know the directions back to my timeline?
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