“A sensible politics needs to ask: how can we create constituencies of countervailing power to the regressive rich?” #ChrisDillow https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2025/01/against-if-i-were-king-politics.html
“prioritize dense, mixed-use, and car-light ecodistricts. There are a number of wonderful examples in planning throughout the world, but I will note that the most visionary are so far removed from our status quo in the US – we lack the ability to even comprehend how much higher quality of life in these neighborhoods could be.” #MikeEliason https://ronpdavis.substack.com/p/mike-eliason-on-corridor-zoning ht @drvolts
peaceful transfer of power vs peaceful surrender of power
you get angry at a group of people, then you get incurious about what they say and write, then you have a blind spot.
@louis good point! i am definitely a correctist.
why is “leftist” used as a term of derision more than “rightist”?
[tech notebook] Supporting all-item RSS https://tech.interfluidity.com/2025/01/06/supporting-all-item-rss/index.html
@mpanhans it's probably true that the public broadly is madder at the things Lina Khan has targeted and still mostly just perplexed by crypto.
i think Putin persuaded himself that territorial expansion is what marks a leader as durably "great", then persuaded his admirers and imitators of this. Trump doesn't actually want to invade anybody, to his credit he's squeamish about that kind of thing, but he figures he might work some kind of deal.
Why did Lina Khan succeed so much more than Gary Gensler?
he's resigned to resigning.
@marick i generally live in what seemed a very futuristic past.
regulation has it costs, but if you go by journalism, which disproportionately presents extreme cases, you'll overstate them. regulation has profound benefits too. that there's lots of room for improvement doesn't render the regulatory state a catastrophe. see #KevinDrum https://jabberwocking.com/yeah-america-can-still-build-stuff/
perhaps i'm mistaken, but i don't think the outpouring of support for luigi reflects affluenza or post-materialist politics.
although, yes, even people with awful health insurance do have a wide variety of sushi options these days.
this by @mattyglesias is very good. https://www.slowboring.com/p/four-years-later
Text: If I were to say, “It’s irresponsible to back Trump regardless of your views on taxes and energy because he’s an authoritarian menace,” these people would say I’m being a hysterical lib. But if I were to say, “It’s fine to vote for Trump while still strongly disagreeing with what he did around 1/6, I’d just like to hear you say that in public,” the response would be that everyone knows it’s best to avoid Trump’s bad side. If you’re not willing to voice criticism of the president, even while generally supporting him, because you’re afraid of retaliation, that seems at least a little bit like Trump is an authoritarian menace. I have concerns! And what I would love more than anything is for Trump supporters in the business world or at conservative nonprofits to set my mind at ease, not by arguing with me about whether Trump is an authoritarian menace, but by showing me that they don’t fear him and can offer pointed, vocal criticism of his conduct and strong condemnation of these potential pardons.
small frivolous expenses — i don’t wanna touch burritos let’s go back to avocado toast — don’t indicate the purchaser is either wealthy or foolish. they can be chosen because, despite their frivolity, they are immaterial relative to big sources of financial stress and deliver pleasure worth the small cost. 1/
humans don’t reveal lexical preferences for what finger-waggers deem essential first to frivolities only if income remains. this includes the preferences of the finger waggers whose excess income only lets them pretend their preferences are unhumanly hierarchical. /fin
if, during a war, you are going to decide which side is a villain by which side’s spokespeople speak tendentiously and in bad faith, you will find nearly always that all sides are the villain.
try not to slide into defending other people's caricatures of your views.
@arthegall well, at least the debate hasn’t happened yet!