virtue shames our leaders and is therefore a crime against the state.
i agree the gilded age analogies are overwrought. the era we are living through is much worse than the gilded age.
We know better than this, but we’re doing it anyway.
@admitsWrongIfProven “intellectual capital” is one of those words. interpret it as you see fit!
what would an intellectual capital strike look like?
one great thing about the full Reagan speech is that he emphasized the anticompetitive / tariff-protected-industries-make-low-quality-high-price-goods aspect of tariffs.
x.com has democratized the car wreck you can’t look away from.
Since China increasingly owns the global automobile industry, maybe we can revise our built environment so we are not isolated and helpless without constant access to that product.
I mean we should have anyway, but maybe declining domestic lobbying clout and geopolitical exigency will help.
the Wayback Machine as a very personal, very fragmentary, time machine. https://web.archive.org/web/19970419013806/http://boo.media.mit.edu/
why is it a “legitimate interest” to give me RSI?
if i make fake video of fake video does that make it real?
it would be kind of funny if it was literally George Soros George-Soros-ing Argentina, just taking in all that Bessent cash with short sales.
“When someone threatens to burn down your house unless you do as you're told, and then they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep doing what they told you.” @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics
conjecture:
llm : friendship :: porn : love
you don’t have to hate anyone. not even the worst of them.
you do have to hold them accountable, which means punishing them, sometimes severely.
in sadness, not out of hatred or in anger. you can still wish the best for them, under the circumstances.
love the humans, each and every.
if it is a flag for some of the people, i’m against it.
if it is a flag for all of the people, i am for it.
“We have been committed to nothing so much as not producing anything.” @ddayen https://prospect.org/world/2025-10-14-china-trump-tariffs-rare-earth-minerals/
@admitsWrongIfProven rich and poor come after birth, after creation. the infant of rich or poor is equally helpless and in need of care. if you want to challenge the claim, genetic difference is the usual approach, because obviously it exists at “creation”, but then the question becomes in what sense do we mean “equal”. i say we mean it in an ethical sense, regardless of any characteristics genetics might affect.
made a sign for tomorrow, but i worry i may be pushing at the bounds of free speech with this kind of radicalism.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," script from the Declaration of Independence, overlaid on an American flag.
@scott i think it’s worth a shot (and generally think we should think about revitalizing the idea purposeful charters and activity ultra vires), but i don’t think it will work. 1/
@scott it’s worth recalling that this Supreme Court has been extraordinarily flexible and creative in weaponizing the Constitution to achieve its conservative members political ends. 2/
@scott i think the piece overstates how difficult it would be for the Supreme Court to simply say, “it’s fine and true that corps only exist as creatures of state law, and states can give or withhold any powers they wish to corporations. so states can of course deny corps the power to campaign-spend when granting charters.” 3/
@scott “however, if a corp violates that condition of the charter, and the state imposes *any penalty at all* for that violation, it is substantively punishing the speech [as this Court has absurdly defined it] of the people who constitute the corporation.” 4/
@scott so the charter limitation would be perfectly legal, but any enforcement would not be. just like states could, in the Roe v Wade era have laws on the books against abortion, but could not enforce them. 5/
@scott in general, i think imagining legal cleverness can circumvent this Court reaching an end its conservative majority wishes to reach is worth trying but unlikely to succeed. legal reasoning permits infinite flexibility, even (perhaps especially as KBJ has pointed out) the kind that styles itself originalist. 6/
@scott and even where there is almost no colorable legal reading that would justify a practice, this Court has repeatedly (the Texas abortion bounty law, Trump v United States) just barreled ahead to do what it wants with naked abandon of reasonable interpretations of precedent and text. 7/
@scott i think doing what they want here would, in relative terms, not be a huge stretch. 8/
@scott i also worry about the political economy between states, a point briefly discussed. a state that pioneered this would be putting their own corps at a disadvantage, and perhaps depriving their own citizens of businesses they might value. 9/
@scott you’d really need a very big state to make the jump, and do it extraterritorially (as the piece suggests, applying the same limitation to out-of-state corps doing business there), so that the effect, assuming enforceability, is likely to be corps refrain from spending, not avoid the state. so ideally, both CA and NY harmonize adoption of these proposals at all once. if you’re Vermont, you can’t go first. Delaware never will go. 10/
@scott i do think it’s worth trying! every time this Court acts egregiously it’s another arrow in our quiver when we make the case to reform this Court out of existence in anything like its present form. and given the balance of merits, you never know, the Court may rule at a moment where it’s nervous about its position and feels like it has to pretend to play fair. 11/
@scott so absolutely let’s try it! as you say, at least we can force upon them the embarrassment of their open hackery. /fin