there’s a lot of ruin in a nation, but eventually it’s going to matter just how much.
“if we are moving away from strictly economic determinants of voter attitudes, it might worth asking about whether the extreme wealth of leading Democrats matters.” @DeanBaker13 https://cepr.net/publications/nyt-columnist-thomas-edsall-trashes-deliverism-should-the-people-of-texarkana-feel-delivered/
i know it seems like they are cynically overstating how dangerous the cities are, but maybe it’s a sincere and understandable fear response given how deeply most city dwellers detest them.
we're phasing out civil aviation because contrails have failed to earn the public's trust.
“America sings on Navy Pier and the many other places where citizens do better than politicians at facing the challenge of creating durable multicultural democracy.” @DanLittle https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2025/08/real-multicultural-democracies.html
if you want to know an administration that was full of RINOs, according to the second Trump administration, it was the first Trump administration.
if depression is learned helplessness, we are as a polity collectively depressed, and making rash, dysfunctional choices as a consequence.
it’s disconcerting when you realize we are living in a country whose the state follows laws only as a matter of habit, whose leaders override those laws and act on whim whenever they choose to, until, over time, there is not much left of the old habits of law.
i don’t get why the humans tolerate the indignity of shitting, nearly every day.
if ai comes and takes our jobs we could just hire people to give a fuck about one another.
If you subscribe by mail to my microblogging, you’ll likely have received a duplicate mail by accident. I’m very sorry about that!
I migrated my primary server this weekend, which was running a no-longer-supported version of linux. I revived it this afternoon to check something out, but had failed to disable the mail subscription service, which had been migrating and had sent the mail. When the zombie server briefly revived, it then sent it too.
Anyway, sorry! Shouldn’t happen again!
i really dislike the degree to which the things i do contribute to organizations i disapprove of. i’m doing my best to migrate away from big tech platforms, but migrating from github would be the most disruptive to me. elimination of the public sphere has meant, one way or another, reliance on private entities, and for networky applications, they’ll be of a scale that renders them untrustworthy.
and now what’s left of the public sphere is under the thumb of fascists. https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115011100793680866
whining ineffectually about norm violations does not constitute enforcement of norms.
@KarlHeinzHasliP Oh, I have no respect for the right of a “people” to self determination, except insofar as a people is understood to be constituted as the individuals who happen to reside between always arbitrary and “poorly drawn” borders. Again, the state is prior to the nation. 1/
@KarlHeinzHasliP The role of states is to render humans’ propensity to a sense of nation consistent with peaceful coexistence, because absent territorially distinct states, or if nation is defined in ways that diverge from territory, it is not. 2/
@KarlHeinzHasliP I would love a world in which much of the world was designated nature preserve in which use of fossil fuels were banned, but something has to do the designating and banning, and that something is likely to be a state or an organization of states if its designating or banning is going to be effective. /fin
@KarlHeinzHasliP i guess i disagree with you on this one. i think Westphalian nation states are all we’ve got, but they should be understood as territorial states before nations. The state is prior to the nation, its duty is to continually construct and reconstruct a sense of nation that encompasses the full public of the territory it governs, despite the diversity and dynamism of that public. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/10/15/a-westphalian-order-is-project-enough/index.html
one lesson we might learn is that when a romantic ethonational project inevitably turns rancid, persecutes and murders members of other groups, the right response is not to exalt and reward whatever romantic ethnonational project might take hold among the victims.
romantic ethnonationalism is the problem, not the identity or virtue or lack of virtue of the groups that ethnonational movements construct in both positive and negative space.
i can’t think like this. i don’t think it’s right, objectively. the world is in tumult. 70 to 100 years from now it’s quite likely to be a nuclear wasteland if we don’t remedy things on a much shorter timeframe. fascists are breaking everything, including any basis for their own popularity or even prosperity. this is collapse, not a regrettable but stable new normal. no one knows what’s next. it will be much better or much, much worse i suspect. https://mastodon.social/@heidilifeldman/115008296315035578
it was the dawning of the age of the sociopath.
Now Comes the Hard Part, by #CharlesHughSmith https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2025/08/now-comes-hard-part.html
@jawnsy we have a disagreement! https://bsky.app/profile/davitivan.bsky.social/post/3lvyqdvhrur2q