There’s the meme in Democratic politics that’s like “why don’t voters understand the economy is good when the stats say it is and when polled they say they personally are doing well?” 1/
I think it’s geopolitics and environmental. When the apocalypse feels close at hand, you just don’t describe it as a good economy, regardless of this quarter’s GDP. 2/
Pax Americana is under siege. Israel has undermined the moral basis, and Republicans have undermined the political basis, for our role in Ukraine, dramatically increasing the likelihood of global chaos, and frankly diminishing our collective will to resist it. 3/
Global temperatures have been off the charts — average, sea surface temperatures — extreme events of one sort or another are tangible threats to nearly everyone, we are in uncharted waters testing the resilience of ecosystems we depend upon utterly. 4/
In the face of all this, “why aren’t consumers optimistic now that inflation is subsiding without a recession” just misses the point, every point. /fin
“I’m mildly obsessed with the phrase “the exception that proves the rule,” which does not mean that the existence of an exception proves that a rule is true, but that examining the best exception to a proposed rule helps you define the limits of that rule.” #MattYglesias https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-the-parties-cant-decide
It looks like you’ve been inactive for a while.
a human passes when its body fails.
still lazy after all these years.
perhaps at first i misunderstood this. https://mastodon.social/@HourlyQuotes/111755251818045673
"Just as nobody is an atheist in a foxhole, no large firm is in the private sector during a financial crisis." @matthewstoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-time-to-nationalize-and-then
Denial is the fundamental human life force.
@jonshell (thank you. that is a very kind thing to say.)
they are politicizing politics again.
"Rufo cares about the actual values that sustain a liberal vision of freedom and justice in same way that Israeli war-cabinet minister who calls for 'voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian reasons' actually cares about humanitarianism." #RickPerlstein https://prospect.org/politics/2024-01-10-first-they-came-for-harvard/
Clever and wise are very different things.
Are there ActivityPub servers that permit posting of fulltext articles in HTML format?
We have heard too much from me.
Is "technical cantilevers" a better metaphor than "technical debt"? See #LuisPedroCoelho https://luispedro.substack.com/p/technical-cantilevers
Inspired by @paninid, I was looking through some old documents. I found I wrote a letter to the old The New Republic in 2003 on Israel/Palestine.
It would satisfy no one today. Contemporary anti-Zionists might characterize it as patronizing, abrogating Palestinians' individual and national rights to immediate equality, foreseeing and accepting a degree of ethnic cleansing.
Contemporary Zionists would oppose it because it proposes eventual abandonment of the project of a Jewish state.
Photograph of the text of a letter to the editor. It is too long to quote here, but I've posted plaintext at https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2003/TNR-Letter-To-The-Editor.txt
Institutional details really matter in systems that describe themselves as democratic. Different voting systems and organizational structures lead to radically different kinds of outcomes, despite allegedly expressing the consent and will of the very same demos.
See "Direct Elections for Labor Leaders Make for More Militant Unions" #ChrisBohner https://labornotes.org/2024/01/direct-elections-labor-leaders-make-more-militant-unions via @40Years
instead of drill, baby, drill,
build, baby, build.
when circumstances demand it, heroism is to be encouraged and applauded.
but overall we wish to diminish, rather than increase, the frequency of heroism, by minimizing the occurrence of circumstances that would demand it.