@louis USAID was much more than an ad campaign! it’d be kicking ass and saving lives in Myanmar and Thailand right now, saving lives as a matter of course throughout Africa. An ad campaign would be a weak tea kind of soft power move for a someday liberated America, and USAID was justified as a source of soft power, but USAID was so much more.
we should form a group called the “real americans” and raise huge sums for ad campaigns throughout the free world apologizing for our country’s behavior under possession, thanking them for staying sane and free, praying we will soon rejoin them after a difficult exorcism.
https://bsky.app/profile/thomashansen.bsky.social/post/3lljncadhqs2y
Venezuela has genuinely been a pretty horrific place for people.
And now the US is like, hold my beer.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article302671624.html
ht #JeffStein
my alma mater was once as close to a utopian community of playful minds as has existed in this country.
i am so sad and ashamed by what it has become, so angry at the moral pygmies so raucously undoing it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/29/florida-new-college-fires-chinese-professor
ht @jennycohn
waiting for the first visa revocation for speaking ill of a Tesla.
Text: In “Personal Responsibility,” Arendt denigrates the “widespread conviction that it is impossible to withstand temptation of any kind, the none of us could be trusted or even expected to be trustworthy when the chips are down, that to be tempted and to be forced are almost the same.” But that is the precisely the conviction that Brad Karp, chair of the law firm Paul Weiss, appealed to in his defense of the firm’s deal with the Trump administration. “It is very easy for commentators to judge our actions from the sidelines,” he wrote in an email to “the PW community.” “But no one in the wider world can appreciate how stressful it is to confront an executive order like this until one is directed at you.”
the project now is to reconstruct liberalism, to build a new liberalism that does not neglect the prerequisites for continuing public support for a liberal society (which implies making material policy demands rather than merely affecting neutrality).
what name should we give our new liberalism? 🤔
i’m so tired of living in a horror movie.
i think much of the Republican coalition is tacitly sure they can do what they’ve persuaded themselves is called for, and the pointy-headed liberals who warn them of consequences will be wrong because God will reward and protect the USA they will have sanctified.
one way to understand what's going on is we've given up on the postwar Westphalian order because an adversary and an ally had territorial ambitions that order couldn't countenance, and we elected an egotist who could be flattered into his own, rather random, annexation lusts.
are any historically US-based software or tech companies relocating activities, servers, personnel outside of the US in order to address political risk?
"If there are two foreign policy agendas that tie US politics together, it is the mantra 'for Israel, against China'." @adamtooze https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-365-defend-columbia-but
// on the cosmopolitan research university—particularly Tooze's Columbia—as ground zero for unwinding retrofutures.
ht @ChrisMayLA6
if a US visa or green card is a “privilege” whose revocation constitutes foreign-policy discretion rather than punishment and so is not subject to protection on first-amendment grounds, couldn’t an identical case be made with respect to passports for US citizens?
@lienrag I guess I consider all of their deaths tragedies. Maybe it’s a distinction without a difference, one way or another people participating in war risk getting killed, whether you consider that a tragedy or an openly accepted hazard. (Of course how voluntary participation is can vary a lot.) I’d like to think if force capability were more balanced, mutual deterrence might yield peace. But then groups like the Houthis initiate military action despite relative weakness.
@lienrag War is bad. But it is also not one-sided. I’m not inclined to give the current US administration, which I consider lawless and fascist, much benefit of the doubt. I think it likely this leadership are reckless with civilian life to the point of war crime. But these melees are in response to hostilities from the Houthis that have also resulted in deadly consequences. 1/
@lienrag You may condemn that too, or you may consider it a justified response to Israel’s actions in Gaza. But these aren’t killings coming from one side out of nowhere. Whichever of the many linked parties you consider more or less culpable, they are all — the US, Houthis, Israelis, Hamas, etc — prosecuting murderous military actions. /fin
@lienrag I don’t revel in the deaths of Russian soldiers either, though of course it’s legitimate for the Ukrainians to kill them. It would have been legitimate for the Houthis to kill these servicemembers too—this is war—but I am very glad that did not happen, despite the severe intelligence breach. War is tragedy upon tragedy upon tragedy. Mass death may eventually help exhaust support for war, but that doesn’t make it virtuous or desirable. There are better ways to peace.
[new draft post] Delivering rough consensus https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/03/26/delivering-rough-consensus/index.html
@lienrag Orders to bomb targets carefully selected for military importance are not *prima facie* a war crime such that a servicemember could or should refuse such orders. Questions of proportionality might lead to accusations *ex post* of war crime, that risks or harms to civilians were beyond proportionate to legitimate military objectives, but that is beyond the duty or capacity of servicemembers to judge in real time. They had no basis to refuse these orders.
@lienrag ( as more information comes out, the case that military planners were not in fact adhering to obligations to protect civilian life and proportionality grows stronger. after the fact, we may well conclude there were war crimes. but again, that's not something servicemembers executing these orders could have judged and refused. https://bsky.app/profile/eliothiggins.bsky.social/post/3llcabku2xk25 )
@Eh__tweet i’m not interested in a pissing match. but i think the blizzard of bad things is preventing people from staying aware and focused on just how consequential and terrible some of these things have been. these are lives, not news cycles.