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?
[new draft post] Delivering rough consensus https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/03/26/delivering-rough-consensus/index.html
kakistocracy is downstream from plutocracy because under plutocracy those who survive in positions of authority become restricted to those who’ve proven susceptible to extortion and gratuity.
if you want a fair hearing on human rights, i guess you're better off suing in El Salvador. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/venezuela-hires-lawyers-detainees-el-salvador-rcna197955
The war-plans thing is bad, but I think it's far less of a scandal than lawlessly decimating USAID, CFPB, NSF/NIH, etc.
It would have been a terrible tragedy if US servicemembers had been harmed due to their leaders' miserable opsec. But what those mfs have done to USAID alone will kill many more.
Donald Trump has no mandate at all. The majority of people who voted in the 2024 election voted against him.
He won a plurality of the popular vote. He achieved not even the barest majority, which itself would not constitute any kind of a mandate.
Excellent, from #MattBruenig, on “Abundance”. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/03/24/the-abundance-agenda/ ht @ryanlcooper
Can we rescue the people we misimprisoned in El Salvador?
if you don’t feed me grapes when i ask for grapes, you are a bad ally. 🍇
i remember when every day had a main character rather than a main catastrophe.
i haven’t read “Abundance” yet, but here’s a bit i wrote when i knew it was coming. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/09/17/abundance-is-overcapacity/index.html
Text: The core of an abundance agenda, I posit, would be to reshape American capitalism so that overcapacity, rather than capacity nearly fully employed, becomes the norm. At desirable overcapacity, the marginal cost of a new unit would sit approximately at the minimum of firms' marginal cost schedule, well below the level where costs meaningfully rise. Firms can't do this on their own. Under capitalism, the means of production are in private hands, but production is always a public-private partnership. That firms use public roads and rely upon public regulation does not render our economy socialist. An abundance economy should rely upon private firms competing aggressively, pursuing pricing power through quality and innovation, rather than by engineering scarcity. But if we want industries to eschew capital discipline, if we want firms to deploy capacity at levels that would undo the pricing power scarce capacity yields, the public sector will have to subsidize capital deployment.
you only press “sleep” when it is time to wake up.