a fascinating, surprising history of Peronism, coups, and the complexities of actual organization and activism in early 1970s Argentina that didn’t fall neatly along ideological or social-class lines. https://gabrielu941371.substack.com/p/the-subversives-montonero-local-organizing
@Phil people can make their own choices, but choices have externalities. if we can persuade ourselves that the good life looks like a penthouse in a new dense neighborhood rather than a mansion sprawled in tony suburbs, if we typically aspire to the former, less-resource-intensive life, we’re collectively richer. 1/
@Phil this isn’t an individual admonishment. i know that you prefer distance. that’s fine! people’s preferences vary, vive la difference. but when we’re promoting, we should prefer the choices that compose to good outcomes if nearly everyone were to make them. /fin
promote aspirational versions of efficient lifestyles.
“That is the logic of virtuous violence. Violence comes to feel not merely expedient but righteous because it is cast as protecting one’s own side, restoring order, and ending chaos. In doing so, however, it denies the humanity of those being attacked.” https://thebulletin.org/2026/05/why-congress-and-senior-officials-must-deny-trump-a-nuclear-escape-in-iran/
the vibe part of vibecession is just the knowledge that we aren’t in it together any more. the seventies were tough, sure, but we understood we were collectively undergoing a trauma, together. now we fail individually while the glittering party goes on.
if you are a parent in the US, do you have a plan for how your kid goes to college without taking on a lot of debt, do you believe he or she has a high probability of an economically secure future if the child does go to college, are you confident housing and health care will be affordable?
@keunwoo i sure hope liberal currents isn’t publishing slop.
i love how people say the stock market is booming and inequality is falling, choosing measures inconsistently only to consistently make the point the economy is “objectively” great.
a sunrise over the black sea.
"This is the era of the hollowed-out government… We did not just outsource the janitorial services or the cafeteria. Instead, we outsourced the thinking… The result is not a 'leaner' government. It is a government that has forgotten how to learn." #IsraelKolawole https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-empty-architect/
@SteveRoth only one of the causers can a lawsuit reach, however!
often it is better to ask than to demand.
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@light @tml more straightforwardly, if the party you like most might be below the threshold for representation in Parliament, and you want to be sure that your vote helps reduce the power of a party you think awful, then it might make sense to strategically vote for a party you know will be represented, so that you can be sure(er) it won’t be “wasted”. 3/
@light @tml but if you are pretty sure the party you like best will meet the threshold for representation, and you’re sure you like it best, considering both your areas of agreement and disagreement with the various parties, under proportional representation (closed or open list), you should just vote for your favorite party. /fin
the thesis “contemporary social media contributes dysfunctionally to a collective sense of pessimistic nihilism” is, i think, correct.
it is not inconsistent, however, with the thesis “a great deal is terrible about Americans’ material conditions, and worse in a variety of ways than previously”
it seems kind of dumb to me that there has emerged a discourse that treats these hypotheses, which i’d characterize as mutually reinforcing, as if they were mutually inconsistent, there can be only one.
@keunwoo i don't doubt you're right! it's just a habit i haven't cultivated. (or perhaps don't have an aptitude for. i am in general pretty gullible.)
@keunwoo (my AI-dar is not so good. i tend to assume authors are human, perhaps too naively.)
i find it funny when people holding big retirement nest eggs in index funds wag about how they want to reduce the deficit.
goldman and musk inc joining forces feels like what if napoleon and hitler got together for an encore tour of europe. kind of an all-stars circuit for death stars of different eras.
it may be the end of the world, but our description of it qualifies as a gripping page-turner. preorder now. (quickly, please.)