a silver lining of Trump’s election is they can’t call you antisemitic or accuse you of a double standard for (correctly) describing Israel’s current government as fascist when you are also (correctly) describing America’s government as fascist.
there are the alarmists and "everything's probably fine" types. the "probably fine" types have the better track record in retrospect. but that's largely because of the work of the alarmists.
relying on empirical track record to decide which attitude to take may not be wise. depending on ones goals.
it's remarkable how quickly "tren de aragua" went from something i had never heard of to a crisis so urgent centuries-old safeguards of liberty and due process had to be cast aside, even at the acknowledged cost of some innocents getting pressed into indefinite detention and enslavement.
a firm is a human organization to accomplish something. recruiting and appeasing all stakeholders, generating cash flow sufficient to pay the bills, these are *constraints* a firm faces, not the goal or function or purpose of the firm.
the people who wanted "everything run like a business" also transformed how businesses were run, and it broke those too.
(they transformed businesses into the idiot share-price maximizers of pathetically stylized economic models, which is not how most businesses actually functioned before 1970!)
this is an administration that "reforms" imperfect but somewhat functional institutions into cargo-cultish mimics of what those institutions once were. https://www.thedailybeast.com/tim-pool-was-paid-by-russia-but-will-joins-white-house-press-pool/ ht @RunRichRun @thetnholler.bsky.social
@muzicofiel @resnikoff Arendt was writing about Nazi Germany. the legal regime may not have been precisely the same. she is also agreeing with your point, saying being asked to do something is not the same as being compelled to do it, and people have responsibility to resist.
"I was proud to reintroduce…the No Dollars for Dictators Act to ensure tax dollars aren't being funneled…to dictators, terrorists and other evil regimes." ~Florida Senator Rick Scott, from his e-mail newsletter.
I guess he really does believe in tax cuts.
@Phil you listen to the one pollster who tells you what you want to hear, and call it accurate because the election went your and its way, but really because if you narrow your view only to it, you needn’t challenge your priors.
and even that one, just two months into an administration, well within the traditional honeymoon window, only shows 45% right track as of now. https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/archive/mood_of_america_archive/right_direction_or_wrong_track
@louis maybe i’d say that the shitty elsewhere was too garishly advertised by adversaries and fellow travelers and Americans failed to realize and so have an opportunity to take pride in how much good we quietly, routinely did in the world.
@Phil “Wrong Track has a 33.1% lead based on 439 polls.” — Mar 29, 2025 https://elections2024.thehill.com/national/right-wrong-track/ you live in a fantasy land, like a drug addict hallucinating pleasure while his body atrophies and starves.
@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.