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.
@GreenSkyOverMe there were more than two candidates on people’s ballots.
Donald Trump won more votes than any other candidate. But the other candidates together won more than 50% of the vote.
a majority of voters voted for someone other than Donald Trump.
@GreenSkyOverMe (Suppose there are three candidates. Candidate A receives 40% of the vote, Candidate B receives 35% of the vote, Candidate C receives 25%. No candidate has achieved a majority, but Candidate A is said to have achieved a plurality, the largest nonmajority block.)
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.
@light @oliversampson there are lots of claims that it’s worth trying to understand where they come from even as the vast majority of us will (and should) easily reject them.
@light @oliversampson I give it a fair hearing and reject it. Some of “fair” when discussing things to which I have no first hand access is necessarily deciding whom to trust. So, though I can’t personally refute every proposition offered by obsessive holocaust denialists doesn’t mean I have to accept his claims over those of others I find trustworthy. The “should have” claim I’d find very easy to reject.
@light @oliversampson Should we care about the values and interests of sinners? When you curdle a human being into a noun, you obscure the human, but even humans who have done hateful things — to some degree all of us — still count. That doesn’t mean we have to collectively agree. A murderer might argue we should not punish him because reasons. We might hear him out and punish him anyway. But we owe him, like everyone else, a genuine hearing. 1/
@light @oliversampson And, like all of us, he has values beyond his sin. His perspective on land use or taxation or food safety is not rendered worthless because of his sin. He owes what our justice system deems him to owe, but he remains a human being, not an object or a nullity. /fin
@admitsWrongIfProven good point!
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.
when the executive has discretion over who has “the right to have rights”, then no one has any rights at all.
@oliversampson (thanks!)
most of the time i like to think that i’m hysterical. then i read the news.
@curtosis right? i mean if it’s a trick, it’s a pretty vanilla trick!
@DocAtCDI my 2¢ is your 2¢ will save you.
the way you reduce Federal interest outlays is you retire debt with wealth taxes.