who knew a kind of contract called "noncompete agreements" might run afoul of a laws prohibiting anticompetitive behavior?
every day is a new surprise.
huge kudos to FTC for placing sanity above the reality distortion fields emitted by money and the people who hoard it.
see @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/
in general with media, the art isn't getting them to say what you want. the ones who are credible resist that, the ones who succumb smell like tankies.
the art is to let them say whatever they want, but to manage the topics they're talking about.
---
(lifted from a conversation with @Alon i thought it worth its own post)
@hamishb yes! that is in the general sense the question!
and within that broad landscape of potential arrangements, controversies over the role (or nonrole) of states loom very large.
@Alon i doubt it is in fact, i don't actually believe in this degree of competence in whatever the relevant organs would be, but if the latest round of disruptive university protests were some covert op it'd be the most effective "hasbara" since 7oct.
in general with media, the art isn't getting them to say what you want. the ones who are credible resist that, the ones who succumb smell like tankies.
the art is to let them say whatever they want, but to manage the topics they're talking about.
A fundamental question that cross-cuts left and right is whether the fight for human flourishing is a fight against the state, or a fight for the state, over who and what values control it.
leftish anarchists and right-ish libertarians share the fight-against frame. social democrats on the left and social conservatives on the right share the fight-for frame.
@Alon will they won’t they is an important story, and i care lots more about what big US media pays attention to than what Palestinian advocacy does. the problem is that too much media pays more attention to domestic Palestinian advocacy than whatever is and isn’t happening in Gaza. it’s a ridiculous own goal, if we take activists as sincere, that US advocacy is leaning into its own visibility and the domestic university policy debates it engenders. total eclipse.
@aronia i foresee some… issues with that one too.
Columbia gets a lot more ink than Rafah.
"war makes us terrible historians and excellent propagandists... we enthusiastically take up the work of flattening ourselves and others into simplistic groupings that make it easier to firm up lines in the sand." @MLClark https://mlclark.substack.com/p/the-stories-of-judaism-lost-to-war ht @mybarkingdogs@freeradical.zone
"For forty years – and especially since the early 1990s 'Gingrich revolution' in Congress and the triumph of neoliberalism... – the US government has been working hard to eliminate its own technical capacities. In their place, a constellation of lobbies, privately funded think tanks, and tax-subsidy farmers has grown up, many of them talented at projecting the impression of scientific authority, which crowds out whatever genuine authority may still exist." #JamesGalbraith https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/04/james-galbraith-industrial-policy-is-a-good-idea-but-so-far-we-dont-have-one.html
it’s ultimately always the wrong choice, but it can be a good way to get started.
the newspaper of record.
an email from The New York Times Subject: You're probably not cleaning your towels enough Here's how often to swap them out…
@phillmv 🙁 they got us by the hearts all we can do is everything.
a spooky moon, cradled by, nestled in, a tree.
AI countertransference.
This has been an important announcement.
whatever you may think of the underlying issues and intentions, elite-university-centered, loud and disruptive “solidarity” with Gaza takes pressure off of Israel and the Biden administration.
the excesses of the most aggressive and cartoonish protestors come to define the news cycle, overshadowing even mass graves.
the incentive for an American politician becomes to distance themselves from the on-video excesses of the worst kids, rather than the much more deadly excesses of a distant army.
every news cycle spent on American free-speech “debates” about campus protest is also a news cycle in which actual events in Gaza are eclipsed.
where we come from, consenting to a human lifetime is like participating in an extreme sport, like getting dumped from a helicopter at the top of a mountain on a snowboard.
[new draft post] Of dentistry and democracy https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/04/22/of-dentistry-and-democracy/index.html
