@phillmv @Rickperlstein yes. there are people i felt politically kin with a decade ago who have podcasts and now i don't feel kin with them at all, even if we'd all be described as having leftish commitments. i think farming the emotional engagement and actually moving the overton window stand strongly in tension. it's not the people you already agree with who have to open their horizons of the legitimate.
@phillmv @Rickperlstein no state can function without the credible threat of violence. the best states function in such a way that the threat of violence is rare and distant. no coalition member can have influence without the threat of exit. but coalitions function best when the assumption is it won't come to that, and negotiate in good faith so that it doesn't. in a marriage one doesn't frequently threaten divorce, although the existence of the possibility may discipline both parties. 1/
@phillmv @Rickperlstein in US politics, i think Bernie Sanders is an exemplar here. on the one hand, he never overtly threatened, after shitlibs moved heaven and earth to defeat him, to quit the party and take his voters with him. on the other hand, he and Biden negotiated a settlement, under which Biden became in domestic economic matters the best US president since LBJ. the threat of defection was always present in those negotiations, but i suspect tacitly rather than wielded as a cudgel./fin
does the writing on missiles thing mean she’s angling for VP?
“the authoritarian ratchet grinds ceaselessly on, with anti-authoritarians helpless to stop it whether we ‘win’ in Washington or not, with the way one group of anti-authoritarians accuses another group of anti-authoritarians of being complicit ‘shitlibs,’ and with that group accusing the first group of sole responsibility for every loss to the Republicans since the time when convention power brokers smoked backroom cigars.” @Rickperlstein https://americanprospect.bluelena.io/index.php?action=social&chash=f21e255f89e0f258accbe4e984eef486.2734&s=ce07d2b5feef04b26a83a61bce292370
let them eat freedom.
"the best military is the one that’s strong enough to deter a challenge, which gives room to critics to ask why so much is spent on a military that does nothing. " #BranislavSlantchev https://slantchev.wordpress.com/2024/05/28/war-economy-what-is-it-and-why-we-will-not-transition-to-it/
the cruelty is a prerequisite.
[new draft post] Masculine virtues https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/05/28/masculine-virtues/index.html
yesterday i went to the beach for the first time this year. homeymoon key, just north of clearwater fl. it felt like the gulf water usually feels in late august. https://x.com/PaulFox13/status/1795531338050867515
can LLMs do standup comedy?
@admitsWrongIfProven@qoto.org Hello, World!
I spent much of the weekend adding support for update histories with links to prior revisions and diffs to my static site generator.
I'm not quite sure why I did this. Neuroticism is neuroticism. But if you care I am fishing for feedback so I can pretend it made any sense to do this. Here's an example. https://tech.interfluidity.com/xml/iffy/index.html#major-updates
what would be the bigger injustice, outright confiscation of 99% of every centibillionaire’s wealth, or how half the world lives every day?
i just signed up with these people for a sync service, but i don’t know how excited i am about the mailing list they put me on. don't miss this opportunity to uncover the untapped potential within your organization. https://tresorit.zoom.us/webinar/register/7817110293213/WN_vMAsbuUIRtC_XBrkvS1eFg#/registration
policy tends to get enacted about 20 years after it really seemed like a good idea.
there was an electron at the lecturn and a chicken in the kitchen. a librarian embraced a libertarian.
@franktaber@mas.to Yes. It is, um, disarming to see how "small" (of course there is no such thing as small, because every human death is a tragedy, not a statistic) Gaza is relative to things we hardly took note of. I'm not sure social media is the discriminator though. We had very vibrant social media under Trump, yet perceived almost not at all the carnage under his administration. It was an era of "peace", as far as the zeitgeist was concerned, though not to those in Raqqa or Mosul.
@franktaber@mas.to I really appreciate the exercise! It is very challenging. Ultimately the US has been in a policing role since World War II, and there are a lot of parallels with the trickiness of judging police violence. On the one hand, it’s primarily facie bad. On the other hand, there may be complex tradeoffs between this form of violence and other violence that would occur under, say, abolition. 1/
@franktaber@mas.to Improving the situation requires disentangling the kind of violence that “pays off” in terms of a greater peace from violence that is unnecessary or even counterproductive to achieving that broader peace. And since we can’t observe the counterfactuals, those distinctions become unanswerably contentious. /fin
@franktaber@mas.to supporting one side of a civil war is defending some party, at cost of potentially greater bloodshed if the other party simply were to win. similar to Ukraine. there’d be less (near-term) bloodshed if the West simply conceded Ukraine to Russia. but thay doesn’t mean that it’d be the right choice. again, it’s very hard to disentangle virtuous vs leas virtuous military behavior.
@franktaber@mas.to I think it’s an admirable exercise, but very challenging! Was Iraq I offsensive or defensive? Defensive only to the original Kuwaiti border? Was Korea defensive until the 38th parallel? Vietnam was in defense of S Vietnam. I think it’s ultimately a set of questions too hard to answer, combat can’t really be divided into offensive vs defensive, it’s ultimately how much death & destruction with US action vs an unobservable counterfactual without.