a bit odd if “Chinese officials” are not willing to have TikTok put up for sale in an open process, but prove willing specifically to sell to Elon Musk. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-14/china-discusses-sale-of-tiktok-us-to-musk-as-one-possible-option
@lordbowlich we're here to chat! you've nothing to apologize for. it's been a delightful exchange.
iOS has a great select-to-translate feature rendered frustrating by the ridiculously narrow range of languages it supports. an intelligent Apple would fix this kind of Apple Intelligence.
@lordbowlich Chesterton is a British writer of the early 20th C. I think the poor here refers to the proletariat. In Great Britain, land had been enclosed as capital and agricultural work formalized on contractual terms by this point, so to some degree proletarianized, I think.
You might make a similar critique with respect to the frontier farmer in the US, Jefferson's yeoman independent smallhold. They could be quite poor! I just don't think these are the classes Chesterton is referring to.
@phillmv capitalizing on anger at caricatures of "the left" or "the woke" seems like the most straightforward path to financial success as a public affairs writer, and there's a respectable niche that overtly new right writers cannot fill.
@phillmv it is a bit, well, almost Trumpish or Muskish that Matt is on a campaign, rather openly, to blame progressives — and to be seen to be blaming progressives because he claims it would be good for the prospects of Democrats! — after the campaign that was actually run. (i swear i saw a tweet where he explained this, but i can't find it now, so grains of salt.)
@phillmv the person i'm subtweeting most obviously is Matt Yglesias and the Vox crew generally. they defended the turn to identity politics in 2016 and now are blaming "The Groups" for identity politics and losing an election after a campaign run almost entirely to their specifications.
This by Paul Mason is worth a read. Its definition of "social democratic" is closer to mainstream US Dem / UK Labor than my own. I bristle at some of the characterizations of more "left" tendencies, and some technocratic tendencies. But taken as a view from the inside, it's clearsighted and insightful. https://htsf.substack.com/p/countering-right-wing-populism ht @williamcb.bsky.social
"This is the age-old challenge, how do you measure deterrence? …When we started, I heard a lot of doubt that we wouldn’t succeed. By the time I was done, I heard a lot of frustration that we did succeed." ~Jonathan Kanter, whome we were privileged to have serve us as DOJ head of antitrust. https://prospect.org/economy/2025-01-13-qa-taking-on-biggest-problems-companies-jonathan-kanter-interview/ via @ddayen
in 2016, i was a class reductionist, a Bernie bro, sensible moderate centrist Democrats kept telling me. "If we broke up the banks tomorrow, would that end racism? Would that end sexism?" 1/
now those same pundits disdain me as a progressive, a "leftist", whose failure to disavow with sufficient energy the identity politics of which i was skeptical back then now has lost the election to the fascists (who they won't call that, to whom they are now building sensible moderate bridges). 2/
i don't think it is my position that has changed. /fin
@kentwillard I don’t think people get just how much these people are “going for it”, trying to make changes that render rule by their coalition politically irreversible. Fractures in that coalition are our main hope for anything like a decent future, but we are bad at exploiting them because on understandable moral grounds, we resist forming coalitions with the warring factions, ultimately driving them back together.
@kentwillard I don’t want to impugn anyone in particular, but people who identify as centrists tend to triangulate, and a combination of Trump’s election and Musk’s takeover of the media and politics (his threats to primary people have a strong effect i think) have moved the pole against which they triangulate and the positions of prominent centrists. 1/
@kentwillard Some of them you could see the shift during the campaign, they offered guarded praise of Trump’s economic plans when Biden was flailing, becoming more critical of Trump when Harris entered and was leading in the polls, now going hard towards Trump and tech. /fin
what if we just planted an American flag on the glacier next to an ice cold keg of Bud and see how the Danes respond to that.
just because you’ve put it in a graph
doesn’t mean that it’s a fact.
@scott I agree that it also functions like a form of rent control! although i’m not sure i can make a case for its dampening supply particularly.
Screenshot of tweet by Basel Musharbash “The poor have been rebels, but they have never become anarchists: they have got more interest than anyone in there being some decent government. The poor man has a stake in the country, the rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.” –– G. K. Chesterton
@brendan If there were only some kind of institution whose judgments would carry social weight. His claims *can* be countered! But Person A is persuaded, Person B missed or doesn't understand the counter, Person C thinks the counter itself is based on false claims, Person D just trusts Elon. With more argument, all the Persons minds can flip. But without anything to represent a tentative consensus, at any time, who knows who won the argument?
@arthegall we are grateful.
It’s working. Centrist institutions “triangulate” towards him. He increasingly defines one side a set of conventions that presume “both sides” equally worthy, equally suspect. Trump couldn’t really do that, because he couldn’t put together a platform, hold a consistent line. 6/
Elon Musk is epistemological poison in a way Donald Trump never was. 1/
Donald Trump bullshits transparently. He lies constantly, changes his story with his interest, (almost) everybody understands that and looks through it into the values that are motivating the schtick (love them or hate them). 2/
Musk, on the other hand, affects himself a supergenius, a knower of truths. He attaches superficially plausible logics to his lies, concocts stories and “evidence” to support them is relentless support of persuading people to believe what he wants them to believe. 3/
In Trumpworld, there have been the Qs, frightening, but discernibly fringe, weird. 4/
Musk, with his determined activity, with the reach and the epistemological deference his money can buy, is intent on reshaping the mainstream with his tendentiously concocted stories. 5/
Trump was bad enough. But Musk and his crew are much worse. Under Trump, nothing was true, there were always alternative facts. Musk is molding lies of his choosing into a version of truth towards which much of our lucre-tropic society may quietly bend. /fin