the career paths now are health insurance ceo, only fans, and uber driver.

@gooser3000 "taxpayers" also are not a coherent agent.

in reply to @gooser3000

"voters" are not a coherent agent, have radically diverse interests, no means of being held accountable in common. constituted as "voters" we are a phenomenon, not an agent, no more constructive to blame than a lightning strike. if our behavior should change, then our institutions must.

if luigi had been convicted some time ago and was on federal death row, would biden have commuted his sentence today?

tired: peace through strength

wired: peace through conquest

are there no rare earths in Antarctica?

“I cannot escape the sense that those pundits who really believed that Donald Trump was going to embrace restraint in foreign policy have been played for fools.” @dandrezner danieldrezner.substack.com/p/d

@realcaseyrollins because we mutually insure one another and the Federal government has far more capable and flexible financial tools than the states.

in reply to @realcaseyrollins

@farah look into pneumonia. antibiotics might help. (i’m still recovering from a rough month.)

in reply to @farah

@akkartik i’m sorry. i’m a vector.

in reply to @akkartik

@akkartik very few checks. there’s the war powers act, a custom at best honored in the breach. i wonder how resistant the military would be to some bizarre adventure, and whether Trump would have the energy to knock heads in order to insist.

in reply to @akkartik

@akkartik i guess i’m not as sanguine. it’s really weird. hopefully it’s just bullshit, but if it isn’t it amounts to an open concession of reversion to great power sphere-of-interest politics, which is exactly what Russia and China have been demanding, and post-Cold-War Pax Americana, for all its flaws, has resisted.

in reply to @akkartik

@carolannie right. it would kill NATO more definitively than a mere withdrawal (which a future government might reverse). there would be no effective Article 5 counter to NATO’s biggest power.

in reply to @carolannie

a panama thing, let alone some greenland / canada / mexico thing, would instantly justify in retrospect russia’s ukraine thing and in prospect china’s taiwan thing. kind of what a russian-asset american president might attempt.

Biden: We have to take extraordinary efforts to counter a recrudescence of territorial adventurism by military force.

Trump: What if we just joined in on the adventure? Our military could take some pretty cool territories!

( re bsky.app/profile/bcfinucane.bs )

in reply to self

“We become one of the most dangerous kinds of people — a cruel person with a clean conscience.” @davidfrenchjag nytimes.com/2024/12/22/opinion

@dpp this Court is an (unlovely, poisonous) oak tree in this storm, rather than a willow.

in reply to @dpp

@dpp there's a chicken egg problem there, especially with the constitutionalization of campaign finance nonreform via Citizens United and other Roberts Court decisions. something is going to have to give. things already are beginning to give, and it isn't and won't be pretty i think.

in reply to @dpp

it's not that remunerative jobs are boring. it's that they are mostly unethical.

@migurski they say no wars in his term (they overlook the crushing of ISIS and accelerated drone wars), tried to withdraw from Syria and Afghanistan. they see Biden as risking WWIII, doubling down on an ill-starred US orchestrated coup in Ukraine (Maidan 2014).

to be clear, these are far from my views.

in reply to @migurski