i feel like some random kidney cell still kidneying in the body of a thing that just blew its own head off.

@scott the president does have much greater capacity to raise small dollar money to counter, even taking into account the vaster scale of the race, i think. campaign cash has diminishing returns. and of course “earned media” is free, and most important. Harris could have done a zillion podcasts, for free, and if she came off well they’d have been worth a lot more than her expensive ads.

in reply to @scott

@scott they raised a shitload of small donor funds. yes, without big donors, they’d need tighter budgets, and less lavishly paid consultants. would the loss of infinite money be made up by freedom to take more populist (and genuinely virtuous) positions?

there’s definitely a tradeoff to weigh. we don’t know counterfactuals, but we do no that twice this trade-off worked out poorly. but once, with Biden, it worked out well!

it’s not easy.

in reply to @scott

from nytimes.com/2024/11/09/opinion

(the piece is badly titled.)

Text:

Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump's appeal - and they failed. The Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole world understands by now, of Ph.D.s and genius-grant winners and the best consultants money can buy. Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. Their most brilliant minds couldn't figure him out. Text: Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump's appeal - and they failed. The Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole world understands by now, of Ph.D.s and genius-grant winners and the best consultants money can buy. Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. Their most brilliant minds couldn't figure him out.

“How Harris Lost the Working Class” by @davidsirota jacobin.com/2024/11/harris-tru

@Hyolobrika almost no one openly identifies as fascist, and nearly every political movement has some degrees of the tendencies you might identify as fascist. but as I define it, i think the current incarnation of MAGA, with its frequent invocation of an insidious “enemy within” and calls for retribution, qualifies.

here’s how i define it: drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/

in reply to this

during the 1920s and 1930s, “fascist” was a descriptive term, referring to particular political movements and politicians.

by the 1960s, those movements and politicians were so fringe, so widely considered beyond acceptability, the term became a mere epithet.

in the 2020s, it is descriptive again.

@feld @Hyolobrika that is the community you are trusting. you trust this community enough that it seems implausible to you that 51% would change the rules adversely.

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@feld @Hyolobrika I made no insinuation that a small group of people control bitcoin. I made an analogy between the trust strategies. Devise a central authority (the whole point of a blockchain is to define a single, unified legder) maintained and controlled by a very dispersed community. Then if you trust the community, you can trust the authority.

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@feld @Hyolobrika i was not entering into any kind of pissing match over degrees of dispersion.

in reply to self

liberal elites are constrained by manners — which they understand as scruples — from fully adopting, endorsing, or even tolerating certain cultural signifiers perceived as working class.

right-wing elites have no such scruples, so are able to adopt any cultural signifiers that help them win power.

( a response to @jbouie bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie. )

"How Baltimore Locals Beat A Right-Wing Media Tycoon" wonkette.com/p/how-baltimore-l

@Hyolobrika @feld that is why we invented the institutional state. it’s very much the same story as the blockchain. there’s a central power (central ledger) but no small group of people controls it, only a large decentralized community. we can trust that community, and enjoy the (absolutely extraordinary) benefits that can derive from central authority.

but, in both cases, there is always an attack surface.

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@feld QE does much less than you think. But you are getting to the actually interesting questions. Fiat is extremely effective. It’s a tool of statecraft. The question is whether its effectiveness is a good or bad thing.

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@feld you might address the basic point that the dollar has retained and gently increased value over time as long as it’s been held in the form of zero-credit-risk Treasuries. your graph just shows the existence of a mattress tax, not a weakness of the dollar as a store of value. while crypto has been a terrible store of value, because a currency has to accommodate those who expect to store negative values (be indebted) over fixed periods.

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@feld not new to me.

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@feld i’ve maybe devoted years of my life to thinking through this stuff. and, um, no.

here’s a presentation that directly addresses what you misinfer from that graph.

interfluidity.com/uploads/2017

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@feld here’s maybe a more concise and entertaining version.

interfluidity.com/uploads/2019

in reply to self

@Hyolobrika sometimes people are glad to win bets by helping them come true.

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you really didn’t have to remind me.

Screenshot of e-mail summary, from Starbucks Rewards, “Your Stars are expiring soon” Screenshot of e-mail summary, from Starbucks Rewards, “Your Stars are expiring soon”

it isn’t “sad” this makes me feel.

Screenshot of e-mail from the “Harris Fight Fund” beginning with

“Steve, it is okay to feel sad and disappointed about the outcome of the presidential election. But, as I said on Wednesday, we can’t ever give up.”

and ending

“If you've saved payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately”

followed by gigantic buttons to donate $127, $191, etc Screenshot of e-mail from the “Harris Fight Fund” beginning with “Steve, it is okay to feel sad and disappointed about the outcome of the presidential election. But, as I said on Wednesday, we can’t ever give up.” and ending “If you've saved payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately” followed by gigantic buttons to donate $127, $191, etc

@eyesquash i don’t think we appreciated at the time just how consequential that concession would be. i miss those days.

in reply to @eyesquash