Denaturalization should simply not be a thing, for Elon or for anybody. The state gets its opportunity for due diligence up front. Once a person is an American they are an American.
@rebeccablood @artlung makes it even worse.
i don’t even know how you would pin any of those people to a gar.
photograph of a gar (the fish) swimming under water. taken from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gar
we encounter ghosts constantly. the ghosts we encounter most often are ghosts of our former selves. boo! it says. look what you have done with us, you shithead.
deregulation + financialization = lobotomization + predation
no one’s been working on the railroad edition, by #PhillipLongman ht @drvolts
use of GDP as welfare measure was always based on qualitative correlations. GDP’s (well GNP’s) inventor said it should not be so used, but seemed to work pretty well. 1/
however, that is changing, because of increasing market power in especially the US economy, and relatedly due to the difference between cost-based and market-based pricing in GDP for govt purchased vs privately purchased goods and services. 2/
under consolidated markets, GDP comes to include rents captured by monopolists. rent extraction reduces welfare but scores as higher GDP. 3/
relatedly, the cost paid for government purchased healthcare in social democracies is much, much lower than the “market prices” of healthcare in the US. quality and outcomes are not broadly higher. 4/
so, US health pathology increases US GDP, while failing to represent an increase (arguably representing a major loss) of real welfare in the United States. /fin
“The bill would also require a ruling by two-thirds of the high court and the circuit courts of appeals, rather than a simple majority, to overturn a law passed by Congress. Wyden said the current court has been too quick to discard precedent and curtail rights by narrow majorities.” https://wapo.st/4e6qau3
( i like this proposal, on the merits but also because i’m an egotist. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7964.html )
@realcaseyrollins I haven’t paid enough attention to have a strong view. But that might be a fair criticism.
I in general think the light touch on the day itself was a good call (although has Mike Pence been hanged or Nancy Pelosi killed, a light touch would have been indefensible). In general with criminal justice, you wish prosecution would focus on the most violent and on “kingpins” but foot soldiers are easier to prosecute.
It’s an adaptation. In the original, Neo was a mitochondrion.
@realcaseyrollins You’ll say it’s my bias as “left” (whatever that means), but I think the arrest and ordinary criminal trial of the fraction of people who participated in January 6 and left sufficient documentary evidence for conviction of specific crimes by a jury of their peers is quite distinct from summarily rounding up millions of people, then detaining and deporting them without trial. 1/
@realcaseyrollins Even if you concede some injustice (I don’t, in general, though don’t doubt there may be particular cases of overreach), just the scale makes a huge difference. There are on the order of 1000 Jan 6 indictees. Trump says he plans to detain and deport 10M+. To abuse the moral weather analogy, a breezy drizzle and a hurricane are kind of the same, but also different. /fin
@realcaseyrollins In what sense? January 6 strikes me as not remotely as horrific as it could have been, had there been the very sharp crackdown by national guard that everyone now blames everyone for not arranging.
@realcaseyrollins Germany’s initial plan was to deport European Jews to Madagascar. Nothing so special. Israel would rather deport than murder, so it’s murdering slowly in hopes that deport becomes an option.
@realcaseyrollins (this feels like a throwaway, but it strikes me as pretty meaningless and untrue unless by fetish you mean an obsession with perceiving rather than perpetrating these horrors.)
@realcaseyrollins No, it didn’t. The Trump administration’s most brutal policy was family separation, and that applied only to new arrivals, not to undocumented with deep connections to their communities and US citizen kids. Maybe Trump doesn’t mean it when he says he’ll deport 10M+ people regardless of their tenure and integration, but if he does, we haven’t seen anything like it.
@realcaseyrollins I understood the reference to be negative. My point is that it is not all that different from #Fascism, in fact it is just #Fascism. We've rendered ourselves idiots by thinking there was something so very special about the Nazis. All that was special about them is they started a war that proved so total atrocity became ordinary and any action was justifiable. Russia has moved in that direction with the dangerous war it started, and may move further yet.
@realcaseyrollins I think you are playing with words to console yourself. Life in Russia is pretty bad, if you are a military-aged male outside of certain elite ethnicities and geographies. You are likely to be sent to war in a way entirely unlike how Americans have been sent to war recently, into a “meat grinder”, a game of Russian roulette. Large groups of people are forcibly relocated or detained in very bad camps. 1/
@realcaseyrollins Israel/Palestine has gone from perpetrating a Jim-Crow-like apartheid to routinizing massacre and torture. 2/
@realcaseyrollins We in the United States put a glass wall around the period of the 1930s/1940s, we mythologized into the opposite of a fairy tale, but something equally distant from ourselves, our “normal lives”. Intellectuals like Hannah Arendt, who had just lived through it all, marveled at this in real time. 3/
@realcaseyrollins Nazis were a real political movement, like other political movements. They were not so special. Making them so — treating them as some extraordinary evil that came from out of space, incomparable to everything else — lobotomizes us. We’ve seen both in Russia and in Israel/Palestine wartime exigencies bring back what is not some weird occult work of Satan, but ways of being that derive from moral and logistical pressures. 4/
@realcaseyrollins “Fascism” is a very ordinary thing. It’s not extraordinary. It’s a primary color in politics, used to some degree by all political movements, but to importantly varying degrees. Ginning up an internal enemy as a source of movement coherence is its signature move. The Trumpists obviously do this. So does Biden (“MAGA Rpublicans”). But the degrees and frequency are quite different. 5/
@realcaseyrollins It’s policy choices, not ideological commitment or some deep inchoate evil, that would drive us to the kind of horrors we associate with fascism. People start doing terrible things when the “moral weather” is full of terrible things, terrible things must be done, better we do what we have to do to avoid being the victims of the terrors. 6/
@realcaseyrollins For example, choosing to round-up people unlawfully present, regardless of length of tenure, degree of connectedness to their communities, existence of citizen children, etc. would make for bad moral weather. Terrible things — from an ordinary moral perspective, watching what befalls som family you knew — start being done. Others in solidarity resist. The state responds eventually with violence against citizen “allies” preventing lawful deportations. 7/
@realcaseyrollins At this point, to much of the country, state violence is not legitimate. Some groups resist with violence of their own. Now the “moral weather” is terrible, and all kinds of things become possible. All of this is not so extraordinary in human affairs. It’s quite ordinary. More extraordinary is the long run we’ve had without such things. It’s an achievement we should be careful with. /fin
@realcaseyrollins remember how the story of the boy who cried wolf ends.
you’ll have to apply your own judgment when the cassandras are unreliable. but unreliable cassandras doesn’t mean no danger is there.
@realcaseyrollins you don’t hear it from me every cycle. i used to be almost indifferent, in the 1990s through Y2K. a lot of people would say, “yeah, and look at GWB” but even there, a lot of people forget that an Iraq War was pretty likely even under Gore. but i think the era of not-so-much difference is gone, and on one side the risk of real catastrophe is quite serious. (honestly the last two decades have been gradual catastrophe, but gradually might precede suddenly.)
@realcaseyrollins i mean, i remember when Europeans felt that way in 1933. so ridiculous.
i am quite concerned. sure, the base case is always we muddle on largely as we always have. but the risks, from my perspective, of things going very bad are quite serious if the guy i don't want is victorious.