facts don’t care about your feelings. they care about mine.
What is extraordinary about this to me is that these firms — i think! — are brazenly counterfeiting DJT's endorsement, even down to using his signature in unauthorized ways, yet he stays silent rather than objecting or suing because he wants the continued enthusiastic support of the people falling for this kind of grift. Demonstrating integrity, protecting his own reputation, would expose them outright as suckers, maybe curb their enthusiasm. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-bucks-promise-wealth-maga-loyalty-lose-thousands-rcna84965 ht @Atrios and #PaulCampos
[new draft post] Smeaguls https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/05/27/smeaguls/index.html
people act as though the point of Ron DeSantis' Twitter Spaces rollout was to impress the public, so it was a ridiculous failure.
of course not.
you don't impress the public in Twitter Spaces. the broad public isn't there. you can't appear Presidential among flags + camera angles in Twitter Spaces.
DeSantis chose Twitter Spaces to cultivate the support of one man, Elon Musk. he's after the plutocratic alliance.
technical difficulties only aid his courtship. he could be magnanimous.
the human condition is always on the verge of tears.
you say i haven't had a productive day, but i upgraded like five applications in the app store.
“The greatest monsters of history —men like Andrew Carnegie, JP Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Andrew Mellon — lived lives of cruel mass-exploitation, only to rehabilitate their reputations at the ends of their lives, or posthumously, by endowing charitable foundations that do genuinely good works, while plastering those monsters’ names on every tangible expression of those works. Our modern crop of monsters are pursuing the same path” @pluralistic https://doctorow.medium.com/rich-peoples-gain-is-worth-less-than-poor-people-s-pain-6c3631292841 ht @SteveRoth
@lori @Alon @MadMadMadMadRN @ddayen we could have unions that embraced a soludarity ethos across age cohorts! sometimes tradeoffs are avoidable.
when the problem is a group is being singled out for persecution, singling them out for protection may be counterproductive. it reinforces the singling out. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/05/25/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-releases-first-ever-u-s-national-strategy-to-counter-antisemitism/ ht @w7voa
“Supply-side progressives like Yglesias and Klein are skilled at detecting the structural problems in American government. They’re less concerned with the problem of power as an impediment to progress. And they’re certainly not interested in equalizing that power, aligning the interests of labor and capital, as the clearest path to deal everyone into a next-generation economy.” @ddayen https://prospect.org/economy/2023-05-25-liberalism-that-builds-power/
trust autopilot.
Is it really true, as seems to be the implication of some commentary I've read, that the way the debt ceiling is playing out reflects a peaceful transfer of power from the Klain administration to the Zients administration?
I've mostly been favorably surprised by the Biden administration. I hope that continues.
But this moment is a test, I think, of whether there in fact is a Biden administration.
We don't need another hero.
Sad about #TinaTurner. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tina-turner-dead-obit-192002/
“The eerie thing about this hyper-technologized world is that it’s very difficult to separate fantasies of persecution from its objectively shitty logic. The phones serve us ads that seem like we are being listened to. Are we? Maybe it’s just ‘the algorithm.’” #JohnGanz https://johnganz.substack.com/p/update-on-twitter-ban
it’s weird, kind of ironic, that there seems to be growing overlap between transhumanist and anti-trans communities.
or am i unfairly stereotyping “TESCREALists”?
you know you’ve played things well when both q and lgbtq are inclined to boycott you for caving to the other side.
“I think my conservative colleagues for the most part support Limit, Save, Grow, & they don't feel like we should negotiate with our hostage.” —Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) https://twitter.com/josephzeballos/status/1661080044498812928
// i hope they speak the quiet part louder and louder. i hope they revel in it like Scrooge McDuck swimming in gold.
"whichever course of action Biden chooses, we should be clear that he has other options than agreeing to crack the whip against America’s poor." #MattBruenig https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2023/05/23/the-debt-limit-situation/
“If Treasury today issued $1,000 bonds paying 8% or 10% interest, at whatever price the market’s willing to pay, it gets a lot more than $1,000. But the “national debt” only increases by $1,000, the “face value” of the bonds…Money to pay the bills, without increasing the national debt. It could make the debt-limit silliness simply immaterial and moot, forever.” @SteveRoth on Treasury selling premium bonds. https://mastodon.world/@SteveRoth/110414015390778669