I am very excited that Kamala Harris has chosen Tim Walz.
q. what do the most considerate lovers say just after you climax?
a. please come again!
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” via #DavidMcCabe https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/technology/google-antitrust-ruling.html
from "The Case for Pragmatic Socialism" by @ryanlcooper https://prospect.org/politics/2024-08-05-case-for-pragmatic-socialism/
Text: The first thing is to help rebuild the union movement. The National Labor Relations Act should be overhauled to require sectoral bargaining, meaning union contracts will be negotiated on an industry-wide basis rather than at each individual shop, and the resulting contract will be extended to every firm regardless of union membership. Stiff penalties will be levied on employers who refuse to negotiate. Second, build a proper welfare state. This will provide an income source to all categories of nonworkers mentioned above, and equalize incomes between households with different numbers of nonworkers. Welfare programs for each category of nonworker—a child allowance, disability and unemployment benefits, a pension for the elderly— will virtually eradicate poverty. Medicare for All will ensure universal health care, and paid family leave, a child allowance, and public day care will enable citizens to have whatever size of family they want. U.S. policymakers are obsessed with means-testing the welfare state, to prevent anyone deemed undeserving from qualifying. But you can just as easily ensure that with stiff and progressive taxation, particularly on the rich. The point is to raise revenue from the broad population to fund the welfare state, while also legally prohibiting the accumulation of vast wealth. Third, rebuild the regulatory state... (truncated due to character limit)
Should be read in the context of Trump v. United States.
From #JohnGanz, interviewed by #IsaacChotiner https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-american-election-that-set-the-stage-for-trump ht @ryanlcooper
Text: Some people would argue that Trump actually does work within the system—that he broadly pursues Republican policies and governs like a Republican. I don’'t happen to agree with this, and I don’t think you do, either. People have a very cartoonish understanding of what happens in dictatorships or what happens during fascist seizures of power. For many years, Mussolini ruled in a constitutional context. He was doing illegal and coercive things, but he did not get rid of the constitution. There were elections, even if they were not exactly on the up-and-up. So there’s always a hybridization of conventional politics and this sort of stuff. Mussolini had to be appointed Prime Minister through constitutional means, as did Hitler They both had allies, coalition allies, that were not in their party. Because of the dramatic endings to all these stories, it’s forgotten that there are often prosaic beginnings, during which these political actors make the same sorts of adjustments and alliances and compromises that you see in other forms of politics. They’re just more willing to push and break things when they don’t go their way. Of course, Trump did not successfully break the constitutional system last time around.
it would be the ultimate troll of everybody if the VP pick was Rachel Dolezal.
do any of you provide trigger warnings to cron?
[New Post] Yimby, taxes, expertise, state capacity, elections, economy https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/10014.html
it’s fucking raining. no joke.
@_dm it’d be nice if that were immunity enough. but people are very generous with tendentious accusations unfortunately.
kind of a wild possibility, suppose for whatever reason the Harris campaign decides in its vetting there’s some matter of concern with Shapiro, but they fear accusations of antisemitism if they overlook him, so they go with Pritzker.
The sound of this tropical storm is kind of incredible.
sometimes VPs do have an impact on governance. that, it seems to me, is a more pressing concern than (apparently very modest) electoral impacts.
even the smallest fish is not so small, if the pond is small enough.
Text: Consumerism is loneliness; it figures other people as a form of inconvenience and individualized consumption as the height of self-realization. But tech companies promise to solve loneliness with a more responsive kind of product and a more perfect form of solipsism. Chatbots are often marketed as though other people represent the main impediment to solving loneliness, and if you remove the threat of judgment and exclusion and rejection that other people represent, then no one will ever feel lonely again.
perhaps it is too generous of me, but i take the fact that the Middle East has not already erupted into a broad war as a success of the Biden foreign policy crew. Iran will undoubtedly respond, but the delay suggests conversations about how to titrate a response between an Iranian government’s need to demonstrate deterrence and save face, internationally and domestically, and a broader imperative to prevent a war that would result in a tremendous amount of mutual destruction and human pain.
@_dm i think the VP teeth-gnashing has become a proxy for fears, on the social democratic left, that Harris may be a new Obama, who, from that perspective, inspired and then betrayed, rendering something like a Trump inevitable. the candidate has (wisely, on electoral grounds) said so little of substance, so that everyone can project their hopes upon her, but the downside of that is we can project our fears as well.
the immediate — almost without objection — convergence upon Harris across all factions of the Democratic coalition renders the accelerating divisiveness of Harris’ VP choice quite a contrast.
she touched the wall and banished the darkness.
“Two Paths for Jewish Politics” #CoreyRobin https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/two-paths-for-jewish-politics