quite a graph, US manufacturing job changes following China’s WTO accession. https://snippet.finance/china-and-the-us/
@_dm i’m not sure i had a point. it’s just interesting, that across really diametrically opposed eras in terms of state legitimacy, going beyond consensus reality has been a constant aming Republican leaders. maybe it has to do with religiosity, a worldview that emphasizes the power of myth over the constraints of circumstance.
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@_dm this is an interesting analysis, but it’s worth noting Republicans lied flagrantly when there was the opposite of a legitimacy crisis, when a US administration thought it could basically shape reality by fiat. there may be multiple, different situations that encourage political dishonesty: the hypotheses aren’t mutually exclusive. but it’s interesting how the variegated circumstances have a through line in the Republican party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
i think a thing that’s really hurt Harris as a candidate is that she hasn’t made a lot of mistakes.
the discipline required to avoid any hint of scandal creates a perception of inauthenticity, a sense you just don’t know the person you are asked to vote for, that they are dissembling, hiding something.
give. gaffe. glove.
believers in Roko’s basilisk offer nuclear reactors in sacrifice to reassure themselves they will be spared.
for me, “Posts For You” today is all Elon.
what a pathetic little cheater.
Screenshot of “Posts For You” section, under the magnifying glass section of my Twitter. All the posts for me are Elon posts.
A scary thing about Gaza is, when considering future contingencies or policy changes and gaming out potential abuses, we'd clip lower tails with remarks like, "It'd be too overt, too egregious, the public simply wouldn't tolerate it." After Gaza, that kind of implausibility claim seems implausible.
@laprice I agree. I think we really need richer parties. It’s time to put the party back in party, we should have dense social networks within them, which encompass our representatives as well.
@laprice Yes. Citizens’ assemblies! I think they could be a really good institution, but a tricky part is, like jury duty, they should be compulsory. Otherwise self-selection to participate is a source of bias. people propose various kinds of stratified sortition to address it, and then we’re arguing over whether we’ve chosen the right characteristics to represent and the quality of statistical moves we make, whether perhaps some intentionally tendentious bias has been introduced.
@laprice (better utopian than dystopian, as so many among the most powerful seem enthusiastically to have become!)
a democracy is a China shop. a billionaire is a bull.
@laprice i prefer approval voting, long story. but RCV would be a million times better than first past the post for most elections.
(my view is we want different electoral systems for “one for all” positions like President and Mayor than we want for representative legislator positions, like in the US House. the US Senate is a weird hybrid. for institutions like the House, we should have some form of proportional representation.)
https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/04/24/two-kinds-of-representation/index.html
@laprice i think it's structural. once the scale of business and communications infrastructure and government activity rendered politics much more national than local, the logic of our electoral system compels electorally self-interested politicians to divide the public into legible, stable, 50:50 blocks they can gerrymander safe positions among. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7687.html
[new draft post] Rule-of-law is incompatible with a sharply polarized two-party system https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/10/21/rule-of-law-is-incompatible-with-a-sharply-polarized-two-party-system/index.html
“We're handing so much money over to owners of prime residential or commercial land, to owners of oil and gas fields, intellectual property and infrastructure that there isn't enough left to create enough demand for dynamic sectors of the economy.” #ChrisDillow https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2024/10/against-scooby-doo-ideology.html
cc @louis // a good rentier capitalism piece!
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i’m looking forward to buying a genuine vitrified Trump French Fry, with its own serial number and certificate of authenticity, from a 1-800 number repeated by the announcer three times in a commercial on Fox.
regardless of who becomes the next President, nothing is a Federal crime unless this Supreme Court agrees that it is.
the main case people make for capitalism is that it gets incentives right to encourage people to act, to produce.
but a capitalism under which the key to wealth is riding number-go-up by owning the right assets engenders very different incentives than to act, to produce.