playing around on redbook, it is all welcomes and smiles and cordial mutual curiosity. until someone asked about israel and, hooboy, that got ugly fast.
i’m rednote curious, prefer using a Chinese app to a Musk, Meta, or Google product.
i’ve no illusions about China’s government. but Elon and our homegrown tech oligarchs are a more proximate threat to my own political community.
i’d prefer a fediverse or atproto alternative obviously!
is “influencer” a legitimate and desirable role in the economy that public policy should support and protect?
"the actual threats came from the GOP, to which Zuckerberg quickly caved. The supposed threats from the Biden admin were overhyped, exaggerated, and misrepresented, and Zuck directly admits he was able to easily refuse those requests… All the rest is noise." @mmasnick https://www.techdirt.com/2025/01/16/rogan-misses-the-mark-how-zucks-misdirection-on-govt-pressure-goes-unchallenged/
"Is Xiaohongshu TikTok Two?"
(Sorry.)
I can't believe I've never encountered Michael O. Church.
Via @BillySmith, I read his remarkable 2012 taxonomy of three distinct "ladders" of social class, within which sit 13 social classes. It's perceptive and useful and filled with trenchant social commentary. And accessible only via the Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org/web/20180528153508/http://sasamat.xen.prgmr.com/michaelochurch/wp/2012/09/10/the-3-ladder-system-of-social-class-in-the-u-s/ 1/
In 2021, he revisited the issue: "Marx was right. If there are stable social classes, there are exactly two of them." His 2021 worldview is darker, sadder, and rings too true. https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2021/01/28/a-reply-to-alex-danco-revisiting-macleod-and-the-three-ladders-in-the-wake-of-trump/
They're long! I recommend reading them both. /fin
@_dm ironically, the founders didn’t mean for a two-party system emerging, and nothing in the Constitution constrains us to the electoral system that causes it to emerge…
@_dm it’s a problem of collective epistemology. it would be via trusted representation, likely mediated by participatory political parties that closely reflect voters’ values and interests that (1) could become true. under two massive political parties and “representation” (often anti-representation) as one representative for 760,000, no (1) will not hold. 1/
@_dm until we restructure to a form of democracy able to think coherently, we’re left with (2), delivering tangible, material benefits within a tightly compressed electoral time frame, front-loading benefits perhaps inefficiently, choosing fast tricks like sending checks over forms of public investment that take time to ripen. 2/
@_dm Democrats, a party dominated by people who style themselves expert, good-government professionals, are particular bad at (2). if “the right thing” would be a Gantt Chart stretching forward several years, of course we’re not going to just hand out quick goodies, in addition or instead. that would be, like, corrupt machine politics! So they feel virtuous and blame the public and lose.
We really need electoral reform to resuscitate (1). /fin
@_dm or a pessimist! for everyone to see that, things would have to go badly askew!
@_dm yeah. i agree it’s an interesting perspective, worth considering, though one would have to have priors quite different from mine to give it credence.
and again, even with priors very flattering of Trump, Elon would become the source of a lot of cognitive dissonance.
@_dm i don’t know. they are occupying positions traditionally help by people like former Presidents. it’d be interesting if they were placed in some manner suggesting subservience, but i don’t think that’s the plan. i don’t think many observers could conclude he’s brought Musk to heel or kowtow.
the forgotten men and women of our country. https://toad.social/@wdlindsy/113838755463069652
there is no such thing as a mediocre human.
the most useless form of take is our politics are bad because our people are bad.
it’s not a constructive or actionable kind of take.
it also gets causality wrong. the character of a community, the character of its members, is downstream from its politics much more than the other way around.
gonna start a trend of close in foot fetish videos under the hashtag #TikTokToe
in theory, our credit ratings are now impervious to medical debt / disputes over medical billing, right? how real do we think this is, as a practical matter, given the change in administration? https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-finalizes-rule-to-remove-medical-bills-from-credit-reports/
hot sauce at neighborhood lunch spot.
Bottle of hot sauce, branded Florida Concealed Carry Masterclass Garlic Hot Sauce
one question is whether regulating or even banning certain kinds of internet platforms would be legal under the Constitution and current Supreme Court precedent.
a quite distinct question is when and if various forms of regulations or bans would be a good idea.
Only Trump could go to Hamas.
The United States is such a broken place.