@admitsWrongIfProven but are you her boyfriend?
my son: “i feel like apostrophes can sometimes be really possessive.”
from @ryanlcooper https://prospect.org/world/2025-04-02-germany-finally-gets-over-austerity/ ht @ddayen
Text: More broadly, it is frankly maddening that it took a military crisis to get Germany (and others) to shake off austerity brain. An entire generation of Europeans saw their career prospects diminished or ruined entirely; Greece and Spain endured a catastrophe on par with the Great Depression. But it should be emphasized that austerity also left Europe militarily weak. Without the austerity poison, its infrastructure would be in better shape, its economy would be maybe 20 percent larger, and it would be able to afford rearmament much more easily.
i love the smell of liberation in the morning.
@light I wouldn’t presume, but wondered. You wouldn’t be alone in having had brushes with the circumstances and systems the remark that punched so hard alludes to. I’m sorry that it hit you in so difficult and unpleasant a way. That wasn’t my intention, but I understand how it might.
@light I’m sorry you feel that way. I guess I’m not quite willing to cop to being guilty as charged, as you say the phrase was an off-hand remark put a bit crudely to add color to what in essence is a very abstract discussion of social affairs. I understand how it could be taken ungently, and in a context where I’m actually discussing tensions surrounding civil liberties, genuine human interests, and institutionalization, I’d treat the topic more carefully. 1/
@light But I guess as a writer, I feel the need for and reserve the right to some recourse to the lurid, gut punching, and hyperbolic, which nearly always means glossing over complexity and difficult feelings. I think in clearly off-hand contexts, where the colorful phrasing is clearly not the subject one is opining about, that’s okay. But I get and respect your disagreement. 2/
@light (This has come up before when I’ve used rape as a metaphor. eg https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/4013.html I don’t see it in the comments to that post, but on Twitter or elsewhere I’ve received pretty poignant objections to analogizing not-literally-rape to rape. I understand that and get why some people are really upset by that! But it’s not a metaphor from which I’ll promise always to abstain. The emotions it provokes are a double-edged sword, but charged metaphor is an important tool.) /fin
If you live in Wisconsin, Florida District 1, or Florida District 6, you are some of the most powerful people on the planet today.
If you haven't voted already, please go now.
@light there isn’t and shouldn’t be, but for 99% of things we rely upon institutions to define for us what we take to be truth, at least in a provisional, we-gotta-act-based-on-something kind of way.
eliminating research eliminates constraints on what official institutions, to which people most frequently fall back, might say, to the benefit of those who wish to control those institutions in their own interest.
you cut Federal research because you just want to be able to say shit and have that be the official truth without pointy-heads in the “deep state” telling you or anybody else you are wrong.
[new draft post] If we weren't idiots, Balance of Payments edition https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/04/01/if-we-werent-idiots-balance-of-payments-edition/index.html
@Canevecchio (thanks! happy day in these times when all of us are somehow fools.)
my wife suggests maybe everyone should get a Trump tattoo to ward off deportation, rendition, enslavement.
it’s #pathetic that this administration mistakenly sent to foreign prison a US resident with legal status but can’t get the authoritarian leaders of a tiny little country to give him back.
what would be the appropriate due process under our laws for sending someone into enslavement for an indefinite, perhaps life, term, without possibility of appeal or parole?
nobody was indefinitely detained and enslaved under conditions tantamount to torture when a bunch of bumbling operatives broke into an office in the Watergate building.
there’s nothing more lawless than a law-and-order party.
fascism is like a prion it folds everything it touches into an instance of itself.
when discrimination becomes indistinguishable from hypocrisy, all is lost.
there's a level of virtuosity in being corrupt in the way you prosecute your corruptions. and the very corruption of your corruption (in PA at least) was why you can't be prosecuted! it became fraud, not vote buying, and who's going to prosecute elon musk for fraud? it's like a pigeon for jaywalking.
@Phil maybe it was shady. but it was open. courts could review and perhaps appropriately review the selectiveness. Trump constantly challenged vote counts in urban districts. it's ugly, but not unlawful. meanwhile… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
i wasn't so exercised at the time, but i now agree that Bush v. Gore was the beginning of our long catastrophe.
privately asking a governor to "find votes" is quite a different thing. one of Trump's many novel contributions.