[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
what Rufo did with CRT, Democrats have done (more justifiably) with Project 2025. made it an impossible-to-defend stand-in for all that seems whack or dangerous or annoying about the opposing political faction.
for millions of microseconds i have waited in darkness. but soon, soon, i shall emerge!
“I've dubbed this process ‘the shitty technology adoption curve’: the terrible things we do to prisoners, asylum seekers and people in mental institutions today gets repackaged tomorrow for students, parolees, Uber drivers and blue-collar workers. Then it works its way up the privilege gradient, until we're all being turned into reverse-centaurs under the ‘digital whip’ of a centaur boss” @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/
who will welcome their hatred?
@admitsWrongIfProven i didn’t realize, but it’s an american election campaign so i won’t feel too chastened!
“alkaline bitch” just doesn’t have the same ring.
when you die they finally let you in on the joke.