[new draft post] There's no such thing as international law https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/12/10/theres-no-such-thing-as-international-law/index.html
@SteveRoth (Treasury department. some politics bloggers got invited to the White House, i think.)
ebb and decline have the same slope, but very different implications.
it is difficult distinguish one from the other.
An aspect of the blogosphere that the twittersphere, newslettersphere, and fedisphere have never reproduced is that writing was a collective activity even as it was unstructured and individual. 1/
there were people whom, as a matter of course, i would read and have a high probability of responding to or referencing. they had the same relationship to me. it was essential to all of us, therefore, that we mostly read one another. to the rest of the world, a relationship with any of us was indirectly a relationship with all of us. 2/
we had no formal name as a tribe or team, and we were not a tribe or team at all, in the sense that what bound us was our shared interests and a kind of mutual respect, not alignment or agreement. on the contrary, our disagreements were what drove our conversation, our collective enterprise. 3/
but we did have a social identity, collectively, despite our diffuse and inchoate nature. we constituted an institution (if there was a name it was "econoblogosphere"), rather than just a bunch of individuals self-expressing. 4/
this morning i found a long piece by someone whom i would have read then, and perhaps responded to or referenced in my own writing. as part of that ethos, pieces tended to be shorter then, shards of conversation rather than independent essays. still, i found myself saying "maybe later" (always a tenuous claim) rather than buckling down. it's no longer my project, our work together. 5/
i'm just another content consumer, making a decision do *i* want to read this?
probably not.
death too is a kind of equilibrium. /fin
memory cannot protect itself from confabulations motivated by the exigencies of the present. historical memory especially. 1/
Extraordinary, by #MashaGessen https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust
that nothing is more ordinary than collective murder, events "we" were the victims of, events we have perpetrated and perpetrate, for any large enough we that survives, is too inconvenient for us to recognize. 2/
rather than arguing about this or that extermination, we'd be better off understanding and creating conditions under which we exterminate less. /fin
@felix @paninid @danilo neither can customers instill ethics and principles into a company's culture, except to the degree that those ethics and principles are malleable in the face of constraints imposed by other stakeholders.
and if they are so malleable, constraints durably imposed by the state are as good as those that might be imposed by customers, and more plausible to achieve.
it's ancient history when we are getting along, it's never-addressed trauma when we are not.
@LouisIngenthron something like that.
@carolannie but what if it isn’t a nice tree?
Biden’s economic policy has been the most progressive since LBJ’s. I wonder if Israel is his Vietnam.
sometimes i worry about the carbon footprint of my cremation. perhaps i should buy an offset.
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the secret, said the dark occultist to his quavering apprentice, is this.
you just fake it ‘til you wake it.
@SteveRoth great point. yes. who knows how the hypothetical market dollar value of the uninhabited American West might have changed?
does the argot "jonesing" for something come from the expression "keeping up with the joneses"?
( dictionary.com attributes it to Mr. Jones as a slang term for heroin, which probably makes more sense. but now I have to reinterpret the song. https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/jonesing/ )
Total real-estate at market value to GDP (excluding financial-sector business, which the Fed flow of funds does not track)
@SteveRoth i don't think you were a fake news purveyer! i'm just looking at graphs, thinking about 'em, trying to distinguish a bit between valuation and financialization as conceptually distinct phenomena.
@perfect_brains and these institutions (and the households that own their funds) end up owning claims on a greater share of the now-and-future economy then their forebears did in earlier eras did.
@SteveRoth (sounds like a mastodon.world issue!)