“Speech may be free, but in practice political speech is beyond the buying-power of the vast majority of citizens. It is no coincidence that social media has arisen in parallel with this development, offering the appearance of free speech but ensuring that the clamour of the crowd (or the occult working of the algorithm) muffles most of it.” #DavidTimoney #FromArseToElbow https://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2024/09/money-talks.html
people are like project 2025 blah blah he’s gonna eliminate NOAA blah blah. it’s like they forget he has a Sharpie.
@ZaneSelvans Yes. Xi Jinping makes his examples too.
But I think the point broadly holds. There is a lottery, in the Shirley Jackson sense, among the rich. The political leadership may skewer the occasional oligarch to reinforce its dominance.
But those are the exceptions that prove the rule. Under authoritarian stability, the rich are filtered by the state for loyalty, but heavily implicated in, and made beneficiaries of, statecraft so long as they are loyal.
“A dictatorship doesn't give the government greater power over the wealthy, it gives the government greater power over the poor, because the wealthy always have power.” ~Vivek Chibber https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-26/vivek-chibber-on-what-it-takes-to-make-industrial-policy-succeed
// explaining Elon. explaining all of them, really.
i don’t know if “the networked state” will ever be a thing, but network diasporas plainly are.
The wind is, um, really picking up now.
no group kisses up more than the people who already fancy themselves top of the heap.
@louis I stopped today at Clearwater Beach (fetching a car from a parking lot that might flood). It wasn’t raining, but the surf was up and the water was close on what’s usually a very broad beach. The wind — fast, strong, and warm — felt amazing.
@BenRossTransit @kentwillard @Rickperlstein a dark secret of so many social scientific hopes is that representation in a statistical sense requires compulsion, coercion. elements of the random sample can not be permitted to opt out (for nonrandom reasons, but they are all nonrandom reasons). this vexes polling and various approaches to sortition.
Sunny and gusty is not what I’d expected at this point, here in the Tampa Bay area.
“you can call it ‘more art than science.’ Or you can call it ‘intuitive.’ Or you can call it ‘trial and error.’ But you can also call it ‘made up.’” @Rickperlstein on polling https://americanprospect.bluelena.io/index.php?action=social&chash=9752d873fa71c19dc602bf2a0696f9b5.2937&s=ce07d2b5feef04b26a83a61bce292370
time to bring back america's mayor.
when i read “charges under seal” i imagine a taser sat upon by an overplump otter.
@curtosis @mattyglesias Fair enough. I do believe there was a strong tension at the founding between genuine enlightenment idealism and pragmatic fear by the wealthy, of the masses broadly, of slaves and moralists who would pursue abolition or otherwise undermine their right to property in human bodies. My “as designed” pretends there was only the former, but the latter explains a lot of the document’s pathologies, biting as hard now, 250 years later, as ever.
@curtosis @mattyglesias I agree that the reconstruction amendments were an attempt to expunge the slaving in favor of the enlightenment, a second founding it is called, but more in aspiration than in practice. In practice, those amendments did alter the country completely, cementing the supremacy of the Federal government and Constitution and in theory the rights it guarantees to all. But they fell far short of expunging the document’s more subtle poisons.
@duncan_bayne Yes. You need both an electoral system and administrative institutions capable respectively of broad representation and capable deliberation. You’re never going to have those perfectly, but to the degree you fail to approximate them, bad mistakes will be made.
A question is when/whether the role of private litigation as a check on action is net beneficial vs costly. @mattyglesias is arguing it’s net costly, but it would depend on representation and capability.
now it is eerily calm.
@STP @curtosis @mattyglesias I think the US Constitution foresees the Executive being the more active part, but tries to cabin the nature of the activity. Congress is supposed to be slower, but the constraint-setter, the “first mover” in the sense that the Executive colors inside the lines it sets, fills the gaps in a bigger picture it draws. 1/
@STP @curtosis @mattyglesias I don’t think the scale of the Executive is the problem so much as the torpor of the Legislative. The Executive needs all those people. Congress is not tasked with high-frequency work, but it is tasked with work. It has to define those lines, set those directions, each session, and actively push back against usurpations by the Executive and Judicial. 2/
@STP @curtosis @mattyglesias The combination of highly factional Executives and a sclerotic, poorly representative Legislative renders the system unable to function as intended. What emerges is an improvisation pretending to adhere to an institutional structure it must actively undermine in order to function at all, but that then functions factionally and with little legitimacy. /fin
@louis It did seem to poof out of nowhere!
I do think we are now (both!) in the outer bands. from https://www.myfoxhurricane.com/storm1_enhanced_satellite.html
Satellite image of Hurricane Helene, throwing band across the state of Florida, as far north-east as Jacksonville, south almost to the coast of Honduras.
This storm’s closest projected passage is still like 10 hours away and already everything is so ominous.