@admitsWrongIfProven oh, i think there was, and it was catastrophic. it led to a whole class of rapacious winners who felt like they deserved it, and losers deserved their fate beyond what pity compelled winners to offer.
meritocracy failed, so we're trying meretrocracy.
@WhiteCatTamer @otfrom i think they think that’s true. and Justice Jackson, in her dissent, emphasized that aspect.
but the decision is very clear about the inviolability of the pardon power, under any circumstances. i think a President that wanted to intimidate the Supreme Court or worse could direct subordinates to do that and pardon them, rendering the Court itself a plaything of the President.
they are relying on the decency of the people they are screwing.
@otfrom that’s basically its effect. more precisely it says anything the President does that takes the form of an “official act” — where that form cannot be questioned via inquiry into the President’s motives or alleged criminality of the act — is at least presumptively immune and sometimes absolutely immune from criminal prosecution.
so, as long as a President takes a bit of care to embed their criming in “official” processes and procedures, it’s effectively legalized.
i think the public remains broadly in denial about how dangerous John Roberts’ decision in Trump v United States is.
@BenRossTransit i don’t think “explicitly and clearly critical” works. the reason why plutocrats fund what you are calling “ultra-left” is because that category reflects wedge issues, both between “left” constituencies and the broad public, and within “left” constituencies. they fund the food fight, because the food-fight disrupts and distracts from social democratic reform. taking even the “popular” side on throws you in the melee. 1/
@BenRossTransit i think it’s probably better for social democratic movements to explicitly absent themselves, as an organized force, from debates about social and cultural issues. of course individuals will have their views, but what should be explicit is a detente, when we advocate for social democracy, we leave them at the door. wherever society ends up on, say, puberty blockers as health care, we’ll all be better off if what we define as health care is provided by right. /fin
the mighty fuck around, the meek find out.
funny how the people who claim it’s “the groups” that make it so democrats don’t win somehow seem less exercised by the people who make it possible for them to do all the good and ill they do. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/07/26/if-i-were-the-plutocracy/index.html
even while he is standing for reelection, he is still the sitting president.
Lina would’ve won.
@rieyin The US allows certain drugs to be sold inside the United States, where the same drug is also sold in, eg, Canada. The drug might be produced by the same manufacturer, in the same plant, for both countries.
But if you try to bring that first-sold-in-Canada drug across the border, the US imposes its steep “tariff” in the form of legal risk.
The arrangement, like a tariff, protects the ability of sellers inside the US to charge much higher prices than prevails elsewhere. 1/
@rieyin But a tariff is charged based on where the manufacture took place, but with pharma, the “charge” comes by virtue of where the drug was first (legally) sold. /fin
@admitsWrongIfProven it’s a mark of absence of competition when a firm can be brutal to its stakeholders. (one isn’t brutal as directly with ones competitors, one can compete hard, but a business does so much not establish contracts on ungenerous terms with its competitors.)
the more you protect from foreign competition on strategic grounds, the more essential it is you ensure a brutally competitive industry domestically.
we're usually better at the first half of that than the second, unfortunately.
one way to think of it is we have huge effective tariffs on pharma products *first sold elsewhere* regardless of where they are produced.
it seems to me people in the US don’t love this. we maybe feel a little ripped off by comparison to our neighbors.
@akkartik i think your prescriptions have to be guided by ones (conditional) prescriptions. i’d not see a doctor who’d prescribe a drug she wouldn’t predict would meet a risk-benefit threshold. 1/
@akkartik being the change you want to see in the world is great, but not immune. lots of time there’s limited harm / cost / risk in it, so even if your predictions are pessimistic, a small chance of contributing to a virtuous network effect is worth it. especially if there’s a community that might make the same calculation. what complicates social choices is social outcomes are very difficult to predict, and small initiatives unpredictably yield avalanches! 2/
@akkartik so i’m definitely kind of with you in practice. i devote much of my time to enterprises i’m predictively pessimistic about that are actually very costly to me. but it’s precisely because i predict the predictiveness of my pessimism is limited that renders the practice quasi-justifiable! (it strikes me as quite analogous to to the famous irrational overconfidence of entrepreneurs.) /fin
@akkartik dog bites man.
years from now, where you least expect it, there will be sightings of dark brandon.
politicians draw the lesson being dickish is the superpower but it only works for a very special kind of dick.
“it was a lie,” he quietly admitted to himself, “but at least it was an honest lie.”
“you say you are an honest man, but *have* you read the terms and conditions?”