@admitsWrongIfProven whatever it is, we are irredeemably within it and have little choice but to work our way through it.
@GuerillaOntologist if popular sentiment as ascertained by polling numbers were “the authentic will of the people”, then should we replace elections or legislative outcomes with polling numbers?
i also think our political outcomes are plutocratic, poorly serve the general welfare. I’m glad to use Gilens+Page to help make that case.
but args abt democratic “preference aggregation” i think ultimately have to be consequentialist, not framed in terms of accuracy in adducing some preexisting truth.
“We allowed markets to produce a class of politically connected billionaires, and defenders of this outcome foolishly argued that it would be to everyone’s benefit. Now that enough billionaires have lined up behind fascism and authoritarian consolidation, it’s clear that liberal governments today and in the future will need to figure out ways to greatly reduce the wealth and social power of that class overall.” @adamgurri https://www.liberalcurrents.com/pluralism-partisanship-and-patriotism/
it’s the authentic will of the people when they seem to agree with me.
it’s the way the system is rigged when it appears that they do not.
(hint: there’s no such thing as the authentic will of the people independent of the system by which it is ascertained or constituted.)
someone is not even wrong on the internet.
@gl33p Yes! There are real tensions between stabilization and stability! (This was a major theme of the blog macroresilience, which was excellent.)
@gl33p (have you seen what the S&P 500 is doing, after a brief flirtation with rationality in April? or the reemergence of GFC-style special purpose vehicles by the Fed to save the banks in 2020? then de facto insuring all deposits during the Silicon Valley Bank crisis in 2023? maybe things change under the chaos monkey, but so far i think stabilizing finance has remained a lodestar.)
the natural lifecycle of an asset class is
1. succeed unconventionally
2. fail conventionally
3. bailout
4. enjoy state backing and stabilization indefinitely
@b0rk maybe one way to do it would be by contradiction. suppose there was no add, commit was a one step process, it always just snapshotted the full state of your working directory. 1/
@b0rk you might get frustrated, you’d want to commit but there’d still be some file not ready. you’d have to mv it to some temporary place commit, mv it back. or maybe you have changes that logically are about multiple things, you’d like to be able to attach a message like “implement feature X” to some changes and “fix bug Y” to others. 2/
@b0rk add and the “staging area” constitute the feature, the improvement over one-step commit, that let you control what gets snapshotted (allowing the convenience of unfinished or temporary work in your working dir) and how changes (even changes within a single file) get labeled. /fin
remember when a New York Times editor got fired for running a Tom Cotton opinion piece arguing in favor of what the President is now doing routinely?
there’s a lot of ruin in a nation, but eventually it’s going to matter just how much.
“if we are moving away from strictly economic determinants of voter attitudes, it might worth asking about whether the extreme wealth of leading Democrats matters.” @DeanBaker13 https://cepr.net/publications/nyt-columnist-thomas-edsall-trashes-deliverism-should-the-people-of-texarkana-feel-delivered/
i know it seems like they are cynically overstating how dangerous the cities are, but maybe it’s a sincere and understandable fear response given how deeply most city dwellers detest them.
we're phasing out civil aviation because contrails have failed to earn the public's trust.
“America sings on Navy Pier and the many other places where citizens do better than politicians at facing the challenge of creating durable multicultural democracy.” @DanLittle https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2025/08/real-multicultural-democracies.html
if you want to know an administration that was full of RINOs, according to the second Trump administration, it was the first Trump administration.
if depression is learned helplessness, we are as a polity collectively depressed, and making rash, dysfunctional choices as a consequence.
it’s disconcerting when you realize we are living in a country whose the state follows laws only as a matter of habit, whose leaders override those laws and act on whim whenever they choose to, until, over time, there is not much left of the old habits of law.
i don’t get why the humans tolerate the indignity of shitting, nearly every day.
if ai comes and takes our jobs we could just hire people to give a fuck about one another.