@realcaseyrollins I think you are playing with words to console yourself. Life in Russia is pretty bad, if you are a military-aged male outside of certain elite ethnicities and geographies. You are likely to be sent to war in a way entirely unlike how Americans have been sent to war recently, into a “meat grinder”, a game of Russian roulette. Large groups of people are forcibly relocated or detained in very bad camps. 1/
@realcaseyrollins Israel/Palestine has gone from perpetrating a Jim-Crow-like apartheid to routinizing massacre and torture. 2/
@realcaseyrollins We in the United States put a glass wall around the period of the 1930s/1940s, we mythologized into the opposite of a fairy tale, but something equally distant from ourselves, our “normal lives”. Intellectuals like Hannah Arendt, who had just lived through it all, marveled at this in real time. 3/
@realcaseyrollins Nazis were a real political movement, like other political movements. They were not so special. Making them so — treating them as some extraordinary evil that came from out of space, incomparable to everything else — lobotomizes us. We’ve seen both in Russia and in Israel/Palestine wartime exigencies bring back what is not some weird occult work of Satan, but ways of being that derive from moral and logistical pressures. 4/
@realcaseyrollins “Fascism” is a very ordinary thing. It’s not extraordinary. It’s a primary color in politics, used to some degree by all political movements, but to importantly varying degrees. Ginning up an internal enemy as a source of movement coherence is its signature move. The Trumpists obviously do this. So does Biden (“MAGA Rpublicans”). But the degrees and frequency are quite different. 5/
@realcaseyrollins It’s policy choices, not ideological commitment or some deep inchoate evil, that would drive us to the kind of horrors we associate with fascism. People start doing terrible things when the “moral weather” is full of terrible things, terrible things must be done, better we do what we have to do to avoid being the victims of the terrors. 6/
@realcaseyrollins For example, choosing to round-up people unlawfully present, regardless of length of tenure, degree of connectedness to their communities, existence of citizen children, etc. would make for bad moral weather. Terrible things — from an ordinary moral perspective, watching what befalls som family you knew — start being done. Others in solidarity resist. The state responds eventually with violence against citizen “allies” preventing lawful deportations. 7/
@realcaseyrollins At this point, to much of the country, state violence is not legitimate. Some groups resist with violence of their own. Now the “moral weather” is terrible, and all kinds of things become possible. All of this is not so extraordinary in human affairs. It’s quite ordinary. More extraordinary is the long run we’ve had without such things. It’s an achievement we should be careful with. /fin
@realcaseyrollins remember how the story of the boy who cried wolf ends.
you’ll have to apply your own judgment when the cassandras are unreliable. but unreliable cassandras doesn’t mean no danger is there.
@realcaseyrollins you don’t hear it from me every cycle. i used to be almost indifferent, in the 1990s through Y2K. a lot of people would say, “yeah, and look at GWB” but even there, a lot of people forget that an Iraq War was pretty likely even under Gore. but i think the era of not-so-much difference is gone, and on one side the risk of real catastrophe is quite serious. (honestly the last two decades have been gradual catastrophe, but gradually might precede suddenly.)
@realcaseyrollins i mean, i remember when Europeans felt that way in 1933. so ridiculous.
i am quite concerned. sure, the base case is always we muddle on largely as we always have. but the risks, from my perspective, of things going very bad are quite serious if the guy i don't want is victorious.
@realcaseyrollins Me neither, but I’m far from immunized.
the problem is Congress has ceased to serve the function of Congress so the other two branches fight over usurping the role.
people get so stressed about running out of thyme, but parsley, sage, and rosemary are enough.
“As for the problems with what is sometimes termed ‘regulation by enforcement,’ that’s exactly the incentive structure the right wing has set up by kneecapping agencies’ abilities to set rules.” @lopatto https://www.theverge.com/24280387/gary-gensler-sec-chair-presidential-election-2024
@LesterB99 Interest rate policy ultimately has to become subject to democratic bounds. I have mixed feelings! People perceive now as a “high-interest” period, but from my perspective, growing up in the 70s and 80s, interest rates seem normal to low. Regardless, we can have the central bank tweak within bounds as a component of inflation / macro stabilization, but relying on it solely is a bad idea, and I think we probably want to cabin it to a range, something like 4% ± 2%.
Speaking of Bernie, a very good profile by @Ddiamond in, um, the Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/25/bernie-sanders-2024-election-campaigning-efforts/
This election season feels like an active shooter drill.
he asked the genie for a grand estate. he died instantly, but his children became very rich.
@dedicto @sjshancoxli seems apt!
@dedicto @sjshancoxli it sure feels like a near-death experience to me.
@dedicto @sjshancoxli Yes. The foundation upon which we all stand must be stable and worth preserving, not a grudging consolation prize granted from humiliating pity.
@dedicto @sjshancoxli exactly. if they get another chance, i have hopes they may finally be learning something. Biden’s domestic policy already reflects a real break with we-love-Google Obamaism, and the very public betrayal of liberal ideals by Musk and Bezos are harder to overlook than the whole rogues gallery of Crows and Leos and Kochs. if Democrats win, i think they do understand they were at some risk, small but real, of ending up in the camps.
@dedicto @sjshancoxli most people are adaptive, i think. they can be nice liberals under one social order, cruel bigots under another. they’ll gravitate towards whichever order seems most plausible to protect them from unwanted change and threats both social and economic.
@dedicto @sjshancoxli yeah. the fascism is a step farther than safetyism. i think it’s organized effectively by the plutocrats, because safetyism alone invites calls for social insurance, so plutocrats construct threats, an “enemy within”, that is not them and that social insurance can’t address.
@dedicto @sjshancoxli i think it takes a whole lot of social insurance before any of us are comfortable with a really dynamic prosperity. it’s like how safety is a more basic element of Maslow’s hierarchy than “self-actualization”, growth. once safety is threatened, a bitter rentier stasis seems better than risking any alternative. some of us are more comfortable with risk and dynamism than others. but i think as a social generality this is very broadly true.
one perhaps salutary consequence of Donald Trump is he’s exposed just how pathetic plutocratic “masters of the universe” really are.