really a fascinating meditation on the freedoms and burdens fragmented political spheres vs centralist attempts to order and rationalize them and then decentralist romanticizations in reaction. balance it strikes me is the thing, but balance so often is just a nice name for conflict. https://lateralthinkingtechnology.wordpress.com/2024/06/19/the-cult-of-the-patchwork-chinese-modernity-1978-2012-and-the-holy-roman-empire/ ht @guan

if we were better at housing, they would welcome us as liberators.

@eyesquash but currents aren’t agents. they don’t choose themselves. we don’t pretend we can hold molecules accountable for them.

one way to describe donald trump is he likes to be a dick to friends and a friend to dicks.

the career paths now are health insurance ceo, only fans, and uber driver.

@gooser3000 "taxpayers" also are not a coherent agent.

"voters" are not a coherent agent, have radically diverse interests, no means of being held accountable in common. constituted as "voters" we are a phenomenon, not an agent, no more constructive to blame than a lightning strike. if our behavior should change, then our institutions must.

if luigi had been convicted some time ago and was on federal death row, would biden have commuted his sentence today?

tired: peace through strength

wired: peace through conquest

are there no rare earths in Antarctica?

“I cannot escape the sense that those pundits who really believed that Donald Trump was going to embrace restraint in foreign policy have been played for fools.” @dandrezner https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/donald-trump-american-imperialist

@realcaseyrollins because we mutually insure one another and the Federal government has far more capable and flexible financial tools than the states.

@farah look into pneumonia. antibiotics might help. (i’m still recovering from a rough month.)

@akkartik i’m sorry. i’m a vector.

@akkartik very few checks. there’s the war powers act, a custom at best honored in the breach. i wonder how resistant the military would be to some bizarre adventure, and whether Trump would have the energy to knock heads in order to insist.

@akkartik i guess i’m not as sanguine. it’s really weird. hopefully it’s just bullshit, but if it isn’t it amounts to an open concession of reversion to great power sphere-of-interest politics, which is exactly what Russia and China have been demanding, and post-Cold-War Pax Americana, for all its flaws, has resisted.

@carolannie right. it would kill NATO more definitively than a mere withdrawal (which a future government might reverse). there would be no effective Article 5 counter to NATO’s biggest power.

a panama thing, let alone some greenland / canada / mexico thing, would instantly justify in retrospect russia’s ukraine thing and in prospect china’s taiwan thing. kind of what a russian-asset american president might attempt.

“We become one of the most dangerous kinds of people — a cruel person with a clean conscience.” @davidfrenchjag https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/22/opinion/christmas-jesus-power-humility.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare