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convolver.bsky.social
What good is seeing-eye chocolate? What good is a computerized nose? What good’s Sanskrit read to a pony? Not much, I guess, not much at all.
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God, every one of those replies is “So you hate waffles” turned up to eleven.
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Walpole’s “George III,” the whole thing being a bit more on the nose than I like from my history these days.
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Can confirm ICE today started executing the brilliant strategy of “stop and frisk random people in a Fiesta parking lot,” so guess the Fourth Amendment’s gonna take a few more body blows before this is done.
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Soooo, how old was Cuomo when Clinton gave him HUD to run?
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I think there’s an insight there, yeah. The literature indicates that those with unstable self-concepts talk themselves into immoral behavior by “offloading” moral sanction (e.g., “everyone does it,” etc.), so I think that mechanism you describe is likely to be how it works with many.
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Not a chance in hell fifteen years ago I would have thought we’d land at “virtue ethics, but from the liberal-left,” but here we are.
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There’s kind of an implication here that a lot of folks with poor self-boundaries and/or unstable self-concepts will generally end up moving to the same place through social pressure, and I think that’s how you end up with things like MAHA.
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One thing I’m considering is that Trump is the dividing line between those with (to use analytic jargon) a strong self-concept and those without, and the latter‘s morality has been profoundly affected by their exposure to Trump and a radicalized social media environment.
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Hearing offline that US military personnel in Israel ordered to shelter from incoming missiles over the past few hours, but no confirmation that Site 512 was targeted.
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anti-corruption drive also disproportionately (negatively) impacted the elites of non-Russian Soviet republics, so that in turn gave rise to some of the regional irredentism that broke apart the USSR a few years later.
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The anti-corruption efforts created their own social stressors, which were somewhat ameliorated by economic reforms, but this meant moving a lot of economic activity out of the Brezhnev-era shadows into a more or less state-sanctioned space, which accelerated the demand for political reform. The /
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Basically, the reduction in geopolitical friction let Andropov and then Chernenko focus more directly on fighting corruption (e.g., the Uzbek cotton scandal) and attempting to deal with economic stagnation, which elevated relatively clean technocratic reformers (such as, of course, Gorbachev).
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Between Site 512 and CSG-1 operating in the area, I think it'd be surprising if the US military /wasn't/ providing at least early warning against Iranian counterattacks.
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Truly believe the one success of the USIC was discovering that Soviet policymakers genuinely believed nukes were about to pop off during ABLE ARCHER 83, which convinced Reagan to lower the temperature on his rhetoric and ended up creating enough breathing room for the USSR to collapse on its own.
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I knew folks who worked on that, and when the ad hit they panicked because they were already working 18-hour shifts and sleeping under their desks for a game that wouldn't come out for three more years. It was not a particularly stable working environment, to say the least.
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I’m sure it’s not coincidental that Netanyahu was facing down Haredi anti-conscription riots and an existential coalition defection this week, for sure.
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“They were playing one of the TRANSFORMER movies on the hotel channel and when we went to check on the Secretary around midnight he was surrounded by empty minibar liquor bottles and talking to the TV screen.”
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The way that party factionalism has so rapidly torn down all the Constitutional guardrails against tyranny between the branches of government is genuinely frightening.
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In my case, there's an academic with my name publishing works in my professional field, so every one of those emails is a handy prompt to read an article I'm generally interested in. (Actually citing those articles would require a bit of explanation, though!)
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The best I can come up with is that regulatory capture goes both ways, and their people aren’t prepared to fight on a non-regulatory/non-legislative battlefield. Starting to think a lot of corporate lobbyists are actually just sharp-toothed pets raised in captivity.
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Thing about the current right wing — and Trump’s Cabinet appointees almost uniformly demonstrate this — is that they don’t have an ideology, they have antisocial personality disorders that never got disciplined out of them.
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I have zero knowledge of immigration law, but the last decade has led to me a kind of untutored belief that immigration judgeships should be Article III judicial officers. This kind of behavior is repugnant to the orderly process of law.
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Yeah, my take is that if I’m half of a polarized electorate and my half has very tight agreement on issues, then I’ve got more room to maneuver than my opponent does to pick Off supporters, with the proviso that voters are not actually bags of policy preferences.
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That’s the one! Chalking up another win for “ideology is downstream of identity.”
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Yeah, you can have a really big tent if you’re only selecting on “hating somebody, anybody at all.”
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The question bank they used is illuminating; my takeaway is that all this is pretty much standard Democratic party plank stuff, but a /lot/ of Republicans disagree with their own party’s positions to greater or lesser degrees.
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My two takes on this: 1. We now have multiple Cabinet officials who have opened themselves up to criminal prosecution with this; and 2. It is my belief that the Presidential pardon power is inherently limited by the Take Care clause in the case of pardoning crimes relating to executive branch acts.
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Attacks on rail systems began in late summer '44, alongside the strategic assault on the Ruhr industrial networks, so it's hard to argue that the US could have gotten to significant logistic disruption prior to that.
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The US post-war bombing survey notes that bombing had limited effectiveness until 1944; the Schweinfurt attacks forced a total revision of US strategy, and it wasn't until spring '44, when the newly-introduced P-51 and P-47s had reduced down the Luftwaffe, that those kinds of attacks were possible.
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IIRC the medium-run revenue on tariffs over the past decade or so has been about $10bn/month, so I think the graph is bad.
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Somewhat interesting that screenwriter John Rogers (also on This Here App) studied physics as an undergrad and approached the brief as “make a goofy 1950s disaster movie with a ridiculous premise, but try to keep the science within not entirely implausible grounds.”
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His May numbers were tanking, and I can’t believe the last few days are going to make things better:
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Yeah, they were late to the cloud game but they’ve built out ≈50 (IIRC) DCs, and they’ve created (surprisingly to me, given my prejudices) a pretty robust solution. But it’s expensive for them given that they don’t (unlike AMZN, MSFT, or GOOG) have an existing need to build out large-scale compute.