thetrw.bsky.social
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The American Century is ending. And it didn't even last a full century.
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JVL, have you read this piece, which lays out the case that DOGE is the plot of digital-elite reactionaries to essentially erase democratic constitutional governance and replace it with opaque algorithms they control, i.e. techno-authoritarianism? Bleak. www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-plot-a...
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"We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both." - Justice Louis Brandeis
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Whether or not the USA continues to be a constitutional liberal democratic republic is, at this point, very much an open question. But if we do, then I believe that there will have to be some significant updates to our constitutional order post-Trump. He has hacked it and exposed its weaknesses.
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Interesting to contrast this with the UK's parliamentary system, where a vote of no confidence (or even the likely threat of one) can push unpopular/incompetent/scandalous PMs aside (e.g. Truss, Johnson).
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It's been a long time coming. Check out How the South Won the Civil War by @hcrichardson.bsky.social: www.theguardian.com/books/2020/s...
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Same is true with regard to tariffs. You can bet there will be plenty of US importers looking to get waivers from Trump. We haven't finished investigating all the corruption from his first admin (e.g. foreign governments bribing Trump via his hotels). I expect far more illegalities in his second.
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I do believe that humans tend to make decisions on emotional bases and then look for publicly defensible "reasons" to support the decision afterwards, e.g. feeling positively about Trump (because of, or in spite of, his corruption, racism, etc.), then saying they voted for him because of inflation.
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This is the main problem I have with Cai's thesis here. Trump continually has a substantial net negative approval rating while Harris hovered around net zero during her campaign. Were folks not being honest in telling pollsters how they felt about Trump, or why they voted for him? Maybe.
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I love it when progs are like "Kamala didn't use woke language and she tacked hard to the center and she still lost, so clearly that's not the answer!" Uh, OK, but you're omitting the fact that Trump spent millions on ads of her on tape fully endorsing taxpayer-funded trans surgeries for prisoners.
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Seriously wondering whether liberal democracy will be able to survive the internet.
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LOL. Which do you think voters responded more to, Dems shifting immigration talk right during election (i.e. "adopting conservative lite positions") or the actual reality of Biden having allowed in millions of asylum seekers who got resettled around the U.S.? www.migrationpolicy.org/article/bide...
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We should ban use of content-recommendation algorithms on social media platforms. Humans curators could push content recs to all users or to subsets who have opted into a relevant interest category, but no more opaque automated systems poisoning the national bloodstream.
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Trump has revealed the deficiencies in the presidential system, which political scientists know to be a more brittle system, more prone to constitutional crises. I would prefer a parliamentary system (with ranked choice voting by public) like so many other liberal democracies have.
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It's nihilism as a governing philosophy.
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Trump is showing us all the ways that our 18th century Constitution no longer works in the 21st century. If American democracy survives, we're going to need to do a lot of amending after Trump.
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I honestly think it's much less about changing/abandoning legislative goals than it is about campaign messaging and how Dems talk.
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Maybe not, but his '16 campaign was definitely more about a populist economic message addressing inquality/class, not identity groups (although he did adopt more of that kind of messaging in '20 after, I'm sure, plenty of brow-beating for not using the "correct" language in '16).
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Yeah, might be better to target "the billionaire class and big corporations" or "the top 2%," etc. Still though, I think the general sentiment is right -- messaging should sound more like Bernie 2016 and less like NPR, Hillary 2016, etc.
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Jumping on Biden for using the term "illegal" when he responded to MTG in his SOTU speech! There is way more of this than you acknowledge, man. I can give you more example if you want.
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Well, they voted against their overall perception of the Democratic Party, perhaps. Yes, that's shaped by Dem voters (esp. the most vocal ones on social media) but also by what actual Dem candidates have said, if not during this cycle, in past cycles (e.g. the anti-Harris trans prisoner ad).
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Sincerely wondering if the courts will tell Trump no on something and then his admin just continues doing it anyway. Once that boundary is crossed is, I think, when we're inarguably in authoritarian territory.
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I think we may be looking at the end of the American-led post-WW2 order. Way bigger than a 10-15 year cycle.
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To save the internet, and possibly liberal democracy, we need to ban algos on social media.
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By all means, Dems should continue to take a stance opposed by 69% of Americans and ensure that it remains a high-salience issue by making unhinged remarks about it as a signifier of their moral purity. www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-...
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And Trump also had the benefit of celebrity, someone who appeared in Americans' living rooms for over a decade playing the role of a successful, decisive business executive on The Apprentice. He could never have won the GOP nom in '16 without that show. It will be difficult for GOP to replicate him.
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To successfully mimic Trump, one would need to be a natural con artist (i.e. sociopath) who lies fluently and for whom there's no real distinction between truth and lies. That allows him to "weave" and "talk out of both sides of his mouth," resulting in a candidate who is like a rorschach.
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No. The answer is not for Dems to campaign on the idea that gender transition surgery is a medical necessity, the same as treatment for cancer or diabetes. And to insist that it is, to the extent that taxpayers should pay for such surgery for prisoners, makes Dems look like the ones w/ a fixation.
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True. Harris smartly didn't lean into identity/woke politics at all. But Trump ads' anti-woke punches landed because of years of woke language culture among Dems/the left, including Harris herself saying she supported taxpayer-funded surgeries for trans inmates. It's just part of the Dem brand now.
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Ban recommendation algorithms. Make the internet human-curated again.
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Yup. The postmodern rorschach candidate. And here we are, once again, debating how much of what he said over the past year will actually translate into real-world actions and damage. Does he end up just playing golf (lol, nothing is real!) or does he destroy our rule of law, global economy, etc?