That Lucky Loser

As much as we rag on these games for having horrible models of history/politics/military theory and the fanbases they attract, there isn't anything inherently wrong with enjoying them because if you look hard enough *everything* is problematic

I think the Republican pitch for midterms is going to sound something like this

I mean the big reason to want a public opinion is that it serves as a rate setting mechanism for the insurance market & also as a backstop for Medicaid in states that opted out of the expansion. It is in fact good public policy.

The "dirty" secret of the Public Option is that it wouldn't drive private insurance out of business as right wingers feared & left wingers hoped, it would simply force insurers & providers to standardize the rates paid for healthcare & help keep those low across the board.

there's a picture of the 2024 PHB in the dictionary next to the word "mid" and it literally does not matter because the people hunger for Third Space The Game.

Food insecurity is also likely to escalate disordered eating patterns among marginalized groups, as my first longform story was about how oppression factors into mainstream treatment for eating disorders, so this will cost BIPOC LGBTQIA+ disabled lives in particular: prismreports.org/2023/09/13/b...

a hot take about academia: it is both too activist and not activist enough. the endless focus on problematizing critiquing, etc etc often degenerates into navel gazing, while there is often a lack of high-quality outcome oriented empirical work on "what could make social institution XYZ work better"

My own solution in the past has been to speak of a political structure - vassalage - which connected kings, aristocrats and retainers, and then an economic system - manorialism - which connected aristocrats and peasants.

I can explain that in a simple, foundational model, which we can build on.

The biggest challenge is convincing people that things could be different and that their actions matter.

It’s been accepted as common sense wisdom from people who hold firm to the “nasty, brutish, and short” vision of humanity articulated in The Leviathan.

“Virtue signaling” has been an all-purpose tool to invalidate any form of advocacy which isn’t centered around selfishness.

the post office is a public service. it doesn’t need to make money. public transit doesn’t need to make money. the library doesn’t need to make money. some things exist for the public good and we desperately need lawmakers to stop thinking about them in terms of capitalism. these are not businesses.

A vain, immoderate faith in these institutions made it possible to overlook the fact that their vitality was gone. The machine could still be heard clattering along, so no one asked if it was still doing its job” - Carl von Clausewitz on Prussia in 1806

it won't happen automatically. but there is very obviously an opportunity for ambitious types who want to quite literally save the American republic to have their names written in history. crowns are in the gutter waiting to be picked up

The median voter isn't a pureed balance of elite centrist takes, they're somebody who has a passionate opinion about vehicle registration fees but couldn't name the current vice president.

when I say "liberal," I mean "centrist who believes in all the basics of Western neoliberalism" but when Chris Hayes says liberal, he means "progressive who believes in a degree of regulation of capital" but when the cheeto says "liberal" he means "anyone left of Reagan"

The lesson to be learned from “Disco Elysium” was not the use of the second-person narrative, nor magical-realist alternate histories, nor different voices in your head. The lesson was to write deeply personal stories without compromise, to lose your fear that your own voice might not fit in.

The thing about Mamdani in this moment is that he is telling people that they do not have to simply accept what's on offer [and you see how much powerful interests HATE that]. He is doing this in just a couple of areas. Others could do the same focusing on the areas of life that most speak to them.

i believe electoralism has to be part of any political movement. but also: we are seeing in real time the limitations of a party and/or movement that simply cannot conceive of politics as anything BUT electoralism. hard
to imagine a better illustration than the nascent Posting Wars

I’m not an Absolute Coffee Guy so maybe Mr Cena is full of it but this absolutely cracked me up.

they want to steer lower-class Americans into trades precisely because they don't want more competition for their special little snowflakes for the laptop jobs.

Homeless camps are a policy failure, but "clearing homeless camps" isn't a policy solution, it's the state harassing people for the crime of embarrassing the state with its policy failure.

Let’s try this: “Science” employs certain methods of interrogating the world, usually in conjunction with mathematics, to arrive at provisional answers of varying utility, which in turn occasion new interrogations. “Humanities” employ other methods to the same end. We live by both.

there is no hell hot enough for people who hate the homeless

Severance main cast

You probably didn't pick up on it, but in the TV show Severance, the severance procedure is a very subtle metaphor for how people have to act differently at work than they do at home. It's a little hard to notice at first but trust me, you'll see it if you look hard enough.

"If someone from [prison] moved into your neighborhood, would you want that person to have spent the past 10 years fighting for his life ... or someone who had spent the time attending classes, gardening, and playing ping pong?"

Something I've changed my mind about is how much of the war on inflation that was central to the birth of neoliberalism was an actual product of mass opinion and not just elite desire for austerity and the disciplining of labor.