Ravi Veriah Jacques

That graph is purely weekly active users of ChatGPT - which people have to choose to use.

Extraordinary

Mamdani’s a great exemplar of this. He’s much louder on the economic than the social - but is still v socially progressive. And he brings people along with him, by being fun, joyous, charming. An antidote to the worst tendencies of the left over the last 10 years.

From the latter crowd, I see lots of proclamations about who they don’t want voting for them. An awful, awful way of doing politics. Any left wing party needs to be a big tent and also bring people along. You persuade by persuading, not condemning, castigating and moralizing

Seeing the You Party schisms - Britain has a rich socialist heritage, and it’s precisely the death of that tradition over the past 40 years that has contributed to the country’s decline.

US-style identity politics - important, but far less essential.

Reading the literature - I’m often left with the same feeling, that there’s a specific way I’m meant to feel about and talk about my body. And I kind of hate it.

I was also able to write things I now couldn’t given I’m more distanced from the worst of my suffering

I’ve been able to start writing again recently in little spurts - and all the tiny things I wrote when I was at my most severe have proved unbelievably useful (don’t know if that’s any consolation)

I feel this so much - there are so many powerful voices that would add so much to our understanding of the world, sickness, and disability that are just silenced by illness

However, you’re more likely to perceive the world through the lens of your impairment if your impairment is what disables you most of the time as opposed to lack of societal accommodation. And that perspective appears less because those people don’t become academics. 5/5

Impairment/disability also applies to more severe conditions - in some hunter gatherer societies, the severely unwell were actually looked after with great care while in the late 19th century they were liable to end up in awful institutions. 4/

If you’re in academia - your bodily function has to be strong enough to allow for fairly high level functioning. So you’re more likely to place emphasis on the ways society doesn’t accommodate you. It’s a broad generalization, but that’s what’s likely to be most disabling. 3/

So eg in some societies, the blind are considered incapable of work. In others, accommodations are made so they can work. In others, there are mythologies surrounding the blind - so an impairment comes to mean v different things in different societies and is thus disabling to different extents 2/

Ah yeah - so the usual breakdown is:

Impairment: the way in which someone’s body or mind diverges from the ‘norm.’

Disability: the society-specific ways that impairment prevents people from social and economic participation. 1/

Too much disability history and theory is written by people for whom disability supersedes impairment. I want histories written by the severely disabled - the people who don’t end up in academia

UBI will continue to be a dull, wonkish debate until it’s quite suddenly the only feasible policy standing in the way of societal collapse. Which isn’t even an exaggeration if we’re talking about a 20-30% unemployment rate in coming decades

Afterlife - a case where the intelligentsia has a radically lower opinion than the majority of the population, and is fundamentally wrong.

Miranda Priestley would fix me

By the time these studies are published, the models are always about 2 years out of date… And 2 years of AI progress is *a lot*

Goddamn does a lot of the literature on disability and capitalism idealise feudalism

Difficult to think of an institution that needs AI more than the NHS.

There’s truth in that but I think it’s overstated. There’s a reason that at the technological frontier you have America followed by China with Europe a way back.

Tech stocks are the most volatile. I generally trust the valuation of other large US companies

American capitalism is just impressive.

In the West, we default to interpreting China through the frame of autocracy partly because there’s truth in it but mostly because it makes China instantly knowable and intelligible. When in actual fact most of us know next to nothing. So so so many more interesting and powerful frames.

Esp tech.

I actually think all of this is a really good thing for the left. One of the issues facing European progressive parties is that there actually isn’t that much wealth in Europe. But America is so fucking wealthy. Gives you a whole range of possible left wing policy instruments.

The rentierism is a huge problem but is shared with Europe.

The thing is that the numbers do reflect some truth about America - if you compare it to other developed countries, it invariably outperforms them in terms of the most advanced industries.

The rewards are of course distributed anything but evenly, but the propensity of the American economy to just grow, grow, grow is so impressive.

The main reason China won’t surpass America in the very near future.

Seeing lots of ppl whine about the second order effects of rent freezes - as if second order effects of housing crises don’t exist. And building enough housing stock to meaningfully lower rents absolutely needs to happen, but is a long-term process.

Mamdaniiiiiii. Extraordinary how much better that campaign was than Kamala’s

I’m convinced a huge amount of it is just Islamophobia, a word you’re not meant to use in 2025.

Zohran ❤️❤️