Sam Levey

“Collection of Handwritten Letters from Children in Detention Center” sounds like an exhibit in the Holocaust Museum.

I really do think this is an excellent metaphor for the moment.

It really pays to remind ourselves frequently that this whole immigration "crisis" is made up out of whole cloth. There was no emergency,danger or problem, only a demagogue stirring up racist grievances for political advantage.

People who say this are clearly speaking aspirationally about a shared American creed they hold dear. “Have you heard of the Trail of Tears?” is not a very helpful response, because they probably have and the priority right now is moral opposition to fascism and not fake-educating each other.

Teaching macro be like "here's this idea about how people behave, pretty crazy rite. You've never heard of it because you don't personally do it. The empirical evidence that anybody else does it is very bad. Every paper must have it or at least address it or the paper can't be published."

It's actually a good thing that previously apolitical normies are finally getting angry and starting to speak out. We need the numbers in the streets and at the polls.

If your response to them is "no, fuck you, too late," then you don't actually care about stopping Trump. You're just preening.

we’re never returning to “normal “

that world is dead and gone

we create a new one, or we live in hell

IIRC though, the same surveys ask about both current conditions and future expectations

and if technology and population are roughly matched, then whichever side mobilizes its resources more fully will have the edge, even if the conflict is fought with high-tech weapons – mass overwhelms precision. This then undercuts your argument about inequality too.

IMO your argument is missing the logic of competitive arming. You point out that the bloated US defense sector does not absorb substantial labor, but in an actual war for survival, resource demands don’t stop at that level, they expand to absorb everything…because the other side is doing the same,

Also they're just sick. They're killing people and whether you think it's justified or not (obviously it's not) that should mean something. Instead they're running around laughing like an axe murderer in some terrible horror movie. Completely broken people

Americans relearning in real time that uncertainty is a necessary sibling of discretionary authority.

In my Foundations of HCI class, we’re in the midst of our social computing section, thinking about how to address online toxicities. Had the students play Masnick’s “Trust & Safety Tycoon” game in class yesterday. Their reactions: moderation is HARD... www.techdirt.com/2023/10/17/t...

Staggering

Headwind vs tailwind?

people's political affiliations are frequently not an expression of underlying ideology but an attempt to define their own identity and a reflection of their perceived (and desired) role in the social ecosystem, which in turn means they're a direct reflection of how they perceive that ecosystem

HOW VOTERS PICK A CANDIDATE:

-they observe the social environment (largely through media)
-they decide what role they want to play in that environment (respected? savvy? oppositional?)
-they pick the candidate they think fulfills that role
-they reverse-engineer an explanation for their pick

"normies do not care about this thing and so it is no use raising a stink" is imho just an excuse for not doing politics, which is the job of making normies care about something

The only check-and-balance that actually matters

The destruction of the East Wing is a reminder that America has violated the only check-and-balance that actually ends up mattering: www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/the-only-c...

This is very nice symbolically, but economically I don’t think it actually does anything, it’s not real leverage. The Treasury would have to sell more bonds to cover the lost revenue, but the states would be depositing the funds in banks, who would be buying the bonds. (Or else the Fed could.)

All of us are individually powerless. We can only form an effective opposition collectively. And when things need to happen on the scale we need them to happen, you’re simply not going to agree with every tactic every group deploys, never mind have a veto on them.

Fragility Is Getting Scary The opposite of risk management.

This, from @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social , highlights a consistent aspect of the second Trump Administration that should scare us all -- across a variety of areas (economy, health, climate, etc.), Trump is weakening our protections against the greatest risks. open.substack.com/pub/howthing...

The problem is that neither inventive design nor enforcement can cover every conceivable scenario, and so peoples’ hearts matter too. The heart makes you do the pro-social thing even if no one is looking.

"[A]ll universities have to do now is do nothing—no accepting the compact, no counter-offers, nothing—and the government will be left with no more power to coerce and control the First Amendment-protected activities of major American universities than it has today."

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.”

Diary of Anne Frank
January 13, 1943

On a productive day I can write about 400 lines of Manim code... which will be like 1.5 minutes of video😅

I still hate LaTeX with the passion of a thousand suns and believe strongly that it deserves to die a painful death..... but, in the AI era, it is a lot more manageable.

Working on an empirical paper sure is forcing me to dig deep into the NIPA manual....

The lesson of history is that tyrants cannot be appeased.

Appeasement only feeds their insatiable hunger for power.

Tyrants prey on people who feel unsafe and vulnerable.

But without mass submission, a tyrant is powerless.