Theo Landsman

It's all speculative, but case for PR statehood was stronger and more bipartisan (even if the case for DC statehood is also very strong) and the insistence on doing DC first because of intra-left disagreements on the path forward for PR was an early sign that we weren't going to make it.

This is getting a little crankish, but IMO the path forward was to get Manchin to be the 50th vote for PR statehood (maybe with R buy in, maybe with some sort of one time Filibuster carve out) then get the PR Senators to be the votes for DC statehood and filibuster abolition.

It's crazy that we had a functional and powerful speaker of the house for like 100-140 years because everyone understood that the dominant party would game admitting new states to ensure Senate dominance and then we just stopped and let our literal House of Lords analogue take over everything,

The teamsters current strategy seems to be that they are going to provide cover for and throw money at any Republican who makes remotely sympathetic noises at them but they aren’t actually going to compete for influence within the Republican sphere in any meaningful way.

There is a way you could do this (supporting Dan Osborn types to run in R primaries in hopelessly red districts) that I would understand, but donating to the NRCC is not just not it but seems to indicate a total failure to get it.

I hasn’t thought about it this way but seems pretty clear that with a little finessing you could get DC statehood AND move the U.S. closer to a national popular vote system.

There is probably a version of that sort of policy that would get tacit support from wealthy libs but its contingent on having the discipline not to throw any of the 'wrong' people in the camps which so far Trump's enforcers have not shown any discipline or motivation to achieve.

This is one of those policies where people are just never gonna be able to think through the second order effects (what driving is like when others are speed limited) until someone implements it, and then they will all be pleasantly surprised

This is the ball that gets hidden in a lot of electoral vs activist left arguments, the things you need to do to be a successful non-electoral leftist up to and including things like organizing a paramilitary mostly require the same skills and demand the same compromises as electoral stuff.

Under the right circumstances organizing can be very grounding. You don’t have the luxury of posting for insane activist clout if you are trying to get normy Starbucks baristas to sign up to your union.

Like under a speed governor equilibrium you wouldn’t experience more congestion because you would never catch up to the grandma driving the speed limit in the left lane and the asshole weaver guy behind you would never catch up to you.

I think there’s also a more understandable confusion here that under the current system driving fast can feel like prosocial behavior (you allow other cars to go fast and don’t force anyone to slow down) not understanding that congestion behind rule following drivers is itself caused by speeding.

This feels like a pretty tenuous reading of that statement IMO. Not strongly identified with either side but seems like a good example of what's being discussed here, IE the antitrust side making wild allegations and playing pretty fast and loose with what's objectively true.

I feel like the slippage is the point though. It would be fine to come up with another term for relationship maintenance, but what people are doing with the term emotional labour is looking for permission to treat maintaining their relationships as an unreasonable distraction from phone time.

I mean for what it's worth I am very sympathetic to the Dem establishment perspective here, it would be great if 'The Groups' were still strong enough to deliver votes, much better then where we are now. But you can't make it so just by pretending it never stopped.

The answer is clearly that people think if the abandoned factories get turned into yuppie lofts the rest of the neighborhood will shortly follow. But it's worth getting people to own that they believe you should never rehab or repurpose anything.

One thing that is clarifying here that I wish would get brought up more is that when people talk about gentrifying places like Williamsburg they are mostly saying that turning empty warehouses and factories into yuppy apartments and offices is bad. Initially no residences were displaced!

The claim that they represent a unified group of voters who will vote for you or vote against you in the next election based on whether or not you do what they ask.

Without trying to get into materialism vs post-materialism, it is clearly the case that you no longer need to negotiate with political elites who claim to represent anyone regardless of their politics and you can poach their voters out from under them with materialist or messaging based appeals.

I don't see this as primarily a left vs center or pro-groups vs anti-groups thing, lots of prominent issue groups don't make these claims and lots of left wing factions do despite having no control over or discipline within their memberships.

If you accept that pro-Israel groups can't deliver jewish voters and don't meaningfully represent the majority of them it calls into question not just the status of those groups within dem world but the status of every group that makes similar claims.

One thing that is sort of underrated with Israel stuff is that the Dem establishment desperately wants to negotiate with elites who can trade policy wins for votes rather than having to appeal to the electorate directly and the failure of Israel policy is part of a larger breakdown of that paradigm.

I don't think Mamdani or really any politician not named Trump has come close to the limits of how possible it is to be culturally omnipresent as a celebrity if they're simply willing to say yes to everyone who wants to film them.

It's a little bit 'At the end of the day the team with the most points is going to win the game' but I do think 'if you're great on camera and have momentum you should do as much media as humanly possible' is sort of underrated as a strategy because its exhausting and can feel humiliating.

That doesn't work if the place is fudging their order timing or hasn't notified the app that they're backed up. Basically the apps made the info environment around delivery much more antagonistic then it used to be in an integrated model.

During peak demand times, I would wager that you are more paying someone to wait in line for you then you are paying someone to deliver to you, which is it's own business model that people pay for, but they don't tend to think about delivery on those terms.

As someone who gets a lot of takeout in line with legions of doordashers who have all been waiting for 15+ minutes. A huge underrated problem with the business model is that the lack of coordination between the kitchens and the drivers means a bunch of downtime that never existed in the old model.

I think we're also just seeing the end of the road for Trump. He is/was a Schelling point for a certain kind of elite media + anti-establishment crank coordination that was very lucrative and valuable for all sides but as the end of the game nears defection becomes more and more tempting.

Find something you love as much as Eric Adams loves committing campaign finance fraud. He's got billionaires fawning over him and still doing it purely for the thrill.

I mean, surely the traditional conservative approach to posting is something like 'don't do it.' Musk is tuning the AI in a way that presumably attempts to replicate and is activating its corpus of text on online edgelord-ism something that has always invoked and been related to nazis.