I will repost most of my comment from the check-in thread...
My fantasy was something like an #OKEveryoneoutofthepool hashtag and a mass exodus or something like that*. But..
My follows have become my internet curation mechanism and it is excellent for following election results so will probably stick around on until then. But I think it is over for me sometime relatively soon. Main thing I would miss other than election stuff would be some niche follows I have discovered; I guess most will also have some other channel. But I have gotten spoiled by the aggregation.
At some point I do think continued engagement will be come willingly being a pawn in the global urge to autocracy... or maybe leaving will be. The pawns are uncertain on how to best avoid being used in the service evil banality..
As someone I follow pointed out, if you want to know who is celebrating on Twitter do a search of the N word and see the accounts glorying in now being able to use it.
Have had a number of main platforms for engagement over the course of my internet life, so what is one more. Which will be?
*I really do want to help inflict some financial pain on the fucking dickhead.
Tribel seems to be being warned against by seemingly credible people I follow.
Twitter is annoying because you need to log in to read more than like five tweets in a stream. I logged out this morning.
I haven't even logged in on my phone since I got this phone.
Even I -- who have never used Twitter in any significant way -- will be checking in to see the former president's first tweet. (The account is still suspended at this writing.)
The demise of blogs was the end of real hope for the internet.
Twitter is annoying because you need to log in to read more than like five tweets in a stream.
nitter.net is your friend here. Anonymous Twitter browsing, read as much as you want.
I have the twitter app on my phone. I even have 2 accounts so I can follow a couple of people that blocked me inexplicably. I don't feel like it matters much whether I boycott Twitter- Twitter has never earned a dime from me, but it looks like many of the people I follow will be leaving, so I guess I will too. Where will I go? Into the woods?
I'm not sure if I should be embarrassed or proud at how much my Reddit consumption ramped up during the pandemic. But anyway that's what I'd replace Twitter with. I don't know what discord is.
6 is helpful! Less helpful today than 6 months ago, but still.
8 is the truth...
I'm wondering how peep got blocked.
I can't believe we're letting Trump out of the dungeon.
Twitter didn't win him the White House in 2016, it won't win him the White House in 2024 either:
"Twitter likely persuaded independents to vote against Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, but had no effect on other elections." https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/how-twitter-affected-2016-presidential-election
Trump voters are older, uneducated white rural people. They don't use Twitter. They get their news and views through traditional media. Letting Trump back on Twitter won't change that - if anything, it might re-solidify anti-Trump feelings among younger independents. The traditional media will win it for Trump, if he wins.
Yeah. Trump won because of CNN and Fox.
Ok, what are everyone's favorite Reddit communities?
These aren't news-related, but two of my deepest loves are:
1. BORU, or Best of Redditor Updates. I find it unbelievably satisfying to read what happened after the person wrote in for advice, or posted about an issue, or whatever. I feel like I get to know how humanity actually works in a deep way by reading these.
2. MomForAMinute: people who don't have a mother that they can turn to in their life for a given situation write posts about whatever's bothering them, and then the mods, or the commenters, or whoever, write incredibly tender caring responses back in loco parentis.
15/16 are TOTALLY missing the point. Trump voters don't follow him on Twitter, but Fox and CNN certainly do, and in their relevant styles, use Twitter to feed their latest breathy takes.
Twitter as an unfettered hub for conspiracy theories and the like is going to cause many problems though.
14: How? The question is why. The answer in one case is that I made a joke in my reply that the person didn't like(not that San / dra New / Man told me, but that at seems like a plausible explanation). In the other 2 cases, I have absolutely no idea.
18: Amen. In the grand scheme of things, not many people actually watch Fox News, either.
18: no, I suspect traditional media's failure to cover Trump properly would have happened whether or not he had a Twitter account. I don't think you can credibly argue that Fox --
FOX! FFS! FOX! ACTUAL FOX! ---
-- would have turned the pitiless searchlight of its critical journalism upon Trump if it weren't for the bird app. They like Trump now when he's not tweeting, they liked Trump in 2015 when he was tweeting. They'll keep liking him.
Evidence: Trump's post-presidential approval on 1 February 2021 - right after they kicked him off Twitter - was 56.8% unfavourable/ 38.8% favourable.
Now, after a year and a half cut off from the vital pipeline to the national media that only Twitter could give him, his approval is...
55.2% unfavourable/39.7% favourable.
That's not what would convince me at all. What I want to know is the percent of airtime that Trump occupied before and after getting kicked off twitter. The Trump-scale has nothing to do with approval/disapproval ratings. The opposite of Trump is Ignoring Trump.
Granted, getting kicked off twitter coincided with the end of his presidency. But I will want to know how coverage of him increases (or not) when he gets back up raging on a large scale again.
My secret fantasy though is now that Trump is so thoroughly pitted against Republicans, that amplifying his voice somehow hastens their demise.
Long term, Trump on Twitter is bad for Republicans but in the short term he is their best tool for GOTV. Every close house race now will have at least one of its remaining news cycles dominated by local media reporting about whatever he tweets about the GOP candidate. Sinclair Broadcasting is going to have a field day with that shit.
22: Because Trump has been much less in the headlines, we can now prove that media attention to Trump has also never had any impact.
Ok, what are everyone's favorite Reddit communities?
I use Reddit a lot, but I don't really like any communities on it qua communities. I couldn't tell you the username of a single Reddit poster. Part of it is the site's godawful design, but also way too many of them are mostly about posting memes and/or screenshots rather than promoting discussion or being helpful/informative.
27 is true. I follow a lot of communities that are at best 50% crap.
I don't like the homepage at all, though. Too much off-putting stuff. If I don't curate a feed of stuff that is generally non-toxic, it makes me unhappy.
Reddit and city-data seem to be where people go to talk about real estate and schools. I read a lot of city data stuff but never posted because signing up looked too cumbersome.
27, 26: Do you guys use the old interface? That is what my daughter recommends. She also recommends rif (reddit is fun) for the phone.
I just use the new/regular Reddit. Idk.
Am with 18 and 26. 15 and 22 is an annoyingly reductive take.
That said I have been mixed on the Trump ban. (not so much right after Jan. 6, but ongoing). I do think this post-election is going to be a shitshow of disinformation. I think Musk owning Twitter will marginally increase the severity of it (if Trump is on that will be some part of it, but not the most significant in my thinking. But who knows?)
Me too. I mostly read it on my phone but I'm not logged in on my phone.
Do you guys use the old interface? That is what my daughter recommends. She also recommends rif (reddit is fun) for the phone.
I generally just use the website in Chrome, if it blocks me from something in particular I use the Baconreader app.
32: I still blame CNN (and other mainstream media) for making Trump a viable candidate by giving him unlimited free airtime.
Annoyingly reductive I'll admit to, but there are a lot of links in the chain here from "Trump is on Twitter" to "Trump wins elections" and I am really not sure that any of them are particularly loadbearing. Trump has other ways of getting the word out. He is still holding enormous in-person rallies, and his blog statements get plenty of media coverage - he just isn't doing as many of them at present as he used to do tweets.
As the election gets closer - and I mean 2024 - he's going to be saying more stuff and that is going to get him more coverage regardless of which social media channels he has access to. He'll blog it if he has to and it'll still get covered.
Every close house race now will have at least one of its remaining news cycles dominated by local media reporting about whatever he tweets about the GOP candidate.
"Trump, the tireless worker on behalf of the electoral prospects of his fellow Republicans" would certainly be a new facet of his character.
32.last: And I am expecting at least one event on the order of the Brooks Brother riot with regard to counting mail-in ballots (somewhere in Pennsylvania being a prime candidate) and/or some disruption at the polls.
Trump has other ways of getting the word out.
Here's the thing: he super doesn't. Have you not seen how deflated he's been in the past two years? Are you talking about Parler or Truth?
He is still holding enormous in-person rallies
I'm pretty sure they're not generally enormous anymore, except maybe this coming weekend in Florida.
his blog statements get plenty of media coverage - he just isn't doing as many of them at present as he used to do tweets.
Exactly. I don't even know how you're saying this with a straight face. He was tweeting an average of like 27 times a day. He was President Twitter.
We know that Trump rallies never made any difference, because the declining attendance hasn't had any impact on his approval ratings. It's science!
Literally nothing about individual media or social media makes any difference -- not Fox News, not the NYT, not Twitter -- because we can show that changes in each of these have no impact on Trump's popularity.
As to what is happening today with people I follow on Twitter, folks are reporting a noticeable but relatively small (on the order of .5% from the few I've seen) drop off in followers.
He was tweeting an average of like 27 times a day. He was President Twitter.
Emphasis here on the word "President".
I think, as you admit in 23, the fact that Trump getting banned coincided with him losing the presidency makes it very difficult to examine this question rigorously. I'm sure he got loads less airtime and coverage in March 21 than in March 20, because in March 20 he was president.
But if there had been a massive sustained drop in Trump's popularity immediately after he got banned from Twitter, and I tried to argue that Twitter had zero to do with Trump's popularity, I think you'd point to that drop as good evidence that I might be wrong.
As for 42, a point which pf is so proud of that he's made it twice already: what changes can you point to in those media that might have had an effect on Trump's popularity? Twitter actually banned Trump. The NY Times did not. It hasn't learned, it hasn't changed. It will give him a load of free coverage when he starts his campaign next year, just as it did in 2015.
35: Oh yes, I do think CNN was probably the key media org in really boosting Trump in 2016 (NYT a close second). Fox was always going to Fox (they have actually become much more information terroristic since 2020), and the main enablement done by NYT/WaPo/major networks was an accumulation of their actions over the previous 20+ years. CNN was much more instrumental in the early going with the waiting for Trump shots, and then the employment of specific Trump defenders when mainstream Rs would not do it. (Some of whom like Corey Lewandowski were certainly operating on NDA from the campaign, something not revealed to the audience*). Zucker was one of the main creators/enablers of Trump the Public Figure. Also see this piece from 2020 discussing some revelations about Zucker's sycophancy (refers to trump as "The Boss" to Michael Cohen for instance--I'm sure a leftover from "The Apprentice" ) from early 2016*.
*All of this adds to my fury at Zucker's utterly performative piece of BS with regard to the ginned up outrage over Donna Brazille giving HRC advance notice of questions at a debate. Zucker wrote and made public a very outraged letter about it just before the election. The recorded call to Michael Cohen was the day of an R primary debate and in addition to being effusive about DJT's performances he offered advice. Total fucking destructive dick.
I know this is a bit astray from the twitter stuff, but as it did not get much coverage when it came out, here is longish excerpt from his call with Michael Cohen. Square this with his angry scolding of Brazille. (I will add Donna Brazille is not someone who I take pleasure in defending; really dislike her politics in general).
"I think the other guys are going to gang up on him tremendously," Zucker said. "And I think he's going to hold his own, as he does every time. He's never lost a debate. And you know what? He's good at this. ... He's going to do great."
"I'm very conscious of not putting too much in email, as you're a lawyer, as you understand," Zucker later told Cohen while referring to Trump as "the boss."
"And, you know, as fond as I am of the boss, he also has a tendency ... if I call him or I email him, he then is capable of going out at his next rally and saying that we just talked and I can't have that, if you know what I'm saying."
"It's not that I don't want to talk to him every day. I've just got to be careful, because, I've just got to be careful," he added. "I just don't want him talking about it on the campaign trail. ... But you know what? I'm going to give him a call right now and I'm going wish him luck in the debate tonight."
"You know what you should do?" Zucker advised Cohen. "Whoever's around him today should just be calling him a con man all day so he's used to it, so that when he hears it from [Sen. Marco] Rubio, it doesn't matter. 'Hey con man, hey con man, hey con man.' He thinks that's his name, you know?"
Meanwhile, fuck Elon Musk in the ass with a meathook, what a fucking piece of shit.
There's no real reason for me not to delete my dead Twitter account at this point, and even logged-in the site has become almost unusable over the last year (showing me the same tweets after 20 refreshes, etc). I do wonder how Musk, or anyone, would turn it into a money-making enterprise. It's literally designed around limitations. Of the planned changes Musk has announced, "you can be really offensive" is the one that seems to have gotten the most traction. Is Gen Z suddenly going to adopt it? Will it be used exclusively for geopolitical trolling? It's such a bizarre platform.
An interesting discussion about the purchase-- "Welcome to hell, Elon". Don't agree with all of it, but a quick fun read.
Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You're the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.
As for 42, a point which pf is so proud of that he's made it twice already: what changes can you point to in those media that might have had an effect on Trump's popularity?
I really don't think it's best practices to chide me for repetition, and then ask in the same sentence that I repeat a point I've already made.
Oh yes, I do think CNN was probably the key media org in really boosting Trump in 2016 (NYT a close second).
I think Drum's take on Fox News (it's all Fox's fault) is actually fairly well-argued, but in general, I think that in this context, citing the NYT (for example) is mainly useful as a synecdoche representing "the media."
(Am I using "synecdoche" correctly there? Even after looking it up, I lack confidence and am tempted to substitute "shorthand." But I think syncecdoche is a little more precise for my purposes.)
50: I admit it will give me joy if, as I expect, Musk loses billions on this. But it won't actually solve any problems, except those of the people who used to own Twitter.
@50 A lot of predictions in that article. Let's see how many come true.
Anyway. Censoring is just tagging + removal. There is no reason why the tagging cannot continue with removal outsourced to the user. Users can opt-in or opt-out of filtering content based on tags associated with that content. Advertisers can insist that their ads be displayed in conjunction with content having (or lacking) certain tags. Content can still be reported - it just gets tagged and therefore automatically removed from the feeds of people who have configured their accounts to screen content having that tag.
Hell, companies or groups could provide tag-filtering configurations. Users could adopt such configurations through a simple user interface. You want to see the tweets that the NYT thinks are fit read? Download the NYT tag-filtering configuration and never again be troubled by an indecent tweet.
54: So for it to work right, every active user has to read and appropriately flag at least one "die [slur]" bot-tweet per day?
I tweet maybe once a month and have a couple hundred followers (my most recent accomplishment was a retweet by Sifu) and I am quick on the block button. Almost at the level of if some uses laugh-cry emojis they're blocked. I looked at the profile of someone who I blocked for this and was entirely vindicated.
The most widely viewed tweet I ever had was a modest political joke and resulted in someone tagging my employer claiming I was discriminatory so any sign you're 1) an asshole and 2) wasting your time engaging with my meaningless account and you can fuck off.
Musk will either wreck it or he won't; the one point that was new to me today is that Twitter has historically been very aggressive in defending against data requests from governments, and that's something that could quietly change, and it would be very consequential for some people.
Also see people saying Musk is in bed with the Chinese government. I don't have good info on that.
@55 No. Twitter's internal Committee of Public Safety can continue to operate exactly as they current operate. Just rather than deleting or suspending an account that they believe spreads, for example, covid misinformation, they tag that account "Covid Misinformation" (or that tweet "Covid Misinformation"). People whose settings exclude accounts or posts with that tag don't see that tweet.
But users could add their own tags! People could choose to not filter tags from their choice of influencers. Twitter could monetize that - charge a fee per number of people choosing to whitelist your tweets.
And this is completely orthogonal to bot-screening. If a brand-new account starts posting crypto-currency advice sixty times a second you shut that shit down.
58.1: Hopefully excluding is an opt-out process. Otherwise the new user experience will be quite something: "Which of the following would you like to exclude? * Racism * Sexism * Antisemitism * Anti-abortion propaganda * COVID misinformation" (and so on for 20 tags)
I can truly never tell when anyone is trolling anymore.
I do wonder how Musk, or anyone, would turn it into a money-making enterprise. It's literally designed around limitations.
I don't think anyone can. It's just fundamentally not a good business model. One of the most interesting parts of the Musk texts that came out as part of the lawsuit, to me, was when Jack said he thought Twitter should ideally exist at the protocol level. That seems right to me, although I'm baffled that he apparently thought selling the company to Musk was a plausible step toward that goal.
@59 Totally! New users could have the option of selecting a recommended policy that includes default settings. You might have a list of policies with different sponsors: the DNC filter set, the RNC filter set, Xi's greatest hits, the ISIS filter set, etc...
Isn't the whole point of spreading covid misinformation to get it to people who don't want to see it and who won't know it is misinformation?
Whitelaw, Greylaw, and Blacklaw Twitter
@63 I think those who spread such things have more of a wake up sheeple motivation. But filtering and tagging achieves the same result as automatic removal among those inclined to avoid such content.
Ohhh - you could delegate tagging. A fact checker could publish tags. An aggregator (e.g., NYT) could adopt those tags into its policy. Users that rely on the NYT policy could then be relying on the fact checker without having to deal with the fact checker directly.
This seemed about right to me:
basic argument is that content moderation is the key feature of social media. He's right that having the same entity trying to build and sell cars in China and also own a moderated global public forum will lead to pressure on moderation coming from car investment.
between this and fb's meta fiasco, the big winner will be tiktok, so Xi.
65: tiktok is winning because for lots of people, reading 140 chars is apparently too much effort. If handrolled filtering can be published and shared, ALex Jones' and great firewall style filters will also exist, and their authors will lobby for those to be defaults/prominent.
Another way to get around the forced logins is to click "Log In" and then X out the login screen.
Twitter is not gonna change much IMO.
N@N, not sure how all this gets implemented with massively less staff. I think we're going to see a ton of flailing and overclever quick fixes that fall apart.
I don't think he's actually going to fire 75% of the staff. I also don't think Twitter is going to change much in practice for most users.
I do think he's going to lose a ton of money on it and eventually sell it to someone else.
I was a twitter evangelist here a decade ago -- and the reasons are probably still going to be valid a year from now. It's a good aggregator of content from working journalists, and a few odds and ends niche people I follow for a while and then drop. I don't really use it as social media, my comments are infrequent, and most the the relationships aren't even parasocial. I'll leave when Musk tries to reach into my pocket. Or when the journalists I follow find another platform (or just stop using this one.) I guess I also follow some local politicians: local media is quite substandard, and it's a decent way to keep up with people I like.
I've been doing the Culture Study discord for a year and a half now. It's a much younger crowd, and so I'm exposed to plenty of stuff that's not already in my silo. The people are decent and mostly pretty earnest. I'm even doing a Music League with some of those folks, which has been fun.
I've never gotten into IG, so its evolution isn't on my radar. I suppose that might be a platform where journalists and politicians go.
@66
"basic argument is that content moderation is the key feature of social media."
But this isn't right. The key is presenting users with content that those users want to see. Centralized censorship is a way to do that. Cuius regio, eius religio. But such censorship will always be contentious & prone to conflicts of interest. And it is not the only way to run things.
You could allow multiple content moderators and permit people to choose their own moderator.
You could allow multiple content taggers and permit people to choose their own filter rules.
Or some combination of the foregoing...
71: Agree with this. Reminds me of Murdoch buying MySpace even when it was clear Facebook was going to stomp it and eventually selling it for pennies on the dollar. And it mattered to his overall power and empire hardly a wit. (I guess we avoided a Murdoch-run "Facebook.") In this case there is not a clear winner at Twitter's expense. I think it stays and is just marginally worse and marginally more destabilizing to the world.
74: Said the bishop to the actress.
MORE MARGINAL DESTABILIZERS!
Another thing you could do is outsource moderation entirely.
Permit multiple moderators, with users choosing their own moderator - but ads are sold for display against tweets greenlit by particular moderator(s). And the moderator(s) get some fraction of the revenue from the ads displayed against tweets that they greenlit.
Different moderators will have different prices / impression, based on their moderation policies.
78 feels like it was written in 1998.
I have a Twitter account but I very rarely use it (I just logged in now to refresh my memory and apparently today is my Twitter anniversary? I'm suspicious), so I'm not losing much. I think I follow links to it from here more often than anywhere else.
As for Reddit, I don't know of any way it's worse than Twitter. It's good for discussion if you don't mind bandwagon effects in any given community, and it's good for mindless fun stuff like cat pictures/videos.
I like Twitter and I like Reddit. I find it hard to believe that much is going to change on Twitter for people at my tiny tiny level. I like the single-topic accounts and talk to other people in my field.
For Reddit, I find r/composting incredibly wholesome. r/Sacramento is useful.
@80 This approach would have been unnecessary in 1998
I'm waiting for the export of all my tweets to come through and then I will be deleting almost all of them. I don't care to contribute to Elon's bottom line, and removing Twitter's regular presence from my life will likely be an improvement.
What we need to do is bring back the blogosphere. Remember the blogosphere? That was cool.
I've never kept as many active blogs as I'm doing right now in 2022. I'm bringing it back, baby.
83: That's why it would have worked then.
Now I can't find the thread, but there was another good point raised that since he jabbered so much about neutrality/free speech and bringing back Trump (and has brought back Ye already), Musk is going to be personally associated with every single misstep in moderation. He's already trying to back away from that ledge.
I think he's about got to for some of the reasons listed in the link in 50. The multiple moderators seems nice, but it effectively requires a good percentage of the population to be willing to remain on the same platform with people who insist on calling for their deaths as a form of free speech.
And GM has just pulled ads from Twitter to have time to "understand the direction of the platform under their new leadership."
I've been looking at the Bolt. But not the Volt, because the charging time is too slow.
I kind of want the Cadillac version, but their styling isn't what it used to be.
Someone here is dressed as the yellow Teletubby.
I stayed longer than the Teletubby (Teletubbie?). Now I probably have covid.
84: how do you export everything?
I haven't ever gotten very far with instagram. I find it hard to use.
I followed virologists and epidemiologists for a while. Also some local politics stuff.
Speaking of local stuff, SP, have you figured out how you want to vote on all the propositions?
I mean, yes to fair share, and whichever way allows undocumented immigrants to keep their licenses. Speaking of licenses, expanding the number of liquor licenses is probably no big deal.
I'm genuinely confused about the dental insurance thing. My basic view is that oral health needs to be folded in to regular medical care and operate like actual insurance with protection for catastrophic care. If this would advance that, then I'm for it, but it seems to have been started by a crusading dentist. I can't tell if this just means that dentists will get paid more with admin staying the same and both dental insurance rates and cash prices going up. And it wouldn't affect self insured employers anyway unless dental pay went up.
This is very good https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitter-acquisition-problems-speech-moderation
I'm thinking yes on all 4. Millionaires tax is a no brained and of course has been opposed by misleading and dishonest claims. "If you bought a house in 1983 and put in $200k in renovations and sell it for $1.7M you might have to pay an extra $20k in tax one time" was an actual Globe article trying to scare people.
Yes for drivers licenses.
The dental thing regardless of who's backing it seems similar to the medical loss ratio provision of the ACA so seems like a good idea to me.
I'm also confused on the liquor licenses since it's been claimed it's big chains trying to lock in some benefits before there's backlash against a bigger reach by them, but I'd be fine with more places selling beer but fewer selling hard liquor so I guess yes on that too.
Speaking of no brained (sorry, too soon?) I did notice an increase in Twitter trolls for the first time with dozens of replies to anything about Paul Pelosi arguing it was a gay hookup gone bad. Looks like a lot of Russian bots based on other tweets that showed up when I tried to report them.
100: I was really pissed by that Globe article.
My thing with the drivers licens question is that I have to be careful to read it so that I vote the right way and not accidentally vote to remove the privilege.
I'm also sure that people will be able to structure major transactions over a couple of years.
Yes on dental. No reason for 50% of premiums to go salaries.
No on licenses. No need to drive further consolidation of that industry. All the stuff about no automatic checkout and increased penalties is horseshit bolted on to the central benefit of including the number of licenses an entity can hold. Just trying to confuse people and make it more palatable. You think the statehouse couldn't pass a "no automatic checkout" law if it wanted to?
100: I guess the guy who started it was sued for submitting false claims to MassHealth.
Question 4 you want yes:
A YES VOTE would keep in place the law, which would allow Massachusetts residents who cannot provide proof of lawful presence in the United States to obtain a driver's license or permit if they meet the other requirements for doing so.
A NO VOTE would repeal this law.
By licenses I am referring to Q3 not Q4. Booze.
I support undocumented immigrants driving drunk and taxing millionaires to pay for the dental work needed when they crash.
Here we've got an question that comes up automatically every 10 years asking if we want to have a State Constitutional Convention. Most dems are against it because everyone is afraid of how the crazy libertarians might use it to advance their odious agenda. And I see where that's coming from, but whatever constitutional amendments come out of the convention would have to get adopted by two-thirds of voters, so I think that's unduly alarmist.
It seems like a missed opportunity to me. We are never going to be able to get a non-partisan redistricting requirement passed through the Republican-controlled legislature, but we might be able to do it through a convention-based amendment process. And we would stand a good chance of getting some abortion protections codified.
Still what it comes down to is it seems like institutional dems aren't really feeling like the party has the capacity to take on the additional overhead of dealing with a constitutional convention, and all that entails. That's pretty sad.
Ohio got a constitutional anti-gerrymandering amendment. The Republicans simply ignored it. Now we are voting in districts that state Supreme Court repeated ruled were unconstitutional.
Ohio got a constitutional anti-gerrymandering amendment. The Republicans simply ignored it. Now we are voting in districts that state Supreme Court repeated ruled were unconstitutional.
Ohio got a constitutional anti-gerrymandering amendment. The Republicans simply ignored it. Now we are voting in districts that state Supreme Court repeated ruled were unconstitutional.
Ohio got a constitutional anti-gerrymandering amendment. The Republicans simply ignored it. Now we are voting in districts that state Supreme Court repeated ruled were unconstitutional.
I return to this site and I guess I just get carried away.
It's been so long that in my head I had it as "Chalky-Help".
Here we've got an question that comes up automatically every 10 years asking if we want to have a State Constitutional Convention.
We have one too, and the religious right is pushing it to try to overturn the strong constitutional right to privacy we currently have that safeguards abortion among other things. That idea is very unpopular so they're trying to sell it by gesturing vaguely at the idea of enshrining the permanent fund dividend in the constitution, which is very popular. Everyone on the left and most of the traditional pro-business right is lining up against it so I think it'll probably fail.
They should have tried to throw in something about fish.
One of the reasons I think the Dems should go ahead and support a convention is that the right doesn't appear to be any more prepared for it than we are.
That was enough for me. I've not used stopped using Twitter, but deactivated the account.
If you don't know, you'll have to wait for it to show up in Washington Post because I'm not linking to a tweet.
I used Tweet Delete to clear out all my old content.
I am not sure, but Elon Musk is showing up in my notifications as though I followed him.
123: I'm a little curious what it was. Looking for news stories I do see this: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/29/banned-british-far-right-figures-return-to-twitter-within-hours-of-takeover
Not entirely sure it hangs together, but this was an interesting analysis. https://davetroy.medium.com/no-elon-and-jack-are-not-competitors-theyre-collaborating-3e88cde5267d
@129 I got to the point where the author asserts that Elon & Putin share a common worldview...
The is some Illuminati level shit.
Elon is definitely pushing pro-Putin points.
It seems like Twitter might soon turn into an avalanche of disinformation and bullshit. Like, worse than it was.
One of the most interesting parts of the Musk texts that came out as part of the lawsuit, to me, was when Jack said he thought Twitter should ideally exist at the protocol level.
They might be too late to overtake ActivityPub, but also is there money in a protocol itself?
If you've heard of mastodon, it's not really a social media site, it's software that people can run on their own that uses ActivityPub to communicate. It's kind of like how email follows a protocol except people don't go around and say "I use email!" as if there's only one email site.
That sounds pretty boring and on some level it is but it's a meaningful bit of detail for people looking at "mastodon" as a twitter alternative. I use it and have for about four years now, but my account is on a server managed by someone I know. I can follow and communicate with accounts on other servers. There are pluses and minuses to that kind of setup. I've wondered what community governance issues might come up if the groups get too large and people get into fights.
Does reddit look any better when you have an account and log in? I've found useful things via search but the interface is bewildering in a scroll-too-far-and-you're-looking-at-something-else-entirely sort of way.
There's no real "town square" in mastodon, though, because the communities don't necessarily interact or interoperate. That solves some Twitter problems, but it also takes away one of the things that makes it compelling.
49, 54, etc.: that's right, you did explicitly state your views on Musk a few months ago. As did many people.
They might be too late to overtake ActivityPub, but also is there money in a protocol itself?
No, and that's why it doesn't really make sense to see the selling of the company to some other rich guy as a meaningful step in that direction. Governance of a protocol would require a totally different structure, maybe a nonprofit consortium like ICANN or Unicode. Without that overarching structure it just becomes a series of people doing their own thing with no particular coordination, like Mastodon or email.
The W3C is already involved in ActivityPub. It is interesting if you're interested in boring things how different standards and different protocols end up with different governing structures.
136 took me (one comment away from ) Nope's recommendation of the Kia Niro plug-in. I was going to ask if anyone knew how taking a plug-in on a long trip was, but then I decided to gtfm and found this article , useful but I can't tell when it was written. Sounds sort of like I should borrow the gas minivan for long trips and use the plug-in around home (in this hypothetical future where I spring for a plug-in). If you've taken a plug-in road tripping I'm interested in how it worked out.
I don't even think they sell the Kia Niro plug-in in this state. I was watching the dealers for a while, but I sort of just decided to wait until I have some selection and something I can test drive.
I'm probably going to do 50 hours of research and buy a Prius anyway.
I was saving up for a Tesla, but not now. I probably wouldn't sell it if I owned one though.
We have a 2015 Chevvy Volt plug-in hybrid and I think its the most versatile car we've ever had. Sadly, they don't make them anymore.
Our new full electric Leaf has a 250 mile range, which works for a visit to our daughter in college, but can't get us all the way to my parents' house.
We have a 2015 Chevvy Volt plug-in hybrid and I think its the most versatile car we've ever had. Sadly, they don't make them anymore.
Our new full electric Leaf has a 250 mile range, which works for a visit to our daughter in college, but can't get us all the way to my parents' house.
Also, everyone needs to admire my son's band. Joey H-C is the drummer.
The video is them live at the Rock Hall, from a battle of the bands the Rock Hall hosts every year for kids in the (mostly local) high schools. Last year they got second place. This year they are aiming for first.
And I still seem to have trouble with double posting.
I dig the band. Glad to see flannel is back.
@139 if you are going someplace with an accessible 120v outlet you can charge off that. Maybe the garage of your friends house. Maybe an outlet in a gazebo at the inn in the white mountains where you were staying that one time all the public chargers in New Hampshire weren't working.
In any case, if you plug the car in at 6pm and leave at 10 am you will gain about 60 miles. If you stay a weekend and don't drive during that time you will be fully recharged when you return.
Also, the level 2 chargers are far more reliable and numerous than the level 3 chargers. Go eat dinner at a hotel with a level 2 charger. You'll have 50 miles recharged while you eat.
On the east coast its not a big deal, really. Alaska or the west would likely be different.
The amusing thing about charging off 120v outlets at resorts or inns is that the staff is happy to assist you. If your charger doesn't reach they'll loan you an extension cord, put up a cone so no one trips over the cord, etc.
Alaska or the west would likely be different.
Alaska has actually been a leader in EV adoption because there are a lot of communities that aren't connected to the rest of the state by road, so range isn't really an issue. Juneau has been particularly noteworthy because it has cheap hydropower. Even in the road-connected areas there's been a big push to put charging stations along the highways. There are only a few highways so it doesn't take many to cover pretty much anywhere most people are likely to go.
Thanks, all! I have a much better sense now of what a plug-in would be like.
This piece in the NYT digs into the finances of the deal in a way that I had not seen before.
JPS's link in 50 (helpfully reiterated by Barry in 98) does a good job of laying out the wide variety of risks Musk is taking on, but the NYT piece suggests, pretty persuasively, that purely from a business point of view, Musk fucked up really badly here.
Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
Maybe this is just a loss leader for destroying democracy to prevent him from paying taxes.
156 is plausible and disconcerting. On the other hand, he doesn't really seem to think that far ahead.
Which is surprising given his reputation, but he seems to be doing his best to destroy it anyway.
Even if he destroys democracy, if he doesn't make a profit off Twitter (or at least bring it to sustainability) it seems his ownership of Tesla and other companies may be at risk.
"$54.20 or fight" may not have been the best territorial acquisition strategy.
It would be nice for him to sell off Space X, which is becoming a national security risk.
Stranding himself on Mars would work too.
It will be hard for his creditors to catch up with him there.
It looks like Musk wants to take Twitter more in the direction of a subscription service or a service that charges a lot of fees so he isn't as dependent on advertisers. This is a really scary model. One of the things that makes (or made?) Alex Jones so powerful is that he just relies on sales of Vitajex or whatever fake pill he's hawking, so he can create an entire closed system of followers and not answer to anyone
The difference is that no one is going to want to pay for Musk's Twitter, the way he's going with it.
I continue to think the most likely outcome is that he flails around for a while and loses a ton of money, then eventually gives up and sells it to someone else.
And damages the fabric of society along the way.
Just this morning, a Democratic candidate for the PA House was attacked outside his house. Fortunately not seriously hurt. And also probably not Musk-related because there was a lot of harassment before.
Musk might be the first to interpret "yeah, but we'll make it up in volume!" as a reference to loudness.
163: Given who his creditors are likely to be, that could well be win-win.
The real treasure is the damage you do to the fabric of society along the way.
I really don't think it's best practices to chide me for repetition, and then ask in the same sentence that I repeat a point I've already made.
I'm not sure you have, pf.
Twitter actually changed the way it treated Trump: it banned him. And as a result his popularity has remained unchanged.
There has been no similar change in the way Fox has treated Trump. There's been no decision by their editorial board to stop covering him, or to broadcast more anti-Trump comments, or anything. Their coverage has only changed because of a change in what Trump is doing, ie not being president any more. I think this is an important difference between Twitter and the rest of the media.
So we have two pieces of evidence here: we have studies showing that Trump voters weren't affected by Twitter, and that the net effect of Twitter in 2016 was to swing independents against Trump; and we have the complete absence of any post hoc change in Trump's approval after he was banned from Twitter.
That's why I think that banning Trump from Twitter didn't have much effect.
We don't have either of those for Fox and traditional media. What we do have is a lot of studies showing that Trump voters do consume a lot of traditional media, and that Trump benefitted from a lot of free coverage by traditional media in 2016.
@164
First, when you say "anyone" you clearly mean "people like me". If he pisses off his audience then he won't have one. Second, Alex Jones is on the hook for a billion in damages. Seems like he's answering to somebody.
@161
How is spacex "becoming a national security risk"? Seriously?
I think Musk does a lot of stuff by the seat of his pants and relies on celebrity and fan boys to keep his Tesla stock high. Twitter won't work out for him but diversifying from Tesla was a good idea since the Tesla stock is artificially inflated.
Given what I'm seeing about the demands being placed on workers, he may start losing too many. Presumably, the best ones are the ones who can jump ship the fastest.
"Higher than I think it should be" is not the same as "artificially inflated". TSLA is where it is because that is the price point at which people are willing to buy it, not because the Fed is buying up TSLA in order to keep the price high or something.
How is spacex "becoming a national security risk"?
If I remember previous discussions on this topic, Spike believes that the SpaceX booster fleet is effectively a ballistic missile fleet, and that Musk has been using threats of ballistic missile attack on US government targets in order to gain policy concessions from the US government. (I think it was Spike who made that suggestion - if not, I apologise to Spike)
@179 Elon only wishes he was a Bond villain.
Has any corporate restructuring ever been as much in the public eye day-to-day as Twitter is now? I just learned of another C-suiter resigning. It's like it's the cabinet of some country.
How is spacex "becoming a national security risk"? Seriously?
I won't speak for Spike, but Musk has carried water for Putin, and threatened to cut off Starlink (which is a Spacex thing) to Ukraine.
I always get Starlink confused with StarTran, the bus system in Lincoln.
@182 musk donated massive amounts of free starlink terminals and bandwidth to Ukraine. Terminals and bandwidth he could otherwise be using to get his still money-losing starlink service into the black.
He probably did this because it was great advertising for his service and because he assumed that the war would be over quickly (as did we all). But the war persisted. And now he is losing serious money.
So he petulantly stamped his foot and demand the DoD pony up for the service. I recall they publicly turned him down. But he didn't shut down the service. Either because he realized that would be worse P.R., or because he got assurances that he would be paid. Probably some combination of the two.
But anyway. Accusing someone of "carrying water for Putin" is some b-movie red scare shit. Aiming that accusation at a private individual who voluntarily provided a critical piece of the Ukrainian defensive infrastructure is just sad.
Musk was parroting the Kremlin line on negotiations just a couple of weeks ago. Like his cross-generational twin, Trump, he might not have believed it or even known what he was saying, but he was doing it.
185: well, not really, though, because the Kremlin isn't asking for negotiations, it wants to conquer and destroy Ukraine as a nation and has not been shy in saying so.
The Kremlin line he was parroting (and he was an idiot to do so) was about Crimea being Khrushchevs mistake, not about negotiations.
The Musk statement about holding elections under UN supervision was so mindbogglingly stupid and beside the point that I assumed he was someone push or paid by Russia to say it. It makes no sense any other way.
If I remember previous discussions on this topic, Spike believes that the SpaceX booster fleet is effectively a ballistic missile fleet
Yeah, I was definitely going for the "he could cut off Starlink thing" not the ballistic missile thing, which is bonkers and ought not be attributed to me.
Musk def carries water for Putin though - his shitty peace proposal was basically Putin's wishlist.
The Russia/Saudi Arabia/Billionaire axis is bad.
184- Didn't WaPo investigate the Starlink "donation" claims and find that he had actually gotten paid for most (>85%) of them either by DoD or by crowdfunding from Ukrainians? And that most of the claimed donation of bandwidth costs was based on inflated list prices? I found the article but it's behind their paywall.
This accounting is more favorable to Musk, that he donated about 2/3 of the terminals but other funding paid for shipping and some service.
https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-spacex-ukraine-starlink-government-funding
190: The wealthy are a fucking menace.
191: I subscribe, and looked at their one article from March and two from October - they don't do much analysis, just talk about different statements made by different parties.
Although, now that I think about it, private ownership of ballistic missiles is probably bad.
They should be like Zipcar, so you can share them.
his shitty peace proposal was basically Putin's wishlist.
No, Putin's made his wishlist quite clear. He has annexed four oblasts of Ukraine. He's already had referenda there and got 95% approval. He's not asking for another one.
Acknowledged that Musk's proposal was very bad, but that's probably because he's scared of nuclear war and thinks (wrongly, but he's not alone) that there's a real danger of it.
And if you really want, we can have a look back at what people here have been saying about Ukraine this year, like whether anyone's been suggesting that Ukr should give up Crimea and commit to neutrality, and maybe we'll find some people on this very site who are carrying water for Putin too, and we can list them by name.
Shall we do that?
"No NATO and giving up Crimea is a lot to give up but I think workable."
"Ukraine is ineligible for NATO membership as long as it has an ongoing territorial dispute. I would think that no membership in the EU is a non-starter. I can see giving up Crimea, it's only been a part of Ukraine since 1954 I think. Donbas is another thing entirely. Maybe they would accept an internationally overseen referendum? Anyway it's a start."
TBH wishing for some sort of nice, "why can't we all just get along?" solution to the Russian-Ukrainian war is not a particularly rare opinion. It's completely unrealistic at this point, and indeed it's been so since the first helicopters appeared over Hostomel and made it abundantly clear the Russians really were going all the way to Kyiv. But there are plenty of people who wish something like that would happen, and for a large majority of them it's more of an expression of justified horror at the war without thinking through what they're asking for.
People have a tendency to go from "this is awful" to "this can't really be happening, surely a compromise is possible", and this is particularly obvious when you're looking at modern wars of conquest. Which is how you get apparently intelligent people going "well, maybe Argentina will be happy with just one Falkland Island" or "really Putin just wants the Donbas" or "no, no, we can get the Serbs to be happy with annexing just a bit of Bosnia" or "the Sudetenland is definitely his last territorial demand in Europe".
197: Shall we play a game?
Putin wants international recognition of his conquest, so he held a fraudulent vote. Musk suggested we redo the vote with enough window dressing for Putin to get that.
202: I think that having elections under UN supervision is a bad idea too. But I don't agree that anyone who suggests it is either mindbogglingly stupid or pushed or paid by Russia to do so - not least because a lot of people here have made the same suggestion and I doubt that they're either of those things.
In my defense, and only the bit about Crimea and a bit about the Donbas hasn't aged well, that was early days and things weren't looking so great for Ukraine. They'd also lived with pretty much that situation since 2014 and seemed content to live with it until the Russians invaded again in 2022. Also March 7 was around the time of the first serious Ukrainian counterattacks around Kyiv and in the south but I don't think we'd gotten wind of it yet although it was apparent that Russia's military was pretty fucked up.
Now I keep waiting for them to open up another front somewhere in Zaporizhzhia and drive to the Black Sea. After that the Russians in Crimea will be truly fucked. Probably too late before winter but it sure would be nice to see, especially before they repair the Kerch bridge in the summer.
203: I don't think anyone who suggests them is paid by Putin either. Musk (and Trump) aren't just anyone. When you have someone wealthy and highly leveraged with big political interests carrying water for Putin, you really should wonder.
204: I thought exactly the same thing and later in that same thread I was suggesting one route out might be for Ukraine to give up Donbas (and Crimea) in order to resolve the land dispute and allow NATO membership.
I think we're going to see continuing mobile operations over winter - at present it's cold and muddy but the ground (and the rivers) freeze hard in winter.
I think this is going to be a bleeding wound until Putin dies of natural causes.
maybe we'll find some people on this very site who are carrying water for Putin too, and we can list them by name.
What's your point here? That it is impossible that people here would carry water for Putin? I think that would be a ridiculous thing to say -- and you probably do, too, since you're careful not to actually say that. But what would your actual point be?
Anyway, there is an important distinction between floating ideas in a blog comment section and credibly threatening to cut off a communications tool to the Ukraine military. There is a reason analogies are banned, and you don't get around that by pretending you aren't making an analogy.
My point - and I thought this was pretty clear - is that it's ridiculous to say that everyone suggesting in any context that Russia should keep Crimea, or that there should be a UN supervised referendum in the occupied territories, was "carrying water for Putin". Lots of people INCLUDING ME have made that suggestion here, and I think we were wrong to do so, but I don't think we were "carrying water for Putin" by doing so and I don't think Musk is either.
I'm sure there are a few people here who would rather Ukraine lost the war, but I'm not aware of any who have actually said so.
Nor did Musk threaten to cut off Starlink access to Ukraine - or, if he did, I would like to see the actual words of the threat, if you happen to have it to hand. He said that Starlink couldn't afford to provide more terminals or to continue to provide service to terminals already in country for free indefinitely, and he would like the US government to pay for it.
I didn't make an analogy.
(I do appreciate the way in which providing Starlink to Ukraine started off being regarded on this site as a pathetic and useless publicity stunt by an egotistical maniac, and has now morphed into a hugely valuable part of the Ukrainian military).
Maybe that's different people? I'm not going to go back and look though.
Here is the Washington Post's take on Musk's threat:
KYIV, Ukraine -- Elon Musk said Friday that his space company could not continue funding the Starlink satellite service that has kept Ukraine and its military online during the war, sparking an uproar as he suggested he was pulling free internet after a Ukrainian ambassador insulted him on Twitter.
A Starlink cutoff would cripple the Ukrainian military's main mode of communication and potentially hamstring its defenses by giving a major advantage to Russia, which has sought to jam signals and phone service in the eastern and southern combat zones.
And here is Musk's peace proposal, a contribution to the debate characterized by the Kremlin as "very positive." Zelensky, meanwhile, responded by issuing a poll asking people whether they preferred a pro-Ukraine Musk or an anti-Ukraine Musk.
Musk was carrying water for Putin. I can't imagine a plausible counter-argument that takes the facts into account.
Musk has also engaged in friendly banter with Medvedev. It's not clear why or what exactly he's doing, but he does seem to have shifted his tone in a more Russia-friendly direction recently.
He needed to borrow a bunch of money to buy Twitter and coddled dictators to do so.
Well, yes, but Russia isn't really a "having lots of money to give away" sort of dictatorship at the moment. They're spending it all on ammunition from North Korea and so forth.
The House of Saud made some of the loans. They've been openly trying to undermine Biden.
I think at this stage, we have to consider the possibility that Musk is a malignant asshole. We can reflect on other possible motives, but I don't think any further explanation is required.
In a similar case, it seems reasonable to suppose that Putin might have some kind of kompromat on Trump, but Trump's behavior can still be explained in the absence of that.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu is back with an even more insanely right-wing coalition than before. It's totally fucking wild that the Kahanists are not just back, but part of the governing majority. They're not just super-racist and hardcore nationalists, but actual violent terrorists who have historically been considered beyond the pale. Last time they won a Knesset seat the Knesset responding by passing a law specifically so it could kick them out.
Can't think of anything more malignant than giving Ukraine millions of dollars worth of comms kit and bandwidth for free to defend itself with. Truly a monster.
218: And AIPAC is spending millions to try to put a Republican in the U.S. House in my district.
Just malignant assholes everywhere. What a time to be alive.
Remember that time Musk tried to save those kids trapped in a cave in Taiwan, accomplished nothing, and wound up getting sued for calling the diver who actually did save them a pedophile?
Or that time his trolling got out of hand and he accidentally agreed to buy Twitter at a giant premium then was forced to go through with it.
The real risk of Musk running SpaceX is that he is a chaos monkey. It may be better not to have critical infrastructure in the hands of such a person.
Thousands of people depend on Musk to make a living. It's a better argument for socialism than anything Marx wrote. Or maybe not. I'm not going to read everything he wrote.
So I think this thread is conclusive evidence that we should add Elon fucking Musk to the relatively short list of topics that cause incredibly heated arguments here (although it's been a while since the policing arguments subsided). I admit I am a) surprised that it gets this intense and b) not sure what's actually at stake. I guess the heatedly anti-Musk position is reasonably transparent.
However, teo brings up the heated-arguments-everywhere topic par excellence in 218, and while I don't think anyone would benefit from a front-page post about it, it's upsetting me a whole fucking lot and I truly don't know what to do.
At least I can vote for Summer Lee.
However, teo brings up the heated-arguments-everywhere topic par excellence in 218, and while I don't think anyone would benefit from a front-page post about it, it's upsetting me a whole fucking lot and I truly don't know what to do.
I think buried in an old thread like this is the best place for it. I'm also upset but not very surprised. I don't think there's anything anyone can really do at this point, depressing as that may be. The most optimistic spin I can put on it is that maybe now having had a brief period of non-Netanyahu rule the public will have less patience with him this time, but that's a pretty slim reed.
There's an interesting map of the results here.
I've had the impression -- maybe it's been debunked -- that EM had some sort of contact with senior Russian officials (Putin himself?) in the run-up to his proposal.
A return to status quo 2021 lands differently in September 2022 than it would have in March or April of 2022. The scale of Russian atrocities revealed, and the scale of Russia's battlefield reverses make a genuine difference. In both cases, you'd have to account for the likelihood that Russia violates the deal when it thinks it can. But a deal that amounts to an improvement on status quo 2021, without some serious sanction (beyond the price Russia pays every day for its poorly thought out policy) looks too much like an invitation to do so.
I think 2014 Charley was unduly casual about Crimea. Looking just under the surface, it's a complicated history with genocide, displacement, and all the rest. Leaving it in Russian hands has strategic and political implications. Yes, Ukraine is going to share a border with Russia for the rest of time, but whether that border has to include that large swath of Black Sea coast is an issue I don't think I want to have an opinion on. I wouldn't have thought we should support a Ukraine initiated war to take back Crimea in 2022, but once Russia started this war, I don't see the recovery of Crimea as a war aim that we should openly balk at, at this point.
So I think this thread is conclusive evidence that we should add Elon fucking Musk to the relatively short list of topics that cause incredibly heated arguments here
This thread is conclusive evidence that Ajay enjoys channeling his inner Halford-style trolling hobgoblin, and has been on a real tear lately.
I did my part - I told my mom to vote for Lapid even though she hates him (her other possible choice was Labor).
Yeah, it's not really clear why ajay is so committed to defending Musk here but he seems to be the main one making the argument heated.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu is back with an even more insanely right-wing coalition than before. It's totally fucking wild that the Kahanists are not just back, but part of the governing majority.
Timothy Burke's latest is pessimistic about politics and makes parallels between the US and Israel. I'm curious what you make of it (I think it's a good post, but the conclusion is overstated).
What I do want to say is that having a very closely divided body politic is bad when every election or every decision is momentous and poses serious existential risks (real or imagined) for one or both of the sides involved.
....
But when countries like the United States, Brazil and Israel are stuck in a seemingly irresolvable loop where razor-thin majority winners feel justified in immediately pushing towards strong, possibly irrevocable, decisions that the almost-majority absolutely reject, you are in a situation that simply cannot go on that way indefinitely.
In part, this is why the concept of "civil war" pushes itself forward both as a frame for understanding these loops and as a fantasy of resolving them, because both sides in that sort of impasse quite naturally have to ask whether they wouldn't be better off in a sovereignty that removed the other side from the picture entirely. It's also why some of those almost-majorities begin to think about ways of sabotaging, manipulating, or crippling the decision-making systems involved so that they can get to a stable equilibrium without having to compromise on issues that they view as existential.
...
That's the problem in a lot of the squishy middle of the public sphere in any of these countries--there are earnest but naive people arguing that everybody just has to build bridges and understand that the other side are fellow citizens. But this is, once you've hit this point, no longer true. The other side really are a threat, and because the divisions are so even, no one will ever accept decisions that move decisively in one direction or another. If you're in a small minority endangered by a large majority and you have no immediate allies, you have no choice but to build alliances and to reduce your possible threat, to propose systems that project minority prerogatives in the interest of general peace and prosperity. If you're in a faction that was 49.75% this time but has some hope to be 50.25% next time and the rules of the game are now commonly and accurately understood to be life-or-death, every decision and every election is do-or-die.
Thanks, peep! To 226.last, the public may feel a variety of ways about Netanyahu, but it sounds like he's in a position to make major changes to the judiciary to get himself out of trouble, and those will likely outlast his term if they go through (as I'm sure you know). Haaretz (paywalled) continues to be apocalyptic:
The few times when Netanyahu has commented on possible legal reforms, he has blurted out something about a committee that would consider the issue and make recommendations. We can assume that the members of such a panel have been identified, along with the objectives. The outcome would be the suspension of Netanyahu's trial, but it would be accompanied by legislation that could fundamentally change Israeli democracy. Jurists following the issue say the new governing coalition can easily complete the process in months, subject maybe to new street protests against Netanyahu.
The left wing's traditional moaning and groaning about the country coming to an end isn't of much use. Contrary to assessments that have been floated in recent days, it's doubtful that Israeli newspapers will be shut down or that members of the LGBTQ community will be thrown off rooftops - or that concentration camps will be set up for opponents of the regime. But what's planned is bad enough. [...] The next cabinet will include politicians on whom the Jewish division of the Shin Bet security service has thick files. Now Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar and his people may have to share sensitive information with them.
It's just so close to some of the more plausible bad scenarios for 2024 here in the U.S., except in our case, at least half the damage to the judiciary is already accomplished. I think I'm probably close to Burke's views, on preview... So far I can't find the explainer on judicial reform that I read a few weeks ago, but it's somewhere.
234: It's a good post, but yeah, overstated a bit. I get why he's including Israel with Brazil and the US, but the situation there is actually pretty different in ways that make the comparison misleading at best.
Over the course of Netanyahu's decades in public life, there's been a reorientation of politics into an extreme personalization at the expense of ideological disagreement, at the same time that the ideological center of gravity has been shifting further and further to the right. The coalition that finally pushed him out last time was dominated by a variety of far-right figures who had previously been Netanyahu allies before falling out with him, and most of them were if anything to his right on most substantive issues. It's not really surprising that that coalition had a hard time governing, but it's telling that the way Netanyahu was able to defeat them was by embracing previously marginalized figures from the even more extreme right-wing fringe. Kahanists want an ethnonationalist theocracy and don't shy away from using violence to achieve it. Considering that a respectable position within a governing majority is a big change, and a very bad one.
We're maybe starting to see this sort of personality cult dynamic emerging with Trump (2024 will be a big test), and the January 6 violence is a disturbing sign of where it may lead. Israel is much further along that path than we are, though, and it isn't a great comparison right now. I know less about Brazil but they also seem to be only at the beginning stages of this possible path.
235: That's a good piece, especially on the implications of Netanyahu wanting to make changes to the judiciary for venal personal reasons but being backed up by partners who are fundamentally illiberal and want to change the judicial system for their own ideological reasons. As the "thick files" reference indicates, these guys are, like, actual terrorists. They fundamentally reject the legitimacy of a secular democratic state in a way that even the most hardline right-wing parties in what had been the mainstream don't. It's a scary development.
Also important in that piece is how the racist backlash to the Arab parties being in government is tied to a larger wave of racism against Israeli Arabs, who are Israeli citizens living within the 1948 borders. There have long been tensions between them and the Jewish Israeli majority, but they're in a fundamentally different situation from the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and their presence has long been an important concrete example of how Israel is not just an ethnostate for Jews. But now the people who want it to be one have ridden to power on a campaign of demonizing them. Again, scary, scary stuff.
222.1: Thailand.
My bad. I have a new employee living in Taiwan so it is on the mind.
So, if you google "is elon musk the antichrist", you get a notice that:
It looks like the results below are changing quickly. If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for reliable sources to publish information.
I guess we just wait a bit and see.
The thing is that Trump is just a lot dumber than Netanyahu. If the Republican cult recenters around a personality who doesn't need someone whose full-time job is following him around to play Memory from Cats to calm him down, that's going to be a lot more dangerous. Of course having a Mad King is bad, but it's bad in a chaotic weird way that's different from someone like Netanyahu (or Erdogan or Modi).
Israel really does seem to have passed the point of no return on its path towards fascism. It's hard to see at this point how it doesn't end in genocide.
That will lead to some really good book titles.
I was at the AJC annual dinner in 2001, and Shimon Peres painted such a compelling vision of a future that at the time was still imaginable. What a loss.
To bring the threads together, the terrorists really did win by assassinating Rabin. Does the Knesset now has more members who supported assassinating Rabin than it has members from the Israeli Labor party?
If you're in a faction that was 49.75% this time but has some hope to be 50.25% next time and the rules of the game are now commonly and accurately understood to be life-or-death, every decision and every election is do-or-die.
Counterpoint: if anything can be learned from the last four years of Israeli politics, surely it's "losing one election does not irrevocably doom you and your faction to extinction, either political or literal". How many elections has Netanyahu lost now?
246: none? I mean back before the destruction of the second temple he lost a couple of times, but in the recent elections it's more accurate to say he didn't win- each time his party got the most seats, but he was just barely unable to put together a coalition.
OK, how many elections has he failed to win now?
My point is that it is just very obviously not the case from recent history that elections in Israel are do-or-die. If Netanyahu "fails to win" an election (let alone losing it), it doesn't mean that he is personally doomed to die, or that his political faction is shut out of power forever. It means that the new government (the ones who, I guess, failed to lose the election) get to pass some measures that Netanyahu would rather they didn't.
Same for the US. Burke oscillates back and forward between saying "some people think that US elections are do-or-die existential events, and this is bad" and "US elections really are do-or-die existential events".
No one knows yet. Burke lives in Pennsylvania where the stated goal of the Republican candidate currently running for governor is that the state legislature should be able to decide how Pennsylvania's Electoral College votes are allocated. And how their own districts are drawn. This would be the end of free democratic elections in Pennsylvania if not stopped by an outside force.
Jesus, 250 sounds bad. Fortunately he's 10 points behind in the polls, but still.
I don't believe the polls completely because they have to account for who will vote and I'm not sure that isn't changing.
The odds of Wisconsin eliminating democracy in the next few years is very high. If they manage to win a governor election while holding on to the Supreme Court then they can change governor elections and supreme court elections to a gerrymanderable method (SC elected by district instead of statewide, Governor by "electoral college") and they'd need to lose an election by 15+ points (in a 50/50 state) to ever lose power. NC is also on that path.
I'm more optimistic about the US and PA staying vaguely democratic (if you call our current Supreme Court + Electoral College + Senate system vaguely democratic), as you say the candidate in favor of making PA undemocratic is doing badly.
They are also trying to gerrymander the Supreme Court here.
And that's another problem with Burke - at one point he says that one-party dominance wouldn't be too bad and wouldn't last that long, because ruling parties tend to splinter.
"what seemed like a stable coalition tends to fragment as soon as it gains unassailable political power. Republican voters in safe districts who are not Trumpists now find themselves as excluded from political power as Democrats. Give Trumpism a supermajority and it will probably fracture along other lines in those districts."
Well... good?
Heavily caveated very good news!
The Dems didn't split in California after they attained supermajority, presumably because there are Republicans in other states to organize against.
Because of the length of Supreme Court tenures, US presidential elections are always do or die. So is Senate control.
259 There's also a time element. California Dems haven't split now, but who knows what anything looks like in 10 years. (Except that Citizens United and Dobbs will still be good law.)
Also West Virginia v. EPA, which will be a huge barrier to progressive change from future presidents.
I don't think many people realize that the Republicans have basically won for this generation. There's no winning an election and going back to 2000 or whatever. It's winning most elections over decades to undo most of this.
The failure of city politics in the US to split into actual competing parties is really weird and annoying and completely contrary to the kind of prediction in 256. Everything happens inside the Democratic primary process and you somehow have to be in-the-know to see what people disagree on.
The problem is that all politics are national (and increasingly *international*, see everyone having a rooting interest in foreign elections, or see increasing support for Putin among Republicans), so local supermajorities are stable.
Ok this is blatantly breaking the analogy ban, but I like it too much not to do it. If politics is fandom then 256 makes no more sense than saying "If too many people in Boston root for the Patriots, eventually they're going to find some way to split into fans of two different teams over something."
what seemed like a stable coalition tends to fragment as soon as it gains unassailable political power.
Gosh, I can't wait for the inevitable reckoning in Texas!
No it won't
No, I don't think it will either. And I think 264 is probably why; in any given area you have a "party machine" and it has two jobs, campaigning for local and national candidates. If you're in a 75% Labour city, the reason why a split doesn't happen is that while your supporters may disagree locally, with their national hats on they still consider it worthwhile to get the Labour MP elected, and it would be impractical to have someone saying "don't vote Labour for the mayor but do vote Labour for the MP".
265: to be clear, 266 was me, and I definitely think Burke is wrong here. 256 wasn't quoting him approvingly!
The structural fix if you _want_ city parties would be to allow people to hold simultaneous registration with those and the national parties, and have it be the city parties that show up on ballots. They do have that system in Vancouver: ABC, Greens, OneCity, etc.
Although city parties seem extremely annoying to figure out, I still think it's better than it being through party primaries, and much better than it being nonpartisan (the latter being the norm in California and I think much of the South and West). In both existing systems, though especially nonpartisan, there are no promises to hold a group of allies to, just individuals who shuffle in and out and how much can one person be expected to do? A city party can actually outline a platform and be held to account on it later.
Yeah, 268.1 is exactly what I want. It's cool that Vancouver has it, I didn't know about that!
The basic function of democracy is that there should be at least two parties which aren't extremist, and if one of them fucks up badly then the other will win. The basic problem nationally is that they'll also lose if they don't fuck up but gas prices go up, so it's really important that both be non-extremist. But the city situation is also a problem, because if the government fucks up then there's no way to know who to blame and vote in the other party.
268 is very interesting and I'd never heard about something like that anywhere - we have regional parties (SNP, DUP etc) but the only thing close to city parties are tiny one-issue and often one-man organisations that are things like the Save Our Local Hospital Party with one councillor.
City parties make more sense now - I think I was assuming that a local Labour split would lead to a Labour candidate and a non-Labour candidate, but if the party setup is just completely different at local level then I can see how it would work.
Are there any other cities that have them, do you know?
Montreal has a similar system. In general Canada is more open to having different parties at different levels than most other countries.
So, I signed up for Mastodon. I don't know if it can grow fast enough to matter. I still kind of like Reddit because you can click the "NSFW" and see (a tastefully distant) video of a small dog unwisely charging an alligator.
Maybe it will be like when Pinboard bought del.icio.us - Pinboard never got that big, del.icio.us just collapsed.
Maybe people will learn to control their small, aggressive dogs.
Social bookmarking was a thing until Yahoo did what Yahoo did to everything it touched: made it go to almost nothing.
How is spacex "becoming a national security risk"? Seriously?
"Ukraine lost access to 1,300 Starlink terminals over a funding issue"