Sure there’s the maga cultists, but that is not the majority of people who voted for Trump. I honestly think a self-inflicted recession may turn out to be a good thing.

Right now Trump is behaving like, and being treated by the opposition like he’s invincible. But I do not think we are at the point where maga has such a hold on power that they can withstand being broadly unpopular. There is still a lot of the government and civil society that remains intact, and could be a platform for stopping the authoritarian takeover, but they are going to need a huge amount of public support. Causing a recession when your mandate was to improve the economy may be enough for this.

The longer this festers, the more maga will be able to destroy or compromise the state and civil society. I think we need to force the crisis sooner rather than later.

Even a socialist command economy has to reason in terms of inputs and outputs. The difference in value between the two is a pretty good indicator of whether the given economic activity is successful or not. In a capitalist system the positive difference is called profits and the capitalists get to keep it. That fact doesn’t discredit the entire concept of “profits” as a net gain in value.

Anyway, just because the capitalists may win most (the whole system is called capitalism after all), doesn’t mean that ramping up European arms production isn’t a huge benefit for Ukraine.

I don’t know of any reason that the proportion of ESL writers would have started trending up in 2022.

You guys are only working on one project at a time?

Any alternatives you like?

The permanent veto holding members of the security council are specifically those countries capable of starting a nuclear conflict. Those vetos are expressly for reducing the risk of that happening. Not saying the world can’t do better today, but let’s remember why it is the way it is.

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It’s up to you now, Europe.

Exactly. This thread seems to be giant whoosh.

I think this only makes a few weeks difference to the withdrawal of US military support. The deal Trump and Russia are putting together should not be thought of as an attempt to end the war, but the creation of a pretense for the withdrawal of support. The terms that will be offered to Ukraine will be completely, and intentionally, unacceptable to Ukraine and Europe. Ukraine will refuse and the US will name it as the justification for walking away.

Eh. He’s a human being. I hadn’t heard about his fleet.

https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yachts.php

It seems nearly impossible for a person to be billionaire loaded and not make some irresponsible purchases. Is there anyone with that kind of money we should be highlighting as a role model instead?

Yeah leaked data stays leaked. You can often find out what was leaked tho.

I imagine this looks a lot like what people in the cyber security sector do after a breach. Audit all the code, scan all the servers, monitor everything for several months. It’s a ton of work and very expensive, but there are people with lots of real-world experience unhacking systems.

There have been two court orders requiring that payments continue normally. It looks like Musk has decided that court orders do not bind him. It hasn’t even been two weeks and already we’re at the constitutional crisis?

I think the idea here is that, as Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated, the minority party can do a lot to simply break the government.

If the Democrats had the intestinal fortitude to be real resistance against an authoritarian takeover, they could start filibustering everything, and using every procedural trick to delay or block every Republican action until some set of demands are met. Perhaps removing Musk from every government system, or reinstating all of the DoJ personnel who have been retaliated against.

Here we see Democrats basically unanimously going along with the Republican agenda so that they can feel like “the adults in the room,” rather than fighting for the life of our republic.

Neither illegal immigrants, nor non-citizen residents get to vote. In what sense are they represented in either case?

Then they have a higher hurdle to clear. All I’m saying is it seems reasonable to give a state representation based on the number of citizens.

I got curious about the size of the issue. The numbers I found for Texas was an estimated 1.6 million illegal immigrants out of a total population of 30.5 million, or roughly 5%. There are 38 reps from Texas, so they’d lose one or two.

This doesn’t seem like it ought to be all-or-nothing. Knowing the number of citizens and the total number of residents is useful for different purposes. Electoral votes: citizens. Disaster response: residents. And so on.

This mirrors how I’ve been thinking about the broader world trends. The neo-liberal world order is dying. It has solved all the problems it has the capacity to solve, and the people have run out of patience with the problems it can’t.

The groups that have been best positioned to fill the gaps created by these retreating institutions are the ones that had always been excluded; nationalists, authoritarians, xenophobes of all kinds, et al. The left? They joined the neo-liberal coalition to try to change the system from the inside, or refused to participate and languished in obscurity.

IMHO if we’re going to avoid a century of oppression, the left needs to abandon the neo-liberal coalition, and get into the fight for what comes next. We’re already two steps behind.