Notices by JA Westenberg (daojoan@mastodon.social)

The biggest casualty is the very idea of reality as shared terrain. When governing becomes improvisation, when policy becomes psychodrama, we lose the ability to discern intention. Is this 145% tariff real? A bluff? A tantrum?

They’re not mad because you’re wrong.
They’re mad because you’re right, and they know you’re right, and they’ve over invested in pretending you’re not.

You can spin this as gamesmanship or deal-making. But this isn't poker night. This is macroeconomic policy in the world's largest economy. When the seat of American power governs by ambush, the cost isn't just borne in the Dow. It's epistemic damage.

In 48 hours, markets surged then cratered. The S&P posted its best day since 2008, only to give back half its gains. Not from economic reports or geopolitical shocks. Because the president said one thing Wednesday, something different Thursday.

Wall Street is used to volatility. It prices risk. It lives and dies by the future tense. But even volatility has its rules. Today, the signal is the volatility.

This is the epistemic cost of erratic empire.

🧵

When the signal is the noise, strategy becomes superstition. CEOs delay investment. Central banks hesitate. Foreign ministries tread water. "Wait and see." But how do you wait when the terrain keeps liquefying beneath your feet?

Analysts are being whipsawed by hourly reversals. Traders, executives, diplomats—none can act with confidence. The result? A suspension of trust. Not just in markets but in the informational environment itself.

Every functioning system requires forecastability. Remove the scaffolding of expectation, and you paralyze decision-making. Every plan becomes provisional. Certainty feels like a sucker's bet.

Authoritarian regimes rely on unpredictability to maintain psychological dominance. When a leader changes rules arbitrarily, it trains the populace into passivity. The aim is learned helplessness.

Disruption has a trajectory. This is sabotage by stochastic theater. We are being governed by impulse, reverse-engineered into policy. A mood becomes a mandate. A tweet becomes a tariff.

Every right-wing grift starts with “I just want to ask questions” and ends with someone getting doxxed, deadnamed, or deported

The manosphere is a special, special place

We are not arguing over policy. We are fighting over civilization.

Tariffs are the opening salvo.

This is America the isolated.

And isolation, in an interconnected age, isn't strength.

https://www.theindex.media/america-the-isolated/

Traders are high-fiving each other because Trump temporarily stopped knifing the global economy. These are not smart men. These are dogs chasing a stick Trump is pretending to throw.

JK Rowling’s next book is called “Fantastic Bigots and Where to Platform Them”

As David Gorski puts it - this is social Darwinism. It's wrapped in turmeric and sold in amber-tinted bottles. But it's no less insidious. The grift is everywhere. Don't trust the CDC; trust this influencer selling ozone therapy and vitamin A megadoses.

These deaths are the price of an ideology. An ideology that pretends to be about freedom and personal choice but is, in fact, a deeply cynical form of soft eugenics. Not the explicit, sterilize-the-"unfit" eugenics of the early 20th century.

The United States is in the middle of a measles outbreak, and three children are already dead this year. The reason? A catastrophic drop in vaccination rates driven by disinformation, institutional sabotage, and a coordinated propaganda war against public health. 🧵

If you say “universal healthcare” 3 times a guy in wraparound sunglasses appears to call you a marxist and then die of preventable disease in a chili’s parking lot

can the Twitter economists who earned their MBA in the comments section please explain how America is gonna conjure a billion-dollar iphone factory out of topsoil and masculine vibes. Is the plan to just yell “made in USA” at a cornfield until Tim Cook appears