Notices by Steve Randy Waldman (interfluidity@zirk.us)

the people who wanted "everything run like a business" also transformed how businesses were run, and it broke those too.

(they transformed businesses into the idiot share-price maximizers of pathetically stylized economic models, which is not how most businesses actually functioned before 1970!)

if a US visa or green card is a “privilege” whose revocation constitutes foreign-policy discretion rather than punishment and so is not subject to protection on first-amendment grounds, couldn’t an identical case be made with respect to passports for US citizens?

The war-plans thing is bad, but I think it's far less of a scandal than lawlessly decimating USAID, CFPB, NSF/NIH, etc.

It would have been a terrible tragedy if US servicemembers had been harmed due to their leaders' miserable opsec. But what those mfs have done to USAID alone will kill many more.

I’m a Jew, I don’t think @carolannie has said or done anything remotely racist or wrong, and I think @serge is being a real dick.

@GreenSkyOverMe there were more than two candidates on people’s ballots.

Donald Trump won more votes than any other candidate. But the other candidates together won more than 50% of the vote.

a majority of voters voted for someone other than Donald Trump.

Excellent, from #MattBruenig, on “Abundance”. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/03/24/the-abundance-agenda/ ht @ryanlcooper

Donald Trump has no mandate at all. The majority of people who voted in the 2024 election voted against him.

He won a plurality of the popular vote. He achieved not even the barest majority, which itself would not constitute any kind of a mandate.

i really hate the conflation of globalism and neoliberalism. neoliberal globalism was a catastrophe. but other globalisms are possible, globalism per se is a mark of freedom and taking pleasure in the variety that springs from the humanity and dignity we share.

“The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.” #MashaGessen https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/opinion/trump-trans-denationalizing.html

What people really hate about "unelected bureaucrats" is they turn into unaccountable tyrants before we find ourselves helpless and unfree.

Thank goodness the Trump administration is on the case, putting those bureaucrats in their place.

https://thetrek.co/a-german-thru-hiker-has-been-detained-deported-and-banned-from-the-us-without-a-hearing-heres-what-you-need-to-know/

ht @benroyce

@realcaseyrollins It's give Trump all the power, not just over ourselves, but over everybody. It's pure hierarchy, and ensuring ruthless means of enforcement.

@realcaseyrollins Bannon sometimes says idealistic things. No matter how elaborately those things are betrayed, he toes the line. Musk is a transhumanist, a threat to traditional judeochristian ideas of virtuous living, he says. OK. Where's the pushback?

There are lots of grand visions, but no constancy in pursuing anything but expanding and demonstrating power. A movement is what a movement does, destruction of institutions, manufacture of fear, consolidation of power.

ambitious sociopaths are drawn to MAGA. rule by unvarnished, unapologetic exercise of power is their highest ambition made real. there are plenty of ambitious sociopaths among democrats. you can see them. they feign disdain but they slip, pulled toward that bright light of ruthless control.

pretty soon the only allies we’ll have left are israel and rhodesia.

if tech treated tech like government, it would have mocked computing relentlessly for crashing so much and sent its own industry to the wood chipper. manual typewriters would be a token of a vigorous masculinity.

we are pioneering a new economic system: casino feudalism

@realcaseyrollins i’m sure the question is academic because you have better taste than that.

if you don’t want to be shunned for your cybertruck, just write FUCK ELON in maximal block letters on its rump hood and gigantic backside.

if March 4 was chosen as the date the tariffs take effect in order to let March 3 be the day of frantic negotiations to postpone them, does Trump/Vance outraging trading partners on Friday render it harder for them to deliver the pretend victories that Trump demands as pretext for postponement?

@realcaseyrollins @Chip_Unicorn "the government seeking to limit the feedback that they receive" is precisely the kind of "efficiency" i am criticizing.

(it's not a real efficiency, taking into account all of our interests, but it's an efficiency from the perspective of the organization that is supposed to actually read and react to feedback.)