We should really start thinking of the governance of corporate enterprises in political terms, and avail ourselves to the vast diversity or forms of governance to learn through comparison how we may better govern ourselves overall.

America to me has always been a tale of two countries. This tension between craven cruelty resulting from a class invested in growing entitlements of wealth at everyone’s expense and a genuine universal understanding of human rights. This fight keeps playing out.

At what critical juncture did the oligarchs class determine it was necessary to loot the country and leave it for dead?

Raskin says the fund is unconstitutional. Congress didn't structure it. 14th Amendment prohibits obligations in service of insurrection. Raskin says Dem House will shut it down and compel transparency on payments. He's calling on Rs to legislate against it now. 4/ newrepublic.com/article/2105...

Actually, Americans are just like you. ~20-30% of them genuinely support fascism, as in ~every 🇪🇺 country. You are just more fortunate to have political institutions & a multiparty system that prevent that 20-30% from fully capturing the center-right party, becoming 51%, & controlling the government.

Democrats should be saying anybody who takes this stolen money will see the government coming after them to claw it back.

JFC There could never be an easier case for impeaching a president. The fact that impeachment & removal is universally acknowledged among the political class to be impossible is the clearest possible sign that the constitutional order has collapsed into some form of dictatorship.

Logical in the friend-enemy logic of clientilistic power building. Absolutely illogical for the pro-democracy movement to acquiesce in response. Hope to see those with power use it to fight back.

the president of the united states sued his own government for ten billion dollars and “settled” it by directing that government to use taxpayer money for a nearly two billion dollar slush fund to distribute to his political allies at will typing it out barely feels real

Phone? Is it phone?

Since Trump is doing this outside of settlement (to avoid a judicial veto), this is yet another budget allocation doing an endrun around Congress. Without a formal settlement, it is illegal for Trump to use the Judgment Fund. www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/... 1/

Top tier mistake: confusing the electoral franchise with the sovereign constituents of a polity. Get it together democratic republics!

We really should examine what mechanisms exactly have given Trump such power over the nomination of Republican officials, as whatever they are, they're unlikely to vanish in Trump's absence.

New at the Smotus Report: Bill Cassidy’s loss reminds us that, even while Trump is unpopular overall, he remains the kingmaker within his party — perhaps more so than ever

Nice, succinct thread. “Politics, not race” is meaningless when politics is endogenous to race.

How many of you were aware that Mexico's fertility rates had fallen below the US? Or that South India's fertility rates had fallen below Western Europe. Be Honest www.ft.com/content/fba3... x.com/70sBachchan/...

when @rajakorman.bsky.social is talking about healthcare as a markup-absorbing drag, this is how that works at the structure level doing health care inefficiently has been a huge employment growth ballast esp now that it is broadly pulling workers away from other sectors of the economy

<<taps sign>> This an illegal and unconstitutional impoundment, it's what got Trump impeached the first time around, and in any sane world he'd be impeached and removed for it before noon tomorrow.

Phenomenologically, reading is very weird: you sit by yourself staring at black squiggles on a white background, which causes violent hallucinations — one of the most peculiar of those hallucinations being the feeling that, despite the fact that you are very much by yourself, you are not alone.

I realise the bar is high these days but it's still jaw-dropping to read that the people helping the Iranians move money around include the guy who bought a stake in the Trump family's crypto venture, and the guy who Trump pardoned. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Also refusing to accept that food cultures can be fully assimilated. Much of what we would consider very trad, even outdated, British pork products are due to a big influx of Swabian butchers in the 19th century.

ICYMI: my first book, WHEN COMPANIES RULE, will be out in November. It's a gripping 400-year history of super-powerful corporations, and a guide to challenging corporate power today. cup.columbia.edu/book/when-co...

Terrific journalism from actually looking at the money flows as.ft.com/r/1e5fba60-4...

Once the parties are defined, you predictably have what courts and political scientists call "racially polarized voting." That makes it straightforward for the majority party to do the last step: to draw districts that ensure they win and the minority party, which contains the Black people, loses.

The VRA *has always* been there to stop racial vote dilution, not to give Black people some kind of bonus districts. The reason we have the VRA (especially the 1982 version) is because Southern white politicians reliably define the political parties in such a way as to make sure Black voters lose.

All the partisan gerrymandering was always (in part) racial gerrymandering, because the parties' politics were always (in part—but large part) about race. So when you tell Southern legislatures "you can do partisan gerrymandering, but no racial gerrymandering," they know it means they can do both.

Recording accurate information, reasoning rigorously, honoring your sources with proper credit, all while also coming up with your own original framework and turns of phrase to inform and sometimes delight the reader have always been appropriately high stakes challenges for human writers

The archived 538 site didn’t cost anything significant to keep online. I saw the contracts. There’s just nobody in charge there anymore who has a commitment to journalistic ethics that overrides their desire for their December bonus check

One reason why I think LLMs will uncover in which fields people actually enjoy the work and treat it as a vocation vs. which fields people only care about what the work accomplishes socially or what having been seen to do the work accrues for one's social status

I think part of the reason for this lack of understanding is that in a lot of jobs and fields many people are already accustomed to not actually doing their own work, & having other people do it. And they have such a low opinion of people that they believe machine output can and should replace them.

This is a good lesson for stakeholderists: stakeholder pressure, from employees, say, does matter! It's a question of the balance of stakeholder power within the business enterprise as polity, as it is within any governed entity. And a question of how one measures power and strategizes around it.

The title of my next West End all-singing, all-dancing revue

Writing is the act of justifying your choices with even more choices ad infinitum

this is such a great encapsulation of what the various factions of the reactionary right want. i might add that they envision themselves as slave masters and the rest of us, in one way or another, as their slaves. betterdonkey.substack.com/p/the-vra-wa...

This level of productivity is concerning regardless of the accusations

You are worried nobody understands you and are correct

What is the whole odyssey if not a penelope cruise

Ness obvs

The vibe of this college essay the NYT published from Peter Baker’s son is him participating in corrupt events & practices, but while participating he’s saying “boy, I don’t know” under his breath

"Gen Z has a hip new approach to truth, it's called 'believing whatever flatters the priors of you and your peer cohort'!" I'm going to have nightmares about this piece.

In the absence of any other great power willing or able to serve as an ordering hegemon, it is the loss of consistency rather than the disappearance of US power that will have the greatest implications for global order and drive the emergence of alternate approaches to ordering interstate behavior.

What's disconcerting is when you encounter this IRL, amongst people who should know better, and realize that they've been cooking their brain, as have you, on social media for far too long

it's trivially easy to debunk this deeply stupid nonsense, but I will say that to me the funniest part of these kinds of claims is that Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze articulate obviously divergent and often totally incompatible philosophies and social theories

As requested by @davidfickling.bsky.social, here's the day oldish goslings to juvenile goslings Jurassic Park edit, including movie reaction footage. 🪶 🐣

I did something like this during his first term, with one of my favorite ledes of all time. www.washingtonpost.com/news/politic...

Pour one out for my herpetologist homies 😞🐍 😢

Use this as a blueprint

wonderful essay arguing that venture capital is essentially a form of planning that uses markets as an information-gathering tool

I think the only durable premise supporting the intellectual and artistic life is that one's attempts to make meaning are meaningful to others

This seems very obviously true when you realize that one of the defining features of most millennials is that their 20s overlapped with the Great Financial Crisis