Steve Randy Waldman

Blog: https://www.interfluidity.com/
Github: https://github.com/swaldman

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Last Notes

2026-08-12 20:19:42 UTC

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it is similar to banks, whose risk also is born publicly! i think it’s very fruitful to think about what for functions of banks we want private sector incentives (eg credit allocation) and for what functions we don’t (management of payments and moderate-dollar “ordinary savings” in ways that effectively convert those sources into investments riskier than “ordinary savers” or payments-systems users mean to bear).

2026-08-12 11:48:11 UTC

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regulation of insurance conpany investment is the standard answer here. but besides the aint-gonna-happen part, the question is what role is served by private business, if regulators are largely going to define the portfolios behind life insurance policies and the state is ultimately going to bear the risk? what is their role? more innovative marketing? new product definition? (do we want that? we’d surr want to regulate it i think!)

2026-08-12 10:50:38 UTC

i'd like some of my erstwhile neoliberal colleagues to explain why, if in 44 states shortfalls are ultimately paid for by tax payers, life insurance should remain a private for-profit industry rather than a service administered by the state? cf @npub178m…w32e https://prospect.org/2026/08/03/ai-bailout-could-be-baked-into-bubble-private-equity-life-insurers-loans/

2026-08-02 22:24:15 UTC

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because it’s long and i didn’t want to split it into multiple posts.

2026-08-02 22:21:32 UTC

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try the alt text.

2026-08-02 17:46:16 UTC

This is excellent, by #JohannKurtz https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/young-adults-are-poor-despite-every
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/117/027/161/722/676/698/original/871e25e14f5f6577.png

2026-07-19 21:50:47 UTC

the current iteration of AI begins with a faltering cloud computing industry's need for a growth driver. so high compute burden and improvement via brute-force scaling begin as features rather than bugs.
but brute-force scaling was always going to become a China comparative advantage.

2026-07-14 12:49:35 UTC

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so, to a first approximation, households are the "roots" of the economy. firms may hold shares of other firms, but those firms are ultimately held by households, so indirectly the households hold approximately all the firms. there is still that "approximately" there, because the state owns things, and in the accounting households are not taken as indirectly owning the state. and the foreign sector can hold equities as well, not just domestic households.

2026-07-14 11:41:28 UTC

two things can simultaneously be true: (1) contemporary AI is real and revolutionary technology; and (2) we are courting the greatest financial crisis in the history of humankind.

2026-07-09 00:16:44 UTC

someday i'd like to meet The People.
we might have a spirited conversation.

2026-07-08 13:41:42 UTC

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But the US legislature is not representative. We don't see many Gingriches in multiparty democracies with proportional representation. The US Congress, at least under current electoral and political practices, does not really qualify as a representative body. It is an institution subject to capture that superficially takes the form of a representative body, that has become (in part due to Gingrich!) too captured and atrophied to accomplish anything at all.

2026-07-07 23:37:07 UTC

charismatic human beings are both seductive and unreliable. that's why we invent and rely upon institutions. we should leave a much, much smaller role for charismatic human beings in our politics. heads of state should be ceremonial.

2026-07-06 13:32:06 UTC

[new draft post] Why are Americans so unhappy? https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2026/07/06/why-are-americans-so-unhappy/index.html

2026-07-05 16:54:08 UTC

"If your website has a 'See more' link, I assume that indicates that the rest of the article or site is unimportant or uninteresting, so I basically never click on it. Why would I?" @npub1dwe…fxlw https://www.philipbrewer.net/2026/07/05/see-more-or-not-see-more/

2026-07-04 09:51:13 UTC

preliterate and postliterate are both varieties of illiterate.

2026-06-25 14:47:11 UTC

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yes.

2026-06-25 14:43:48 UTC

look. i know people claim air conditioning cools them. i do want to respect people’s “lived experience”.
but the science is very clear. on average, air conditioners heat rather than cool the areas immediately surrounding them.
i suggest we look to the dynamics of contemporary social media to better understand the disconnect.

2026-06-08 10:35:36 UTC

“when people opt to devote their energy to tracking the latest TikTok star or scrolling content instead of nurturing interpersonal relationships, they are effectively amusing themselves to death.” @npub1u2k…nxuj https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051261437487

2026-05-22 00:54:47 UTC

the thesis “contemporary social media contributes dysfunctionally to a collective sense of pessimistic nihilism” is, i think, correct.
it is not inconsistent, however, with the thesis “a great deal is terrible about Americans’ material conditions, and worse in a variety of ways than previously”
it seems kind of dumb to me that there has emerged a discourse that treats these hypotheses, which i’d characterize as mutually reinforcing, as if they were mutually inconsistent, there can be only one.

2026-05-03 21:28:20 UTC

[new draft post] The $200,000 standard deduction https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2026/05/03/the-$200000-standard-deduction/index.html

2026-01-28 12:25:22 UTC

they hate us for our freedoms.
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/115/972/710/158/436/323/original/9d5ed4935fe1cbfb.jpeg

2025-12-16 02:25:43 UTC

i’m 55 years old, but when i talk to myself i still refer to myself as “kid”.

2025-12-15 01:54:27 UTC

pricing power is the root of all evil, except of course when you’re the one doing the pricing.

2025-12-11 23:11:23 UTC

For a cause to be just, there has to be a telos, a desired end-state, that offers a decent outcome to everyone, even those perceived to be on the other side of the cause. 1/

2025-12-09 18:32:11 UTC

they advertised authentic Vietnamese, but it was faux pho.

2025-10-29 14:54:43 UTC

if we think of Jeffrey Epstein as a kompromat op, isn't AI erotica served by centralized platforms likely to become Jeffrey Epstein blitzscaled?
i don't mean to draw a moral equivalence. no children are harmed indulging a weird fetish with Mistress GPT. but it'll become a blackmail treasure trove.

2025-10-16 23:34:51 UTC

i know we’re all supposed to hate the groups, but i say we start a group called “citizens united against citizens united”.

2025-10-16 23:27:57 UTC

is anyone keeping a database of the black letter crimes that members of this administration seem to commit with some frequency, so that a next administration can finally take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed?

2025-10-08 12:42:52 UTC

the entrenchment of a gerontocratic political leadership globally suggests life extension research may have social costs its enthusiasts and funders have not reckoned with. for much of the world, the finitude of leaders’ natural lifespans represents the public’s best hope for change.

2025-10-05 23:00:40 UTC

“What appeals to me most about American traditions is the creedal nature of national identity, the Declaration’s insistence on universal equality, and the rights enumerated in our Constitution. Perhaps this is wishful thinking, but I consider innovation, productivity growth, and sustained material prosperity to be downstream of free expression.” @npub1lk2…9zdg https://rajivsethi.substack.com/p/the-compact

2025-09-28 08:58:48 UTC

why are they referred to as “scare quotes”? who is supposed to be scared?

2025-09-22 17:29:57 UTC

basically the world’s policeman is now a mob guy.

2025-08-26 16:09:14 UTC

when will The State be reified as a chatbot you can talk to?

2025-08-26 01:21:10 UTC

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i think a lot of what contemporary platforms do ought to be public goods provided by the state. meetup.com would qualify. the basic criterion is network effects are created by and should be owned by the public. if the value of a thing comes from network effects, it should be public, either like the public internet (decentralized, participatory) or if that’s not practical managed in the public interest by the democratic state (if/when we have one of those).

2025-08-21 15:53:54 UTC

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you’re making me feel so old. Woolworth’s is still around in Mexico I think!

2025-08-21 15:27:18 UTC

"today we practiced an age-appropriate Active Threat Drill in conjunction with the…Sheriff’s Office. These drills are required by law to occur at least four times per school year. Students practiced either running or hiding depending on the location of the potential threat."

2025-07-09 19:00:37 UTC

“‘targeting’ is just taxing by another name. Means-testers have not figured out how to better spend a fixed amount of tax revenue. Rather, in these debates, they use national accounting rules to allow themselves to tax more in order to spend more while preventing universalists from doing the same thing.” #MattBruenig https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/11/11/universal-benefits-cost-less-than-means-tested-benefits/

2025-07-08 11:31:28 UTC

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I don’t think there was a golden age, but it’s also not true all ages have been the same. This is a very different age than the late 20th Century I grew up in, in some ways better (more viewpoints get a wider hearing), but in important respects much worse (less conducive to using reason — with inevitable unfortunate biases but still — to converge upon a widely shared, pretty functional, consensus understanding of reality).

2025-07-07 19:21:29 UTC

you don’t want news organizations optimizing for viewership or subscriptions.
what should they optimize for? that’s a hard question.
but definitely not viewership or subscriptions.

2025-07-06 10:34:33 UTC

it’s more than a bit pathetic that a *Gulf petrostate* like UAE sees the writing on the wall and dives headlong into EVs + solar, while the “good ol’ USA” clings nostalgically to coal, oil, and monster trucks.
see #TimSahay #KateMackenzie https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/brics-in-2025/

2025-07-03 10:31:37 UTC

what’s the inverse of Hanlon’s Razor? i think that’s what applies to the current Supreme Court.

2025-06-27 14:37:57 UTC

the universal binding of Supreme Court decisions affords justices more power than is necessary to give particularized litigants justice.
“inferior” judges should pay the Court no mind, do their own thing, let each set of litigants appeal to the Supreme Court if that’s their thing.

2025-06-20 00:27:38 UTC

for people who live there and love it, NYC in fact has a lot if market power.
no matter how rich you are, there really isn’t anywhere else like it, particularly if you are an English speaker and your politics are antagonistic to European social democracy.

2025-06-19 13:13:23 UTC

suppose you cut medicaid, but create a “stabilization fund” to hold hospitals harmless, prevent rural hospitals from shuttering.
all you’ve done is created income for hospitals without requiring—or even allowing—them to actually do the work of helping those who would have been medicaid recipients.

2025-05-05 20:33:38 UTC

it should matter much less who the President is.

2025-05-05 12:32:57 UTC

“french films” undermining our morals again.

2025-05-03 17:38:51 UTC

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i agree with all of this.
(i don't think eliminating single family zoning would go too far in getting a lot of multifamily built in affluent SFH neighborhoods. but the fact that we continue to build out and zone new SFH neighborhoods is SAF (stupid as fuck). and our collective habit of building this way drains the potential market for better ways of living in all the ways you describe.)

2025-05-03 15:25:02 UTC

i think housing policy should put its thumb on the scale for dense, multifamily, LARGE apartments.
great buildings are where families are raised, not post-college dorms for singles and young couples.

2025-05-01 12:39:31 UTC

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yes! Ricardo’s comparative advantage presumes balanced trade, but not necessarily bilaterally balanced. ( i’m explicit about that in this one https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/04/27/how-can-taxing-foreign-investors-balance-trade/index.html )

2025-05-01 01:50:36 UTC

[new draft post] Overall but not bilateral balance https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/04/30/overall-but-not-bilateral-balance/index.html

2025-04-30 02:01:43 UTC

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not working extra hard because of hate. falling into line, obeying the leader unconditionally, because of love of ones community in the face of an insidious enemy that existentially threatens it.
see https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/05/what-is-fascism/index.html

2025-04-30 01:56:11 UTC

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i certainly agree, but the counterclaim would be that sufficiently demonizing a minority outgroup unlocks a kind and quality of coordination (i think a horrible, ugly kind and quality) worth the cost in conflict and the sacrifice of potential collaborators.

2025-04-30 01:38:46 UTC

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just an idea!

2025-04-30 01:36:06 UTC

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you just treat every press organ that is not absolutely fawning of you as different faces of the same enemy, one blob emitting “fake news” whenever it is news you find unhelpful.

2025-04-30 01:32:59 UTC

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as steve jobs would say, stay tuned.

2025-04-30 01:29:15 UTC

maybe the answer is your faction should always loudly accuse the press as being and enemy and out to get you. it seems to work. they go every extra mile to prove they are evenhanded and unfairly maligned.

2025-04-29 14:01:13 UTC

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you might consider replacing them with your phone!

2025-04-29 13:59:45 UTC

our phones are trying to make themselves our spouses, completing our sentences for us when we are half way through them.

2025-04-28 12:57:37 UTC

andreeson used to chat widely, than he blocked anyone who might say anything he might find uncomfortable to hear. in retrospect that has proven consequential.

2025-04-23 16:34:40 UTC

it's weird how the catholic church now has a moment when it has to decide whether it wants to accommodate or pointedly resist a global trend toward authoritarianism.

2025-04-17 19:14:02 UTC

kind of emblematic of what DeSantis and Rufo have done to New College.
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/114/354/896/309/315/369/original/99a92ead22ece92e.jpeg

2025-04-16 17:11:38 UTC

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ha!

2025-04-16 17:08:14 UTC

2-squared / 4-squared / 5-squared

2025-04-16 14:27:08 UTC

“You cannot restrict unfreedom to a particular class of people. It will metastasize to consume the entire society.” [@jbouie](https://threads.net/@jbouie/ ) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/opinion/trump-court-order-constitution.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare ht @npub1esh…ggsa

2025-04-10 05:19:00 UTC

you can just do things. stupid things.

2025-04-06 18:25:09 UTC

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i agree with respect to the crazies of your own faction. but be very careful, if you try to go after the crazies of a faction in coalition that is not your own, that you don’t slip into conflating their crazies with their faction. that’s a trick (of your opponents), to provoke interfactional warfare by getting “crazies” in each faction to start a food fights in which each faction slips into viewing the other in caricature.

2025-04-05 17:02:44 UTC

what the fuck is wrong with this world? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-israel-aid-workers-deaths-video.html

2025-04-03 17:27:37 UTC

not only does it have the lowest tariff rates, but the penguins aren't unionized.

2025-04-02 22:29:09 UTC

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but are you her boyfriend?

2025-04-02 22:11:42 UTC

my son: “i feel like apostrophes can sometimes be really possessive.”

2025-04-02 13:57:06 UTC

i love the smell of liberation in the morning.

2025-03-30 15:49:10 UTC

a firm is a human organization to accomplish something. recruiting and appeasing all stakeholders, generating cash flow sufficient to pay the bills, these are *constraints* a firm faces, not the goal or function or purpose of the firm.

2025-03-30 00:32:53 UTC

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USAID was much more than an ad campaign! it’d be kicking ass and saving lives in Myanmar and Thailand right now, saving lives as a matter of course throughout Africa. An ad campaign would be a weak tea kind of soft power move for a someday liberated America, and USAID was justified as a source of soft power, but USAID was so much more.

2025-03-29 23:56:42 UTC

we should form a group called the “real americans” and raise huge sums for ad campaigns throughout the free world apologizing for our country’s behavior under possession, thanking them for staying sane and free, praying we will soon rejoin them after a difficult exorcism.
https://bsky.app/profile/thomashansen.bsky.social/post/3lljncadhqs2y
ht #WilliamCullerneBown

2025-03-29 18:13:05 UTC

cc @npub144u…adjw https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/734089

2025-03-28 15:58:10 UTC

from @npub1edf…tqa5 https://resnikoff.beehiiv.com/p/living-with-a-murderer
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/114/240/878/201/064/565/original/9d4f8b7d759d7e4b.png

2025-03-28 00:32:56 UTC

i think much of the Republican coalition is tacitly sure they can do what they’ve persuaded themselves is called for, and the pointy-headed liberals who warn them of consequences will be wrong because God will reward and protect the USA they will have sanctified.

2025-03-26 22:47:56 UTC

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You may condemn that too, or you may consider it a justified response to Israel’s actions in Gaza. But these aren’t killings coming from one side out of nowhere. Whichever of the many linked parties you consider more or less culpable, they are all — the US, Houthis, Israelis, Hamas, etc — prosecuting murderous military actions. /fin

2025-03-26 22:46:03 UTC

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War is bad. But it is also not one-sided. I’m not inclined to give the current US administration, which I consider lawless and fascist, much benefit of the doubt. I think it likely this leadership are reckless with civilian life to the point of war crime. But these melees are in response to hostilities from the Houthis that have also resulted in deadly consequences. 1/

2025-03-26 22:26:53 UTC

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I don’t revel in the deaths of Russian soldiers either, though of course it’s legitimate for the Ukrainians to kill them. It would have been legitimate for the Houthis to kill these servicemembers too—this is war—but I am very glad that did not happen, despite the severe intelligence breach. War is tragedy upon tragedy upon tragedy. Mass death may eventually help exhaust support for war, but that doesn’t make it virtuous or desirable. There are better ways to peace.

2025-03-26 16:50:08 UTC

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( as more information comes out, the case that military planners were not in fact adhering to obligations to protect civilian life and proportionality grows stronger. after the fact, we may well conclude there were war crimes. but again, that's not something servicemembers executing these orders could have judged and refused. https://bsky.app/profile/eliothiggins.bsky.social/post/3llcabku2xk25 )

2025-03-26 13:10:45 UTC

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Orders to bomb targets carefully selected for military importance are not *prima facie* a war crime such that a servicemember could or should refuse such orders. Questions of proportionality might lead to accusations *ex post* of war crime, that risks or harms to civilians were beyond proportionate to legitimate military objectives, but that is beyond the duty or capacity of servicemembers to judge in real time. They had no basis to refuse these orders.

2025-03-26 12:28:17 UTC

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the servicemembers acting as ordered, on a mission that is not a war crime, are not the people responsible. their deaths are not to be sought or excused. in consequential terms, had incompetence led to their deaths, the probability of an escalation for all involved, leading to more civilian and noncivilian catastrophe, would be very high. it may already be high, but severe escalation (eg restarting full civil war) may also yet be avoided.

2025-03-26 03:34:21 UTC

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It would have been, yes.

2025-03-26 01:52:10 UTC

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.

2025-03-25 14:36:45 UTC

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.

2025-03-24 14:39:43 UTC

Excellent, from #MattBruenig, on “Abundance”. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/03/24/the-abundance-agenda/ ht @npub1c2d…c2yj

2025-03-19 21:29:49 UTC

the way you reduce Federal interest outlays is you retire debt with wealth taxes.

2025-03-19 15:03:21 UTC

one thing i’d not have guessed is it’s the rich who’ve decided to burn it all down. recruiting the discontent and fanning the cynicism of the not so rich, sure. but the rich are in drivers’ seat of uprooting the foundations of their own extraordinary lives. great wealth turns people stupid.

2025-03-13 15:18:50 UTC

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you'd much rather be a surplus country than a deficit country in a time of growing trade barriers. the main benefit to deficit countries is they can learn to become more like surplus countries. /fin

2025-03-13 15:18:31 UTC

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further, surplus countries that produce high-value goods tend to have metacapacity — they know how to build competitive industries. deficit countries less so. 3/

2025-03-13 15:18:16 UTC

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obviously this is oversimplified, because the goods and services previously exported by surplus countries won't precisely match the goods and services domestic publics will want to buy. directed subsidies can help ameliorate this. 2/

2025-03-13 15:17:56 UTC

re: https://bsky.app/profile/rajakorman.bsky.social/post/3lkbdfilsfs27
persistent trade surplus countries just have to write a check to their own people, then deal with higher accounting deficits or tax the rich. any inflation is limited because, well, excess supply.
persistent deficit countries have to build industries they've forgotten or never known how to run. 1/
#economics

2025-03-12 03:11:58 UTC

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.

2025-03-11 21:55:25 UTC

"Overall, we find that gains associated with ideological moderation are relatively modest and likely secondary to turnout effects."
// a bit sad from a persuasionist perspective, but seems consistent with recent experience, e.g. relentlessly moderating Kamala Harris damned by turnout more than swing
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5172049

2025-03-06 23:21:20 UTC

“I think Trump is modeling himself to be our Caesar, ending the Republic and creating an Empire. He would be far better off, as would we all, if he modeled himself after Solon, the forgiver of debt.” https://econcrit.blogspot.com/2025/03/trumps-address-to-congress.html

2025-03-06 15:32:37 UTC

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i still build my world around RSS! (you can subscribe by mail if you want.)

2025-03-06 14:59:33 UTC

i think all social media posts should begin with a land acknowledgment that blogs were here first and sincere expressions of contrition for colonizing the place and destroying the culture.

2025-03-06 06:57:06 UTC

i’ve had my issues with ActBlue, but debilitating Democratic fundraising infrastructure would be an obvious “competitive authoritarian” play. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/us/politics/actblue-democrat-fundraising-resignations.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

2025-03-05 14:39:52 UTC

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you can be charitable and describe them as blinded by epistemological caution, or be more accurate and describe them as handmaidens for the ideology that conferred prestige upon their discipline.