People should note that the billionaire Mercer family, which is financing the resuscitation of Parler — infamous as a hub of 1/6 planning — and which financed Breitbart before that, is also putting its weight behind J.D. Vance’s potential senatorial ambitions.
“The family of hedge fund manager Robert Mercer also donated an undisclosed amount [to a Vance-supporting super PAC], and Lanza [a PAC advisor] declined to specify how much.” bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
If I had to put money down, I’d bet on the Senate getting one more Josh Hawley — in the form of J.D. Vance — as likelier than getting rid of the one it has.
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Just putting out there, in preemption, that “he’s a probable incel, not a probable white supremacist, shut up woke-ist!” is not the argument winner that a few people might think.
Listening to an @NPRCodeSwitch talk in a Twitter Space right now, and I have to agree with the approach apparent in Twitter’s announcements today: Clubhouse-style chats and Patreon-style memberships are more of a feature, in the end, than a product. nytimes.com/2021/02/25/tec…
Between Twitter’s rollouts, nascent apps like Clubhouse & Dispo, continuing growth @ Substack, and stuff like the Hey email app’s experimentation w/ blogging as a feature (see below), 2021 feels like a year of good ferment in tech — and it’s only February. world.hey.com/jason/hey-worl…
the big geniuses of the ’90s: “well, that’s it! Soviet communism is over. we’ve reached the end of history”
history, for at least 20 years and counting:
I’ve said that the Balkan wars of the ‘90s prefigured the nationalist authoritarianism & ethnic conflict that have come to define our time, and I still believe that. “End of history”? Pffft.
It feels funny recognize, in hindsight, that the ’90s — with a film called ‘Reality Bites’ and a band called Garbage — were as good as things seem likely to get, in my lifetime.
At least I lucked out and had that decade as my youth.
I usually find myself in agreement with Ben Rhodes, but i have to take exception here.
AI is within its rights to withhold its ‘conscience’ designation from people with track records of ethnic divisiveness in their rhetoric — which is incontrovertibly true for Navalny.
I can root for his leadership of the opposition to Putin and acknowledge the presence of moral ambiguity.
We overlooked overtones in Aung San Suu Kyi’s rhetoric when she was a human rights icon—before the Rohingya genocide. We shouldn’t repeat that error. foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/16/mya…
Ehhh …
We lionized Suu Kyi — rightly, we thought — for similar courage and suffering. She rose to power in part on the wings of that reputation — whereupon latent ethnic nationalist inclinations led her to wink at the army’s campaign of ethnic cleansing.