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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 2h

What the Trumpers aren't saying is the real justification for invading Portland is they're looking for the Lathe of Heaven because they secretly know e-dreaming is the only way they can actually make their whites only utopia real.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 3h

Yeah, I think we'd have to make personal entertainment a whole lot less convenient in general since the rise of social media, streaming, and endless cheap games is the main big change that lines up with the second fertility decline.

Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 5h

I'm also skeptical there's an economic solution for the second demographic transition we're undergoing, which seems to involve people delaying or forgoing coupling period. You can perhaps induce existing couples to have more children but there are inherent limits to that strategy.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 5h

I agree with this but also suspect moving the needle would require a couple of orders of magnitude more expenditure than anyone is willing to contemplate.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 5h

I think it is perfectly cromulent to provide tax incentives for all sorts of pro-social things and if your stance is "fuck you, I don't want to do any of that, give me money" you might as well call yourself a libertarian.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 8h

And we're ultimately getting a brutally vivid illustration of Milgram's experiments. In hierarchical institutions very few people will defy immoral orders. Moral leadership isn't nice to have. It is everything.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 8h

Laws are not self enforcing. Someone ultimately has to run the prisons or push the button to take money out of the bank.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 8h

I get the desire to legislate every transgression of Trump, but I don't think there is any escaping the need to set social norms and put people in power who respect them. Courts can be very good, but as we've seen they're much too slow and ultimately depend on other powers to impose sanctions.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 9h

And it ends when the Portland folks achieve total hegemony through superior ice cream.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 9h

Civil War 2, but the military picks sides based on whether they served in Chicago and became Italian Beef guys or in Tennessee and became Nashville Hot guys.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 10h

But the more political capital we have to spend fixing things, the less we can spend doing necessary reforms so it is very worth going to the mat here.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 10h

Saving health-care, yes, and also preventing as much damage from Trump's power grab as possible. The electoral impact will be nil because attention spans are so short.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 10h

I think I'm convinced viewing the shutdown through the lens of electoral politics is a mistake. This is a policy fight and it's about securing the best baseline we can when the political tides inevitably shift.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 13h

Ron Johnson going on NPR this morning and trashing Obamacare preexisting condition protections and blaming subsidies and I encourage Republicans to go with that strategy. Brilliant messaging, sir.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 21h

Now now, let's not downplay the trauma of getting twirked by an inflatable tanuki

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 1d

Tbh I don't think the Texas National Guard lasts in Chicago much past the first real cold front. Texans don't exactly have thick blood in my experience.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 1d

Yep, only time my cats bite it's either clearly self defense or they think I'm a big dumb idiot who needs to learn how to properly tussle.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 1d

Of course we could still end up in a 1990-91 style recession if Trump's chaos and tariffs remains and the fed is forced to (and can) keep rates up.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 1d

I guess the discourse is pushing me to think people are underrating the chances of an AI soft landing. The data center boom simply...slows back down to a normal pace and we get a normal amount of consolidation as the industry matures.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 1d

More seriously, the amount of pure hallucinations driving political divisions is insane. American politics has always had that paranoid strain and hunting nonexistent enemies, but the scale of it in the social media age is breathtaking and it's leading even ordinary people to some dark fantasies.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 1d

And I'd say catastrophic dooming on the left is also a problem, but right now it's a problem that results mostly in deranged posting because the left doesn't have power.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 1d

Your grandchildren not talking to you isn't an existential crisis demanding mass imprisonment of imagined enemies. It's a skill issue.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 1d

You will always be within spitting distance of winning power. Americans are still skeptical of taxes and new government programs and social engineering. Yes, that means the actual fights are boring vs your imagined race war. Deal with it. Sephiroth posting your way into attempted coups ain't it.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 1d

Feel like we've got to find a way to do mass scale therapy on the right to stop them catastriphizing. No, you aren't one election away from having your property expropriated and given to illegal immigrants and you aren't being sent to re-education camps.

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Chris Wightman 🧟‍♂️ @wymancr.bsky.social · 1d

I also remember just enough from the 1990-91 recession to know sometimes uncertainty just causes everyone to freak out and horde money. Which is where we'd be without the AI gold rush.

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