Financing Our Own Destruction: Are we taking this fascism thing seriously? https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/financing-our-own-destruction
Pension funds need to stop letting MAGA billionaires manage their investments — they're using worker money to support policies that harm workers.
"Humans have a wonderful capacity for normalizing our own experiences. When our circumstances change, we are able to readjust to them as a new baseline in order to carry on with our lives. Research beloved by pop psychologists shows that this hedonic adaptation allows us to regain our equanimity even after a devastating life event—or, to lose our sense that extraordinary changes are special, rather than expected.
"This is a nice thing and all, and probably an evolutionary necessity to allow us not to freak the fuck out at this wacky wild life all the time. It does, however, come with drawbacks. A positive mental model of hedonic adaptation would be an accident victim who is paralyzed, yet manages to regain their happiness. Great. But another mental model of this phenomenon would be: Frogs in a pot, constantly readjusting to the rising temperature as they are boiled alive.
"America in 2025 is a nation that is being dragged by malign political forces into a pit of fascism, oligarchy, and hatred. This transformation is not happening very slowly at all. Yet it is slow enough that we can observe ourselves and others ever so slightly readjusting our daily expectations so that we can carry on with our normal lives. As we should. Simmering in constant anxiety is not a productive form of personal resistance. On an institutional level, though, that dogged refusal to snap out of the soothing belief that things are the same as ever is going to get us fucking killed. "