u/Metacatalepsy

A good chunk of the recent "exit interview" of Ross Douthat centered the early blogging experience, and I thought it was worthwhile to go look up what that actually looked like.

This one is a somewhat representative sample of Ross's output from that era, which paints a more stark view or what the "war blogger" era was like.

I don't want to like, jump too hard on something that is now twenty five years old and a position that has been at least in part abandoned by its author, but at the same time, it's also a reminder of what that "golden age" of blogging actually entailed, and the quality of thought that was elevated afterward.

Documents related to how "Abundance" branding and fundraising is being sold and operated. Relevant, obviously, to the book "Abundance" and ongoing debates about its impact.

I think the editorializing in the Prospect is a bit too much but the core documents are interesting to read (I recommend reading them first).

A lot of it is broad political strategy - an emphasis on building over the long term rather than just dropping money into a situation to try to make an affect. Which, fine, a little depressing that this is something the people running and funding politics need explained to them, but okay.

Some of the details are a little...telling, though. One of the things that article highlights that isn't actually a major point of the draft but does seem revealing to me: a bullet point talking about their coalition highlights how "Neighbors for a Better San Francisco", a political group they have worked with as moderates, has had a "major accomplishment" in recalling Chesa Boudin, but have since been a net negative for Abundance-style politics.

...but why is recalling Chesa Boudin a major accomplishment? Boudin is a Housing First advocate, and exactly the kind of person you'd want if you were trying to shift to a policy regime that emphasized building housing as a solution to problems rather than throwing money at police crackdowns on homeless people. It's a throwaway line in the document, but precisely because it is thrown in as an aside that it's important - the author has assumed the target audience is already on board with why Chesa Boudin is bad, no explanation is needed.

One of the core debates about "Abundance" as a political movement is the nature of its actual instantiation and goals. Whatever one things of the arguments presented in the book or more generally by Ezra Klein and associated policy thinkers, if the actual operation of the moment is more as a rebranding and organizing exercise for an anti-progressive politics, it seems pretty straightforward why progressives are going to be hostile to it.

If the goal of Abundance, as a political ideology and movement, is to try and improve policy outcomes in places where progressives hold power, it would seem imperative that they not be seen as hostile to progressive policies more generally. If the goal of Abundance as a political movement is just trying to drive progressives from power generally and replace them with people more friendly to "ultra high net worth" individuals, well...that too, would be clarifying.

As title. I have an image I want to use as a mask, but directly adding it just uses the rectangular area of the image as a mask - I want to use only the non-transparent parts. How do I do this?

Thank you.