Just incredible to write the words 'calling it the war department will curtail mission creep' as the guys renaming it send troops to occupy American cities, put down protests, march in pointless parades, sink random speed boats and spread fucking mulch.
Left: yesterday Right: today
the thing is that the entire beltway press corps knows how unwell Mace is and they literally do not think it’s something the public deserves to know
You don’t actually need a new word to describe people on blue sky. I get it, everyone on here is incredibly annoying. It’s still better than Nazis
"NUMBERS ALWAYS TEND TO BENEFIT THE LEFT"
NEW: Trump's nominee to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics ran an anonymous Twitter account filled with sexually degrading attacks on Kamala Harris, anti-gay slurs, and far-right conspiracy theories. www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/p...
you cannot hate Tesla enough
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
Well I'm a dumbass lmao
Kavanaugh's statements make the problem worse, not better. If the reason SCOTUS is using cryptic shadow docket orders is because "five" of them can't "reach a consensus or a compromise on a particular issue that might be difficult," then that order should not be precedential —there's no majority.
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
It's because of the jet2holidays meme iirc
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
I don’t know what to tell you, man, but private interests have their private interests that are more responsible for the climate disaster than whatever the fuck you’re talking about
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social)
Absolutely correct. I was told point-blank by a climate VC partner that *scientists* are to blame for climate inaction bc they focus on studying and not actionable things while they could have sold private interests on SRM and we’d be much better off rn. I was dumbfounded!
We urgently need overhaul the moribund political economy of American liberalism in order to forestall the rise of reactionary conservatism, which we are neutral-to-positive about.
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social)
I was told by the brightest minds here that pointing out the now clearly obvious "putting your eggs on the coup basket is delusional" fact was being a doomer. Also, that expecting little of the military was just being a coastal lib out of touch with real America and The Troops
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
Wasn't I called an asshole on your mentions for pointing out there was never gonna be a coup? It's pretty irritating to see another institution showing its ass and bskyers responding with barely more than an erudite version of the "ah well, nevertheless" tweet
Once again, I think the better analysis of this is that it isn’t capitulation to Trump so much as it is using Trump as cover to do the very kind of thing that the people in charge of CBS want.
The term “anti-establishment” was redefined the same way as “working class.” Both now mean “person of any income, education level, or type of work who holds right-wing culture war views.” By contrast, “elites” means “holds broadly left-wing views on cultural issues.”
Everyday I think about how this guy personally is responsible for ruining the lives of millions of people around the country and world.
I thought we'd all learned by now that laws without the will or the power to enforce them are just words but I guess not
what do we do about every media outlet crying bloody murder about it
All kidding about this nonsense answer aside: The regime is asserting the power to murder without trial a boat full of people suspected of drug trafficking, who easily could have been intercepted and arrested instead. That is unconscionable and horrifying even assuming everyone aboard was guilty.
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
ngl the only thing that has caught me by surprise is joining the war on cancer on the side of cancer. So yeah, I expected it, but -actually- going through it, hell... I wasn't prepared emotionally for it
District and appellate courts, I think fairly, keep asking the Supreme Court to clarify what they actually mean—i.e. "If the new rule is that the Trump admin can never lose then you have to say that" and the Supreme Court keeps being like "No, you're supposed to just do it without us having to say."
yeah materialist politics are just more viable when the asks are things like “running water and flush toilets”. Not that deprivation doesn’t exist today, but there’s just more of a baseline of ambient prosperity in the first world that makes people more into relative/status goods.
"Cuomo is such a bad candidate that he needs Donald Trump to clear the field for him" is an amazing yet true fact.
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
That being said I enjoyed moving around by bus when I lived there
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
SF buses real good but slow as hell
So sick of these centrist impurity tests. Not everyone can meet your standards of being a huge piece of shit, sometimes you have to just grit your teeth and vote for someone good even if that goes against your principles
What even is the opinion here, "we would like the federal government to be run by totally different people with an entirely different agenda"? All of the blame and agency is placed on local officials, not the deranged authoritarian calling in militarized forces under false pretenses.
you caught me. i transitioned because i was ashamed of being a white man, which is why i decided to become a part of that famously beloved and celebrated group: white women
Every conservative principle that could have merit is already represented in the mainstream Democratic Party, not to mention fully abandoned by conservatives themselves. What's left? Bigotry, sadism, tantrums over corporate logos. This is what you're trying to find common ground with
over a million people fucking died and we have had no public reckoning over it and we are arguing over school closures still. just unbelievably misplaced priorities.
Results so stunningly clear they inspired this classic xkcd (xkcd.com/2400/):
The people who control our information environment want to help Trump so have waged a years long propaganda campaign to turn his most deadly disaster into something else.
MAHA’s central thesis is that modern medicine is bad, unless it’s gear
One thing that the backlash to COVID has taught me is that nobody understands how risk works. The bars opened before the schools because going to a bar is an opt-in activity and going to school is required, not to mention schools being a place where germs are passed around all the time.
The closing of churches was not a radicalizing moment for anybody who had not already been radicalized by Democratic governance since 2009.
Amazing things are happening on X the Everything App
I saw some of the discourse happening today on this app and one observation I have is that the sooner we start to understand that much of what gets called “online left” are actually diagonalists and Nazbols/Red-brown the better off we will all be
you don’t hate the media enough (also why are democrats all still totally unprepared for all of these predictable ambushes)
All hail Access, Queen of Revenue, Defender of the Status Quo.
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
plz post link I wanna see the big yabos
How are you going to have a 2 state solution without recognizing one of these entities as a state??
It still blows my mind that there was a deadly disease that killed 1 million people in this country alone and the people who get to air their opinions about it most are those who think we did too much and were too careful.
If I had said, in 2005, that 20 years later the Republican Party would be even *more* systematically opposed, not only to domestic action on climate change, but to action on climate change anywhere in the world, I would have been dismissed as a hysterical partisan.
What a fantastic development. Historical icon Amoeba Music will build housing on its site and remain a music store (and preserve the famous People's Park mural). Pretty A+ all around. Thankfully, no CEQA for infill means this project can't be fucked with. www.berkeleyside.org/2025/08/28/a...
adding "doctors" to the list of professions that, alongside judges and lawyers, have so far given a good account of themselves under authoritarianism
Jim O’Neill is a tech investor, former CEO of the Thiel Foundation, and co-founder with Peter Thiel of the Thiel fellowship. He has no direct medical education or experience. It’s hard to get away from the feeling that they really are trying to kill us.
a hundred substackers, unfortunately, mean little if the commanding heights of capital J journalism are held by people like Dash Sulzeberger, Joe Kahn, and Will Lewis
ezra klein is not a smart man who tells rich people what they want to hear and makes a lot of money doing so. liberals pay attention to him because they think talking wonky is smart and dispassionate and lets them operate like a bunch of spocks. its all fucking dumb.
having goals gives you clarity. right now the dems' goal is "win more seats in the midterms" and that gives them clarity of purpose; unfortunately, it is actually extremely damaging to spend 2 years of spreading authoritarianism stepping out of the way because you think it'll help you next election
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
This has nothing to do with defeatism. Defeatism would be to give up. Joe is being clear of the challenge ahead, which is better than pretending it's not there. America being America doesn't exempt from the challenge of getting out of the very deep hole. That's bizarre exceptionalism
It just absolutely blows that RFK Jr. looked at this and said, no that’s not bad enough, we can do worse
IT IS NOTABLE THAT THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE HAVE NOT SEEN ANYBODY IN THE MILITARY DO
I think we can get carried away with the whole "the President is only constrained by norms" framing. The Trump administration has broken an extraordinary number of black-letter laws (impoundment, civil service, etc.). The problem is that courts (or at least, SCOTUS) have looked the other way.
I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure the whole ballgame for democracy is the critical mass of people who will just ask chatgpt who to vote for, and I think that on an institutional level republicans know this and democrats don’t
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
But if you point this out, bsky experts will happily tell you nobody can escape objective economic reality, you're just being a doomer, etc
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social)
This is what I've been saying: Instead of exerting power to discipline Trump, financial elites are, for different reasons ranging from cowardice to fear, trying to make it work. Frog-boiled into losing reliable free data because Wall Street will convince itself the paid alternative is good enough
Super-interesting from the finance industry newsletter Short Squeez: now that Trump is trying to turn the Bureau of Labor Statistics into a Trump propaganda vehicle, professional investors are making all kinds of other plans to get legit reliable data.
the actual sources of Trump's power are not Trump himself - a feckless and lazy incompetent - but the media and judiciary, who swoop in and clean up all his messes after the fact.
You will rarely see a better encapsulation of Tesla
If someone freelancing for a major donor did this during the Biden administration not only would Joe Biden have been impeached and removed from office but the person who did this and everyone who facilitated it would be facing +25 years in federal prison.
so everyone's done with the cope that the military secretly hates trump now right
We can and must dream better than this, which is the work we're publishing and promoting at @cipolicy.bsky.social internationalpolicy.org/publications...
Much better messaging than the usual suspects
If Obama or Biden had said this, it would be rightfully understood as them arrogating dictatorial authority to themselves, it would be the only thing anyone in the media or opposition would talk about for a year, and it would probably end their presidency. For Trump, it’s literally just Tuesday.
No amount of appearing reasonable and trying to avoid provoking them will stop them from escalating against you. The only thing you'll do is inspire revulsion in everyone else: if you won't even stand up for yourself how can you stand up for anyone else
Oprah platformed Jenny Mcarthy to talk about how much she hated her son and now we can't have vaccines anymore.
I do not think music criticism needs to be more mean. I do think it would be nice, though, if it taught you things about music and how it works. As it stands, I generally do not learn much from most music criticism beyond a given artist's personal and professional trajectory.
The IRA was surprisingly effective at spurring investment in green energy. Where it failed was making it *politically* sustainable by delivering immediate tangible benefits to the public. In that sense, the Green New Deal was, in retrospect, the more prudent and realistic approach. on.ft.com/4n4Ayra
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social)
scratch a libertarian etc etc
a huge part of the problem with AI and delusional spirals at the moment is that the "AI safety" people were busy with their own fantasies of Skynet, AGI, and paperclip maximization being the danger and seem to have done zero due diligence on the *actual* risk factors of the product.
I'm sorry, but literally whatever you think about Newsom or AOC as a matter of substance, this analysis is fully detached from political reality as far as internal Democratic politics and general election politics are concerned.
You see the papers of Lord Coke prevent having a workable healthcare program btu don't prevent jackbooted thugs from shutting down a university because a professor criticized gender norms 5 years ago
Americans broadly hate all of this, and we all gotta remember that when it feels like things are spinning out of control
That is always how they talk about us. Listen, when they screwed Puerto Ricans during Hurricane Katrina — A LOT OF US knew we were all considered Puerto Rican and we stood up against what the administration did. Miami Cubans are finding out they are just like the “rest of us” and not a “good one”.
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
My model of this is that business and financial elites want more than anything for Trump to work out, enough to distort their nominal financial interests. A ‘Wages of Being Able to Harrass my Secretary’, if you may, that distorts market signals
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social)
I said basically this earlier and got some pushback but I believe this is 100% correct
Annnnd the FX market reaction is almost fully reversed:
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
I mean elites in Krugman’s “masters of the universe” sense. Anyway, we’re at an impasse here. We’ll see and I’ll be more than glad to get owned by you guys on this.
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
This actually shows how this could play out: The same way we’re frog-boiled with higher and higher tariffs, this guy is gonna keep slowly pushing the envelope with fucking around with the fed, and people are going to keep talking themselves into going along. But anyway, we’re an impasse here.
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
I did note that. I’m not saying that Trump is not accountable to reality, I’m saying that “reality” is very shaped by elites that are every day making it more clear they’re on board with the program. What you guys are saying requires a strong external check that is harder to envision by the day
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
And then what happened after that? What tariffs do we have now?
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
And then what happened after that? We're now with tariffs that would have been unthinkable before Jan 21st!
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
Again, based on this model many things that are already happening wouldn't be happening. We can't seriously keep telling ourselves "well, now _this time_ he fucked around too much with the money"
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
Yes, and the notion of fucking around with the fed was unthinkable and yet here we are
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
Sure. I'll happily be wrong, but I'll put my stake here that this leads to nothing
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
Again, cmon, we haven't found the upper bound on the price elites are willing to pay to kill woke. You guys are way too confident you can price it right when nobody has been able to
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
Look, this model has had zero predictive capacity up to now, surprising everyone. What exactly makes you think this time it'll be different?
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
You guys are severely underpricing elites just riding it out because they like this guy being the boss and they want to go back to harassing their secretary more than anything
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
Sharon, respectfully, you guys have been very wrong about the dynamics of who balks and who rides it out up to now. I would be much humbler than this, but you guys think you've got it all figured out
gauaren.bsky.social (@gauaren.bsky.social) reply parent
Here's the thing tho: they won't, and it won't crash the economy because Wall Street will act like it's no big deal and they move on. This idea that the markets will react is so evidence-resistant... Let's get real
I’m sorry you worked out a plan in your heads that involved benefiting from an imaginary racial hierarchy and it didn’t pan out.
The reason why older generations burnt the shit out of their meat and boiled the shit out of their vegetables, was your kid died if you didn't. Medium rare steaks and roasted Brussels sprouts are a side effect of an intact food safety infrastructure