This is why I’m eye-rolly over technocrats freaking out that people said the economy was bad in ‘24 even though it was good. Everyone went through a once a century societal upheaval, we have little way to capture that, so people channeled those fears into what we do capture which is economic.
day that ends in Y
Sentenced to live on that libertarian island with the kind of people they pretend to like but really hate
Seems super 90s and passe to say this but it feels like the powers that be made a long term bet starting in the Reagan years that they could neuter the power of the American public through dulling yet addictive effects of consumerism and they were right
"Politics is not the nursery." www.unpopularfront.news/p/this-is-it
This is the real blueskyism: various factions of the left getting apoplectic with each other over disagreements that would be utterly inscrutable to normal people
People severely underestimate the protective factor provided by living for decades as an utter normie
There should also be some soul searching on the libleft (more lib than left, I think) about how giving up on ideas of justice and going all in on technocracy has left them incapable of grappling our greater societal wrongs
At least a tiny bit funny that Klein et al are confirming some of the worst caricatures of liberals as out of touch elitists
It’s clear now that Klein-style liberals live in as robust a bubble as Fox News conservatives it’s just that their fantasy world is one where everything is much more ordered and reasonable than it actually is
On the latter point, a good demonstration of this is Mamdani’s ‘Free Buses’ which is as much a political statement as a policy one. If technocrats understood that but decided to only engage with the policy side that would make sense but they don’t seem to even understand there is a political side
Going out of their way to confirm critics’ worst version of the movement
Twitter is sort of doing a real time version of what ai is doing in terms of pickling the brains of already mentally unwell people
(aborted manager in heaven) I would have loved to touch base with you…
Yassified Albert Einstein
You get the whole cow
the first time i smoked it was with my older sister who was a seasoned drug user so I matched her intake thinking she would stop me if I went overboard and it was one of the worst nights of my life
At my old workplace there was once a chicken-wing eating contest and one contestant was going so slowly that a coworker shouted out scornfully, “He’s just eating lunch.”
they traveled down the mississippi like grimes
10 years ago their whole thing was that girls’ sports don’t matter because no one cares about or wants wants to watch ‘worse’ athletes play
Well a fair number of people clearly want no enforcement at all, whether from cameras or cops
the lockheed martin smol bean could have been all of those things without reproach if they didn’t also want to be bombastically self righteous online, but i guess the pull to engage in moralistic posting was too great
Just found my new favorite startup
If we’re to change anything it’ll be because a mass of people get mad and are pushed out of their stupor to act on that anger. Simplistic accounting of events will be what compels them, no one will sit down to review all of the evidence to decide if this is time we can justify doing something.
this book is so bad, no clue why it is beloved by so many. i read it with my two boys (10 and 12 at the time) a few years ago and they thought it dull and uninspiring even being in the core demographic at the time.
having the rule in place would probably change the calculus of who decides to run and who the voters will support in a primary in a way that pushes effective top age limit lower than 75 (but really 72 would be better actual limit for this reason)
this is an uncomfortable truth for dems who assume that there must be an aspect of consensus building to all of this. but there doesn’t have to be and we are getting a lesson in that now. sometimes a small group of people with a righteous rage can overpower a much larger group that’s weak.
the erroneous assumption here is that the left needs to get mainline liberals on board to be effective. but the conservative tea party didn’t start like that, they were just louder and more demanding. they bulldozed regular conservatives many of whom eventually joined their ranks.
the center left controls all levers of power within the democratic party and almost all big dem funders are centrist. blaming a small fringe for the failures of the party at large is excuse making for a group of people too moribund to respond to modern problems.
this reads like a guy who’s never planned a kid’s birthday party but has seen his wife stress over it and thought ‘how hard can it be, i’ll bet AI can do it within five years’
a part they miss is that cultural development happens concurrently with the technological development and you can’t have one without the other
it’s very much a penny wise pound foolish approach with them since vaccines have near the best payoff in terms of avoided health spending
this seems like a pretty terrible billboard design to me. like if you’re driving by fast and glance at it you might only see a nice vista, the name of a park, and paid for by doge. i would bet a certain percentage of viewers have no idea that this is an anti-doge billboard.
yeah, we need a shortcut for that because we don’t have a stable of pols with 30+ year careers of banked goodwill and being able to consistently hammer home that things are fair/unfair is more resonant than whatever it is the dems are doing. aoc of course is good at this.
being willing/able to frame issues in terms of justice, which bernie is able to do, would go a long way to achieving some mysticism. it certainly seems like a natural lane for pols on the libleft and yet most dems are allergic to anything but technocratic messaging.
i’ve noticed a steep drop number of seniors at my kids’ high school who plan to go into cs so i think it’s filtering down to them that it’s no longer a reliable path to wealth
It doesn’t matter that it happened 10 years ago, they haven’t forgotten, and still think poorly of you because of it.
matt’s been a dipshit for decades, i don’t know why people think this is a recent change. his whole thing in his early blogging days was being pro iraq war as a young ‘liberal.’ steve sailer commented on his blog around that time and matt thought it was funny and contrarian to argue with him.
has he acknowledged and grappled with the fact that he wrote a book titled ‘one billion americans’ less than five years ago or is he pretending that never happened
as kids my dad somehow tricked me and my siblings into thinking cream of wheat was a special treat we could only get for special occasions
horseshoe theory for dating-related grievances
my favorite leftist posters are ezra klein and nicolas kristoff
if someone wants to make a political scandal of who a dem candidate is dating it better be, like, that large koch son with the fancy shirts and not just another well known leftish person
i’m glad there are people who have high morals about this stuff but i will never give up snarking on the looks of these dumb bitches
refraining from commenting noem’s garish looks does nothing to change the permission structure to attack women’s looks generally
this is an especially weird tantrum they’re having since there is another dem in the primary who owns a very nice home. to be clear, neither matters, but freaking out about one and not the other, well
it’s very savvy not to care about anything
They don’t have a vision for how they’d like to reshape the world in 10-50 years because the world mostly works for them as is, so there’s no urgency for anything but tweaking the status quo.
why is he dressed like he’s going to the kind of british wedding that happens on a thursday afternoon
lunch is cottage cheese and half a grapefruit but you get to have wine with it so
it’s the specific journalists people are suspicious of, since their focus is on palace intrigue, which isn’t helpful as a substantive assessment
‘a well known online person is dating another well known online person with similar politics.’ what an incredible gotcha from people who are, i guess, 15 years old.
the democratic party at all levels is infected by a provincialism by which even the most consequential elections are treated with absurd tests of fairness akin to the selection of middle school ‘student of the month’
Trump also has a pretty common response to someone snubbing him which is to snub back. The dem tolerance for humiliation is genuinely odd and off putting to a lot people.
you could probably recreate this with the right tools to bend the metal. i’m guessing the buttons have metal posts with the ends of the latch spiraled around the base to secure.
looks like a fancy hook and eye latch secured with buttons
there was a thread in the last week that was talking about why someone might want to own guns, no threats or anything, and some of the responses were so over the top. ‘GET READY FOR A VISIT FROM THE FEDS!’ okay, if just talking about guns gives you the vapors then log off.
people here will scream about fedposting in response to the blandest and most theoretical conversations
it’s without a doubt the worst algorithm out there. i clicked on a pic of some of my kid’s friends on spring break and now > 50% of my recommendations are random teens on beaches.
having a junior in high school i’m experiencing this first hand and one thing i see is that very few kids, even at the most exclusive private schools in our midwestern city, go to elite universities. ivy league is rare and you have a better chance by being unique and from a city or rural high school
Why is this house so cool? www.zillow.com/homedetails/...
I also think we’ll not see a candidate like him again or for a long time. A long legislative record will only be a hinderance. It’s underappreciated how Obama’s short Senate tenure worked to his benefit.
Maybe too obvious to note, but, part of the goal here is to scare people away from being diagnosed so they can point to lowered vaccination rates and make a spurious connection
i used to work at a liberal research org and marinated in the type of communication where demonstrating expertise is of high importance. when i left i refocused to become a more persuasive communicator and it was humbling that my education and experience didn’t help much for changing minds.
for as much as liberals believe themselves to be more empathetic they’re often unable to muster that in interpersonal interactions. ‘that’s sounds hard. i was in a similar situation and what i did was…’ is going to be more empathetic and persuasive but a lot of people can’t refrain from lecturing.
sometimes, frequently even, convincing people of something means playing a bit dumb and a lot of these people won’t pretend to be even the tiniest bit less smart than they are for any reason
hard truth but bernie’s too online campaign staff from ‘20 would have been the perfect fit for ‘24
his campaign being staffed solely by like 20 of the most online groypers made them more in touch with with these low engagement voters
we’re probably not going to turn them off from presidential elections which are now a form of entertainment, like the super bowl, where people with no previous strong attachments feel the need to pick a team to side with
This is a topic that has been flogged to death, debated endlessly, not new terrain being covered for the first time, as is suggested here
A lot of these voters only show up to vote in presidential election years and will leave other elections on the ballot blank
downvotes are a mild way to note when something sucks and without them we get pointless, endless pile ons. downvotes are one of the things that make reddit good.
Not just alcohol this is happening with but also smoking, eating bad foods, staying up late, just chilling with no purpose. Everyone’s pressured to be living these ever more optimized and pure lives and it’s exhausting and alienating.
Also ‘the left’ to them includes all sorts of mainstream liberals who for whatever reason don’t sign on to a servile and doctrinaire view of what the party should be.
I’m seeing this firsthand with my teens where their choices are get a worse grade for something they did completely themselves or a better grade with AI assistance. It bugs me that these conversations make today’s kids out to be idiot puddingheads when the system itself is perpetuating the problem.
We should also be honest that if more subtle uses of AI result in better work, instructors will awards those efforts and students will respond to those incentives.
seeing carney’s win makes me wonder if americans would be more receptive to liberal technocrats if they were actually technocrats at some point. instead we have career politicians who style themselves as eggheads and it comes off as phony and their ‘economic’ messages unconvincing.
They’re going to say it and immediately feel disappointed because most people will continue to think it’s gross and it will immediately lose it’s high after that first time.
And the left does have some influence and can be a barrier, just not the primary one. When they are assigned outsized power it’s ideological and because they make satisfying opponents.
this the hobbyhorse i’ll ride off into the sunset at this point, but, the left in the US is (unfortunately) not big or influential enough to be the primary barrier to anything
not now bby mommy’s being a fashion expert online
If they internalize powerlessness as part of the liberal identity then it’s game over. Don’t think that’s a certainty but it’s distressing how few recent examples of liberalism assume a stance that we have and should use the power to bring powerful institutions to heel to achieve our ends.
Tried to put some numbers around this and Kalama didn't lose the election because of Uncommitted, it's just not a big or influential enough group. But it's a group people can point to and blame rather than the DNC or the much larger amorphous group of low info voters. bsky.app/profile/goin...
When discussions of improving health insurance come up there’s a retort that Americans wouldn’t tolerate greater socialization of those systems because they’d receive less care. But the fracturing of insurance into all these programs accomplishes some of those ends by different means.
Actually it’s 9, I forgot the prescription drug plan.
it seems even worse as people with disordered relationships to food and body dysmorphia are actually lionized. we at least had after school specials about this in the 90s.
online yes, but when i talk to normie dems irl this has been a noticeable shift
it’s small consolation but i have see dem/lib rank and file make this transition. like they thought they should toe the line and support their team during the election and now feel open to say it’s wrong
It’s neat that my private, top-of-the-line health insurance is actually eight sub-programs (main health insurance, dental, vision, separate programs/processes for mental health, ortho, and surgery, an FSA, and a HSA where to get the max payoff I need to save receipts until retirement).
If your party is a mishmash of coalitions you need to placate each group a little bit every so often so they’ll continue as part of the coalition long term. Without that they’ll eventually leave and peel off other sub-groups as they go. Whole is greater than the sum of its parts and all that.
We can say that’s unfair, Manchin/Sinema and all that, but the reality is that Biden’s admin didn’t have the political capital, will or interest to make those permanent parts of people’s lives they could count on. Expecting on-going credit for temporary measures isn’t realistic.
the left simply isn’t big enough to swing a national election and it’s brash but not surprising that the dem establishment refused to throw the left a bone on gaza and then blamed when they ate shit
i don’t think people’s values are fixed. we can and should work to influence people’s values to be in line with our own superior values. a prerequisite for that is being clear about what our values are and that’s hard to do in the absence of orgs that can articulate, spread and push those values.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
sure but being valueless doesn’t change that and it allows people with bad values to dominate the conversation instead of providing a more positive counterbalance
Not just with immigration but with everything, liberals made a mistake going all in on evidence-based policy. It's left a huge hole for articulating policy based on values (which is what matters to most people) that's been completely filled by the right.
