starmer is doing all the anti-immigrant and anti-trans "popularism" stuff the centrists are demanding US dems do and this is the predictable result:
Rhetoric PhD + digital marketing agency co-founder. Teaching @ UMD and JHU. Also board game design. https://www.social-intellect.com/ 📍DC
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starmer is doing all the anti-immigrant and anti-trans "popularism" stuff the centrists are demanding US dems do and this is the predictable result:
Everything I've seen about Democrats' version of Project 2029 is far too modest and weak-kneed. Democrats need to look at the precedents Trump is setting (and shattering) and figure out how a progressive can maximally wield the power that this administration is concentrating in the executive branch.
Probably plenty of them grew up in rural areas and have particular ideas about urban life, and now they get to witness just how extremely normal it is. I bet some of them are thinking hard!
Not that it's justified by any means, but there's probably a good chance that a lot of these kids--and a lot of them are kids--come out of this with a very different opinion of cities in general. I watch them standing there, miserable, watching people just like go to baseball games and dinner
It's so jarring to see them standing there at, like, the Navy Yard metro of all places. Even more so today, because the ones you're referring to were a bunch of fucking kids
September Newsletter drops tomorrow -- sign up here if you haven't already! mailchi.mp/social-intel...
I appreciate that you all stayed up late doing this important work for the rest of us
Spent the end of the week drafting Ringleader cards, finally implementing some asymmetricality into the game. I'm comfortable enough with the game core to move into this next step, which I think adds a very important layer to the experience
listen as somebody who has a lot of really good ideas ideas are fundamentally worthless. sorry. we give WAY too much credence to people who have them. yeah, even good ones, dude. the only thing I respect is execution. whether it's in myself or somebody else. an idea executed is worth something
we all love Saving America by horsetrading the lives of marginalized and vulnerable populations who are merely Cultural War signifiers and Objects of Policy rather than flesh and blood human beings or mature, rational, and realistic political Subjects like ourselves
Been a little quiet, but still making significant progress! Here's a new card, as a treat 🎪
Illinois Gov. Pritzker vows to pursue Trump officials who participate in an illegal National Guard deployment to Chicago: "If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me - not time or political circumstance - from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law."
i'll say it again, my loud and vigorous support for any democrat who calls for televised hearings and criminal charges for everyone involved in DOGE. this guy should never be able to live in peace again.
Happy Silksong
Is there another phrase for that, do you think?
I love to show up every day for my job, which is standing around holding the front of my tactical vest and getting told to choke to death by thousands of passers-by while 11 of my coworkers handcuff a roofer on his way to work. Every night I drive 80 minutes home, thinking about nothing at all.
Sam Altman: I see humans achieving omnipotence using dark matter by… 2030 maybe? That’s if OpenAI is given a quadrillion dollars Theo Von: Yeah Altman: Or, we may become a race of slaves, genetically modified to be harvested by robot spiders. That’s if OpenAI doesn’t get the money Von: Right
Look you just have to make the cool weird shit that excites you. You must. In this world besieged by bland, scrubbed boring, computer slop, you must. Make the thing you’re embarrassed to make, the thing that feels “too much” because otherwise we get drowned in a sea of cowardly work made by a button
If costs were lower would all of this be ok?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I would do just fine in the The Shining hotel, send me to the The Shining hotel, I will get lots of work done, whatever else is going on in that hotel is simply none of my business
secret service police about 15 of them walking eastbound on H St NE for blocks, they all parked on the 1300 block of I St NE and were patrolling residential streets as well, seems to be the new norm @dcmigrantmutualaid.org @remorahousedc.bsky.social @dcafa.bsky.social
the thing everyone is going to have to accept is that the post-trump period, whenever it comes, will not and cannot be a project of national unity, it must be a project of partisan project of renewal, in the same way that reconstruction and the new deal were partisan projects of renewal.
It was not primarily about how museums and statues do this or that
As usual, it's a good day for memory scholars to remember that Pierre Nora's project was really about French nationalism and its signification in memory.
Latest batch of updated playtest cards is ready for trimming! Current count: 156 / 180 🎪🎪🎪
they don't live here, for one
"Crime" has always been an empty signifier (in the Laclauian sense) but discourse moments like this one really make that explicit
I also think the cause and effect is reversed here. Disgust is a socially conditioned response, and these people all grow up in the suburbs.
So much about our current national situation is explained by the fact that a substantial proportion of Americans truly believe that “feeling somewhat uncomfortable” is the same as being the victim of an actual crime
DC friends & neighbors, make sure this week you're taking the time for mental health by riding your bike, going for a run, packing a picnic, mocking these fascists, asking them why they're serving this brutal ignorant regime, telling them you bet their families are proud, and giving them the finger.
DC statehood is now an imperative. No more dicking around. Next Dem majority, get it done immediately.
good day to subscribe to @51st.news and support orgs like @dcmigrantmutualaid.org and @remorahousedc.bsky.social
they did the tweet lmao
Good morning from DC, time to crack open the local newspaper and see what's happe--
Tomorrow, the President is going to order the national guard to militarize the nation's capital (despite crime being at a 30 year low) after sending Congress home to prevent them from investigating evidence he committed sex crimes against children. The Congressional GOP is unified behind him. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Folks, after weeks of agonizing, I believe we have found The Font for card text 🙏
Unlike Sam Altman, the people behind Gemini actually do understand what it means to have five Ph.D.'s in your pocket
It's actually my first time, wish me luck
Goddamn it
Heckuva time for Trump to declare that 14-year-olds are now adults.
I think we know what's gonna happen here
Did ChatGPT tell you this was a good idea?
Brought to you by, so to speak, Draft Kings bsky.app/profile/wire...
If I was going to run cover by reframing the raison d'être of a nation state as the unjustified actions of an extremist regime, I suppose this is the kind of thing I might dream up.
I don't say this lightly: The New York Times should fire the reporter and editor who chose to present a leak from the white house as if it was a leak from Harvard. Don't print lies in the newspaper
I mean that one's funny
I don’t know what changed, but this is what it feels like to use this website now
He's a tiny lil guy isn't he
August Cirque newsletter is out! 🎪🎪🎪 Find it here: mailchi.mp/social-intel... Subscribe here: mailchi.mp/social-intel...
The vote goes down today for the RFK stadium. This is literally what the DC Council is voting for.
The fact that you're working actively on it is a sign of respect and caring, by the logic of the original analysis.
That looks like it might be a modern knockoff of W&W. It had castle and siege pieces rigged up to rubber bands, and they would send bits flying on a direct hit. Hours and hours of fun.
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You may have heard about a new Washington Commanders stadium in the context of Trump vowing to pull the plug without a name change. But the stadium deal itself is terrible, committing DC to spend over $1 billion amid a local depression caused by DOGE cuts. Great story from @gurleygg.bsky.social:
and yoga, apparently
In my experience people are always conflating the structural forms leading to gentrification with people moving into a neighborhood and then calling the cops on everybody
Spent some of the day meandering the US National History Museum and came across this magnificent artifact Circus poster, 1923
Give the guy some credit, he was sometimes also standing next to Jimmy Page
Spent most of today working out the rudiments of Solo Mode. The irony is that I don't tend to play a lot of board games solo, but have been studying solo design to implement in Cirque and...it's apparently pretty fun!
i CANNOT stop watching this
Getting some wings doordashed from the strip club down the street
I feel like this guy misunderstands what Hooters is, fundamentally.
"Downwardly mobile elites"
But the parents are so lost they don’t even realize that it’s not the classes that changed your kid, it was separation from YOU. No gender studies, sociology, or history class could ever accomplish what three months of not having to live with your bullies will do.
The question comes down to this: do you think them getting railroaded by their sworn enemies is appealing to their existing or potential acolytes, on the whole, or not? I do not care a whiff for their personal success, for me the question is whether this will be persuasive to others.
This is your irregular reminder that you can deploy &UDM=14 to make Google searches actually useable again. udm14.com It's not actually a search engine – it just adds a modifier to Google searches to strip out rubbish like AI overview. I use it on desktop & mobile and the difference is amazing.
This is great. You can set this up on firefox as default.
At least in the humanities, that era is definitively over. That's not to say you can't scrape something out of it, but you can't go back. If you think I'm being dramatic: I earnestly hope the LLMs at least get your arguments right when they're spitting them back out, for your sake.
I miss the thrill of it sometimes. Sharpening an argument to a fine point, making a connection no one had made, sharing that with others, feeling conceptual certainty build within me as a project developed.
And for those thinking about it, and I know there are lots, many of you simply have no idea just how creative you are. It takes an enormous amount of creative energy to write scholarship. For me personally, that energy is now spent on other things, and my contentment has grown exponentially.
The only thing keeping us all going besides tenure was the fantasy of knowledge production, itself romantic beyond evidence. I just can't think of a reason to ever write another academic sentence again.
Academic publishing was already like having a tick on your face (academic publishers) and one on your ass (universities). No one reads the vast majority of the monographs or articles, the quality of the scholarship has plummeted, and now AI Unless you need to publish for your job, there's no reason
imo, if someone believes some races or ethnicities are genetically inferior to others, that person has revealed a weakness of mind and character that casts extreme if not irrefutable doubt on their other ideas. why would i expect them to use more rigor on, eg, housing than they do on human nature?
What is the acceptable practical economy here? 50 averted fascists per successful grift? 1,000?
This is an inevitable upshot. Most aspiring fascists are not talented enough to pull this off, though. bsky.app/profile/notu...
Faced with the exact opposite thing happening in front of your eyes, it's certainly a choice to stick with this perspective in spite of basically all evidence to the contrary.
So I have no idea what the larger impact of it will be, but I say let him cook. It's something he's outrageously good at, and the upside of broadcasting the humiliation of fascists is bound to be greater than the downside of having to look at their faces
On the other hand, if I was a dipshit kid looking for an ideology to soothe my insecurity and self-loathing, I'm not sure I'd rush to choose the one where you get humiliated constantly on the internet
I keep seeing the argument that Medhi Hasan is just amplifying and legitimizing fascists by circulating their arguments. But, like, the president is a fascist saying all of those things daily. We don't need jubilee for those ideas to spread
In a stunning moment of carnal desire, my calculator said “BOOBIE5”
On the other hand, while it's tempting to think of MAGA superfans as humorless, it's in fact more accurate to say that their sense of humor is completely inscrutable to everyone including themselves, so who even knows whether this is funny.
We're on a much-needed vacation, but here's an excellent piece of card art to tide you over Card: "Sword Balancing"
The funniest thing is that if they had not duck-and-covered, probably no one would have clocked this as infidelity and they might have gotten away with it.
I'd just like to point out how weird it is that places with hundreds or even thousands of reporters — the NYT, WaPo, CBS, NBC, AP, etc. — are all getting pummeled on every major story by the dozen computerboys at Wired. To fumble the bag this consistently is, at some point, cowardice and a choice.
This is obviously true because when you work it backwards, these same critics would never suggest that a transphobic voter is a "spoiler" for not voting for the pro-trans candidate. So, as always, the bigots get to be big babies that must be appeased but everyone else has to suck it up for the cause
When a presidential hopeful turns against trans people in hopes of gaining transphobe votes, you can't really position everyone who says they won't then vote for that person as a "spoiler" voter. You either need those votes or you don't.
I'm not going to bite on the escalation here or spend time pulling apart your projections, but what I will say is that it gets very tiresome arguing with people whose methods of achieving the outcomes they profess to desire are consistently at odds with those outcomes and who refuse to ever learn it
Definitely what I said, thank you
And anyone wonders how NOLA got a memorial for the so-called Battle of Liberty Place
It's very hard to talk sanely about this with people. The post says "all evidence suggests they're pretty safe" and every other reply is like "right but that doesn't match how I feel, which is proof that they are actually dangerous"
Sad update: it appears that the crazy people I've spent years training to be rabid animals have, for reasons too complicated to explain right now, completely turned against me
I don't think they believe it, they just like them and want to ride in them, and they believe it's persuasive to others. But maybe I give them too much credit.
Some excellent art rolling in this week 🎪🎪🎪
School isn't where I learned file directories, personally. I feel that it's much more attributable to Apple usage.
I credit that character with my not becoming a Car Guy
Tomatoes are just about reaching the "can't eat this many every day" volume
Kyle Clark is a real one
Yes, this is precisely right. I like Zipper on a lot of things, I also think it was a terrible idea to contribute this article at this time.
i think that if you are an upper income writer living in a major urban area complaining about “the laptop class” — really, if you are a knowledge worker of any kind complaining about the “laptop class — you have an obligation to quit your job and go work in a factory for a year
