"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be" - Kurt Vonnegut
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The white nationalist movement's strange dance (inventing white Americans as a distinct ethnolinguistic group, when historically whiteness was a racial and legal category with no ethnic content) starts to make sense once you put into focus that they are all motivated by anti-Black grievance.
okay, chat asked to belabor this point a bit. [vast majority of both men &] Women don't actually give a shit about ham radio. adjust your expectations on your own hobbies, you're not gonna convert anyone. There's two things that matter here: 1. hobby exists 2. passionate but not overbearing
I am a bona fide Congress expert with letters after my name and a long list of publications backing up the claim and this is 100% true.
I am still skeptical that Chicago will happen, for precisely the reasons you note.
Funnier than any joke we could write
we’re about to see a second wave of teen reddit atheism the world has never seen before
oh this is straightforward white nationalist agitprop
The United States is rapidly going fascist and is the most materially prosperous large nation in human history by a huge margin. If that’s not rich enough to prevent a fascist resurgence, there simply is no amount of wealth that will stave it off and the problem is social and political.
This ‘blue states closed schools too long’ narrative is becoming increasingly entrenched in the Polite Center but it’s arguable at best. Republican states had far more deaths during COVID and their students have roughly comparable learning loss.
Lethal force against a civilian vessel in international waters is a war crime if not in self-defense. If not in self-defense, only non-lethal actions, such as warning shots or disabling fire, are allowed. "Not yielding to pursuers" or "suspected of carrying drugs" doesn't carry a death sentence.
getting everyone on the internet to watch your press conference so they can see if you’re dead is one way to expand attendance
The exact same correlation exists for male education
just keep jamming him with those big 40cc horse syringes full of The Good Shit, guys, then cart him out in front of the teevee
trump’s doctors currently injecting him with that salton sea gack
This is the real story most mainstream journalists are missing. Ppl are setting up neighborhood watch groups to patrol their block, volunteers are accompanying migrants to school/work, etc. and much of this is happening organically as well as being organized by @freedcproject.bsky.social #FreeDC
Many critiques of "the groups" are equally true of YIMBY orgs! They are fundamentally nonprofits demanding policy concessions from Democrats while not representing a mass movement or democratic decision-making. And that's ok, if the policy is good.
The people instilling doubt in academia from the right don't care about this at all. They're conservatives. They have their chosen authority and hierarchy. Academia is a rival. That's why they're fucking with existing universities (Columbia) and making new ones (Liberty, U of Austin).
Somehow our diseased information environment has produced the net outcome that *the pandemic is considered a political problem for Dems*, not the party that lied about it & got people killed at every juncture. The party that tried, but not perfectly, to save lives, is being forced to apologize.
History will not remember these people kindly.
Probably will be something forgettably evil but there’s a decent chance he invades Venezuela
Whoopsie. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Being lawless does not make Trump omnipotent – nor can he just snap his fingers and make all his authoritarian desires a reality. America is in an acutely dangerous situation. But obscuring those distinctions is an act of defeatism that only serves the regime.
Tastes like sour candy, crunches like potato chips, and is also somehow healthy!
Whoever invented freeze-dried strawberries deserves all the medals... Those things are delicious
RFK Jr: “If you’ve ever compared an unvaccinated kid to a vaccinated kid… you see the bright eyes, the engagement, the social interactions, the curiosity. And you compare them to the child who even had one or two vaccines, and they’re completely different.“ This man is an existential threat.
Gemini has gone from apologizing for not being able to fix bugs in its code to offering to hire a developer to fix its bad code. I wonder what happens if you say yes? 🤣
Remember the Goolsbee Rule, also called the “pathological irony of crisis”: If you lose credibility, your statements begin to mean the opposite of what you say.
People will repeatedly refuse to recognize the importance of anti-Blackness to the current moment despite being given every signal of its importance.
That Trump and Trumpism are fascist doesn’t explain the sheer vandalism of unleashing mass murdering mayhem via RFK to replace medical/scientific institutions of immense value and prestige with medieval peasant superstitions. That is a criminal madness facilitated by but above and beyond fascism.
And I'm no sociologist but I'm pretty sure devastating an urban core's economy is not the best way to reduce crime rates, and is in fact exactly the hole DC and other major American cities have spent decades, with good success, climbing their way out of. That's what they're destroying, deliberately.
Business at DC restaurants and bars and the like has plummeted. To whatever degree crime is "down," if any, it's because people in MD and VA are literally too scared to come into DC, and those in DC are being terrified into staying home and off the streets as much as possible.
Medical science: Ahaha we have invented tens of thousands of life improving and saving medications ahaha we are unstoppable Grapefruit:
Media has adopted the pretext of the authoritarian.
Wait! I thought Trump was supposed to be “ending homelessness.” HUD just announced a nationwide audit of Section 8 “citizen status.” Mixed-status families could lose rental assistance, even when kids are U.S. citizens. Families including children could be thrown into eviction & face homelessness.
I’m not sure how else to say this to the New York Times, but what we are seeing is not a “crime strategy”! You don’t have to parrot every lie a fascist tells about their motivations as if it were true.
Don't forget, Trump fired the head of the BLS bc of unflattering jobs numbers ... How do we even know that the 87% number is correct?
"Insane" does not begin to describe the amalgam of fascism, techbroism and despotism that united to create this idea
Astonishingly, this is in fact a real fundraising email!
I expected the hardliners in the early days of the administration to try to slow walk people from "why do we need to know about Harriet Tubman?" to "how bad is extrajudicial killing really?" but they have opened the bidding at "how bad is cancer really?"
The extent to which ICE is ignoring all civil rights and due process is astounding — and indicative of a culture where they’ve been told they can do literally no wrong. Agency and admin leaders must face sanctions and legal consequences.
🧵 Authoritarianism, Democratization, and Coalition Politics. The consensus around here is, more or less, that the United States is currently a consolidating authoritarian regime controlled by a mix of reactionary populists and fascists.
Old Soviet joke for today: A man walks into a newsstand every day, looks around, and leaves. After a long time of this, the owner says “Can I help you find something?” “I’m looking for the obituaries.” “The obituaries are in the back of the newspaper, comrade.” “Not the one I’m looking for.”
See also: all those drawings of Buff Trump (sometimes shirtless).
If grandma can still drive safely at 90, that's awesome. I aspire to be like that. But if not, it's best for her and everyone else that she not drive. (I'm also very much in favor of more public transit investment, incl public transit targeted at seniors)
Coming up Sunday on all op-ed pages: When will out-of-touch Democratic elites finally stop pushing fringe identity-politics culture-war issues, like research into brain cancer in children?
Dear Americans, welcome to the thrilling game of ‘Did this dictator die or just disappear for a day?’ We’ve been playing it with Putin and Lukashenko for decades. Enjoy the suspense.
Anywhere where there is no easy way to test competency should have a mandatory retirement age. And we should be doing age competency tests for more things - driving, for example. Once a year, every year after you turn 75
This isn't how anything works! It's why we have mandatory retirement ages or competency testing in many many professions!
"His mother told NBC4 that the agent told her son they had confused him with someone else, but to “look at the bright side: you’re gonna have an exciting story to tell your friends when you go back to school”." WTF www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
bsky.app/profile/indi...
Undertale
The warfighters in DC got the trash picked up, now time to mulch.
Live your life such that everyone doesn’t spend ten solid years planning the rager they’re going to throw when you die.
“Who the hell invited the National Guard?” | The New Yorker www.newyorker.com/cartoons/dai...
Once again, the administration ostensibly obsessed with fixing our trade deficit is doing literally everything it can to destroy our most globally competitive export industry.
America’s elites seeing college students get a little uppity with an authority figure at a scheduled guest lecture and deciding it was time civilization fell
okay i should be logged off but incredible things are happening on the other site
take a look at what these clearings accomplish. they take dentures from people who cannot replace them. they took a woman’s husband’s cremains and urn. identity documents and family history. if you support any of this, no matter how central “NO MAGA” is to your sense of self, you are a monster.
By the time we get power back the catastrophes will be so numerous the question will simply be how do we get sufficient aid to people in the disaster zones? And there's nothing we can do to prevent it.
I think yes to this. RFK is a genuine threat the health, well-being, and lives of millions of Americans. the harm he has already done is hard to calculate. if there's any card that gets rid of him, now is the time to play it
I'm out of DC and a 65-ish black guy saw my DC plates and commented on the national guard presence. He told me he was a cop for 25 years and very pro law enforcement, but hates what they're doing with the National Guard in DC. Really hasn't hit elite media how broadly unpopular this stuff is.
Going back to her original passion, "castrating hogs on an Iowa farm"?
Via our partners at @streetsensedc.bsky.social: At least 20 people have been displaced from eight encampments through federally driven closures. Law enforcement told many more people to move from public spaces where people experiencing homelessness often congregate. 51st.news/trump-takeov...
🧵 In the wake of numerous reports of interactions with AI chatbots that resulted in deadly consequences, the Center for Democracy & Technology's Dr. Michal Luria says AI firms should stop designing products that pretend to be human.
UnitedHealthcare, Cigna, and Humana have all faced lawsuits over their use of AI to process prior auths and claims, yielding a whopping 90% reversal rate upon appeal. The problem, of course, is that most people do not appeal, and rates are especially low among less affluent patients.
Loving this so much. Who would have guessed that if you send in a hostile military force to occupy a city and then ask the residents of that same city to agree to let you imprison people for disagreeing with you, they might say "no?" (John Adams, he would have guessed.
I think we can start to consider whether this is a trend of actual grand jury nullification. We will never really know given secrecy. The sandwich case was dreadfully overcharged. That said, given the rarity of no bills… these jurors are not rolling over for prosecutors in this moment.
The insurrectionists succeeded. It just took awhile.
Vaccines were nice while we had them, everyone start loading up on flintstones vitamins, the government recommended alternative to penicillin and medical treatment of internal bleeding
More or less universally a country seeking to limit foreigners studying in that country is a sign of a society, culture, great power in severe decline.
there have to be tribunals
This came to me in a vision
NEWS: CVS, the largest pharmacy chain in the country, is currently not offering Covid vaccines in 16 states and DC — even to people who meet the new FDA criteria — because the CDC hasn't signed off and isn't expected to do so (if it does so) for at least three weeks.
Back when Trump was at his rallies saying “we know who shot her” this is what he was saying but people weren’t interested in digging deeper.
adding "doctors" to the list of professions that, alongside judges and lawyers, have so far given a good account of themselves under authoritarianism
It really should be emphasized more that Stephen Miller is from Los Angeles county, that Donald Trump is from New York, and JD Manynames is from Ohio. Very few of these people are Southern, this is the least directly responsible the South's been in generations.
Also, plenty of married women are liberal and plenty of single women are conservative. The whole framing of marriage = conservative is weird to me.
Why are Republicans so desperate to convert Taylor Swift?
This is a hell of a letter. “The intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines…will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer….Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated…”
For folks not in higher ed, PhD programs are designed to be finished in five years minimum.
imagine being so maniacally racist that you side with the fire over the firefighter
This is a real photograph of Washington, DC this week, where the United States president has ordered military occupation in peacetime, and ordered the display of colossal portraits of himself. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...
This is insanity. This is the sign of a government that has lost its mind.
Unless the vaccine you want to get is a covid booster! Then it's RFK jr's decision :(
this is what a labor action looks like. (or one thing it looks like.)
*opens up your fridge and sees you have 2% milk* hey bro you need to charge your milk
Congrats!
Same here. I see them every day. If you take the metro to work, there's a good chance you see at least one group.
DC statehood now!
It was and remains a very curious feature of the US presidential election that it was fairly transparently a "sufficiently many voters are mad about inflation" election but it was treated as a huge Zeitgeist Shift by both proponents and opponents of Trump. This led to some over-confidence from Trump
I've lived in each of these cities' downtowns, in a public transit hub. I don't own a car and take public transit everywhere I need to go. I've seen plenty of homeless people (a product of US housing policy/ongoing housing crisis), but little crime.
I've lived in Boston, NYC, and DC. The worst crime I've ever experienced was having someone lift my wallet out of my pocket in an NYC food hall. That was in 2018.
Quick question: how many of those Americans actually live in big cities?
Arguably the most anti-religious administration in history. Just nakedly hostile to those who wish to practice their faith.
My American behavior seminar in grad school was taught by a fellow who believed that the only interesting thing about race/prejudice in political behavior was measurement.
Literally unable to indict a ham sandwich
Probably not a great sign that we now live in times where right-wing online tantrums will actually lead companies to make changes that a few years ago would have been laughed off.