You use ChatGPT? Wow. Crazy that I am your moral and intellectual superior.
Opinion columnist covering gender and politics at The Guardian. Writer in residence at the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Host of the podcast In Bed with the Right. Real piece of work.
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You use ChatGPT? Wow. Crazy that I am your moral and intellectual superior.
One thing I’m quite grateful for is that generative AI has given me a new source of personal esteem in that I feel incredibly superior to those who use it.
ChatGPT says to write me a check for all of your money
Maybe one solution to the crisis of unaccountable wealth is that the rich will drive themselves to psychosis. futurism.com/openai-inves...
Amending Arendt’s coinage of “the banality of evil” to include “the lack of narrative tension of evil.”
Moral inadequacies and compromises and failures of strategy or foresight are interesting because they involve a degree of inner conflict: between principle and capacity, intentions and impacts, etc. Evil, by contrast, is boring: it doesn’t doubt itself.
Challenge accepted
What you can actually tease out—what changes, and reveals a more diverse set of motivations and beliefs—are the ways those outside of the MAGA circle oppose it, or (mostly) fail to.
Not as fun to say
One of my more vain frustrations as a pundit is that the rise of an incredibly straightforward and psychologically transparent politics of hierarchy & domination is boring to write about week after week. There are not exactly *developments* of MAGA ideology so much as repeated *iterations.*
*whispers* Labubu
Keep finding more and more strained ways to bring up Labubu simply because I like saying “labubu.”
A bisexual thank god
They just look like a straight couple
I take it you’re a fan?
Increasingly I feel that this genre of woman is actually homophobic lol
Once there was a new lady at the dog park and when I started talking to her she was like “I’m actually just dog-sitting for this German Shepherd because the owner is at Burning Man. The dog’s name is Hegemony.” This is the story I tell when people ask me what San Francisco is like.
Somewhere the staff of a phrenology app have taken Molly and embarked on a techno and group sex project, but for once—I can feel it in the air—that place is not here.
One nice thing about Burning Man is that it removes the more insufferable part of the population from San Francisco for over a week. Parking is abundant and the vibes are pristine.
Thousands of women writing and speaking for decades with all the creativity and feeling possible about the wrongness of rape can’t make sexual violence stop or even be understood as real violence but RFK Jr croaking “beef tallow is the philosopher’s stone” has the force of policy now
If you’re a feminist you can spend your whole life grappling with the inadequacy of narrative to convey reality or summon enough political will to enact change. But if you’re a fascist you can just use narrative as a hammer to claim ownership of reality and beat material conditions into conformity.
Climate catastrophe, state abandonment, and then years of privatization, corrupt over-policing, and reproductive terror … in a way what happened to New Orleans was a preview of what is coming for the rest of us.
New Orleans is a special city that deserved better than Katrina and its aftermath and continues to deserve better than the rapacious, privatizing, and exploitative governance that followed.
You will have a delightful evening with friends of all ages at a minor league baseball game and you will spend less than $40 per person including snacks
Just want to be clear that I am very much using both of my kidneys.
In retrospect it is darkly funny that during her campaign Kamala Harris said she was from Oakland when in fact she grew up in Berkeley
They are specifically creating an authoritarian state by the means of enacting and generating authoritarian imagery … a kind of “fake it till you make it” or “dress for the job you want” of regime change.
"The spectacle that falsifies reality is nevertheless a real product of that reality, while lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle and ends up absorbing it and aligning itself with it."
Because the thing is, this is real but also, it's not real. This image reflects the reality that Trump *wants* a total state in which he is the unquestioned leader, but we do not actually live in that state, at least not yet.
i find this image so fascinating. it is both a literal example of authoritarianism but also a second-hand reproduction of the aesthetics of other authoritarian states. it's like a simulacra of authoritarianism whose purpose is to attempt to make the simulacra real.
One of the things I’ve come to suspect over the course of doing @inbedwiththeright.bsky.social’s Project 1933 is that the Stephen Millers of Trump world are imitating the Nazis on purpose, as a kind of tribute or cosplay.
“She could end the genocide with an IG post.” No … no she couldn’t?
Impulse purchase.
Known military strategist and geopolitical power player Taylor Swift
“Cherchez la femme” misogyny used to require a “chercher” element … now they’re just picking whichever woman they see first and blaming her
Saw someone blame Taylor Swift for the Gaza genocide lol
Shhh don’t scare them 🤫😂
Like shooting fish in a barrel, they can’t help themselves.
Will “yes-and” this to say that I think the anti-idpol left’s antagonism toward feminism is more acute and impassioned than its de facto suspicion & impatience with other identity-based liberation movements. They see feminism as particularly corrupt and suspect.
I mean no one is out here defending Janice Raymond.
They were a group of passionate people who disagreed on a lot in the ways that many other movements and intellectual milieus do, and they’re worth encountering as thinkers and individuals in their own right.
Honestly I that’s a reductive take on a really complex and internally contentious tradition! Part of the problem, I think, is that people who don’t know very much about the radical feminists feel that they are supposed to declare them “bad” or “wrongheaded,” and in doing so discourage inquiry.
The radicals never made much headway in enacting their program, but the liberal feminists genuinely transformed American life for the better, particularly through public health efforts and civil rights law—and I’ve been shocked at how quickly their achievements are being reversed and dismantled.
So much of my own job interpreting Trumpism for the public is just reciting elementary second wave insights about masculine domination very slowly and loudly for people who have never been exposed to them before.
That one might be a you problem
Seems like now would be a pretty useful time to have a theory of gender as a hierarchy and women as a class
Sucks that feminism became politically verboten at exactly the moment when the right calcified into a masculinity death cult
She’s a genius
Regardless of shooter ideology (though shooters often share a stated ideology that gets overlooked by initial reporting), mass shootings have an ideological form, which is that agency belongs to those willing to do violence, that the dead deserve their fates, that this is the point of gun power.
Weird that these mass shootings get narratively framed as random violence caused by an imprecise miasma of social pathology and not as independent contributions to a specific and highly organized political program.
We’ll learn to surf!
That’s what he thought
She was being playful!!! Honestly, his vet said the same thing. 😬
He’s big boned!!!!!
At a diner where we ate lunch outside today a waitress called Monte “chunky.”
I love Canada like so much by the way.
Anyway does anyone want to offer me a job in a different country lol
I have found a lot of use for Melinda Cooper’s concept of the anti-social state: a government that exists only to extract wealth and inflict violence, and dismantles all its pro-social and life-enabling functions. www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...
Misogyny would explain both, but unfortunately it’s illegal to suggest people really really hate women
Eat, Pray, Murder.
My dog has more self respect.
Sadly, Pelicot is not an outlier in this respect: this is how a lot of mothers respond to their daughters’ revelations of abuse by the mothers’ husbands.
One double bind of anti-rape feminism: women’s experiences of sexual violence are no guarantee of their feminist solidarity, and women’s loyalty to men or tolerance for their violence against other women is no guarantee of their personal safety.
I do find this side of the story very painful. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08...
Weird subplot in this forthcoming novel where the main character, Ingram, keeps demanding that various women who work for him watch him masturbate?
I wrote about the re-arrest of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
The case against Kilmar Ábrego García is a study in sadistic absurdity | Moira Donegan
Just because Trump personally believes that he embodies the spirit of the American volk and that any opposition to his whims is un-American and illegitimate on an almost spiritual level does not mean, contrary to popular opinion, that Democrats should act like they agree.
Even his leads in “border security” and “crime” are narrow enough to suggest that aggressive messaging could erode his soft support.
People who yelled at me in 2017 that men have a due process right not to have women talk about their behavior now believe that immigrants have no due process right not to be deported to South Sudan.
The Me Too skeptic to pro-Trump pipeline is a straight line and the journey is not very long.
if you wind back the clock a year and say “trump will be president, he’ll tear up entire agencies without any legislative authority, ignore court orders, build a concentration camp, and send troops into multiple US cities” you wouldn’t ask “well how many troops?” before deciding what this describes
The corruption of the US Supreme Court has arguably been the most serious single contributor to the US's transformation into autocracy
America 2025: Formalizing the use of military forces to routinely police American cities. Text of the EO: www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...
Me applying for and getting this job as an undercover investigative reporting scheme, like Nellie Bly getting herself committed to a mental institution.
David Shor circulates a memo to leading national Democrats showing new polling that suggests they should all become Republicans instead
At a certain point we have to drop the cutesy hedge of calling him an “aspiring” dictator and admit that he’s been allowed to catch that particular brass ring.
Donald Trump had claimed—and, in many cases, largely been granted by institutional compliance and inaction!—the authority to change law by decree.
David Shor releases a new poll suggesting that Democrats should host televised broadcasts of themselves drowning kittens and stealing children’s lunch money.
FWIW I actually think this is a morally indefensible stance and am working hard to discipline myself into action, if not “hope.” I’m just saying: I do get the appeal.
Chekhov!!! An excellent idea.
Ha ha, JK—all the arts funding has been cut and nobody can read anymore
Meet you at Balzac
I wonder actually if we’re going to see a re-investment in the kinds of art that most often tend to resist politics—so, maybe not like realist novels but more like atonal music and abstract expressionist art.
Thinking about the possibilities for what Germans called “inner emigration” among American intellectuals, especially on the left. As a feminist, my work for women’s liberation increasingly feels comedically futile and sometimes dangerous. Hard not to think, well, what if I just read all of Flaubert?
This man is being subjected to a real-life version of Kafka’s “The Trial” as punishment for being the embarrassing object of the regime’s own malicious and chaotic incompetence. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08...
Did mutter to myself “propane and propane accessories.”
Help: I am the most masc person at the summer house and now they expect me to grill
As is often the case, it is very hard for feminists to focus public attention on pregnant women and new mothers, whose actual experiences and suffering are obscured by a cloud of sentimentality.
It’s been hard to discuss pregnancy and birth as sites of right wing radicalization—partly because women’s grievances against conventional medical authorities are often legitimate, and partly because doing so would require us to recognize that pregnancy and birth can be deeply negative experiences.
Pregnancy and childbirth are dramatically radicalizing experiences for a lot of women, who often find themselves discarded, condescended to, and hurt at a moment of profound vulnerability. For some women,’the experience makes them feminists. For others, it makes them paranoid, eugenicist quacks.
Climate change … this whole thing smacks of gender
I sound insane when I say this but I truly believe a big part of the Trump admin’s approach to energy policy is driven by gender anxiety. They think coal and oil are manly and renewables are effeminate.
Would kill for it; it will inevitably go to Rachel Aviv.
Not interested lol
I’m maligned but not famous, which I think is called merely “unpopular.”
Amber Heard … call me
My whole career as a feminist is part of a long con to get to ghostwrite the memoir of a maligned famous woman.
Reminder that our society does not particularly value or protect teenage girls. Child marriage is legal in 34 states. Just about everyone hates pedophiles, but a lot of people are pretty indifferent to the abuse and exploitation of teenage girls.
