https://splained.substack.com/archive So prescient, I never had a Twitter account.
177 followers 247 following 1,756 posts
view profile on Bluesky 
This story is WILD. Trump sent Seal Team 6 into North Korea to plant a listening device. The entire thing went sideways within minutes of landing when they noticed a fishing boat near the beach. They killed everyone on board, sunk the bodies to cover their tracks, and fled. Congress was never told.
The Home Office's own employees warned it, at least. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018...
Indeed the Windrush scandal seems to've begun with the UK Border Agency deciding to destroy identifying documents of immigrants from the British Empire. Under a Labour government! The government can unilaterally revoke ID to kick out immigrants, it turns out. www.channel4.com/news/factche...
To be clear, Ford does have _a_ response; I just contend it's a weak one that doesn't confront the problem that the citizen-versus-non-citizen boundary is abstruse, vague, and shifting.
...the Windrush scandal suggests that ID cards, far from preventing such scandals, would be a precursor to a bigger version of the same scandal.
Prof.(!) Rob Ford's further responses under this blueskeet indicate that he's not just dispassionately reporting a polling result, but advocating for ID cards. But he doesn't seem to have a strong response to @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social's observation that...
Without looking at the bottom text, I didn't know whether Loomer was referring to trans kids, Palestinian kids, or BLM-protester kids.
Tapping the sign.
Unemployment was 6.7% in November 2020. Also, that economic perceptions were mediated by people's views of the pandemic, and vice versa (with people concerned about "economic impacts of pandemic-related restrictions"), does not warrant writing off the economy as irrelevant to elections.
Numerous members of right-wing think tanks like AEI and the Manhattan Institute at the Abundance Conference too. This is just straight up a right-wing âmovement.â
My mind immediately went to Tenet, which came out 6 months into the pandemic, was greeted online by â as I recall â mostly half-irritated half-amused mockery...and made $366 million anyway, with everyone (citation needed) who went out to see it forgetting everything about it on the drive home.
Corbyn tried "progressive patriotism" - more arts funding, bank holidays and protection of landmarks - but it didn't cut through because it isn't about patriotism. These guys want English ultranationalism, with all the ugly xenophobia and violence that implies.
"As the credits rolled on screen the Venice crowd gave a standing ovation. For about 23 minutes hundreds of people applauded the makers of 'The Voice of Hind Rajab', a story about the 5 year old Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli forces in 2024" A report on the film.
Would align with this: www.reddit.com/r/radiohead/...
sam altman is trying to find the guy who did this
Malcolm Gladwell indeed bad. shameproject.com/report/malco...
24% is certainly a far cry from no one. It is also wholly compatible with a net approval rating of â30. today.yougov.com/topics/polit...
?
Were I trying to signal my intelligence with language like "grownup tradeoffs", "abject fools", and "fantasy", I would try not to shoot myself in the foot by making up stuff about the levelized cost of a power source. If nuclear's high costs really are necessary, you can just make that argument!
More @eleanor.lockhart.contact foolishness: a watered-down version of the "MAGA Communism" horseshit about baristas not being working-class.
#YouCanBlockButYaCantHide
Working-class means you have to work for a living. If you work as a teacher so you can make rent and not starve, you are working-class. What can't be taken seriously is denial of that.
Rubioâs tweet announcing a US military strike somewhere in the CaribbeanâŠif Iâm not mistaken, first combat action by SOUTHCOM since the Clinton administration called off the invasion of Haiti three decades ago.
As long as we're trying to define "Blueskyism", how about this: Will Stancil pins a generic failure mode of groups on leftist groups specifically; Ellie Lockhart complains about bullying Nazis et al.; "Fascism Heckler" decides pro-Nazi-punching "extreme" leftists may be antisemites, just cuz.
...has to do to become President is win a major-party primary enough times that they're running against an incumbent when swing voters turn against that incumbent for primarily non-ideological reasons. Then you get fascism without the fascist even having to sell themselves to the wider electorate.
I'm not convinced that follows either; I don't think fascism necessarily needs "selling" to win an election because the presidential vote tends to split evenly and swing voters tend to swing against the incumbent if the economy goes south or their kids come home in body bags. So all a fascist...
I'm old enough to remember when Will Stancil, who is not a woman or a racial minority (and not, so far as I know, a sexual minority), was posting about alleged "psychopathically violent" people on Bluesky, "embedded in various sexual subcultures", like they were lab specimens.
Regardless, I was disputing a later empirical claim: that Trump support rises with income. That claim is at best a half-truth. (And that's in scientific surveys of individuals, the claim is surely false if we look at ecological data like the county level.)
đ€· I'm not seeing who claimed that "fascism was purely driven by economic needs"; the claim with which Stancil took issue was that "material suffering" was/is a necessary (not a sufficient or sole) condition for selling fascism.
The Cooperative Election Study found a hump-shaped relationship between income and Trump support, not a simple positive (or negative) correlation. According to the CES Trump's vote share has always peaked at middle incomes, not the highest incomes.
This subthread might be of interest:
"We show that the building of the Autobahn network in Nazi Germany boosted popular support for Adolf Hitler, [...] Our results suggest that infrastructure spending can raise support for autocracy when voters are led to associate it with visible economic progress"
"Using German data from 1996 and 2006, we analyze [...] racist and xenophobic feelings towards [...] specific groups [...] We also analyze racist and anti-Semitic feelings [...] Individualsâ perceived (or actual) economic well-being is negatively related to the strength of these feelings."
"Our empirical approach exploits variation in exposure to foreign currency household loans during a currency crisis in Hungary. Foreign currency debt exposure leads to a large and persistent increase in support for the populist far right." papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
"Worsening mortality rates were positively associated with the rise of the Nazi Party in 1930s Germany. Social security mitigated the association between mortality and Nazi vote share." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
"We examine the impact of the Great Depression on the share of votes for right-wing extremists in elections in the 1920s and 1930s. We confirm the existence of a link [...] What mattered was not simply growth at the time of the election, but cumulative growth performance."
"From 2010 the UK entered an âage of austerityâ, with major cuts to welfare payments. [...] Using a panel of 313 Community Safety Partnerships areas in England and Wales, we show that for each ÂŁ100 loss per working age adult, racially or religiously motivated crimes rose by approximately 5-6%"
"Voting data from a thousand districts and a hundred cities for four elections between 1930 and 1933 show that areas more affected by austerity (spending cuts and tax increases) had relatively higher vote shares for the Nazi Party." www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Were you being polite to socialist writer Carl Beijer when you launched a baseless rumor about him supposedly "creeping on very young women"?
"And once you levellise costs it isn't so bad"
![Screenshot of the start of a Scottish government response to an FOI request reported at https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-202400420100/. Quoted text as follows. Response The Contract for Difference price awarded to Hinkley Point C (ÂŁ92.50 per MWh) is higher than the strike prices set for solar, and onshore and offshore wind in the March 2024 allocation round, at ÂŁ61, ÂŁ64, and ÂŁ73 per MWh (in 2012 prices) respectively. This data has been retrieved from: Contracts for Difference (CfD): Allocation Round 6 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) Statistics published by the UK Government provide details on the levelised costs for electricity generation technologies. A levelised cost is the average cost of the lifetime of the plant per MWh of electricity generated. They reflect the cost of building, operating, and decommissioning a generic plant for each technology. The below figures are central cost estimates for projects commissioning in 2025 (in real 2021 prices), and can be retrieved from the following Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) publication: Electricity generation costs 2023 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). New nuclear: ÂŁ109/MWh[1] Offshore Wind: ÂŁ44/MWh Onshore Wind: ÂŁ38/MWh Large-scale Solar: ÂŁ41/MWh](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:a2qilsqtzjwqfd6lr7l5d33s/bafkreihwbbmggrkmz6tnddy4ueqybetfdnin5ydtd74xcdwhrgeynbilxm@jpeg "Click to view full size")
"the userbase is speaking with its feet"
Based on the timing, the decline appears to be just the excitement of the election and Trump's inauguration wearing off, and has been negligible for weeks. I don't see how this place is "declining faster than Twitter is".
"I don't troll people!"
I don't have a wisecrack for this one.
I wonder how much secularization and rising irreligiosity have been driven by more religious diversity and comparative-religion classes in schools.
I seem to recall Bluesky debating whether Trump could be called a tariff otaku, since he didn't really seem to get how tariffs worked. Potential generalization to sexuality otaku left as an exercise to the reader.
One way of looking at this is that if the government doesnât set the agenda, that creates space for opposition parties. Another way would be to note that, in the absence of clear direction from government, the British press reverts to its core function: inciting hatred against minority groups.
Incredible scenes as Terf.K Rowling finally acknowledges that Graham Linehan existsâŠbut he canât tweet about it due to bail conditions. The best and worst day of his life
Once again watching England with an archly raised brow from Scotland; we've had 15 years of scorn heaped on Independence supporters up here for being narrow, flag-obsessed nationalists, and now the whole UK Cabinet is lying about having loads of flags they shag all the time, mortifying behaviour
Both of the named platforms moderated according to reasonably specific rulebooks (at least until one of them got bought up by Elon "pedo guy" Musk), not by Stancil's vague "Don't be a troll" dictum. That, I think, advises against Stancil's recommendation for large social platforms.
@whstancil.bsky.social endorses the moderation practices of the forum on Something Awful, a forum which, if I recall correctly, ran his ass out.
Objection: assumes facts not in evidence.
Behold, the destruction of Bluesky by the naughty, abusive left:
Interesting to see Will Stancil using a diluted version of right-wing rhetoric about the left-wing hivemind pushing them away just for refusing to succumb to groupthink.
Counterpoint: no, other people regurgitating your posts (which you freely posted for everyone to read) is not "an abuse problem that's destroying [Bluesky's] user base".
If Matt Yglesias is left-wing, so much the worse for the left wing.
It took me way too long to consider the possibility that Will Stancil's setting himself up for a pivot to Cameo.
The funny thing is, between you and all of those "maladjusted leftist bullies", the "maladjusted leftist bullies" have lost precisely zero elections because of their posts.
Yup. We just got through a month of the right screaming & clawing at itself over the Epstein files.
dc prosecutors fail to indict ham sandwich
This is not normal. Japan is continuing its run of astonishing temperature records. The country has just had its hottest summer for the third year in a row, and by a substantial margin. Data: JMA
The unphysical shadow and glow effects around the edges of things in these collages immediately made me think of those David Dees conspiracy collages.
Griffinâs definition of fascism as palingenetic ultranationalismâspecifically a reactionary nostalgia for a lost history of the nation that never existedâremains undefeated. A nostalgia for a type of bread that is ubiquitous, created in the 20th century, and rage towards bread as old as civilisation
Nate Silver talks about this site like it's the best pussy he's ever gotten but it didn't call him back so now he's 'over it'.
đ€
When DR posted the below, the journalism appearing most in my feed was Ritchie Torres being a slippery asshole about Israel in an Adam Friedland interview. Maybe the real problem is that "good, fair, factual journalism" from the left feels like Fox-style hackery to elected Democrats?
Genuinely not sure which of the two authors is doing more intellectual damage in the long run.
There maaaaay have been something to that "Bare minimum for holding a conversation" xeet from 3 weeks ago.
Nice idea, and I don't want to discourage people from screwing up public facial-recognition surveillance, but...would these lenses stop most recognition systems? The lenses work by blocking near infrared, but isn't a lot of facial recognition done on regular visible-spectrum video recordings?
crashnotaccident.com
âQuite how asylum seekers living in hotels who are banned from working but are provided with meals and receive ÂŁ9.95 a week are expected to afford any luxuries is unclear.â This is ridiculous on many levels. Even people on welfare are entitled to things that give them joy. Itâs what makes us human.
They're doing the Great Replacement/White Genocide meme about _bread_ now?
What is with people using the word "literally" when they mean "probably not"?
Quoteblueskeeted thread takes it as given that it's Republicans and racists who have the zero-sum mindset that must be defeated. But when it was posted, the most salient example of zero-sum thinking I witnessed on here was the let-rural-hospitals-wither take from Good Liberal "Leonid Baezhnev".
Apparently Bluesky's just like the neo-Nazi-owned, bigot-riven, mecha-Hitler site because pundit-CEO Mark Wallace caught shit for getting weepy about a far-right extremist think tank being hit with red paint.
The austerity to which "Yvette Cooper Action" is objecting killed ~ 190,000 people. For comparison, how many people has "Yvette Cooper Action" killed? How many people has that red paint in the austerity showroom killed? blogs.lse.ac.uk/inequalities...
Mark Wallace (Chief Executive of Total Politics Group. [...] Publisher of PoliticsHome, [...] ConservativeHome and more. Columnist) pretends below that red paint sprayed on a far-right think tank is what's "open[ing] the door to a tit for tat rise in intimidation across the board". At best ignorant.
Policy Exchange promulgated fabricated evidence to stoke Islamophobia. That's not "perfectly legitimate work".
If "Tankie" now just means recognizing the incitement of e.g. religious hatred as being worse than red paint, then why ain't you a "Tankie"?
Elon "pedo guy" Musk and Grok's anime-girl Ani skin are more meme-able, but this stuff from Meta isn't any better.
Policy Exchange certainly have a track record. In 2007 it put out a report ("The Hijacking of British Islam") that used forged receipts to try to frame mosques as extremist. www.bbc.com/blogs/newsni...
If domestic relationships "aren't relevant" (they are), then why did you tweet about Rishi Sunak's wife's financial interests? archive.ph/JUE3e
Former DC Assistant US Attorney Jennifer Kerkhoff Muyskens was charged with misconduct by the DC Bar for concealing and altering the Project Veritas video footage, which was central to the mass conspiracy prosecution of Trump inauguration protesters: unicornriot.ninja/2025/newly-r...
From this article www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Phenomenal persistence by these SJP students at Pitt. SJP is reinstated by federal court order!
They're openly calling to lock up every trans person by force. We need every ally to speak out forcefully against this because trans folks cannot do this on our own.
Uullat Bach, 63, a retired teacher living in Nuuk, Greenland, was around 13, she said, when she was subjected to an involuntary IUD insertion. Years later, scarring from the device had left one ovary blocked and the other narrowed, making pregnancy impossible. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/w...
NEW: Credit reporting giant TransUnion has confirmed a data breach involving more than 4.4 million customers' personal information. TransUnion claims "no credit information was accessed" in the late-July breach, which it said involves its U.S. consumer support operations.
Notable that his budget being cut came shortly he did a lecture for Gaza bsky.app/profile/roge...
Well for example when Bellingcat's Christo Grozev accused "Socialists around the world" of being "useful idiots" for the Kremlin, I am going to go out on a limb and say that this is at odds with my political ideals
"what if a girl band fought demons" isn't even mad libs at this point, that's a stock magical-girl anime premise. The "popularity-driven mad libs" step was Koreanizing it. (And writing genuinely decent songs for the soundtrack, but that's the "fun and well-executed" part.)
Ignores? Government transfers to individuals had _also_ collapsed by the end of 2021. They spiked in January 2021 and March 2021, and hit a post-2020 low in November 2021. fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCTR
Ok, so, a little thought experiment trying to break down the cyberpunk genre into different "stages". Don't pay too much attention to me.
simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism
Gordorb 
