Good idea, they could start by giving away the trumpets

The genre of discourse where a person makes an intentionally provocative post and then gets their nose out of joint when people react to what they actually wrote and not some more nuanced idea that they apparently actually believe is deeply tiresome. That’s my Bluesky opinion of the day.

If the Supreme Court is concerned about its declining public legitimacy and thinks too many Americans are calling the Supreme Court illegitimate, the majority could try not issuing bad faith rulings that illegitimately distort law in pursuit of undemocratic partisan power. That’s always an option.

relatedly i strongly believe — and i think there is even research to this effect — that people are routinely told that affirmative action or DEI is to blame for their professional or academic failures to avoid having to confront them with the realities of their performance

fact of the matter is that more people than you think simply see black students as inherently “unqualified” and thus blame affirmative action for taking the spot of a “deserving” student, even when affirmative action no longer exists.

The Department that is led the elimination of DEI to bring back merit is very explicitly lowering standards to bring in less qualified employees into government. This raises the question, why would anyone take anything the Trump admin says about public employment seriously.

Oh you don’t say

The actual impulse is to insist that sexual violence is not really violence, and to punish the woman who violates the gendered order by objecting to it. It is she, not her rapist, who has breached the social contract, and she, not her rapist, who is seen to be the problem.

The thing about this insistence that rape victims have some terrifying moral power that ruins men’s lives and compels the public to do anything to avenge them is that it has never once happened. What actually happens is that victims who disclose are ruined and men who are accused gain.

Power outage on Daredevil night. ☹️

I'm not excusing anyone. I have written many a piece about people not intervening who should have. I am, though, reminding everyone that there are no good systems built to manage reports of gendered violence and we are a misogynistic culture at our core. This will happen until that changes.

It’s profoundly ignorant to suggest that the Pope should be fighting crime on behalf of the Catholic Church. Anyone who was remotely familiar with Roman Catholicism would know that that’s what Daredevil is for

This feels correct to me, not based on me having any particular historical expertise (I don't,) but because we have all met people like Hegseth who have somehow, against all reason, ascended to positions of power at various levels, and this is always what they do.

Amia Srinivasan’s “Sex as Pedagogical Failure” should be required reading. Whenever a man in position of authority pursues a subordinate woman, he is changing her trajectory in that space forever. The research on how much even “consensual” affairs hurt the women involved is jaw dropping.

This true for sexual misconduct allegations of all types, in workplaces, politics, schools, and communities. Why? Because we simply don’t treat women’s right to be free from violence as real and universal. We evaluate claims based on the identity and status of the accused and the victim.

If you wish people had come forward sooner, help create a world where they feel safe doing so, where it isn't going to ruin their mental health and haunt them for years. Or, you know. Shut the fuck up.

Excellent thread:

So this whole thread, but also given how victims are treated when they come forward, I don't understand the cycle of "Why didn't she tell?" & "Why didn't reporters tell without consent or a witness?" We all know the routine of victim blaming & denial that happens around powerful predators right?

Is it really so much to ask that powerful liberal men not be absolute shitheads who abuse women? I’m so fucking tired of being told we have accept these scumballs as the best we can have. Just disgusting.

Another measure of wealth disparity in the US: the huge difference between mean and median savings by age group.

Spoiler: It's because he and his boss are racist and sexist pieces of shit

Let's just encourage people to always be reflecting on whether or not the things they enjoy could be doing harm. None of us is so perfect that we've never loved something that a shithead made.

these articles all make a ton more sense the moment you realise when they say "the economy" they actually mean "the owner and his friends"

Finally watched One Battle After Another and confirmed that Sinners was robbed.

If there is going to be a reckoning about violence in progressive organizing spaces, we need to be prepared to hear survivors’ critiques of restorative justice. A lot of progressives think restorative justice is the only path forward, but it can be weaponized and co-opted just like other processes.

Very little voter fraud actually happens, but when it does, *a lot* of is committed by republican officials. There are multiple examples in Colorado and this is a delightful story of it happening in Alabama.

Who would have thought that tariffing all our allies over a lie, threatening their sovereignty, calling them names, proclaiming us the greatest and saying they aren't doing anything, and then starting a war of aggression could result in this!

100% same. Also probably 90% true for Amazon. Every now and then there’s something we have to order from it but mostly it’s just not a problem to not have prime.

What's My JND? 0.0028 Can you beat it? www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd... Genuinely no idea how the scores work but the test was fun.

Look at that Afghanistan number...

Have you really ever lived if you haven’t had a cat relax like this on you at the end of a day?

I think govts should be thinking about contracting from a sovereignty perspective, not just efficiency. This matters in three ways. First, the Abundance-adjacent debate on state capacity need to consider how contractors undermine the ability to do stuff. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-means-...

Anything by Jonathan Franzen. I know objectively his prose is nice but man I have hated everything I’ve read by him.

Social media created this nonsense idea that not exposing yourself to hatred is isolationist. Choosing to not spend your free time with bigots isn’t living in a bubble. I don’t need to know what’s going on at X. I won’t be smarter or more knowledgeable or empathic by being there. Neither will you.

In my utopian vision of the future, instead of offloading all the pointless, annoying work tasks (like reports that none one will read and needlessly opaque forms) to robots, we restructure work and society so that the pointless tasks don't happen at all.

Rent is due in Minnesota. Essentially every rent fund still needs donations to keep people in the houses that offer them protection from ICE. There’s a very long list of places to donate on this website. Please help spread the word!

This is my whole career actually :

Because racism and misogyny don't have political limits

There is a version of this world that could exist where, at any given time, the majority of humans beings are just chillin’ and eating fruit.

What strikes me about the BAFTA discourse is how we have two communities who experience entrenched, systemic discrimination and cruelty being asked to extend grace, when they must both be exhausted by constantly accommodating the white, able-bodied supremacist world we have created.

I love this whole thread. I’m tired of our democratic politicians failing us and pretending to have less power than we do. Anyone who thinks a legislative minority has no power has never picked up a rule book or watched republican minorities use the rules to force concessions and make their points

Divide and conquer is not just a trite truism. Solidarity is the only tool to save multicultural democracy and too many groups are unfortunately now learning this the hard way.

I want us to understand this in the context of these same people killed affirmative action using Chinese-American plaintiffs because they said helping Black people was discriminatory against Asian Americans and anti-merit. Once again: it was never about that. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Finally watching Heated Rivalry and oh my gosh, the end of episode 5. I am actually verklempt

There is a cognitive dissonance at play where because people understand that something is illegal and horrendous they do not understand that it is also ubiquitous and common.

“Will anyone in the Epstein files be held accountable?” What you have to understand is that while sexual violence is technically illegal and frowned upon in the abstract, in practice it is accepted, ubiquitous, de rigeur, and a primary vehicle for male bonding.

This captures my fear about these drugs - that people will see their existence as license to be even crueler to fat people and to further police what an acceptable body looks like. I already see it in people I know- they use the drugs to confirm their judgments rather than question their assumptions

It’s the “okay” [clap] combo for me.

I tell you what, Ring figured out exactly how to weaponize white people’s empathy in service to a corporately controlled surveillance state. Tell them it will find your dog.

What Kendrick did last year was in continuity with what Bad Bunny’s performance did this year, but let’s be VERY clear: Kendrick was articulating a specifically Black experience of oppression in a US/American context while using Sam Jackson as a foil for white supremacy itself.