yes this is a class of upper middle class professionals who strived to high earnings on a platform of passive income yet sees nothing but meritocracy and honest competition among their peers. their self-delusion is uniquely deep

As we saw during the brief woke era, the country is run by middle-aged white men who are absolutely freaked out by the rise of a young, diverse, liberal workforce with high expectations. AOC is going to trigger *all* of that.

Every now & then I see people post things like “if I suddenly got rich, you’d never hear from me again, all my socials will be deleted,” etc. Are we forgetting everything we know about wealth, power & unaccountability? You would post constantly. Trivially. Self-destructively. Like rich people do!

wait it's late afternoon ET on President's Day and NOW sweet nippy betting markets open???

lol the wealthy reactionaries centrists are so cooked

When you put Wong Kar-wai’s “Happy Together” on your Christmas wishlist and your (wonderful) mother-in-law says “I got this”

we gotta vote in people who will destroy the fascist Cathedral

had occasion to observe earlier today that "i think we should prosecute everyone in the government who has committed a crime to the fullest extent of the law" is, in literal fact, very close to just proposing The Terror at this point

I’ve decided to call this a “reading comprehension” problem rather than a “I want to antagonize ppl on the internet” problem because I want to foreground reading as a social skill that requires a philanthropic theory of mind for connotation to work.

americans cannot fathom a meaningful social safety net and are therefore convinced that efficiency improvements are evil, and so they hate them whenever they are visible

If you want to understand why rich guys are turning back to eugenics and recreating the rhetoric and theology of slavery, it’s because they know on some level this level of wealth inequality is unjustifiable bsky.app/profile/marl...

UBI in the context of democracy & a mixed economy is good anything in the context of class rule and capitalist supremacy is bad

Social media is the chief cause of RW extremism taking over the GOP

Ya know what’s better than “delivery worker”? Frisbee golf. That’s the “tradeoff” we get to make with advances in social justice and technology.

watching The Favourite last night & what a exegesis on Sex & Power. Once you’ve dug in on Sex As Power, which means a lot of psychic energy & stress goes into bobbing & weaving your nuts for status, you can see how much of a release of psychic pressure rape is for these sociopaths.

Party polarization was an inevitable result of a national economy and mature (post-)industrial urbanized labor force. It’s post-war Southern conservative Dems (& to a lesser extent northern liberal GOP voters) that were the historical anomaly. Fox is a subsequent/parallel thing I think

I say “polarized news is better” because editorial decisions and reader interpretations are more transparent. “Straddling both sides” not only fails to protect from bias, it adds an extra layer of (self) deception/product-opacity to the mix.

I think at the moment there are a few: Stronger messaging criticizing ICE and DHS more broadly, support for immigrants, rethinking laser-focus on individual greed ("kitchen table issues") that I suspect only galvanizes people who don't like Democrats on general principle.

news is a public good state vouchers to citizens for news subs subsidies for local journalism public options for local journalism and renewed for national level (pbs)

President’s Day is a good reminder that the best thing we could do with the office is abolish it.

Sometimes you wonder. Bloomberg this morning saying that you can't both believe that AI is a big deal and that we're in a bubble. But you absolutely can! That's exactly the story of the tech bubble of the 90s, major economic impact but not big profits. Sigh.

Great piece from @dsquareddigest.bsky.social, which touches on one of the big theories for why English-speaking countries do especially badly at housebuilding: Adversarial and litigious common law systems (Anglo) vs judge-led civil law systems elsewhere. samf.substack.com/p/build-the-...

Also… According to this Reason article: *97,000 FL votes for Nader *24,000 or those among registered Ds *308,000 FL registered Ds voted Bush (!) *based on down-ballot voting and surveys, only about 60% of all FL Nader voters would’ve voted for Gore w/o Nader reason.com/2016/08/03/r...

This isn't over. It may not be over for a long while yet. But I am 100 percent convinced that we are going to win. (7/7)

koko market cap jealousy investor

I’m still waiting for @notalawyer.bsky.social’s wife to tell us she’s called all our parents and they’re on their way to pick us all up.

Thai food doesn’t use enough Roquefort imho

Steely Dan implies the existence of Kovary Dan and Kanthaly Dan.

Been reading up on Milan since the Olympics began, and one thing that stands out is the transformational 15 km M4 line. Not only did it stitch together the rest of the Metro underground, but it also transformed the streetscape above. This is how you create mode shift!

we are trained to passively react or actively engage. The public sphere is either a spectacle or a performance, a parade or a festival; we are cast as an audience or a crowd.

yes AND so much of today’s & every days vibesession discourse is too presentist. The background causes of inequality & mass precaritization (*relative to income*!) are gonna destabilize an already-broken-and-hacked politics. That’s what lets middle & upper class reactionaries form & thrive!

Why the billionaires lost their shit under Biden

the 2020 election was a poisoned chalice and what's important now is trying to slow or stop the anti-incumbency see-saw

There are no mediating institutions that take the immediate & visceral experience of a pandemic and turn it into public ritual and public agency. That I think is the insanity.

"Americans are to a greater and lesser extent all psychologically traumatized from watching more than a million Americans die from COVID, and explain that general sense of malaise through economic sentiment" has always struck me as a parsimonious explanation.

I think key here, and in lit that @besttrousers.bsky.social sites today, is that American politics doesn’t work

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his multicultural economic zone. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his autarkic ethnostate.

Literate but poor readers see the contrast between the “tightness” of denotation with the “looseness” of connotation and feel freed from the burden of discernment. Good readers see the looseness as a minefield and take extra care to apprehend and apply context.

And in my attack mode I came up w a theory about poor literacy.

Arguing with an anti-Stancilite until THEY block ME is a nice change of defense/offence the typical anti-WS poster can. not. read.

In January I tried Claude Code out and it immediately turned a 4 hour job into a 15 minute job without any errors. Not a huge economic impact there, I just have more time to go hiking now. I don't buy claims of 20% GDP growth, but I also think a lot of people haven't adjusted to recent improvements.

I still think the internet is the best comp for AI. It was a bubble that popped, but the underlying tech turned out to be real. It enabled a bunch of psychosis and slop, but also some genuinely cool stuff. Massive labor market disruptions, but employment levels look about the same.

Biden was the most economically progressive president since LBJ at least, he pursued a full-employment economy at huge political risk, it worked spectacularly. And what happened is that the entire progressive universe decided that he must not have done any of it, or else he would have been popular

#NoKings March28th.... #Resist #Epstein #EpsteinFiles

The vibecession was primarily driven by lower sentiment among the upper and middle classes, not the lower classes.

when you order see food at the Dad Cafe

Thirty years of concern. Never enough courage.

deluded centrists want to take credit for the good stuff they can do cuz they won. But they wholeheartedly own the evil that they let in the door when it blows up. You’re not savvy, you’re sick.

Also, idk guys immigrantjustice.org/press-releas...

god she’s gross