It is IMO not possible to operate any kind of meaningful democracy when your national press is a joke and a travesty, but your mileage on that may vary. I think it’s incontestable that it is impossible to govern well and effectively, while being in hock to these pantomime clowns.

Yikes. (via @steverattner.bsky.social)

“Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by U.S. school districts against Meta and other social media platforms.”

This is fu*king outrageous! The federal government on Saturday dismissed charges against a Utah plastic surgeon accused of throwing away COVID-19 vaccines, giving children saline shots instead of the vaccine and selling faked vaccination cards. apnews.com/article/utah...

“Have they given up? Are they just deciding to build up herd immunity by watching us die? The government has given up, hasn’t it? They are throwing us into the slaughterhouse.” It’s not hindsight - we knew this at the time @drrachelclarke.com writes: observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

Montage of 19 clips of Trump insulting, berating, demeaning and attacking female reporters over the past few months. Part 1.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has been disliked by the left for years and years and had never had to fear for her life. She's been disliked by the right for 1 day and now has to hire security.

when people decide they are experts in some other country's politics my question is: 1) do you think you need to know who Marjorie Taylor Greene is to understand American politics at the moment? 2) Do you know who the MTG of [country you are talking about] is not MTG precisely, but you get the idea

loads of problems would be resolved in our society if we embraced two truths: 1) sometimes you need to shut the fuck up and mind your own business 2) sometimes being mildly inconvenienced is essential for society to function and that starts at an interpersonal level

It's not just that he's a pedophile, he was the least popular pedophile

To recap: Jeffrey Epstein offered a NY Times reporter photos taken in Epstein's kitchen of Donald Trump and girls in bikinis *and* implored the NYT reporter to put this information in the public discourse in 2015 What did the NY Times editors know about this offer?

NYT editors put "Claudine Gay" in "top 5 featured on the New York Times homepage Dec 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 22, 25" While they put Trump calling for Constitution's "termination" on page 15 and his chief of staff's "tyrant" warning on 12 Christopher Rufo openly bragged about the plans:

My takeaway from every new Epstein revelation is that some powerful people victimized many powerless young women, many more knew, some actively enabled it--and we're still being told that MeToo and accountability for sexual violence have gone too far

srael has destroyed more than 1,500 buildings in Gaza since ceasefire (or, to use Trump's words, since he achieved "the peace that has been sought for at least 3,000 years") bbc.com/news/article...

Finally driving my first EV and can’t be the only middle aged dad now *obsessed* with regenerative braking and getting as many miles as humanly possible.

The far right is obsessed with Lord of the Rings and Musk keeps posting about "hobbits" because modern scientific racism owes more to fantasy worlds and gaming systems than genetic science, and they see both as effective mediums for right-wing propaganda www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

As the ~discourse~ seems to bend interminably towards Republicans trying to figure out how they can (further) HDHP-ify ACA coverage, it's worth revisiting what is probably our best (most rigorous) study on the effect of deductibles in health insurance. academic.oup.com/qje/article-...

lol she got his ass and he knows it

The average SNAP benefit per month is $177 a person. The average ACA benefit per month is up to $550 a person. People want us to hold the line for a reason. This is not a matter of appealing to a base. It’s about people’s lives. And working people want leaders whose word means something to them.

City of London lawyer Andrew Milne bought up hundreds of freeholds on homes across Sheffield before advising leaseholders that, if they didn’t pay him exorbitant sums (upwards of £25,000), he’d see them in court. Well done @sheffieldtribune.bsky.social @joshiherrmann.bsky.social for exposing this.

The solution to the male loneliness epidemic is attending a local Democratic Party canvassing event.

Mamdani: "New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant."

Centrists who react to Nazis gaining ground with "we should try to reach out to them more" and react to socialists gaining ground with incandescent rage and tutting about populism are letting you know that their "centre" exists somewhere off beside Augusto Pinochet

Tonight's even more proof the mainstream reporters who are still on Twitter are suffering from a brain problem akin Havana Syndrome that is preventing them from accurately doing their jobs. They are being cooked alive by a snuff-focused apartheid algorithm.

😎😎😎😎 GOOD THINGS CAN STILL HAPPEN 😎😎😎😎

So many people were detained extrajudicially, were tortured, or died because of Dick Cheney. You can't get to the danger we're in now without everything he did. The weapons he helped forge are ones we need to take away from U.S. presidents forever.

...and less than 24 hours later Condé Nast has fired Lex and the rest of the Teen Vogue political desk, even as stories like this were bringing huge numbers of readers to the site

Today, Mike Johnson will keep the House adjourned for the 91st day out of the last 103. 12 days of work in 103 days. With full pay and benefits. The senate has been working, so this is not about the shutdown. It is about avoiding a vote to release the Epstein files.

Interesting paper! When you ask people about the most important issue "facing the country," they often say immigration. But when you ask them about issues facing them personally, it doesn't crack the top 10. This indicates that voters are reacting to media narratives, not their own experience.

This is a good way to put it. I'm not going to write anyone off as an irredeemable human being but as a political matter, the American right is animated by bigotry and misinformation. It just is.

We've gotten so many of these pieces where a liberal engages in a good-faith effort to understand Trump voters. Every time, they discover that there's no deeper sympathetic reason they hold their views. They're just misinformed and hateful. My own efforts have found this too.

We literally do disagree about this, though. Some politicians want to take food from children and some politicians don't. Pretending this "isn't political" just allows the child-starving ghouls to get away with it. Tell people who supports the *political program* to feed children and who doesn't!

This is the sort of feature of normal American family culture you can lose sight of when you staff your newsroom exclusively with people who have been banned from attending family Thanksgiving bsky.app/profile/deli...

We tried to place this story - very expensive polling, the first of its kind, strong quantitative data about what trans people feel about Britain: bluntly there is no better way to tell the story - with the BBC but it said it was "too weak". But it will pick up any old piece of transhating garbage.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Trump screws his voters again: He just denied disaster aid to Maryland (while giving it to red states). But I took a look and it turns out the suffering Maryland counties are in Appalachia and backed him by 40 and 54 points. On the pod, @stevebenen.com and I discuss: newrepublic.com/article/2022...

who creates the lively art and music scenes if the rent is too high? who makes cultural life? who serves you food or washes your dishes? who creates the fancy little restaurants that draw you to urban living? affordable housing is at the heart of what makes city life worthwhile.

Here's a photo of my friend and colleague, Jorge Bautista, getting shot in the face with a flashbang grenade. The ICE Agent is so afraid of Jorge (who was posing no threat) that he has wet himself. Please share this photo. Everyone needs to know what cowards ICE agents are.

this is accurate along multiple dimensions they’re getting dumber and more right wing but they are now smarter and more left wing in comparison to the people they see on twitter all day (stupid nazis) which also leads them to be even more prone to dismissing criticism from the left

We need to get past the idea of these people being "radicalised" on X. The British ruling class has been racist for centuries. For a while that was suppressed by hard won anti-racist social norms. But after years of chipping away with e.g. talk of "legitimate concerns" those norms are now collapsing

Take note of all these people turning out for protests in small towns in red states. Remember them the next time you’re inclined to write an area off because “they voted for this.”

Guys who crawled up into fame by running small businesses and mastering SEO and cloutchasing being more right wing than people who mastered a collaborative art form seems pretty intuitive to me

Pritzker: "Stephen Miller is clearly ordering people to break the law. So he should know that yeah, it may be three years from now that he is held accountable, but I think it's important for them to know that whatever they do now, it's not like we're going to forget."

Yesterday I had an emotional conversation on the phone with Arteja. She was trafficked into this country and terrible exploited by gangs before finding safety and community in Liverpool. Now she’s been detained and is set to be deported back into the hands of those who caused her so much trauma.

Someone send this to Fraser Nelson please (who keeps talking about a workless crisis)...

👇

Aftonbladet's report is harrowing and should make anyone who doubted it feel ashamed.

The fact that top Republicans are already fearmongering about, lying about, the No Kings rallies this Saturday, across the US, tells you how worried they are about public pressure and protest against their reactionary, autocratic, anti-American agenda.