If a government tells you that you can’t call it authoritarian, it’s authoritarian.

"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply." me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

I'm going to say the quiet part out loud: the threat to the speaker's safety, and to the safety of their family, would more than make Klein's suggestion untenable. Klein, like everyone else who fetishizes debate, does so unmoored from the on the ground reality of our political climate.

“You used to be able to say anything” comedians never been more quiet in their lives

What we're seeing in the "don't sign up for protests" discourse is what Paulo Freire described as the convert's failure to trust the knowledge of the oppressed. As the convert tries to stand in solidarity with the oppressed, they refuse to let go of a world where they were the authority by default.

"I can abhor the violence that took your life, but I don't have to celebrate how you chose to live." Pastor Howard-John Wesley

Weird how Robert Redford and Ozzy Ozborne had zero people calling them pieces of shit after they died, by the simple virtue of not being giant pieces of shit

I confess to being an Autumn lover, so I'm weirdly excited that I get to walk to work in the rain...we'll see how many steps I take before that wears off.

this from my piece on charlie kirk is probably the most important takeaway if you want to know why bad faith, right-wing voices in media are treated as just another set of peers

I allow the computer madness into me, but I am aware of its presence like inviting a demon to share my body

I shouldn't be shocked, but I'm still always brought up short to realize how many people think "civility" means "white people speaking in relatively calm voices" no matter what vile shit they say.

Feel like I’m going insane with the revisionist history that Charlie Kirk fostered open debate. He chilled speech and his targeting of professors for wrongthink led to threats, harassment, and being forced out of their jobs. His legacy is chilling speech right now, about him

This you? Just two hours later?

Deluze, in 1976: "All our petty fears will be organized in concert, all our petty anxieties will be harnessed to make micro fascists of us; we will be called upon to stifle...every suspicious face, every dissonant voice, in our streets, in our neighbourhoods, in our local theatres."

I am having a hard time reconciling "Charlie Kirk was a fierce advocate of open dialogue and free expression" with "we must identify and persecute everyone who is insufficiently mournful"

It is pretty amazing to see people go from “the left is the enemy of democracy and must be purged” to “who can really know why good kids do bad things?”

Too bad the GOP effectively criminalized studying how information moves online and news orgs laid off and demonized all the reporters who covered the burgeoning online accelerationist performative death cults. All of that work was somehow "censorship" that needed to be stopped. Now we're here.

pretty wild that it so quickly became normalized that immigrants don’t have even basic free speech rights www.axios.com/2025/09/11/c...

When you publish a website that posts the names and photos of scholars who have written or said things you disagree with and encourage people to surveil and harass them, you are not, in fact, a “free speech” organization.

The murder of Charlie Kirk was criminal, wrong, and should be condemned. And Charlie Kirk was a horrible, hateful man who spent his life radicalizing young people to embrace their worst demons by targeting women, people of color, immigrants, and the marginalized. I refuse to sanitize him.

if i get killed, you can quote stuff i wrote. that's why i wrote it

It is quite simply dishonest to describe TPUSA as a “free speech” organization and not even mention the “Professor Watchlist,” as NPR just did. Reporting on a crime does not entail adopting the victim’s views.

Kirk was an anti political advocate who wanted to overturn the public sphere through force. No human being deserves to die as he did, but he sowed the seeds of his own death through his senseless defence of American gun culture, spewed constant hate, and should not be lauded or remembered kindly.

i’m not going to be lectured about political violence by people whose politics is violence

"Political violence" is a term that exists to suggest a moral distinction between "violence against politicians" and "violence by politicians" - so that one can be condemned while the other can be normalized. Obviously, no such distinction exists in reality: violence is violence.

Has the @nytimes.com already blamed leftists for the murder of Kirk rather than the gun culture and the culture of violence that he spent years promoting?

Noooooooooo don’t point out what he was saying and in which context that’s not fair 🥺

Let me get this straight: this man routinely trafficked in racist, misogynist, and queerphobic bullshit, argued that school shootings were a small price to pay for the second amendment, and advocated violence against his political opponents. And you want me to feel sorry about his death? C'mon now.

Which work? Calling for gay people to be stoned to death? Blaming airplane crashes on black pilots? Anti-vax bullshit? Election denialism? Pushing Great Replacement Theory? Kirk’s murder is awful and ominous for this country. But no, we don’t need to honor him or “continue his work.”

Someone shot up my kid's school today, and our governor is paying tribute to a guy who thought that is an acceptable price to pay for having the Second Amendment. Jared Polis has failed Colorado.

Without comment:

Absolutely true, but it's also a pretty natural reaction to worry about how this will be exploited to accelerate things.

- you clean up that banksy? - sure did, your honour, leaving a perfect, permanent outline, imbuing the work with real fuckin gravitas while making its point better than the artist did himself just like you asked

You leave her the fuck alone

“If there’s a glimmer of hope in all this rage-inducing misery, it can be found in the growing number of people around the world who refuse to be intimidated into silence.”

How else are we to cope if not through at least trying to understand what suffocates us?

These hotel riots are definitionally terrorism. There is a clear basis for the government to proscribe these groups. Much clearer than Palestinian Action. Everyone should be asking why they aren’t. Very loudly.

Oh woe is him. Boo fucking hoo.

You should not have to prove you're an adult, and indeed should not be required to be an adult at all, to send private messages. This is the most obscenely tyrannical part of this whole thing. Underage people have a right to speak, a right to privacy, and a right to private correspondence.

Does anyone else find it crazy that you can walk into a bookshop and be charged £9.99 for a paperback novel that took the author a year to complete, but £17.99 for a completely blank notebook?

A U.S. surgeon trying to have a “peer to peer” consultation with a doctor at a health insurance company who is hiding his identity as her patient gets denied coverage. And it gets worse from there. You have to see it to believe it. (1/2)

Part of the reason things are such a mess is that the social contract was amended to say "you have to be polite to stupid cunts and pretend they've got valid opinions and legitimate concerns"

I believe that there are newspaper owners, editors and journalists in the UK who deserve to go to prison for what they've done.

When Stock presented at an internal seminar at my former department, she delivered some of the sloppiest philosophy I ever had the displeasure of encountering. She's an affront to any notion of academic rigor.

Kathleen Stock turning into a firebreathing anti-choice campaigner is one of those things that was in retrospect both entirely predictable but is also just so funny to witness

Faced with the notion that their side of the argument is completely indefensible, morally, ethically and politically, columnists are now shifting to the tried and tested position that the people they oppose are actually uncool, preachy and, if you think about it, actually embarrassing themselves.

There was a time when JK Rowling and Maya Forstater and Sonia Sodha etc. caveated their bigotry by saying 'well of course we have sympathy for *actual* trans people' but how do you reconcile a quote like this with the belief that trans people exist? You can't, and you look like a fool trying.

The masks came off years ago - were arguably never on - but every so often you see a quote like this and marvel at how bold Forstater and co have gotten recently. Telling a coming of age story about a trans person is harmful because it's delusional? Think about what's being said here.