My latest for Liberal Currents: I wanted to explain the core of Trump's appeal to his followers. There are many, many Republicans who are bigoted and cruel. But only Trump has made his followers feel like they can *get away with it.* This is why we need to prove him wrong at any cost.

Ok, this is a ... lot. youtu.be/OC7sNfNuTNU

Do you want the Vile Offspring? Because this is how you get the Vile Offspring.

I love journalism, and I get now is not a great time (financially or spiritually to be a journalist), but seeing them do wagon circling is always the worst. Why? Because when I see it, it calls to mind when they had this reaction to stories like this:

Twitter is owned by a fascist who deliberately manipulates the algorithms to promote far right messages. Here’s why Bluesky has an intellectual diversity problem.

JFC, a million people died.

very funny to me to see folks who have no social media presence outside of twitter say you have to be on twitter to be influential

A month ago you could go there and find threads of revenge porn and child abuse material made by the owner's pet AI. I dunno what it'll take!

I have no patience for takes like, "BlueSky is so hostile to journalists that people have no choice but to spend time on the Nazi site."

Peter Thiel in the staff lounge

I liked Shadowrun when it was a game.

The two hardest problems in Computer Science are 1. Human communication 2. Getting people in tech to believe that human communication is important

feel like i'm gonna be getting a lot of mileage out of this one

This is a wildly overblown causal claim based on a correlation

Just in case you have missed history, this is an excellent interview about what concentration camps are, a glimpse into how they tie into both American and human history, and how we have this moment to shut down the ones our government is running today.

The whole Stancil/Verge hitpiece is interesting insofar the meltdowns from the Journalist who wrote the article and her Editor indicates no one at The Verge is familiar with the term 'it takes years to build a reputation and only moments to destroy it'

Donald Trump is responding to a Supreme Court loss the right way. by Ezra Klein

New: A comedian set up a fake ICE tip line as a joke. Then 100 calls flooded in: neighbors ratting on neighbors, a teacher reporting a kindergartener. Fans say the viral TikToks revealed deportation's "banality of evil." Conservatives say he should be in prison wapo.st/4kM4qbF

Judge Goodwin: "An anonymous government is no government at all. It cannot be held accountable. A masked agent freely uses force without justifying his actions, and the public cannot name him to challenge his conduct. A regime of secret policing has no place in our society."

Clever of Trump to release a Stancil profile to distract from the—<deletes account>

Look, Ro could win me[1] over if he just quoted Andraste and said "The Maker teaches that technology should serve man, not rule over it." [1] Just kidding, he would also need to admit that cryptocurrency comes from the Black City.

Dumbest version of this: youtube.com/shorts/2VM7T...

Stupid monkey's paw.

This scene is more relatable every day.

Listen, laws like this are bad and should feel bad. Not because I'm a big gun guy, but this is a loaded gun in the hands of the government to tell us what we can make ourselves. All fun and games until you have an abusive government, which uh... blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/19/c...

Happy, like the author, to be the dumbest man in the room on this issue. Put more plainly: As for me and my house, we will keep helping our neighbors.

My wife (tonight): "What do you know about the Swarovski Shrek?" Me (nervous): "Why do you ask? Do you ... want one?" Her: "I just got recommended the If the Books Could Kill Subreddit and it was the first thing there!" @notalawyer.bsky.social Tell your wife that the bit worked!

It's _almost as though_ free speech and free ideas are not what they're after. Or what they're paid for.

"Call the machine IT, not HIM, or HE^H^H IT will GET INSIDE YOUR MIND" - Modern security advice (possibly also Laundry IT support day 1 training)

Jesus I've seen what you've done for the K-Pop demon hunters and I want that for me.

Look I think we are at world historical levels of you never have to take Tyler Austin Harper, Sam Moyn, Sam Haselby, Dan Bessner, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, et all seriously again.

Baudrillard administration confirmed; spectacle as policy.

It was raining again, so another brooding selfie emerged (ht to @davidhobby.bsky.social for the tight crop suggestion).

Every Tuesday, the Godmothers of the Disappeared gather outside the detention center to pray for those affected by ICE raids. They commemorate individuals who have been taken into custody and those whose lives were lost.

Speaking of borders....

I remember watching the racist right in the UK stage riots where they tried to burn down hotels where refugees were living. "Good", I thought, "Now Labor has an easy target" Oops! Don't let your left party taking marching orders from the opinion section of the Atlantic? (worse: the NYT).

Real victory for feminism: Normally you'd need to be a white man fail upwards into running CBS, but she managed to break the glass ceiling!

So…the Bari Weiss-led CBS News loses Anderson Cooper from 60 Minutes after 20 years but keeps Peter Attia, the health contributor whose name appears in documents connected with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein over 1,700 times. So far, she’s covering the institution in glory. https://loom.ly/fI7qA9o

Local government may not technically control federal real estate, but the elderly Republican who owns and runs Majestic knows his business depends heavily on deals with many separate local governments (many of them in CA!), and he cultivates a civic minded philantropist reputation for a reason.🤷‍♀️

It's kind of funny how Hayek's (mostly correct) argument against central planning because concentrating that much economic power in one place inevitably lead to totalitarian behavior is also a pretty strong argument against like, extreme concentrations of wealth and market power

i‘m using it for a column but i want to share here this line from lincoln on jefferson because it is applies to our situation as well. you can find it in his april 6, 1859 letter to henry l. pierce.

👀 Invoking Orwell, a federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore panels and historical acknowledgments of the history of slavery that the National Park Service removed in Philadelphia. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

RIP to one of the all-timers. I hope Robert Duvall finally reached the surface.

🫠

Read the “AI agent wrote a hit piece about me because I rejected its patch” blog. 1. There’s no evidence the AI autonomously decided to publish the article. 2. AI generated news articles full of falsehoods including Ars Technica’s article on the incident are a sad, new normal that devalue the web.

Does nobody in government listen to If Books Can Kill (if nothing else)?