Last post of 2025 is now up at the blog/newsletter! I'm pretty proud of this one. It's fun and worth anyone's 6-8 minutes. You don't want to get things wrong because you're behind on *logic,* do you?!

The Prosperity Gospel didn’t just warp Christianity — it rewired American politics. From televangelists to MLMs to Project 2025, this is how faith became a sales pitch for greed and power. www.bytheballot.com/p/the-regres...?

[screaming at the top of my lungs, once again] the fundamental technology of humanity is care

Not woo woo at all. There’s increasingly robust science on the massive individual and collective benefits of connection to nature and of awe and wonder.

there is one and only one political strategy, and that is: “hang trump like an anchor around the neck of every single elected republican and the party itself.” no ‘friends across the aisle.’ no ‘the fever will break.’ anyone not on board with that has to go. no exceptions

This is what Bari Weiss et al think "censorship" actually is; when subordinates criticize their superiors. That has been the bedrock of the entire "cancel culture" discourse in elite media; rage at the idea that students, women, journalists, interns, etc might be able to speak against the boss.

Ooh, cilantro discourse! I haaaated cilantro but I hated that I hated it and I trained myself to like it when I was 22 through slowly increasing additions to things I already liked, and now I love it Worth the effort! I’ve been considering training myself to like fennel but, eh

and in framing themselves as the only True Knowers, the data boys fail to understand how they form part of the complicated, contingent outcomes they’re claiming to observe objectively. “We can only respond to poll numbers, not shape action,” is itself a theory of the world that evidence doesn’t back

It’s odd that people use Beatlemania as a lens for condescending to and laughing at teen girls when it’s actually clear evidence that teen girls have good taste and drive the culture

Vought is one of the top three or four enemies of the Constitution & American democracy. His removal from power is one of the highest priorities for any project of checking the dictatorship's lawless wielding of the vast powers of the state

Yes, it’s illegal. Like changing it to Department of War, like ten thousand other things. Part of the Trump strategy is to break the law and convey “the rule of law is weak and feminine and laughable and should be overridden by Our Guy.” Trump is fundamentally anti-law. /1

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit. Incredible words. Listen to all of it!

When we were finished, [Miller] came up to me and he said, ‘You know you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to someone in your photographs,’” Anderson recalled. “And I look at him and I said, ‘You know, you do too.’ “I don’t know how much he related to that,” Anderson added.

"Subhuman" isn't a thing because "human" isn't a more-or-less measure like that, but Trump and his braying mob sure AF are *anti*-human in every nightmarish thought and action. Just monstrously opposed to the whole project of their own and anyone else's personhood. This is a good read. 👇

Something I want to see in these kinds of interviews is asking these people where they get their information from, what news and social environments led them to believe this shit, and then ask them if they have any plans to rethink their media diets and the people who told them to trust the man.

I’m about a quarter of the way through this open access* book and it’s SO GOOD, so far at least lol, I really want to talk about it with someone * www.taylorfrancis.com/reader/downl...

Outnumbering your enemy is not enough. *Strength* in numbers requires a shared sense of purpose. That must be cultivated. Understanding and relationships must be built. This is the work most people don't want to do. To turn moments into lasting movements, we need organization.

New newsletter/blog post--check it out! It's about the modern math knowledge that's gatekept away from you even though it not only has massive implications for our understanding of the world, but also is just way more fun and sexy than arithmetic and calculus and statistics. I promise.

New newsletter/blog post--check it out! It's about the modern math knowledge that's gatekept away from you even though it not only has massive implications for our understanding of the world, but also is just way more fun and sexy than arithmetic and calculus and statistics. I promise.

This column on Vox is the biggest pile of steaming AI crap I've seen this year. Human's aren't running out of ideas. Instead, those with power and money don't want to listen to ideas that threaten their power and money. Ideas are plentiful. Putting those ideas into action is the hard part.

One could diagnose Masley’s evident cluster of beliefs in the inherent benignity of profit, the commensurability of value, the hunky-dory-ness of monopoly power, the conflation of AI with valuable “information,” and techno-utopianism as the core of data center proponents’ arrogant wrongness. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Thread worth reading.

This, more than anything, is what the right realized in the wake of the 2000 election: in a moment of chaos or crisis, they can do anything -- *anything*, no matter how overtly criminal or gross -- & just smooth it over later with "both sides" pablum. "Let's not fight, let's look forward," etc.

Class reductionism is not actually opposed to capitalist extractivism it just wants to give different white men a chance to be on top

There’s a difference between doomerism - “it’s all terrible and there’s no answer” - and the warning given here, which is “it’s currently heading in a terrible direction and we need to *make damn sure* we DO something about it.“ Because we can. But currently we aren’t.

This is indeed great from start to finish, but “the kind of specific neurological injury that you can only get by paying for an economics degree” was a particular highlight.

Putting Elon Musk on the cover of a magazine for anything other than “his illegal government funding cuts have already killed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly children” is propaganda

I think about this quote from @georgemonbiot.bsky.social a lot: “The idea that some people may freely poison others is one of the most astonishing but least contested aspects of modern life.”

I think Trump experiences fear, jealousy, pleasure, disgust, rage, & that's about it, emotionally speaking. Barely a peg above lizard shit. Beyond that I think he's basically a glitchy human AI, trying to spit out a facsimile of human-sounding language without any real processing or understanding.

Agree with the addition that “negative externalities” isn’t a concept in capitalist economics so much as a refutation of it. A system that excludes massive relevant effects from consideration can only possibly be a lie to cover for extraction and abuse of power.

People keep wondering why they're going after Venezuela. It's because they want to do regime change and control its oil, then use a big tract of land there to keep a tax free "network state" that looks like Dubai but operates like Rhodesia. They are saying this out loud! Believe them!

Saying "it's good that this is happening" isn't the same as saying "the people who are doing this are good." Scumbag politicians figuring out what the progressive base wants and giving it to them is an essential part of making the country better. Always has been, always will be.

There are 56,000 of them, the wealthiest 0.001% of the planet with at least €254 million in assets. Together, they now own three times more than the poorest half of humanity or 2.8 billion adults …Back in 1995, the 0.001% held "only" twice as much as the poorest half. www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/a...

@quigley.house.gov Signing on? Your constituents (hi!) need you to support this as soon and as strongly as possible.

🚨 Today, I formally introduced articles of impeachment against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. RFK Jr. has turned his back on science and the safety of the American people. Michiganders cannot take another day of his chaos.

It's a weird psychosocial terror of being feminized by penetration, but the penetration is "your feelings being affected by people you care for," a basic element of being a social creature. They want to amputate a key chunk of human nature in the name of being totes alpha masc bros.

🧵 Also: Much legal theory seems to be based on a fantasy Congress. The administrative state grew because Congress, which has a limited number of people with extraordinary time demands, delegated to specialists. It now has the same number of people, demands are worse and tasks are more complex.

MAGAts believe disasters are good for weeding out the weak and undeserving and for giving deserving rich white men opportunities to grift and profit from suffering, safe in their enclaves and bunkers. By their measures, this asshole has all the merit. (Climate messaging people should take note.)

This is extremely my jam. My law review article was on soil protection. Soil is magic. 🍂🍄‍🟫🪨🐌🪱

Seriously, conservatives DO NOT MIND BEING CONDESCENDED TO. Obviously. They mind being condescended to by people they don’t respect as their superiors. And they’re very superficial, very big on big dick-swinging appearance. We can only make inroads by compromising LESS, not more. Know thine enemy.

Left-liberalism is morally, ethically, intellectually, practically, and aesthetically superior to conservatism. It always has been. We should worry way less about looking “condescending” than about looking wishy-washy when we’re right—even from the perspective of effective persuasion.

Sucks for rural kids and blue dots that most of their neighbors are in a death cult.

I want to face-punch everyone who ever said conservatism meant respect for tradition and prudent caution in the face of change. The only thing conservatives have ever! wanted to conserve is unearned dominance. I’m a leftier-than-left radical and I’m way more “conservative” by that BS definition.

One of the best three ingredient meals.

In these cases, AI is being used to solder together the libertarian goal of dismantling administrative capacity with the fascist goal of ever present control and enforcement. This mediating function between contrasting desires is at least as important whether it actually works.

Our education system is structured to prepare students for capitalism and sort the deserving from the undeserving, and sadly no amount of heroic effort from educators to prepare students for society and full humanity, encourage curiosity, and treat them all as deserving can overcome that structure.

One of my neighbors has been putting up these fish facts posters. All kinds of different fish, marine, freshwater, deep, shallow, all kinds. This is a good one. “Stg this real fish” took me out. Good work, neighbor.

They know that SCOTUS is very likely to overturn the 14th amendment, which definitionally means that overturning the 14th amendment is a reasonable thing to do, which means they need to start preemptively constructing justifications for it now, to show how reasonable and sensible they are.

We could build that on a recognition that science conclusively proves the ontology of reality is best explained as process-relational, i.e. that everything and everyone is deeply interdependent and defined by our relations not self-contained essences. Bridges religious/secular. Better vocab needed.😝