honestly a big part of the problem is that many people don’t care about being lied to as long as they like the lie. this is an actual both sides problem and it’s getting worse. watching all the paid dnc influencers and strategists spread conspiracies about the shooting is not a great sign

Maybe a hot take, but the death penalty is without exception one of the most heinous things we continue to allow to exist. That being the case, if it’s going to occur it shouldn’t get to hide behind the faux “humane” medical theater of lethal injection. A firing squad is at least honest about it.

the correct position is obviously to not give a shit if someone is stealing from a grocery store or something but "it's actually marxist praxis to steal" is something I have only ever heard rich people with email jobs say

I need a better writer than me to write something about how Pragmata is the apotheosis of the “parenthood without women” dream that has taken root among increasingly misogynistic disillusioned young men. People have written about Sad Dad games but not enough about their role as reactionary fantasy.

true crime brain has fucked people up so bad and they get really mad when you point that out. and also that the entire true crime industry is predatory and exploitative

Beyond political conditioning (bc I’ve talked to plenty of left-of-center people from other parts of the U.S. who are a little leery of the subway!) I think this is the biggest reason for the disconnect in who perceives New York as inherently dangerous. Cars change your relationship to the world.

I’m glad some lefties are finally letting go of the “the debt isn’t real” thing. The debt as an excuse for why the poor should suffer was never real, the debt as an impending freight train that will further immiserate the poor… extremely real!

Can we get back to talking about all the insane ways this tech is being deployed and how bad it is that people are offloading their thinking to it now, or are we going to have to keep on having a proxy fight about the environment that has always been only about the tech itself anyway?

The index of consumer sentiment isn't broken; models that try to predict it just don't have the right input variables. I fix that and find that, yes, high nominal price levels explain why the vibes are so off. It's the prices, stupid www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-04-14...

I worry a lot about communities formed around the commitment: anyone who ever tries to tell you anything short of the maximally emotionally satisfying thing to you right now is a liar who wants you to suffer.

Portes is right. I have definitely come to see the value in political education, because "emotionally cathartic slopulism" has already taken over the Right and I think it could easily do so on the left too if we don't hold the line on, like, actually insisting that it matters you get things right.

This guy is no doubt a piece of shit, but this sure sounds like someone talking about a cost of living crisis and lamenting what people are having to do as a result, chopped up to sound bad. Can’t find the source audio anywhere outside of this but see a bunch of people uncritically reposting this.

I get that YIMBYs are annoying and “Abundance” is a Trojan horse for some loathsome twats, but I fear some people have allowed that to make them stupid. This article is a misread/overstatement of a study that itself fights a strawman, before concluding “okay but even if they’re right, it’s too slow”

Really important reframing for something I think a lot of people can unknowingly get sucked down some dark paths on

The way these models work for questions like this they mostly spit out the median expert opinion on the topic, which in this case is “lol are you fucking stupid, do not do that,” so I think we’re in the even dumber world of “I didn’t ask about some strait, I said I wanna bomb some schools”

This is bad, and part of what makes it so bad is that this is clearly pulling from *genre* understandings of reality, which the statistical linguistic machine seemingly cannot distinguish from other text included in the training data. Truly an ideology machine where every episode of CSI is true.

as a person who has not infrequently bolted awake at night out of fear of having accidentally transposed a number, it is really wild to me the extent to which people often just say things

People talk a big game about reading the article, then go brain off when they think they see a dunk. The explicit thesis here is that there’s no evidence for either of the diverging lines, that both the evangelists and doomers are working off nothing, that the true long term impact is likely modest.

I was extremely naive in my twenties and early thirties, took people very much at their word when it came to values, and absolutely destroyed my mental health (and my career) thinking I could publicly demand accountability and survive it whole. (1/?)

My general philosophy is to not openly criticize the efficacy of individual protest actions, but I am gonna need people to really think through what purely voluntary, disorganized, short notice “economic blackouts” and the like are and are not doing.

When censorship comes for your site, you *will* know, I promise. You do not need to fight every ghost you see in the meantime.

This “evidence” isn’t compelling, it’s embarrassing. GenAI is a societal catastrophe in so many ways and it deserves better critics. If you can’t understand how AI could do this without directly storing anything, you don’t understand it well enough to critique it on a technical level.

There’s no future unless these ghouls are brought to justice and every elected who chides “look forward” is pushed out of public life. And I can’t see the path to either through our sclerotic leadership and the vile machine they’ve built to retain but never wield power. It’s a very bleak road ahead.

Not sure exactly how to phrase this but I find it alarming the speed with which people default to moral/ethical shortcuts now. Like they don’t consider the specifics or context of a thing, they look for the markers that tell them Good or Bad, Us or Them, discard the rest and fully entrench there.

Pluribus rules because it’s forcing people who wanna see a bunch of sci fi lore dumps to instead watch amazing actors have incredibly interesting conversations about what it means to be a person

This is one of those things that I think is quietly important – when these people are talking shit about cities, Portland or Minneapolis or New York or Charlotte or wherever, you have to loudly say, “no, fuck you, you’re lying, that town and its people whip ass and you’re the asshole”

Pimping AI article narration on the “scope of the AI bubble” article is incredibly fucking funny

I wouldn’t say it’s a new stance, but seeing these jackboots run roughshod over my city with impunity has crystallized for me that everyone involved in this from top to bottom facing charges is the moderate, sensible position. Willingness to execute on that is now the minimum bar for Dem electeds.

I too am excited about all the other wins, but Charlotte also had a transit referendum that was very much uncertain and it passed and I am so happy to live in a city that’s actually investing in becoming livable without a car.

Many people’s experience of public life is now that everyone else is in your way, a threat, or both. Taking the most dangerous, hostile, and isolating activity and replacing it with one where we all share the same goal goes a long way towards not becoming an antisocial misanthrope about the commons.

Furthermore public transit teaches you how to live with temporary minor annoyances and cars teach you that you're god's most special baby and your moment-to-moment comfort is the only important thing in the world

i think if you ride public transit enough you learn that most weird behavior is not dangerous, and conversely i think driving a car teaches you that everyone is trying to kill you at all times

What is baseball even about

Gotta stress the extent to which it really is everyone (at middle manager or below, anyways). I’ve yet to meet an exception who hasn’t personally bet the farm on the AI delusion.

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

I think the way dog people simultaneously stopped making an effort to train them and insisted their dogs must be present everywhere was an early indicator that many Americans started to no longer think we live in a society

there's more to it all than this, and Schmitt of course was a theorist interested and then complicit in how such control shifts to self-declared dictators subverting the rules of liberal democracy, but we're already at a stage of assumed impunity to federal goons. Contesting it is what's left.

wrote about a great writer thealexpress.substack.com/p/kaleb-horton

Man. I didn’t know him so it feels crude to chime in, but he was on the shortlist of writers on here I was always eager to read, and it never added up why finding places for that writing seemed like pulling teeth. Incredibly sad loss.

The “fetish for getting yelled at” meme is too liberally deployed, but given both the content and ubiquity of rejection of this take, it might be the most it has ever applied.

This is simply untenable. There is no way forward with media and political classes captured by the right. Every time someone commits a crime you have to pray it's not an undesirable or it's purge time, then when it turns out to be themselves again they just shrug and wait for the next one.

Re:”political violence” as a discourse, again it is entirely possible to understand the ways we already live under extraordinary violence and also that the floor can fall out so much farther. It’s not that it affects those who were comfortable, it’s how much worse it gets for the already vulnerable.

Police brutality is bad; systematic racial profiling and illegal deportations are bad; abortion clinic bombings are bad; mass graves are worse. You know what a child's skull looks like after multiple blunt-force traumas? That's the floor. Keeping everyone out of mass graves is the fundamental goal.

People don't understand that civil conflict looks like your neighbors dragging you out of bed in the middle of the night and executing you in your living room simply because they're suspicious you might be a political enemy, and it really shows sometimes.

Lot of otherwise smart people that seem committed to pretending to not understand this today.

Evenly divided between waiting for the Act I patch that is definitely coming, and pushing through for the pre-nerf Radahn “I beat Last Judge on launch” cred.

Have a theory that the combination of passive investing dominance and the remaining market movers embracing an unreality that ignores fundamentals is turning the stock market into a second social security for the upper classes where the only real variables are how many are paying in vs cashing out.

Imo the real version of "Nobody wants to work anymore" is nothing works anymore. If the business you're dealing with isn't outright defrauding you it's incompetent at the most basic things