It is bad for your soul to be so pathologically averse to accountability for your words and actions that you have to tie yourself into laughable knots to escape it, and even then only barely convince yourself and no one else.

Much like most of the press, the wrecker left thought re-electing Trump would make them relevant like they were 2017-2019, & it's gone just as well for them as it did for the press.

these guys are just holdouts fighting the last war. the world has moved on, thank god

it's funny because this style of post is intimately familiar from Woke 1, and only makes sense in an era of total cultural ascendance, where sephirothposting at some random lib felt like a real threat

"final warning"

Stancil made him quote tweet him, too

They’re still talking about it. We are facing real world problems in terms of coalition management because of Murc’s law and the inability of some online factionalists to size up their own faction.

What made the Nazis "the Nazis" was a very 20th century thing: industrial-scale death for its own sake. Other totalitarian societies existed, other genocides have happened. The Nazis really were different. That did make them special, even in a world of British and French empires that did genocides.

Guess when you have to get up every day when raising milk cattle

Realized what this reminded me of - Erick Erickson but Woke

Seeing how much of the right-wing on Twitter is just bot farms, kinda lays bare how much hate and hatred is a project that needs to be constantly maintained, a fire that needs to be fed all the time lest it go out for a moment, so much time, effort, and resources to keep people angry and hateful.

ah yes, everyday voices such as Alan Dershowitz and Dana Loesch

the definitive feature of our time is that our society is committing collective suicide to own the experts just an entire culture flushing itself down the toilet to avoid admitting that you can learn things in school

lol fucking hell the sex cult people are wokescolding us now

The DSA can’t even agree if voting is good or not. How would they be able to be counterinsurgents?

you see, having strong political opinions, is the actual same thing as fighting in a war

lol. lmao. lmfao.

do you want to radicalize the Dem senate caucus because this is how you radicalize the Dem senate caucus

"elevate charismatic figures such as Alan Dershowitz" -____________-

This one hurts

What they said about Harris never was about being opposed to wars. It was about being opposed to a woman commanding them and defending our allies and classical liberal values. They never opposed following Donald Trump to commit plunder, rape, and murder for fun.

another data point for the evaporation of journalists' ability to feel shame is how Ben Domenech's Malaysian payola was seen as something embarrassing and now taking money on the sly to do PR for foreign governments is something our media betters think you'd be stupid not to do

Propaganda works

a lot of things start to make sense when you realize our media betters are straight up pro-eugenics

the idea of a neighborhood character is every bit as reactionary as the idea of a national character, and is motivated by the same thing: "I deserve to be here and others don't"

it's all fucking consumerism. every single facet of our society, and the left is not in the least innocent of it.

This is exactly what happened with Obama.

we're not actually starting a fucking war with Venezuela the week of thanksgiving, right?

"what if 2003, but for the *actual* reasons conspiracy theorists thought we went in 2003 for?"

Breaking: Viola Ford Fletcher, the oldest living survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, has died. She was 111 years old

It’s like the people behind the Fyre Festival decided to throw a little war

alas, there's a lot of sanewashing in this piece - even as it expresses frustration in RFK, it treats him as a legitimate, good faith actor in a way that's just not true.

in the course of musk's pronatalist crusade he implemented one of the largest single policy inflicted child death events of the 21st century so this is par for the course

"how do you reconcile this with your belief that child abuse is a foundational precept of culture and that people will defend their right to abuse their own children" two things: people learn to dehumanize children, and people have massive blind spots around their own families

most people decide their politics based almost entirely on a mental abstraction that they don't spend a lot of time on, likely haven't examined a lot, and that doesn't connect to material reality much for them not everyone has strong in-person empathy, but it's very common

it isn't in any way confusing to me that someone can pull the lever for "mass deportations now" and then might jump in front of an ICE officer or at least video tape them doing deportations when someone's screaming and begging for help

"Ellie, the theories you're currently espousing don't seem to reconcile with your confidence that the American people will resist fascism" people are better to people right in front of them than they are to abstracted imaginary people, and the fascists are forcing confrontation to the former context

As a chorus:

It’s so funny to see people ANALYZE why Trump fawned over Zohran Mamdani and it’s literally because he’s an old man who watches news TV all day and the man from the TV came to see him which was very exciting

I have made my mind a sunless space, Charlie Brown

anyway noah smith knows what he's doing

i have read enough ethnographies where if they say about a culture "liking your wife is considered effeminate" you can fill in like 60% of the cultural details including the percent of men who die by violence

you want the good side to win? you need to bring back the power of the teachers union. you need to bring back the power of the managerial class. you need the (frequently feminized/female) educated class in a position to influence future generations, and you need the existing masses placated

you want progressive values to win? you will not get them from the people demanding them. the reason the public is resisting fascism now is because a critical mass of people aren't willing to *watch* cruelty in front of them. almost everyone will sponsor it out of sight

"I chose to have faith people can be better" so do I. But that faith is rooted in the knowledge that politicians can use coalition politics and convenient just-so stories to placate the hatred of the common person long enough to achieve durable coalitions, not that people are magically nice

most people on this site who are "progressive" simply do not have the will to look, soberly, with open eyes, at what most people want our society has a massive underbelly of absolute hate for any difference, any divergence. your neighbor would crush you and your childrens' souls if they could

it's also white people in deep,deep denial about how bad other white people are "surely you can replace 13% of the population and their silly little identity issues with a message that appeals to the majority of people"is the message racism? is it specifically hating minorities? if not,no you can't

every time someone puts this in my feed i get angrier and angrier. the country-loving conservatives squared the circle of living under obama and biden presidencies and still loving america by declaring those 12 years, definitionally, "not america."

you can't say anything more about his instincts as a reporter and commentator than the fact that he has avoided making this his beat or even a concern

noah smith used to regularly DM me about the fact that his silicon valley venture capitalist buddies were going off the right-wing deep end because they were afraid they would get MeTooed for the fact that promotions for young employees at the startups they were funding were gated by sex