Opinion: Bluesky is a dangerous echo chamber because no one wants to hear from me, specifically

“It is a cliché, but a cliché that seems to be a cliché because it is so true, that almost all billionaires I have met . . . despite the astonishing opportunities for growth in their lives, have the emotional intelligence of tedious, privileged adolescents.”—David Whyte, Consolations II (2024)

They knew. And they didn’t care.

“The good thing about everything being so fucked up is that no matter where you look, there is great work to be done.”—Derrick Jensen

“The fact that we’re no longer Robin to America’s Batman, and that Batman has certainly turned into the Joker, means that we have to get our act together in a way that we never, ever have had to do.”—Stephen Marche, “Is Canada Leading the Anti-Trump ‘Resistance’?” CANADALAND (May 5, 2025)

“Remaining open to the powers of conversation—to new evidence and better arguments—is not only essential for rationality. It is essential for love.”—Sam Harris, Lying (2013)

French nails it. Again.

Why do we love Carney? Because Canadians have a weakness for boring nice guys who look like they refill the ice cube tray without having to be asked.

Damn! That was quite the spanking. Bill Maher isn’t going to be able to sit down for a week.

Yet another reason to love Ryan Holiday. This guy really walks his talk.

If Jesus had focused more on kitchen table issues and less on unpopular outcasts like lepers and prostitutes, he might have won more support from white working-class Judeans.

Highly recommended. Thanks for recommending it, @aaunio.bsky.social

I wonder if they’re tired of winning yet.

“The work of our lives is to go from dependence to dependability, from being taken care of to being a caretaker—but not just for our own children if we choose to have them, but for others, for ideas, for causes, for justice itself.”—Ryan Holiday, Right Thing, Right Now (2024)

“For government to do more—or even for it to just do what it is already doing—sometimes it first needs permission to do much less.”—Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Abundance (2025)

“‘The environmentalist movement evolved to stop bad people from destroying the world, and so we have perfected the art of saying no,’ says Larry Selzer, the president and CEO of the Conservation Fund. ‘But we can’t “no” our way to the kind of growth we need.’—Klein & Thompson, Abundance (2025)

every college, corporate, and nonprofit president right now

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202... Every accusation is a projection, autopen/ didn’t know what he was signing edition

“In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.”—Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Abundance (2025) #ezraklein #derekthompson #abundance

“In the same progressive zip codes where homeowners press signs into the soil of their front lawns bearing the message Kindness Is Everything, affordable housing can’t be found—and homelessness is endemic.”—Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Abundance (2025) #ezraklein #derekthompson #abundance

“If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen, they need to offer the fruits of effective government. Redistribution is important. But it is not enough.”—Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Abundance (2025) #ezraklein #derekthompson #abundance

“Liberals should be able to say: Vote for us, and we will govern the country the way we govern California! Instead, conservatives are able to say: Vote for them, and they will govern the country the way they govern California!”—Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Abundance (2025) #ezraklein #derekthompson

“Democrats cannot simultaneously claim to be the party of middle-class families while presiding over the parts of the country that they are leaving.”—Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Abundance (2025) #ezraklein #derekthompson #abundance

“History tells us what happens when people let evil act with impunity, when suffering is ignored or allowed to happen. It doesn’t work out well . . . including for the people who turned away or dallied when they could have made a difference.”—Ryan Holiday, Right Thing, Right Now (2024)

“When you shrug at the suffering of someone else, you invite it, inevitably, on yourself and people you love down the line.”—Ryan Holiday, Right Thing, Right Now: Good Values, Good Character, Good Deeds (2024) #ryanholiday #dailystoic #thedailystoic #rightthingrightnow

“The story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities. Recognizing that these scarcities are chosen—that we could choose otherwise—is thrilling. Confronting the reasons we choose otherwise is maddening.”—Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Abundance (2025)

People talk about Trump taking away their freedoms. But what about the President’s freedom to imprison his political enemies?

Probably the best thing you’ll read today.

“It’s a sad spectacle to see a law firm …rendering itself into an instrument for lawlessness. It’s also a cautionary example of how lawyers should not conduct themselves as the Trump regime proceeds with its effort to replace the nation’s justice system with one governed by cronyism and corruption.”

“There is little evidence of racism in Viking society and, as far as I am aware, not a single example of a denigrating epithet or attitude on the basis of skin colour.”—Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings (2020)

Like James, I agree with almost everything in this article. Highly recommended.

“One of the greatest gifts we can give our friends, our partners, our children or our colleagues, might be to forsake anxiety: to realize how much we use our worrying as a barrier to our becoming and a protection against real intimacy . . . .”—David Whyte, Consolations II (2024)

“The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot. . . . At the end of a day of walking, the wealth of a single day is past counting.”—Werner Herzog, Every Man for Himself and God Against All (2023)

I keep trying to think about best case scenarios instead of worst case ones, and the best case scenario is the bottom dropping out of Trump’s support, ala post Jan 6th or W in 08. The problem is it’s hard to see that happening absent some big catastrophe that also causes huge amounts of human misery

As anger grows over tariffs, Canadians cancel U.S. travel plans https://www.montrealgazette.com/news/canada/article794556.html?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Bluesky

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone.“—Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow (1921)

Urging Canadians not to "buy Canadian" so much as "buy not-US." We benefit from being integrated in a global trading order, and if the US is withdrawing from that, we have reason to strengthen trade with the rest of the world.

“How did the US-led liberal international order collapse?” “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”

Welcome to the resistance, Wall Street Journal Editorial Board!

If being constantly contradicted makes you crazy, being rarely contradicted makes you stupid.

“Canada, Mexico and China are the three largest trading partners of the United States, accounting for more than 40 percent of both U.S. imports and exports last year. The three countries supply the bulk of crude oil, beer, copper wire, toilet paper, hot-rolled iron, cucumbers and chocolate”

“In a way, we represented the first true, damning proof of how badly things can go wrong in a social media–driven world where kids are content and content is king.”—Shari Franke, The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom (2025)

Those who amass knowledge without perspective are like fish who learn a great deal about the things in the sea, but nothing about the sea.

The exceptionally vicious and the exceptionally virtuous have at least one thing in common: they tend to believe that, deep down, we’re all like them. Those who deny it are either lying or in denial. This is a failure of the imagination.

At the point on our timeline where millions of lives are put at risk because one person must insist on the truth of lies the internet taught him.

Instead of Canada becoming the 51st state, the USA is becoming the Amerikanskaya oblast.

This guy is the new deputy director of the FBI. America has become such a joke. Such a bad joke.

I’ll keep you posted, @chrislhayes.bsky.social