Politics really matters. Every bit of it. It's not about posting and it's not about vibes.

Carter: i am afraid so, joss Carter: in hindsight, it seems like firefly was just lost cause mythos in space Whedon: b-but the quips! Whedon: you all love my quips! Carter: there's been a reassessment on the quips too Whedon: NO!

there are wide bodies of work in philosophy that are just horrifying tarpits that trap and drown people

passive voice final boss grand champion honorable mention award for turning slurs into a sentient thing that can do actions www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/u...

removing the headphone jack had unforeseen consequences

Odysseus had his crew lash him to the mast to keep him from doing an interview with Chotiner.

I do think that being welcoming and generous to immigrants and refugees is an issue that has a long long history in Christian thought is squarely within the realm of liberalism and has the advantage of being against the ways of our present world / darkness.

One of the dumbest things I have ever read www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/o...

Under a new policy released Thursday, the Trump Administration will test conversion therapy on trans people in prisons. It explicitly states that it aims to help trans people “recover,” all the while forcibly detransitioning them both medically and socially. transitics.substack.com/p/the-trump-...

they're not nominating a Californian for president in 2028 and if the party electorate does in fact do so, it will be the shortest electoral suicide note in history

basically there are a lot of people who are utterly convinced that "racism" is a cheat code for winning in politics. some of those people are left of center, where being racist is generally frowned upon. and so they spend lots of time trying to find plausibly deniable ways of doing racism

I am a black public figure (lol) and I have actually experienced the way that white strangers hold me to a much higher moral standard than my white peers, to the extent that I get blamed for things my white peers have actually done. It is deeply unpleasant and very obviously racialized. That’s all.

if i were a coach for a baseball team, & we were losing by the 7th inning, & my speech to them in the lockers was "We had a chance to win, & we fucking blew it. We're awful. Aight game time," i'd be a pretty bad coach, right? ...anyways, SAYING "WE'RE COOKED, ITS OVER" IS NOT ACTIVISM.

It is really important to understand that the thing Mamdani does where people want to be his friend *IS* politics. other people do this, too, in different ways, and we have to start understanding it as a source of political power. AOC could get MATT GAETZ to talk with her. That's POWER!

the number of people arguing loudly that it *isn't* anti-vax in the replies to this, is really "hit dog will holler" vibes

This, 1000X. Vaccination is *by far* the best tool we have for controlling the number of covid *infections*. Convincing one add'l person to get vaxxed is like convincing 10-30 people to wear a mask at all times around other people for an entire year. bsky.app/profile/mich...

Like, by any measure, the democrats have wielded the minority party status as a surprisingly effective weapon in both the senate AND the house.

this is basically my biggest gripe with the online hard left rn, which is basically "they have obstructed Thune in a way that McConnell wouldn't do" - they have literally forced him to change the rules multiple times because they have ground everything to a halt.

Ouiabou if you want the french phonetics :P

It’s not true that vaccines only reduce severity. Vaccines significantly reduce transmission, as well as the risk of long COVID.

It drives me crazy that most people think that COVID-19 vaccines don't reduce transmission. They don't bring Reff <1, but the difference between spreading an infection to 2 people vs 1 person is huge at the scale of the population.

I have been saying!! bsky.app/profile/jonm...

kermit no 😢

A former ICE instructor is expected to testify that new agents are trained to run roughshod over constitutional rights, including the right against a home invasion, and that the federal agency is “broken."

this is also what it feels like to use bluesky

OP has basically got it. It's a synthesis of all of these things plus race into a single arbitrary scale. Rather like "race" is in the USA.

bluesky, the north american yelling about hockey app

the "AOCification of Zohran Mamdani" is a phrase that's going to live in my brain rent free

Causal inference is my passion.

personally I think the New York Times’ chief legal correspondent should know that the court was not a 6-3 conservative majority during Trump’s first term

I've said this before but I worry people are losing sight of what is actually happening by catastrophizing a new Holocaust which I do not see as likely. The ongoing harm is mass deportation itself; the terror communities go through during roundups, the families torn apart, and the lives disrupted.

The endgame is mass deportation. The goal of this plan is to rebuild the entire detention system from scratch, turning it into “[Amazon] Prime but for Human Beings,” where ICE has a standardized detention system that moves people from arrest to processing to deportation as “efficiently” as possible.

I somehow ended up with four cats and what I realized too late is that I really want negative four cats - something in my house that lowers my grocery bills, occasionally gives me $800, puts things back on shelves, helps me sleep better, and mends tiny holes in my clothes, furniture, and skin.

Incredible opinion. It holds that the common ICE tactic of jumping out of an unidentified rental vehicle and seizing suspected noncitizens while masked violates the Fourth Amendment because the *manner* of the seizure is incompatible with a free society governed by the rule of law.

Let me show you a wardrobe you can build with $1,700 🧵

by the way, this is why it's useful to have stancil (or someone like him) being media-facing. its a good piece, and a good profile, and stancil has consistently had his eyes wide open about the downsides of media exposure, and even still it can be surprisingly uncomfortable/unpredictable.

for sure the less-nuts conservatives *believe* this is what they're doing. and it might even be true in some administrations (unlikely, but possible) but I think it misunderstands both the personal and political dynamics. (Alito, who is a pile of pure maga id, understands this as a loss!)

my goal is to give absolute dictatorial powers to Alysa Liu, so whatever gets there is fine

New Interview: www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

Looking through comments on the latest video, and something stands out to me which we need to talk about: Too many people hear "I think you should vote for Democrats in November" and think I went on to say "that's all you'll have to do and everything will be fixed" Y'all gotta cut that shit out.

NBC ran a piece where Mary Carrillo went to Norway to find out why they're so good at the Winter Olympics and i was yelling BECAUSE IT'S COLD THERE then she went to a little tiny ski jump for kids and was like "it's free, equipment is provided, & they don't emphasize results" and i was like. oh!

Let me explain what this genuinely EVIL memo does. The admin is doubling down on its plan to arrest, detain, and interrogate tens of thousands of legally present refugees; people already vetted who’ve lived here legally for 1+ year. Hundreds were arrested in Minnesota before a court blocked this.

Also “what if a babe lived in the forest and she was hot but also pretty scary”

oh. did the company run by a visibly deteriorating unstable wirehead make an erratic move

I really do mean this politely, but: as a non-Christian in a country with a lot of Christians, I am not willing to cede Christianity to the right wing, and would prefer that Christian politicians who genuinely believe in a pluralistic society run for office

It’s a fascistic, pernicious question and everyone should know the constitutional answer is no.

The more of these fascist atrocities I see, the more I become an immigration maximalist. Let everyone in, give everyone work permits/green cards. Make it possible to get citizenship within a few months. Make it as easy as getting a driver's license.

anticorruption stuff is gonna hit i think by 2028

Whitmer / Gillibrand

fun sub-question i'd like answered/speculated: Can Vance 2028 win Ohio?