The post missed that the aim of tit for tat gerrymandering is to make it easier to abolish gerrymandering altogether.

Exactly! I originally bristled at the below post until I realized it is exactly right if we view the two approaches as complementary. "Yes-and"

because the person running Iran's propaganda has a somewhat average sense of humour and the person running the US' has had his brain cooked in a Discord chat for so long he thinks his weird ingroup jokes are even comprehensible to normal people

Happy Mother’s Day from this guy

Happy Mother's Day from this legend

One of the most pernicious developments of the trans sports panic is the mainstream normalizing of major nationwide media outlets naming and shaming minors with no consequences whatsoever. Kids are having their lives ruined daily and it’s become so common I rarely see people comment on it anymore.

have to admit it is quite funny that Donald Trump, the Republican Party president, has kicked the green energy transition into overdrive with a de facto ~$100 a ton carbon tax. getting a little chuckle out of that

@riiahenriikka.bsky.social @nuclearanthro.bsky.social

An annual reminder: The cognitive & emotional toll of staying in contact with abusive family can be both significant & difficult to recognize. There's a kind of social contract that abusive parents have violated. You owe them nothing. Nothing. Mother's Day doesn't change that.

We are once again administering q SARS-CoV-2 antigen test because it feels like I have COVID even though I almost certainly don’t have COVID no it’s probably Long COVID.

I’d be red-faced if I didn’t catch that.

If we actually want to appreciate moms, we should be providing free childcare, healthcare, and guaranteed income for stay-at-home parents to put more money in families’ pockets and ensure no SAHP is reliant on a partner for their economic security. Idk I think that’s better than 15% off a vacuum.

Louis Latimer

(realizing i should link this, so here you go: www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/... )

quote from pew on this: “As of August 2025, 36% of U.S. adults say they follow the news all or most of the time. That is down from 51% in 2016, the first time we asked this question.”

the percentages aren’t great!

If it helps you want to read and share, think of this as helping you. If you want a story to be heard, stop scolding and start asking, how can I share this in a high-dominance frame? But yes, harder than it seems.

I also predict this thread will be ignored for the same reason. It doesn't flatter our egos. It makes us feel bad, instead.

Incidentally, this also explains why Gaza was a motivating issue under Biden, and protest energy has dried up almost completely. People felt they could influence Biden. They think Trump is beyond influence. They moved from a high-dominance to a low-dominance framework and lost energy.

So yeah, "The Big Bad Media isn't covering X" is likely not why a story is failing to catch on. It's because people don't want to pay attention to it. It makes them feel bad, instead of feeling dominant. Sad instead of gleeful at seeing an enemy get his. Fearful instead of angry.

A lot of people who aren't right-wing like crime stories, and I think it's perversely because hey, we aren't the victims. And we like stories about people getting served justice, which makes us feel powerful and in control. Unsolved mysteries are attractive to people who try to solve them, etc.

The reason crime stories perform well is weirdly, because they make people feel powerful. For right-wingers, a lot of the allure of crime stories is that it reinforces their self-serving myths. They like it when criminals are not white, so they can feel superior, for instance.

Trump's grifting stories make people feel helpless and sad. Feeling helpless is a low-dominance emotion. So people avoid stories that make them feel that way. Fear is also a low-dominance emotion. It's a total myth that people are drawn to stories that scare them.

This is a really useful article from 10 years ago that still helps predict what stories you think are getting covered, because you actually pay attention to them. You prefer stories that have high arousal, dominance-oriented emotions. You need your ego stroke, basically. hbr.org/2016/05/rese...

As someone who has to worry about writing stuff that people will actually read, I've learned the hard way that a story like "Trump is grifting billions off crypto schemes that are probably illegal" will get no reads on it. That's because this story doesn't make readers feel good about themselves.

So let's explore the claim that the Big Bad Media ignored Trump's crypto grifting. Is it true? Well, no. It's been heavily covered by all the biggies. The reason you don't see it is because you see those headlines, and you don't click them. You don't share them. And other people don't see them.

I want to circle back to this, and I'll probably be ignored, but let's try: There's this naive myth that because *you* don't read stories about Issue X, it's because the Big Bad Media is failing to inform you. Odds are high that it's actually that you are ignoring the stories.

I can tell you from experience that of people actually read and shared stories about Trump and crypto, more people would know. The stories are written. And ignored.

For those of us who fought tooth and nail to have interoperability of medical imaging with standards. 😂 This is the thanks we get.😂 Ingrates! They could be mailing you FILM! #DICOM #IHE youtube.com/shorts/Tnixk...

As you can see, Arab Israelis enjoy full equalities, they even serve as public prosecutors

There is real rising antisemitism in the US right now, including on the left, as even left-wing Jews will tell you. Meanwhile, this editorial spends most of its time complaining about Democrats voting to block weapon sales to Israel, which is not antisemitism. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/10/o...

wife: I need you to not get obsessed with this sprinkler project like you do with things me: rot why would I get obsessed do you think watering the plants is a passion for me lol *3 days later* wife: what are you doing me: researching the history of irrigation WHAT I CAN'T HAVE HOBBIES NOW HUH

Bluesky has its own Gamergate,

On the subject of Trump and the Maduro/foreign rigging lies, I happen to have written a debunker here: www.lawfaremedia.org/article/five...

Literally an IG report thehill.com/policy/techn...

Sharyl Attkisson thought Obama hacked her computer when the delete key got stuck. I’m not kidding. Link below. She is incredibly stupid. I’ve followed her “work” for over decade because she was also one of the few media people who took the antivax movement’s most crank theories seriously.

My own sister and her family STILL support these criminals! Sadly, our relationship is ruined because of it 😢. My mom says -- don't let the (Trump) win... But they've changed... And not in a good way. Tried to ignore the orange elephant in the room, but term 2 proves too horrific to ignore 🤬

😻😻😻CLEANSING THERMONUCLEAR FIRE IS CANCELED FOR THE EARLY MORNING! HOORAY ADORABLE FOSTER VOID KITTENS A WHOLE CUDDLE OF VOID KITTENS WHO ARE WARM AND LOVED AND FED AND GOODNESS REMAINS IN THE WORLD!😻😻😻