You really can not exaggerate how true it is that the way to get attention & credibility in US elite media & political circles is to come up with your own clever diagnosis for why Dems are Doing It Wrong. Incentives push *everyone* in this direction, relentlessly. It renders solidarity impossible.

From a recent Ta-Nehisi Coates interview

Ten years ago today, in April 2016, the Boston Globe printed a satirical front page imagining a future Trump administration. The page was called "alarmist," "hyperbolic," "dystopian." But we’ve put up with so much since then it now looks like . . . a slow Thursday?

Wishing you and yours a very merry Confederate Surrender Day.

In "Technofeudalism," Yanis Varoufakis argues that Big Tech firms aren't actually engaged in capitalism, because nonstop investment replaces the need for profits. Instead, they just undercut and eliminate all competitors, then charge rents for access to infrastructure, i.e. feudalism.

some people you can recruit, other people you have to simply defeat. politics makes more sense when you accept this

You have more in common with the people of Iran than you do with anyone in this administration, any member of the technocracy, anyone who is profiting from this war, or any billionaire. When you see Iranians forming human chains outside key infrastructure sites, you should feel a sense of kinship.

If you think this is exhausting, imagine being Iranian.

This is no way to live, man

Is this what living through the Cuban Missile Crisis felt like

again very funny to think that a critical pro trump message in 2024 was that he wouldn’t start world war iii

today sure feels like one of the all time ‘so i still just gotta go and do my little job during all this?!’ moments

Nuremberg was an important symbol of German nationhood so I say with 100% sincerity that this is a job for Philadelphia

people think the talmud is like the protocols of the elders of zion but it's 9,000 pages of "if a donkey kicks a lamp and sets a hay bale on fire, who pays for the hay" in every possible combination of owners of the donkey, lamp, and hay bale

Tax invisibility is a scourge in our politics > Public childcare isn't free, it's tax-funded. > People buying $34 burgers pay taxes. > Believe $34 burger eaters should pay more? wait until you hear about this idea "progressive taxation" Wow, problem solved, thanks taxes! 😀

Polymarket shouldn't exist.

I'm a bit of a broken record on this, but usurping the power of the purse isn't just one constitutional violation among all the many others. It is, uniquely and singularly, the death of constitutional government altogether. Game over, end of story, you now live in an autocracy.

Almost all millennials and the oldest members of Gen Z can say that the US president has been a white guy born in the summer of 1946 for the majority of our life. Bill Clinton: August 19, 1946 George W. Bush: July 6, 1946 Donald Trump: June 4, 1946

This guy is two letters away from my name, I feel like @naomiaklein.bsky.social

It's rare that you get to see both a vivid depiction of the revolving door in action and confirmation that it doesn't have to be an inevitable post-government career.

Bob Kuttner reviews 2 magisterial books on capitalism & its critics, from its emergence in imperial conquest to its recurrent crises & adaptations. It's a history we need to know if we're going to get to the kind of democratic reforms that America needs.

"[email protected] said, 'The proposal for a post-human future is one where there will be human beings, they’ll just be treated inhumanely.' To avoid that future—to refuse it—is to keep relying on other human beings, even if they sometimes disappoint you. What’s more human than that?"

what next? what, are we gonna provide *roads* for the wealthy too? gonna have health inspectors keep contaminants out of their groceries? are we just gonna have gutters and sewer systems around rich people's homes?

My thinking on this case is that Clarence Thomas should have been removed from office immediately when we found out his wife had plotted to overthrow our constitutional republic

A good rule of thumb is to not trust anyone who refers to themself as a futurist.

This case is only happening because a racist president created an ultraconservative Supreme Court, and a handful of extremely thirsty law professors are trying to get the racist president’s attention for an appeals court judgeship. It’s all very stupid and embarrassing, and also *really might work*.

A single vote for Trump in the birthright citizenship case would be as bad as anything the Court has done since Bush v. Gore. This issue has been settled for more than a century. It is the jurisprudential equivalent of asking what 2+2 is. Any answer other than 4, something is deeply, deeply wrong.

this is superb. and even more rarely for the NYT, not edited into mush www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/o...

Banging on this that batteries met up to 44% of demand on the CA grid yesterday, roughly equivalent to 6 hoover dams. Cheap batteries are powering the grid. www.linkedin.com/posts/nicola...

your grandparents voting for reagan

This is why after "punish the villains" we are doing "toddler new deal." National policies like treat people the way you want to be treated, clean up after yourself, share your toys

My migration into a place - culturally enriching, unfairly maligned, our right to stay a matter of justice and equity. Your migration into a place - basically an invasion, theft of our heritage, a metaphysical attack on the deep spiritual connection we enjoy between our bodies and the land.

Fascism is worse than neoliberalism in literally every way

US liberalism and neoliberalism only gave us “on paper” legal equality and rights, not material equality? Well now we don’t even have the on paper legal equality and rights

next time we should try a government staffed by people who are good at their jobs to see if things work out better

ah fuck I forgot to plan out my future

Happy birthday to the Washington Metro, which opened 50 years ago today with service on 4.6 mi of Red Line between Rhode Is. Ave & Farragut N. System now serves 130 mi. The DC Metro shows that, with good planning & enough investment, the public sector can succeed & build something extraordinary.

This has really bad and dark ramifications.

good @briamgilbert.bsky.social vid about da zeitgeist www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCms...

The Senate has voted unanimously for the Democratic proposal to reopen DHS and fully fund TSA without giving a single dollar to ICE.

the republican justices are as pickled in MAGA slop as any pardoned jan 6er

this is what happens when you let this much wealth and power concentrate in the hands of so few people nobody wants any of this but them and they’re the only ones who get a vote

I don't know how to speak about being Jewish right now. michaelianblack.substack.com/p/my-only-pr...

a hugely underrated aspect of parliamentary systems is the snap election. far superior to impeachment, which was a dumb design to start with and straight up does not work anymore

I don't think either political party -- or anyone in politics, really -- is thinking in ambitious enough terms about the electricity grid. We need to start thinking of it as the foundation of our 21st century economy & prosperity. It needs to be rethought, rebuilt, & made a solid base for growth.

if there's one conclusion that the study of both labor history and imperialism converge on, it is that the richest people in the world are happy to burn money on control, power, impunity. and the "everything is about profit" version of anti-capitalism does not survive serious contact with either

it's cool how so many genuinely talented and thoughtful disaster specialists are unemployed or underemployed right now, but the teleported-to-waffle-house guy has a big fancy job the core narrative of this moment is "competence is actively punished."

Happy St Patrick's Day to the Irish-American tradition that's about solidarity with oppressed peoples and opposition to imperialism, and *NOT* to the part that's about integration into American whiteness via exercises in domineering racism.