Years of lead poisoning.

3/ Tech fascism in a nutshell: “Computers are so much more rule-based, controllable, fixable, and comprehensible than any human will ever be. As many political schools of thought do, these technolibertarians make a philosophy out of a personality defect.“ She wrote this in 2000!

2/ In 2001, Borsook said tech "libertarianism" reflected an adolescent mindset, with a craving for unchecked independence & resistance to constraint. She warned that tech libertarians wanted an anti-human world that worked more like a computer. From "Cyberselfish," a book based on her 90s writing:

Starmer "seems ultimately, in political terms, to be an idiot: neither able to comprehend the situation he or the country is in, nor figure out how to act to do anything about it."

Civilitycraft is our modern witchcraft: we conjure bad manners to explain democratic breakdown, the way failed crops were once blamed on witches. But politics isn’t haunted by rudeness: it’s broken by rules and power. www.waleed-shahid.com/p/our-crisis...

Dems sure like congratulating themselves for losing.

From the report Jacobin cites, despite GOP rollbacks, poverty in 2024 was still at one of the lowest levels in modern history. And for working families in general, real wages had risen significantly for the first time in decades

Elected office is not an entitlement and having members die of old age in office is failure of party discipline.

Clapping like on Family Feud going "GOOD ANSWER GOOD ANSWER"

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Somewhat irrational responses to this measured thread from people who should know better. You can disagree, obviously, but should do so on something other than an article of faith or repetition of simplistic mantras

The greatest minds of the right wing intellectual dark web think tank cannot -- or won't -- distinguish between "comic gets yelled at in comedy club for telling shitty joke about trans people" and "federal government forces corporation to pull comedian off the air for mocking President"

Whether children are people or property is the political fault line of our time.

i have seen exactly zero evidence to suggest that peter thiel is anything other than a dumbass who got lucky once

We have Tucker hosting Holocaust deniers on his show while cackling at Kirk’s memorial about the “hummus eaters” who killed Jesus, and Candace blaming Israel for Kirk’s death, and now Rogan and his lizard people…whatever happened to MAGA’s ever so authentic concerns about antisemitism?

This is huge: “A drug that provides near-perfect protection against H.I.V. with shots just twice a year will be made available at $40 per patient annually in low- and middle-income countries, offering new hope… making lenacapavir a realistic choice in countries with constrained resources.”

lmao. see, people hate on "defund the police" because both political parties dragged it, but they still support what it actually means

Perhaps the US should stop hitting itself.

losing track of 1,800 people is kind of a big deal. That's more people than Hamas killed on October 7th. We know Noem and her team are pretty damn incompetent, but this is hard to believe.

It’s incredible how Trump doesn’t even need to pretend like the Kimmel situation is about anything but Trump’s feelings. You’d think he would feel at least a little pressure to pretend like Charlie Kirk was the reason Kimmel got pulled. Trump didn’t bother to mention Kirk in that tweet at all.

Robby Starbuck is a far-right activist. Meta putting him in the position of being a "bias advisor" for its chat bot is insane.

Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache!

The government knowingly putting false information in the label of a drug is crossing a Rubicon that should not be taken lightly

It’s an act of charity to pay any mind to the former Vice President at this point. In any competitive primary she will sink like a bowling ball, just like in 2019.

I know it smell crazy in there.

Not to take anything away from a smart, effective interviewer, but: the reason Isaac Chotiner is so feared is because he prepares for the interview and asks follow-up questions, techniques that make him like unto a cat on an island of flightless birds

Maybe we should put Pedro Pascal in good movies.

Abortion bans making pregnancy more dangerous, shaming women for using tylenol, making the world more dangerous for babies: this is all pronatalist because pronatalism is about recreating mandatory childbearing, not making childbearing easier.

If you want a less coercive society, you need informal mechanisms of social control like shame. The alternative is bringing in cops and lawyers.

There are so many layers of anti-science, fraud, bad faith, and cultish in-group signaling over the "autism announcement," but maybe the worst thing to me is how even the more responsible coverage of this in the press goes along with the idea that "Autism" is a single discrete clinical entity

Ed Luce's FT column this morning is pure brilliance.

Make Saint Paul Normal For Once

You can’t negotiate with this. Shut it down.

Pedocon is a theory like gravity is a theory.

This would carry more weight if you hadn't spent the last year cheerleading for the Cass Report

Today, the president of the United States of America said that the country's current pediatric vaccine schedule was "too much liquid... going into that baby" and then issued a decree announcing that anti-fascism is terrorism

regardless of the details I think it’s important to spin the Kimmel thing as a win Trump is weak, he’s unpopular, he massively overreached and inspired enough of a revolt that Disney had to backtrack immediately he wants to paint himself as an all-powerful dictator, paint him as a loser who sucks

The Blackbird is a simple, masterful gem of stop motion. Only Norman McLaren could've made it. But the film took him a decade to figure out. We explore the story, and the personal struggles, behind the work: animationobsessive.substack.com/p/a-little-p...

Leading national political reporters vowed that never again would they look the other way when a president was showing every sign of being too debilitated to do the job

I have zero fucking sense of humor about this rfk shit. besides the obviously gross misreprestation/othering/etc of autistic people it's catastrophic from any sound scientific POV. any doctor who consults governmental guidelines for anything at all under this admin is guilty of malpractice

The wheels are cheating.

This is the part of "Abundance" that I think we urgently need: our bureaucratic agencies/systems are not up to the task. They end up being small c conservative. And I think progressive mayors/govs/etc seem unwilling to think about what it would be like to explicitly reshape bureaucracy.

Leader of the Democrats does not support Democrats.

One of the most egregious violations of human rights of our benighted era. This is a glimmer of hope in dark times.

that a guy so deeply damaged and out of touch, a guy jacked up on hormones and fish tank cleaner and god knows what else, a guy who does phone sex cheating, is spending his last waning days on earth passing judgment on your kids as you shepherd them onto a plane is just. unsettling. creepy

i feel like it's an even simpler lens for them (not to entirely discount their rank misogyny): if you get ill that's your fault and that's your problem

At the Nuremberg trials, Karl Dönitz was convicted of war crimes for the sinking of civilian vessels. This is not a complicated question, it's been illegal for centuries.

anyway, I give you stephen miller's internal dialogue with himself: bsky.app/profile/rach...