authoritarianism is a consistent ideology whose adherents consistently oppose freedom qua freedom!

there is absolutely no reason why you can’t be a moderate center-leftist on policy and also be a firebreathing bomb-thrower who gets attention by saying shockingly blunt things about Republicans!

The Western European paranoia about burkinis really needs to go away, and hopefully courts ruling against businesses for discrimination speeds that along. Telling women how to dress is inherently antifeminist, whether you're telling them to take clothing off or put clothing on.

i’m baffled as to what this is even telling me not to do. Like, no, I wasn’t planning on using this package to pole vault? and if I’m honest the guidelines for the correct way to open it also leave me with more questions than answers

calling seltzer “sparkling water” is a nefarious scheme by Big Seltzer to normalize their swill. it’s “water” in the same sense that orange juice is “water”! “carbonation juice” would be a more accurate name!

my moderate take is that partisan primaries are a net plus for democracy as long as everyone understands that they serve a different purpose from general elections and that methods other than the primary can also build legitimacy

Makes sense really given that the Post has actual conservative subscribers and audience and therefore has a reason to actually investigate conservative movements they may be involved in, as opposed to treating them as curiosities and opportunities to enrage their hated lib reader base

had a vision of a future where the *only* people still operating human-driven cars are elderly people who don’t trust newfangled technology, so there’s an orderly, safe fleet of self-driving cars and buses alongside a bunch of 87-year-olds constantly plowing into them

per one of my regular hobbyhorses: I think people on this app who think the key to solving our present crisis is to “bring back shame” are being shortsighted, because the primary way shame manifests itself in our politics is via men’s gender insecurity, with these results.

everyone quotes Yeats but the most important lines in “The Second Coming” are “The best lack all conviction, and the worst/Are full of passionate intensity” which is a single-sentence summary of all of contemporary US politics

the now-decades-long saga of tubman on the $20 bill is a great, if somewhat unimportant and symbolic, example of the democrats' lack of ability to Just Do Stuff

authoritarianism is a consistent ideology whose adherents are consistently opposed to freedom qua freedom!

on one hand, there’s a strong argument for nominating career politicians who have been thoroughly vetted over several elections on the other hand, I think even among charismatic outsider candidates, very few of them are *this* bad

he died as he lived: doing nothing for as long as possible in order to deny a Democratic executive the chance to fill a vacant seat

if i had cofounded airbnb i would not be promoting the pseudoscientific idea that there’s a fixed bundle of housing that we’re all in competition for!

everyone should have to do national service of feeding me grapes while i lounge on the couch in a robe

As long as I'm being cantankerous today, to all the people calling for New National Service among the youth. Guys, if you want a bonding and uplifting experience of bringing young people together in an exciting environment that opens their horizons, that's college, not national conscription.

why is this stock photo model (apparently not the blogger herself) posed as if she’s a British sea captain stoically trying to conceal a fatal chest wound

admittedly not my country, but I think anti-lgbt views are inherently immoral and a blot on one’s character rendering one unfit for office, and even beyond that, implying that you, unlike the majority of your constituents, have “a conscience” is political malpractice and reason enough to dismiss you

there’s a deep poignancy to fitness influencers’ fervent attempts to convince the reader (and, one suspects, themselves) that getting good at this one thing is the skeleton key to getting good at everything

never sure whether to blame my dissatisfaction with my own life on the state of the world or to blame my pessimism about the state of the world on my dissatisfaction with my own life

If the law explicitly says X, and you claim the law says X while I claim the law says Y, then you’re right and I’m wrong. But the current standard in the US is that if the law says X but Republicans feel Y, everyone must pretend the law says Y, or at least that Y is a reasonable interpretation.

concept: the “in this house we believe” sign, but at the bottom it says “and we are no longer asking”

There’s an argument that we shouldn’t expand the court because Republicans will just expand it right back when they can, but I’m fine with that because I think the goal of reform has to be to render SCOTUS totally inoperable so the only way politics can proceed is for everyone to ignore it.

making the housing discourse worse by calling all the folks who have only lived in their hometowns all their lives “cisplants”

actually i don’t think San Francisco specifically or the Bay Area in general have a uniquely toxic political or ideological culture, and it’s lowkey weird how often people on here allege that they do

it’s so weird to me how many people discuss the dragons in House of the Dragon as weapons and strategic considerations I know the show encourages that analytic frame, but I can only see the dragons in the way that the We Rate Dogs guy sees dogs

I find it very frustrating that some leftists don’t feel compelled to refer to people’s actual positions on Israel/Palestine in order to assert that Democratic candidates they don’t like support genocide.

this is good but doesn’t go far enough. car *horns* need to go too. in any situation where cars need to make a loud sound for safety reasons, we now have the technology to do that without giving every driver a “press here to scream at the world for mildly inconveniencing you” button

This man is the most thin-skinned human in history, among his many other obnoxious qualities, and one of the many reasons to pass a binding code of ethics for SCOTUS is it would be pretty easy to get him to quit in frustration if we added even the slightest inconvenience to his life

It's also fucking *weird* When I was a child, I hated the lack of autonomy! Could not wait to be an adult! I vastly prefer a "complicated, but freely chosen" life over spending any of it under an authoritarian's boot

Trump doesn’t care about housing affordability, exhibit number a thousand:

the strongest case for someone like me to vote for DSA-esque candidates is that moderate policy views are inextricably tied to moderation on temperament please prove them wrong!

Brad Lander may not end up as a national figure on the level of AOC or Mamdani, but more than just about anyone else in the US right now, he feels like he has the capacity to help break the assumption that "Jewish politics" in the US means AIPAC. And that is a wonderful thing.

I feel like New York’s restrictive ballot access laws have really been a disaster for American progressivism, given how many progressives in NYC can oust incumbents in primaries when they’re able to get on the ballot, compared to the difficulty of removing an incumbent in a primary elsewhere

the problem with journalism is that it is impossible to create a product that serves the needs of both people interested in politics and utter blithering nincompoops unable to locate their rear end with both hands, but the former is who pays for newspapers whereas the latter is who decides elections

“America needs a Caesar. like Trump. but not like that! i mean a Caesar in a good way! we just need to find someone who’d be really good at it!”

can’t sleep, so book review time: I think this review sort of holds the book to promises it didn’t make; as I understand her work, Maltz Bovy* has never claimed to have the solution to the gender crisis in broader society. her book succeeds as what it is: an argument that it isn’t emancipatory to…

one thing reactionary centrists like starmer in the uk & the american anti-lib left share is a contempt for the people who actually vote for progressive parties in the modern age

leftist anti-liberalism in the US is 99.5% just about aesthetics if you ask a leftist anti-liberal what policy views make them not a liberal, their answer will almost always boil down to liberals not doing enough edgelordism

tfw you go to edit your profile on a dating app because you feel like you’ve been talking to people who don’t get what you’re looking for, then you reread your bio and you’re like… wait a minute I wrote this perfectly, what would I even add

rick and morty I only got six episodes in. partly there was just too much body horror happening, but also I think I have deep moral objections to the show’s worldview (at least based on those six first episodes)

honestly this phrasing might be better than the original (“authoritarianism is a consistent ideology that consistently opposes freedom qua freedom”) my only quibble is I’m not sure “reactionaries” is interchangeable with “authoritarians”

I agree with this! in my experience (mostly from observing Oakland politics 2021-23) the intellectual energy in urban politics is on the far left, the smart and charismatic electeds are on the far left, and while they’ve gotten better on housing, centrists still need to up their game

once again: he one hundred percent believes that people coming to the US for asylum are coming *from insane asylums*, no one will call him out on it, and the media owes us a deeply reported piece on how Trump thinks immigration works, which they will never give us because they support him

We joke about how everything is gender, but also: you can't raise boys to be the masters of their sisters and their wives, and then expect them to go act like good citizens of a republic of free and equal citizens.

incredible, they said it couldn’t be done: a runoff between two Democrats and they’re both terrible

what Weigel is saying is false any way you slice it but there is a difference between “celebrating” a religion as one of many faith traditions and “celebrating” a religion as the one true faith

This thread is badly worded because it makes Levin seem like the arch-slopulist when in fact he’s just refusing to show the political courage to reverse a previous generation’s slopulism. The insurance companies are doing this slippery stuff because they were required to insure high-risk homes.

a giant chunk of social media content is people framing universal life experiences as unique to one identity or demographic, in order to find a market niche to sell stuff to i don’t think social media started this but targeted advertising definitely makes it easier to do