hot take: the Constitution *is* a suicide pact, if what’s meant by that is “the government does not get to violate the Constitution even when the alternative is the destruction of the country” the nation exists to protect our inalienable rights, not to endure forever for its own sake

I said this in replies elsewhere, but I want to say it loudly here. Anything other than a fullthroated affirmation of birthright citizenship in this country by SCOTUS is an act of treason. It is grounds for immediate impeachment. It is a violation of every oath they have made.

The more the Supreme Court removes avenues to use the law to protect trans people from persecution, the more important it becomes for regular people to rebuke and stigmatize transphobia. Transphobes want to use lawfare to win cultural victories; we can deny them those victories.

I HEREBY DECLARE THAT I DO NOT GIVE MY PERMISSION FOR ATTIE AI TO USE ANY OF MY PERSONAL DATA TO CREATE AN EVIL PALETTE SWAPPED “WA-“ VERSION OF MY PROFILE AND POSTS

Singapore is not a full democracy, and that’s bad and a reason to think less of Singaporean policymaking.

Notice how Republican *elected officials*—not just private citizens—campaign against Democrats not as individual officeholders but as a type of fellow citizen it is good to hate But when liberal private citizens strongly dislike Republican officials, the *private citizens* get called intolerant

“You can’t just be against Trump, you have to tell me what you’re *for*” is such DC consultant brain poison. “Orange man bad” commands majority support; filling in any policy detail subtracts from that support. Also the Democratic Party cannot impose a policy agenda on individual candidates.

Everyone talks about older normie libs’ willingness to say stuff that’d get your account suspended on any social media app, and sometimes I worry that the generations that grew up with social media have become inured to the idea that you should expect retaliation for your speech.

I just fundamentally side against ideologies that say "where you're born is where you must stay, your family owns you, you belong to a piece of land and if you leave where you're from you're oppressing people wherever you move"

the way some US politicians and commentators talk about section 230 drives me insane. they want to “own” “Big Tech” so badly that they will rip out foundational law that protects the freedoms of _individuals_ because they think, wrongly, that doing so is inconvenient to “Big Tech”

This is an extremely weak argument for mandating that kids learn to write in cursive, so weak in fact that it makes me preemptively skeptical of the studies that people are citing in the replies. I’m open to being wrong, but even if it’s good in the abstract, what’s being cut to make room for it?

instagram is a great way to familiarize yourself with the terrible political views of extremely hot men around the world

the issue with buying into “decadence” is that most people who worry about “decadence” use the term to mean the emancipation of women and lgbt people, but the most consistently right political actors have been those whose politics are centered around emancipating women and lgbt people

I am not exaggerating when I say that many Americans, both politicians and regular voters, want to make everybody’s life worse on purpose!

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I was willing to live and let live with rural communities. then they elected a guy who sucks at being president and is personally evil specifically because he pisses me off. twice.

tankies, actual Lost Causers, Nazis, it's ultimately the appeal of a failed cause that wins the hearts of people who believe the world hasn't given them what they deserve: power over others. the ideology is mostly just an excuse.

this site having another round of leftists vs liberals discourse is very dr-manhattan-moon.jpg but this time I’m struck by how many people there are who hold *identical* political and policy views except for the fact that some identify as liberal and some think “liberal” means people they despise

i’m so sorry but you have all been unsuccessful in trying to convince me that political cartoons are any good

your usual reminder that joseph campbell was a sexist piece of shit and that the hero with a thousand faces was based on the extremely dubious and mostly rejected anthropology of Frazier’s Golden Bough

objectively insane view I think I’m talking myself into actually believing: the editorial page editor of a newspaper literally agrees with every op-ed they run, otherwise they wouldn’t run them “no, this columnist just makes an interesting point” but like what does that mean?

the Chicago Sun-Times logo looks like a censored curse word in a Central European language

the gay angels in The Amber Spyglass were definitely Dogma fanfic, right?

every violation of the norms of democracy has the same logic. the only way right-wingers will resume abiding by a norm is if they see that they benefit from it, which means left-wingers need to violate it, unless it’s an ethical line we can’t cross. celebrating an enemy’s death isn’t such a line

I don’t think “an assumption that life owes you nothing” exists, psychologically. the people who complain about other people acting like life owes them stuff clearly believe they’re owed not having to listen to other people’s complaints

a) don’t post stories about your kid that might ever embarrass them using their real name on your real-name account to your millions of followers; that’s actually gross

A lot of people (by which i mean me) had kind of a reactionary centrist moment in 2020 and a lot of it was because climate advocacy, specifically, was being held hostage to this omnicause stuff. I think climate change is a major global crisis, and the Sunrise Movement demonstrably doesn’t.

the demoralizing thing about the Senate is for most of my fringe, unpopular political views, I try to think of a range of arguments for them, but “one person, one vote” is something people already agree with, idk how else to convince them the Senate is bad, and they’re still like “eh, why change”

there’s a line in Henry V where he says, “I love France so much I will not part with a village of it” and this seems to be the type of “love” some Americans have for Canada

liberal politics commenters on far-left content creators: look at all these fun weirdos, i am going to elevate them as key partners in our coalition, omg do I have a crush? far-left content creators on liberal politics commenters: look, these guys are all jews

imo NIMBYism is mainly the Liz Lemon “if I could press a button and five people would die but I’d get free cheese sticks for life, I’d do it” quote but replace “cheese sticks” with “convenient parking”

As much as I hate to hand it to a buzzy trendpiece that popularizes a weird term, I think this basically anticipates a lot of the reactions people are having to it, from “this is actual attempted murder” to “some women are excellent hikers, though”! But it doesn’t prove this behavior is widespread

Clarke’s post implies that it would be fine or understandable if poorer areas voted in a way he found unserious. This tiresome idea that only PMC liberals have agency and can be reproached for their voting behavior is pervasive across countries.

you’re telling me Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t understand how fiction works other than as pure, po-faced moral didacticism?

america has a shortage of elite parkour athletes due to our lack of investment in brutalist architecture send skeet

I don’t actually believe billionaires are inherently bad, but if forcing everyone to introspect meant no more billionaires, that strikes me as a very low price to pay for making everyone introspect

maybe I should do a series of reviews of various brands of chocolate-flavored protein bars

it will never stop being funny that the US, France, and the UK are united in each blaming every modern affront to traditional values on the other two

my personal reason for being an individualist liberal is that I think that society is at war with the individual and that probably the bulk of our institutions, but most especially the family, are arranged to minimize individual autonomy by offloading suffering onto disfavored kinds of individuals

there is no “the economy” except for presidential approval rating empirics in disarray “economics is just a theory”-cels SEETHING now that theory is literally the only way to assess macroeconomic conditions

I hate the line “politics should stop at the water’s edge”. The Republican Party a) represents an immediate threat to my freedom and way of life, b) is aligned with ~all the foreign regimes that also hate freedom, and c) clearly does not share any values with me. but I can’t call them the enemy why?

authoritarianism is a consistent ideology and its adherents consistently favor whatever minimizes freedom qua freedom!

you’re telling me an oppressed minority is overwhelmingly voting for left-of-center parties that support their basic rights, even as many of them also hold illiberal views on other important leftist causes? unprecedented, surely. I’ve never heard of anything like this

you know how the more you learn about biology, the more the simplest questions (“what is a species?”) become the hardest? something similar is happening to me with housing policy. what even is “homeownership”?

I think people are overrating the odds that Trump deliberately made Marco Rubio wear clownishly oversized shoes (because of gender) and underrating the odds that Rubio lied to Trump about his shoe size (because of gender) could still be the first thing, though

I think a lot about how much listing-all-the-presidents kitsch there is—kids’ books! puzzles! placemats! the National Portrait Gallery Hall of Presidents!—and I think given Trump, they should stop making it. I can’t imagine they will, but they should.

“I want that twink OBLITERATED”

In the struggle between rural communal 'values' and corporate greed, I want corporate greed to win every time.