I'm entirely serious about this: until you internalize the view that urban America is Real America, you won't see the urgency of structural reform of an American government whose fundamental structures so disadvantage its population centers—the great engines of its prosperity, progress, & culture.

Another good practice for the New Year would be for all the non-fascists in America who want to opine about politics to really begin believing that urban America is Real America & that its denizens are The Authentic People. Get some self-respect & drop the volkish nationalist view that they're not

You cannot have “AI” without having “machine that almost solely exists to create nonconsensual sexually explicit images of mainly women and children.” The former exists in tandem with the latter. That’s how this industry has worked so far, and it has only gotten worse with zero accountability

Were 90s kids clamoring for a Batman cartoon with 1930s Art Deco aesthetics? Is that what the market demanded? Or did some really smart creative people have a vision and make a genre-defining hit that sustained 20 years of TV shows? If you want success look for vision, not just metrics.

It is an index of societal failure that a guy this deeply damaged is ever placed in a position of power or authority

Something to think on today for progressive/leftist causes: The legacy media is never going to like you, so what do you need to do to make them irrelevant?

There are people who pursue power as a means to some other end, and people who pursue power as an end in itself with no clear idea of what to do with it, were it achieved. The problem is the Republicans are the former (the end is “turn society to ash”), while the Democrats promote only the latter.

This might sound harsh, and judgmental, but if video is your preferred way of getting information about a topic, you’re a fucking moron

These parents killed their kid. It’s not an ‘unthinkable tragedy’, it’s criminal negligence.

[installing asbestos] “love it or hate it it’s here to stay”

If somebody trained a chatbot to intermittently say “please don’t type so hard, it hurts my ears,” I hope we’d be sensible enough not to start speculating where its ears are. And yet the algorithm learns to emulate obsequiousness and suddenly it’s a deus ex silico.

Call it the New Animism—the richest men in the history of the universe falling on their faces before a sophisticated astrolabe

Sam Altman: hey I made a machine that stole literally all your stuff in order to make CSAM of your child actors, sometimes it encourages people to kill themselves Disney: Holy shit here's a billion dollars Altman: the machine loses more than that each week but thank you. Soon it will become god.

People will drive like dicks IN LABELED WORK VEHICLES now, that used to be rare pre-lockdown. I've taken to leaving 1-star reviews on Google with a description of what they were doing and on which roads

I mean we are absolutely in a place now where the only solution to this information disorder is for everyone to constantly evaluate the source of information. Never trust a chatbot, but also don't believe a video unless you know and trust where it comes from. Unfortunately... that's a lot of work.

Absolutely vile, and completely unbecoming of a lawyer, or any honest participant in public life. I’m ashamed that these people represent our government.

Democrats need to lay the groundwork for reform by attacking the villains on the Supreme Court - loudly, angrily, personally, relentlessly. And they should start now. paulwaldman.substack.com/p/democrats-...

Once again reflecting on the unifying theme of conservatism being an inability to tolerate ambiguity. Hierarchies must be rigid and visible; racial and gender categories must be strict and their clear borders sharply policed; people must fit neatly in Good and Bad boxes so we know our enemies.

Definitely read this thread for the substantive analysis, but I’m sorry the image immediately lost me with the room labeled “coat bath”

Honestly to improve people’s lives in American cities you will have to piss off: merchant associations, some labor unions, neighborhood associations and some liberal nonprofits. If you’re unwilling to piss all of these people off at different junctures you’re not fit for public office imo

i think that we should charge even people who have been pardoned, because there is no conceivable way the founders intended the pardon power to permit the executive to order people to commit crimes and then pardon them for them

Interesting new working paper that studies chains of movers after the construction of a new apartment building in Honolulu. Paper finds that the project resulted in the opening up other, lower cost, housing on the island, benefiting the housing market overall.

‘Remigration’ is a term that comes out of the European far right. Its use by the DHS account is a sign of democratic and epistemic collapse

Mass pardons are coming. There will be no accountability without treating those as null and void. And that means a future administration taking an official position that Trump is not the legitimate president right now because he is disqualified by the 14th Amendment. The two things are inextricable.

Whenever you advocate for being "tough on crime," whenever you support "crime free ordinances" or mandatory minimums or harsh prisons, whenever you support imperialism...you support the same racist, predatory ideologies that create more Trumps.

primary every last dem senator

Cull the Democratic Party. Systematically chip away all the weak, corporate centrists and corrupt, gutless elected officials who refuse to fight and instead suck at the teat of the oligarchy.

Tech guys six months ago: haha yes we’re cutting all this WASTEFUL spending by eliminating medical research and USAID Tech guys now: yes I think taxpayers will be excited to bailout my non consensual pornography machine

New KMT Chair Cheng Li-wen attends memorial event for White Terror victims organized by pro-unification group. The event honored, among many others, convicted and executed CCP spy General Wu Shi, whom the CPP named a Revolutionary Martyr in 1973. www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/...

"overwhelming defeat" is when you lose by a point and a half (historically narrow) www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/u...

real sign of the times that an oil fund has to suspend its ethics rules to hold tech company stocks

the political director for trump’s 2024 campaign today gave the game up and said trans rights literally don’t matter in deciding elections it is “not even the top five issues, according to voters” per the intv with @politico.com

Advertising is one of the worst things ever created by mankind.

Ah yes, “failing to feed the troops,” something that has never historically been a regime-limiting move

Mamdani has won more votes than the entire population of any of the 5 smallest states.

This is incredibly important: we must frame tonight as a resounding victory — an electoral landslide, a mandate from the universe itself and as a repudiation of MAGA, of Trump, and of vichy democrats we must be relentless, we must not shut up

So Schumer never did endorse, huh. Nor Gillibrand. Just irredeemable pieces of shit, the entire NY senate delegation

I think I just sprained my eye muscles at this statement

685,000 NYPD stops on the predicate of collecting guns. Only 2% produced weapons. 85% of stops involved Black & Latino men. 3 terms with Bloomberg. Now these same wealthy New Yorkers insist that young & working class voters defer to the alleged “superior” judgment of the millionaires & billionaires.

A good sentiment, but actually backwards—NYC is more of a heartland than Montana or Kansas. More Americans live here now than have ever lived in either of those states. We have created more Americans—more America—by birth and by choice, in the last hundred years than they will in a thousand.

"People like Merrick Garland think that they’re eschewing politics. The reality is the opposite: The careful avoidance of anything that appears political is itself a political act. It is a performance, intended to convey to your audience that you are neutral and unbiased. It’s institutional PR."

I always think of Gandalfs line in LOTR, "I pity even his slaves". Coupled with his swift condemnation of Frodo's wish that Bilbo had killed Gollum and I feel that even though Tolkien never fixed his orc problem, his view was always to see even evil characters as worthy of compassion and mercy.

Extremely trenchant question. A correction to the article though—it talks about a “tight” primary. Sure, polling looked tight beforehand, but in the end it wasn’t even close; Mamdani won by like 13%.

Nobody wants to admit this but it's true. If you want to get really spicy with it, apply class analysis without holding over 19th or 20th century conditions. The conclusion must be reached that the globalized, urbanized, cosmopolitan PMC are the politically developed revolutionary class.

Of course they do.

When I worked in WaPo Opinions in 2017-2018, senior editors specifically told junior editors not to factcheck Marc Thiessen and other MAGA columnists, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to publish anything by them at all, and “we need them for intellectual diversity.”

This might actually be THE point where Christian Nationalism starts either splintering...or the NAR literally just joins with Christian Identity and REALLY returns to its roots (I'd have thought the SBC/NAR widening split would have been the fissure, but a neo-Nazi/NAR split has been growing) 1/x