he’s basically made himself whole on it through the other parts of his empire of bullshit but even if the cost of twitter was setting 44 billion dollars of cash on fire in the middle of a field it was still dirt cheap in terms of the amount of influence over elite opinion he gained

makes me weep to think of the gifts robbed from us because unaffordable housing has made it difficult for people to pursue their passions and hobbies

In the 1970s/‘80s the economy almost crashed due to stagnating wages causing lower spending. The “credit revolution” encouraged people to mortgage their future by continuing to spend at the same level using debt rather than income. Now everyone’s maxed out and they’re still not going to raise wages.

These are the stories of people who can spend $2,500 on a pumpkin display, call themselves working class, told their college friends they wouldn’t vote for Kamala because they didn’t want Jyydyn and Ryygyn drafted, pay for X, own a boat and an ATV, but want SNAP & WIC recipients to work extra hours:

just an fyi, on the same night the fascist chuds swarmed the ICE camp in portland in coordination with the local police, one of their buddies went and torched the house of a black city council woman who had taken a stance against ICE

'we needed a bigger event space so it's fine he shut down the government and spent bribe money on a building he'll name after himself' do these fucking mooks hear themselves IF YOU WANT A BIGGER EVENT SPACE THERE ARE WAYS TO DO IT THAT ARENT THIS

every trusted news brand has been bought and is increasingly being repurposed like when the viral "here in my garage" guy acquired the radioshack trademark to push NFTs or whatever scheme he was misusing it for speaking of which oh look a recent update no way this is entirely unexpected information

Could Chatham House please invite more foreigners with no …. to give, so they will say exactly what they think. Thank you.

Is it odd, that the Manchester bomber was so closely aligned with British interests in the war that has now resulted in Nicolas Sarkozy being sent to prison? Could it be that these are not smart guys, and things got a bit out of hand. And when they did, nobody wanted to talk about it.

I personally sat in 2011 and watched Noman Benotman of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group live on BBC News 24 urging the government to help his lads topple Gaddafi. The Times gave him an article and a column to make the case. And the bomber was one of his guys. So, what would we say happened there?

Does it seem like something extremely suspect happened there, and it was hushed up? I don’t want to sound paranoid but when the Home Secretary appears to approve of Islamist militias going to Libya, and one of them later suicide bombs children in Manchester during an election campaign, well

The Manchester bomber who carried out his attack during the 2017 General Election, and had been allowed to travel to and from Libya at will *by Theresa May as Home Secretary*, a thing that seems quite odd when we note Theresa May was leader of the Conservative Party in 2017.

A broadly applicable truth right now is that it’s always been bad but it has not recently been like THIS

I know without even checking that there’s a ton of “always has been” responses to this, and in the main that’s basically true, and yet that does not change the fact that we really are in an era of intensity and blatantness that I have never seen in my personal lifetime

I think this goes back to an even larger question that no liberal government seems to have a good answer for: how should a democracy deal with a popular political movement whose goal is to undermine the democracy?

There's a really dumb and counterproductive tic in American politics that treats polarization and partisan division as a bad thing that must be overcome. Would we bemoan such division between Putinists and non Putinists in Russia? What about between supporters and opponents of Jim Crow in the 50s?

and right on queue we move from trying to ratfuck Mamdani out of being elected to trying to sabotage his mayorship before it gets started

Actually let’s check how many of Platner’s defenders fell for it with Tulsi, hm? Venn diagram looking like O

American law, it seems to me, exists to create a condition of constant titillation for people whose material needs are never unmet, but whose appetites have been teased into a state of ungovernable sadism by sloganeering & advertising that promises a return to a world that never existed & never will

"[Russell Bucklew] was going to get tortured to death. So the Supreme Court again changed standard, saying ... torturous pain isn't enough. You have to show that the state did something to make it that way. You have to show that [the state] somehow 'superadded' pain. Which, good luck with that."

Also, "About as many Americans like Mamdani as Chuck Schumer, despite the fact that nearly half of Americans have never heard of Mamdani" is a hell of a stat.

"Republicans mostly hate Mamdani because Republican elected officials can't stop talking about him, and Dems and independents outside NYC mostly haven't heard much about him" is what this poll shows, and it's ... not actually a surprising result.

They realized that RFK Jr. wasn't killing Americans fast enough so they decided to dump a bunch of toxic waste onto a public golf course to speed things up

1. that's not how this works 2. this is, like, six hours of pay 3. this is clearly Trump trying to message to the military that they are his personal army and reliant on his largesse 4. they're probably lying about this donation even existing 5. that's really not how any of this works!

it's wild to me that we have a letter from 850+ rabbis denouncing zohran mamdani for things he never said and positions he never took while no such letter has been written condemning stephen miller for claiming to "defend jewish values" while being an utter fucking nazi and dismantling our democracy

80 handwritten pages of self-attestation for my last attempt (longtime followers know my fingers dislocate when I write by hand for too long). Fifty of those were sprung on me by surprise; sent by snail mail with a deadline a week away. By the time it got to me, I had half a day.

SSDI/SSI is an appalling amount of work for people trying to inform the government they cannot work. Nondisabled people assume it’s as simple as getting your doctor to sign a note saying “please excuse Anna from work; she really is disabled.” It’s not even that easy for the parking permit.

I reject out-of-touch, radical centrist ideas like mandating penis inspection day at school, sending foreign aid to Israel, and restricting vaccine access.

I believe in moderate, middle-of-the-road ideas like simplifying and providing healthcare for all Americans, raising taxes on the rich, and imposing sanctions on Israel.

Do you know what is an actually centrist, popular position right now? “Israel is bad.” Even most of MAGA thinks so. Do any of the self-described “centrists” support that position? Nope.

You know what it would take to kill Graham Platner, a nobody with an SS tattoo? Running a candidate whose age isn't about 80 who seems to want to fight for anything good at all.

There are going to be a lot of takes blaming “the left” for Platner, but more than anything else, what this phenomenon is is a failure of “centrism.” These people claimed to be the adults in the room, refused to give an inch, severely misread the mood of their voters, and now this is happening.

The final trope is always enshitification.

now that everyone should have actually foreseen. But Roberts was too busy [colorful euphemism redacted]

basically all this shit is Roberts' fault, because the immunity made Trump feel like he could break the law as much as he wants without consequences. bsky.app/profile/jayw...

Pretty much every goofy-ass defense of nazi tattoos I've seen on here has been a screenshot from X which is one of the clearest signs yet that staying on there desensitizes people to nazi shit. You're gettin pickled in the nazi juice dummies!

In America it either takes years or is outright illegal to build a simple apartment building but the President can destroy the most famous residence in the world on a weekday afternoon on a personal whim. Cooked society. The despotic elite laugh at you while landlords boot you from your flat.

but zohran/dsa is the problem

this is the country we live in now and we tried to warn people but a lot of folks were like "just vote for dems and everything will be ok" ok well now a dem has a nazi tattoo and apparently that's not disqualifying

so like seeing all the center-left media heroes go to bat for a literal nazi is exactly how trans people have felt this whole time watching the democratic establishment question our right to exist in public for like two years now

did we not learn this lesson with MeToo "oh well he just drunkenly harassed a woman one time, surely it was a unique circumstance" was always inevitably followed up by 47 other such incidents it's never just the one thing

I detest this framing. Most men aren’t running for Senate. Thats *literally* the prerequisites for the job. Doing politics and being a Senator are two very different things. I don’t love presuming that men need to be handled with children’s gloves. Men can handle being told when they fuck up

It is true that most people are swimming in an informational sewer clogged with propagandic sludge these days, AND. It is also true that these guys are committing a ton of unforced errors that people feel concretely and then see Trump claim responsibility for *in his own propaganda.*

There's no carrot in any of this, folks are feeling the stick already. And then on top of that Trump is hitting people over the head with the realities of who is at fault by owning the tariff stuff, loudly. He is immiserating everyone and CROWING about it. Repeatedly and loudly

There IS a model for what he's trying to do, it happens all the time in municipal politics. You can steal from people quite a bit, you can implement ruinous policy, you can get away with it but you HAVE to offer a tangible immediate bribe to distract from the pain.

I can't stress enough, the political problem here for Trump is that he is simply too greedy to remember to do some bread and circus in the midst of all the plundering. And he has surrounded himself with people preoccupied with making the rest of the country feel immediate, punitive pain.

The most insincere man alive: Look I did something super insincere for insincere reasons, in a very cynical way, I'm basically mocking you to your faces lol The most credulous voters in America: To me u are my president

Bernie Sanders September 8, 1941-October 21, 2025 "He finally fucked his stupid ass up beyond repair, but we will miss him."

Politico right now