constant discourse about how bluesky is good or bad makes me wonder if anyone actually remembers pre-Elon twitter. it was bad in all of the ways people complain bluesky is bad, down to the very discourse about its badness!

I spent a probably dumb amount of time today writing out my dreams for a better qualitative data analysis application than the presently available options. I use MaxQDA and while there’s stuff that’s helpful it’s also just massively clunky and takes longer to code data with than my manual methods.

the right wing obsession with the church interruption really signifies the asymmetry in discourse. nobody vested the church protesters with any power! they’re ordinary citizens that no one else actually has to answer for. ICE agents and the president are literally the government.

I’ll confess to not being as generally bearish on AI as some folks on the left. I think, though, that the criticisms that are most compelling to me don’t get addressed in this post. The first is teaching writing and the second is internet experience degradation.

He was a Communist, Elmo.

going into the game I had serious doubts that either of these teams could beat the seahawks. they and the pats are the only ones that feel like they could take the whole thing

no matter how OT goes, my memory of this game will be the most incredible pass I've ever seen

martin buber eats. I and thou are hungry. is this anything

I think what a lot of folks really want is a party where this kind of commitment is the norm: both seeing that better is possible and tirelessly selling it to the public. This is why I find the organizational hostility to Bernie and Zohran so discouraging.

man, this reminds me of when CT excerpted "the benedict option" years back. at least that title pretended to a level of sophistication that this...lacks. what's amazing to me is that Shenvi has all the evidence in the world that he's doing yesterday's shadowboxing, but he keeps at it!

because I can freely download two different child pornography generating apps on Apple's App Store and the Google Play store, both very popular and highly ranked, I must conclude that Apple and Google endorse that activity

“Are we only fish to be caught and killed? Are we only sea creatures that have no leader? Must we be strung up on their hooks and caught in their nets while they rejoice and celebrate?

I continue to be surprised at my own capacity to be shocked. I feel so angry and ill. I dread what horrors would be required to set in motion the uprooting of all of this—not just from the government, but in the millions who eagerly chose and even now cheer this inhumanity.

the rulers of this world

I finally laid out the details for my Christian plan to help billionaires. My offer stands, billionaires! sojo.net/articles/opi...

I am always baffled at the response people have to the home childcare allowance proposal, especially as Bruenig proposes it, because it’s *in conjunction with free public daycare.* It’s straightforwardly about horizontal equality between households that prefer center based or home based care.

we’re missing the coolest stuff the internet could be. streaming services especially have sucked all the creative energy out of music distribution. I’m not gonna like, make money on my music, so I’m not releasing to spotify etc. I wanted to make a music experience like sitting down with a record

we’re missing the coolest stuff the internet could be. streaming services especially have sucked all the creative energy out of music distribution. I’m not gonna like, make money on my music, so I’m not releasing to spotify etc. I wanted to make a music experience like sitting down with a record

it’s still christmastide, so I’m an advocate of continuing to listen to christmas music. I noticed there are too few christmas songs that are huge bummers—but hey, it’s the feast of the holy innocents! so I made one. nomoresea.xyz

I do support simping Social control of production Intuitive tax systems Municipally-owned utilities Payroll tax-funded social insurance Implementing a social wealth fund National health insurance Guaranteed housing

“Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good.” And yet: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” I think this is why we can’t go back to status quo ante or be pulled by the winds of public polling. Evil is only truly overcome by sincere goodness.

it really sucks to have a government run by people who, down to their most mundane public displays, luxuriate in depravity

the people of this great republic yearn for locomotive transport

we desperately need more infant formula positivity. infant formula is beautiful. babies love it. it saves lives. it’s egalitarian. you can put it in the baby brezza and it just produces perfect temperature bottles. not nearly enough people are saying how great it is!

it’s taken me awhile but I’m finally reading what has arguably done more to confuse evangelicals about poverty than any other work: “When Helping Hurts.” core claims: poverty isn’t primarily material in nature, “handouts” don’t solve it, and the goal is to solve poverty with labor income

I’d more say pie is the most consistently overrated dessert form to my preferences, as someone who’s not really into cooked fruit. and it looks simple but is in fact hard to not screw up on a technical level. ice cream is the only dessert that can improve or even contain basically all others

the thing about this sort of measure is that it gets at real problems. paying for private childcare is extremely expensive and it often puts a massive consumption burden on households with children younger than school age. but it’s very dumb to include it in a core, static consumption bundle

when I was 18 I made an album cover with no songs or band, and subsequently formed a band and wrote and recorded the music. honestly not a terrible way to work

I am an egalitarian: all human life is equal in value, which means society should be structured as a community of social equals and to the greatest extent possible create equal real access to the means to live a flourishing life

“prison abolition” in terms of like, “have something basically unrecognizable compared to american corrections” seems fine to me—the problem is just overdoing the language to sound radical. I think that’s where people started, and then negatively polarized themselves into much dumber positions

this is a common right wing canard: no one is genuinely egalitarian. or perhaps there are some, but they’re all rubes being fooled by sociopathic masterminds. twisted view of the world, that

Some people need to be way more afraid of hell.

reddit atheists demonstrating a strong grasp of how ancient historical sources work if you want to lose hope the replies to this post are a good way to do it

@dawsonvosburg.bsky.social it's happening, again.

babe wake up, dawson paper just dropped

Instead of trying to green cars so much why don't we just invest in trains. city trains. under ground trains. above ground trains. trains between cities. trains between countries. TRAINS THE PEOPLE CRAVE TRAINS

Food bank director: “for every meal that a food bank provides, the SNAP program provides nine. There’s no way we can meet that gap.”

New from me +friends! When my colleagues and I decided not to grade our course assignments, I was certain it would blow up in my face. But it didn't! We studied how our students responded—and discussed what we found on the Teaching Sociology podcast. sagesociology.libsyn.com/teaching-soc...

I remain incensed that a whole class of Christian and other centrist social critics spent years telling us that actually anti-racism had gone Too Far. Not because I think all solutions offered to racism were good, but because those critics were really saying “it’s not really as bad as all that.”

I also got a writeup by @friendlyatheist.com, who read the paper pretty soon after it was published! Grateful and humbled to see this much engagement with my work beyond the academy. substack.com/home/post/p-...

I didn't think a writeup of my academic work would be the thing related to me that got 12k upvotes on reddit?!

Dawson Vosburg, a Ph.D. candidate at The Ohio State University, recently published a fascinating paper in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion trying to understand how conservative Christians twist the Bible to downplay economic inequality. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

heartbroken to learn the pope sympathizes with the poor. how can i continue to believe in god

if you're looking for a leisurely Saturday watch, why not make it about Christian socialism!

Christian anti-socialists make a lot of bad arguments and don't even seem to know the core critique of capitalism. This time they came for @malcolmbfoley.bsky.social and that made me upset enough to spend too much time making a long video about how bad those arguments are. youtu.be/kkRQe3cRxlI

all the pop girlie music has me asking where the piano rock girl pop went. we had such a wealth of it 20 years ago. who is the sara bareilles, the ingrid michelson of this era? is alicia keys even a phenomenon that could happen today?

I don’t agree with people that “ai” is useless. it’s very helpful if you want to transcribe things, if you want to modify punctuation/capitalization without tedium, cutting out subjects from the background in photos and videos, stuff like that. but those are not exactly economy-transforming gains

got recommended a t-shirt that looks really quality and exactly what I've been looking for, made in Canada. they say on their website that their stuff is under USMCA but it feels hard to trust that this will not happen to me if I try to buy from them!

It’s very hard to metabolize the anger generated in me over the last 9 months. I feel so ill watching this. I feel furious that people call this a Christian politics. Difficult to just keep on with daily life when I know this is the state of things and it’s not really registering.

"I don't have to attend every fight I'm invited to" is important (and difficult) for me to internalize—I often feel guilty withholding a strongly held belief, but I think it's often because I've correctly judged that voicing it will have high cost and little value