"You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but are useless for right." Goddamn, Melville could really cook.

it’s only an echo chamber when it’s the left. when it’s the right they call it some bullshit like the Agora or the Town Square

You, an individual, cannot "fix" the whole world. You can act at the scale of your life. You should act at the scale of your life.

Reading people. Body language. Knowing how to connect with people totally unlike you and with different backgrounds and beliefs. Defusing tense situations. Gaining trust. High endurance, pain tolerance, and work ethic. Reaction time. Prioritizing order of execution. Anticipating people’s needs. Tons

working on a new unified theory of american reality i'm calling "everyone is twelve now"

Baby listen... getting older is mandatory, but becoming wiser is optional.

It really is amazing how much of political punditry, *especially* elite outfits in NYC and Washington, still embrace this bizarre idea that rural spaces represent the "Real America" while metropolitan areas, where most (presumably real) Americans actually live, should be held in contempt.

It’s Duck, Duck, Fuck ICE now

sucking at something is the price of admission for being good at something eventually

Anyway, good morning from this evergreen quote from a guy we teach the kids is a great American hero

1/ @oldmanweldon.bsky.social This atheist with a God complex thinks that celebrities should stop speaking out on issues because they're costing Democrats elections. He also claims that they "don't strike people in most of the country as sensible or in touch with reality." (Projection much?)

People are not talking enough about the antiblack and anti-African reason for the ICE sending thousands of its agents to Minneapolis in the first place It's always about fucking white people, wven when white people are the reason we're all in this situation in the first fucking place

Nixon insisted the bombing of Cambodia was just targeting Viet Cong outposts there and not meant to undermine its government, but the bombings destabilized the Lon Nol government and paved the way for the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields and the massacre of more than a million people.

My man looks like Robert Redford was battered and deep-fried

one of my recent preoccupations is the visceral hostility the MAGA right has for the histories and traditions of the United States. these are people who spit on the Declaration and salute third-rate European despots!

@samlitzinger.bsky.social hi, I’m a huge of yours. Do you still have that New York Times gift article about falling in love with jazz guitar in five minutes?

you show me some guy who emanates hitler particles, i’ll show you the biggest can’t get no bitches loser on the planet

Your life is worse off because too many white people hate Black people.

And just as a reminder, the Obama-era IRS "scandal" the right was so enraged about here was the agency simply questioning whether explicitly partisan Tea Party organizations were eligible for a specific tax-exempt status that, by law, forbade the recipients from engaging in partisan politics.

@oldmanweldon.bsky.social love the podcast. Will you plan on having @timheidecker.bsky.social or @andylevy.net on the pod anytime soon?

We need to build some real social stigma around being afraid of cities. You don't have to like them or live there, but a politics built this strongly around watching TV and going "ewww" is embarrassing, and people should be embarrassed by it. It's like "fear of werewolves" being your top issue.

McKinsey, Blackstone, Blackrock, and Goldman have destroyed more American jobs than foreign competition.

In my opinion? Absolutely. Taney brought us the disastrous Dred Scott, but Roberts has delivered horrible rulings on a wide variety of issues — Citizens United, Heller, Shelby County, Brnovich, Dobbs, and of course Trump v US.

I don’t let white people tell me to be humble, thanks.

Trump and the Republicans more broadly are highly unpopular right now. Does that seem to have restrained them, to force them to tack towards the centre, to temper their ambitions? Perhaps there is something there the Democrats could actually learn from.

I don’t usually recommend using AI tools, but this summary of Juan Linz’s definition of fascism - standard on this - is actually pretty good.

So weird how the “great guy” narrative on mainstream media is backed up by zero clips of him demonstrating the qualities they are celebrating.

I am further convinced that every pundit and journalist who’s stayed on Elon’s Nazi adjacent electronic bulletin board has had their brains completely cooked. They’re fine using the R-word. They casually joke around with race scientists. They don't even flinch at literal Nazis in their timeline.

When Eric Adams, a corrupt dirtbag centrist cop, won the primary four years ago, mainstream white media was quick to anoint him as "the future" of the Democratic party. Nate Silver said he's be the party's presidential nominee. Mamdani wins and it's like "oh, shit, well, there's still the general."

Tim Walz might be too progressive for average Americans, according to millionaire cable news pundits, based on their one-on-one grassroots exchanges with other millionaire cable news pundits in a wide cross-section of midtown Manhattan greenrooms.

When Ted Turner asked Carl Sagan if he was a socialist, Sagan gave the answer America keeps failing to learn.

How is the president seeing "dollar signs" and using the money for his pet programs a legal predicate for punishing universities? If Joe Biden "saw dollars signs" in car dealerships and demanded that they pay fines to fund green energy programs, would the Times cover it this way?

You know at some point we liberals kind of just have to lean into this Yes, liberalism is a universal philosophy! Yes that means everyone! Even if the existing power structures in many places don't like it! That's kind of the whole point!

A few people I interact with treat liberalism as something inherent to the Western world that can’t spread effectively elsewhere for vague reasons of “culture” — but cultures change all the time, stealing ideas from elsewhere Liberalism’s one of those ideas, and a really popular one worldwide

The harper's letter crowd is pretending the real threat to free speech is the same as the fake one they spent years panicking about. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

the destruction of chattel slavery is one of the great accomplishments in our nation's history and the reason conservatives hate celebrating it is because doing so legitimizes the black counter-narrative of the united states

Bari's career isn't based on writing, or reporting, or journalism. It's based on identifying billionaire marks and then running games on them.

Always forgetting that Dr. King dreaming of a day when HIS children--specifically his own children--were judged not by the color of their skin but the content of their character, by way of making the point that they were not, and that making his dream reality was going to take deliberation and work.

something to write about how conservative originalism explicitly treats the 14th and 15th amendments as dead letters almost in their entirety

it's not an accident that "originalism" emerged concurrently with small government conservatism and the "neoliberal turn." conservatives offered a vision of how the constitution ought to be understood and how the political order ought to be structured in addition to making a policy argument.

individualism is the greatest societal cancer we have ever witnessed, the root of almost all rot in todays world

1/ the anti-Muslim hatred we’re seeing right now is the racialization of religion, which refers to the process of assigning racial characteristics to religious groups, often leading to discrimination, marginalization, and prejudice.

A lot of this country’s problems boil down to straight white men who see themselves as some sort of default “normal” but any variation on that as “an identity” that is “political”

If there is one lesson to draw from the history of fascism in the interwar period in Europe, it is this: Democracy falls if and when mainstream conservatives and centrist/center-right elites decide to make common cause with extremists because they consider the “radical Left” the more acute threat.

Americans are obsessed with the idea that someone, somewhere, is getting away with something.

Imagining someone taking a careful concise shit, cautious not to get anything on their fingers as they wipe meticulously; they stand up, zip, and then drop to their knees and start manually shoving and punching the waste into the hole with their bare hands instead of flushing

I once posted on Twitter that any white person who reflexively opposed antifa would likely have been opposed to the civil rights demonstrations of the sixties. People got VERY mad, but I was just summarizing the data.

Also, the way that every event, no matter how shocking or horrible or unprecedented, gets fed into the far-right social media hallucination machine, and twisted beyond recognition until it supports the far-right's own nonsensical worldview, is the very core of why we are where we are as a society.