Yeah this is absolutely not how I would phrase a question about Platner if I wanted to get an accurate answer about how an informed population would vote for him

a) run candidates in every damned district. b) districts that were Trump +25 are meaningfully in play and they won't be able to fight for all of them all at once. c) they're diluting their OWN districts b/c of gerrymandering. d) being aggressively liberal is not a downside even in R+25 districts.

If you are a state legislator, city council member, doctor, or scientist in an R+20 or better district and for some reason you want to be in Congress, you should probably start making calls tomorrow to form an exploratory committee.

the thing is - and i know in my heart that this is WHY they say shit like this - i can feel my OWN moral fibre fraying as a consequence of having read this. some part of me is off in its own private domain imagining Kelly encountering Hell the way a sentence encounters an exclamation point

I cannot apologize to the college feminists on my campus in undergrad enough. They were clearly the real materialists and I was LARPing. It really is gender all the way down.

fuck it, for the people in the back: the jeff bezos owned washington post is the outlet responsible for making sure the primary complaint about AI was water. this may have been in part because jeff knew it was bullshit, so when amzn gets blowback they can easily prove their water footprint is small

nobody with good intentions will validate your fears infinitely. if that's what you fundamentally crave you're basically lost

"That's Numberwang!"

They believe that Trump will use the formal powers of the government and whatever informal powers he may have to extract costs from them if they do not play ball and they equally believe that the anti-Trump coalition will not extract these costs. So we need to extract those costs.

'Democrat' is not a species with DNA: it is an empty box into which any combination of politics may be poured, same as 'Republican.' Try to pour in something good and useful. Perhaps this jumps out at me more clearly because I do not identify as a Democrat myself.

The DC shooting story is really getting to me because we literally trained this man as a child soldier for a death squad in a forever war and Stephen Miller et al want to blame it on other cultures? It's our culture, American culture, that killed that woman.

Happy Thanksgiving

I went through every proclamation once. The first to mention the Plymouth colony was JFK. Before the 1940s, the proclamations at most mentioned "an ancient tradition" of thanksgiving festivals.

Lincoln’s original proclamation of Thanksgiving Day from 1863 doesn’t really go into colonist-native relations, but it does recommend “humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience.” www.battlefields.org/learn/primar...

It’s really funny how a generation will roll its eyes at parents who watch Fox News but doesn’t see why being immersed in Twitter is having the same effect. Lots of serious people show up on Fox News too but that shouldn’t be your primary source on the news.

this applies to both Yglesias-cluster centrist weirdos who insist that you can just dangle money in front of the rubes and it'll Work, AND to the people very concerned about being the correct kind of communist on the internet, in almost the exact same ways

"welcome to Bluesky, the site where we all pretend that our political views are based on what's best for poor people, a category of people we reason about from first principles"

oh my god that stupid "$100k is the new poverty line" slop got published and i'm sure you can guess where

go support liberal currents, seeing new media rise from their decline makes the nyt and atlantic very sad

Evergreen

This is the type of hater energy that will fuel us in the years ahead.

To be blunt, most people's lesson from "listen to marginalized voices" was "find the first person who claims to be marginalized and agrees with my priors and use it as a permission structure to call the ones who disagree with me uncle toms"

I love juries but they shouldn't be the ones judging the cost-benefit analysis on safety measures. If money is spent on accessible elevators instead of screen doors, a jury gets to punish the city? And why isn't city paying out billions for far more car deaths from unsafe street design?

seeing a lot of people try to cram the Venezuela thing into their left-populist framework of "elite interests" or "resource extraction" no, it's literally just because Trump and Hegseth want to blow stuff up there is no ulterior motive other than killing people for fun

When I say Waymo "doesn't scale," this is what I mean.

it's "how dare you say Christmas is a Christian holiday" time of year again

nothing will radicalize you against zoning quite like engaging with zoning

Lots of people are calling out the fact that X is filled with fake MAGA influencers from far away countries, but I wanted to point out that this, not "ideological censorship," is why companies have trust & safety teams that work on stopping inauthentic behavior.

My infantry Bn had a really hard time parsing the gender and sexuality issues of Southern Helmand. When people say, "you wouldn't want a 'purple haired gender studies major' in the Marines" I reply "YES we desperately needed them!" We had teams of anthropologists who published studies for us.

also not only CAN you build your way out of climate change, it's the only way out, and not building our way out of climate change dooms hundreds of millions to misery and displacement.

The Scooby Doo Theory of Housing states that we can arrest housing price inflation if we only some clever kids are able to unmask the evil villain responsible for making rent go up.

Maybe the real sky fairy is the naive delusions about the causes of war and genocide that you met along the way

Hard for me to say how this is different from Fox News's entire business model, except that it's less sophisticated. This is transparently and obviously bad — and Elon should ban these accounts — but the spirit here of trading rage for money is pretty much a lot of right-wing media.

you will never understand politics if you cannot accept that *some people want bad things*. not because they've been tricked, not because Capital has manipulated them, because they *have bad values*

I'm so tired of spineless centrists appropriating the term liberal. Do you hold these truths to be self evident all men are created equal? If not then as far as I'm concerned you have nothing to do with liberalism

Fun Fact, the Guillotine became such a powerful symbol of bourgeois terror that the Paris Commune banned it

"female reporters sleep with sources" factoid actually just statistical error. Average female reporter sleeps with 0 sources per year. Olivia "Old Man Hunter" Nuzzi is an outlier and should not have been counted

Libertarianism invariably boils down to some combination of: 1) Assume a strong theory of property, 2) assume a distribution of all existing property 3) declare that any derogation from those (1) and (2) is violence 4) pedophilia

MEESA PROUD TO BE ACCEPTIN THE NOMINATION OF DE GREEN PARTY FOR PRESIDENT OF THESE-A UNITED STATES

don't think i've forgotten about you steven pinker

"housing is a human right and that's why it should be illegal to build more of it"

Straight people lurk too much on queer parts of social media, see our reclaimed humor over things like Grindr and conservative men and about “doth protest too much” and then go “oh yes this is funny I can now accuse every evil man of being gay. Also, REAL straight people can’t be homophobic!”

Anyone can break up a showing of an enemy propaganda film by putting two or three dozen large moths in a paper bag. Take the bag to the movies with you, put it on the floor in an empty section of the theater as you go in and leave it open. The moths will fly out and climb into the projector beam,

are the people saying we should accept marjoram tarjoram glarjoram as a Democrat immediately with open arms in the room with us right now, Brent, or are you just bound and determined to use this new and exciting way to take a bong rip and then blame the Democrats for your weed hallucination

you: it probably is not actually true that donald trump blew bill clinton me: it depends on what your definition of is is

My “I am not a malformed creep who groomed a child for years and then abducted her to my secret dungeon, I’m just a misunderstood tragic romantic” playlist is raising a lot of questions already answered by my playlist.

I'm giving you a "gift non-link" to that Olivia Nuzzi story in the New York Times. Do not read it. I know this warning will only make some of you more curious. But it's not fascinating – it's stupid and icky. You'll feel played, just one of the fools manipulated by her enigmatic blond shtick.