This is actually good spin, or would have been. But the fact that the Democratic cave happened without even a coordinated, agreed-upon message like this indicates the depth of the leadership void.

This so much! Parents (usually mothers) in car-centric areas are forced to chauffeur their kids around. It also means they emphasize predictable, scheduled activities (like sports leagues) that cost money. Youth mobility gives kids freedom, saves money, and reduces the unpaid-labor burden on women

Congratulations to Bari Weiss, the new General Manager of the Dallas Mavericks!

Why so mad at the man who saved the lakers

"Agents of disinformation rely on 'reality-based communities' bogging themselves down meticulously studying data while the pace of lies overwhelms them."

Parker Washington is the Randy Moss of Adam Humphries's

To be clear, when I suggest that people sign up to be election pollworkers, I'm not trying to be flippant. I'm dead serious. It's a vital civic service where you help your neighbors vote. And you learn an absolute *ton* about how elections actually work, as well as meet the officials who run them.

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

we need corner stores we need neighbourhood pubs, too

This is kinda backwards: the problem is that “affordable” is too many things, especially in housing contexts. There’s HUD’s guideline of 30% of household income, there’s several tiers based on area median income, and people end up talking past each other

“I will always love you, I just want a life with Kevin in Paris.”

completely agree, and i think it's a little like the inner narrative of gambling. can't stop NOW, i'm down so much - i at least have to keep playing until i can gain back what i've lost.

Where my GOP China hawks at?

This is fucking brilliant, and you should read it: lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

It's actually a common belief that postdocs are real but it really comes from a mistranslation of the Chinese word for traveler

My quick Georgism explainer, originally on substack and now slightly expanded and added to my ghost newsletter!

I understand why we shut down American airspace for a few days after 9-11 to avoid a repeat attack but imagine shutting down American airspace to avoid releasing the Epstein files.

Congressional salaries have not increased since 2009. $174,000 simply isn't a competitive salary given the amount of work/travel members are expected to do. A ban on Members of Congress owning stocks should come with a significant pay increase to $250,000

I always laugh when people accuse my state senator, Scott Wiener, of pursuing YIMBY housing policies because he’s being paid off by developers. Senator Wiener is a 55 year old man with a Harvard Law degree. If he was motivated by money, he wouldn’t be making $132k/year in public service.

California legislators and their staff should make 3x their current salaries.

Kennedy Assassination conspiracy bullshit is still prevalent today

making Jacob the stereotypical Bluesky user is the rudest and truest attack anyone has ever made on us

Senior German officials have accused the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party of deliberately abusing parliamentary powers to collect and likely pass secret information about the country's military capabilities and the state of critical infrastructure to Russia. Source: Der Spiegel

Our friends Wings and Aji up in northern New Mexico need some help distributing grocery gift cards for people in their area who lost SNAP. I'm sending $50. I'm going to make and post a fruit or vegetable drawing of choice for the first 10 people who match my donation.

These people are viscerally terrified of the possibility that someone else might be able to make them feel bad about something because they find that a deeply disempowering sensation, and I think a lot of their specific political stances are actually *downstream* of this.

Green neighborhoods should benefit from vulgar deliverism early and often. Give these neighborhoods good things and ignore small-ball objections to do it decisively. These are the neighborhoods that are bought into the vision and where it can most easily rack up early wins.

This provides some insight for how to approach each of these regions when governing to sew up this coalition so it has downballot staying power and can ensure reelection in 2029. Of course this will vary immensely based on local councilors, organizations, and so on. Still, here's the broad strokes.

I'm too lazy/out of practice/don't have a license at home to do this properly but close enough for posting work: I overlaid The City's new general election map over their primary map, and turned the general to 70% opacity. This produces four colors.

Y’know how the vibes are immaculate right now, and so you’re constantly refreshing the timeline? Bluesky didn’t cause that. It channeled it. Good times make good platforms. Bluesky, as a platform, has been saddled with trying to scale amidst bad times.

I think Lander has a substantially stronger shot than AOC. AOC has done a good job realigning herself, but Lander would be going in with significantly less baggage and a solid springboard from the NYC institutional party.

the brutal ableism of Trumpism is an underrated part of its ideology by most pundits. Trump mocking a disabled journalist *invigorated* his voters rather than repelling them, because it made them feel that they were safely on the side of the bully, rather than the victim.

the leftist fantasy of building a large, complex bureaucracy to handle large, complex human problems without any technocratic expertise whatsoever

My brother in Christ how do you expect socialist utopia to work without fundamental trust in human beings’ innate goodness

If you want to trigger the meanest, most disconnected from reality stuff, calmly explain to people that firing several million insurance employees to enact medicare for all will trigger some angst and might doom the project.

The “Red versus Expert” debate of the Cultural Revolution, and also how Chavez lost the plot and set up the Maduro shit show

Literally operationalizing the administrator holding values above just enforcing regulations to ensure they are improving the lives of their citizens.

The democratic socialist future of America will require millions of Leslie Knopes doing the thankless work of the bureaucracy required to provide services to the people. If you think people like her are "neoliberal shills," you're not really a democratic socialist, you're just a cosplayer.

Like yeah, I know, it's uncool and cringe to be idealistic and believe in a mission and swear an oath. You're supposed to believe that everyone in government is corrupt and broken and inept. Which begs the question, so how do you convince the people to put government in charge of health care?

Propagandists use the concept of "American communists" exactly like they use "Ukrainian neo-Nazis." Are there some? Sure. A lot? No. Do they have any power whatsoever? No. Are they used as scary propaganda by russia and russia-friendly politicians to whip up hate against normal people? Yes.

Imagine seeing the results of last night's elections and thinking "well, we definitely need to end this shutdown, voters are clearly turning on us" You should just resign your seat today if you think this shutdown is a political loser for Dems.

*whispers* it's because US political reporters are really bad at their jobs

*whispers* you can continue to read me, the pundit who insisted the other pundits were wrong about these conclusions

The number of Jake Chatterbrook-Silvers who will call for the GOP to moderate its extreme right-wing positions and focus on voters' kitchen table anxieties will be precisely 0.

I’m just a small-town political scientist, & it’s still relatively early, but it appears that The Actual Democrats did not Need To Do any of the Things or Learn any of the Obvious Lessons that Ezra Douthglesias said they Must Do & Learn.

Hip guy who seems upbeat about future, city somehow more popular than Legacy Ghoul with normal people—Pack it in, Abundos, the real popularism is that normies don’t care about policy that much, & backfill policy preference from general vibes. There is no policy set that will make them like us.

Since I currently believe we are already in hell, Cheney dying forces me to believe in the existence of some kind of mega hell.

torturing actual humans to generate training data for fake humans, what a time to be alive

Oh shit they got him on desecration of a sandwich & failure to eat

It was a mistake to give him special treatment. It has always been a mistake to give him special treatment.

We’ve reached the stage of the Twilight Zone where Trump is endorsing (checks notes) Andrew Cuomo. 🤷‍♂️