to all who celebrate...

The FAFO schadenfreude aside, it's really insane how many people seem to sincerely believe in their heart that politics is just a game people play to amuse themselves and isn't something with very real consequences for real people who may have intensely vested stakes in the outcome.

If you take seriously the idea that we need to have zero trade deficit with every country, we better get to helping massively develop every poor country until they’re rich enough to afford our high value manufactured goods. Sounds like a job for USAID.

As everyone knows, there are only like, 10 trans athletes, which explains why anti-trans activists can reliably dredge up example after example of stuff like this occurring in different sports, at different venues, and at different levels at a steady clip for months on end. Oh wait.

I was just confronted with some very sobering facts that essentially sum to this: the mean middle/high school in America probably has around 3 trans kids playing sports, and at the median such school, 0 of them are on HRT. This is genuinely a big problem!

Get myself banned from every major transgender subreddit any% speedrun in progress

It is unfortunately a fact that we largely do not get things done The biggest thing of which is build enough housing to let people live where the jobs are without being rent-burdened to the extreme Noticing that rent is $3.5k for a studio in Manhattan isn't a hallucinated concern

It all started when the IRS agents who systematically flagged right-wing organizations for audits weren't summarily executed /hj

At the same time, it's easy to see where this misconception comes from, because in general TOD isn't happening. This is my home subway station. There's only one large enough building here to qualify as meaningful TOD, while the opposite corner is literally a vacant lot.

just wild to see how these people are so captured by ideology

The great political struggle of our time isn't left versus right. It's liberalism versus illiberalism.

The fight going on in the Democratic Party right now is not between hard left, left and moderate. It’s between those who want to fight and those who want to cave. And Team Fight stretches across all ideological aspects of the Party. Misread this at your own peril.

IMO the strongest argument for following rules of war is game-theoretical. If you don't follow them yourself, then one day when your country is no longer a dominant power and has to fight a war against someone else, they won't follow them either and your soldiers will pay the price for it.

The co-president says speaking against Putin’s interests is akin to treason. So I guess that’s where we are now.

Hot take: legal resident and citizen taxpayers not wanting their money to go towards the provision of free education to people who aren't supposed to be here isn't actually all that bad or hard to understand

Meanwhile, I've seen some rather prominent liberal influencers on this site insist that holding sites accountable for their algorithmic suggestions is actually a smart thing to do. Hate for 230 comes from all corners, apparently. Just for diametrically opposed reasons.

It’s overall obviously good that Dems are increasingly open to abundance agenda stuff like permitting reform, zoning liberalization, & nuclear power, but it does mean education polarization is gonna be even more deeply baked in, because without those there’s basically no smart person GOP issues now

See, I will never be convinced that rhetoric like this - blunt, honest, sincerely believed, an effort to explain something the speaker finds horrifying and important in clear language - isn’t superior to the default liberal approach of trying to run all ideas through a Kitchen-Table Translator

2032. The Democratic Party sponsors nationwide Listening Centers to make voters feel more heard, where each working-class American is allowed 45 minutes to shout at his or her tearful rep. Republicans officially denounce all non-blonde Americans as untermensch. The GOP wins the election by 4%.

If there is one silver lining that could be said to be coming out of the active destruction of my rights, it's that it's rapidly forcing me to crystallize and formalize a solid ontology of transness behind which to throw my weight. As it turns out, it's a long way removed from what I used to think.

No, non-transsexuals should not be accommodated by being able to substitute their gender for their sex in the "sex" field on their government documents. Sorry

Democrats need to shut up about billionaire bashing as their main axis of attack against Trump and Musk. No one cares. No one! Find other reasons why they suck other than that.

I'm sorry what the FUCK

This is how you know concerns about "not being able to afford" continuing to send Ukraine weapons are fake. www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-a...

If you went back in time to 2016 with foreknowledge of the lunacy that is the entire first 5 weeks of Trump's 2nd term and tried to frantically warn America this is the Pandora's Box it was opening when it first elected him, you'd have been involuntarily committed.

"Zelenskyy was an ungrateful swine and he should have worn a suit to the Oval Office," said the chorus of chuds online who have already been calling him a dictator for the past month anyway.

In 5 weeks, Trump has managed to not only ruin incalculably many lives at home and abroad, but also to totally diplomatically isolate the United States. I am ashamed to be an American. Trump has easily outdone himself as our worst-ever president by a mile. We face 4 more years of this. God help us.

No, this is the most ashamed you've felt as an American *so far*.

Truly disgusting to watch people disingenuously claim that there "isn't enough evidence" against Luigi Mangione. If you truly believed that you wouldn't dedicate your online personality towards building up this cult of personality around him and wearing shirts with his face on it.

As Ben Finegold would say: "Very suspicious"

Very slowly feeling myself get pulled in the direction of transmedicalism fr :/

I think trans women have kinda gotta stop with the "would you feel comfortable in the men's room" bit when talking to cis women. I used the men's for 22 years. It's not a scary place. Safety for us isn't the point of inclusive bathrooms, and highlighting it undermines the case for unisex bathrooms!

I’m going to again post my stance on Trump and fascism from my campaign site. A lot of local Dems seemed spooked by this kind of talk, told me to “fight the far right as a private citizen and don’t attract attention to us.” But how much better would Dems be polling if they were talking this way?

I am thoroughly convinced that the constituency behind DOGE is sustained mostly through gross innumeracy. They sit around and brag about cutting a bunch of $50,000 contracts while promising to singlehandedly balance the budget by eliminating $2,000,000,000,000 in supposedly fraudulent spending.

Man he really called it

Reddit is so astroturfed that r/pics (a facially politically neutral subreddit) has posts with 40k upvotes talking about desecrating the very concept of jury nullification underneath photos of Luigi Mangione. What have we come to as a society?

As it turns out, I really don't think Bluesky has "the juice". As long as my Twitter feed isn't swamped in sociopathic anti-trans rants, the quality of discourse here is noticeably more post-truth left, and with less useful debate. It feels like an echo chamber. Misinfo goes viral with zero pushback

We live in a bizarro upside down world where Illegal Immigrant Deportation ASMR is a phrase that means something, and it originated with the White House itself. What the fuck

How it started --> how it's going Y'all I don't think a pluralistic Syrian democracy was on anybody's bingo card for 2025 Here's hoping it pans out

Jesus Christ, what are we doing here

It'll never stop being morbidly amusing to me that Trump's greatest actual achievement during his first term was the COVID vaccine and now the right is overrun with antivax brainworms and they have to act like it's dangerous and killing kids and that's why we can't mandate it in schools.

If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, they should immediately move to rename it to the Gulf of The Americas, because I have a sneaking suspicion this manufactured "it's a gulf and it's in the Americas!" justification that the right has concocted for the name change is basically fake

Apparently, if you are insufficiently left-wing as a trans person, and/or you do not toe the line on gender orthodoxy (e.g. by rejecting queer culture) there are hordes of lefties who will not hesitate to blatantly try to invalidate your identity to attack you. How kind and how principled of them.

Stancil haters are funny

Anatomy of the average Brianna Wu tweet: Brianna: [selling out with open transmedicalism and enby- and queerphobia trying in vain to win conservatives' approval] 85% of the comments section anyway: STOP FORCING YOUR DELUSIONS DOWN OUR THROATS Will she ever learn? I'd take the under on that bet.

Renaming the Gulf of America is actually classic fascism. No one asked for this change, it's self-evidently just an absurd reaction to prior renamings that were actually well-motivated, and yet we are all asked to go along with it for the sake of appeasing the erratic whims of the God-Emperor Trump.

Hi Bluesky! Glad to be here.

The reason Trump could kill someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it is because the press would cover it like “Trump kills a man. Critics call it a crime.” which creates a permission structure for everyone to keep believing what they already believe