That was PJ O’Rourke’s (z”l) line—“There’s no such thing as race and barely such a thing as ethnicity. If we were dogs, we’d all be the same breed.”

The far right is straightforwardly a retreat from civilization as such.

It makes me feel old that the joke is now to call it "Shakira law" instead of "Shania law"

I've been so disappointed with Reason over the last year. It's really been eye opening to me to see how basically every libertarian institution, even "the good ones", has failed to meet the moment when literal fascism arrived at the door. It highlights critical problems with the ideology as a whole

There is a pretty critical distinction. The waters get muddied mainly by politicians labeling themselves as democratic socialists while governing as social democrats.

Still tired of people using "centrist" as code for a very specific type of person to insinuate that anyone who isn't fairly far to the left is some mealy mouthed coward that plays footsies with fascism.

Bluesky has a lot of terminally online far left types that are perpetually upset about anything that isn't a communist revolution.

Sad that Sam Foster lost (barely) the election for mayor of Marietta, but happy for the blue wave overall yesterday.

McDonald's has ~150,000 employees. That means if you gave them the CEO's entire annual salary, evenly divided, they'd get an extra $121/year each. This is textbook "hating the rich" more than "loving the poor".

We've got you 👍

A country that chases the past will be left in the past.

MAGA succeeded largely not by convincing people racism is good but by convincing people that opposition to racism is "uncool".

CEOs have learned that all they have to do is pander to Trump's ego and the market will be forced to shift in their favor. It's toxic as hell.

People arguing that racial diversity "reduces trust" are mostly just telling on themselves.

The future ain't what it used to be.

If you have money to spare, donate to your local food bank. Demand is likely to surge as SNAP benefits don't get paid out. People still need to eat.

Let's be honest; it's very unlikely Trump will be both alive and campaign-capable in 2028. This "third term" talk is probably going to be moot in the end.

Liberalism needs to be romanticized again. You're not going to win people over with dry arguments about economics, material conditions, etc. You need to make people feel *good* about liberalism; optimally, you need to make pursuing it feel like a higher calling.

What is it with enthusiast modders and software project maintainers being so emotionally fragile and reactive to polite feedback? It's like this position selects for people that don't know how to handle that.

Agreed. It's pretty clear that most of the draw toward Trump had nothing to do with people feeling their personal financial situation was bad. They were high on fear of immigrants and trans people and other "woke" stuff that was spoon fed to them via media.

Obama should announce he's running for 2028 as a troll just to force MAGA to have to publicly argue, somehow, that Trump should get to run for a 3rd term but not Obama.

the duality of man

this headline hums with ancient autumnal dread

It's pretty clear that we need a Constitutional mechanism for the people broadly to intervene when Congress abandons its duty in the face of the destruction of the country.

Keep it, but make it a museum in honor of those who suffered due to slavery and prejudice. It can even contain all of the Confederate monuments that have been taken down elsewhere along with displays that go into detail about their crimes.

Can one of the changes we make to prevent this shit in the future be to consider media communication by elected officials to be "under oath", so that if a public servant blatantly lies to media like this, they can actually go to prison for it?

This should not be legal

The left decided that "normal people" are the problem with the Democrats, so they are selecting for edgy weirdos with predictable consequences.

I hate to break it to you, but if you're calling someone a "quisling" because they merely think Trump should go to prison instead of being executed, you're basically advertising that you're incapable of any kind of meaningful coalition effort to solve this problem.

My theory is that a lot of popular non-fiction books really only have 50-100 pages of real content but need to be padded to be "book sized", which is why they often fall off hard in the 2nd half.

Pretty rough association to give Nietzsche, given that he was critical of both because of their *religious beliefs*, not racism, and he famously ended his friendship with Wagner over his antisemitism.

My prediction is that people are way over-invested in the Epstein files and, if they get released, it's just not going to be the end of Trump or MAGA that a lot of people have convinced themselves it will be.

Modernity was built on liberalism.

I will not apologize for saying "No Kings" because some people living in constitutional monarchies are butthurt. Frankly, you shouldn't have kings either, and your emotional attachment to the idea is a kind of nationalist Stockholm syndrome.

My patience for people who want to endlessly critique how fascism is being opposed while themselves doing *nothing* about it is at zero now. Critique is something I accept from allies, not fence-sitters and cowards.

It's gonna piss the far lefties off so much that America is gonna be saved by normie libs.

In case you want to mute/block the official government accounts that are now on BlueSky. Worth doing even if you wouldn't normally, IMO, cuz evidently they are threatening to action on people for how they post here. bsky.app/profile/drew...

I honestly don't think we talk enough about how someone can be "tried as an adult" while being well below the legal age of consent. How does *that* make any sense? If they can't consent to sex, you can't treat them as an adult for crimes. They aren't a full person yet in that sense.

Women and men without property would like a word.

There are a large number of libertarians who would insist that they oppose tyranny with all of their heart and soul that will not be at a No Kings protest on Saturday because "Eww, Democrats are gonna be there"

This is very concerning, but the people leaping immediately to "this explains everything!" for MAGA are kind of embarassing. Almost certainly not the explanation for a list of reasons you could probably think of yourself if you just thought about it for about 2 minutes.

Governments don't issue credit scores. This platform sometimes...

The real political realignment is that the GOP has become the party of anti-social assholes with corrupt moral worldviews, and so people like that select into the right. This is why you see celebs on the left "cancelled" for being abusers moving right. The right welcomes bad people.

They aren't going to win.

Dr. Pepper or bust

I'm not even a leftist and this made me go wtf. I've never seen a leftist say anything nice about Fuentes.

Be sure to spread it around

Look, I get that MAGA is insane and are using "Antifa" as their opposition bogeyman, but are we all just collectively memoryholing the fact that there was indeed a decentralized group of people calling themselves "Antifa" that was a lot more specific than merely "people that opposed fascism"?

I don't like quite a lot of these (a couple I don't recognize), but what would it mean exactly to "abolish" the DSA? They are a private organization and obviously have the right to speak, assemble, etc.