Time for Racket Teen to rise from the ashes for a new generation.

Predictable but still amazing to watch people who spent literally years accusing every librarian, teacher, and trans person they could find of sexually grooming children suddenly throw themselves in with "actually it's ephebophilia"

"In 2025, 40% of women aged 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. The current figure is four times higher than the 10% who shared this desire in 2014, when it was generally in line with other age and gender groups."

Incredible how much dirt the Dems had on Trump and never used it 'cause the Epstein case hits a bunch of their own guys. Their donor class and the guys they advance as major candidates have so much more in common with him than with you.

we gotta get like three VPNs deep with signal chats set to a disappearing turnaround of minutes to be able to use adult words instead of "unalive" or "grape" meanwhile our political elite are apparently just emailing each other plaintext "up for sex crimes tonight ?"

Sometimes journalists and media outlets have real reasons for not running things they know, but that doesn't require them to cut out the part of their brain that knows the information

As I've said, we're in a federally mandated relationship with the worst person you know. That's fucked up.

Important to understand the Epstein stuff and the fascism and the corruption are, in a lot of ways, really all the same story from different angles: powerful men who can and do abuse vulnerable people around them because they can, and because systems of elite accountability catastrophically failed

My takeaway from every new Epstein revelation is that some powerful people victimized many powerless young women, many more knew, some actively enabled it--and we're still being told that MeToo and accountability for sexual violence have gone too far

the decision to really just abandon moderation and let it rip suggests that this is what meta wants for its platform. this is the final, idealized form of the product

Librarians told 404 Media they're being inundated with new pitches for AI library tech and catalogs are being flooded with AI slop books. But more broadly, AI maximalism across society is supercharging the ideological war on libraries, schools, government workers, and academics.

What is the argument for voting for Democrats for harm reduction if the harm is not fucking reduced

pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.

One predictable downside of making it "no this is only about ACA, our only demand" is that does get harder to defend as time goes on and the shutdown pain stacks up. The line for giving up on that, taking its loss as the lesser evil, is much lower than "we're not funding this fascist police state."

books have no tech tree, no fog of war

Well, at least everyone suffered for nothing.

Soon.

Me declaring war on my neighbors and community: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!! Me in a war with my neighbors and community: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck

i really do think this is the core of it: trump himself is mostly impervious to the consequences of his antisocial behavior, and because of this he can uniquely create space in which people feel permitted and safe to act on their own antisocial impulses which would otherwise ruin them.

Political elites' apparent assumption that Trump winning another term meant Americans as a whole decided trans people and immigrants deserve concentration camps or worse is so fucking revealing

it was ludicrous for pundits to conclude that Americans as a whole decided to go backwards on all social issues because an asshole won an election against an unpopular incumbent. That's not how shit works

the entire twitter and group chat poisoned elite of American society who decided Trump winning an election by 1.5% heralded a thousand year reich may have miscalculated a bit

Sobering news for a lot of top Democrats, tonight, as they realize people would prefer they actually fucking do something.

Great thread and smth I’ve tried to articulate as well: we do still have effective information resiliency and people do have the ability to be informed about reality despite all the intentional fantasist rot. We need to extrapolate on what is working and not give in to an idea of information doom.

The last month of the anti-Mamdani campaign was an absolutely shameful undertaking, an attempt to rip the city and Democratic coalition apart and I'm very happy to see it failed.

It really is amazing that when a popular young Democratic politician who wants to solve real problems for people beats an old-guard institutionalist Democrat in a primary, the institutionalist Democrat just stays in the race and basically runs as a Republican.

I think a lot about the chance we had at the start of COVID to finally become a more compassionate, collectivist nation, and how profoundly we were failed not only by the sociopathic greed of the ruling class but by each other. It doesn’t mean we won’t get there, but the lost opportunity haunts me.

Centrist pundits, faced with any evidence that Democratic leaders are already following their advice, and none of it is breaking through because we aren't living in a pretend ealry 1990s media environment:

(4) Trump and the Republicans don't have an advantage over Democrats because they *better understand heartland Americans.* They have an advantage over Democrats because they created their own universe of propaganda outlets, and then went out and bought all the mainstream outlets. Duh.

Is it so much to ask to be able to make a living by using my brain to try to make the world a better place?

For people who think they can hunker down, be apolitical, and ride this out, this is how it's going to go. They will hold the resources for any worthwhile public work hostage to try to make you complicit and make you serve them, even if you just want to make some improvements to packaging security.

The problem is devs want to treat data as a property rights issue when personal data are actually observations of behavior to be used as evidence—primarily for social surveillance and control. It is rendering people in your community into relationships with power outside of their control or consent.

hey, @bretdevereaux.bsky.social? do we have an actual example of an Emperor suspending the Senate, raiding the treasury for his own purposes, and stopping the grain dole?

So much of "cancel culture" discourse is a re-description of the normal functioning of a democracy and public discourse by people who didn't like the results of one, or both, or how it made them feel.

ICE has been cracking down hard across the vast expanse of the greater Chicago area, and I wrote a little bit about what you need to understand about what it’s like here now. Plus, I compiled some resources for locals to get alerts and whistles. dansinker.com/posts/202…

Almost every major news story this week is about how the entire economy is now gambling, scams, bribes and theft.

“Donald Trump is a wish fulfillment fantasy of yelling at the TV” is incredible.

"normies do not care about this thing and so it is no use raising a stink" is imho just an excuse for not doing politics, which is the job of making normies care about something

More proof that anyone can put on Hi-Viz gear and immediately become Invisible and Official in the eyes of the public.

I don't think many people realize yet how damaging Trump's suspension of SNAP payments will be to millions of Americans, doubly so because huge cuts are simultaneously hitting food banks and charities. Help your neighbors any way you can.

The question to ask all young men is 'how many people have you helped this week? how many have you cared for?"

If you want a working class candidate instead of a perfectly polished out-of-touch Ivy League wonk, you could nominate a social worker or a barista or a home health aide. But ofc that's not what they mean by "working class" now, is it? What kind of working-class authenticity? Oh, you know the ones.

people across the political spectrum need to understand that politicians are fungible. enough good ones will get you good outcomes, but by themselves they won't save us.

Honestly, I think the 2024 election was basically viewed as a referendum on public morality by elites and therefore nobody is ever going to apologize for anything ever again no matter how heinous because the American people have spoken.

re: Platner the fear and uncertainty of the current situation is an opportunity for all kinds of grifters and reprobates to shoot their shot, and the broader center-left is in a very vulnerable place RN and casting about for someone, anyone. Gavin Newsom is exhibit A, but there will be plenty more.

Well, he’s technically correct, he was not a *secret* Nazi, he was in fact quite open about it!

Harvard is the 'best case scenario' for US research pedagogy (at least, financially). They have a $57bn endowment. I think the takeaway here is that the days of most PhD programs in the US are numbered

Once again, EVERY R1 research university depends on federal funding for ~15-25% of its budget. You simply can't unplug the largest or 2nd-largest source of $$ of every R1 university & expect it not to have devastating consequences for graduate education, which will spill over to undergrad education.

just a genuinely wild experience to watch people with enormous amounts of power and wealth be like, "all right, human endeavor and experience, let's wrap it up! we won't need any of THIS anymore!!!"