Rooted cosmopolitanism vs rootless nationalism.

Recurring gripe of mine but it is incredible how National Conservatism is supposedly built around decrying lack of community, common project etc, while turning every “hate your neighbors” dial they can access up to 11. Make your professor terrified to say anything, don’t trust your doctor, etc

So to me the Tylenol/autism thing seemed to come out of left field. It felt like RFK Jr was gearing up to blame the MMR vaccine on autism to justify banning it, so where did this Tylenol theory even come from? Here's a good thread on X by Rachael Bedard that connected the dots IMO:

doomers: there’s not going to be elections in America ever again me: if they can’t even cancel an entertainer due to popular pushback what the fuck makes you think they can cancel elections

"Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that." Looking forward to seeing Jimmy back on the air.

generally speaking, and with the glaring exception of november 2024, the more directly democratic an institution has been, the better it has checked Trump (eg grand and petit juries); the more elite and insular, the less effective (the Senate, the Supreme Court, big business)

it's a pathetic liberal emotion, but the strongest thing i'm feeling right now is total indignity at how much they hate us despite us not doing fucking _anything_ to them

How I'm thinking about the possible budget battle in Congress:

I really need people who want Dems to filibuster the budget no matter what it contains to game out what happens, because I don’t think you’ll like either of the ways that ends: 1) enough Dems defect to break the filibuster, Dems look terrible, Rs look unified, circular firing squad continues

Alright, so I've been afraid to say this out loud, but I think after today, I can say it: In the first Battle of Los Angeles, the good people of LA County have prevailed. We beat ICE back. 1/

I disagree with the good doctor’s dx here: I think this is perfectly consistent with a proto-authoritarian state that has very limited but nonzero capacity to punish dissidents.

What if they not letting Trump speak because he had a Reverse Fetterman Stroke and hes woke now

like, when we are talking about Hungary, i can name like fifteen advantages orban has over trump off the top of my head

This sucks so bad. My daughter and I have been working on our amusement park all summer. Most of the rides are full sets, but everything in between (baseplates, pathways, walls, trees, some minifigures, parking lot) were all from pieces purchased from Pick and Brick.

one thing to remember about "ICE is going to occupy Democrat strongholds" is that ICE, if it hires to capacity, will employ about 26k people by the end of 2026, which is 1/3 smaller than the NYPD, which is not a large enough police force to occupy New York City itself.

1/ Man, we need a media ecosystem and political leadership that can propagate this kind of thing. This is the whole ballgame, it's why Dems get tagged with even the most fringe behavior (likely by someone who hates Dems!), while the GOP gets to just say unhinged shit and pay no penalty.

i find wailing about the irrecoverability of anything resembling a society just absolutely contemptible. this all came from nothing and can be returned from it.

All I read in Trump's post is that he's a lame duck. Tax bill is done, tariffs are done (subject to daily revisions), deportations underway — what else is there to his agenda? Time to measure the drapes on federal buildings and shuffle homeless camps from place to place

the reason it was extraordinarily important to persecute Trump and his sycophants under the Biden Administration is that it would have reduced Trump's support among Trump supporters. it is precisely his impunity which makes him popular among authoritarian submissives.

There are two significant components here: i) the media infrastructure that selectively highlights/amplifies right-wing extremism, and ii) the ease with which these specific views can be presented as autochthonous, authentic, or spontaneous. We obviously lack infrastructure...

There's a strategy for moving the Overton window wherein you say extreme stuff so even if you don't persuade centrists you recalibrate their sense of where the reasonable compromises lie and thus get things a bit closer to your preferred point of view. My sense is the Right can do this and we can't.

i really do love this stuff, man, and because a bunch of MBAs decided to do what they did, i'm going to spend the rest of my career fixing what they broke, breaking what i built, or apologizing for what i did

the dominant ideology of Silicon Valley right now is "god does not exist, but He soon will, and He will be our slave"

It's so funny how these guys say "import the third world, become the third world" and then their own policy preferences end up converging with the taliban

Amazing to be a billionaire, where "I should consider the consequences of imposing my entire worldview on society that's actively resistant because it's harmed by it" is only considered in *retrospect.*"

I'm adding a 2nd part to my account of why I refuse to assimilate to Celsius. (Part 1, of course, is Fahrenheit's superiority for weather; 0 to 100 expresses a large fraction of the actual weather instead of wasting more than half its scale on the march up to the boiling point of water.) 1/

People on bsky will really be like "you believe in setting the narrative by being bold and charismatic? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, triangulating to win low info voters" and then not win low info voters

These two unstated beliefs that govern modern punditry have completely ruined for the Democratic strategic response: 1. Trump is immune to traditional political gravity 2. Public opinion is the cause, not the effect, of public action, and we must obey it at all costs

Yesterday, @robbwiller.bsky.social and I published an opinion essay making the case for the power of nonviolent protest. I’m proud of our work but also think we could have done more to “steel man” case *against* nonviolence. Here’s essay. Some counterarguments in 🧵 www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/o...

Good thread on the state of labor with undocumented workers.

It is 100% carrying water for the opposition to participate in this collective delusion that Dems for some reason need to answer for every teen who throws a rock rather than hold the Trump admin accountable for intentionally creating chaos and breaking the law to stoke violence. They are in charge.

Lol when you hit all the disaster options at once in SimCity

Underrated in the discourse in LA county - the actual number of immigrants detained are like, under 100? Let's be clear - what Trump is doing isn't about deporting immigrants, it is about *punishing speech against deporting immigrants.* They want it to be politically toxic, if not overly illegal.

I know it's tempting to think otherwise, but very few of these guys joined ICE with boners over the idea of raiding Home Depot parking lots and being called "YOU FUCKING FASCIST!" by everyone. They wanted to wear SWAT gear and rappell from a warehouse roof to bust a gang lord. This is not that.

Yeah I guess LeBron putting up a 22.6 PER is pretty special, but it's not that impressive when you compare him to people rolling out of bed and firing off something like this at age 86.

NYT reporter writing an article on Dom Lucre, defending why he doesn't mention him posting CSAM until paragraph 28, and doing the literal @lioneltrolling.bsky.social meme.

I think it's this - but also the left just hasn't shown it can mobilize votes to help beat Rs. I think there's this sense "even if you make the left happy, they can't actually turn out enough votes for us to win, meanwhile the GOP feasts on the perception we've moved too far left."

I think a lot of hard left accounts on here don’t fully realize the extent to which the center-left genuinely believes they made a good faith effort to reach out which was met with rejection, betrayal, and libel. You may not think it accurate or fair, but the belief is sincerely held.

Babies and toddlers don't understand things like "progression of time" and "object permanence," and by all observable behavior, neither do many Trump voters.

A real problem the Dems have is that most of those on the political right who get disillusioned, if not outright defect, are literally elite snobs? I don't mean that pejoratively, by "elite snob" - it's shorthand for the intelligentsia class that likes to read and write critically, and...

okay, i'll take a stab at it: the Dem position on immigration should look more like the third position the Biden administration took (closed borders, high at-port throughput, easy work authorization) than the first (nobody in) or the second (everybody in via asylum/parole, bad work auth).

This is by far the best description of Trump I've ever seen. If you've done anything at any competitive level in your life, you've met losers like this. Aggressive, unorthodox, and sometimes unethical tactics that dominate novices but fall apart against even a modicum of skill and experience.

This sums the whole situation up quite nicely.

I agree, the Aaron Boone contract extension was a bad idea

Thread about how the GOP understands Americans respond to "identity politics" as *consumers* much more than *workers,* and demonstrating these "consumer identities" is how they connect with voters nowhere near their socioeconomic class, like Trump enjoying Diet Coke and McDonald's.

Two things that aren't immediate issues to resolve, but probably will need to think about at some point: 1. Should a Dem administration focus on rolling back "unitary executive" precedents, or take advantage of them? 2. What do we want from MAGA defectors?

Modern Zionism: answering the question "what if angel moms were a country?"

To be fair, one man technically does not have this kind of power; he has it only because he has the support of an entire political party and its movement