here's a hot for Bluesky take: a lot of tech-criticism is so bad and focused on a kind of stupid imagined STEM-humanities culture war that some companies have been able to build whole brands around being "evil tech bros 😈" making supervillain promises despite their shit being vaporware

@jvl.bsky.social JVL - you previewed the Monday Triad by mentioning the City Journal interview. This is what hits me - don't these guys sound *exactly* like anti-anti-Trump politicians when Hitler is mentioned? "I don't support what he did in all of these specifics, but I absolutely support him!"

@jvl.bsky.social - I was inspired by your "Match-Throwing Club" for this one. Well, less 'inspired' and more 'reassured that it was okay to write' - the only other person I know of who writes in parable is Elizer Yudkowsky, and I don't want to get any of *that* on me.

This person has been posting explicit violent fantasies about me for months if not years. I don't care if she's trans, she's unhinged and at some point people are responsible for their words and actions.

I think this is right. It’s like when a family has decided to tolerate an abusive drunk. They know what he’s like and they’ve priced it into their decisions and they don’t want to hear you talk about it.

Yes, Fox makes people dumber, but I think many of you underestimate how many Trump supporters go to Fox because they already know he’s terrible and they don’t want to hear about it

@jvl.bsky.social and @ebharrington.bsky.social - submitted for your approval (after months), I finally have another post. Hopefully, this one is worth the essay-length read. I'll try to get the next one out sooner, but I'm a perfectionist at heart.

I still genuinely cannot believe that it is apparently the position of many Latin American leftists that the government of the United Kingdom should have allowed a bunch of their own subjects to be sacrificed to a brutally repressive right-wing dictatorship

I find this sort of messaging so much better than insisting that the USA is somehow poor in aggregate.

We are not serious people. No one even asked us to fight for democracy - they asked us to give up a tenth of a percent of our income and we said that’s too much. We have chosen decline and chosen it with gusto

"the revolution will be televised but in a way that creates a parasocial connection with revolution so that a lot of people get really invested in the idea of being revolutionaries without doing much to contribute to it"

Anyway, a U.S. client state is currently doing a genocide bloodier than the Gaza war right now, yet for some reason the perpetrators lack some characteristic which stirs quite the same outrage on Al Gore’s internet. Really makes you think.

“It’s shocking you’d rather tell the truth than lie for my good cause” - whatever segment of the left this is, leave me out of it

My stupid galaxy brain continues to be "a foundational problems with the modern American left is that its luminaries are largely entertainers & academics, two groups who not only don't have to pass policy but actually benefit from continued leftist marginal status by retaining their cool cred."

I‘m tired of being nice about this; “abolitionism” has had years to develop a non-idiot policy program and the best they’ve come up with is ”murder without even the pretense of juridical process.” And I am not nut-picking; this is all over abolitionist writing.

Yeah, there are segments of the far left and far right alike that are built on a sour paranoia that the better world of your youth was robbed from you. The main difference is whether the paranoia pools around disfavored ethnic cultural groups or nebulous monied interests.

Thanks for your terrible opinion but actually as an Eastern European I love that the Soviet Union fell. Glory to the liberation generation of '89, death to all Stalinists xoxo

It is a completely rational heuristic, founded on the assumption that the Almighty God is evil and wants us to suffer.

Gamers demanding they get their games right now with no production delays at the same price they paid in 1997 and then wondering why every game comes out half-finished and trying to milk cash from you with microtransactions.

Again for the record the idea that Fetterman got bonked on the head like Fred Flintstone and instantly changed all his political positions is pure cope from people who refuse to do anh self reflection on that six months they spent posting PigShitBalls.jpg at cringelibs who supported Connor Lamb.

How I feel about political candidates

Hey John any updates on this dunk

If a candidate endorsed by Elizabeth Warren had gotten caught posting about how black people don't tip at restaurants their'd be immediate demands for them to step down and page long screeds about how this shows the moral degeneracy of liberals

It's funny to me how many people on here take it for granted that they can intuit the aesthetic, rhetorical, and policy preferences of the median American voter; my working assumption is that the voters who decide most American elections would rejoice to see me and everybody I know and love dead.

Every angry screed about how Biden blew it just does not acknowledge the whole reason Biden was unpopular was because he did the exact economic policy they claimed to want instead of pummeling the workers with austerity until Doordash servants worked for pennies and Subway footlongs were $5 again.

Relatedly, I see a lot of doomers on here who don't have that dog in them and could use a Dan Lanning speech. THEY'RE FIGHTING FOR CLICKS, WE'RE FIGHTING FOR WINS. IT'S DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS, AND EVERY CUT MATTERS. WE PLAY THE GAME, NOT THE SITUATION. WE BELIEVE IN OUR TECHNIQUE.

reader i cackled

The sequels are an anti-trilogy, TFA is about course correcting from the prequels, TLJ is about course correcting from TFA, and TROS is about course correcting from TLJ! Genuinely a baffling series of decisions

You apologize profusely for this because your countrymen did this to them and if you think you can abdicate that responsibility because "I didn't vote for him" then get ready to follow in Navalny's footsteps because that's the only valuable thing you'll be able to do

remember when Dems passed the overwhelmingly popular COVID stimulus bill and received LITERALLY NO POLITICAL BENEFIT WHATSOEVER remember when Dems campaigned on protecting Social Security and received LITERALLY NO POLITICAL BENEFIT WHATSOEVER remember when they passed the infrastructure bill and r

"Antizionism isn't antisemitism." That's true in a "I think it was a bit uncalled for when that F-15 dropped two thousand pounds of iron on a puppy orphanage" sense but not in a "Israelis of Moroccan ancestry opened a Moroccan restaurant because the perfidious Jew has no culture" way.

I'll trust Ken's opinion on US law, but I want to point out the way these people "think": Simply *existing* in a "space" is violent abuse. Committing an actual act of unprovoked violent abuse is not.

The Germans a generation after the Reich consciously made sure to tell history the right way. The Japanese did the opposite. There’s no right side of history, history has got to be made.

Look, I need to write the 1K+ of the lady knight charging into a besieged lair with her army for her fate to be extra erotic.

I have been told numerous times (always by white people) that this is actually normal and disliking the PRC for doing it is hysterical sinophobia

People think they want to be peasants when they actually want to be landed gentry.

I have lost all patience with the apparently unshakeable conviction that striking a reasonable, moderate pose means assuming the sincerity of transparently pretextual horseshit. Donald Trump does not care about reducing crime in DC. He is testing and normalizing paramilitary deployments in cities.

this bothers me so much from a chauvinistic national pride perspective. US cities are *way* richer than all but a few foreign ones, but they don't look like the future because we prioritized boomer property values. the SF Bay Area should be a fucking marvel of the world, should eclipse Singapore.

"oh you just want urbanism because it will make the country look more impressive visually?" yes, bitch, correct. fuck you your sprawling stucco craftsman. move to the goddamn country instead of trying to bring it to major metro areas.

This but many of them didn’t even get that far—they saw prices rise and decided to push the “change government” button

People voted for Trump because Harris's affordability campaign was boring nerd shit and Trump's deranged conspiracy theorism was Funny Good Economy Man telling they wouldn't have to talk to tech support workers with a foreign accent anymore

imo a lot of this comes down to modern trek losing the nautical reference points it had at one point

As someone who thinks LLMs are both clearly very useful and extremely technically impressive, while also overall bad for society in ways that have little to do with war use, I feel very alienated by both the breathless idiot hype men and people screaming that it is draining lakes but is also fake