so, I have some great news,

As much as the author has orphaned the idea, I want one billion Americans. I don't think we'll struggle to find people willing to contribute to that number

" As wee now wonder at the blindnesse of our Ancestors, who were not able to discerne such things as seeme plaine and obvious unto us. So will our posterity admire our ignorance in as perspicuous matters." I feel called out, but also very touched.

interlude (putting this early) lambert: "oh hey u guys are back early" cromwell: "moon's irish" lambert: what? cromwell: loading a blunderbuss, getting back into the flying chariot "moon's irish"

I feel like the 17th century English space program run by Oliver Cromwell's brother-in-law has the potential to become a history meme

this did not happen except for a very small number of northern slaves emancipated during the war

here’s the thing about Zohran Mamdani: he has fun, he smiles, but what’s really important is that he’s an adult and he talks to you like an adult. he doesn’t do memes because he’s not chasing trends. he’s not ironic because he would like you to know this matters to him. underrated things, I think.

i am legitimately offended that i keep trying to tell everyone on here that the weak point in the fascist project is the people at its top, who have recognizable names and can be frog marched to the hague, and i am tired of being asked to take seriously the notion that the physical building matters

fundamentally the court believes it is above recourse and that it is impossible its actions will negatively polarize a congressional majority against itself

it is crazy how many red states are straight up ignoring their antigerrymandering amendments

In December, SCOTUS stayed a district court ruling blocking TX from using its new maps because the lower court ruled "on the eve of an election." That district court ruling was issued 15 weeks before the TX primaries. Callais was issued *17 days* before the LA primaries.

Huh. You'd think a comprehensive 6 episode audio investigation of youth gender medicine by a major US newspaper would include at least one interview with a trans young person or their parent.

Trump becoming president killed *11 million people* by destroying USAID. closing the Hormuz will kill more as oil shortages bite in Asia. and the most you're willing to do to stop that is "take different stances on the four trans girls in Ohio who want to play high school sports"?

I am actually pretty persuadable on "we should moderate on substance so we can radicalize on process". I think the GOP is bad enough for that to be defensible. but MattY doesn't want to do the second thing! he does not want to play hardball on e.g. gerrymandering. so what's the point of moderating?

it continues to baffle me that MattY wants to do ruthless party discipline and he wants to do it in service of incrementalist technocracy

Every Republican state treats its cities as conquered territories to be ruled by fiat, and this gets approximately one thousandth the degree of national attention and critique as anytime a Republican voter in California or New York feels underappreciated.

There are some contexts where ppl should insist upon the title--not only insisting others use it, but more importantly using it themselves, because it brings not only prestige but responsibility. Dr. John Doe owes certain duties to the professional world around them that Johnny Doe does not.

This sort of thing also punishes historians for actually trying to understand ambiguous evidence or think about ideas of sexuality and gender that don’t map neatly onto our own.

Kinda tired of the "historians will say they're close friends" meme. Babe, we've been screaming about how gay everyone is for *decades*. Funding for history keeps getting cut as a result. There are entire moral panics about it. You just haven't read any history since highschool.

like "oh no! a big monster that runs real fast! and has claws!!" guys i have got news for you about all the big monsters that run real fast with big claws: we wiped those suckers out with spears twenty thousand years ago

the basic problem with like 90% of science fiction combat these days is authors radically understating how lethal modern militaries are

the true killmonger was exactly the sort of communist I am, the Marvel depiction is a vile slander upon the true character who is definitely real

Let me be blunt: Democrats should gerrymander the ever living shit out of every state where we have unified control of government. If we need to gerrymander our way to electing a Congress that will ban gerrymandering, then we should fucking do it. open.substack.com/pub/santiago...

I had never seen this and holy shit it’s good

Correct. Ppl need to get good at natural language to be good at using nat lang interfaces. And good at critiquing arguments, evaluating sources, disassembling rhetoric into its components... Oh, and at formal logic, which needs to be universally taught from the ground up for all sorts of reasons.

The person I keep thinking about is Isabel Fall, who did literally nothing wrong, whose entire engagement with the world was a single work of art, and was hounded into obscurity in act of injustice. There’s no mitigating, offsetting offense she committed. But people still act like it’s “complicated”

write as though social media didn't exist, it's the only way.

you can see why she developed the paranoid didactic style that made Babel so very, very bad, but this is no way to write - or to live.

maybe she could write a five paragraph long footnote explaining how Israel is bad.

For those who might disagree that Zionism is a national liberation movement because it trods on the collective and individual rights of the Palestinian people, I uh have some news about essentially every other nationalist movement in history.

I wouldn't say it's a *leftist* experiment but it is certainly an example of nationalism as national liberation.

it is both true that the past was far crueler than we can imagine and also true that we can and should demand a better future, and there's no conflict between these things

i am near the end of THE ANARCHY, about the east india company's horrifying and brutal corporate colonialism in india, and, let me tell you, i was not prepared for how many accounts of people having their ears, lips, noses and appendages cut off that i have read about

The last President as hated as Trump will shortly be is Herbert Hoover, and if Hoover had tried to hold onto power by force at that point his remaining lifespan would have been measured in hours. In our more civilized time, when Trump tries another bloody autogolpe, I believe in a full, fair trial.

wow, so they're saying they super duper ultra mega care about religion in order to do vitue signaling on surveys while not actually going to church at all?

Look. Either we crush the current version of the Republican Party and salt the earth, or our entire way of life gets destroyed. It's that simple. The answer to "what happens when they next take power" is "We will not allow MAGA to ever take power again, because if they do we are all dead."

The Republican Party has decided to indiscriminately crush academia in general. There's no meaningful political compromise between academics and the Republican Party on offer--much like for just about anyone else who even vaguely cares about democracy, freedom, truth, or the rule of law.

As an example, two weeks ago House Republicans proposed a $4 million cut to D.C.'s HIV treatment and testing efforts. To be clear, *these were not cuts in federal dollars*. This was prohibiting D.C. from spending *our own money* on HIV treatment and testing. This is the shit we have to put up with.

Farmers are not salt of the earth peasant yeoman farmers in America, they are business people and they are business people mostly playing at land appreciation. If they aren't that, they are wealthy hobbyists whose hobby is massively subsidized. I feel no pity.

Would strongly suggest not overindexing on the list of hardware; a hallmark of this admin has been listing as much big manly shooty stuff as possible as being "involved" in an operation regardless of whether it actually is doing anything

One underdiscussed emotional land mine when discussing the horrors of the world is that I think people have very different beliefs about how common really, really horrible things are and in what context

explicitly theorizing all the stuff I hate as inevitable so the irony gods have to destroy it

a side thought, but one day I will write the piece that will unify everyone in Yelling At Me (pro athletes are the only rich people discriminated against by the tax code because nobody was ever conceived of having that much labor income with no other tax advantaged sources)

striking that wurman is basically unable to grapple with the real world and turns instead to a shallow formalism that leads him to positions such as "interpretation of congressional statutes in furtherance of rights is exactly the same executive orders meant to strip rights away."

Will Stancil is correct, there are a lot of people whose leftism is clearly about just being able to maintain a pretense that their lolcow milking is woke, and a lot of them are on this site

I'm increasingly of the opinion that the most dangerous thing to believe is "I am the victim and therefore whatever I do is righteous and justified" This mindset is most obvious in fascists but it's most dangerous when one's grievances and claims of victimhood are very real!

It is in fact bad that large numbers of people are bullying, harassing and self radicalizing themselves against a man who holds no real position of power or influence. And when people can’t agree with this fact without qualification, all I hear is that they’d do it to me too if they could justify it

I’m really bored of this in-group signalling where you have to add a caveat about how we all agree Goody Proctor is an evil whore before we can suggest that burning her at the stake might not be a good idea