New post from me for The Argument: we tend to assume that politics is driven by either “the culture war” or by “the economy”. But they’re kind of the same thing - and the economy takes precedence www.theargumentmag.com/p/the-cultur...

the power of psychoanalysis

It's worth reading the whole interview in full. It basically verifies that the NYT has spent the past decade-plus doubling down on top-down narratives for coverage, getting more intense over time. Sulzberg personally picked & chose whom the news apparatus would target and whom it would kiss up to.

tech has always been terrible about guarding against the abusive use cases of its products, but now those use cases have become the selling point and it is leading to an extraordinarily dark place

it was obvious stone was like this the way he spoke about abortion and gay marriage, i dunno why that immediately didn't clue people in as to how far to the right he was

Remember: Lyman Stone is a liar. He pretends he's just a religious bigot with no racial animus but he's ✨lying✨

term “moral panic” is something that needs to be retired

“I cannot describe to you how enraging it is to look to well-established, reputable, publicly altruistic people to seek to understand how to use power, fame, and influence responsibly only to discover that for the most part this question, or this agenda, has never occurred to these people at all.”

Woohoo! Chickenpox vaccines are on the menu in the UK - finally!! www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

let's be honest it was *painfully* obvious that the never before used song for the stranger things finale was going to be purple rain

still think it's a good bet to have her show in avatár 4: na'B minor

In this in-depth interview Billie Jean Sweeney — a former editor at The New York Times — details how the paper shifted towards openly promoting anti-trans hatred, why this was directed from the very top, how some staff pushed back and the immense damage done by the NYT legitimizing bigotry.

2020 feels like it was simultaneously two and twenty years ago in fact. there's something relativistic going on, like humanity got sucked into a black hole of stupidity and it's scrambling space and time the deeper into it we go

2025 seems like it was just yesterday

can't believe stranger things season 5 ends with vecna being shoved off the stage of the hawkins philharmonic by none other than hometown conductor lydia tár

there's a guy named "bert kreischer" who's getting dunked on on tiktok for discussing with another guy whose wife they'd like to run a train on. the most surprising part of it all is that "bert kreischer" is a right wing podcaster and not a 90 year old jewish man who used to be in cpusa

Surprised that so few people in a poll of "The Argument" subscribers could remember reading "Abundance". /s

I think it's really worth noting that literally ZERO mainstream media outlets were talking about Trump claiming a land strike on Venezuela until a few others and I noticed this post here on Sunday and started asking questions. That goes completely unacknowledged in coverage.

the us government, which owns the kennedy center, is responsible for keeping the kennedy center viable. guess nobody wants to perform for the trump center

Recessions hit economically vulnerable groups first. 🚨 My First Working Paper 🚨 using broader labor-utilization measures, like a U6-based @claudia-sahm.bsky.social style rule, flags recessions months before dating. Please read + share: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

big robert gordon point - AI, self driving cars, electric vehicles, etc will never have the same growth impact as computers, cars, and electricity *because they're iterations of computers cars and electricity*

I hate these charts so much because they imply chatgpt is comparable to the internet or phones You could create the same graphic for full screen pop-up advertising on websites and make them look like ultra-rapid technology adoption when really they were just baked unavoidably into the internet

trans inclusive war on males i guess

Here's what I'll say about the Hankins story: One, much moreso than the Savage article, this one is obvious culture war grievance bait that is being used to justify the "war on whites" narrative at the heart of MAGA antiwokeness. www.compactmag.com/article/why-...

One of the best to ever do it

Property taxes are like libraries in that people would scream they are an impossible leftist fantasy if they hadn't already existed forever.

for those who missed my remarks on reactionary camp: www.liberalcurrents.com/the-new-gend...

i hate how people keep saying "read curtis yarvin read curtis yarvin" to understand the modern right. yarvin doesn't have a singular original idea, just a regurgitation of burnham and hoppe with a lord of the rings filter. it's like a dietician trying to infer someone's weight by smelling their shit

what do you even call this. gender extremism treatment? gender reductio ad absurdum? not far from getting surgery to give yourself balls the size of space hoppers

In our FAQ on the far right, @tomgpalmer.bsky.social and I write about the inherent instability of far-right coalitions. When they turn on each other it's an opportunity for liberals opposing them. That opportunity is not that they're liberal after all. www.theunpopulist.net/p/your-compr...

Not me, though

grothendieck is a truly inspired choice

i'm sure that in the final episode of stranger things steve and nancy get back together and she dumps that creep jonathan

can't believe economics would just put together a theory that only explains ~33% of total economic growth and just calls the other 66% "productivity" and pretend they understand it. that wouldn't happen in physics - instead of "productivity" they'd have "dark technology"

I see he managed to squeeze some drive-by birtherism in there. Which, I think, at least partly answers the freaks question. These people will never recover from having a Black man named “Barack Obama” as president.

i met francis fukuyama and that's like, about it

This is true and I was the only one on set excited about it (and playing the song on my phone to blank stares)

Just found out Cameron Winter (of Geese) 's mom wrote a book about being polyamorous... rebelling against your poptimist liberal bobo polycule parents by starting a rock band in your garage is one way to do it I guess

I try not to be the reddit atheist as much as I once was but it is just fucking psychotic to treat "we're ending cancer research" and "more people are my religion" as comparable

something very important for Dems to realize is that the tech overlords are not people you can win back by promising a lighter touch and saying a few nice things they’ve gotten a taste of mask-off fascism and they are not going back, they don’t want to play nice with the peons anymore

in your 20s, you'll come across someone who's wrong online. it's very important than you spend the next 40 years of your life learning and arguing about this topic online long after they've moved on, built a career, and raised a family.

btw if you've not seen it... fucking hell, it looks like the fucking 4chan meme

very convenient that the rich ruling class techbros solution to income and wealth inequality will be solved by letting them accumulate even more wealth

getting asked to solve the hamiltonian in an optimal control problem like that's easy it's just asking how does a bastard orphan son of a whore and a scotsman born in the middle of a forgotten spot in the caribbean impoverished in squalor grow up to be a hero and a scholar

everything chappel roan has had happen to her on social media (being driven off socials by endless mockery for saying she didn't like kamala harris, now dunks for praising a problematic dead person) would be described as a cancellation if she didn't have left wing politics

It has happened before. It will happen again. (The interesting debate might be over exactly what mode of capitalism different places are practicing right now).

japan and south korea see themselves as part of a "judeo christian west" that includes half of latin america

If you think of "hiring in entry level positions" as "procuring labor to do the tasks entry level people do" then you probably do think AI is a magical headcount reduction machine. But the point of hiring in entry level positions is to produce mid-career employees.