Remember.

I’m a colonizer in Hawaii? Where, wise stranger, should I do my email job? Which other local economy should get my purchasing power instead? Who should get my tax dollars? And can you please go there yourself? I like it here.

Wrapping up a day of almost perfectly non-alienated labor. In some ways I'm still lucky. I must strive to remember it.

America's political ancestors didn't fight the English Civil War for this. Personal and political wealth are always separate in a well-run republic. Or heck, even in a well-run monarchy.

I'll second this recommendation. The libertarian movement in the Trump era has ultimately been disappointing, but the loss is compounded by the fade out of the intellectual institutions and communities that made up its best parts.

I'm glad to have read that. It matches my experiences too -- tho I think I'm even older than you! It reminds me of what I really enjoyed about that community & why I tried to make it work for so long. So many in the Oist orbit are rabid Trump supporters now, and the rest are useless. SIGH

The libertarian community of the 90s and 00s was toxic and wrong-headed in a whole variety of ways, but it was a genuine intellectual community. I'm super glad to be out of that world completely now -- not that it even exists any longer -- but it was something.

Mixed feelings about sharing this excellent piece, whose subject might not go down well here. But if you ever wondered where I came from and what I saw in all that, here it is. Thank you, Nur. www.nurbaysal.com/the-end-of-s...

If any one person saved our republic during the 21st century it was Eugene Goodman and I am sure that he hasn’t been thanked enough.

Trump’s anti-neoliberalism is primarily a side effect of him hating competitive markets. His ideal market set up is just corrupt licensing and rent seeking, which is why he loved the NY/NJ development industry

Fact check true

They've granted my appeal for the same image a few times recently but not this time. It's also immediately instantly labeled and hidden. The straight couples have been up for hours and nothing. I'm pissed! 😠

I don't know how to describe it, but there's this profound brokenness in the American body politic where nobody can take the implications of anything seriously. People keep saying things that should be existential threats to the political system, and then everyone just keeps going on as normal.

Nice to see gays remain a punch line in the center-left coalition. Cool, cool.

Is this what Trump meant when he said we are "running" Venezuela?

Cancel culture *is* the libertarian approach to fighting bigots and it always baffles me how many libertarians (even otherwise pretty decent ones) don’t seem to grasp this

This looks like fun for somebody!

It's part of a broader pattern we've had for a year now where the public arguments and justifications of the administration and its boosters have little relationship to their actual motivations or any true facts about the world bsky.app/profile/dave...

“Hitler was just one self-interested statesman among several, all jostling for power” is so much more insidious than “Hitler was right and evil is good”

January 6 in History Wrote this two years ago: “If the insurrectionist-in-chief returns to power without ever facing any real consequences and while explicitly declaring his intent to establish a vindictive autocracy, then January 6 will have been successful.” And here we are.

"Rob from our neighbors" was exactly the foreign policy of Nazi Germany. It was the second worst thing they did.

We defeated the British, the Confederacy, imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union without having to subjugate the rest of the western hemisphere. We have no strategic interests in Greenland that could justify stealing it from a close longtime ally.

The US pushed for decolonization. This was a point of contention as far back as FDR and Churchill clashing over it during the war. That's why it was baked into the UN Charter. We also excluded colonial empires from NATO coverage. Eisenhower threatened to crash the pound sterling over Suez, etc.

The part of the Christian apocalypse movie where the devil is on tv saying might makes right and there’s a montage of Americans nodding in agreement

This (very good) @jamellebouie.net column on America’s tradition of elite impunity reminds me of a point Eugene Genovese made in “Roll Jordan Roll:” The growth of civic society in the South was stunted by the belief that slaveholders had to possess a power above the law to maintain human bondage.

This is the truth. Even ardent pro Trump supporters were, for the moment, taken aback. Stunned into momentary reality as it were. Some called me to express it. That was the moment the GOP could have and should have ended Trump. But for lack of a few Senators with courage, here we are.

If Stephen Miller thinks Venezuela is an island… could he find it on a map?

Believing that Venezuela is an island is the same kind of mindset that leads you to believe you can impose big tariffs on coffee and bananas. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NiB...

Trump is like the schoolyard bully who sneers, “What did you say about my mother?” to a hapless smaller kid who actually said nothing, then cites this invented insult as justification for forcibly taking his lunch money. 4/ newrepublic.com/article/2049...

The thing where the media feels blatant lies have to be treated as a serious statement to be engaged by serious people as a discussion lies at the heart of so many problems.

The first “king” was “nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, [the] chief among plunderers; and who by increasing in power… over-awed the quiet and defenceless to purchase their safety by frequent contribution” - Tom Paine, Common Sense (1776)

When Trump says we must have "total access" to Venezuela's oil and that some of that "wealth" will go to the US, and justifies it with a story of our alleged victimization by that country that's largely invented, it sure looks like outright plunder. 2/ newrepublic.com/article/2049...

Trump just said "all" of Venezuela's oil must be made accessible to US oil companies. Trump wants to emulate Putin's model: Authoritarian, expansionist rulers carving up their regions and distributing the spoils of conquest to friendly oligarchs. 1/ (new piece) newrepublic.com/article/2049...

Copy Editing Matters, from HHS's release on the new childhood vaccine schedule: All the diseases will still be available to anyone who wants them

Always happy to talk about Theravada Buddhism, tropical plants, distance running, and home cooking. I feel like those topics don’t get as much engagement though.

If the biggest donor to the DCCC/DNC ran a website where you could use AI to take women's clothes off I feel like there'd be a demand for Dems to give the money back.

"By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland?" The implied answer is obviously "by force" and if we're going to pick a fight with the entire world, that will eventually mean testing our military strength against literally everyone.

A polity in which it's considered naive or irrelevant to center political discourse on the general welfare or abstract moral principles cannot sustain a "democracy" in any sense worth defending; it's just a scrabble to assemble the largest coalition for the purpose of divvying spoils.

Broken record: The obsession with "kitchen table issues" imagines an electorate too obtuse or amoral to be reached by any appeal to abstract principle, morality, or any longer-term consideration than the immediate health of their bank account. If that's accurate, the game's already over.

I’m deeply demoralized by this. My politics and hers weren’t the same, but we always got along well, and often we’d repost each other. But I’ll never pass the Bluesky purity test if she of all people couldn’t.

Got one here and uh it's the president: www.mediamatters.org/foxdominion-...

I want this site to beat twitter, and for twitter to evaporate. For that to happen, people you hate must have a more pleasant experience posting here than posting there. A minority of this site decided instead that they want it to be their little club, so that's what we have.

I’m still here too. But I firmly expect that soon I’ll also find Bluesky impossible to use. When that happens, I’ll leave, and you’ll congratulate yourselves. And I’ll try my best to agree with you, because being mean to randos is how to heal the world. Please know that I am a very good leftist.

If you have a Republican representative, you should call them and ask for their support for the impeachment and removal of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. A brief script people can use from my call to Lauren Boebert's office over the weekend: bsky.app/profile/sarw...

Do you have a Republican representative? Call them. You don't have to like Chuck Schumer. I'm not asking you for that. But our situation doesn't change before midterms in any other way than enough Republicans breaking ranks with the mad king.

If this happened to a conservative organizer, Republicans would make her a hero, a household name and a congressional candidate. Elected Democrats just pretend it isn't happening.

Land of the free, we used to call ourselves.

Say what you will about the Bush administration (seriously, say it) but they did not lie half as shamelessly as the Trump administration, and when a scandal hit them, it was evident that they felt it *as* a scandal and something they needed to respond to.

It is both true that Trump's intervention is about the oil AND that it makes no sense as a capitalist matter. Trump likes the IDEA of taking oil from other countries and has for literal decades. But, as usual, he has no notion of the practicalities.