the biggest lesson of the last seventy-five years of politics is that the democrats should have done a lot more ratfucking

Something I think about from time to time is that most of the current SCOTUS conservatives, conservative operatives writ large, would’ve been kids or teens (or adults in some cases) during the Nixon years, and 100% had parents who thought he was getting crucified

Was this lady at the memorial today?

Had an absolutely cursed vision just now of the Dalai Lama passing in the next few years and the new child they pick having to meet Trump. Getting a tour of the ballroom

Newsom passing a law about masks is fine. Good, actually. As is his attempts at a ballot measures to counteract the gerrymandering. He does not have to be the second coming of Chris to receive credit for doing more than most others have done

It should be obvious, but from someone who is aware of the literature: There is no observed link between Tylenol use in pregnancy and autism. But there is significant data on all sorts of bad outcomes if pregnant women don't treat high fevers.

Mets probably hang on just barely to the wild-card slot, which means this season will carry on just enough to continue torturing me personally

who was President from 1 Jan 20 until 20 Jan 21 continues to be the defining political question of our time

Countries engaged in decades long civil wars do not experience something like the OKC every month. I am not what one would describe as an “optimist”, but gonna need people’s most catastrophic takes on here to be dialed back by at least 40-50%

The left should study the tactics of the 21st-century right just as the right once studied the tactics of the mid 20th-century left

What’s funny about this is that it is really unnecessary. The Euros are intent on destroying their own governments too

As usual, in its own strange way, the Trump answer is more honest

I honestly believe the modern society has broken everyone. Social media, complexity, etc....almost nobody can cope with it. It's perfectly designed to destroy our perspectives and mental models and drive us to madness.

You should show empathy for the victims. His most committed voters aren’t the victims

It's a remarkable state of things that we have a drug that reduces your chances of dying of any cause by FORTY PERCENT and reduces your risk of cardiovascular death, stroke or heart attack by 28% if you're a diabetic and yet barely a peep from traditional media. @proptermalone.bsky.social

The epistemic bubble these people live in is a black hole

pynchon called conservatives embracing degrowth like... 70 years ago? (The Crying of Lot 49)

This has really crystallized for me the fact that a great many MAGA Republicans have invented their own new religious movement, which has absorbed Christian symbols for legitimation purposes, but stands far outside Christianity in order to literally sacralize their politics and deify politicians.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this, the skids got greased up for him sure, but all my life conservatives have hated “leftist” colleges and Hollywood. I was raised by and around these people and the desire for suppression was always there, they’ve been waiting for someone to do it

Every single criticism of BlueSky is valid except somehow the one the pundits stumbled upon, which is roughly equivalent to kicking down the door of a KFC and incredulously asking everyone if they are aware they are eating fried chicken.

the difference between me and guys like klein is that he thinks we should study the right to learn their values and i think we should study the right to learn their tactics

Spending the start of Oktoberfest threatening to reinvade Afghanistan

again, again, again, again: autocrats like to declare themselves untouchable and all-powerful. sometimes they even write it into law. and yet that does not make it so

Should view the H1B thing as not just part of the broader war on immigration, but also as this very weird skirmish we’ve gotten into with India

this exists it is called thinking

FWIW I think what is actually happening with Dem leadership is they genuinely have no idea how to navigate any of this believe everything they did the last decade was wrong. So just playing possum or sticking to their rule book is far, far more comfortable. This is compounded by age and ego, yes

The broccoli head haircut thing all the Gen Z kids are rocking looks terrible

Conservatives are obsessed with paranoid fantasies about sicko service workers fucking with them because their entire ideology is based around abusing them, it’s like a class version of their fears of white genocide

Lmao I’m offline for a couple hours to read and make dinner, I come back and utopia is banned form the site, and H1B visas are banned from the country

Nobody on the visa deserves this, but the tech c-suite does

“woke right” comes from this incredibly stupid meta idea that “wokeness” is a discrete tendency in american politics whose style has been imbibed by the political right. note: believing this requires you to be almost totally ignorant of the shape of american politics going back to the 1930s.

wrote about this last year and sure I wasn't in any way the only one but imo people voting for populist politics in the 21st century *is* a sign that they do just have too much faith in institutions, as opposed to not enough - they want to have their little tantrum but assume things will just hold

political systems have bounced-back. that's happened in this country before, in fact. history is long, the world is big, the future is unknown. you are not the main character of human history, nor is your country. get over yourself and get to work.

Buried in the weeds of Trump’s bad poll numbers is voters still strongly supporting the GOP on immigration and crime, which means the underlying dynamics on these issues hasn’t really changed. Which, I think, gives Vance a good deal of latitude should he be the nom in 28, or have to take over early

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, but for doing a land war in Central America

A and D, easily. No contest

Loosely, I think the Politics Knowers underestimate the possibility of just wading through a generically bad economy that mostly weathers the storm and the Economy Knowers underestimate the risk of domino collapses.

People hate this shit, man. Even more aggravating when members of the national press write long screeds about how “we just have to live with it”. Offensive to anyone with a conscience and also just not even a good read of reality

listen, if this is what it takes for the left to stop treating labor like it’s a movement of saints, and not real people with the capacity to do harm out of irrational self-interest, then good.

Everything is quite bad at the moment, but let’s not lose sight that it is also all incredibly stupid

Move over lump of labor fallacy! It's time for lump of consumption fallacy!

Part of the issue is that many Americans are inclined to think of Germany as a closer peer than Brazil, Argentina or Chile when I would argue the reverse is true.

Astonishing belief I’ve seen more than one person utter before as well. Like who by this standard will have contributed more (positively) to American cinema in the last twenty years—who wasn’t already a giant like Scorsese?

U.S. leftists should read If We Burn and how globally all of the “leaderful”, decentralized protest movements of the 2010s mostly failed and members pretty uniformly wish they had been more centralized and organized and less anarchist

Which is to say...there will likely be a crisis around the midterms but I very much doubt it will be what people are worrying about (they don't have the resources). It's one we'd win if it happens But we should probably prepare ourselves mentally for the chaos.

among the issues with people not having any knowledge of hybrid regimes in the global South is the fact that everyone assumes contemporary authoritarian governance looks like 20th century totalitarianism

historical analogues are good but they are always analogues and approximate and not strict guidelines, because there simply arent any 60 year old but also 250 year old democracies to have elected a mad king but nominally only for four years

The excerpts of the book that have been released thus far do not scan to me like someone who plans to run again

If you removed Biden’s name, you would assume this was about Trump