Going to be deactivated through the holidays. See you all in the new year. Try to stay sane out there and on here, as much as possible

one of the critical things here is that 90 percent of journalism has been destroyed, and the remaining 10 percent is what was once the top 10 percent, highly status-driven, highly opinion-driven, and intensely New York/DC centered. there's no ladder to come up as a journeyman left.

Bill Clinton going into “one last job” mode and it’s trying to ratfuck a GOP administration the way they did him is admittedly very funny. You gotta hand it to Slick Willy on this one

She is so fucking stupid. We are a nation with two intelligentsias now: the dying class of actual smart people, and the upstart class of dumb-person’s-idea-of-a-smart-person.

Ah right back to disliking Nolan

chronic problem in American society of too many people wanting to cover their own ass instead of doing the right thing

Yeah, that about sums it up. YIMBY has had some success as an elite persuasion tactic because if you put this up for a straight vote among the public it’d llose

Too many folks see these guys as movie villains instead of motivated by the same bad, boring old emotions that have animated petty villains and misanthropes since the beginning of human history

yeah

I'm proud to say I knew exactly what Bari Weiss was the day she "resigned," just as I knew exactly what JD Vance was when all my betters were pumping his book.

These people will never be able to admit that the libs were right

The last two years really should’ve shattered whatever high ideals of the press you were still holding onto. No group of humans in history has ever circled the wagons like them

As someone who’s been in this situation, I can assure you, you cannot fix her I’d try again anyway

In the summer of 1950 most US newspapers ran an AP story about how race had become the main issue in the upcoming Georgia governor's race. Segregationist Herman Tallmadge, governor from '47 to '55 and then a Senator until 1981 made a name for himself by refusing to "apologize for being a white man."

Pure cinema watching: Criterion 24/7, sound off, don’t know what it is, didn’t look it up, not reading the subtitles

Michael Mann needs to give up Heat 2 and get to work on The Insider 2

The core lesson of 2025:

There was no vibe shift, just anti-incumbent anger that was misinterpreted by the dipshit pundit class as a mandate.

I think it’s bad that a good many Anglosphere elites and their offspring have completely gone insane. We should stop listening to them and do something about the sites and institutions reproducing it

New Fox News poll shows Trump's approval on: Border Security: +2 Crime and public safety: -5 Immigration: -10 Foreign Policy: -15 Economy: -22 Healthcare: -25 Spending: -25 Tariffs: -28 static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/...

It has happened again

We’ve allowed the stats guys to talk too much for too long. Not everything in politics is reducible to a an electoral number, man

I do not understand how you people continually subject yourself to the pain of college football

Can’t imagine why white people in politics and punditry keep downplaying all of this. Maybe it’s for the same reasons we get all these Op-Ed’s talking about how DEI and wokeness went too far

cities are impersonal and overwhelming but they also allow for individual identity formation because of the psychic space they have. which is tightly linked to physical space

"village" mentality is what sustains conservatism. not being able to do anything without the Grandma Gestapo reporting your every move. depending on the easily withdrawn kindness of others instead of impersonal but reliable services. and of course obeying aristocratic landowners

This Yglesias piece in the NYT is horrifically bad. Almost every "fact" it cites is provably false. At best it is cocktail party banter from a pundit who knows nothing of energy. At worst, it was cut/paste from oil industry talking points. So, a rebuttal: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/o...

Turchin's "elite overproduction" thesis got things wrong. It's not that there are too many fighting over a declining pie. It's that all elite systems historically face turmoil when the social foundations that gave rise to them change.

not that the present economic picture is rosy, but i do think that popular culture — and specifically nostalgia bait television — is a big part of the reason that our public memory of the 1970s, 1980s and even 1990s seems to miss the real economic pain that marked each of those decades.

Nebuchadnezzar, by William Blake, 1795-1805 (flipped) #NetflixPartner

Some of these redactions are almost like modern art

Unfortunately, I’ve been converted… to liking Emily in Paris

dawg

The worst shows on the Vegas strip are less chintzy than this

Republicans clearly expect to get completely wiped out next year

likewise, in case this needs spelling out: "you have arthritis in your knee" vs "your knee is and will be fine" are different judgements, and "the economy is currently in a recession" vs "you should feel fine about how things are going" are also different judgements

Different battalions of illiteracy are at war today on this here website

Reminder that focus group participants are by definition not low engagement voters. High engagement voters have much more fixed loyalties and are well practiced in motivated reasoning. And on the right, they lie all the time, about everything.

The impression I get from all these responses is actually that these are incredibly vacuous and stupid people, and to the extent they have any actual “politics” it’s just backfilling in whatever they hear that satisfies their general desire for violence and paranoia

Yeah I see people say that he doesn’t care about anything anymore, and that’s just demonstrably false. Like he’s never cared about policy much, but status and legacy are what he has been obsessed with his entire life. More than money. And that’s a constant across nearly every president

Something about revealed preferences here is how much this group is mostly the same one that complains about immigration all the time.

He needs to get the fuck out too

What’s remarkable about this is that the Senate Ds can’t even wait until they control the chamber to repeal it so they can at least dictate the terms of implementation before sending it to Trump to sign. Just can’t even manage that level of baseline self-preservation

There’s a lot of criticisms of Democrats that I agree with, and many I don’t. But passing that TikTok forced sale was an incredibly stupid idea, which may only be trumped by the 230 repeal

I disagreed with that article and the writer, and said as much, but I also don’t care much for the pile-on thats happening

the thing about art and politics is that in art you advance by extremes and provocation. when things are boring and staid, something needs to be shaken up. that's good. but that impulse is almost universally terrible in politics

As someone who does think aesthetics matter, the issues with Wagner’s piece are that it is a) not making any particularly insightful points about far-right aesthetics, or specifically about Trump, b) feels like warmed over thinking from ‘17 that hasn’t been updated for where we are in ‘25

Don’t be annoying. Blundstone boots are great, always stylish and multi-faceted, and usually on sale around now

Every new character involved in the Epstein Cinematic Universe is the least surprising person possible