What is wild is the answer to ‘what can an opposition party do anyway’ is partly answered by things Democrats have occasionally done, just half assed and inconsistently.

The growth of Red-Brown politics (TYT talking about "goyim," Graham Platner boosting Stew Peters) will not be stemmed by saying they are "not real leftists." Even if you think they are not part of any meaningful left, they need to be fought by acknowledging they portray themselves as on the left.

i think we need to be very clear that forcing trans people to use documents with the wrong marker is a form of sexual humiliation, it’s sexual harassment from the state itself

I cannot understand people who were alive and paying attention to politics in 2009-2010 (as I'm sure Mark was) who have this opinion that minority parties are completely powerless. The degree of selective memory feels almost malicious.

I see a lot of people interpreting this post as "they are all the same," but what I want to convey is that socialist electeds have the opportunity to choose the frame when they fall short. Choosing when to use language like "efficiencies and waste" is part of proving why you are different.

it's so wild when someone says this because like: what's happening here is deeply and irrevocably connected to what's going on in the rest of the world!! if you want to have any hope of making things better here you gotta be aware of that!

"If a new Democratic House majority toys with the popularism bullshit Labour officials have embraced, they will lose support from the very people who have created the largest protest movement in modern American history and pushed pro-democracy forces into power"

One of the things that personally drives me crazy in the U.S. is how youth sports/athletic activities went from a part of the public good (municipal leagues and fields! rec centers! public parks!) to a privatized, expensive, highly competitive, highly structured pursuit for wealthy kids’ résumés

Thousands of institutions abandoned programs, ended or rewrote scholarships, closed down clubs and publications, all in pre-emptive compliance. And you know why? Mostly because they wanted to do it if they thought they could blame someone else for it.

my councilmember's office (district 26) had not heard about this and the person i spoke to is urging more people to call and write in!!

I hope New Yorkers will challenge Mamdani about this. Too often, people feel they need to be absolutely for or against a politician — ignoring their missteps or throwing them out with the bathwater. You can like and/or believe in someone and still challenge them to deliver on their promises.

It's 2026. I don't want to hear virtue signaling from liberals about all the horrible people they'd vote for over Trump/Vance in 2028. I want to hear what work they're doing TODAY to ensure we will have better options then.

The problems with AI are primarily ones of corporate power and governance—a tiny handful of billionaires are deciding the future of this increasingly powerful technology. I tend to believe the whistleblowers here; but whether you do or not, the real problem is that the public doesn’t decide.

Just going to note again, because somehow we've all completely retconned this and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, that pound-for-pound Biden had one of the most draconian border security regimes of any U.S. president ever, second only to Trump, *many of whose policies he inherited and kept*

Pam Bondi needs to be impeached. With the split in the House and Massie where he currently sits, it could pass the House, and trial in the Senate would be a necessary truth telling exercise.

I fear that men are about to do what men do. They are about to characterize any sober thinking about power as non-technical and therefore unserious. We have seen this pattern over and over again in tech criticism. Women and people of color repeatedly lead on understanding tech changes.

AI is not in the ballpark of good enough to perform the jobs being suggested, and it’s very likely it never will be (people really don’t understand base rates and scaling) but even if it were good enough now, it would take years of investment and organization to seriously shift white collar labor

"Hype" is already a nebulous concept. I get frustrated when people say this, as they don't provide evidence of what they're referring to, nor do they clarify what they mean by hype. It's demonstrably true that the most aggressive claims about what LLM's are capable of have not come to fruition.

Many analogies made btw resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act & popular resistance to ICE. One analogy not often made is that it literally took the creation of a new political party to get the “opposition” to stop compromising w the slavocracy

A few charts on these benchmark revisions. Starting with the big picture: These revisions dramatically lower the rate of job growth over the past two years. In total, payroll employment is more than 1 million jobs lower than previously reported. #NumbersDay

Contrary to popular impression, fiscal policy – especially huge new federal deficit spending from OBBB -- is creating a huge, temporary boost to economic growth, +3.0 pp in annualized terms in 2026Q1, per @brookings.edu www.brookings.edu/interactives...

i mean it’s both. there’s a real burden on voters to deliver the opposition to power but then there’s a burden on the opposition to use that power appropriately for the task at hand. we are where we are in part because voters delivered them to power in 2020 and they catastrophically flubbed it.

Her community rallied so fast and so diligently. This is a victory to uphold and celebrate. Reminds everyone that it's worth fighting back.

The problem with the so-called "nonviolence" of the Civil Rights Era is that it is misnarrated. The retelling in the "American myth of progress" version of the Civil Rights movement was that it was completely nonviolent. That is not true. Plus let's call it its full name "nonviolent direct action"

as i keep saying, the things to do to secure elections are to volunteer to work the polls or to serve as an observer, & to pressure your *state representatives* to take steps to further secure voting locations and ballots. you should also learn about how election administration works in your area.

I think the Dems should withhold all funding at least until DHS proves that they will follow existing law, which they are already flagrantly and happily flouting That’s the pragmatic version, where we accept they will have to find DHS at some point

this is simultaneously much more than i expected and not nearly enough. IF the Reps abided by this it would make things LESS awful but i just don't see why we'd expect them to abide by any agreement they make once they have cash in hand

From 1982-2018, the Republican National Committee was barred from "ballot security measures" because of their record of using state actors to intimidate minority voters. (H/t @rickhasen.bsky.social) www.npr.org/2018/01/09/5...

Here is your case for socialism. Formally, an institution like the Washington Post can be treated as private property. But substantively it is something else. And there’s an unavoidable and sometimes violent conflict between the form and the substance.

A burning dumpster is used to construct a road blockade. Road blockades are used to limit the area in which ICE, or other enemies, can move. This tactic is used around the world. The goal isn't to "win hearts and minds," it's to shrink the area that ICE can operate in.

A practical and necessary exhortation: "Let go of traps, cycles, and debates that produce nothing other than go-to doctrinaire lines. None of that nonsense is stopping fascist bullets, freeing people from prisons, or overrunning agents of the state"

It should inspire serious reflection among liberals and institutionally liberal institutions in the US that this woman was (is still?) considered a standard-bearer on the issue of what constitutes bigotry.

liberals have orders of magnitude more people, financial resources, and institutional support than anarchists do in this particular part of the world and this particular part of the world still looks like what it looks like, maybe chill out a little

I'm gonna say, I do not think this is all a big conspiracy plot by specifically epstein, it is much more systemic than that: all the rich and powerful naturally assume positions that consolidate their power, that marginalize the marginalized more, that ensure existing hierarchies remain as they are.

“No matter who” is fucking us UP bruh. Can’t keep voting blue if this is what they offer.

Many of the discussions about violence vs. non-violence are frustrating and unhelpful because everyone has a different idea in their head of what "violence" means. People use it to mean anything from assassination campaigns, to damaging property, to just idly blocking street traffic.

Most conspiracy theories are based on pattern recognition gone awry. Conspiracy theorists identify the correct conspiracies but mis-identify the conspirators

The epstein files reveal the bourgeoisie acting AS A CLASS, which is to say, sharing ideas, cultural touchstones and social circles. But they do not invent economic conditions out of idle conversations, they are idiots repeating what they hear from their underlings and colleagues, please im begging

right like it seriously needs to be reiterated a billion times that the incidents here aren't conspiratorially unique but a machinic form of patriarchal violence and violation that occurs in fractals and scales at all levels of society. sexual abuse is the glue of structures of exploitation

Something I picked up pretty early when I started studying sociology is that things that look like grand highly intentional conspiracies are so often just systems of power and incentive structures that connect people who have the same interests Which isn’t to say there are no conspiracies but

It's hard to overstate how NORMAL it was to sexualize teen girls when I was growing up. "Jailbait" jokes were everywhere, I was constantly sexually harassed by men in cars when walking to school in 6th grade. Epstein is of an cohort where it was GENERALLY maybe a little edgy but not extreme.

A caregiving social movement IS political.

JUST IN: The Department of Justice on Friday released more than 3 million pages, more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images in its files tied to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

I'll never forgive the people who consistently and deliberately cast doubt on these figures.

So, incredibly, the White House has chosen to escalate in blue Minnesota and retreat in Maine to protect a vulnerable GOP Senator. It's confirmation that Trump-Vance-Miller view ICE as a partisan govt-backed militia to attack blue America while propping up their regime. 1/

Have Jain/Yglesias/Shor nexus come out in favor of abolishing ICE yet or are they moving goalposts?

Tim Walz is ideologically to the right of George Will

A lot of our current politics stems from the fact that a lot of folks have completely fabricated in their memories a different Barack Obama & a different 2008-16 than the ones that actually existed, because he was very good at the "be a decent human" & "give good speeches" parts of the presidency.

Not to belabor this point even further, but it's noteworthy that people a year ago were talking about Trump riding a wave of Latino support, but he literally had a negative approval rating among Latinos upon taking office.

Wrong. Democrats tried to pass a $10 billion increase to ICE/CBP funding in 2024 and campaigned on passing that bill. It wouldn't have been 100% as loud, sure, but Dems definitely wanted to show how "tough" they were on immigration. Just see how they voted for the Laken Riley Act last year.