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The torture of losing is easy by comparison with the torture of winning. #Mets #LGM #WeGotAReprieve

One thing I would love is if, when a straight white guy “sees the light” and joins the left, he would volunteer for a community group and like knock doors for someone who’d been on the left for ages instead of immediately wanting to be the candidate. It’d be like a litmus test for if they’re serious

I've argued that LLMs facilitate man-in-the-middle attacks on representative democracy, whereby malefactors flood legislators with text and voicemails, preventing them from ascertaining what their actual constituents want and need. The US is uniquely vulnerable because face-to-face is impossible.

I love the English language.

Hat tip to Ellie tennesseelookout.com/2026/07/06/t...

"The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” -- D.H. Lawrence America Needs to Grow the Fuck Up open.substack.com/pub/karenatt...

right wingers think it's good for the ruling class to get arts and humanities degrees. they understand the value this type of education has for the rulling class. they support vocational education (which is what they consider STEM to be) for other for precisely that reason.

Yes!

People literally do not have time. But also, I’ve tried to replace most of my uses of “I don’t have time” with either “I can’t make the time” or “I don’t have the energy” because often I technically do have the time but cannot muster what is necessary to seize the opportunity

Also true! Ask me how I know! And some of my favorite creative artists were those with day jobs (Kafka, WC Williams, Ives, Borodin). Those on this website doing the same, I appreciate you!

Noting here that, the Habsburgs being an abiding interest, this was not a Habsburg failson, alas, but a Bourbon failson. Much more mundane characters, the Bourbons.

This whole thread is very interesting and incisive on the uses of pure research.

Oh, that's just grand. (The MTA is state-run, so this is Gov. Hochul's responsibility rather than Mayor Mamdani's. But I might bug his office anyway.)

I decided to translate this and turn it into a needlepoint chart

And "nothing's going to happen" carries a subtext of "what do you want me to do about it?" We the People are sovereign; let's act like it. (This reminder is for me, too.)

Yeah, the food in Colombia wasn’t very spicy at all. And in my experience, Puerto Rican and Dominican food are very savory, but not spicy, either. But I think a lot of us from the US and Canada think of Mexico, because it’s closest to us, before we think of any other Latino culture.

Accurate.

LMAO seriously! How much would we pay to hear our actual elected officials shit talk these losers?

This Day in Labor History: July 5, 1935. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act. This created real labor law and allowed unions to survive. Let's talk about the most important labor law in American history!

This explains a lot. nathannewman.substack.com/p/the-sane-n...

This is a prime example of why right-wing populism slides so easily into antisemitism. You need a populist framing of "the people" versus "the elites," but you can't frame the elites in strictly economic terms, or else you end up with leftism. Hence you need another way to define "elites."

Going back to Roman Hruska, re: G. Harrold Carswell, standing up for mediocre people deserving Supreme Court representation because "we can't have all (((Brandeises, Frankfurters, and Cardozos)))," they know they're not bright, but white privilege outranks mere intelligence, don't you see.

I miss subtle, classy incompetent authoritarian shithead Republican presidents.

It’s been several days since democratic socialists won primaries in multiple states. We haven’t had diner profiles of their voters the way we got profiles of tea party and maga supporters shoved down our throats for the last 15+ years. The mainstream media is in the tank.

A lot of govts have limited this guys company in order to ensure affordable housing, but he has a different explanation for housing shortages, one courtesy of an organization too racist even for William F. Buckley. And he also in charge of digital branding for the US government under Trump.

In case ppl wanted to know why the schism Catholics (SSPX) being mad about Vatican II + yelling "We just want to pray in Latin" & Vatican II apologizing about its long tail of antisemitism are connected, aka "we just want to pray in Latin" is "ethics in game journalism", here's the text in q:

I love New York.

Whenever I teach the Declaration of Independence (or, more frequently these days, the Declaration of Sentiments), I play this medley & explain how controversial the 5th Dimension’s recording was at the time. Then I horrify my students by dramatically lip-syncing particularly banging lines…

It's been fun watching I Love New York guys Adams and Cuomo scamper the fuck away to be full-time pieces of shit, proving everything everyone ever said about them 100% completely correct and making everyone who ever supported them look like the unprincipled jackasses they are

Justice Jackson may well be the best thing to come out of President Biden's term in office.

would love to see a hostile audit of Freedom 250. hell, would love to see hostile audits of everything even tangentially related to trump. this will produce endless material. you could conceivably bring the administration to an effective halt!

Reminder that sesquicentennial for the Statue of Liberty is in 10 years and is an excellent excuse to do a vastly improved celebration of what America can be. We got shit to look forward to folks.

It’s interesting how the right’s take on US History has come to resemble that of the nation’s most radical left critics, only with the valence flipped 180 degrees. “America was founded on prisons and the police,” and that’s what makes America the great land of the free!

Alternate history about the Second World War has often been criticized as being fiction for Nazi fetishists. But the best such fiction doesn’t ask “what if the Nazis won,” but rather asks a far more discomforting question: “what if fascism was always present in some part of my own national myth.”

Just as you're going "This can't get any worse" that fucking punchline hits lmao

Aha! This gets at why I can't be convinced that LLMs are a good idea even if they were accurate (which they're not): context, authorship,and presumed audience are a fundamental part of media literacy. And an LLM strips all of that by design

200 years ago, July 4th killed both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson: remember the reason for the season.

The founder we should talk more about is Thomas Paine, who will fuck your shit up every time. Here he is in The Rights of Man just ripping into any ideas of "originalism" and that kind of garbage.

I've always identified as being specifically from Brooklyn, versus NYC as a whole, and that hasn't changed at all since whichever Before Time you want to date back to. Een Draght Macht Maght, youse guys!

And just in time for the Semiquincentennial! (Rocky Balboa gets his shot as part of Apollo Creed's Bicentennial title defense, it's a whole theme in the movie. I'm thinking of watching it again tomorrow for that very reason. It mostly holds up, but his treatment of Adrian hasn't aged well.)

MECHANIC: that’ll be $250 CUSTOMER: $250? For tightening something with a wrench? MECHANIC: $250 for a lifelong education that allowed me to know what to tighten with a wrench

I like this idea!

The Roberts Court is predictable. Not because it follows the law, but because it never passes an opportunity to push its ideological vision. Once you know where Roberts and his colleagues want the country to go, you can figure out how almost every relevant case will end.

I'm happy with the DSA victories but it also seems worth reminding ourselves it's not because DSA is crazy strong but because Dems are so calcified and lethargic from running on autopilot and doing nothing but waiting for either their deaths or a seniority position that they're political veal.

I'll say this until I'm dead. The whole conservative project has been about the conversion of public spaces to private ones, ones where groups can be excluded all in the name of individual choice. And if you hear the phrase "tragedy of the commons," you know who you're talking to.

"the January 6th of Catholicism" is such a perfect description the same "bravo to us, the lone heroes standing bravely against woke oppression" - except that this time there were permanent and unambiguous consequences, including dire warnings to would-be imitators, in place by the next business day

Originally there was no Constitution. So ignoring the Constitution is the only truly originalist approach to Constitutional law.