i don't have a super strong opinion on the hemp thing but most of the people mad about it really do not seem to understand any of the issues around it. 🧵

progressive donors/organizers are going to need to come up with a radically different model than they've previously used to deal with the party's vichy caucus. at a minimum they need to start doing things like: 1) clearly identify everyone who caved EVEN IF their cave isn't in the voting record

they should run on this and then, if elected, actually confiscate as much his wealth as possible

last question makes an especially good point. the conservative movement has now so completely given itself over to kayfabe and bad faith that speaking of its "beliefs" loses coherence. obviously the core belief here is gutter racism but everything on top of that feels like psychodrama or theatrics

i think this is one of those things where it helps a lot to have been in online spaces for a realllly long time. by like 2005, i'd seen every manipulative rightwing trick in the book on online forums, so it's a lot easier to now see when someone is falling for their bad-faith discursive approach

rewatching THE REF (1994) and much of the plot is still fresh, with the exception of everything related to the police even back then it was silly to think that cops would shut down a whole town on christmas, even an affluent one, just to catch one burglar, but it's especially ludicrous in 2025

it does seem instructive that young men go nuts over the gamified experience on Robinhood but seem to have little interest in doing the exact same trading at Fidelity or Schwab, which also have had apps for years

in SNEAKERS (1992), produced by Universal, the end features a character in a position to demand anything he wants from US govt agents. his ask: "peace on earth and goodwill toward men." final scene is the punchline: the NSA fulfills his wish by stealing all the GOP's money & giving it to charity

name recognition likely matters a *lot* for lower-propensity voters. it's probably underappreciated that john fetterman, e.g., was not going up against someone super well-known in the D primary in 2022 in conor lamb (not a nobody, but not as high-profile as the sitting governor)

trump is demolishing our national symbols and selling the country for scrap to his corrupt donors

in general i'm not a big fan of a centrally planned economy but it's getting harder and harder to see why that's much worse than "every 10-15 years capitalism comes up with a fun new way to make the real economy implode by wasting trillions of dollars"

this describes a lot of what's gone wrong with modern media, and in more far-reaching areas than just the presidency. above all, the prevailing US media culture is obsessed with staying *decorous*. that's why they never touch some very newsworthy topics - they would be indecorous to explore.

wild that *ron conway* of all people did this since he has been the ur-techbro meddling in SF politics for forever, bankrolling every recall of a progressive official, etc unsurprised that a lickspittle like heather knight would just ignore all the history though

it really is counterintuitive for the average schmo. they can understand a story of "the business's costs went up so they had to raise prices", but "the business was being run at a loss for years but then loans got expensive so they couldn't anymore and raised prices" is too heavy a lift

we're all trying to find the lady who did this

and even if you *do* argue against your values a lot of viewers *still* get the impression that the false accusation is true, anyway, because if it weren't, why would they be asking you about it and why would you be denying it?

also kind of says something about parasocial relationships. most of these people would still be repulsed by the idea of reanimating their dead grandmother to rehash those memories, but celebrities aren't "real" in the same sense their family and friends are - they are just comforting objects

these smarmy shitstains don't just think they can use the shadow docket to rule in trump's favor without any explanation whatsoever, they also think that that also constitutes precedent that binds all lower courts

hard not to see the global spread of the specific nonconfrontational civility norms of the US west coast as a very strong causal factor in the rise of "wank." tribalism impervious to argument and a focus on feelgood over action exist everywhere, but they're completely culturally pervasive here

Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion. Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.

definitely better, but even here the most aggressive Ds are not great at communicating in a way that codes as strength to most of the public. investigatory hearings in this century look like theater and it's unclear how much elites fear them. gotta use the words "criminal referral" and "prison."

the other side of the coin here is that there's a similarly banal truth that centrists, if they were honest, should accept: that the concentration of wealth in the US is itself fueling much of trump's power, and civic recovery is going to have to *start* with confiscating a good chunk of that wealth

i would go one further than Coates. they are obsessed with universities, yes, but it's just a part of their obsession with education generally. these people are so in love with the idea that they're genius technocrats that they're certain they understand education better than actual educators.

saint peter calls it: gettin' stung

really is 👨‍🍳😘 how US pundits whose only use for the french was when they provided them with a slogan to generally bash muslims like they wanted to do anyway are now repurposing that slogan to try and use it against their domestic opponents, which, again, was something they always wanted anyway

really is telling that "doing things the right way" means* "more or less sticking to incitement and merely facilitating violence (eg kirk's role in january 6) rather than directly being the guy who is beating and shooting people" *lol of course non-rightwingers are held to a 1000x higher standard

brb, gotta finish mailing another round of forged incriminating birthday notes for random rich guys, pretending to be one of their random rich friends, just in case one or both starts having some serious legal trouble around the year 2036 or later

one of the overlooked contributions to the epstein birthday book is that alberto pinto apparently prefers to communicate birthday greeting messages in the voice of a 7-year-old using barely legible multicolors in a comic sans-like font

if nothing else the Epstein book should be an instant cure for impostor syndrome. some of the richest men in the country and most of their writing suggests thinking that's at about a sixth-grade level. i'm not even talking about the juvenile horny aspect of it, these people are just morons

a trivial point compared to the culturalism/racism on display here, but look at how everything these shitstains do is in bad faith schmitt could care less about the constitution in every possible instance *except* when he can use it pretextually to slam the inherent inferiority of foreigners

i have no idea exactly what happened to produce this screwup, and i haven't worked there in many years, but i bet it stems from this story from the early days: around the time i started at google in 2006, there was an internal war inside the company on whether google needed marketing at all.

this is the key point. elite centrists have no mass constituency for their ideas. they're mostly just liberal-minded people who became corrupted by their supplication to rich funders annoy the gazillionaires too much and there goes your fancy think tank career!

everyone hates an "i told you so" but i could see the writing on the wall for YIMBY in SF years ago. instead of laser-focusing on housing they were taking lots of opportunities to cozy up to VCs on their pet idiotic issues, like obsessing over 8th-grade algebra

lmao you asshole, @jeffjohnroberts.bsky.social , trevor traina was literally donald trump's ambassador to austria

also feeding into this is the potential destruction of BLS statistics. what i mean is that if central bank independence is compromised, investors will anticipate inflation and hedge with inflation-protected bonds. except that might not work if the goverment refuses to measure inflation correctly!

closely related to this correct point is that the framing of "gives trump a political weapon" is incoherent. the NYT is trying to gaslight us not only into believing that pulte's move against cook is about honest concern about fraud, but also that he's an honest broker instead of trump's lickspittle

as this piece notes a few grafs down, these self-serving lunatics have believed this delusion about themselves since the ***literal founding of the state*** not holding my breath, but god it'll be funny if the reason the gaza slaughter stops is that the IDF cannot handle these guys as army grunts

the most instructive lesson i had on the fecklessness of US elites came almost two decades ago. it wasn't caused by some powerful person or institution. it was caused by some nobody named gilbert who lived hundreds of miles away. gilbert was a very upset customer of ours.

have to think that SCOTUS also has a disturbing amount of influence here. when six justices have shown that they basically accept "trump = the constitution" as truth, and will torture the law however possible to facilitate that, it's harder to see some senior DoD lawyer going "nuh uh i know better"

one of the most maddening parts of the discourse-era we live in is that tons of people have perfectly understood its depravity for decades now. and nobody important ever listens to them, while an ever-rotating cast of rich idiots like cuban (or their flatterers) are granted influence instantly

this is the nub of it. i don't think demsas and her financial backers are that dumb - they know that most twitter users have little to no reach/influence. they aren't actually interested in the masses' ideas; rather, they see the masses' duty as to lap up whatever *they* are putting out there

one of the biggest failures of the framers of the US Constitution was that they didn't foresee the fundamental asymmetry involved in the state they were creating. if a private citizen kidnaps a neighbor and holds them without due process, there's a kidnapping statute that can send them to prison.

frankly this is now generalizable to about a million different cases and it's one of the things that makes living in this century so draining. take the workplace, where a classic power play is to demand to be looped in on some decision purely as a disingenuous entry point to getting a desired result

gawd this exactly gets why I found the college democrats repulsive (something I've been thinking about for the last two decades and was unable to phrase it this clearly). it felt like most of them didn't even mean it; they were all ambition and no principles

trump's razor: the reason all of trump's aides looked "ashen" upon leaving the alaska summit wasn't concern for the US or ukraine, but rather that they realized they had all just dragged their boss to alaska based on witkoff's massive fuckup and he isn't quite dotty enough yet to not get mad over it

about half of the reason i washed out of corporate america is that i would have rather stabbed myself in the eye than waste time making a slide deck with perfectly clean and pretty lines. literally sat in meetings where people fixated on that stuff instead of the perfectly comprehensible content

if students can *actually demonstrate* mastery in the concepts the assignments teach, it seems fine to let them advance past them. that's why universities have independent study, grad courses in "reading and research", etc. if it's just "i'm too good for this so i get to informally blow it off", no

i followed who was doing the posting pretty closely back then. the posting was mostly disingenuous. the idea was a propaganda win-win: either coyly whip up anti-arab sentiment with the actual poster, or get viral video of people (who knew the real game) getting mad and ripping them down

exactly. you saw this during the whole anti-congestion-pricing freakout where support for congestion pricing became an *automatic* signal of a "gentrifier." the "real" new yorkers were "200 people who live in outer queens and must drive to lower manhattan every day because reasons"

the entire trump era is an object lesson in that however many times you think is sufficient to repeat a message that you want the entire country to absorb, for at least 30% of the population, you need to take whatever that number of repetitions is and, at a minimum, quadruple it.