one sign of progress is that he at least seems too ashamed to tell the interviewer he is a two-time trump voter

My kids had friends whose parents installed apps that rerouted iMessages through the provider (a security nightmare) so the parents could snoop on all of it. And I encouraged those friends to get burners and told my kids they probably shouldn't be around those parents. It's deranged behavior.

You can't joke about anything anymore. Because you signed a multi figure contract with the Saudi government that said they wouldn't pay you if you did.

When pundits become overly obsessed with their own personal conflicts, it can cause them to lose touch with actual public opinion on issues and lead to them taking positions that are extremely unpopular.

“Anti-woke” “free speech” comics only ever wanted to use slurs in an environment of impunity where people were afraid to criticize them.

They haven't been hollowing out the federal government in order to downsize it. They've been doing it so that they can repurpose it to serve their ideological program.

A moral society would make guys like this absolute pariahs, basically excommunicated from all sources of social belonging and support. There's no excusing beliefs like this. They're products of an entirely malformed being.

the thing to understand about the fascist intelligentsia is that theyre mostly dilettantes and their output is basically self-serious fanfiction or scribblings recollected from bad trips

centrist liberals faced with fascism have to choose between the centralism and the liberalism. choosing the first leaves you as a hollowed out meat puppet for fascism.

The thing about Yarvin is he's exceptionally stupid. But there are enough guys out there who fancy themselves geniuses while also being exceptionally stupid that his writing found an enthusiastic and lucrative audience.

My sixteen year old is obsessed with wanting various pets, but they're all bugs or vermin. Today she announced she wants a pigeon. Yesterday it was an opossum. Right now she has three separate enclosures in her room for spiders she's captured, and she's angling for an emperor scorpion.

Every day gives more reasons to think about the people who make a living sharing their political analysis and who insisted in the days and months before the election that Trump would not seek to rule as a dictator or, if he did, federal institutions would keep him in check. Just humiliating stuff.

There is reason to be a bit skeptical of Similarweb's methodology, but this was probably inevitable once Musk took over. And reason to be increasingly suspicious of the judgement and character of people still active in X political communities and saying, "It's fine, I don't see what the problem is."

If I were very rich and wanted to use my money to protect American liberties, I'd build on the grand jury momentum we're seeing by taking out ads everywhere I could to educate Americans about jury nullification so every juror going forward knows it's an option.

My best advice for parents re: harmful content: show genuine interest in the stuff your kid is watching and doing online. Let them talk your ear off about Minecraft and Roblox and the funny video they just watched. Make them feel excited to share with you, vs making them feel ashamed or judged

When Substack's ownership highlights creators using the platform, it's through puff interviews with far-right grifters who spread hate against the LGBT community. Patreon, on the other hand...

It's becoming clear that the Constitution dictates whatever SCOTUS is *not* ruling. The problem is, from time to time it still gets things right, but at this point future courts will pretty much be able to, and must, repudiate whatever comes out of this one. Which daily we see is obviously wrong.

Man i know this gets said a lot but god twitter has really turned into such a fucking hell hole

My advice on how to approach this awful moment, and all the awful moments sure to come. www.patreon.com/posts/139645...

I really wish there was a grand treaty where big business and progressive grass roots teamed up. If Trump tries to do heinous illegal shit to Intel, Indivisible gets folks in the streets and out in force on their behalf. If Trump targets the marginalized, biz contributes to defend their rights

Timeline syncing. I want the app and Bluesky in my browser to remember where I am in reading my timeline and stay synced with each other. And for new posts to load in above my current position. I'm a timeline completionist.

The superintendent they just kidnapped is a former Olympic athlete who runs footraces with the kids from his schools while wearing a maroon suit and a bowtie. This is quite simply about the people in power feeling threatened by Black excellence.

The Trump administration would be doing a lot more damage right now if they hadn't driven everyone with any competence out of the GOP.

Yes, you could win some money, but to do it, you'd have to admit not just to having a PragerU account but to watching PragerU videos.

JD Vance appropriating the term "blood libel" to describe legitimate criticism of ICE agents is one of the most antisemitic things I have heard in US politics in the past few weeks. Yet this administration has somehow managed to convince a lot of people it actually cares about fighting antisemitism.

There are admirable conservatives, but they're not the conservatives these guys want us to admire. The basic feature of the American right in our Trumpist moment is a bunch of unadmirable guys who don't understand what it takes to be admirable, and so instead demand all of us admire them.

"this is why for the good of democracy i have sought out the most disturbing ideas possible – 1000 pages of tumblr subcultural infighting"

The author's bio is exactly what you'd expect it to be, including the performative-tough-guy-but-actually-makes-him-look-exceptionally-fragile "discovering, in the process, that Greenwich Village is scarier than Baghdad" line. yaf.org/people/geoff...

The thing about Trumpists and their enablers is if you stand up to them, they'll pretty often back down.

I have to disagree with both Shirley and Powers about this. Present tense isn't objectively better than past tense, but it's not worse, either. In general, given the kind of prose I like, I have a preference for present tense. E.g., I think it often works better than past tense for crime fiction.

Shifting TikTok to push right-wing content, which it's a safe bet will happen under its proposed new ownership group, the result will be driving the kids off TikTok. They've switched platforms before, and many times. They'll just do it again.

I wrote this before the election, based on conversations with friends who work in DC policy circles and were seeing it first-hand, about how Trumpism was driving talent out of the GOP and how the GOP's pipeline for new talent was clogged with grifters and dregs. Everything since has confirmed it.

It is permissible and correct to call them authoritarians if that's what they are. It is permissible and correct to call them fascists if that's what they are.

Trumpists hate cities because cities put the lie to the entire Trumpist narrative about societal health and decay. www.patreon.com/posts/why-ri...

I don't know what a roaring bitmap is, but "Roaring Bitmaps" would've been a great name for a 90s industrial band.

The joke's on Pete. Those guys' medals melted in hell's flames long ago.

Recurring gripe of mine but it is incredible how National Conservatism is supposedly built around decrying lack of community, common project etc, while turning every “hate your neighbors” dial they can access up to 11. Make your professor terrified to say anything, don’t trust your doctor, etc

I'm rereading William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. Just finished Count Zero and am a good chuck into Mona Lisa Overdrive. And I'm struck by how exceptionally controlled his tone is. The novels have a consistent feeling in a pretty remarkable way.

Now that Trump's new executive order has outlawed the promotion of radical ideas opposing the administration's ideology, you might enjoy my podcast about the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical liberalism. pod.link/1614436300

This is bad, but also vital to remember: it’s an EO. It’s not a new law. It’s just instructions to his appointees. Who remain constrained by the Fed criminal code. And, to preempt the doomers: Those. Laws. Are. Holding. That’s why Trump’s losing it over Comey in EDVA.

If they had the capacity to do this, it would be really bad. And they probably will try to do a couple of high profile examples to make you think they *do* have the capacity. But like a lot of stuff, this is a memo designed to get you to voluntarily stop doing stuff they don’t like.

People are mocking this, but, look, the guy is just being consistent. If your thing is first principles, you have to reject abbreviations, because first principles definitionally cannot be abbreviations.

My sixteen year old has very strongly held political opinions she expresses often and loudly and for the life of me I don't know where she got this from.

You can say a lot about how much Bluesky sucks but they tried to cancel Dril here and are accusing Darth of suppressing free speech so you know we are COOKING WITH GAS

Some of the rage about "Blueskyism" is that a lot of newsletter writer types over on X have a lot of beliefs that are the result of the steps I outline in this article, but those nonsense beliefs are widely shared on X. When they come here, though, they get told, "Actually, that's nonsense."

It's possible this prediction looks pretty stupid in the coming months, but I wager Trump's new plan of weaponizing the DOJ against the funders and foundations of liberal America will be less successful now than if he'd tried it back in the "Well, I guess he has a mandate" early days.

The search is underway for someone with executive experience named Koopa.

I think this is right. The US is facing a crisis of mass alienation and atomization but it's unevenly distributed along various lines, including gender. And alienation among men is a particular problem because they're disproportionately likely to turn to violence absent social constraints.

people care about men being lonely in particular because under patriarchy the belief is that men are entitled to women's deference/bodies/affection, and if they're not getting that, then there's a crisis.

If loneliness is widespread, and greater than it used to be, and is particularly bad among the kinds of men who are very online in self-consciously masculine communities, the fact that pop Stoicism is so popular right now I suspect makes loneliness worse and harder to dig out of.