people complaining that the new CEO might make bluesky profitable is gold. i hope bluesky does great, but if it doesn't i get to watch all these people get what they're asking for

We’re launching @liberalism.org this Thursday. It’s going to be, frankly, pretty rad. And if you want to get notified of the launch, and all the cool stuff we publish, you can follow us on Bluesky or drop your email address here: liberalism.org

I don’t think we should have senators in their 80s at all, but this is just an FEC filing to keep his committee going for fundraising purposes, incl. transfers. It is not filing for reelection as such, the state law process for putting his name on the ballot, and it doesn’t commit him to doing that.

Part of Trump’s mass appeal (and of why he’s so dangerous) is that he really seems to share Joe Barstool’s worldview that there are no complex problems: Everything has a simple brute solution, which previous leaders were somehow too stupid or weak to deploy.

My daughter did one mock trial competition at her high school and now she's watching footage of random trials on YouTube.

Frankly, I'm distracted from the content by how bad this prose is.

It really is kind of amazing how stupid Yarvin is, like however dumb you'd assume he is, he comes up with something stupider

The thing about racists is that in addition to being immoral, they're just unbelievably stupid.

I wrote this a couple of months into Trump's second term, and events keep reinforcing it. So many voters and pundits thought Trump 2.0 would look like Trump 1.0 but without the COVID, and so talked themselves into supporting a madman who's now burning down everything around him.

We're launching @liberalism.org this week, and I'm both hugely excited to have it out in the world and kind of freaking out at how looming that deadline is.

My So Called Life. I was the same age as the teens in it when it first came out, and really liked those characters. Rewatched the first couple episodes with my wife a while back and both of us found the kids annoying and much more identified with the parents.

wonder how hard it would be to make a custom feed that emphasizes conversations people you follow are having with each other (probably one of the best parts of social media for me!)

My 13-year-old has achieved nirvana. Which, in his case, is playing Duck Hunt in his room on original NES hardware plugged into a 15" CRT TV my mom just bought him for his birthday.

I’m sorry, doing this in a baseball cap sold by your campaign store is deliberately disrespecting the dead.

Gary Lason predicted far-right manosphere social media.

They blew up an elementary school Tom www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Not a world where speaking Spanish is forbidden. Just a world where you surrender your dignity to speak it.

It’s a testament to the sophistication of our moral psychology that we can *actually see evil* on someone’s face.

Even on mute the malice is clear.

I just made my wife an espresso, a beautifully pulled shot, into which she poured flavored non-dairy creamer, then decided it made it too cold, so she put the whole thing in the microwave. And I still love her, but marriage brings its share of challenges.

Street Fighter II was released in arcades 35 years ago today.

war as a means of self-discovery live. laugh. launch.

I think about how there was long ago some guy who said to himself, "You know those wolves, the fiercely intelligent apex predators? With hard work and a commitment to a project I won't live to see the completion of, I bet I can turn them into what will one day be called a Pomeranian."

Gosh, maybe the DoD really *does* need Claude.

He's dissolving Ohio State University

My take on the prospect of LLM consciousness is that people are caught basically in the same kind of trap as the smart bomb escalation spiral. They think that a very large quantity of a means that is inadequate to a purpose can basically force through realisation of that purpose.

NYC old money blackballed Trump for years because he was a classless, tasteless boor, & every day he demonstrates they were right to do it. The people's house, now featuring all the sophistication of a Vegas limousine

My sixteen-year-old is very outspoken about the injustice of socially constructed gender roles, but my wife just asked her to go out and shovel the walk, and my daughter refused on the grounds that shoveling snow is "a man's job."

Strategy is fundamentally all about developing a sophisticated theory of the mind of one’s opponent. With MAGA’s Iran Adventure, guess we’re going to see what a modern war almost totally devoid of anything we’d call “strategy” looks like.

“MAGA’s fundamental shared quality is a total lack of theory of mind for other people” is a theory that keeps getting validated by reality - look at almost every decision they’ve made in the war with Iran, and how they seem constantly surprised by the unanticipated actions of other parties.

New: font options in Leaflet! 🔡 ☞ six curated fonts ☞ set for both body & header ☞ option to add *any* Google Font The Google Font option is fun for adding funky headers…a few examples here :) Also useful for non-English scripts. More ways to theme your writing with its own special flavor!

Stupid Colorado weather, yesterday it was sunny and 70 degrees, and today we’re on our way to three to five inches of snow.

One of my morbid hobbies in these horror times is taking 80s/90s political thrillers and imagining Trumpism in place of neoliberalism.

Sanewashing is like a religion now. The glorious rapture in which Donald Trump acts like a sane and normal person and adopts moderate, mainstream policies is coming any day now!

The people in charge of the US federal government have bad ethics. The people who enthusiastically support them have bad ethics. But the majority of Americans are pretty decent people.

I will miss Kristi Noem's inimitable constitutional insights, as when, asked by Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H. at a Senate hearing to define "habeas corpus," she replied, "Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country."

My seventh grader, mad about homework, has announced that "French is the most idiotic language."

I'm an atheistic Buddhist, and I have a significantly better understanding of Western civilization and more fully appreciate its values than Pete Hegseth, whose basic character is a rejection of everything worthwhile about the civilizations of the West.

I'll always remember Kristi Noem for the "Meth. We're on it." campaign.

I assume this “previously nonexistent security role” will be protecting the homeland from puppies.

Looking over the rough cut of the launch video for @liberalism.org, my colleagues and I are all sitting in front of bookshelves, as one does. But they have Very Smart Books, and half the books behind me are Shadowrun and Warhammer TTRPGs. I think of this as liberalism enabling diverse lifestyles.

This photo of Viktor Orbán I came across while searching google for something makes it look like he’s rockin’ quite the mullet.

Wait, do they think that’s how you find oil that doesn’t need to be shipped through the Strait of Hormuz?

These guys are constantly telling on themselves that they can’t imagine anyone acting on an actual principle. Protesters? Must be getting paid. Bishops noticing that Jesus had some thoughts on welcoming the stranger? Gotta be a payday in there.

I don't have a problem with Tim. But I do think it is deleterious that so many smart people spend so much time on X, which has essentially become an algorithmically and AI-optimized far-right MAGA message testing and propaganda machine. People assume X posts represent the masses, but they don't!

missed this incredible journalism news: @liberalcurrents.com reached their $500k fundraising goal!! that means full time staff, further building out the site, and funding for good people doing important work without billionaires. hell yea.

I am arguably responsible for the existence of the contemporary indie tabletop RPGs movement and played a not insignificant role in setting in motion events that led to D&D 5E.

Bluesky's underlying open protocol means you can see which people have blocked you, which lists you've been added to, and which blocklists you're on. And this means seeing when you've been added by some random account on Bluesky to a thoroughly perplexing list.