It’s weird that the “vote blue no matter who” crowd seems so opposed to open primaries. Why do they care if they’re going to vote for the candidate anyway?
There's probably a lot of reasonable political strategy around not dirtying up your candidate and such, but given it feels like we're like 0/3 in finding candidates, I'm 1000% Open Primary. I also think it would actually be good for the party generally to shake things up right now.
I don't know that this actually keeps
#fascism in check or anything, but an interesting dynamic in the attention economy is that if you're not on the inside, it's much easier to get attention criticizing your baby than loving it:
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
Curtis Yarvin helped inspire DOGE. Now he scorns it.
The neo-monarchist muse of Silicon Valley helped inspire Elon Musk’s DOGE. Now he compares it to an orchestra of chimpanzees.
Taking this point to what I’m sure will be a friendly audience on BlueSky — have the electoral benefits of moderation really declined or has the actual amount of expediency/pragmatism fallen especially on cultural issues?
www.slowboring.com/p/what-can-w...-
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It's not entirely crazy to think that if Democrats spend all their time defending immigration, they won't spend political capital helping citizens. The message that shines through has to be that we respect immigrants and have a plan for helping Americans, but it's not when playing defense.
But I think one thing Republicans are really good at, is forcing the core narrative Democrats focus on away from kitchen table issues. If you want people to believe that 80% of your focus is going to be on core issues, than you have to spend near 80% of your time talking about it.
It's not the moderation that's the problem. It's the inauthenticity, in contrast with the authenticity of Trump. Moderates that are too scared of ever answering the progressive based are inauthentic. Like Harris, who focus grouped her way out of responding to the attack ads being run against her
I think it's inauthenticity, and I think the second problem is being seen as following on everything. On the one hand, when Republicans are attacking civil rights like on immigration, it's hard not to fight back, but somewhere above the mess, they have to control the narrative.
Murc's Law is undefeated.
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This article is a hilarious summary of the "Everything is Democrats fault". There are sexual abusers. The left tried to fix it, and failed. And it's no wonder the right now celebrates sexual abusers. But celebrating sexual abusers isn't nearly as bad as the mortal sin of trying and failing.
But not even one minor implication of how terrible it is for the right to be bear-hugging sexual predators.
I'm behind, so I'll have to block the word
#andor for next couple of weeks.
I’m starting a book on the fifties. And part of me is really curious to see what this world is that conservatives are excited to go back to. But I imagine I’ll be somewhat disappointed. 1/2
Two reasons. Any things I end up liking about it probably won’t be the things they do, and ultimately, it’s not about going back to a specific moment, it’s more about undoing the civil rights movement / sexual revolution of the 60’s.
this is the least relatable post I have ever seen online
I sort of do, you can’t go back, but once I got most of my partying done in my early twenties, I probably would have been happier settling down earlier, but alternatively, I’m ecstatic I waited for the wife and family I have :-)
And I met her at the perfect time, her career choices meant she wasn’t able to settle down until literally just a few months before we met.
I wrote about the myth of the "AI-native" startup and new data finding buyers' remorse from CEOs who have attempted to spread it throughout their organizations
www.platformer.news/ai-native-st...The weird thing about AI, is that so much money is being spent on it, in the absence of another hype cycle, it will be our future regardless of its utility.
But there’s so much hype sometimes I think I’m taking crazy pills for not having fired my whole staff to replace them with agents.
I genuinely can’t believe we have a new winner for “most tragic incident involving a shallow body of water and a Kennedy.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, posted photos on Sunday of himself and his grandchildren swimming in a contaminated Washington creek where swimming is not allowed because it is used for sewer runoff.
RFK Jr. Swims in Washington Creek That Flows With Sewage and Bacteria
Swimming in clean water is woke.
TODAY the NYT publishes an investigation into the Trump memecoin $TRUMP and how it has turned into a extraordinary venue for foreign influence campaigns. What we are seeing is potentially corrupt attempts to change US policy by paying the Trump family money. This is no "Russian Hoax"
nyti.ms/4kkv7D7
Auction to Dine With Trump Creates Foreign Influence Opportunity (Gift Article)
When the bidding stops Monday, the top buyers of a Trump family crypto coin will win a tour of the White House.
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The phrasing of your sentences are confusing. While there may be a law “Corruption” that requires explicit quid pro quo, you then say “it is not corrupt”, implying the ethical concept, which very much would not require quid pro quo.
The fact that congress is supposed to approve gifts to the president over a certain size, implies very much concern about aligning future events or the offerer.
One annoying thing about cursor, and I'm not sure if there's a way around this but, it's really bad at figuring out that you actually want to do something against pattern.
I often wonder why our society seems so focused on the negative i.e. criticizing all the things we don't want; than the positive i.e. promoting more of the things that we do want.
one of the many stories of the trump administration is the extent to which its policy agenda is a massive fuck you to rural communities
There's a big part of Republican philosophy that I think is more mad about the things going on in their own communities than like "the libs". The message of "Hillbilly Elegy" and "Rich Men North of Richmond" is that liberal policies make it hard to punish people in their communities.
Maybe next time they want to do tax cuts for billionaires, the Democrats should call it the "Class Equity Tax Act"
Can you imagine the reaction from the scum at Right Wing media if a Democratic President accepted a luxury plane from Qatar?
It would be call and measured, weighing the pros and cons but ultimately deferring to the judgement of the president.
Ok, I found one really cool use for
#vibecoding. Persinal dashboards. I can have. A custom rss feed, todo list app, flash card app, and like gallery viewer all vibe codes fairly simply with a custom layout, since it’s just basically a bunch of simple easily replicable apps.
Politicians really need to stop using X to assess public opinion on any given subject, at this point they might as well be relying on 4chan.
Don’t give them any ideas.
Counterpoint: Only rich people who don't need an income would be reps. AOC would be unlikely to afford to live as a US Representative on $60k/yr. As it stands now, a lot of freshman reps struggle to afford a residence at home and in DC.
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literally the only people this punishes are working/middle class people who want to be representatives. This opinion is just a gift to say if the Trump kids or anyone else with nesting doll yachts wants to serve. They can absolutely live on that salary.
Is your argument really only the upper classes or people with trust funds should serve?
one thought i have reading this (great) thread is that the administration has been proceeding as if there is no chance they will ever face a crisis or a sudden challenge, and has destroy its capacity to respond to one should it arise
🧵Ok, I rag on Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the nation's top diplomat, for his impeachable conduct on deportations and abandonment of all his prior views. But today he's the one "constantly on the phone" and paying attention to the India-Pakistan crisis. Should we be reassured? Absolutely not. 1/
another way to think about this too is that fascism needs crisis to offer it external validation
preventing crisis, weakens fascism’s claim to authority
if we ARE in crisis, fascist propaganda works a lot better than right now where they need to manufacture crises (“we are being invaded”)
I’m reticent to attribute anything the administration does to a coherent strategy; I don’t think they’re that organized or smart.
But in general when the world is in crisis, you can make the argument that we can’t focus on progressive change because there are more important things to do.
Very weird since in < 1 year, all new code will be written by AI.
www.404media.co/anthropic-cl...
AI Company Asks Job Applicants Not to Use AI in Job Applications
Anthropic, the developer of the conversational AI assistant Claude, doesn’t want prospective new hires using AI assistants in their applications, regardless of whether they’re in marketing or engineer...
"Sen. Dems voted down procedural motion that wd allow the upper chamber to take up GOP crypto legis, stunning blow to Repubs on one of their first major policy pushes..
48-49 not to proceed..
All Dems + 3 GOP incl Rand Paul & Josh Hawley voted 👎🏼..required 60 votes"
www.politico.com/news/2025/05...Why is Rand Paul anti crypto?
Oh he just doesn't want new regulation. Which is kinda funny, but gotta respect the dedication to libertarianism.
The GOP is out here trying to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America because clearly that’s the emergency, while Americans are out here losing healthcare, housing, and food benefits.
We see exactly where GOP priorities lie.
I like how the GOP says we need to be more to restore the pride of Americans, and then does absolutely nothing to be proud of.
Interesting piece which reveals a lot of the tech bro ignorance of government: DOGEr comes in, expects to find lots of inefficiency, is at least willing to acknowledge he was wrong unlike the hard core ideologues.
It's interesting to me that anyone really thought Government inefficiency was more process than politics.
I'm sure there are lots of inefficiencies, but some of these people also might say something like "you can't trust voting machines, everything should be paper ballot".
This was designed 36 years ago
Looks more like the future than things designed today!
A record 69% of American say the Democratic Party is out of touch with the concerns of most people in the United States today
The Democrats need to change, and change fast, if they want to take back control from the Trump regime
usapolling.substack.com/p/democrats-...I feel like the takeaway is you can take whatever you want from these polls. “The democrats are failing on running the same playbook they’ve been running for years, which produced the current most popular presidential candidate”
>Watches a trailer that is 95% violence, strippers and ass
>Screenshots the first 10 seconds of a man shirtless
>"It's giving gay vibes"
If you show a skinny man it’s woke for inclusion, if you show a muscled man it’s woke for gay….
Someone should create a new game called the manliest manly man man man, and just release a new version every month and flood Twitter with it.
Faced with the highly secretive and complex ritual of choosing a new pope, Catholic cardinals have turned to Hollywood to learn how it could all play out.
Cardinals are watching ‘Conclave’ the movie for guidance on the conclave IRL
The 2024 movie is proving a useful primer for clerics about to take part in the real thing to choose the next pope.
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I found it interesting, all of the long held “this is how it’s done” sort of little secrets. Interesting.
Probably didn't help that I just watched Angels & Demons.
Am I the only one who didn't like Conclave? I felt like it was a little too slow, and there was nothing really surprising in it. Sure. I didn't necessarily guess the twist ending, but it signaled there was one pretty hard.
Is it just me or is it weird that there doesn't seem to be an explosion of content because of
#genai. Is it there, it's just not easily discoverable? Like with the cost of having a bot that creates content down to 0, couldn't we have billions of twitter bots bsky/bots/blogs? 1/2
Like don't tell me there aren't enough bad actors on the internet. 2/2
Bring back existential teen comedies with synth wave soundtracks
#riskbusiness #80sThis is a general thought, not a subtweet, but I increasingly feel like there's a lot of unintentional revisionism about US public opinion during the pandemic. Views obviously shifted, but early on there was *remarkably* broad support for a wide range of mitigation tactics
The thing that bugs me is that we learned nothing.
We made some mistakes, some of those mistakes were liberal coded, we all could learn from this in a bipartisan fashion and move forward, but instead it’s total hindsight bias that everything was easy and obvious.
21 trillion? With a T?
JFC
Weird thing to say while simultaneously dismantling the post-WW2 order and veterans protections.
Changing the entire landscape of American politics by showing the Free Press staff the Wikipedia page for Strom Thurmond
I this really saying that the reason we have racism is the libs fault?
"Party of personal responsibility"
Pam Bondi: "We're gonna lock them up forever, and if not we're gonna send them back to El Salvador. And they need to be in a horrible prison where they're never gonna get out."
I think Jesus said this in his sermon on the mount.
This is a good point. A sustainable progressive political movement has to be a good time.
To the extent that “we need our own Joe Rogan” means “we need to move ahead from joyless bickering,” it’s a fair call.
I kinda disagree, at least in part, the magic of Joe Rogan is that he's not explicitly political. I think the magic of <some> right-wing personalities is that they've made "fun" code right wing, and I think we need to find a way to get some of that energy back.
I wonder if a good like heuristic would be, if you want to be a political influencer, don’t go straight at it, start by being an influencer in a hobby or something else you’re passionate about, and find a way to naturally integrate your values.
The misconception at the heart of “the left needs its own Joe Rogan” is that Rogan himself is a right-wing voice.
He’s not. He’s a gullible man with a huge platform who’s popular with the right because he doesn’t push back on even the dumbest of claims.
The left does not need one of those.
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One.. Paradox? Maybe is that like, it's probably hard to grow your influence above a certain level if you're too hard on your guests. It's interesting to me that like Lex Friedman is right-wing, I sort of want to know why there aren't more Lex Friedman's on the left... 1/2
And I think the problem is that there are, but like you suggested, you're not going to get like Mark Zuckerberg or Musk or half the audience that Lex Fridman gets if you're a critical interviewer.
Fun fact, these monstrosities were traced back to Home Depot, they're plastic and painted gold.
metaphor
I kinda disagree, at least in part, the magic of Joe Rogan is that he's not explicitly political. I think the magic of <some> right-wing personalities is that they've made "fun" code right wing, and I think we need to find a way to get some of that energy back.
Like Rogan is popular (or at least was popular) was because 80% of his podcast is interviewing strange and interesting scientists, fitness influencers, etc. So when he did turn towards politics it didn't feel like he was lecturing you.
Interesting piece which reveals a lot of the tech bro ignorance of government: DOGEr comes in, expects to find lots of inefficiency, is at least willing to acknowledge he was wrong unlike the hard core ideologues.
