I certainly agree it's ridiculous that it was even conceivable to bring Trump back to the White House and the media did a crappy job of communicating the reality of his past misgovernance to the public, let alone the awfulness of what he was proposing going forward, what we are living through now.

Trump II has been a disaster. But voters in 2024 didn't have the experience of 2025 to reject. They had the experience of a rough Biden term and gauzy memories of an okay pre-COVID Trump economy.

if we had real political parties, they themselves would be the teams we’d be voting for.

bidenomics was a bad time for much of the public. massive inflation, withdrawal of covid supports, housing pulling ever farther out of reach, generally speaking the assetholding class pulling ahead while everyone else fell behind. IRA/CHIPS/BIL didn’t have time to discernibly deliver.

just rely on the people who call their posts “truths”.

@grok

if new college had an “ideological bubble” it was iconoclasm, a perhaps too-little-examined gusto for piercing ideological bubbles.

the great thing about having an open point of view is that it creates an incentive to bend over backwards to present alternative and opposing views, in ways proponents of those views would recognize and endorse, in order to neutralize accusations of unfairness and propaganda.

if you want to get shit done, rather than a “strong man”, instead of autocracy, have you considered a democratically elected unicameral legislature which directly appoints and can remove the executive?

i think the insinuation is he benefited from some form of cronyism, on the theory many readers don’t understand rent stabilization with vacancy decontrol.

the fraction of communication we experience — across all media, excluding what is explicitly fiction — that is in one form or another a lie is extraordinary.

🫩

at least the fallout from such an explosion is sweet. crunchberries, yum!

so much of civilization is keeping one’s vexations to oneself.

“Enjoy what may be your last Merry Christmas!” is just over the top with menace.

apartments don’t have to be small.

nowadays if you’re naughty he just farts into it because natural gas is cleaner.

i guess any construction where “drone” constitutes part of a verb (and refers to flying things, rather than how grownups speak in Peanuts cartoons) invites trouble.

we should drone-show Santa’s sleigh flying around Christmas eve in order to more thoroughly and marvelously mislead the children.

since AI is going to solve all the medical miracles now, we can dispense with the exorbitant patent rents, right?