people act like Trump is trying to strong-arm Canada or something, but actually he's offering them a sweetheart deal with two whole senators.

democracy depends upon collective cognition, and we cannot cogitate well or sanely while dopamine machines owned and manipulated by Musk and Zuckerberg constitute the public and coordinate the effort.

i think in almost every context the premise racism is bad is taken for granted. there are some subcultures that dispute that, but they remain very marginal. my point about “leftist” is i think it’s explicitly used to personalize and dramatize critique, make it about bad people rather than policies.

i think neither “right” nor “left” is pejorative (without modifiers like “hard” or “far”). i think people often do identify as left or right (or just as ofter prefer other words, “conservative”, “social democrat”). but “leftist” mostly is pejorative, while “rightist” is more rarely deployed.

i see it used to pretend there’s some policy relationship while mostly functioning to personalize and demonize its targets. compare “Warren’s focus on antitrust alienated tech leaders.” to “Leftists intentionally kicked tech out of the coalition.”

i think racist is probably closer in symmetry, because throwing around “leftist” as an epithet is not discrediting of the thrower as overwrought in the way that throwing around Nazi often is, in ideologically mixed company. racist OTOH is not treated as disqualifyingly inflammatory.

the first two are hardly epithets, as they are embraced by those they attach to. (I guess some people identify as “leftist”, but mostly not, mostly it’s a derisive attribution from the other side.) racist, sure. that’s a fine example.

“fascist” and “communist” are used and abused pretty symmetrically. what are some other favorite terms of derision for right-wingers?

there was gossip and space aliens. but less fascism!

oh, yes, not you!

pathetic.

billionaires are pathetic.

and fascism! from @ryanlcooper.com prospect.org/power/2025-0...

“The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, which, um, advises the government on Medicare payments, estimates that last year Medicare Advantage cost taxpayers $83 billion (!) more than those enrolled would have cost under traditional Medicare.”

📌

“A sensible politics needs to ask: how can we create constituencies of countervailing power to the regressive rich?” @chrisdillow.bsky.social stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_an...

au contraire checks and balances are stronger than they have ever been in American government. Elon writes checks, and they flow into balances.

“prioritize dense, mixed-use, and car-light ecodistricts… a number of wonderful examples [are] in planning throughout the world… the most visionary are so far removed from our status quo in the US—we lack the ability to even comprehend how much higher quality of life in these neighborhoods could be”

on the one hand they are the same, transfer implies surrender. but on another level they are not. transfer connotes flow, things that are transferred are often transferred again. surrender suggests the possibility of a more permanent submission. Lee surrendered at Appomattox.