the two party system has become the fascists and everyone-else-not-fascist. it’s not surprising that the former has something of an advantage in coherence.

bring the abhorrent-view-holders by! people’ll be mean to ‘em, but it’s not like the other place is known for niceness!

doing anything that matters makes critics wail louder than supporters praise. in a multiparty system, where you face multiple competitive candidates, other people getting heat doesn’t guarantee any benefit to you. but in a two party system, it does. denouncing while doing nothing becomes the play.

actually millennia of foundational immigration law was written in fortran.

what do the national guardspeople and marines, most of whom don't have Stephen Miller's view of the world, think of the role into which they've been thrust?

approval voting is much more tractable. fewer moving parts, voters can more accurately understand the implications of their choices.

“i feel vindicated!” (just mouthing those words.)

i mean, surely Joe Biden’s presiding over the onset of COVID, the initial lockdowns, and most of the inflationary stimulus checks is bad enough. (poe’s law. i know.)

i think most people who express anger and disappointment towards Barack Obama aren’t in particular trying to win influence within the Democratic coalition, but are simply expressing their own profound anger and disappointment towards Barack Obama and the choices he made.

i don’t doubt these tools will help knowledgable people. but they won’t automatically supplant human experts and institutions, rise like benevolent gods to solve all our problems for us even as we destroy competences within ourselves we’ve spent centuries developing.

perhaps i owe Vanilla an apology!

i could be remembering it wrong?! maybe milli vanilli, but then what was the scandal that laid Vanilla Ice low? i could look this up, i suppose. but where’s the fun in that?

“don’t worry about NIH or NSF. our machines will do the science now and it will be amazing.” they really believe this shit, some of them. you have to admonish yourself (i have to admonish myself) you can’t wish cancer on anyone, that kind of thing is bad for the soul.

Vanilla Ice was a strangely prescient name and lip-syncing seems now such a quaint kind of scandal.

from “Children of the Days”, by Eduardo Galeano. bookshop.org/ebooks/quote...

even when a course correction is urgently required, it may not make sense to blow up the plane.

📌

1990s — X Files 2020s — Epstein Files

i don’t follow NYC politics all that closely, but i like that sometimes when i’m quickly skimming Mamdani parses as “Madman”.