i mean, who would you go to for advice on how to run free and fair elections?

so many AI videos are just the marketing of marketing.

however begrudgingly, one has to hand the administration some credit for finally securing the northern border. no one crosses it into the United States anymore.

i don't know that any service has enjoyed an enshittification arc quite as steep as meetup.com, which briefly seemed like a revolutionary and essential utility and now seems like a scammy, spammy backwater.

i'm sorry for it too, because in its heyday i think it genuinely did lubricate and encourage in-person civil society. nothing as convenient and effective has emerged to supersede it.

“We allowed markets to produce a class of politically connected billionaires, and defenders of this outcome foolishly argued that it would be to everyone’s benefit. Now that enough billionaires have lined up behind fascism and authoritarian consolidation, it’s clear that liberal governments today and in the future will need to figure out ways to greatly reduce the wealth and social power of that class overall.” @adamgurri https://www.liberalcurrents.com/pluralism-partisanship-and-patriotism/

it’s the authentic will of the people when they seem to agree with me.

it’s the way the system is rigged when it appears that they do not.

(hint: there’s no such thing as the authentic will of the people independent of the system by which it is ascertained or constituted.)

someone is not even wrong on the internet.

the natural lifecycle of an asset class is

1. succeed unconventionally
2. fail conventionally
3. bailout
4. enjoy state backing and stabilization indefinitely

remember when a New York Times editor got fired for running a Tom Cotton opinion piece arguing in favor of what the President is now doing routinely?

there’s a lot of ruin in a nation, but eventually it’s going to matter just how much.

“if we are moving away from strictly economic determinants of voter attitudes, it might worth asking about whether the extreme wealth of leading Democrats matters.” @DeanBaker13 https://cepr.net/publications/nyt-columnist-thomas-edsall-trashes-deliverism-should-the-people-of-texarkana-feel-delivered/

i know it seems like they are cynically overstating how dangerous the cities are, but maybe it’s a sincere and understandable fear response given how deeply most city dwellers detest them.

we're phasing out civil aviation because contrails have failed to earn the public's trust.

“America sings on Navy Pier and the many other places where citizens do better than politicians at facing the challenge of creating durable multicultural democracy.” @DanLittle https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2025/08/real-multicultural-democracies.html

if you want to know an administration that was full of RINOs, according to the second Trump administration, it was the first Trump administration.

if depression is learned helplessness, we are as a polity collectively depressed, and making rash, dysfunctional choices as a consequence.

it’s disconcerting when you realize we are living in a country whose the state follows laws only as a matter of habit, whose leaders override those laws and act on whim whenever they choose to, until, over time, there is not much left of the old habits of law.

i don’t get why the humans tolerate the indignity of shitting, nearly every day.

if ai comes and takes our jobs we could just hire people to give a fuck about one another.

If you subscribe by mail to my microblogging, you’ll likely have received a duplicate mail by accident. I’m very sorry about that!

I migrated my primary server this weekend, which was running a no-longer-supported version of linux. I revived it this afternoon to check something out, but had failed to disable the mail subscription service, which had been migrating and had sent the mail. When the zombie server briefly revived, it then sent it too.

Anyway, sorry! Shouldn’t happen again!