JEM

Is this skate Bluesky???

Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a studen…

Peter Coviello isn't on Bluesky, but this definitely should be: lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

A List of Things Said to Have Been Ruined by Women

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OK. Let's fucking go. Kat next.

The Democratic Party Needs to Learn from Zohran Mamdani's Guts and Backbone Zohran Mamdani did something different, and it made all the difference.

I am no longer employed so I'm not blogging Zohran tonight but I can just repeat exactly what I said in June :-)

he won on the back of a pro-migrant, pro-trans, pro-working class campaign. and also: Dem pundits are full of shit

If these elections had gone the other way — if the Democratic Party had underperformed or even lost one of these contests — then every commentator under the sun would say, rightfully, that Democrats were in disarray; that even the president’s deep unpopularity couldn’t keep them afloat with voters. But Tuesday was a Democratic victory. And the party didn’t just win — it won by commanding majorities on virtually every field of play. In polls, in focus groups and now at the ballot box, the public is telling us something very clearly: Trump is simply too much. If this is an opportunity for Democrats to win back lost ground — and it is — then it is also a warning to a Republican Party that has tied its entire identity to the man from Mar-a-Lago.

i closed out my column this week with this preemptive jab at basically every commentator currently looking for ways to say that last night didn’t count

How Zohran Mamdani Beat Back New York’s Elite and Was Elected Mayor

This NYT story about how Mamdani dealt with the opposition by the city's elites fails to mention one particular elite institution: The NYT editorial page, which last June railed against him as "uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges... lacks political savvy"

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/n...
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Stepping in here to defend Ann’s statement, which I’ve now seen framed this way by several technologists.

Ann is an author.

Her context is about usability, not technical capacity. On the merits of her context, she is correct.

Technical specificity does not change her conclusions.

It doesn’t matter what I think. Also, none of this would ever happen. But if I had a zillion dollars:

1. Run a “we do hard things” campaign across southern and rust belt states. Invest heavily in local, state and regional social infrastructure. Sponser later hours at a library, build a skate park…

Congressional Candidate Kat Abughazaleh Walked Off My Interview — Here’s What Happened

Today's winner of the "Please STFU" Award is Kat Abughazaleh.

She was right to hang up! Don't talk about the facts of your federal indictment on a podcast! Or anywhere except your lawyer's office!

Sincerely,

Every Lawyer, Literally All Of Us, Heed Our Counsel And Shut The Fuck Up

Very helpful, putting Lakoff into practice

What We Can Do About ICE ICE is in the Bay Area. And yes, we can all do something about it.

While this federal administration has been busy empowering ICE to become, essentially, an extrajudicial militia allowed to disappear people from our streets, the Bay has been organizing. We will not be beaten down.

Cops led us into the street as the new “protest zone” and then beat us repeatedly.

Got hit in the face with a baton. Leaving to pick up my friends who were arrested.

Stay safe out there.

Inside the Improbable, Audacious and (So Far) Unstoppable Rise of Zohran Mamdani

we’ll see how his mayoral tenure shakes out but i am convinced that Mamdani has the juice. not just the charisma to win an election but the temperament to govern and the measured pragmatism of someone who genuinely believes what they’re saying and wants to accomplish real things.

This is some of the best political news I've seen in a very long time.

There's a clear a way to end the Citizens United precedent by changing state incorporation laws - and now luminaries in both parties are forcing a vote on it in the 2026 election.

NYT headline: "Rutgers Expert on Antifa Tries to Flee to Spain After Death Threats" subheadline: "Mark Bray was teaching courses on antifascism. Turning Point USA accused him of belonging to antifa, which he denies. His flight to Spain was canceled abruptly on Wednesday night."

you'd think a prominent news outlet like the New York Times might mention that "antifa" isn't an actual organization in a long story about antifa, but nope!

and the subhead helps props up a false claim this professor was up to something seedy as something up for debate

We need to talk about Russell Vought – But Properly Why certain mainstream outlets insist on sanitizing Vought as a devout “small government” conservative – and what actually animates his war against pluralistic democracy

We need to talk about Russell Vought – But Properly

Why certain mainstream outlets insist on sanitizing Vought as a devout “small government” conservative – and what actually animates his war against pluralistic democracy.

Some thoughts from my new piece:

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What a story!

There is a gulf in America. I submit it is the gulf between good and evil, or at least not-evil and evil.

The gulf is not just between people who oppose this and people who are indifferent to it or reluctantly accept it in support of immigration policy or see it as collateral damage.
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Only an administration intent on committing war crimes in the present and future would stoop to calling Wounded Knee a "battle" rather than what it truly was: a massacre of over 250 Lakotas, mainly women, children, and the elderly. 1/

photo of paulina borsook

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it).

But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

Opinion | Civility Is a Fantasy

I wrote about the dangerous fantasy of the civility framework in political discourse. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/o...

The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi From 1964: An encounter with Martin Luther King, Jr., during a summer of pressure.

Incredible writing, it makes me think of this infuriating exchange MLK was subjected to The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi www.newyorker.com/magazine/196...

"You don't think that the [expletive] globalist lizard people who run the world are sitting here going: 'Great, what do we got — three years? We'll wait this out. We'll wait this out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, let them say the government should be involved in censoring people's speech'"

How about we not compliment people like Joe Rogan who spew the most gut bucket, fascistic, antisemitic conspiracy theories out there while “defending” free speech?
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/a...

“When Affirmative Action Was White” (Katznelson) is how I know

EXCLUSIVE | Mamdani to pull planned ABC town hall event after network suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s show | amNewYork Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani will announce Monday that he is cancelling a televised town hall with WABC News planned for Sept. 25 in the wake of

EXCLU: @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social will announce today he is cancelling a televised town hall with WABC News planned for Sept. 25 in the wake of the network suspending comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show last week.
www.amny.com/news/mamdani...

I’m a Congressional Candidate. I Was Assaulted by ICE. An interview with Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old Democratic House candidate in Illinois, who was violently thrown to the ground twice at a peaceful protest in Illinois on Friday morning.

As I told @newrepublic.com, "Once last week, twice today, ICE has picked me up and thrown me on the ground. Honestly, it doesn’t compare to what our neighbors who are trapped inside the Broadview processing facility are going through. They’re committing crimes against humanity there."

Right-wingers are calling for my arrest. You know why? Because they know I’m the only candidate in my race who will actually stand up to ICE and Trump.

And they’re right.

Wild. Is all of skate Bluesky here on this thread?

The Trump FTC’s War On Porn Just Ensured That Accused CSAM Offenders Will Walk Free Well, they finally did it. A federal agency finally shattered the precarious base that upholds the edifice of prosecutions for child sex abuse material (CSAM) in America. That agency is the Federal…

I have a 2-part blog post at @techdirt.com today on the FTC order to Aylo re CSAM on Pornhub. Part 1 is about the order's lurking 4th Am problem; Part 2 explains how the order is really about controlling *legal* speech online.

1: www.techdirt.com/2025/09/15/t...

2: www.techdirt.com/2025/09/15/t...