Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈

“some will always play corporation games. who cares; they’re always changing corporation names. we just want to dance here—someone stole the stage. they call us irresponsible, write us off the page” -me at the salons of 18th-century Paris

personally i think we should build our society on rock and roll

what is “we need to build our society on something”??? like what does that mean???? how does David Brooks imagine thought happening?

when you are overawed and left speechless by someone’s resemblance to a cartoonishly far-right British politician, you’ve been JACOBREESMOGGED [i am pelted with rotten fruit and booed off stage]

This reminds me of how things work on housing, where “apartment developers only ever build luxury products!” is a narrative that serves the interests of both left-NIMBYs and also sometimes developers

“normal” advertising hype is good in the short term but undermines the industry in the long term

YouTube video by Mylène Farmer Mylène Farmer - C'est dans l'air (Clip Officiel)

This week: Mylène Farmer, who I think it’s fair to call France’s most iconic pop star. In typical French fashion, most of her songs are about either death, sex, or the death of meaning. I think this is my favorite of hers, at least these days:

like, yeah, women are allowed/required to make more distinctive fashion choices

but also: have you ever looked at how a man’s t-shirt drapes across the small of his back when he has broad shoulders and prominent shoulderblades?

…bigotry, but in a small dose” which erases an important distinction.

That said, I’m hesitant to make an argument of the form “our politics would be great if we switched out $INCORRECTWORD for $CORRECTWORD” so maybe it was a doomed discourse to begin with.

Honestly, I kind of think the *word* “microaggressions” was the biggest mistake in this discourse.

It seems to me the phenomenon worth commenting on was “stuff people say and do that could totally be innocent or could be suggestive of bigotry” but “microaggressions” makes it sound like “definite…

hard disagree, but yeah, I would, given the “hardwired into the gender/sexual orientation” thing

Washington is really leaving every other blue state in the dust when it comes to pro-housing reforms, at least at the state level (and honestly I’d bet at the local level as well).

The fact that we need such institutions, and the fact that this level of open confrontation is dangerous and feels wrong, does nothing to change the strategic logic at issue. There is no alternative to becoming fearsome.

At the same time, the only way to change the behavior of the nonpartisan institutions is to be the faction most willing to write angry letters and cancel subscriptions and boycott and raise your kids such that they’d feel dirty taking a job at those institutions.

People respond to incentives, and nothing Republicans have seen in my lifetime has suggested that behaving like Trump is a bad idea. If we want future ambitious conservatives to act differently, the way we treat Trump’s collaborators has to make up for *decades* of them winning.

Republican politicians’ behavior over my whole life has deteriorated further and further, because they *rationally* believe that nonpartisan institutions (and therefore Democrats, who respect those institutions) will refrain from punishing them out of fear of losing legitimacy.

the Enlightenment was good and in fact did not go far enough

a map of the world that I drew in a notebook

this is probably the best I’ve done it and it still looks bad

tbf I put Iceland too far from Europe and it ended up being consequential for the Americas

I think that’s a chicken-and-egg question—people’s expectations have gone up, and I think HGTV is part of that, but maybe it’s a symptom not the cause.

It’s also so hard to buy a home now that maybe the people shut out of homeownership would buy modest starter homes if they could buy anything!

(Jane Kim is a left-NIMBY SF politician)

[sees headline]

oh ok I’m skeptical but maybe this can be ok if done responsibly

[sees byline]

well, that didn’t last long

Hot take: HGTV is conservative coded because most first-time homebuyers are people in the exurban South and Midwest, which is where homes are being built. Another benefit to ending zoning in major cities is progressive 20-50-year-olds would have more influence over home decorating trends

The nature and basis of taxation is a core Congressional duty an allowing the tariffs to continue is a direct challenge to Congress authority. If not forcing them to nuke the fillibuster, when? At what point is it too much?

politics makes more sense when you recognize how many people, both leaders and regular voters, just straight up want everyone’s life to be worse

German songwriter, 1983: in my song i created the 99 Luftballons as a cautionary tale

US government, 2026: at long last we have shot down the 99 Luftballons from classic protest song “Do Not Shoot Down the 99 Luftballons”

this does rather suggest something easy and cheap that regular people all along the Mexico side of the border could do that could crash the US economy and bring down a hostile regime

totalitarians generally don’t believe in “people.” the idea of the individual human subject is contrary to their whole thing. there are groups, masses, cadres; but the individual is a liberal fiction.

I’m not even persuaded that BYU, a private and explicitly religious institution which enrolls consenting adults, should be legally allowed to have grooming standards.

I guess legally prohibiting BYU from having them is worse for freedom on balance, but it is immoral and perverse that it does.

I’m an extremist on this. The right to choose one’s own manner of dress is fundamental to freedom, and instituting dress codes that don’t have a direct relationship to health and safety, especially for kids, teaches people to be authoritarian subjects.

we need a nationwide ban on school dress codes

the next Democratic administration has to kill the coal industry dead with extreme prejudice. it has to be so wiped out that there isn’t even cultural memory of it to make nostalgia out of