Joy Reeber 🦄

Everyone is hope scrolling now

The day started off great and just kept getting better

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

I’m just a small-town political scientist, & it’s still relatively early, but it appears that The Actual Democrats did not Need To Do any of the Things or Learn any of the Obvious Lessons that Ezra Douthglesias said they Must Do & Learn.

this is such a great encapsulation of why this race feels existential even to people outside NYC. Cuomo as the final boss of everything wrong with the current Democratic Party, Mamdani happily grabbing the third rails everyone’s told are too dangerous to touch (trans people, Muslims, socialism)

Here are a few of the better counterpoints I've gotten in response to my post lamenting mass blocklists

we just take it for granted, that R's will lie about and demean "blue states". Imagine any D so consistently denigrating red states. Fox News would have a collective aneurism.

Oh right, the sun is gonna set before dinnertime. Happy depression week to all those who ruminate

The firing of the award-winning political staff of @teenvogue.com is going to go down as another ‘wrong side of history’ move of this era. Shame on the magazine. What a bitter disappointment.

YES YOU SHOULD VOTE IN LOCAL ELECTIONS TOMORROW EVEN IF MAMDANI IS NOT ON THE BALLOT WHERE YOU LIVE

I think every Democrat should be shown this chart and required to explain why any policy solution would convince voters in this environment, and if they cannot, give three steps to fix the media environment, and if they cannot, be forced to resign their seat

You don’t get to name your kid X Æ A-12 and then say “or whatever his name is” about anyone else.

Hot off the presses: it appears Krampus has endorsed Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo during the campaign: I'm the only man tough enough to stand up to the evil Donald Trump!

Cuomo on election eve: I hope New Yorkers all listen to my good friend Donald Trump and heed his advice to vote for me!

you can convincingly portray this whole financialized AI edifice as a mortgage crisis-style house of cards without even mentioning that the fundamental product is unreliable, based on outright theft, and people don’t like it.

When I was little, I believed that adult people in charge of stuff were all really smart, because they wouldn't be in charge of stuff if they weren't; like, you couldn't be stupid and still have responsibilities. And while I have been wrong about many things in my life, I was wrongest about that.

One time. The GOP has won more than 50% of the popular vote <one time> since 1992. And yet, every day, you are bombarded with Takes™️ from Ezra Douthglesias about how deeply unpopular The Democrats and their policy platform are, without any reflection on how the same standard applies to the GOP.

if Teen Vogue as we know it dies today, I hope its team know in their hearts that they did more to champion democracy and freedom of speech and to mobilize citizens of all ages toward progressive causes than all the pundits at legacy outlets who sneered at the notion of wanting teens to be informed

billionaires have invested in media not because they support journalism but because they want to control it. there is only downside to a free press for people with that level of wealth. journalism is a great equalizer and they don’t want us to be equal.

I am so upset.

Last week Time Magazine solicited a piece from me on Zohran Mamdani & anti-Muslim hate. I pitched a framing re the dehumanization of Muslims & how Mamdani’s inclusive, socialist campaign in its content resists that. They agreed. I wrote the piece. 1/

They fired every Black woman at Teen Vogue and every trans staffer.

It is astonishing watching the American media ecosystem just falling like dominoes, bowing its knees to fascism.

wow, if only there had been warning signs about his temperament before he was confirmed

A good thread, and one I suspect several of us ought to read through. You're you, and you deserve to like yourself.

Remember, they're currently arguing that Biden's pardons are illegitimate because he signed the actual forms with an autopen.

Trump, meanwhile, repeatedly insists he knows nothing at all about one of his very controversial pardons. Never heard of the guy!

Sorta seems like a problem.

Werner Herzog’s New Book Tackles The Problem Of Truth | Defector You might think of Werner Herzog’s new book, The Future of Truth, as the story of two animals.  On the front cover, you see the silhouette of a lone penguin, somewhere in the middle distance, setting…

'The Future of Truth' might be thought of as a book about how people need to embrace what few remaining opportunities we have to act like mad penguins, before we all become like pigs stuck in quadrilateral sewers. defector.com/werner-herzo...

In the eyes of the establishment, there’s literally nothing Mamdani can do to prove he’s not an antisemite, and literally nothing the openly fascist trump regime can do to prove they are, up to and including intentionally dressing like literal, historical Nazis

Kirby from Nintendo eats everything so you don’t engage with hideous arguments and their framing. You eat them and say what is actually happening.

I found this Kirby idea helpful on not trying to engage with or maintain the framings of eugenics, fascism or racism.

Name what is actually happening

- you eat their frame
- starts with what's actually happening
- contains and explains what they're doing
- your argument is shaped like kirby

This has been such an Illuminating part of our current moment:

It’s revealed just how unwilling those with actual power are to even just ask tough questions, while highlighting how willing pajama-wearing suburbanites are to physically drive off guys armed with actual guns.

Yeah, academia dot edu is not a place to house your scholarship.

Oh that's clever, my friend. That's precisely the kind of whimsical fuckery we need these days.