SFSN

The "Being Hakeem Jeffries" Award

I've been rereading some of his old Viewpoint pieces and I think this is my favorite, written after the airport protests in 2017

Man, this is terrible. One of the brightest minds on the left - learned a ton from reading him over the years. Viewpoint was a revelation.

if Netflix buying Warner Bros. Discovery a) prevents the Ellisons from owning it and b) potentially kills off Paramount's steaming ambitions, it may be a net positive, as long as a future antitrust movement breaks it up

they claim to be defending Western Civilization but they only know action movies

plenty of things done in history and the present which adhered (however pretextually) to the 'laws of war' are still morally abhorrent and should be opposed. but these guys are too ignorant to even pretend to follow the traditions that are supposed to give force the facade of civilization

morally, I don't think killing the shipwrecked is much worse than other things the regime has done - but it uniquely identifies Hegseth & co. as *barbarians* in a very classical sense in the way it shows them to be totally disconnected from any tradition of 'civilization' bsky.app/profile/grav...

The only thing I can think of the flag having 'both' of is 'stars' and 'stripes' so I suppose it's a call for real men to wear both rhinestones and lots of stripes

This week, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute published its latest critical technology tracker, covering high-impact global research in 74 areas. It found that China now leads in 66 of those technologies, in fields as varied as computer vision, quantum sensors and nuclear energy

In 2005, China accounted for just 6 per cent of the world’s most highly cited research papers but that share had risen to 48 per cent this year. The comparable proportion of US publications fell from 43 per cent to 9 per cent.

The hegemonic transition? That train has left the station, buddy.

of course "the flag wears both / and so should we" doesn't seem to make much sense on its own terms, whatever those may be, but it DOES sound like a patriotic argument for cross-dressing

The bio for AI "artist" Frontier Heart on Spotify. It reads: "Outlaw country ain’t dead—it just grew fangs. Frontier Heart is where southern grit meets boot-stompin’ rebellion. We blend raw outlaw storytelling with southern rock soul and thunder-heavy rhythms that don’t ask for permission. It’s not background music—it’s a warning label. These are anthems for the misfits, the blue-collar bruised, the ones still standing when the smoke clears. If you came here looking for polished pop, turn around. But if you’re chasing truth with a steel spine and a crooked grin—you just found your soundtrack. 🎵 Hit play. Turn it loud. Raise some hell. 📌 Follow. New album Warning Label drops Dec 15." We also learn that Frontier Heart is supposed to have 7,463 followers, 473,830 monthly listeners, and is most popular in Brisbane, Australia

It is also implied that Frontier Heart is a vampiric form of Outlaw Country. apparently Australians are particularly into this

cover image for an AI single titled "Raised Hell the Country Way," but the image only says "Raise Hell the Country"

cover image for an AI single titled "No Apologies in My Blood", credited to "Frontier Heart"

cover image for an AI single "Bullet For the Ones I Love", credited to Frontier Heart

cover image for an AI single titled "Three Lives Deep", credited to "Frontier Heart"

there are a few dozen of these. one of them appears to be specifically for family-annihilators, and another features either reincarnation or murder confessions. idk, I'm not listening to any of them

cover art for an AI single called "Fistful of Fuck You" released under the name Frontier Heart

cover image for an AI single called "One Money, One Credit, One Loan", credited to "Frontier Heart"

cover image for an AI single called "The Flag Don't Fold Easy", credited to Frontier Heart

cover image for an AI single titled "The Flag Wears Both and So Should We," credited to "Frontier Heart"

stumbled on an "AI" "Country" "artist" on Spotify called Frontier Heart.

one money, one credit, one loan

12:00–12:59 is 'noontide'

you could save the country and ensure you at least get some seats and can join a coalition government, rather than facing a complete electoral wipeout

the other options would be 1) do things to become popular, which isn't going to happen, or 2) collapse so badly the Greens are set up to beat Reform head on by the next general election, which they're not going to do *on purpose*

at this point, the main (only?) thing that UK Labour could do to stave off a Reform government is to replace FPTP with proportional representation, right? without a written constitution, is there anything preventing a party with as big a majority as Labour from doing so if it wanted?

I said my usage was limited!

A screenshot from Spotify Wrapped claiming that my "listening age" is 20

anyway: lol

I'm fully aware of the various evils of Spotify; however, I'm still on a former roommate's family plan, so until she cancels or boots me off, my limited usage of streaming services will continue to be there

"Captain Gains" on Capitol Hill Shang-Jin Wei & Yifan Zhou WORKING PAPER 34524 DOI 10.3386/w34524 ISSUE DATE November 2025 Using transaction-level data on US congressional stock trades, we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension. Leaders' superior performance arises through two mechanisms. The political influence channel is reflected in higher returns when their party controls the chamber, sales of stocks preceding regulatory actions, and purchase of stocks whose firms receiving more government contracts and favorable party support on bills. The corporate access channel is reflected in stock trades that predict subsequent corporate news and greater returns on donor-owned or home-state firms.

令 1 1 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 9 Year Figure 2: Estimated dynamic quasi-difference-in-differences coefficient, di, of equation(3), with vertical dashed lines representing 90 percent confidence intervals. The point estimate of the year in which the lawmaker became a congressional leader (Year 0) is normalized to zero. BHAR over the 250 days following each trade is the dependent variable and calculated using the Fama-French five-factor plus momentum as the benchmark model.

After becoming a congressional leader, a politician’s stock portfolio beats out those of peers by 47 (!!!) percentage points a year through trades timed around bills and firms that later get government contracts

www.nber.org/papers/w34524

via @florianederer.bsky.social

The thing about immigration is that xenophobia and racism are the elite centrist position. Here's a senior fellow at Brookings, spouse of CRFP head Maya MacGuineas, explaining the mere presence of foreigners in Germany is a "problem" that someone must solve with "speed and determination."

yes, that's part of it. I think what makes the hegemony of trauma so odd is that it's avoidable in theory, since it arises within one's life history rather than being intrinsic or inborn, but is represented as so ubiquitous as to be nearly unavoidable in practice. a kind of...Traumatic Realism?

this suggests to me that a certain humanistic pessimism may actually be a necessary precondition for forgiveness and solidarity

(recently I saw an Instagram post screenshotting some psychologist claiming that ALL limerance is a product of trauma, because ONLY a deeply traumatized person could possibly maintain such a strong attachment that isn't requited)

thus the self formed by trauma both retains the neoliberal subject duty's to self-optimize, and an incentive to fend off any others who might traumatize them, therefore damaging and minimizing what would otherwise be a potentially limitless self

if every maladaptive behavior can be traced to a traumatic event in someone's life history, then there needn't be anything intrinsic in e.g. the nature of desire or human consciousness that causes unhappiness. you *could* be perfectly happy - if other people hadn't knocked you off track

while trauma discourse figures each person as a compilation of damage accumulated during their life course, it also implicitly presupposes a pre-traumatic self with potential unlimited capacity for happiness

my hypothesis for how the prevalence of trauma discourse in pop psychology serves the purposes of neoliberal individuation:

as we entered November, I thought to myself that one advantage of the subjective experience of time accelerating as I age is that this winter should feel like it breezed right by. now that we're in December, I know the truth: it's always been winter, and it always will be