lila graham (mere finite mode)

hello again by the way. ive talked to many of you under the cover of anonymity (my alt) in the interim.

my buddy habeas is off scot-free. thought they might suspend him.

guy classified as asian and african american by us quasi-legal racial classifications checks asian and african american boxes. okay. whats the story guys? a substack eugenicist posted about it? no way....

id love to read it if you're somebody who circulates drafts!

altho i think reframing this question which could be about desire-individuation in terms of causal explanations might be more indicative of my idiosyncrasies than the nature of desire lol

i am mostly disinclined to believe someone who 1: claims that gender doesn't structure their sexual desires at all and 2: maintains a consistency in the gender of the people they're attracted to that would be very surprising otherwise (as in, more than a handful of cases of attraction in their life)

if we are taking gender as something as thin as category membership, divorced from engaging in gendered practices/behavior, i think it's basically trivial that that does next to none of the explanatory work for *anyone's* attraction. on the construal that includes all that gendered activity, though,

congrats!! looks super cool, very excited to read it!

He proposes releasing some ICE prisoners to labor on farms where the employers will “own them” and be responsible for them.

Historians have spent decades meticulously proving the straight line between slavery and modern capitalism’s concept of the laborer—or we could just let them say it.

ohhhh i completely forgot that he was married to carole hooven

does anyone know how it is alex byrne got this way? regular transphobic bigotry is sort of in the air — totally explicable. but this sort of life-destroying obsession with transgender people doesn't come from nowhere. whats the story?

Rural hospitals and small colleges have kept many small towns lights on. Both are being eliminated with this budget bill

the budget bill is an unmitigated disaster. if it passes as is, we're going to head straight into a truly calamitous recession. cutting federal benefits at the start of a recession is an incredibly stupid (and evil!) move. with tariffs and federal research funding vanishing as well...

this is the level of funding where all the possibilities for American politics that have been described as hyperbolic over the past decades - the comparisons to Nazi Germany and other nightmares of the 20th century - become logistically possible and politically likely

but he never told me what he would do as mayor to combat the joker

Dear Professor Byrne

hi everybody! if you're an academic philosopher and would prefer your colleagues didn't produce propaganda which furthers the trump administration's attempt to eradicate transgender people from public life, consider reading/signing this open letter about it!

dearprofessorbyrne.wordpress.com

i do think inasmuch as we are thinking of ourselves as pundits i don't have much sympathy for the "it's not a death sentence" line — the stakes are more important there because
trans kids are not gonna get their hopeful messaging from CNN or the NYT or whatever. good to circulate it in-community tho

was talking about this a bit yesterday, bsky.app/profile/deus..., but im not very optimistic about us running all our language through a test of whether or not we think it would work if we're pretending we are pundits. not that we don't have to sometimes speak to the ~public~ but tbh most of us dont

it is all context dependent, though. not a cop out to point that out! ofc there's still work to be done to elaborate what kinds of things make sense in what contexts, but i suspect the rhetorical moves that work will be visible through their operation, rather than being pre-planned by committee here

in his time running the paper, he was a cruel and authoritarian boss, and really pumped out the pro-iraq-invasion propaganda. he is mostly remembered for his mishandling of the jayson blair plagiarism scandal, but he's much more interesting as an example of 21st century liberal journalism in general

"An unmistakable fog of political incompetence" hangs over the Clinton White House. Bob Dole shills "for a corrupt status quo." Dan Rostenkowski acts like a "capo"; the rest or the House leadership isn't much better—"plump fellows who never saw a tough choice they couldn't dodge." All this punch stuff has appeared on the editorial pages of the New York Times since Howell Raine became editor on January 1. H3s been credited with raising the Times' editorial voice as well as stirring readers grown accustomed to the page's tradition of moderation and muzzy liberalism. Because the 50 year old Raines grew up in Alabama and worked for Deep South papers before joining the Times in 1978, the consensus is that he has brought a gritty, redneck populism to the Times—a "kick ass tone" in the words of National Journal.

the cover of Howell Raines' "New York Times Bestseller and Notable Book" entitled "Fly Fishing Through The Midlife Crisis." there is a picture of him fly fishing in the center.

howell raines is an interesting guy because of how much he prefigured what's up with the "liberal media" now. as the editorial editor of the times he really changed its trajectory towards what we see today, and coasted off of a hack literary brand of "southern authenticity," a liberal JD Vance type.

a tombstone. the name is "A. M. ROSENTHAL." the epitaph and dates read "HE KEPT THE PAPER STRAIGHT. May 2, 1922 - May 10, 2006"

often think about how the tombstone of abe rosenthal (who is the man most responsible for the times' horrible mishandling of the aids crisis) has an epitaph reading "HE KEPT THE PAPER STRAIGHT." i don't have a similarly ironic/infuriating anecdote about judith miller, howell raines, etc. though.

the new york times is so evil. i sort of expect fascist american politicians to be evil — it's just what they are — but if there's anybody who knows better and could have done better it's the new york times. you'd think they would have learned something from 2003, or from 1982, but no.

In this metaphor, the middle eastern country being attacked is the USSR, not the beleaguered empire—ran by a ring of spineless power hungry yes men—that is attempting to topple aforementioned middle eastern country. I am very intelligent.

After Getting The Ruling It Wanted, New York Times Publishes 6 Anti-Trans Articles The paper has lost all claim to objectivity on transgender people.

1. After the Skrmetti decision, the New York Times has published 6 articles dancing on the graves of trans youth and spreading disinformation on care.

It was cited 7 times in the ruling.

Read my latest on what will be a black stain on the NYT for a generation.

Subscribe to support my journalism.

Dog they passed a law banning gender affirming care. The options are sue to try to stop it or don’t.

that's all i have to say regarding things to *do* beyond words right now. but my post concerned words, and the point was honestly a basic one; the right thing to say depends on who you're talking to. "it gets better" style remarks are both helpful for some people and very harmful for others.

not what im saying at all, but unfortunately my suggestion relies on reading between the lines. some context: im a public employee writing on a public platform under my legal name

only some things should be said on a public platform with names attached. regardless, everyone who wants it has a moral right to access trans healthcare — hrt, surgeries, etc. no amount of rhetoric is going to ameliorate all the suffering caused by the gap between that right and our current world