Chris Miller

Let me tell you a tale of how completely the normies have been mobilized. My 14 year-old niece has done School of Rock for the past 5 years; last summer she was part of their touring band, and the kids loved playing together so much that they decided to keep doing it. (1/?)

a man in a tie is sitting at a table with a glass of wine and the words `` shots '' written on the screen . ALT: a man in a tie is sitting at a table with a glass of wine and the words `` shots '' written on the screen .

Cause & effect!!! (everyone drink)

I think people are overestimating how much a Democrat crowing about his policies would go over, particularly considering we are still arguing about whether the economy was good under Biden.

We had just lived through a decade or two of below average inflation. People took its return as a major shock, and something that must be punished.

The populace really fails at some basic cause and effect stuff, and it's dooming us all.

As much as people like to mock conservatives for being divorced from reality, segments of the online left really give them a run for their money.

Your two minute hates against Will Stancil won't win elections or enact the Democratic Socialism you (and I!!) want to see.

Again, I hope everyone likes Lost Decades, because the lesson Democrats have learned is to never try for full employment & ambitious policy in response to massive economic crises, bc you’ll get destroyed for single digit inflation you didn’t even cause & told you didn’t care about the working class

From Cyberlibertarianism: Weev’s Dangerous “Wisdom” There may be no clearer example of the passage between cyberlibertarianism and cyberfascism than the one embodied in the person of Andrew Auernheimer, who styles his name as weev. A self-identified hacker who prided himself on berating others for their lack of skill, often focusing on minorities and women, weev had long been active in hacker, cryptography, and far-right social media sites like 4chan, especially the “unofficial 4chan wiki” (Read 2011) called Encyclopedia Dramatica (Schwarz 2008). Auernheimer is a lifelong white nationalist, neo-Nazi, and anti-Black racist (Southern Poverty Law Center n.d.) who has frequently associated with many of the most virulent figures, platforms, and publications associated with the far right. He used his influence with digital advocates to direct abuse toward those he disliked.

The late David Golumbia saw weev (real name: Andrew Auernheimer) as a linchpin in Silicon Valley's turn toward fascism. He spends nearly a whole chapter on weev in "Cyberlibertarianism: The Right Wing Politics of Digital Technology."

How and why police actually support the federal invasions—I have been working on this article for ~6 months, trying to make sense of Trump’s nationwide surge of DHS officers, how it has evolved, what brought us here, and what will remain after it ends.

Josh Hawley and JD Vance do not believe this
Josh Hawley and JD Vance do not believe this
Josh Hawley and JD Vance do not believe this

They are lying to get votes for oligarchy

That a lot of the story of 2024 is the American *consumer* class going Kalecki is really important and something we need to deal with; instead of pretending something more convenient happened.

But we didn't have economic stagnation for the working class. We had a period of unusually *high* wage growth for low income workers.

I didn't say journalistic writing doesn't move people, I said narrative writing can do it more powerfully by encouraging more perspective taking.

Good readers might do that automatically, but for many others immersive narratives better trigger that.

Or, you know, an ending?

It so clearly seemed to be setting up a sequel, so why didn't he write one? Didn't sell well enough?

with alt text, because everyone needs to be able to read this 😭

Pro-Vaccine Messages Actually Backfire, Study Finds (NBC News) | Department of Government A new study led by Dartmouth’s Brendan Nyhan suggests that public health messages aimed at increasing childhood vaccinations are actually having the reverse effect, reports NBC News.

Has this problem gotten better or worse in the past 20 of traditional journalistic reporting?

Has empirical research found that anti-vax beliefs are profoundly resistant to persuasive messages from "experts"?

I'm very open to new approaches that might actually work!
share.google/ZsY5GZUzZMs4...

Yes, all the other ways of writing this can have some positive impacts, but clearly modeling the knowledge that your decisions created this tragedy and that you know it and have to live with that guilt has greater persuasive impact.

... if the character you're inhabiting finds ways to deflect and minimize their guilt, or if they fully realize their guilt in the matter. I think it makes for a more effective cautionary tale.

One power of the written word is it uniquely invites you to live in the shoes of the character whose character you are reading. Journalistic writing doesn't do this as well as narrative writing, and I think doing so has a powerful ability to change people's minds. And I think it does matter...

This was a parent of a child who caught measles as an infant before she could have been inoculated, not the parent of a child who chose to ignore the advice of medical experts.

Her loss is tragic, but it doesn't lead one to imagine the guilt of losing a child to your own poor decision making.

Propaganda during WWI and WWII in fact

The Struggle for the Fed | Trevor Jackson The Fed is under attack. Can it be both protected and held accountable?

We don't talk about it this way, but the US government's choice to pursue austerity in the 2010s was a truly monstrous crime -- yet another crime for which none of the guilty elites paid any penalty at all, not even reputational.

‘Domestic Terrorism’ ICE Contractor Palantir’s Tools for Tracking Dissent – Byline Times Digital / Print Edition The controversial data firm co-founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel – which holds UK government contracts – researched protest prediction for the US Army before agreeing to build ICE’s data platform to conduct mass deportation. Nafeez Ahmed reports

🟨 Print Edition — ‘Domestic Terrorism’ ICE Contractor Palantir’s Tools for Tracking Dissent

The controversial data firm co-founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel…

🔗 https://subscribe.bylinetimes.com/edition/83/domestic-terrorism-ice-contractor-palantirs-tools-for-tracking-dissent/

She wanted a 'freebirth' with no doctors. Online groups convinced her it would be OK. As Judith's pregnancy stretched past 44 weeks, she grew worried. But rather than seeking medical assistance, she turned to extreme online communities.

This is a rare exception from a few years back that gobsmacked me, about a woman falling prey to freebirth mythology.

She wanted a 'freebirth' with no doctors. Online groups convinced her it would be OK. share.google/jX3RjZDfqbvC...

I think it's more difficult than you might think to find to find people to whom that actually happened, and who came out of it with the "correct" conclusion for an effective cautionary tale.

More often you get this, from the parent of the first measles death in TX.

Yeah, but real people have inconvenient beliefs and ways of managing their guilt and grief that are not conducive to the persuasive intent of this piece.

Yes, but do you think more hardcore ev christian types read Atlantic pieces or more Marianne Williamson types?

People's feelings, once meaningfully activated, are not so easily reduced by facts. We have so many examples of this now.

I liked the piece.

It's unchartered, but we can see the terrain: the territory ahead includes masked secret police taking people to concentration camps but not new vaccines. That's our reward for a system in which fewer than 20 people, all of them deranged and malicious, control over $3 trillion.