not sure exactly what you are trying to say here but pretty certain it's about how you hate waffles
most specifically I would say -
a) healthcare is always very expensive and a serious chunk of any developed state's budget
b) universal healthcare is a *cheaper and better* way of handling this necessary spending
c) the main obstacle to healthcare is not the military budget
as far as I can tell Trump's criteria for choosing him was literally that he was a gay man and therefore must love musical theatre.
lol. CBS had been trying to get Zohran Mamdani for an interview, but Bari Weiss' deranged tweeting caused him to turn it down
link.vanityfair.com/view/5df1007...
Grammarly's AI-fueled edits -- using my name - suggested making up sources and writing vague insinuations.
In my latest for @nytopinion.nytimes.com (gift link) I describe Grammarly's terrible edits in my name -- and call for a federal right of publicity.
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/o...
I've been fascinated with Talarico way before he became a national darling. Part of that is because for a lot of Dem politicians, their support of LGBTQ+ rights lives uneasily with their faith, if they have it at all. But for Talarico, the first flows from the latter.
New: I spoke to Rev. Babs Miller, a lesbian pastor at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Austin, who has known James Talarico since he was "Jimmy." They told me about how Talarico's church formed his support for queer and trans people from a young age.
www.chron.com/culture/arti...
When a federal judge (finally) put ICE officers under oath, they admitted that they are given daily detention quotas and rely heavily on a Palantir-supplied AI tool to select targets, without warrants and without enough evidence to obtain one. They simply go into neighborhoods and round people up.
I feel it in my fingers
I feel it in my toes
The Iran War is over
Because the Strait is closed
most of what you need for pro-natalist policy (strong social welfare net, affordable housing, affordable health care) is good for *everyone*, not just people who want to have children, even if i have to chain and gag the inner reactionary inside me who grumbles about portland's PFA tax
i'm someone who will never have children, my partner and i are firm on that, but pro-natalist policy will have downstream benefits for us childless people as we get older, too, even though i very genuinely find the entire conversation around pro-natalist policy unpleasant
so for the record folks this is the sort of shit that gets spread in your circles.
All the policy nerds are like “why does all the latest Democratic messaging assume voters are innumerate morons who care only for treats?” and, uh…
I have some theories about how they reached this conclusion.
Funnily enough I met the Friends writers at a NATO event and we had a fun chat about this (and the global soft power impact of the show)
If we want better welfare services we have to be able to talk realistically about what and why they cost!
“Neither of us wants the boy or the goat
To get caught in the wheels
Of the “Had Gadya” machine.”
Are these people just out of frame, laughing too?
a tangentially related thing here that i find funny is the number of SV pricks who idolize "real work" (labor, industrial work, etc.) and are profoundly contemptuous of, like, "HR" or "DEI" or "training" or whatever, because they have no idea of how much the latter is involved in that kind of work
I’m a very social introvert
i see a lot of folks posting variations of, "dems won't do anything if they win! they'll just return to the same old same old!" but, speaking from personal experience, the failures of biden and the extreme nature of the current trump admin have caused many in the staffer class to go absolutely rabid
You see this in the discourse around UK/EU and US wages.
Your average working class Brit has the same or better living standards as a working class American. The real divergence comes around for white collar middle class jobs, where a job that nets you 60k in the UK might get you 100k+ in the US.
the point here is that the Iran war spending, as appalling and wasteful as it is, would not fund 'generations' of healthcare but like a week of it.
you are weirdly misreading me and I make exactly this point in the third post in the thread.
The US government spends more per capita on medicare *fraud* than a lot of countries spend on healthcare
relatedly, older folks in the us love to pull out the "i paid into medicare/social security my entire life, you can't cut it" - like, if you just want what you paid in, it would cut your benefits by 50-65%
Tim Walz offering a positive vision of traditional masculinity and being loathed for it was low key one of the most blackpillling events of the past decade plus.
Loathing for the IRGC regime does not make it necessary to celebrate the disastrous strategic vandalism pursued by Trump and Netanyahu.
Loathing for the Trump cartel does not make it necessary to embrace the delusional echo chambers of IRGC cheerleaders.
FFS come on people.
It is both possible, indeed likely, that this ends up as a strategic fiasco for the United States as well as severely weakening Iran's economy, security structures and state capacity.
The inability of so many to grasp political and historical nuance is a curse of our era.
It is completely mad that the government is expelling high flying Sudanese students from British universities - from a scheme that is explicitly aimed at the future leaders of countries.
www.theguardian.com/society/2024... - one of the last great self-taught working class British socialist public servants. Knew him when he was teaching at Tsinghua in the mid-2000s
