Stephen Saperstein Frug

Soviet republic of New York takes first key step towards total communism by publicly owning Andrew Cuomo

The factional grifters will hate this, but the Mamdani-Spanberger-Sherrill axis actually suggests the outlines of a broad, emerging Dem coalition organized around both anti-Trump *and* affordability politics, not a party bitterly divided against itself.

Don't get me wrong, tonight looks like it was a great night from sea to shining sea; but let's keep some perspective is all

I hate to throw cold water on everyone's celebration, but remember a few things:
1. Dems now do better when fewer people vote, so off-year elections better than presidential
2. Dems (in particular Biden) fucked up 2024 because they overread the signal of 22
3. NYC is much farther left than country

To spell it out a bit more: Redistricting works by taking safe seats and "spreading the wealth" to competitive ones. Republicans are discovering that there wasn't nearly as much wealth to go around as they'd hoped—so instead of turning competitive seats safe, they've turned safe seats competitive

Library, of course. This is even a question?

Two tweets from Patrick Cosmos. The first says: "working on a new unified theory of american reality i'm calling 'everyone is twelve now'". The second says: "'I'm strong and I want to have like fifty kids and a farm' of course you do. You're twelve. 'I don't want to eat vegetables I think steak and French fries is the only meal' hell yeah homie you're twelve. 'Maybe if there's crime we should just send the army' bles syour heart my twelve year old buddy

Honestly this explains a lot.

What Stuart Stevens says is perfectly obvious, and something you will not see reflected in any of the major media coverage.

Going on Mounjaro (a.k.a. Ozyempic 2.0): A Personal Narrative Possibly the First of a Series Depending on Both Whether Anyone Is Actually Interested and If Any Further Additionally Interesting Things Actually Happen

My latest essay has posted! More of a *personal* essay than most of mine. #Mounjaro #Ozempic #GLP1Agonist
stephenfrug.substack.com/p/going-on-m...

"This fucking sucks" and "all is lost" are two different sentences.

Don't say the second when you mean the first.

The Walton family (who own Walmart) are worth over $400 billion, yet many of their employees are on SNAP.

Bezos is worth over $400 billion, many Amazon employees require SNAP.

The people who need help are not the problem.

It’s corporate greed. It’s an unwillingness to pay a living wage.

One of the better photographs depicting modernity, I'd say:

Well, in a certain way, Trump achieved what the flight 93 hijackers could not

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs

- Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%
- Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%
- Social Sciences by 50–70%
- History by 60%
- Biology by 75%
- The German department will lose all PhD seats
- Sociology from six PhD students to zero

New Godwin’s Law, updated for the Trumposcene era, just dropped.

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death. The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died. While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants. Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....

Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.

Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.

I find @nytpitchbot.bsky.social often walks that fine line between parody and prophecy

Won’t some dice decide most now?

#palindrome

“Nobody wants to be Moist
A bunch of overactive pores
I struggle opening doors
And I lose every tug of war…”

I see pieces like this a lot, often w/ a spin of lamenting cultural degeneration, but reading is a LABOR issue, it’s declined because so many people are working overtime or two jobs & employers expect after hours work. France has Earth’s highest reading rate b/c long lunch breaks & labor protections

An early issue of Grant Morrison‘s Invisibles, #12, is a biography of a guy shot in issue #1 (who is in like 3 panels). But while portraying him as flawed it’s ultimately much more sympathetic than what it sounds like you are imagining

“The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.”
― J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

Terrifying

I'm a big @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social fan but I think that @sethcotlar.bsky.social scores a decisive hit here. The defense of Klein ("he said the right WAY, i.e. talking, not the right CONTENT") breaks down if support a violent overthrow of the government

Well played

You're into baudrillard?!?! Pervert

The big reason I'm trying to hammer "civil conflict/political violence" here is because I've spent a substantial chunk of the last five years looking at mass graves. I want a society where people aren't plotting to kill their neighbors and throw them into one. That's where all this can lead.

I disagree. As a historian I think we won't know unless we go look at the documents, but allow me my impressions: I think anthrax did a *lot*. Especially in the news media (who were targeted), which of course is a vector for further worry when it influenced their reporting

I think it was something like this, but it wasn't the DC sniper, but the anthrax scare. Remember that? It's been pretty much forgotten, but it took place in the month or two after 9/11 and scared the shit out of elites. I'm sure the beltway sniper accelerated things but I think the anthrax was key

We must stand resolutely against political assassination and political violence of all kinds, and just as resolutely against everyone who exploits acts of violence as the pretext or excuse for political repression of political opponents.