Erstwhile Gardener

The truth is in politics almost nobody cares about ideas and almost everybody cares about vibes. (And even most people who say they care about ideas are using that to justify their takes on vibes.)

A thing that Shaun does a lot is making up a liberal to be mad at

Many people with power and influence have a weak and changeable set of core beliefs. Chris Rufo knows and uses this, we have to too.

Tweet from David Sirota: Huge congratulations to the Pod Save Guys, the Abundance Guys and all the Democratic pundits who suddenly discovered Mamdani and started saying nice things about him less than 36 hours ago as soon as the Polymarket odds shifted - this victory is all you guys, great work

A certain type of guy is so allergic to coalition-building or taking a W that if anyone he deems uncool embraces his preferred candidate, it’s proof of something nefarious or insincere.

The politics of bullying and flattery is everywhere and it sucks so much

Mamdani-Lander is the blueprint for Democrats going forward in so many ways

NYC Comptroller Brad Lander was just arrested by Trump’s ICE agents because he asked to see a judicial warrant.

This is fascism and all New Yorkers must speak in one voice. Release him now.

imo this is especially frustrating because it seems to come way less from Klein and Thompson themselves and more from a group that has attached themselves to the movement. I am down for Klein as an ally in this fight I am much less down for Yglesias and Barro

Shaun is just terminally bad-faith at all times. This isn’t why liberals are mad at you dude they’re mad because you’re constantly lying

Quietly very good in The Night Before, a movie I think is underrated

Genuinely worried for Will's safety at this point

Recommend the games Later Alligator and Ace Attorney! Both very fun and funny

Stardew Valley or Ace Attorney might be fun— not complicated, both with a sense of humor and discovery

God I fucking hate online debate culture. This hatred for hypocrisy above all comes from the world of quote tweets and twitch streams and it is just the lowest form of debate possible

Governance idea: democrats deliberately propose awful policy knowing republicans will immediately propose the opposite. Republicans get to own the libs, democrats get “bipartisanship”, everybody wins

And like to be clear I think Thompson and Klein are basically right on this issue, and I don’t necessarily blame them for the response. It’s just that this book is most useful to a California state senator and least useful to Richie Torres

I think abundance is addressing real and frustrating issues (the inability to build in blue states and cities is a legitimate problem for many reasons) but it feels like and is a distraction when the big issues of the moment are corruption and unchecked authoritarianism. YIMBY/NIMBY shit has to wait

If you think every death threat made to someone u find annoying online is fake you are being willfully naive. The internet will send death threats over so much less!

This is the danger of book discourse— a tiny percent of people who have opinions on it have actually read it. At least with film a good number of hot take artists will have seen the movie!

This feels connected to the men discourse to me. Boys whose only sense of feminism comes from SJW cringe tiktoks, jokes about ethics in video games turning into decades-long harassment campaigns, etc etc etc

Love white people yelling at other white people about how their niche political positions aren't diverse enough. What is this, Wesleyan University?

In both academia and journalism there’s this pervading notion that “objectivity” and “giving both sides equal weight” is the same thing, which makes centrist orgs way too willing to platform right-wing lunacy but also makes people on the left way too critical of the concept of objectivity

Which is weird bc “high and tight” more accurately describes what happened to Mussolini

The ADL have put themselves into an morally and politically untenable position and I would feel a bit bad if it weren’t for everything they’ve said and done in the last two years

It’s funny too bc the meanness feels so forced! Like you can see them calculating exactly how mean to be

the national comms ppl all have political cartoon brain

Democrats and legacy media are both, in different ways, convinced that cleverness is a high virtue and therefore they’re too smart to point out the things that feel obvious to them, and then the obvious things happen without resistance

Aside from the obvious direct harm, what's so irritating is that a handful of spoiled ignorant assholes are breaking things that we all built together. They weren't content to own almost everything, they had to wreck what little they didn't own. It's vandalism on a mass scale and has to be punished

Similar to Hanania where their innate snobbery has somehow won out over their insane prejudices, kinda fascinating to witness