Carlson

The one thing I'll say about current events tonight is that its ok to be upset about how the shutdown appears to have gone down at time of typing - you *should* be upset. You should be angry and sad and many other things.

My usual advice/threat comes attached though:

don't fucking doom.

digital painting of two skeletons staring into a snowy tundra skeleton 1: how will we get through this? skeleton 2: I don't know but we are going together art by roxiqt.com

We can't give up now. ❄️

Time for me to break out a political hot take I don't get to use often:

Abolish the Senate.

My old, semi-popular tweet about getting booed at the DSA meeting for liking Hamilton, now in essay form!

Claim: Mamdani is a communist. False: Any real communist will happily spend six hours explaining why this isn’t true.

Fact-Checking Claims About Zohran Mamdani https://theonion.com/fact-checking-claims-about-zohran-mamdani/

The angel on my shoulder hates Republicans for being evil. The devil on my shoulder hates them for not even being good at it. But at least we’re all on the same page for once.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that a big piece of Mamdani’s campaign was simply “cities are cool and lots of people enjoy living in them” which in and of itself dismantles alot of rightwing talking points

Among other things, last night was a demonstration of the abject moral necessity to tell doomers to fuck off.

Americans have spoken and they demand wokeness

No matter how hard people try to convince us having empathy is wrong,

it is right.

No matter how hard people try to convince us that diversity is a weakness,

it is a strength.

No matter how hard people try to convince us that love is limited,

it is unlimited.

Turning the Civil War from "a tragedy, brother against brother" into "The Good Guys Destroyed The Bad Guys" is necessary. It is absolutely essential. The fourth grade class I attended in the 1990s sang Dixie every morning and we need to completely stomp that out.

a genre of take that drives me up the wall is “this government is acting like they won’t be held accountable, therefore they already have durable authoritarian rule locked in”. the hell they do! more likely they’re just extremely mean and stupid.

Mamdani's model only works in a few places now, the most effective way for him to spread his ideas is to be a good mayor.

Every day, I make a conscious effort to do the right thing because I desperately want to be a good person. It's not easy. I can be impatient, angry, bitchy, and selfish like everyone else, but I think it helps to remember that being a decent human is a lifelong habit, not a permanent state of being.

i’m under the influence of living in nyc as cuomo and his allies try to finish one of the ugliest campaigns in recent memory as hideously as possible, so take this all with grains of salt but: i just feel like this country is not as mean and as brutish and as nasty as these people seem to do. 1/n

i do think Dems should moderate on immigration in the sense that Dems should redesign our immigration policy to work like people think it works: you wait for a while (but not forever) to get into the country and then you wait for a while (but not forever) to become a citizen.

it doesn’t feel great that the Left has engineered this sort of can’t-win reaction tic of treating any oppositional gestures by the Dem establishment as evidence they’re about to be crushed and any friendly gestures as evidence they’re about to be neutered

Happy birthday! 🥳

Happy birthday! 🥳

Tiny Magpie sewing oversized buttons onto a piece of cloth

He is so busy!

One of the things I think the vibe coding stuff hasn't yet really come to terms with is junior developers and owners often think the key skill for developers is ability to write code, and principal developers know the /actual/ super power that distinguishes principals is their ability to debug.

Drawtober Day 31: Happy Halloween!

#drawtober #Halloweenie

Allowing people to raise bad-faith arguments in perpetuity without ever questioning their motives just validates those arguments and gives them a veneer of plausibility and acceptability.

Deplatforming Nick Fuentes was what kept him from being mainstreamed, it worked. Elon's replatforming of all of these people and allowing actual Nazis around is why the US government is now publishing white supremacist propaganda regularly.

This is not a new debate. Deplatforming works.

Can't overstate how fucked up it is that unraveling what is arguably the greatest achievement in the history of humanity is now a motivating issue of one of the two dominant parties in the U.S.

I think fundamentally the problem with post liberal thinkers is that they seem to assume that vanquishing liberalism results in their enemies being converted or defeated and not becoming radicalized into enemies who no longer extend the mercies they once did.

I’d rather have a million SNAP abusers than a single SNAP person go hungry even once

“some people abuse SNAP” your soul is rotten

A purple button badge on squidwards shirt that says "I'm not ignoring you I'm just really busy and if I don't use my few free hours for myself instead of responding to everyone I will straight up lose my sanity"

don't have a lot left to say about the Nazi tat discourse other than the general observation that when some say they oppose "moralism" they mean they oppose self-indulgent or otherwise unprincipled appeals to faux-morality and when others say they oppose "moralism" they mean they oppose morals