Jason O

i'd say it did. the public put a group of thieves, vandals and extremists in office last november and they promptly went about destroying everything that might work to limit their ability to loot, steal and inflicting pain on the people they hate

Opinion | JD Vance Is Idling at the Edges of American Politics

i think vance is only interesting inasmuch as he extremely unprincipled and thus a good guide to where the GOP is going (gift link)

made a similar point on the opinions podcast this week in response to the idea that epstein is a dead end. not only are actual voters interested in this but it divides the gop and puts pressure on the president. it would be political malpractice to treat it as a sideshow

I guess I see the sequence of circumstances that I suspect contributed to the 5 point shift (& I include the assassination attempt as being a part of that) as rolling the snake eyes, but I definitely see your point.

Hard to know if that was overly optimistic or not. We might have genuinely rolled the snake eyes!

It's funny that multiple NYT writers were on here yesterday spiraling out of control trying to defend the integrity of the paper and then today they publish an enormous puff piece on Olivia Nuzzi, including glamour shots. It's like the paper did it specifically to make them look bad.

Puzzling that the centrist pundits who are arguing for a "big tent" Democratic Party are the same people who spend all their time on social media attacking the left. The Venn diagram of these two groups is practically a circle.
Meanwhile, if you take Dems and subtract the left, you get 2000 and 2024

The way I square the circle is that the journalists would like for Nuzzi to sleep with them, and that's a gross unprofessional thought, but its a gross unprofessional choice to platform her nonsense, too

look I just hope that if I'm ever at the peak of my career and my profession, and do something that is ethically insane, personally deranged, and politically grotesque, I too can call up the most powerful journalistic institution in America to write a swooning defense of me

who gets this kind of shitty romanticizing prose written about them, and who gets dry commentary, depends on being in the club or not. as a journalist I find little more obnoxious than the idea of going to bat for somebody who violated basic professional ethics simply because she's in the club

capping a week of stories about elite depravity with a story about a journalist who broke basically every possible ethical rule (and was rewarded for it) to elevate an unqualified wealthy failson who is trying to destroy american public health is, well, it's a lot, tbh

Olivia Nuzzi got sent in to do a profile but it turned out she wanted to fuck the subject so we sent in Jacob Bernstein to profile her and it turns out he also wants to fuck the subject

turns out the emails we should have been reading in 2016 were from the NYT

Tried to explain some of these emails to my very offline wife over the phone, and she was like, “Okay but you’re paraphrasing and exaggerating for effect; what do they really say?” and I’m like no, I am reading.

And whenever I do peel back the curtain, it’s like “yeah I dunno how THEY’RE managing it but that sure as Hell isn’t for ME.”

See, this is why I try not to peer into the romantic partnerships of others (unless I’m explicitly asked to opine on it); all the complexity of another’s inner world, multiplied (and further intensified) by the number of participants.

It was strangled in its cradle by powerful people who didn't want to be subjected to its searching gaze. It didn't go even close to far enough.

Today is a good day to remember, and to say, that the #MeToo movement was right, and was righteous, and has been vindicated over and over again. There was no overreach. There was no excess. There was no they-went-too-far.

So much work remains to be done.

Honestly the Epstein files kinda give an explanation as to why the (elite-led, because basement dwelling groypers didn't do jack shit) backlash against MeToo and "wokeness" was so intense and ultimately succesful.

My takeaway from every new Epstein revelation is that some powerful people victimized many powerless young women, many more knew, some actively enabled it--and we're still being told that MeToo and accountability for sexual violence have gone too far

I mean honestly, it *does* explain how elite backlash against MeToo was about as intense as the reaction to 9/11.

Important to understand the Epstein stuff and the fascism and the corruption are, in a lot of ways, really all the same story from different angles: powerful men who can and do abuse vulnerable people around them because they can, and because systems of elite accountability catastrophically failed

Also important to remember that everyone involved in the coverup -- whether formally or informally -- is part of the exact same conspiracy against the victims and against the nation.

TOS era Kirk was a top tier lib

I am disappointed that he has since been found. Better if he had remained lost.

Hyperreality & Resistance - Bees and Spiders and Other Stuff Democratic Politics in Heightened Reality in the Second Trump Era

updated my post to clarify something: the reason that it's a problem that our leaders live in reality is that our enemies don't, and our enemies are making the unreal real for the most vulnerable people in our society first
bees.leaflet.pub/3m5f5jfimlc2...

Look, I get what Whitehouse is trying to say here, I really, really do, but I’m not sure that this is a winning spin message for the (rightfully) angry base.

(I also don’t see any mechanisms for achieving any of the policy goals he outlines in the thread now, but that’s a separate issue.)

See but even “really fucking bad” still sounds like an undersell!

I cannot even articulate what a nightmarish hellscape healthcare used to be pre-ACA.