The Book of the Void

Note to self: anyone with a bitmoji avatar is invariably a fucking idiot

Let me break this down for you in simple terms

- vote for Hakeem Jeffries at beginning of new Congress in 2025
- experience serial disappointments and messaging fails
- hopefully win at midterms
- choose someone else

He's a shit leader, they should dump him, they'll lose votes if they don't.

Fuck all the way off with that bloody shirt waving

Are you unable to see past a single political cycle
The way to win more political power is to stake out a position on a clear moral issue and fend off the inevitable attacks. You cannot win by only ever playing defense, because you're not giving people anything to vote FOR.

Why? He's weak and rudderless. We have numerous better alternatives.

Unscented gas chambers

I know someone who went from being a lifelong D voter to doing a protest vote for Jill Stein due to disgust over the Gaza issue. When are you going to recognize that a lot of people have moral issues they are simply not willing to compromise on despite the downsides?

No fucking way

Also their insistence on keeping this report secret instead of facing up to it is keeping those same voters away. If someone in the Democratic party wants them back the smart thing to do would be to leak it and clean out this self-inflicted wound instead of letting it fester.

A detail of a Victorian print showing a gentlemen in an exaggerated pose of despair

"hostile and unserious space"

MAGA types openly fantasize about imprisoning and murdering journalists but tell us again how bad things are here

@replsimon.bsky.social was it just talk? Status update please

You should try reading the article first, since it had nothing to do with that.

Why do your screenshots look like they came from a Sega Genesis

The Evolution of Trust an interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other

There's a whimsical but illuminating interactive game that demonstrates the repeated application of different game theory strategies. The right wing does a great job at exploiting these while a lot of centrist players are still stuck at the 'I can't believe you would do that' stage.

ncase.me/trust/

Believing people are fundamentally good is wishcasting, much like 'that's not who we are'. A significant chunk of the population are not, they don't share values or aspirations with the others, and don't subscribe to undersalist assumptions. avoiding conflict inures to their advantage.

Every day spent and essay written describing the problem is a time wasted on fighting it and initiative ceded to people who want to channel institutional power to violent ends. The performative civil rights tactics are an attempt to martyr our way to success. This isn't sustainable.

Trump's support is emotional and atavistic, not intellectually derived or arrived at by reason. Those are just smokescreens exploited by propagandists.

The assholes got their hands on the levers of power and have no plans to release them. This is the unpleasant reality of our times.

Democrats and centrists have spent years trying to win an argument with people whose worldview can be summed up as 'don't care, because fuck you.'

It isn't deeper than that, there's no brilliant syllogism or analytical frame that's going to Change Everything.

Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games Lab-in-the-field experiment reveals that humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games.

It really isn't. There's some good scientific evidence that approximately 1/3 of people are assholes who are only happy by seeing others worse off than themselves, and this is about the size of the immovable MAGA base. They're not going to change or have an epiphany.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games Lab-in-the-field experiment reveals that humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games.

Economy-first voters are just fine with fascism as long as they feel other people are enduring a larger loss than they are. I agree that chasing this demographic too eagerly is a complete waste of time.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

@pfrazee.com I'm getting really tired of every link card opening a 'https://go.bsky.app/redirect?u=[some website]' tab on desktop

This isn't news
Flag it as spam people

It's black and has room for 5 fingers - what are the odds?!

Excuse me, Bill Maher is SMOKING. He is a REBEL, not one of those elite cucumber-sandwich enjoyers with their cucumber sandwiches.

Yeah, well Honest John's flyer in my mailbox says he'll give me a better deal than anyone else on a used car, why don't you report that

An unusually good recommendation, I look forward to reading it.

A cheerful-looking logo with stars and rainbows that invites you to get ready for disappointment

Sure, because common sense and practicality have carried such weight in our politics for the last few decades

I wish academics would spend less time curating their problem collection and more examining the success conditions of various counter-despotism strategies.

We have a good idea of how bad it is and how bad it can get; there's much less written about how tyrannical regimes are toppled.

'News'

Sorry, I'm watching The Psychology of People Who Don't Watch AI Slop Videos

It's because I'm different, independent, and don't run with the crowd - not because I can't, but because I choose not to.