I think the important takeaway here is not what’s being said, but that the New York Times is saying it. That’s a pretty significant shift.

It’s very important to note that Spider still urges people to vote anyway. You can be angry at the deep, deep inadequacies in the current political structures, and you can work to rebuild those structures, but while that work happens you still have to engage in harm reduction. Sometimes, harm reduction means voting for The Beast. It’s fucked, but it’s what you gotta do.

This isn’t just Rogan. There’s a lot of people feeling like this.

An absolutely fascinating polling number we’re seeing now is that - even among Republican voters - people generally see Trump as doing badly on immigration. This is a massive shift from how he was perceived before the election, where immigration was where he polled the strongest IIRC. Actually seeing his immigration policies in action has actually soured right wing voters on them.

And the reason is simple; in their minds, they truly, genuinely did not vote for this. They voted to kick out all the “Bad” immigrants, not the sweet old lady who bakes amazing churros and the nice man who runs the drug store.

It’s the Shirley Exception. They just assumed that the people they like would be exempt. Because they do not understand that you cannot build a machine for cruelty and then ask it to be kind.

The bad news is, these people vote. The good news is, these people represent a deep and serious fracture in Trump’s support, and there is a very real opportunity here for many of them to finally figure out how fucked up their thinking has been all this time.

Meta cutting previous failed ventures to pay for next failed venture.

Even if you can somehow get past the absolutely horrendous privacy implications, how the fuck is this even supposed to work? They want to prevent “digital flashing” (eg, dick pics), but how the fuck is any system supposed to be able to tell the difference between consensual and non-consensual content? What if someone wants to see a picture of someone’s dick? Even assuming you can create a computer model that can accurately identify a dick pic every single time (you can’t), it would also have to be able to infer context to a level that would require effectively human level intelligence and the ability to make judgements across the entirety of a person’s communications. This is so far beyond impossible, from a purely technical standpoint, that I cannot begin to imagine how it was ever allowed to become law.

To put it another way, how many aircraft did the Taliban have?

BTW, anyone who simply thinks that a wealth tax wouldn’t work because the billionaires would all hide their money or whatever; Peter Thiel just bet $3 million that you’re wrong.

As a Canadian, I can’t say I’m upset about America deciding that now is a good time to nerf their own military.

Might as well just call this the “Notice me daddy” act.

Fuck it, Japanese sure beats American. And they still do all their production in Canada, as far as I’m aware.

Unibroue are amazing, if you’ve never tried their beers you’re missing out. La Fin Du Monde, Trois Pistoles, and A Tout La Monde are all exceptional. Also if you can somehow get your hands on it their 30th Anniversary beer is worth every penny.

I will agree that defeatism is always appealing, because if nothing can be done then then you’re no longer obligated to do anything. Expecting the worst is easier than fearing it, because without the chance of success you remove the dreadful element of the unknown.

But with that said, I’d be hesitant to apply any of that to people who resist the idea of voting as a means for change. Many of them are actively seeking change, they just feel that it’s wrong to even include voting in the conversation. And they’re absolutely correct when they say that voting alone will never ever be the answer. That’s an accurate and valid assessment. What I’m disagreeing with is solely the notion, which tends to spin out of that position, that we shouldn’t even talk about voting. Voting matters, but it’s only one tool in a toolkit. If all you have is voting then you’re trying to solve everything with a hammer. But by the same token, you’d be an idiot to throw away your hammer just because you own fifteen other tools.

Yes! You get it!

More people to understand and internalize this idea.

There’s nothing wrong with ignorance. It’s refusing to recognize and correct ignorance that’s the problem.

No, it’s not.

Scary is the guy who can form babby, and drive and own a gun, who is also absolutely and completely convinced that they are right about everything.

Remmy P is not the problem, because Remmy P encountered a situation where their poor information didn’t mesh with reality and immediately stopped and asked for help. Remmy P is learning. Remmy P recognizes their ignorance.

There are people with PhDs who do not have this basic life skill.

Those people scare me. Remmy P just needs a little help.

Remember, everyone is a fucking idiot sometimes. Even (especially) smart people.

Mamdami is absolutely a template for how progressives can win nation wide. But the key is to treat it is as a toolkit, not something to be copy-and-pasted exactly. Mamdami wouldn’t win in, say, Idaho, but there are people who can. They just have to keep hammering on the shit that matters to the average voter.

Biden and Kamala sank because they promised to keep doing exactly the same shit they’d been doing for the last four years, while refusing to acknowledge how much worse the average person’s quality of life had gotten over the last four years. Mamdami won because he focused, hard on cost of living issues. Make that your core message and people will flock to you. Healthcare and groceries. That’s what it’s all about right now.

organize, vote,

A lot of people are going to get upset at you for including “vote” here, but you’re absolutely correct, and those people really need to understand that these are not mutually exclusive imperatives.

Wasn’t the height of Nazi popularity (at least vote wise) something like 30%?

Keep in mind we’re talking about a political system where coalition governments are far more common. It’s not the two party system the US is used to, so votes aren’t a measure of “popularity” per se. What I mean by that is you can have plenty of people who don’t vote for a party, simply because there’s another choice they like better out of the fairly wide array of options, but that doesn’t mean they actively dislike every option they didn’t vote for just that it wasn’t their first choice. On top of that, the Nazis were very smart about putting in place policies that improved the lives of average working Germans (you know, the ones they liked), and they made sure to start out by targeting the minority groups that people least liked, or cared about, before taking their crackdowns wider.

This has been one of Trump’s major misplays. They went in with their immigration crackdown, which should have slotted neatly into that same zone of “Going after the minority groups people least liked” but in order to hit Trump’s outlandish target numbers they had to start rounding up the immigrants that everyone actually likes. Turns out for the most part Americans actually really like Abdul who runs the corner shop and gives them extra meat on their delhi sandwich, and they really like Eduardo who does their landscaping and is always on time and super polite, and the immigrants they hate are mostly just fictions made up by Fox News. Whereas Jewish people in Nazi Germany really were pretty actively disliked by a very broad swathe of the populace (the roots of European antisemitism go back millennia), so there was a lot less resistance to the concept as a whole.

It was very cumbersome to take a picture in the 1930s.

Yes, but you’re also not travelling as far from your home neighbourhood to do your job as any kind of cop or government agent. So a lot of the people around you are going to recognise you that evening at the bar or grocery store. People generally moved in smaller circles.

This actually relates, in a weird but interesting way, to how people get broken out of conspiracy theories.

One very common theme that’s reported by people who get themselves out of a conspiracy theory is that their breaking point is when the conspiracy asserts a fact that they know - based on real expertise of their own - to be false. So, like, you get a flat-earther who is a photography expert and their breaking point is when a bunch of the evidence relies on things about photography that they know aren’t true. Or you get some MAGA person who hits their breaking point over the tariffs because they work in import/export and they actually know a bunch of stuff about how tariffs work.

Basically, whenever you’re trying to disabuse people of false notions, the best way to start is always the same; figure out what they know (in the sense of things that they actually have true, well founded, factual knowledge of) and work from there. People enjoy misinformation when it affirms their beliefs and builds up their ego. But when misinformation runs counter to their own expertise, they are forced to either accept that they are not actually an expert, or reject the misinformation, and generally they’ll reject the misinformation, because accepting they’re not an expert means giving up on a huge part of their identity and their self-esteem.

It’s also not always strictly necessary for the expertise to actually be well founded. This is why the Epstein files are such a huge danger to the Trump admin. A huge portion of MAGA spent the last decade basically becoming “experts” in “the evil pedophile conspiracy that has taken over the government”, and they cannot figure out how to reconcile their “expertise” with Trump and his admin constantly backpedalling on releasing the files. Basically they’ve got a tiny piece of the truth - there really is a conspiracy of powerful elite pedophiles out there, they’re just not hanging out in non-existent pizza parlour basements and dosing on adrenochrone - and they’ve built a massive fiction around that, but that piece of the truth is still enough to conflict with the false reality that Trump wants them to buy into.