Miniver Cheevy

Today we must draw a line

2026-04-07T10:47:00.000-07:00

This morning, President Trump threatened to commit massive genocide in Iran.

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!

Today we are all tested.

Congress and others in power

You bear greater responsibility than ordinary citizens. Getting this right was your job.

Anything short of active opposition to Trump and all his works from the beginning places you among the disgraced for the rest of your life: no voice, no power, no responsibility.

Anything short of vigorous effort to impeach President Trump before the sun sets means you belong in the dock at The Hague for crimes against humanity.

Citizens

Today I saw someone on social media say:

The only groups you can effectively blame for this are MAGA voters. The independents stupidly moved for economic reasons they thought this creep would fix. They basically did a Transformers unite and shit this horror on the rest of us.
It simply wouldn’t have happened without them.
A lot of minority voters voted for him, too. And I have seen people wishing harm on groups of people because some people in a group did that.
That is also fucked up. They also didn’t singlehandedly vote this man in.
It took groups of people to create this mess we are in. A lot of factors go into presidential election victories and movements(propaganda, voting restrictions, and deliberate ignorance baked into our citizenry).
So, if someone is like THE LEFT IS THE FAULT they can go to hell.

I concur that moral responsibility rests on Trump voters and people in positions of real power. Even the most prominent American leftists have just not had the power to bear meaningful responsibility. And I have repeatedly and publicly allowed for people who refused to vote:

I can respect saying “I just could not bring myself to vote for the lesser evil on this”. I vigorously disagree, but it is legitimate.

I meant it. But my grudging respect ends today.

And I have repeatedly and publicly extended this grace:

The bargain we offer to Trump voters is that we grant that it was an honest mistake if they admit that it was a mistake.

I meant it. But that ends today, too.

The new covenant

If you have not opposed Trump to even the minimal measure of voting at every opportunity for the only electoral candidates who viably contested him, today is your last chance to avoid permanent disgrace.

“Gosh, I made an honest mistake” no longer cuts it.

You must admit today that you got a vital and easy call catastrophically wrong. You must admit that you have no wisdom to offer on any subject until you have rigorously examined & altered your principles to make this error impossible for you in the future, and then demonstrated to the satisfaction of people who opposed Trump that you have gotten your head straight.

If you positively supported Trump with even just a ballot, you bear a moral debt which you have to work off with active effort to prevent another Trump ever threatening the world again.

Anything less is so morally reprehensible and dangerously stupid that anyone who ever credits anything you ever say or entrusts you with even the smallest measure of power or responsibility joins you in the ranks of the disgraced.

If you want anything more than teeth-gritting support for your fundamental rights as a human being, you must devote the rest of your life to vigorously supporting those of us who got it right in our labors to build a better world.

Murc’s Law

2026-03-20T11:17:00.000-07:00

the widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics

You’ve Probably Never Heard of “Murc’s Law”, But You’ve Seen It in Action Lots of Times assembles several useful commentaries. (It has a good reference to Romney bitterness.)

See also Campos’ Exception from The paradoxical limits of Murc’s law:

If the government is shut down, that is because the party that is against the government [the Republicans] has succeeded in achieving its reason for existence, which is to not have a government, or at least one that actually works.

Facts have a YIMBY bias

2026-03-19T18:31:00.000-07:00

For now this is just a disorganized stub index. I keep needing resources about housing policy, so I’m going to start racking them up here.

Ned Resnikoff

A policy wonk I like.

Dissent | Supply and the Housing Crisis: A Debate

Debunking a lot of silly left-NIMBY arguments.

The Nation | A YIMBY Theory of Power

A response to criticism of the Abundance YIMBYs.

Roosevelt Institute | There Is No Housing Affordability Without Building More Housing

The vacant housing canard

Debunking NIMBYism: A Closer Look at Vacant Housing Units

A few key statistics showing that there is not a big resevoir of unoccupied housing which people could move into tomorrow.

Millions of U.S. Homes Are Sitting Vacant, So Why Are Homes Still So Expensive?

Another look at the numbers on vacant housing.

Why vacant homes won’t solve our housing shortage

Another overview of the fundamentals.

Building “luxury” housing

Many NIMBYs say that allowing more housing development will not bring down housing costs because developers will just build “luxury” housing. But even building fancy housing brings down housing costs, because it soaks up housing demand by affluent people who would otherwise bid up the cost of existing housing stock.

The Downmarket Impact of New Multifamily Housing: Evidence from a Honolulu Condo Tower

A case study showing that fancy new housing brings down the cost of all the housing nearby.

Curbing Rising Housing Costs: A Model-Based Policy Comparison

An academic paper with evidence that building new “luxury” housing might actually be the best way to bring down housing prices.

Policy

Beyond Skepticism: Data Confirms Auckland's Zoning Reforms Delivered on Housing Promises

A case study showing that zoning reform brought down housing costs.

California YIMBY | Restoring the California Dream

A comprehensive proposal.

Tax Incentives and the Supply of Low-Income Housing

A study showing that tax credits targeted at the creation of “affordable” housing is ineffective.

Pew | Austin’s Surge of New Housing Construction Drove Down Rents

Increased supply lowers costs.

Politico | The left’s housing civil war is ending

YIMBYism is not neoliberalism.

Housing the unhoused

It turns out that high housing costs cause people to become unhoused, and the most effective policies to address houselessness are to lower housing costs and to just give people on the street stable housing.

Finland’s Zero Homeless Strategy: Lessons from a Success Story

An overview of a policy success.

Two encounters with the grift

2026-03-05T13:16:00.000-08:00

I have an unwholesome interest in scams.

A call from a boiler room

One day back in the 20^th century I got a cold call from a young lady working in a boiler room somewhere. She had an Exciting Offer for me. She talked through her script with earnest, clumsy enthusiasm. I let her run for a minute, then gave her a couple of softball questions, which she fielded by awkwardly reading scripted answers. Then I took a guess.

“Is today your first day at this job?”

“Yeah, sorry, I’m still learning.”

“No harm done. You’re doing great. But can you tell me how your employer makes money from this?”

She started to paraphrase the rap from her script, but I interrupted her. “No, that is not how they make money.” Then I explained the scam to her.

She paused a long moment. “Wait. Really?”

“Yeah. Now, I don’t want to tell you what to do. Working this kind of job is a bummer. You wouldn’t have taken it if you didn’t really need the money.”

“I sure do.” She said it with conviction I was glad she could not muster when reading the script.

“So think about this. Your employer is lying to me in order to rip me off. Are you sure that they will keep the promises they made to you?”

“Oh.”

“Hang in there. And have a good day.”

“Thank you.”

I felt like a hero.

Short con on the street

One day I was walking up Powell Street in San Francisco, near Union Square, among the tourists. A man in a nice suit and no necktie approached me. He sheepishly confessed to being in a jam; things had gone sideways for him, his wife & kid were holed up in a hotel room, and he needed a little money to get his car and them back on the road.

He was good, but I made him work for it with some pointed questions. He had great answers, and he really sold the mix of anxiety and embarrassment. I gave him forty bucks, and he handled the blow beautifully — grateful and eager to go sort out his troubles. Worth every penny.

Maybe six or eight years later, I was walking up Powell again, and I saw him scouting the crowd; he was even wearing the same suit. I hoped I might get to see him work someone else. But instead he approached me. I understood him not recognizing me; the last time I had been clean-shaven, with my hair tied back, dressed casually, while this time I was beardy with my hair down and wore a good suit.

It was uncanny having him give me the exact same pitch again. I drew out my wallet, pulled out a couple of twenties, grinned, and said, “You told me the same story right here on Powell Street years ago; I gave you forty because I admired your craft. I’ll give you another forty now if you tell me why you marked me.”

He tried to bluff past it. He didn’t know what I was talking about, he had to get back to his wife and kid, blah blah blah.

“No, I already heard that one. But I really will pay to hear what about me got you to choose me as your mark,” I said cheerfully.

His demeanor changed. He was sorry he had bullshitted me. The reality was that he was in a different jam, but he figured the wife and kid thing would be more convincing. He started to lay out this whole different story.

“That’s not what I asked.” I waved the money. “Satisfy my curiosity, or don’t.”

His demeanor changed even more sharply. He was suddenly in tears. He was desperate because he was in trouble. He trembled. The guy was good. I feigned a sympathetic expression and enjoyed him working it for half a minute. But I pulled my hand with the money closer to me.

“Heartbreaking,” I said. “But not what I asked. It’s easy money. Do you want it? Tell me how you marked me.” I expected a lie, but was ready to enjoy one.

He stopped the shtick, suddenly and completely. He was expressionless, and for a moment he met my gaze with a psychopath’s dead eyes.

Then he just walked away.

Republic Dogs

2026-02-23T19:47:00.000-08:00

Rescuing a classic from linkrot:

Republic Dogs
By Nathaniel Daw
Copyright 1994 and all that.

[Thrasymachus is tied up in a chair. Socrates is brandishing a gun in his face.]

Thrasymachus:
Don’t kill me, man!

Socrates:
Are you finished, fucker?

Thrasymachus:
Look, look, man, you can have my ten yoke of oxen. My virgin daughters? My pomegranite orchard?

Socrates:
You like pomegranites? Shit, motherfucker, I hear they’ve got a fuckin’ all-you-can-eat special going on on pomegranites where you’re headed.

Thrasymachus:
Don’t do it, Socrates. Be fair.

Socrates: [Suddenly contemplative]
Fair?

Thrasymachus:
[Sees an opportunity for survival]
Yeah, fair … think about my wife and children --

Socrates:
Would you say that to be fair is the same thing as to be just?

Thrasymachus:
What?

Socrates:
Well, I’m just a dull, wandering street philosopher, so I don’t understand quite where you’re headed with this particular line of reasoning. Perhaps [motions with gun] you could further elucidate your theory of justice.

Thrasymachus:
My theory? Of justice?

Socrates:
Yes. You do … have a theory of justice, don’t you?

Thrasymachus:
Uh …

Socrates:
Or perhaps you’d like to hear my theory.

Thrasymachus:
Oh, yes, yes, yes, of course, your theory. You have a theory?

Socrates:
Well, yes, I have been thinking a little about justice -- not of course, so deeply as could a wise sage like yourself. But I’ve had a little idea, an insignificant but troubling little idea, and it’s been bothering me a little, and I thought that maybe someone as smart as yourself could help convince me that it was wrong.

Thrasymachus:
Of course, I’ll do anything I can to help.

Socrates:
So you’d like to hear my theory?

Thrasymachus:
I’d be honored.

Socrates:
My humble little idea goes something like this. [He is suddenly extremely loud and violent. Roars:] Justice is only the will of the stronger. What do you think about that, asshole? [Slaps Thrasymachus across the face with his gun]

Thrasymachus:
Uh, uh, uh …

Socrates:
Come on … come on, you wanna try and disprove my theory, you weak little shit? Yeah? Yeah? Shit, I think I feel a proof coming on. [Shoots him.] Why, thank you Thrasymachus, you’ve certainly opened my eyes.

Narrator:
Thrasymachus. Alcibiades. Aristotle. Socrates -- are Quentin Tarantino’s Republic Dogs.

[Enter Alcibiades and Aristotle]

Aristotle:
So you’re saying you’d give Helen of Troy a foot massage?

Alcibiades:
Fuck yeah, in a minute.

Aristotle:
You’d touch her feet? She might be the most beautiful bitch since fucking Aphrodite, but trust me, her feet stink. And her armpits stink too. Just cuz she’s beautiful don’t mean she don’t smell like the rest of us. And don’t you go telling no deodorant story, either, cuz you know and I know it wasn’t invented during the Trojan war.

Alcibiades:
What, you wouldn’t do her?

Aristotle:
I didn’t say I wouldn’t do her. I said I wouldn’t give her a foot massage. I don’t dig on feet.

Alcibiades:
Well, what if before you did her you’d have to give her a foot massage to get her in the mood?

Aristotle:
Allow me to inquire, Alcibiades. What if you had to massage her armpits to get her in the mood?

Alcibiades:
Fuck you, Aristotle.

Socrates:
You guys have got it all wrong.

Alcibiades:
What, you don’t like foot massages either?

Socrates:
No, motherfucker, the Iliad, you’ve got the Iliad all wrong. Do you wanna know what the Iliad is about? Well, I’ll tell you what the Iliad is about. It ain’t about no bitches, that’s for fucking sure.

Alcibiades:
Sure it is. You’re saying Helen of Troy ain’t one hot bitch?

Socrates:
I’m not saying Helen of Troy ain’t a hot bitch, I’m saying the Iliad ain’t about her. She ain’t even in it. The Odyssey is about bitches, I’ll grant you that. But I’ll tell you what The Iliad is about. It’s about big boats. Didn’t you ever read the second Canto? Boats boats boats boats boats boats boats. Hence, the Trojan War.

Aristotle:
You’re full of shit.

Alcibiades:
Fuck yeah you are; the Iliad is about Achilles’ struggle with his own homosexuality.

Socrates:
Maybe I should frame my theory a bit more emphatically. [Drawing his gun.] Didn’t you ever hear of the face that launched a thousand … boats?

Alcibiades:
Uh …

Socrates:
WELL?

Alcibiades:
Yeah.

Socrates:
Well, how’d you like me to launch your face?

Alcibiades:
Uh …

Socrates:
Ahh, I guess that example cleared up all your objections then. [Points weapon at Aristotle] You don’t have any problems with that, do you?

Aristotle:
Hey, man, it’s cool. Cool. Boats are cool by me. I was just on a boat recently.

Socrates: [Putting away his gun.]
Well good for fucking you. This makes you special?

Aristotle:
From Mycinea.

Alcibiades:
What’s it like? I hear they do some crazy-ass shit there.

Aristotle:
Man, that place is like Mount-fucking-Olympus. Every night, they gather round the fire in certain legally designated areas, where government-licensed civil servants throw the roots of a domestically cultivated plant in the fire.

Socrates:
So fucking what?

Aristotle:
So the smoke makes them giddy and lighthearted as if they had drunk on wine, only they don’t have a headache in the morning, that’s fucking what.

Socrates:
That’s it, I’m fucking going. It’s the perfect fucking city.

Aristotle:
It ain’t the perfect fucking city.

Socrates:
You know a better city?

Aristotle:
No, I don’t know a better city, motherfucker, but that don’t mean fucking Mycinea is fucking perfect. “Perfect” doesn’t mean that there ain’t nothing better, it means perfect.

Socrates:
Can you explain that lofty idea in terms a base, wandering street philosopher like myself might be able to understand?

Aristotle:
Well, allow me to demonstrate. Let’s say there was an imaginary city, and all the people were divided into three groups. Let’s say I represent the Gold group, I’d be Mr. Gold, you, Socrates would be Mr. Silver, and, you, Alcibiades, Mr. Bronze.

Alcibiades:
Why do I have to be Mr. Bronze?

Aristotle:
Because it’s only a demonstration. So me, Gold, I’d be the philosopher king --

Alcibiades:
But why can’t I be the philosopher king? Look, Socrates, I’ll trade with you.

Aristotle:
[Draws a gun, fires a shot into the air,
and points it at Alcibiades]
Interrupt me again, motherfucker. Interrupt me again. Nobody’s trading with anybody. This is my allegory.

[Alcibiades gestures submission.]

Aristotle: [Putting away gun.]
So as the philosopher king, it would be my duty to keep seditious literature out of the city.

Socrates:
I got it. I understand.

Aristotle:
Shut up, motherfucker, how can you understand my perfect city when I haven’t explained it yet?

Socrates:
No, dickhead, not that, I understand what you were saying before, about perfection. It’s all about forms.

Aristotle:
Forms?

Socrates:
Yeah, motherfucker, forms. Like, something don’t have to physically exist for it to be perfect; it exists as the perfect ideal, the perfect form, beyond mortal comprehension.

Alcibiades:
Socrates, you’re supposed to pour your libations on the ground, not drink them till you’re talking like a crazy Bacchae bitch.

Socrates:
Normally, I’d be pouring libations with your spinal fluid right now, but since I’m feeling at peace with the universe I’ll try to enlighten your sorry ass instead. Imagine there’s this dark, underground cave.

Alcibiades:
Yeah?

Socrates:
And there’s this rapist-motherfucker, and he’s got this gimp, right, tied up in the cave. See that?

Aristotle:
Okay.

Socrates:
And this rapist, he’s a sick motherfucker, so let’s say one day he sends down a coupla pipe-hittin’ negroes to cut the gimp’s ear right off.

Alcibiades:
Cut his ear off?

Socrates:
Yeah, and gouge out his fucking eyes. Now wouldn’t you say that the ear and eye are the proper receptacles of the senses of sight and hearing, respecitively?

Alcibiades:
Clearly so.

Socrates:
So, moreover, would you not agree that this gimp’s senses are imperfect?

Aristotle:
Why, yes, Socrates, I suppose they would be a trifle damaged.

Socrates:
And what do things look like to someone with imperfect senses?

Alcibiades:
Dark?

Socrates:
No, motherfucker, nine letters, begins with “I.”

Aristotle:
Imperfect.

Socrates:
Bingo. So you’d say this gimp, you’d say this gimp motherfucker would be unable to perceive true perfection -- but that don’t mean it don’t exist. Now if you brought him out of the cave, into the light, things would be less dark, and his eyes might heal a little, he might begin to see a glimmer of light, thereby gaining the idea of true perfection --

Aristotle:
What kind of argument is that? Your theory of the forms rests on an arbitrary and vicious act of violence.

Socrates: [Draws his gun.]
Aristotle, you’re Plato’s student, I respect you, but I will put fucking bullets through your heart if you don’t take back what you said about me being violent now!

Aristotle: [Also drawing gun]
You shoot, you’ll be dining with Lord Hades tonight. I repeat. You kill me, your ass is eating pomegranite fucking casserole for the rest of eternity.

Alcibiades:
Shit, man, you’re acting like a bunch of fuckin’ Spartans. Am I the only philosopher around here?

Socrates and Aristotle: [To Alcibiades]
Shut up!

Alcibiades:
Guys, guys, calm down. Look, I’ve got it. Let’s have a symposium -- we can all drink wine and make speeches in praise of love.

Aristotle:
What are you, some kind of pansy?

Socrates:
Shoot that dipshit.

[Socrates and Aristotle turn in unison and shoot Alcibiades, then turn back and again aim at each other.]

Socrates: [To Aristotle]
Don’t think you’re getting off that easy. You ever read Plato?

Aristotle:
Of course.

Socrates:
There’s this little passage I got memorized that I like to recite in situations like this. It is a tale of a brave man, Er, who once died in war. On the twelfth day, as he was already laid out on the funeral pyre, he revived, and told what he had seen yonder. He said that after his soul had left him it travelled with many others until they came to a marvellous place, where there were two openings upward into heaven, and between them sat judges. These, when they had given judgment, ordered the just to go upward through the heavens by the opening on the right. The unjust they ordered to travel downward by the opening on the left. For all the wrongs they had done to any person they paid a tenfold penalty. Savage men, all fiery to look at bound their feet, hands and heads, and threw them down and beat them, tortured them on thorny bushes.

Aristotle:
What the fuck was that all about?

Socrates:
So, motherfucker, prepare to test the hypothesis! See, I’ve got it figured out, I’m the just man, and you’re the unjust man, my gun is the thorny bushes, and Mr. dead pansy here is the judge. Now DIE MOTHERFUC --

Aristotle:
But what if I’m the just man and you’re the unjust man and this dead dipshit is the thorny bushes?

Socrates:
Oh, uh …

Aristotle:
Or what if Alcibiades is the just man, and we’re both unjust men. And the thorny bushes are the judge?

Socrates:
Shit, well I guess that all depends on your definition of justice.

Aristotle:
Exactly my point. That was what I was working up to with my description of the perfect city, before I was so rudely interrupted.

Socrates:
Shit, I’m sorry. I don’t suppose you could explain it to me now?

Aristotle:
Only if you stop pointing that thing at me.

Socrates:
Well … all right.

[Both of them holster their guns.]

Aristotle:
Whew. That was exciting. [Patting him on the back,] Could I interest you in a drink?

Socrates:
One minute. I’ll meet you there.

[Aristotle starts to walk off]

Socrates:
[drawing his gun and pointing it
at Aristotle’s back]
But first, how’d you like to hear my theory of justice?

[they both freeze. the end.]

One cheer for “‘AI’ art”?

2026-01-28T13:32:00.000-08:00

I am generally skeptical of breathless “AI” boosterism. LLMs have given us some astonishing surprises in the last few years, and we can expect more surprises over the next few years at least, but it is preposterous to see artificial superintelligence is on the horizon. LLMs have differently-shaped strengths and limitations from familiar proceedural computing systems, but the contrasts with what we see from human cognition make it obvious that there are a lot of things humans do which they simply cannot.

I am generally disgusted by the disdain both for the arts and for artists in how “AI” boosters imagine replacing artists with robots. Surprising and weirdly impressive as developments in “‘AI’ art” art have been in the last few years, I cannot imagine thinking that “AI” is on a trajectory toward replacing novelists, painters, filmmakers, et cetera. I join those who refer to “‘AI’ art” as “slop” because of its deeply schlocky quality.

But I don’t want to be a one-dimensional “AI” hater, and have been challenging myself to think about ways these tools can be useful. So here’s an idea I’m not sure is right, offered as a provocation to my thinking and others’.

Maybe “AI” illustrations are not a big problem because their distinctive janky quality signals what they are, meta-communicating I am using this as an ephemeral little instrument to communicate a simple intent, rather than as a subtle work.

When generative “AI” image tools were new, I experimented a bit. I made this little meme image quoting a Lou Reed song by asking “AI” to give me a “sneering Statue Of Liberty”. I am satisfied with it delivering a little something I could neither draw nor afford to pay an artist to do.

I think that plays because it is not a subtle work. A picture is worth a thousand words and I wouldn’t ask “‘AI’ art” to do that … but sometimes you just need an illustration worth less than a dozen words. There are plenty of bland corporate filler illustrations which express no profound human intent. I know using “AI” deprives illustrators of jobs making this stuff, but isn’t that the kind of elimination of toil we should embrace as enabling Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism?

Maybe the right regulatory solution to “AI” images is to lean into their janky soullessness. Might we force them into a few house styles so we always recognize that they were not created by an artist?

Over on the Bluesky thread where I first articulated this idea, someone countered …

“Fully automated luxury gay space communism” should have a higher aspiration than to feed money to the VIC collective to torch miles of rainforest and fresh water to generate an image of partying seniors with 9 fingers per hand for a failing rural elder care program.
Put a tick more precisely I think a use case for LLMs of artists doing drafts and preliminary scaffolding for their sincere work is orders of magnitude more socially beneficial than for making corporate PowerPoint sloptent even more repellent & sloppier.

Indeed. Even my dumb little meme only seems useful to me as an instrument for a small purposeful comment.

The more substantive uses of “AI” I find interesting are artists using these tools as one among many instruments in composing something with intention and meaning, whether it is James Curico weaving “AI” elements into complex mixed-media artworks or Damien Walter using “AI” illustrations just to liven up a videoessay so it’s not just him being a talking head. Curico says:

I’ve had very good results in this direction, personally. Though it’s kind of a lose-lose talking about the process since on the one hand it’s “doesn’t matter if you spent 90 hours on it you still deserve the electric chair” and “what's the point if can’t do it with one prompt?”

Reconstructed movies

2026-01-23T02:47:00.000-08:00

I have lately been seized by a mania to track down interesting re-edits of films, either done by the original creators or by fans.

Ones I have seen

Raiders

Steven Soderbergh — the prolific director best known for Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Ocean’s 11/12/13 — has transformed Raiders Of The Lost Ark into a seductive film school exercise. He changed the color to crisp black-and-white and stripped out all of the sound, even the dialogue, using instead a loop of Trent Reznor’s score for The Social Network.

Why?

I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me.

Fun for me too.

Raiders Of The Lost Ark: The Adaptation

Soderbergh’s experiment is weird film-nerd joy but it isn’t anywhere near as fun or as gutsy as this variation on the theme.

Back when Raiders Of The Lost Ark was new, a circle of tween-aged kids had a crazy idea: how about taking a parent’s home video camera and making their own version of the movie? They resolved to reproduce every shot from the original film as well as they could, which is bonkers considering that home video releases of films were not yet a thing, giving them no way to examine every scene closely. They went to a movie theater and furiously took notes, recorded the audio on a tape recorder, pored over stills they found in places like magazines and trading cards.

They spent their whole summer vacation working on it, but they didn’t get as far as they imagined. Filmmaking is hard. So during the school year they kept at it on weekends when they could. Then they devoted the following summer to it again. Then the next summer. They were in too deep to stop. They had almost the whole movie done when high school graduation forced an end to the project.

Decades later the kids, now grown, dusted off their VHS tapes and did a few showings at theaters willing to spare a screen for a couple of hours for this oddity … despite being unable to charge money lest a plague of studio lawyers descend upon them.

I was lucky enough to go to one of those early screenings, with a raucously enthusiastic crowd. Watching the film is uncanny and delicious. Actors transform back and forth between kids and teenagers from scene to scene, or even within a scene. Because it’s a film you know, you cannot resist thinking ahead. “I know what comes next. How the heck will a bunch of kids reproduce that in a backyard?” Every time, their solution turns out to be more clever and impressive than one would dare hope.

Word eventually found its way to Steven Spielberg, who decided he had to meet these creators. He must have twisted some lawyers’ arms, because now you can just buy a home video copy.

Gus Van Sant’s Psycho

So. What if it’s not a gang of kids attempting a zero-budget shot-for-shot remake of a Hollywood film? What if, instead, a talented real-deal director had the resources to do it right?

Would it produce the same movie? Would it turn out as a different movie? This should just be a film school hypothetical, impossible to test, but Gus Van Sant cashed in on the moment of his greatest industry pull to actually do it.

What did the experiement reveal?

I find it impossible to describe. Yeah, it’s the same film as Hitchcock’s … sort of. But also sort of not. The only way to get it is to see the film. Van Sant says:

The results were that it wasn’t as frightening as Hitchcock’s film, and I attribute it to the director, me, my DNA, and the different totally immersive style of Hitchcock. Without that, it seemed it couldn’t be reproduced.

I cannot recommend it unless you are a film nerd. But if you are, there’s nothing else like it.

Touch Of Evil — 1998 Walter Murch restoration

I’m glad that I somehow never saw the original theatrical version of Orson Welles’ noir classic despite having meant to catch up with it. It had a reputation for being great despite confused storytelling which resulted from the studio trimming the film down from Welles’ original cut.

Almost 20 years after the film was released, a print close to Welles’ last version was found, but that had been an unfinished film, with postproduction work still to be done when the studio took it away from him. Then another 20 years later, after Welles had long since died, sound designer Walter Murch discovered an angry memo Welles wrote to the studio criticizing what they had done to his film. There were 58 single-spaced typewritten pages detailing everything he would have done differently. Murch restored the film, using the memo as the blueprint, revealing the real movie at last.

Metropolis — The Complete Metropolis

One might guess that Touch Of Evil is the only director’s cut delivered from beyond the grave, but Metropolis may be an even greater miracle.

Metropolis was made in 1927 and it still looks wildly ambitious to eyes accustomed to mega-blockbusters. The cost of the elaborate sets and effects nearly bankrupted the entire German film industry. But epic result was packed with imagery so powerful and influential that I refer to it as a film everyone has seen even if they have never seen it, because its moves (and even snippets of the film itself) show up in so many later films that when one sees it for the first time, it feels familiar.

Few people ever saw the full film. It was trimmed down from its original 2½ hour runtime for distribution in Germany, then trimmed down further for international distribution. Then decades passed, with prints circulating through film schools and rep houses, getting scratched and burned and broken and spliced back together, so each extant print was at least a little different. In the ’80s a producer struck newly restored prints … with a different (rock ’n’ roll!) soundtrack, goofy colorization, and trimmed down more than an hour shorter than its original runtime.

Then at the end of the century, a German film foundation asked to borrow every print in the world. They scanned them all and combined the data — one print could correct the loss from a scratch on another print, a lost frame on one print could be covered by it surviving on three others. They pored over archived notes from the original production. This produced the fullest version any living person had ever seen, a little over two hours long. The computer synthesis of information from multiple prints made almost all of it look as fresh as if it had been shot yesterday; the film was even more beautiful than we knew. Title cards describing what surviving records revealed about the missing scenes got them as close to rescuing the entire film as anyone believed possible.

Then one more print turned up in a museum archive, a negative struck from the original full version. It was in bad shape, but it had 25 minutes of footage which no one had seen since 1927. There were a few bits damaged beyond repair, but it meant that we got all but five minutes of the original cut back.

Have I mentioned that the film is amazing? The film is amazing.

Brazil — The Director’s Cut

Terry Gilliam had such a hard time getting the film released at all that The Battle Of Brazil is a book entirely about Gilliam fighting against the studio’s attempt to bury it, which then spawned a documentary film. Gilliam showed the movie at film schools and art houses on the sly in his campaign to bring attention to it.

Finally the studio relented, but in a final tragedy they held Gilliam to his contractual obligation to deliver a film within a certain runtime. To keep the studio from hacking the film entirely to bits, Gilliam cut out ten minutes of footage from the finished film he had been showing around.

That theatrical edit was still hailed as a great film and became a staple of rep houses, where I fell in love with it as a young film nerd. But a decade later Criterion, the prestiguous home video publisher of classic and arthouse films, made Gilliam’s original edit available.

Gilliam was right to be frustrated by the theatrical version. The full version includes a scene unnecessary to the plot but underlining the film’s theme, the terrifying secret police revealed as working joes griping about their day, oblivious to the horrors they commit. It’s good to have the real thing back.

Blade Runner — The Final Cut

Possibly the most famous director’s cut to find its way to a broad audience, and one of the few to eventually displace the original theatrical version almost entirely.

Warner Bros had wanted a sci-fi action blockbuster, but director Ridley Scott delivered a textured, alienating science fiction art film. To make the movie more accessible, the studio insisted on adding a introductory title card, a happy ending, and voiceover narration throughout. Harrison Ford recorded a deliberately stilted voiceover track in an attempt to help Scott talk the studio out of using it, but the trick didn’t work.

The resulting film was not the hit they hoped for, but despite the voiceover and other flaws, Blade Runner became a favorite of film buffs, including me. I saw it in its original release and was a little too young for it. I rediscovered it as a budding film nerd in college, re-watching it obsessively. I no longer rank it among my top-tier favorites but it remains the film I have watched more times than any other.

Because cinephile love made it a rep house perennial, prints of an early assembly cut from before the studio’s changes found its way to screens, misrepresented as a “director’s cut”. Scott felt frustrated by that version’s lack of polish, but the interest people showed in it led to the studio coöperating with Scott to create a proper Director’s Cut. The resulting film was subtly different and better. Then Ridley Scott’s ongoing success in his career made it possible for him to get one more bite at the apple, making a host of fine adjustments and even shooting a bit of new footage more than two decades after principal photography had originally wrapped.

Despite having seen the original theatrical cut dozens of times, the Final Cut is so right that it has almost completely displaced that version from my memory.

Dark City — Director’s Cut

I had long thought that this edition just removed the opening narration forced into the theatrical release which undercut its surreal-mysterious tone, but seeing it recently revealed that it adds 11 minutes of footage to expand several scenes a bit, and to significantly alter the closing psychic-battle setpiece.

Fixing the opening is definitely an improvement, as I aleady knew from skipping it when watching with friends who were new to the film. I’m not so sure the other changes are worthwhile. That psychic battle landed as a little goofy even when it was new; having more of the effects which have not aged well belabors the inherent problems with the ending. Though is sure does land as anticipating The Matrix, which arrived the following year.

Maybe I need to make my own fan edit which never shows us the city from the outside?

Star Trek: The Motion Picture — Director’s Edition

Nerdy, obscure, and amazing.

I grew up a Star Trek kid. I was the right age to be entranced by the goofy Filmation animated series when it was originally broadcast, grew into nerdlove for the original series in syndication, and was still young enough when the first feature film was released that I was uncritically delighted to see new Trek on the big screen at all.

But by the time ST: The Motion Picture was released for home video, my tastes had matured enough that revisiting it revealed that how the film was a clumsy slog. I had heard rumours about how The Motion Picture had suffered from Studio Meddling. Since the special effects shots were expensive some suit had insisted on including every bit of them, whether they served the story or not, filling the second act with a stultifying series of shots of the crew of the Enterprise looking at clouds through the viewscreen. To spare time for that nonsense, a bunch of character stuff and ideas landed on the cutting room floor.

It did not stand up in contrast with The Wrath Of Khan and the run of pretty good original cast Trek films which were still coming out. Then there was Next Generation. Then other Treks. I thought I would never look back at Star Trek: The Motionless Picture.

This wasn’t a beloved classic the studio could cash in on investing in like Blade Runner; even the famously enthusiastic Trek fandom admitted that it was a dud. There wasn’t a better cut just sitting on the shelf like there was with Brazil.

But the studio still had the footage that didn’t make it in to the theatrical release, director Robert Wise just couldn’t let go of the thought of the better film he had wanted to make, and a lot of film professionals have a soft spot for Trek. Wise doesn’t call what he and a host of enthusiasts did a restoration of his cut, he says they got to finish an unfinished film. They didn’t just trim out the clouds and weave the story beats back in, they worked on everything. They improved the sound design. They cleaned up the effects shots they wanted to keep. They made new effects shots to replace things they originally hadn’t had time, or money, or capacity to do back in the 1970s, careful to match the distinctive look of the original effects.

The resulting labor of love is not just a marvel of craft or just a good Trek film. It’s a great Trek film. It may not have quite the appeal to non-fans of The Wrath Of Khan or The Voyage Home (the one with the whales!) but anyone who likes Trek at all will enjoy it, and for anyone who ever loved the original series it is a true gift.

Alien³ — The Legacy Cut

The theatrical version of this film was so bad that it nearly killed the franchise. I saw it on its original release, which was an unnerving experience. The first few scenes were so gripping that I thought the universally negative reviews were lunacy. The next few scenes didn’t quite work. Then the next few scenes were weaker still, and it continued to decline through an incoherent second act, and then further still to an excruciatingly hokey ending. Strong turns by Sigorney Weaver and Charles Dance couldn’t save it. It’s a pile of crap.

It was well known to have come out of a horrendous production process. There had been a succession of scripts and directors — including a script by William Neuromancer Gibson which one can now find adapted to comics and as an audio drama — and was already wildly over-budget when young David Fincher took the reins to direct his first feature. The filmmaking and wrestling with the studio was such a mess that Fincher is said to have come close to refusing to have his name on it. He hasn’t just refused to attempt a new cut of the film, he is so bitter that he has refused to ever talk about the movie at all.

The studio tried to lure fans into paying for a home video release of this unloved mess by creating a box set of Alien films with a bunch of special features, including what they called the Alien³ Assembly Cut, a Frankenstein’s Monster made without Fincher’s involvement incorporating a bunch of unused footage and reference images for special effects that were never made. I gather that the result is a hash that makes one wonder what might have been. That non-film inspired a crew of nerds to create this fan edit, tinkering with the arrangement of scenes and fleshing out missing effects.

The result is better than anyone who has seen the theatrical version would believe possible. It’s not as good as the original Alien or James Cameron’s Aliens sequel, but that is praising it with faint damnation; I think it’s better than the sequels Ridley Scott has given us. If you have a taste for the series it’s worth a couple of hours.

The Abyss — Extended Edition
Aliens — Special Edition

While I’m nerding out, I have to point to these James Cameron re-edits of two of his films.

The theatrical release of The Abyss was good but sloppy, and the ending was completely broken. We are lucky to have the Extended Edition even though it remains more than a little shaggy.

I understand why some people prefer the theatrical version of Aliens — it’s so tight that you could bounce a quarter off of it — but I concur with Cameron’s judgement in creating the Special Edition, if only to have the sentry guns pile on even more suspense.

Ones I want to see

The Dark Side Of Oz

Probably the most-seen fan edit ever made, in part because anyone can re-make it DIY: it’s just The Wizard Of Oz with the sound off, playing Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side Of The Moon as a soundtrack. There was a craze for it back in the 1990s, when video rental through Blockbuster was at its peak; reputedly there’s a lucky alchemy in the way the tracks of the album align with events in the film.

Despite listening to the album a billion times when I was young somehow I never got around to trying this. One of these days.

Silent Hill — Restless Dreams

I have not played the vidya game, but an enthusiast for it introduced me to the film adaptation. It doesn’t quite work, but it is so atmospheric that I found it seductive anyway.

Fan edit enthusiasts rank this one of the best examples of the form; rumor has it that even the movie’s director likes it.

Raising Cain — Director’s Cut

There are a lot of director’s cuts broadly recognized as better than the original theatrical version. There are a lot of fan edits which many fans call better than the original theatrical version. There are even a few fan edits which directors have praised. But I think this film is unique in being such a good a fan edit the original film’s director annointed it “The Director’s Cut”.

Admirable humility by Brian De Palma.

Bateman Begins: An American Psycho

This is a weird one. Christian Bale played both Patrick Bateman, the titular main character in American Psycho, and also Batman in the three Christopher Nolan films, so an enterprising fan has stitched the two films together to suggest that they are the same guy.

It’s so crazy, it just might work. I have to find out.

Blood Simple — Director’s Cut

An oddity both in that it tightens the the movie to be a few minutes shorter and that many fans fault it as inferior to the theatrical version.

The Blackened Mantle

Akira Kurosawa’s lost original cut of his story of Annakin Skywalker’s fall from grace against the backdrop of the rise of the Galactic Empire.

Well, obviously not. But that is what it is meant to feel like.

Star Wars has enough enthusiastic fans that there are countless fan-made re-shufflings of the films. They follow in the footsteps of The Phantom Edit, a pioneering fan effort from before just anyone with a laptop and a lot of patience could re-cut a film; it re-arranged scenes from the first prequel The Phantom Menace and cleverly transformed Jar-Jar Binks into a wise sage by snipping out his slapstick moments and replacing his dialogue with an invented alien language and wholly new lines delivered in subtitles.

Mantle takes that trick much further.

Star Wars is a pastiche informed by a host of sources. George Lucas had originally wanted do a Flash Gordon film but could not get the rights, so Star Wars stirred that together with Westerns, Edgar Rice Burrough’s Mars stories, flying ace movies about both World Wars, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and … the films of Akira Kurosawa set in Japan’s feudal era, most directly The Hidden Fortress.

So informed by Kurosawa’s influence, The Blackened Mantle refines Revenge Of The Sith by presenting it in the style of Kurosawa’s works. It’s in black-and-white, with bits of the other prequels woven in as sepia-toned flashbacks. All of the actors’ performances have been dubbed in Japanese so that subtitles can tweak the dialogue to reshape the storytelling.

A friend recommending this got me going down this whole alternate-edit rabbithole in the first place. I have seen a couple of scenes and they are delicious, so I am keen to sit down with the whole thing.

End Of Skywalker

Nosing around the internet, I find a lot of people calling this the best of the sequel trilogy re-edits, mining footage from all three films and using the subtitles trick to assemble a single feature telling a significantly different story. That’s not as seductive as the Kurosawa conceit, but I’m curious.

As with the Star Wars prequel trilogy, the sequel trilogy is frustrating. The Force Awakens demonstrates impressive craft but not quite the resonance someone who grew up with Star Wars hopes for, The Last Jedi is divisive (I adore the way it brings Luke Skywalker full circle), and The Rise Of Skywalker wraps it up with … a total trainwreck. That last is particularly bitter given the gorgeous production design, actors’ strong performances, and nifty action setpieces it wasted. Good ingredients for stone soup.

The Empire Strikes Back — Revisited

It’s easy to pitch me on the fan edits above attempting to improve on Star Wars at its worst, but why mess with The Empire Strikes Back, generally recognized as the best Star Wars feature film?

Well, I found fans insisting that this edit is actually better than the original film. I didn’t think I needed to see Empire again at all, but my curiousity is piqued.

Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut

The Superman II we got was a remake of an unfinished film the world never saw. The original plan for the 1970s Superman movie was to leverage the cost of the ambitious production by doing two films worth of principal photography, in the hope that profits from the first film could fund post-production on the second film. It almost worked. After a long, difficult production, director Richard Donner delivered Superman: The Movie and it was a hit. But budget and production challenges meant that the shooting Donner had done for the sequel was not quite enough to bring the sequel home, and in a complicated behind-the-scenes soap opera, Donner was replaced by Richard Lester.

In order to resolve the legal ambiguity that created in assigning a director’s credit, Lester wound up re-shooting a lot of what Donner had already done. While Lester deserves credit for how rightly beloved Superman II was and remains — “kneel before Zod”! — some of its odder elements are Lester’s additions.

As with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a sentimental director and enthusiastic nerds decided to finish the film that might have been. I gather that the result doesn’t have anything like the astonishing polish that the Trek team got to deliver, but I also hear that it qualifies as an interesting real movie.

Once Upon A Time In America — Extended Director’s Cut

The title is a misnomer. Director Sergio Leone’s true original cut was about 700 minutes long (almost six hours!). This recently released edit was created without him, since he has been dead for 25 years, and it runs “just” just 250 minutes.

The cut Leone preferred is lost to time. There are no records of what it contained, precious few people ever saw it, and he is not alive to tell anyone about it. Legend describes it as a glorious, fascinating misfire. Since the elaborate production had Leone starting from a ten-hour rough cut, there is no figuring out what Leone wanted to do from first principles.

It was cut down for a showing at Cannes, then cut again for limited release, then at the point when it finally got a full a full US theatrical release it had been whittled down to a broken 139 minutes. But then in the years since Leone’s death there has been a trickle of different releases adding more and more things back in. It seems that the latest edit is the most complete version we will ever get.

I have not seen any version. Someday I want to tackle it, and binging the longest available version seems like the way to go.

Dark

Dark was filmed in 2013 and released in 2014 under the title Dying of the Light. The film was taken from me after the first director’s cut, re-edited, scored and mixed without my input.
I offered to revisit the film, cut and mix a new version at my own expense but was denied permission by the producers.
This cut was created using work print DVDs. I had no access to the original hi-res footage and unmixed sound. I used those limitations to my advantage when creating this new film.
I was working toward a more aggressive editing style when Dying of the Light was taken away from me. Dark represents the direction I was hoping to go.
Dark was not created for exhibition or personal gain.
It is for historical record.
— Paul Schrader

Found by a friend who says it “largely takes place within Nicolas Cage’s CIA agent’s brain as it is being eaten by a tumor, as he pursues vengeance against a terrorist. I haven’t yet seen the official release, but the re-cut is just wild.

More fan edits

I want to come back to write these up in greater detail, ideally after seeing them.

The Escape from the Shining Alien Thing from Beyond the Stars

Reputedly a weird, inventive mashup of several films, starting from John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Cosmogony

A weird mashup of several films, said to be more “contemplative” than a narrative.

Dune: The Alternative Edition Redux

A fan attempt to recover the novel’s spirit and Lynch’s intent. I have soft spot for some of the weird stuff in the very long “Alan Smithee” cut, so I can imagine how that might be possible. And it gets surprisingly positive commentary.

Wes Craven’s Dark Nightmare

A fan edit of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare which reputedly makes it more psychological than fantastical to good effect. I revisited New Nightmare recently and I found it short of the fresh surprise which impressed me when it was new, so I imagine that there is room to improve the film by re-framing it.

Phantom Of The Paradise — Uncensored Cut Restoration

An elaborate fan project to rescue the lost version of a cult classic.

Paradise

A fan edit weaving together the Ridley Scott Alien sequels into a single film, in an attempt to produce something that makes sense. an attempt to make them make sense.

Hellblazer

A fan edit of Constantine drawing on deleted scenes. It seems there is a lot of opportunity there, given what a mixed bag the theatrical cut was, and the choice of title suggests that the creator shares my love for the ’90s comics. But hard to get.

The Matrix Revolutions Decoded

All the sequels woven into a single feature, much loved for clarifying the source’s themes. One can get a little taste.

More official releases

I want to come back to write these up in greater detail, ideally after seeing them.

Doctor Sleep — Director’s Cut

The theatrical release does amazingly well at sweating down the doorstop of a novel and reconciling King’s novel The Shining with Kubrick’s film The Shining along the way. But there is a lot more to say, so I wonder how it does that.

Little Shop Of Horrors — Director’s Cut

Lots of little changes, plus a big change to the ending, reputedly making it even more Faustian.

Das Boot — Director’s Cut

The theatrical release was already a great film … and it turns out there is a much longer version available.

Highlander 2: The Renegade Version

The director’s attempt to recover as much of the movie they had actually wanted to make as he could. Sort of. But do I care?

That Thing You Do! — Extended Cut

Reputedly better all-around, including that it corrects queer erasure in the theatrical release.

I Am Legend — Alternate Version

The only major change is in the last few minutes … but that is reputedly a profound change.

Kingdom of Heaven — Director’s Cut

A fair bit longer than the original theatrical version, which evidently makes it land as completely different on a thematic level. During the Iraq war era I had no appetite for a film about the Crusades, but I’m curious.

Blackhat — Director’s Cut

A weak film that came out of a very messy production, and this cut is supposedly very different. But in this case is different actually better?

Conservatism as fear and “instinct”

2026-01-20T19:49:00.000-08:00

Capturing a Bluesky thread from Matthew Sheffield.

‪Kai Ryssdal‬ asks:
Fight and help win a world war.
Establish a global order that cements your national power for 80 years.
Blow it all up.
What am I missing?
This is literally what I've been writing and podcasting about for years. I was planning to do an essay on this, but here's a [Bluesky thread].
The main reason is psychology. Due to personal, family, and cultural histories, some people are inherently scared of the world. The fear of the world usually manifests as fear and hatred of new things. They rarely admit to this fear (especially the men), but they show it in their actions of carrying a gun everywhere or thinking that if they don't cheat others first, they will be cheated.
This fear actually proceeds from an even deeper impulse, the belief that quick judgment thinking (what I call memetic epistemology) is superior to extrinsic thinking. They trust their instincts more than anyone else, regardless of their expertise. Conservatives and their reactionary cousins believe that their views are true because they believe them. They don’t need hard proof or to be able to argue for them. They’re “common sense.” This viewpoint is the fundamental unifier of everyone on the right, from atheist ancaps to Christofascists.
Memetic epistemology isn’t inherently bad. It is in fact how we experience love, art, music, faith, and maintain coherence in adversity. But the self-focused, somatic nature of memetic thinking means that it can be dangerous when applied to the world at large.
Society has become so large and so complex that one person can no longer have total mastery of even two fields of knowledge. The paradox of modernity is that each advance in knowledge also creates ignorance, in two major ways. The first is that knowing more things also increases the number of known unknowns. Our models of reality are not reality itself. Scientific laws are descriptions of physical obligation, rather than the obligations themselves. When we describe one thing one way, it unlocks other ways to describe it. This extrinsic epistemic approach has made modern humans able to advance through science in ways that would appear godlike to any ancient human.
But this new way of thinking is knowing through negation. And it’s not how humans did things for the entire history of our species. It’s “unnatural.” For more on the fear of the “unnatural,” please see this recent podcast episode I did with Natalia Mehlman Petrzela: Robert Kennedy’s bizarre obsession with ‘natural’ isn’t going to make Americans healthier: historian of fitness Natalia Mehlman Petrzela on why an obese president has a health secretary who moralizes about wellness (audio).
Cumulative advances in knowledge are threatening to people who only want to use somatic reasoning and who respond to all new things memetically. They want to imitate authorities rather than have humility and accept extrinsic realities through abstraction. This is the conservative epistemology.
Besides piling up all kinds of newfangled things, expansions in knowledge also can liberate minds from social prejudices. For centuries, women and other ethnic groups were not fully human, same-sex attraction wasn’t real, and trans people didn’t exist. As Virginia Heffernan and I recently discussed, this is the problem of other minds. Because cognition is done through hidden states and language is an only a very partial extrusion of thought, we can’t know for sure that other minds are as real as ours: Renee Good and the problem of other minds (audio).
But the problem of other minds also extends to institutions made by other minds. During the Great Depression and after World War II, the United States and many other countries built governmental and international institutions to alleviate poverty and resolve disputes. These institutions and the global order they created were very far from perfect, but they were much better than what existed before. Unfortunately, their creators didn’t realize that they needed to continue to advocate for institutions and to continue to reform them.
People are sometimes surprised that Trump and other reactionary politicians don't have consistent policies. They shouldn’t be. Reactionaries hate abstract systems and coherence. They don’t understand NATO, USAID, public broadcasting, literature, or science. So these things must be destroyed. Government as the ultimate mutual aid, cooperation, consent, and sexual autonomy are concepts that don’t make sense in a worldview where only the strong survive.
There's so much to do to educate the bystanders and the malcontents about what the right wing is doing. Please share if you could!
I forgot to add that it’s no coincidence at all that the emergence of science and liberal democracy happened at the same time. Science and democracy need each other, and it's also no coincidence that reactionaries hate both, as Mark Histed and Jenna Norton discussed with me: Science is under attack because it left the public behind: NIH scientists Mark Histed and Jenna Norton discuss the deep connection between democratic principles and scientific progress (audio).
Science, democracy, and art all go together. And so does sexual freedom. They’re all ways of knowing ourselves, as Savannah Sly and I discussed here: The right-wing wars on science and sex are linked: New Moon Network founder Savannah Sly on the radical right’s attack on self-knowledge and autonomy (audio).

Not exactly my analysis, but related enough to add to my Understanding American Politics index.

Campism

2026-01-15T11:22:00.000-08:00

A long excerpt of the perennial points from a longer post Against Campism by a wise leftist I recommend following, Alley Valkyrie.

What’s campism, you ask?
In short, campism is taking a binary position regarding the current geopolitical alignment of the world, the belief that those who stand in opposition to the same “camp” that you are opposed to need to be supported no matter what.
It’s the ideological/geopolitical version of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which manifests itself as the idea that any leader and/or regime positioned in opposition to the United States needs to be supported in the name of anti-imperialism.
For those who adopt this mindset, the fact that some world leaders who are seen as “enemies” of the United States are also brutal, murderous dictators who oppress, disappear and slaughter their own people is an afterthought, if even that.
More often than not, campists will insist that such beliefs are actually nothing more than Western imperialist propaganda. That in fact, folks such as Assad, Putin, Maduro, and now Khameini are really not so bad after all, and need to be supported because to not support them is to continue to prop up American empire.
[⋯]
Campism is to leftism what a fear of insects is to our personal well-being: an instinct that had a legitimate function in previous stages of our evolution but which nowadays does much more harm than good.
Let me elaborate on the former.
The origins of campism are rooted in the geopolitical shifts that resulted from the emergence of the “Great Powers” in the early 20^th century, which solidified in the years after the Russian Revolution and then cemented itself in the divisions that unfolded due to the Cold War.
The Cold War created three general geopolitical groupings: countries aligned with Western capitalism, countries aligned with Soviet socialism, and the “non-aligned” countries. These three groups are where the concepts of the First, Second, and Third World come from. Three camps, if you will.
But even during the Cold War, when geopolitical lines were much more clearly drawn, adherence to campism could function as a trap. Consider the origin of the idea of tankies, a term which was birthed as a way to distinguish and call out leftists who defended the use of tanks by the Soviets in order to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Those who did so were so blinded by their allegiance to Communism that they either failed to or refused to consider that the reasons why Hungarians were revolting was legitimate and that such a show of force on the part of the Soviets was brutal and unjustified. Those who defended the Soviets in that instance, as well as during the ’68 uprisings in Prague, were engaging in campism and absolutely deserved the pejorative label that they received.
After the fall of the USSR, in the absence of the previously-stated categories, campism reinvented itself into what we see today. In place of a (theoretically) tidy capitalist / communist split, campism ended up taking on the trappings of what’s best referred to as Third Worldism. The divisions redefined themselves as follows: the Global South versus the Global North and / or the underdeveloped world versus the developed world and/or the colonized world versus the colonizer world.
Which is a set of alignments that from a leftist perspective should absolutely act as a guide, a compass, a framework that anchors where we take off from. But after the take off, nuance and critical thinking are paramount, and campism has no use for either. It’s black and white. Good guys, bad guys. And from that, the idea that any leader that the bad guys don’t like must be a good guy.
Which is how you end up with folks like Caitlin Johnstone, who has stanned pretty much every modern-day dictator that’s come up against American empire without fail. For her and other campists, the ends justify the means. The suffering and fate of millions of people is ignored in the service of taking an ideologically pure position against empire.
And such a position is abhorrent.

Virus-cautious socializing

2026-01-12T17:42:00.000-08:00

Looking at covid, flu, et cetera, my sweetheart & I are trying to live a virus-cautious life, so that compels us to have a protocol for socializing.

Indoors

Just as one doesn’t like to share air with folks wrestling with obvious symptoms like coughing, we are wary of folks who have been in big risky crowds et cetera in the last few days.

Since rapid covid tests are not so accurate these days, we pack a Metrix test kit for use before sharing indoor air … though the awkward bit is that it takes 30 minutes to run the test. Ideally we would build a small circle of folks testing.

We are also looking at more aggressive HEPA filters and far-UV lights improving the odds.

Outdoors

We have both gas & electric heaters set up for our covered patio. They aren’t strong enough to overcome the coldest times of winter, but they take the edge off enough to be cozy on a chilly day if one also dresses warmly.

We are also trying to cultivate a list of venues with covered & heated outdoor seating.

Victoria Bar
our favorite, with good nosh — NE Albina
The Rambler Bar
N Mississippi
¿Por Qué No?
taqueria — SE Hawthorne
Bar Maven, Bar Carlo, Shami Cafe, 5 & Dime Bar
surprisingly good food (except 5&D) but none of these have heat outside — SE Foster

We are also up for an adventure to try places like …

Mirisata Restaurant
Sri Lankan food — SE Belmont
Laurelhurst Market
a world of beef — E Burnside
Tiny Bubble Room
taproom & grill — N Lombard
Interurban Saloon
N Mississippi
The Knock Back Bar
NE Alberta

Divination and “AI”

2026-01-02T17:51:00.000-08:00

I am an esotericist who takes divination seriously as a thinking process, neither more nor less different from electrical engineering than film theory differs from medical diagnosis.

Contrary to what some esotericists and most civilians imagine, when doing divination using tarot cards (or I Ching hexagrams, or runes, or astrological charts, or whatever) one need not believe that the Cosmos delivers wisdom through a spooky process which controls which of these tokens come up.

Each token in a divinatory system (a card or rune or whatever) has a complex, multivalent meaning. Famously, the Death card in tarot does not necessarily mean actual death — readers take it more often as signifying sharp changes and transitions, carving away the unimportant to attend to the important, and so forth. I personally like tarot because of how this manifests in the complexity of the imagery on the cards, but even a spare, simple rune has this quality; isa (ᛁ) signifies ice, stillness, reflection, observation, facing fear, endurance, the antithesis to primordial fire, and more. Learning a divinatory system involves developing a rich, complex sense of what each token can signify.

During divination, drawing several random tokens offers the reader a big bouquet of symbolism rich in meaning. The reader’s mind surveys that, picks out elements, and synthesizes those into a description of what they see the tokens “saying”. This is not a reasoned process, it is an “intuitive” process. Reading tarot, I find that different elements of a card stand out for me in different readings; I may focus on the fallen king under Death’s horse in one reading, then in the next reading find myself thinking about the odd sunrise (or is it a sunset?) between two towers in the background.

What are the mechanics of that “intuition”? One can conceive of it as receiving information from spiritual forces & entities, or one can conceive of it as an entirely psychological-materialist process. Practitioners commonly describe how everything feeds a divinatory reading — not just the tokens but the querant’s question, what the reader notices about the querent, what the reader knows about life, et cetera. This is the kind of subtle mental process Freud was trying to address by talking about conscious thought being the tip of an iceberg which included “das Unbewusste”, the unconscious. Does das Unbewusste draw on information from spirits or other cosmic forces? Jung thought so, and many readers find it useful to think so. Jung would also say that the Cosmos arranges synchronicities — meaningful coïncidences — so that the hand of the Cosmos chooses the right tokens to appear. But one may also presume that contemplating a novel mix of arbitrary symbols just brings forward analysis das Unbewusste does on information it has received through mundane channels, that perceiving meaning in the spread of tokens is just a useful illusion.

Esotericists generally counsel resisting the temptation to overthink those mechanics. I embrace a radical agnosticism on where the insight “really” comes from … though in doing divination I find it very helpful to pretend as hard as I can that the particular tokens which come up contain a carefully-composed message from the Cosmos.

The relationship between a querent and a reader parallels the relationship between a reader and a spread of tokens. What a querent absorbs from a reading is the querent’s own process of “intuitive” interpretation drawing on the set of ideas the reader presents to them. I submit that this double cascade of interpretation further demonstrates how divination is a structured thinking process; doing divination solo, a querent drawing their own tokens without a reader, is notoriously difficult.

Software systems attempting to deliver divination have been around for decades, but they are unsatisfying. Having a computer program spit out a fixed meaning for a tarot card or astrological correspondence — “beep trine between the Sun and Saturn signifies a need for caution in financial & business concerns beep” — does none of the subtle analysis I describe above. This is the same difficulty as doing divination solo.

But I wonder about LLMs, the technology animating recent discussion of “AI”. I have a hunch that they might enable better divination robots than the proceedural software systems of the past. The way I describe the mental process in divination above seems to rhyme with the way people (sometimes dangerously) project meaning into the output of LLM babblebots. Maybe a querent can exercise the Eliza Effect with an LLM as a substitute for a human reader? Or cultivate that as a skill easier to develop than ordinary solo reading?

Over on Bluesky, a wise esotericist I know challenges this suggestion:

This idea is disgusting to me on principle. This only makes sense to do if you don’t think spiritual matters are real, because if they are, then the unethical and exploitative nature of the tech is surely a form of spiritual pollution you wouldn’t want touching your divination.

As both an esotericist and as a nerd skeptical of “AI” boosters’ breathless enthusiasm for supposed applications of LLMs, I share that impulse, but I am also trying to resist becoming a reflexive LLM hater.

I think they were partly responding my original thread’s implication that an LLM might do a human spiritual process, which I do not want to suggest.

Rather, considering the potential usefulness of a divination robot depends on a couple of big ifs. Are there querents who do not need the full support of a human reader’s insight, but do need a more digestible instrument than raw tokens to provoke their own spiritual insight? Can an LLM do the necessary work of symbolic refinement to provide something useful to that purpose? Does divination require an input of spiritual insight beyond what lies within the querent — if not a human reader, Something Else like a conscious nonhuman spirtual entity?

I don’t know. Surely someone is trying the experiment?

The tale of RMS Carpathia

2025-12-15T20:07:00.000-08:00

I’m overdue to keep a link to this great telling of one of my favorite stories: the RMS Carpathia rescuing surivors of the wreck of the Titanic.

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

Have a hanky handy. I’ve read this dozens of times and it makes me weepy every time.

Also: in case you didn’t already know, this story will show you that the Starship Enterprise is a steamship.

Clarifying common social justice praxis

2025-11-21T13:50:00.000-08:00

Social justice is not my primary political project, so I don’t want to claim profound expertise. But having rolled with people who are serious social justice advocates for a long time, I have a developed a distinctive way of articulating some key things which some people find useful. This post is no place to start thinking about social justice, but I hope that it will help clarify what is happening in other commentaries.

The left
Liberal vs identity politics
Hard vs soft identity politics
Identity politics concepts

Fundamentals

Social justice

The term should be familiar. I like to name a few things explicitly.

Praxis is a word much-used by leftists to name to the manifestation of ideas through practices.

Social justice means addressing injustices pervasively experienced by social groups: the sexism women encounter, the racism people of color encounter, et cetera.

Social justice advocacy more specifically refers to the practice of attempting to correct social injustices. There are a range of different approaches, grounded in different analyses of how social injustices work. This post is mostly an attempt at clarifying how some major approaches work.

Social justice advocacy culture is an expression I use to distinguish advocates’ driving ideologies from the social norms & practices people exercise. This can be useful, for instance, in naming that one embraces the feminist project & analysis while faulting some moves feminists tend to make … or vice versa.

Opponents of social justice include people acting from a few different principles. Some assert that American society is fundamentally just, with social justice advocates misrepresenting how the world works. Some accept that the conditions social justice advocates point to are at least partly real, but reject addressing them as impractical, or entirely impossible. Some recognize those conditions but assert either implicitly or explicitly that those conditions are right & good. I find it useful to talk about these types together while recognizing that they are not simply all the same.

The left

We should not just conflate social justice advocacy with “the left”.

We need to start with clarity about the term “left”, which can mean a few different things. (I have a long post on the subject.) To name to the range from Democratic Party moderates to Maoist revolutionaries and countless points in between, I like to refer to “the broad left”.

Leftism — or The Left — is the portion of the broad left which calls for profound institutional change replacing capitalism with some form of socialism (not just social insurance like single-payer health care, but public control of factories et cetera). Within both groups one can find many different relationships with social justice — frameworks for understanding, policy approaches, and degrees of attention.

Social justice advocacy is not just the same thing as either the broad left or leftism. Social justice advocacy on the broad right is rare, but does exist. Some people on the broad left have a weak enough concern with social justice that they do not qualify as advocates. Many social justice advocates conceive themselves as leftists; many others do not. Some leftists consider social justice advocacy a distraction from economic class as the important locus of political action.

Two big social justice ideologies

Among social justice advocates in the US one finds two broad ideological schools with profound differences. The failure of social justice advocacy culture to articulate these schools clearly produces a lot of confusion. Alas, as when talking about the left, the most precise terms of art invite confusion, but we have no better alternative.

The liberal school school is more familiar to people who do not have a deep engagement with social justice advocacy culture. Not “liberal” in the sense of the policy objectives of the Democratic Party (which leftists call “lib”) but a deeper sense: the approach to governance & society which grounds political claims in democratic institutions and universal egalitarian rights. (To specify that sense, I often abbreviate liberal democracy as “libdem”.) One may summarize the liberal school of social justice as:

calling for equal rights for all
vigorously rejecting institutional discrimination
exercising institutional power to counter private discrimination

The identity politics school has come to dominate US social justice advocacy culture in recent decades. Unhappily, this name for it is most often used as a bogeyman by opponents of any efforts toward social justice, but we need to be able to distinguish this framework from the liberal school, and no other term will do. “Identity politics” first appeared in print in the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement, and one can learn a lot about this approach to social justice by reading that early document. I summarize the identity politics school as:

considering the universalism of the liberal school inadequate for achieving social justice; as Anatole France famously snarked, “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread”
examining the particular group categories society imposes on individuals’ identities (race, gender, et cetera)
actively countering the unequal relationships between those groups in every context (cultural, social, institutional, et cetera)

Hard vs soft identity politics

I find it not just illuminating but important to distinguish “soft” from “hard” identity politics. This distinction is my own coinage, but I find that it helps make sense of where people stand.

Soft identity politics embraces both the liberal and identity politics approaches. It sees them as complimentary, acting as counterweights to each other’s limitations.

Hard identity politics rejects any other approach to social justice as illegitimate. It sees the liberal school as nothing other than an instrument for maintaining & justifying inequities.

One cannot draw an entirely bright line between these tendencies. Among the soft school, people may lean more or less on liberal or identity politics frameworks, often changing their priorities in different contexts. Among the hard school people still sometimes invoke liberal language about rights et cetera despite their rejection of the liberal framework. But looking for social justice advocates’ attitudes in these terms can be very clarifying.

Identity politics concepts

To understand what the identity politics school is — and to make a lot of social justice praxis legible — I find it clarifying to reïntroduce some key vocabulary & concepts from the identity politics school’s analytical toolkit which advocates don’t always describe crisply.

The term equity directs attention to bottom-line outcomes, in contrast with liberal ideas of rights & process equality. This famous cartoon offers a metaphor:

Identity politics registers that different axes of identity (race, gender, et cetera) operate in similar ways. In particular, it refers to relative advantage as privileged positions (white people, men, etc) and refers to relative disadvantage as oppressed or marginalized positions (people of color, women, etc). “Privilege” in this context neither contrasts with rights nor denotes the particular advantages of high social class; the term stuck despite those misleading resonances because a famous 1991 commentary used it well in speaking to college-educated white feminist women.

Identity politics articulates several ways that different privileged positions operate similarly, just as different marginalizatized positions do. For example, culture tends to frame privileged positions as “normal”, while taking marginalized positions as deviation from that norm, so a privileged identity often goes unmarked while a marginalize identity is marked even when it was irrelevant — one will hear references to a “Black doctor” or a “female doctor” much more often than to a “white doctor” or “male doctor”.

Identity politics also examines the unique characteristics of each axis, and intersectionality names its body of ideas for addressing how people’s positions on mutliple axes interact in complex ways. No one is simply privileged or marginalized. A gay Black man experiences privilege along the axis of gender while experiencing marginalization on the axes of sexuality and race. Each identity complicates the others; a gay Black man experiences racism differently than a Black straight man or a Black lesbian woman does.

The identity politics school has a vocabulary for talking about different mechanisms which produce inequities — personal, interpersonal, institutional, structural, and more. This expands the scope of social justice advocacy beyond impacts of overt bigotry & discrimination, trying to overcome systemic inertia from ignorance, misunderstandings, inequities in financial & social capital, et cetera. Thus it uses “racism” to refer to everything which creates & sustains racial inequities, rather than to refer just to racial bigotry; likewise for sexism, homophobia, etc. This makes it easy to get confused about which processes we are talking about in a particular instance; I try to never deploy terms like “racism” alone, instead specifying “racist bigtory”, “systemic racism”, et cetera.

Because of this attention to systems beyond bigotry, identity politics underlines that one can participate in injustices without exercising bigotry at all — that indeed one inevitably will unless one makes deliberate efforts toward antiracist / antisexist / etc action, especially along the axes where one occupies a privileged position. The aphorism “impact, not intent” reminds us how focusing on the particulars of bigotry can become a distraction from understanding & correcting how one implicitly enables unjust processes. One practical application of that is that nouning is considered harmful — one should avoid asking whether we should indict a person as a racist or sexist et cetera, instead registering without disqualifying their whole moral character the ways they should look to better support justice. I sometimes express that by saying things like, “I don’t think you are a racist, but when you X you are doing racism, so you should change that”.

Grappling with criticisms

Reasonable people of good conscience can come to significantly different conclusions about how best to understand & correct social injustices. Vigorous contention among social justice advocates about how to understand and address injustices is healthy, inherently difficult, and necessary.

Personally, I find the identity politics toolkit for overcoming the limits of libdem unmistakably necessary … and I am committed to taking libdem remedies as far as possible before venturing beyond them, so I stand with soft identity politics. I find wisdom and allies from folks in both both the liberal and the hard identity politics camps; one must respect people committed to the project whom one considers mistaken.

There are real problems in social justice advocacy culture. Frankly, there are even a few social justice advocates who we must keep far from the levers of power. There will always be smug, noisy assholes whose voices carry when they rationalize themselves with so-called political principle.

But one can easily misread loud voices as more significant than they are in any movement. The worst ideas and actors in social justice advocacy hold no significant power, and will not any time soon. There are obstacles to a healthy culture of social justice advocacy from within the movement, but they are dwarfed by the problems rooted in adaptations to facing constant attacks motivated by stubborn misunderstanding or deliberate bad faith. Even the movement’s greatest failings are not nearly so bad as opponents of suggest.

That defense made, I see a need to talk about criticisms at length, for several reasons.

It is important on the merits. I have posted before about concerns because we can and should do better.

It serves the primary misson of this post, delivering clarity to people sympathetic to the project of social justice who find encounters with social justice advocacy disorienting and frustrating. Advocacy culture is not self-aware about legitimate anxieties about our practices which tend to drive people away. Clarifying things people react to and putting them in perspective helps people find good ways to engage, even when they remain skeptical. This is why, for instance, this post names a distinction between social justice versus social justice advocacy culture; I want to defuse any tendency to reject the project of social justice because of stinging encounters with movement culture.

It refuses to cede the ground of critiquing social justice advocacy culture to opponents of social justice. I don’t want to those opponents to look more credible than they are by being able to claim “we are the only ones talking about XYZ”.

It supports improvements in praxis. When we cannot sustain an internal dialogue about a problem, new critiques cannot build on past efforts or address those efforts’ limitations, re-starting from Square One, reïnventing the wheel. (I find it particularly galling that social justice advocacy culture has let our opposition repeatedly coöpt our terms of art for self-reflection, including not just “identity politics” but also “political correctness”, “social justice warrior”, “woke”, and others.)

So below I try to name some common troubles in social justice praxis, focusing on things which I find that people unfamiliar with advocacy tend to mis- or over-read.

Faux liberalism

A lot of criticism of social justice advocacy which exercises libdem language is either deceit or wank rationalizing inaction which leaves inequities in place. One can see this fundamental problem in one of critics’ classic moves: demanding that we demonstrate to their satisfaction that an inequity emerges directly from bigotry severe enough that acting to correct it is possible and morally necessary.

Social justice advocates often reject that move from bitter experience with such critics refusing to ever accept that we have proved that case. I consider it useful also challenge an assumption lurking within that demand. The burden of proof should fall on their suggestion that an inequity may be fair, not on social justice advocates’ assertions that inequities are unjust.

Consider people framing their objections to antiracist policies as standing for “equality of opportunity, not opportunity of outcome”. How do they account for every metric one can find revealing white people better off than Black people? It is trivial to see how in 1950 this reflected inequality of opportunity. Today’s inequities pointing in the same direction as past differences in opportunity is a very suspicious coïncidence. If American society changed to provide equal opportunity, when exactly did that happen? 1975? 2008? What evidence supports that claim? If Black people get lesser outcomes from equal opportunity, is that not a claim that Black people are somehow inferior? If one is not a bigot, isn’t it more parimonious to attribute inequity to lingering unfairness in the system? If that unfairness does not emerge from direct discrimination, why would that make it OK? Even if bigotry were entirely erased from American society — which we know it has not been — we would expect it to leave a lingering systemic legacy, like a traffic jam persisting after cars wrecked in an accident have been cleared. Why wouldn’t we do whatever we can to correct those echoes from past wrongs?

Reflexive anti-liberalism

I respect how the kind of people I describe above inspire impatience with liberal arguments skeptical of the analysis and remedies offered by the identity politics school. The culture of identity politics advocacy sometimes presumes that all support for the liberal school of social justice must therefore reflect nothing other than disingenuous opposition to social justice. In my personal experience people offering skepticism framed in shallow liberal terms sometimes turn out to be more goodhearted than they appear, having embraced a misreading of liberal principle because they have given these questions very little thought. I would never demand that any social justice advocate spend the time and energy it takes to walk people out of that thinking, but they should not oppose other people making the attempt.

Some hard identity politics folks extend that reading yet further. One rarely sees social justice advocates draw the distinction I do between the liberal and identity politics schools because a lot of people committed to identity politics resist recognizing it as a social justice ideology, because they think of it as the only real form of social justice advocacy. This denial of the legitimacy of the the liberal framework often extends to implying that no real liberal tradition in social justice advocacy has ever existed, which would come as a surprise to the people who put the word “rights” in the middle of the name of the Civil Rights Movement.

Language policing

Most social justice advocates consider cultural change as important as institutional change. I have sympathy for this feeling like nitpicking sometimes … though the shock of encountering casual racism, sexism, homophobia, and other bad cultural politics in media just a few decades old makes a strong case that the nitpicking efforts which changed our norms were well worth it. Taking care with language is a big way social justice advocates do this cultural work. But the practice can have messy unintended consequences.

Sometimes preferred language is just an arbitrary signal that one pays attention to social justice. One cannot deduce from antiracist principle that one should say “person of color” rather than “colored person”, one has to just know. It does not make the language hollow — signaling that one pays attention to social justice is a good thing to do! We should be forthright about that. In that particular example, objecting to someone saying “colored person” is fair because the rule is well-known. But in other cases, social justice advocates take offense based on language norms which they presume are better-known than they are. Esoteric language can drive away people with their hearts in the right place who don’t know where to start in getting more engaged with social justice advocacy culture, and can reïnforce social class gatekeeping by presenting a greater challenge to people who have not been exposed to that langauge through a college education or other professional-class spaces.

Social justice advocacy culture responding to people who don’t use the word “racism” the way it does presents a particularly fraught example. Advocates often tell people that they are “wrong” to think that “racism” means racial bigotry because the “real” definition of “racism” understands it as a system. Trying to assert the “correct” meaning of “racism” is like trying to identify the “correct” meaning of “God” — the ideas the word represents are too contested. Most dictionaries offer racial bigotry as their first definition of “racism”; and many do not reference racism as a system at all. Countering people talking about racism in terms of bigotry with an assertion about the definition of the word turns the discussion away from the substance of language to the semantics.

At its worst, this becomes a lazy attempt to force people to accept a whole way of thinking about social justice without bothering with the argument for it. I find it both more honest and more effective to say, “Because looking only at bigotry does not reveal enough about how things work, a lot of social justice include everything which produces racial inequities when they use the word ‘racism’ — stuff like honest ignorance, social & financial capital, et cetera. Since different people use the words ‘racism’ and ‘racist’ differently, I try never to use them by themselves. I say ‘racist bigotry’ or ‘institutional racism’ or whatever, in order to be precise.” People often object that the way advocates use the word is weird, but they can accept a description of the usage of the word is accurate, and talk about the substance of what I am trying to say, without spiralling into unanswerable questions about what the word “really” means.

It further undermines attempts to assert an “accurate” definition of “racism” when social justice advocates are not actually precise with their usage of the word. Advocates commonly slip between using “racism” to mean The Big System Of Injustice and using it to mean bigotry. That sloppy language makes advocacy look like sloppy thinking. In those cases, it is slopping thinking, implying that systemic inequities prove the presence of bigotry without presenting an argument, which falls into the trap I described of faux-liberal skepticism setting by insisting on proof of bigtory.

Social justice advocacy culture needs to do better at delivering the care with language in practice which it calls for in principle.

Absolutism

Sometimes social justice advocates over-read tendencies as absolutes.

Understanding from lived experience

For example, standpoint theory registers that one’s identity positions have an inescapably profound impact on one’s encounter of the world, which makes it good praxis to value lived experience: people in a marginalized position have a generally more sophisticated read of the inequities along that axis, and the mechanics of how those inequities work, than people in a privileged position do. Women understand sexism better than men, et cetera. We can recognize that while also understanding that sometimes a man may happen to have an insight into sexism which a woman does not.

But this sometimes does stiffen into an abolute form. I have been told that a particular fact I have offered about the history of feminism which a woman did not happen to know could not possibly be correct, because men must never tell women how sexism works. I have seen social justice advocates insist that the lived experience of queer people are the only ground for understanding homophobia, which may make us dismiss a useful insight from a straight historian because it differs from queer cultural memory. This can produce maddening paradoxes, calling on people in privileged positions to speak out against injustices but then scolding them when they do.

This is tricky to navigate! My fact about feminist history was not all that important; on balance, relying too much on queer cultural memory may still deliver a better understanding of how homophobia works than being too credulous with straight historians. People in privileged positions tend to over-read the marginalized as making bad moves, which is one reason why the privileged need to cultivate skepticism about their own reactions. So correcting such errors at the margins is not always worth the effort. And in decisions where stakes are higher for the oppressed than for the marginalized, the marginalized have a compelling moral claim that they should be the ones to make a call about what to do.

Campism

The privilege–marginalization framework inherits a lot from the anticolonial work of Franz Fanon, who underlined the importance of always checking one’s politics against whether or not it supports the oppressed in overcoming their oppression at the bottom line, summarized in the famous aphorism that the oppressed have a right to overthrow their oppression by any means necessary.

If one actually reads Fanon, he cautions about the dangers in reducing that analysis to a campism which justifies any brutality the oppressed might commit. He supported liberation by any means necessary, not by any means possible. I have encountered people fall into the trap he warns about, claim a moral impunity for frightening ruthlessness, in a creepy parallel with Carl Schmitt’s fascist “friend-enemy distinction”. That kind of vulgar Fanon-ism should give us the cold spooky.

Oppression Olympics

If the only ground for understanding is the experience of the marginalized … how do we discern who resolve whose marginalization is legitimate and relevant in context? Some “feminists” claim that trans women are really men, and accepting their account of transphobia illegitimately favors privileged men over marginalized women; trans women call this a demand that we favor privileged cis people over marginalized trans people. I know where I stand — transphobes are liars — but “defer to the marginalized” in itself does not give us the ability to resolve that question. People can fall into an oppression Olympics of arguing over who is most marginalized … and intersectionality names the importance of not doing that, because the dynamics are always complex and entangled.

Cancel culture

I have another post directly addressing this. There is no better example of a genuine challenge which opponents of social justice grossly exaggerate. Two key points:

the scary thing is capriciousness and lack of proportion

Perversely, the more one actually cares about social justice, the more vulnerable one becomes to the thing we are talking about when we are talking about “cancel culture”. That bad actors often benefit from being “cancelled” is no comfort if one is neither cynical nor evil.

Manifestos for a new America

2025-11-20T11:36:00.000-08:00

We have no choice but to think big.

The ongoing reälignment of American politics which produced the Trump regime is already at least as profound as the emergence of the New Deal administrative state. Given the course I imagine for the Trump regime, we will need a reconstruction as profound as the unfinished reconstruction after the Civil War. Not just policy. Not even just governance or an economic system. A full new social vision with its own ethos.

I’m starting to see manifestos, so I’m going to index them here.

Visions

Liberal Currents
Reforging America

A word from Samantha Hancox-Li of Liberal Currents, where people are thinking about the muscular, radical liberalism I yearn for.

The mainspring of governance

Congress must be revitalized internally
Congress must reassert itself vis-a-vis the other branches
Most importantly, the link between the Congress and the people must be reforged
A world of abundance
We must clear out regulations that serve only to create artificial scarcity
We must run a hotter economy than the neoliberals allowed
We should invest in basic public goods
We should re-found the world trade system

America for all
We must invest in public and higher education
We must finally arrive at a new settlement on immigration
We must prosecute all the criminals of Trump II.
We must rebuild our public sphere

The UnPopulist
The Reconstruction Agenda

The Reconstruction Agenda, a new project of The UnPopulist, will take this problem seriously, building on its Fireproofing the Presidency series. Its Executive Watch project is diligently documenting the copious abuses of the office emanating from this White House. The Reconstruction Agenda will propose fixes and mechanisms to avoid such a scenario from transpiring ever again. Through written analysis from myself and outside experts, along with regular in-depth interviews on The Reconstruction podcast, it will examine how American democracy became so brittle and how it might be rebuilt. The goal is to value genuine expertise and make it accessible to any thoughtful reader. You’re smart people and you deserve smart answers, not clickbait and ill-informed punditry, nor nihilistic doomerism. The task before us is restoring the capacity for freedom and self-government, not simply lamenting its decline.

Manifestos for a manifesto

These are not quite manifestos themselves, but rather smart comments framing what we need from a manifesto.

Timothy Burke
Working On Our Ism

We are against Trump and Farage and LePen and Orban and Weidel, but what are we for? What do we call it, if “socialism” is either hopelessly abstract or tied to references that don’t translate into the present? Could we give a positive, e.g., not defined by negation, description of what electoral majorities want other than fascism or ethnonationalism, and from that granular description, coin a new ism?
[⋯]
What I think we need is something like a list of propositions that many of us agree with deep in the bone, that we feel, without any attempt to specify implementations, laws or policies. If we do this right, I think we can find some basic ideas that a very substantial majority agree on, even including some people who might right now be voting for authoritarian or ethnonationalist parties.
[⋯]
But somewhere in all of that is not so much an anti-capitalism, defined by negation, but a vision of shared social life that is other than capitalism. Something other than liberal modernity or mass society. To give whatever that it is a name of its own and a pathway to concretization I think involves more conversations about these ideas before we try to make parties or movements or policies.

Brad DeLong
“The Permanent Problem of the Human Race”

A liberal economist observes that this is a integral to the history of economic thinking and its limitations.

Brink’s major diagnosis of the ills of modernity is that the society we have built while an absurdly rich society is also a terrifying mass society: we confront it as producer-cogs in labor markets, as consumer-cogs in product markets, and as parasocial information- and entertainment-consumers who then find themselves without agency to affect anything at all worthwhile. All human associative groups and markers of cohesion and particularity have been steamed away.
We have market economies with their price signals and their equilibria. We have states—democratic states, for now at least—setting-up rules of interaction and issuing commands via what really is a tremendously efficient bureaucratic order. We have ideologies creating and enforcing common values and orientations and operating procedures to a degree that the Prussian General Staff college dreamed of but never managed to attain. And we always have the possibility of a charismatic personalist dictatorship, law-abiding or not, giving mass society direction. on the other — whether by a market equilibrium, a bureaucratic command, an ideological conformity — enforcement, or an overmighty authoritarian personalist dictator.
All of that is necessary for us to be extraordinarily productive as we are.
Yet these societal-scale institutions squash the individual: liberate us from material scarcity and personal hierarchical domination and empower us to control nature and organize ourselves on the one hand, but subject us to the dominion of extraordinary strong powers — market systems, bureaucratic systems, ideological systems, and now algorithmic systems — that seem arbitrary and alien. They seem so because they are. They make us their playthings, controlling us by making us offers we dare not refuse, for refusing them hobbles our very valuable extraordinary material prosperity.
And so none of that is at the human scale we need for autonomy and agency, and thus for human flourishing.

Wank

2025-11-10T10:46:00.000-08:00

Iris Meredeth offers “wank” as a useful term of art:

Our society clearly has an issue with a whole family of bad-faith speech acts: outright lying is an obvious problem and bullshit, as defined in Harry Frankfurt’s text on the matter is a pressing concern in our political climate. However, none of them quite capture what’s going on here, which can perhaps be described as speech that aims to bolster someone's self-image or let them feel good about themselves, but that is disguised as something else: a political statement, an objective statement of fact or a form of artistic expression. This essay aims to define this form of speech, and given its observed properties, we could do worse than to call it wank.
[⋯]
⋯ Our working definition might therefore be as follows:
Wank is a speech act directed first and foremost at helping the speaker feel better about themselves, stated as an objective claim about the state of the world, that we are expected in discussion to treat with the epistemic authority of a claim about identity, but the content of the actual claim.

The end of the Social Justice Détente

2025-10-15T17:44:00.000-07:00

After the wrenching fights over social justice from the ’60s through the early ’70s, American society made an implicit bargain I like to call The Social Justice Détente:

no big new government policy moves to correct injustices
no public expressions of overt bigotry

Advocates for social justice today tend to think of the emergence of The Détente as simply the bigots winning, but it did not seem that way at the time. Before The Détente, American public culture had allowed a measure of bigotry hard to imagine even if one is old enough to remember it. Changing that was not trivial.

Part of the logic of The Détente was that in the ’70s & ’80s, social justice advocates in our pop media engaged in a pervasive propaganda campaign to overcome bigotry. In an episode of Mork & Mindy, Young Robin Williams faced down the local chapter of the Klan! In an episode of The Partridge Family, Danny became an honorary Black Panther! Norman All In The Family Lear was the king of this sort of thing, but it was everywhere. When young social justice advocates grumble about white liberals’ earnest, maddening misunderstandings, half the time they are confronting ideas inherited from this propaganda campaign, which feels dangerously tepid & naïve to contemporary viewers but reflected a powerful challenge in its time, supported by sophisticated social justice advocates.

The broad left hoped that these egalitarian parables and a public sphere purged of overt bigotry would produce a new American generation free of the bigoted attitudes of the past. Arresting policy progress was a pause, not a surrender; the next generation would would pick up the baton and take the next steps toward a more just society.

Obviously that did not happen. American culture still has plenty of bigotry. The wave of political support for new policy comparable to the anti-racist (and anti-sexist) reforms of the Civil Rights Era did not come. To understand our current condition, we need to understand both those failings and the successes we did get.

Baseline common bigotry on the broad left today mortifies people attentive to social justice, but it is far less than the bigotry common even on the broad left prior to The Détente. Even the fact that we have a hard time remembering how bad bigtory used to be constitutes a major victory.

The broad right today is twistier.

The right started worse, and changed a lot less. But they are sincerely offended by a lot of things their great-grandparents would have said casually … which they think means they are not bigots at all.

Bigots never think they are bigots; they think their attitudes are just obvious common sense. So people on the right assume that most people on the left privately understand and agree with their attitudes. They imagine that we just differ from them in working harder to maintain the hypocritical performance of public norms which conflict with common sense. Surely in our most private circles we let ourselves admit the truth.

People on the right have learned not to express themselves “honestly” without subtly checking first whether everyone in earshot is “cool”. It is easy for folks on the left to underestimate the gulf between the attitudes people on the right have and routinely express in private versus what they say when measuring their words in our presence. When people on the right grumble about the “far left” exercising “totalitarian” control and “dominating” culture with “lies”, it is absurd, but they are sincerely describing what they experience.

Compounding that, the broad right feel that the broad left have violated the terms of The Détente. We didn’t accept The Détente as a satisfactory endpoint. We don’t admit that “real” racism & sexism have been obviously defeated. Indeed, we greedily demand more. The scope of what we permit in public keeps narrowing. And we have extended the power of the state to support the disgusting queers.

All this is of course a big part of why they find Trump refreshing and forthright. And they remain frustrated because even Trump does not get to say everything they say in private. I think it’s dangerously simpleminded to understand MAGA as just about bigotry, but it is a lot about bigotry.

I was prompted to finally write this post because of a recent story about leaked chats among Young Republicans which I think even most people on the broad right would find repulsively bigoted and fascist. The bigots-among-the-bigots use the skills they learned in stepping carefully in mixed company to watch what they say even among ordinary folks on the broad right. Even more than regular people on the broad right, they find it cathartic to speak “plainly” among themselves, and yearn for a world in which they can be “honest”.

Vice President Vance dismissing concern over the leak by saying “I refuse to join the pearl clutching” demonstrates how MAGA as a manifestation of our ongoing massive social reälignment rejects both aspects of The Détente: they will roll back the social justice policies implemented in the ’60s & early ’70s and change our public culture to permit bigotry.

Liberal Currents
The Present Crisis and the End of the Long ’90s

A racial and sexual hypocrisy
The Long ’90s was also a cultural settlement. The cultural settlement was not embodied in any single law or policy, but rather shaped the basic assumptions of Americans about our country — and, most especially, who was a full citizen. Surprisingly, the consensus can be expressed quite simply. On the one hand, explicit racial or sexual discrimination would end. On the other, America would remain de facto a white man’s republic.
From the perspective of 1982, this seems like a good bargain for all concerned. The bruising unrest of the 60’s and 70’s — including the violent terrorism the New Left had degenerated into, including the violent terrorism of Jim Crow or COINTELPRO — all that would end. The insurgents — the feminists, the civil rights activists — would get a major improvement on the status quo. And the status quo — the white patriarchy — would in practice get to keep most of its privileges and power.
The compromise broke down with the election of Barack Obama. After forty years, the “insurgents” were no longer the children of Jim Crow and white-picket-fence patriarchy. They were the children of the Long ’90s, who had been promised the world. We told all America’s children — men, women, and otherwise, black and white and otherwise — that they could be anything they wanted to be. Unsurprisingly, they believed us.
Meanwhile, the old guard of the white man’s republic — men and women both, it turns out — were shocked and appalled at the possibility of a black man being president—of black people demanding an end to routine police brutality — of women demanding an end to routine sexual assault. Both MeToo and Black Lives Matter were shocks to the conservative psyche it has not yet recovered from.
The Trump II theory of the case is bizarre and conspiratorial. Trump II appears to believe that this sea change in American culture — the belief that America is not a white man’s republic, but a republic in which all men and women are endowed with certain inalienable rights — was a result of a cabal of Marxist professors and other elites, the “Cathedral,” which brainwashed the youth of America, and if they can simply find the Cathedral’s funding and cut it off, Americans will go back to loving the boot. They just need to kill the woke mind virus. The demand that Harvard accept a group of political commissars to ensure “viewpoint diversity” (aka affirmative action for rightwing incompetents) embodies this.

Romney bitterness

2025-10-15T16:45:00.000-07:00

Over on Bluesky, a bunch of lefties piled on to a post expressing a common sentiment from the right.

The media smeared Mitt Romney as Hitler. Then Republicans thought, well we might as well run Hitler.

We have been hearing this for years, and lefties mostly respond by calling shenanigans on this as disingenuous. This classic cartoon from lefty satirist Matt Bors sums up the point:

That critique of the right claiming that the left drives them right has a lot of truth to it, but I think there is some extra dimension to folks on the right feeling raw about Romney in particular.

To many folks on the broad right who may not even be MAGAs, supporting Romney’s presidential bid reflected something paralleling what Clintonian triangulation represents to the broad left. “He is obviously sharp. He is fundamentally competent. He doesn’t say inflammatory stuff that freaks out the other side which some other potential candidates from our side might. We are tacking toward the center rather than toward what we want most, to be less vulnerable to criticism.” There was even the inversion of Dems’ grumble, “How can the Republicans object to the Affordable Care Act when it is essentially the same plan Romney implemented in Massachusetts?” He was not a candidate who excited them, he was a candidate they hoped would repel their opponents less, win over a few votes, and enable reaching across the aisle in Congress.

I’m not saying Romney was that person; he was more a creature of longstanding Republican movement conservatism than they remember. But a lot of Republicans sincerely understood him that way. Folks on the broad left should be familiar with how it feels to see that fail.

There’s also a thing that fascinates me about Mitt Romney’s screen presence. He looks like the actor one might cast in a movie which has just one scene in the Oval Office, and thus needs a guy who is obviously meant to be the president without anyone having to be told. It’s a characteristic which feels very comforting to Republicans in a way they would assume extends to Dems. They don’t understand that it opens the question of why they don’t feel the same comfort with Obama in the Oval, with its obvious ugly answer.

Dems of course did not attack Romney as Practically Hitler. But we did sharply criticize him (for very good reasons), which felt so unfair because they were Trying To Be So Nice in picking him.

Fine, then. They’ll pick a candidate who does excite them. Not because Trump is a fascist — obviously that is a “leftist” fantasy! But they get to enjoy the schadenfreude from the left frantic over that “fantasy”. Why not? Being nice by picking Romney got them nowhere.

“Cancel culture” and criticism

2025-10-15T15:56:00.000-07:00

I keep bouncing off of my attempts to say something sophisticated about the challenges in constructively criticizing social justice advocacy culture. It’s a huge subject and I get lost in nuance.

One must start from the recognition that 95% of criticism of social justice advocacy culture is disingenuous reactionary bullshit from opponents of social justice … and that 95% is not 100%. There are legitimate criticisms which are not simply attacks on the project of social justice itself. There are roadblocks deterring worthy criticisms which emerge organically from social justice advocacy culture itself, but I try to keep from focusing on my grumbles because most of the frictions preventing the culture from facing its own failings have their roots in necessary adaptations to dealing with opponents of social justice.

Today I fell into a rant about “cancel culture” on Bluesky, so it seemed worth capturing (and slightly refining) that here.

What are we even talking about?

The Thing We Are Talking About When We Talk About Cancel Culture reflects this knotty challenge. Because opponents of social justice often make absurd claims about “cancel culture” or “call-out culture”, advocates for social justice often claim there is no such thing. But there is a thing, it is a feature of social justice advocacy culture, and as the Bluesky thread which inspired this post observes …

in hindsight it makes sense to see cancel culture as a harbinger of the end of shame rather than an excess of it. “shame” presupposes stable social norms and a sense of what one did wrong and how it could have been avoided. not suddenly a thunderbolt from zeus thrown at random people

I have captured that thread below. This post started from me expanding on the point: the scary thing is capriciousness and lack of proportion. Memorable real examples include:

A woman followed by a handful of friends on Twitter ironically takes the voice of a bigot to make a bad joke about AIDS in Africa, gets on a plane, and when she gets off she is infamous and unemployed. She deserved criticism, sure, but that was capricious and disproportionate.
A couple of guys at a tech conference joke to each other about the funny technical term “dongle” and by the end of the day they are infamous and one of them is unemployed. They deserved criticism, maybe, but that was capricious and disproportionate.
A trans woman writes a raw, personal story attempting to subvert a transphobic trope, the publisher faces so much criticism of it being “obviously” transphobic that they withdraw it, and the writer ends up so shaken by the pushback from her own community that she never attempts to get anything published again. A tragedy.

We all have said bad things that landed with people as even worse than they were, then found ourselves unable to set things right despite our sincere efforts. Dreading the possibility — however distant — that such an episode could seriously damage our careers or standing in community is natural and justified.

Moves people in social justice advocacy culture make to dismiss these concerns — like saying “‘cancel culture’ just means ‘consequences’” or “people should be more careful what they say” — implicitly endorse the capriciousness and disproportionate stakes.

The Thing We Are Talking About When We Talk About “Cancel Culture” is turbo-charged by online social media shitstorm dynamics but it is such a distinct phenomenon in social justice advocacy culture that Jo Freeman referred to it as “trashing” in a famous essay about feminist organizing in 1976.

The acid test, however, comes when one tries to defend a person under attack, especially when she’s not there, If such a defense is taken seriously, and some concern expressed for hearing all sides and gathering all evidence, trashing is probably not occurring. But if your defense is dismissed with an oft-hand “How can you defend her?”; if you become tainted with suspicion by attempting such a defense; if she is in fact indefensible, you should take a closer look at those making the accusations. There is more going on than simple disagreement.

Perversely, the more one actually cares about social justice, the more vulnerable one becomes to the thing we are talking about when we are talking about “cancel culture”. That bad actors often benefit from being “cancelled” is no comfort if one is neither cynical nor evil.

Again, most criticisms of “cancel culture” are disingenuous BS from bad actors trying to rationalize their desire to say bad things in public without consequence. But they are leveraging a real thing which presents substantive problems. Dismissing that real thing and those problems helps the bad actors and weakens the effectiveness of our advocacy.

That social justice advocates all too often snap — either retreating from public advocacy or even joining the opposition — is bad for everyone. I submit that many people we push out from social justice advocacy culture were just flawed in an ordinary, human way, just trying to figure things out, just making honest mistakes. On principle, social justice advocacy culture should help people where they stumble, not attack them. Yet the Driving People Out thing in social justice advocacy is another pattern which pre-dates the era of the identity politics framework and social media. Yes, some of those folks were charlatans all along, but is rooting out charlatans as vigorously as possible worth the cost? The right don’t think so; they support their charlatans and it sure pays off for their cause.

Many of us are too eager to read dissenters as having been Charlatans All Along; the psychological pressures of people facing a shitstorm of criticism will screw up even the most level-headed person. F’rinstance, I am fascinated by the tragedy of Warren Farrell. In the 1960s & ’70s he was a deeply committed feminist advocate. He turned the feminist analytical toolkit on what we now call toxic masculinity; I read his 1993 book The Myth Of Male Power, which has a fascinating mix of insight and bad ideas. Had feminist culture engaged with what he wanted to address rather than rejected him, our understanding of toxic masculinity would have gotten decades of head start. Instead, the pushback he got from feminist women drove him mad, and eventually he became a thoroughly evil MRA.

As I say in a longer word on grappling with criticisms of advocacy culture …

Preventing social justice loyalists from making good faith critiques of advocacy culture is not just bad on the liberal-values merits, it has been bad for achieving social justice. We can and should do better.

Commentaries

Aelkus on Bluesky

Not exactly my read, but illuminating, and it inspired the thread which became this post.

in hindsight it makes sense to see cancel culture as a harbinger of the end of shame rather than an excess of it. “shame” presupposes stable social norms and a sense of what one did wrong and how it could have been avoided. not suddenly a thunderbolt from zeus thrown at random people
because that was what CC was for the vast majority of people actually impacted by it.
at its peak, it really was essentially a free for all driven by platform dynamics and a ritualized system of aggression
Venkatesh Rao described a good part of here: The Internet of Beefs
there's a saying “not even wrong” to describe bad theories — they’re so bad that they’re impossible to be shown wrong. you might coin an analogue: “not even a mob with pitchforks.” all of the insanity of a crowd stoning someone to death, but none of the lasting social effects
i don’t think it makes sense to make an analytical separation, anyway, between “online harassment” and “cancel culture” as phenomena. they were both symptoms of the same underlying generating mechanisms in the 2010s
we do so largely because they are still ideologically loaded terms rather than neutral ways of describing “large masses of people concentrating negative energy on the internet towards a single target”
similarly, little of the discussions of “surveillance capitalism” in the 2010s acknowledged that social media was always built around peer to peer surveillance
the end result was fairly predictable. lots of random furries in discords got their social identities obliterated by other random furries in discords. however those with significant offline social status not only weathered the storm but became proficient at controlling platforms to use as tools of aggression. the quasi-feudal system Rao described in the post I linked died, and was replaced by what X represents today. A fully operational battle station controlled by a single nutty person
the fact that the system that produced this progression is now filled with nostalgia speaks to the enduring delusions its participants have about its true nature

Frances Lee | Excommunicate Me From The Church Of Social Justice

This memoir of familiar frustrations with social justice advocacy culture has a telling comment about the topic of this post:

Scrolling through my news feed sometimes feels Iike sliding into a pew to be blasted by a fragmented, frenzied sermon. I know that much of the media posted there means to discipline me to be a better activist and community member. But when dictates aren’t followed, a common procedure of punishment ensues. Punishments for saying / doing /b elieving the wrong thing include shaming, scolding, calling out, isolating, or eviscerating someone’s social standing. Discipline and punishment has been used for all of history to control and destroy people. Why is it being used in movements meant to liberate all of us?

Offbeat Empire | Liberal bullying: Privilege-checking and semantics-scolding as internet sport

Common call-out culture trends:
Focus on very public complaints. I can think of exactly one time when someone emailed their concern about problematic language. These complaints seem to be always intended for an audience.
Lack of interest in a dialogue. These complaints aren’t questions or invitations to discuss the issue. They’re harshly-worded accusations and scoldings (which I’ve written about before).
Lack of consideration for the context or intent. The focus is on this isolated incident (this one post, this one word, this one time), with de-emphasis on the author’s background, experience, or the context of the website on which the post appears.
And on a more stylistic note, these complaints are often prefaced with phrases like “Um,” and other condescending affectations.
It’s challenging for me because the values motivating these complaints are completely in-line with both my personal politics as well as my professional passion for catering to niche markets and semi-marginalized cultures …

Lydia Laurenson | Cancelled Left and Right

A memoir with Laurenson’s characteristically thoughtful ambivalences. A taste:

What bothered me most was that there seemed to be no grace, no possibility for a canceled person to recover or make amends — not even anything resembling a “fair hearing” that a person could request once targeted by the cancel mob. Additionally, the cancellation process seemed unfairly harsh for any but very serious crimes. In other words, cancellation struck me as a punishment that didn’t fit most crimes it was used for. Moreover, even when applied to bad cases, the process seemed counterproductive for the community using it; most people who’d been canceled shifted away from social justice norms or left the movement entirely, and sometimes took their friends with them. All these effects seemed destructive and wrong, but saying anything publicly was clearly dangerous for one’s reputation and sanity.
[⋯]
Worse, the club benefited from cancellation. It helped them stay at the top. That was the thing that disgusted me so much that ultimately I could not bring myself to publicly rejoin the movement. “The club” let newcomers run into the cancellation buzzsaw while watching to see if they survived, and if the newbies didn’t? Well, then there was less competition for the women in that room! Supporting a canceled feminist was a calculation made afterwards, based on whether she made it through the experience.

Everyday Feminism | Maisha Z. Johnson | 6 Signs Your Call-Out Isn’t Actually About Accountability

An insider’s review of types of misfires.

In many ways, holding each other accountable has come to mean punishing each other. Sometimes it feels like we’re all competing on a hardcore game show, trying to knock each other down to be crowned the movement’s Best Activist.
[⋯]
You’re Not Focused on the Outcome
You’re Not Choosing Your Battles Based on What’s Best for the Community Involved
You’re Using the Same Strategy for Every Situation
You’re Centering Yourself on Behalf of Another Group
You’re Engaging in Respectability Politics to Police Other People’s Behavior
You’re Trying to Force Someone to Be Accountable

Adrienne Maree Brown | Unthinkable Thoughts: Call-out Culture in the Age of Covid-19

Too subtle and poetically rich to usefully quote; this taste is meant as an enticement to read it.

the kind of callouts we are currently engaging in do not necessarily think about movements’ needs as a whole. movements need to grow and deepen, we need to ‘transform ourselves to transform the world’, to ‘be transformed in the service of the work’. movements need to become the practice ground for what we are healing towards, co-creating. movements are responsible for embodying what we are inviting our people into. we need the people within our movements, all socialized into and by unjust systems, to be on liberation paths. not already free, but practicing freedom every day. not already beyond harm, but accountable for doing our individual and internal work to end harm, which includes actively working to gain awareness of the ways we can and have harmed each other, and ending those cycles in ourselves and our communities.

Contrapoints | Canceling

A long video-essay. I should note that, as usual, Natalie Wynn inspires a lot of criticisms, and I have my own … and as usual I admire her brave, deeply-considered, astringent efforts to face hard questions. There’s a transcript if one needs it.

The Ballads of Malcolm Reynolds

2025-10-08T10:33:00.000-07:00

Over on Bluesky, Sean Kelly says:

Malcolm Reynolds starting off as an abusive prick who all the women love anyway because deep down, he’s a good person is such a case of Joss Whedon telling on himself.

Kelly is smart about this sort of thing. I see why he says this. As someone who watched — twice — all of Whedon’s perverse masterwork Dollhouse, I recognize him frequently revealing his misogyny, narcissism, and abusiveness in his storytelling. I see plenty of those problems in Firefly.

But on this point I see something else going on, because we know quite a bit about what Whedon wanted to do with Firefly and with Malcolm Reynolds. A few years back, I posted a quote from Whedon on this very subject:

Mal is somebody that I knew, as I created him, I would not get along with. I don’t think we have the same politics. But that’s sort of the point.

The series offers Mal to us as a noble scoundrel loved by all of the women aboard the Serenity, but not because Whedon wanted to tell that story, quite. Whedon created that under protest, as an adaptation to Fox’s insistence that the central character of the ensemble could not be the utter bastard he wanted to examine. Whedon filed down Mal’s rough edges — still an abusive prick, but less so — and made the whole ensemble less fractious, more loving. That paradoxically meant that the story did less work to justify the sympathy for Mal it asked for, creating a dissonance which made Kelly itch.

We can glimpse the different Malcolm Reynolds Whedon wanted to give us in the pilot which the studio rejected. The first sequence introduces Mal as a callously violent soldier smugly fighting for the Space Confederacy. In the second sequence, we see that losing the war broke something in him, turning him into an utter shit. He is insulting and disrespectful toward a sincere priest and a self-possessed prostitute! Had Whedon been able to figure out a way to justify including a dog in the scene, Mal would have kicked it.

In that pilot, yes, Kaylee does love Mal. Whedon has said that in writing the show “when Kaylee says it, we believe it” because she is a pure soul, wise enough to fall in love with the real hero of the Serenity crew before his heroism became apparent. But her love for Mal is the only thing in the pilot telling us that this asshole is worth caring about. Even Mal himself tells us otherwise.

In that pilot, River does not love Mal. Well, she doesn’t get to say much. In the second first episode, River says in one of her fugues of holy madness, “Mal. Bad … in the Latin.” The show uses River’s inhuman insight to tell us things, much as Whedon says it uses Kaylee, so that is stark. River comes to love Mal as the whole crew do, but along the way River — who is a scary murder-monster — often fears Mal.

In that pilot, Zoe does not love Mal. She is utterly loyal to him, and she trusts him. The show hints that she feels indebted to him for something he did in the war. But that is not love. In the Serenity film, Whedon tells us very clearly that Zoe only loves only one person in the ’verse, and it ain’t Mal. In the pilot it seems that Zoe does not even like him, though maybe she hopes to someday get back a better Mal she knew before the war broke him.

In that pilot, Inara does not love Mal, despite genre savvy telling us that Inara & Mal have romantic tension. What keeps them apart? Mal being terrible. Inara finds Mal attractive but dislikes him, for good reasons. (In this do see a different accidental confession from Whedon, resentment that women like Inara often feel attracted to men like Mal, an ugly note which shows up many times in his work.)

The changes in charactization after the pilot are significant but not jarring because Whedon and his team are crafty, largely just fast-forwarding to a state Whedon had meant to work hard to earn over a few seasons of storytelling.

He did a similar trick in wrapping as much as he could of several TV seasons’ worth of storylines in the feature film Serenity, including an abbreviation of Malcolm Reynolds’ arc. The series gave us Mal living by a code of honor which emphasized total dedication to his crew. In the film, he realizes that caring for a small circle of people is not good enough. He has to care about everyone. His moral obligation to the ’verse outweighs his own life and even the lives of the people dear to him.

Had Whedon gotten to make the Ballad Of Malcolm Reynolds he originally imagined, I doubt that many people would love it the way they love the cozier Ballad Of Malcolm Reynolds we got. I wish I could reach into a parallel timeline to watch the story we lost; it would have been a hell of a thing.

Luke Skywalker

2025-09-24T17:47:00.000-07:00

I don’t entirely love Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi — it works for me, though I recognize that it is messy — but I consider its capstone to Luke Skywalker’s story not just the best thing in John Williams’ opera cycle but even so good that it retroactively improves Luke’s story in the original IV-VI trilogy. Rescuing some thoughts from X/Twitter and elsewhere:

For one thing, it keeps the promise made by that last moment in VII: The Force Awakens —

— Luke is now ready to truly understand Kenobi, though it takes Luke until the end of VIII: TLJ for him to fully register Kenobi’s final lesson to him and stop wallowing in his own bullshit. It is the fitting end both for Luke and for the “saga”.

John Williams knows the score, if you will pardon the pun. The first time we hear the Force theme is seeing Luke restless in IV: A New Hope …

… and Williams teases us by leaving the theme uncompleted. As he will again and again, either letting is fade away or interrupting it with something else. Until, at long last, he does complete the theme — gently, not triumphantly — with Luke’s death at the end of VIII: The Last Jedi when we know that Luke has in his last moment come to peace with himself, because he finally learned the lesson Kenobi needed him to understand.

A word about violence

It is a pity that the choreography of the fight between Obi-Wan and Anakin at the end of III: Revenge Of The Sith is so bad because the core idea is brilliant: Obi-Wan keeps falling back and falling back and falling back, desperately hoping that Anakin will make a mistake.

Obi-Wan’s error in succumbing to settling things with Anakin through violence and trying to set his own terms for it should give poignance to his duel with Vader decades later in IV: A New Hope, showing he has learned and matured. In Obi-Wan’s last duel, he finally accepts that he cannot — and should not — defeat Vader through violence. He does not try to set the terms of the fight, or try to “win”.

Wisdom.

This takes us to Luke — who we met and came to love as a young hothead — finally learning what Obi-Wan was trying to teach him, stepping up yet refusing violence, completing the work.

Moviebob

So Uncivilized

Luke is not a generic hero, he is a repudiation of the generic hero.

Jesse McLaren

So Luke Skywalker force projected across the galaxy to distract a Sith blinded by anger that he didn’t even realize he wasn’t a fighting a physical person, allowing the next generation of heroes to escape and then he gloriously faded into the sunset and you didn’t like that?!
And it was revealed Rey isnt from a famous family she’s just an ordinary person who has the power to take on the forces of evil and you were mad she’s not a nepo baby?!YOU WERE MAD SHE’S NOT A NEPO BABY?!

Jonathan McIntosh

A handful of The Last Jedi haters in my mentions are offering up a fascinating misreading of the final showdown between Luke and Vader in V: Return of the Jedi. I think it’s worth taking a moment to discuss because it may help explain why these guys hate Luke’s character so much in Episode VIII.
The misreading: Luke Skywalker uses his great warrior skills to defeat Darth Vader. Once he’s proven himself in combat and stands victorious, Luke does the honorable thing by showing mercy and sparing his enemy. Thereby saving himself from corruption and redeeming his father.
What really happened: Luke tries to avoid fighting but gives into anger. As he bests Vader in combat, Luke realizes his great mistake, winning this fight means losing his soul to the Dark Side. The battle itself is corrupting him, understanding this Luke throws away his weapon.
Notice that the misreading (above) reframes Luke as a badass warrior and reframes his refusal to kill Vader as an act of mercy stemming from a position of power. This is significant because Luke beating Vader in combat is explicitly depicted as a moment of weakness not strength.
The desire of some fans to re-imagine Luke as a powerful warrior who spares the bad guy out of benevolence is consistent with the way male heroes are often represented. It’s the way Batman is framed when he doesn't kill The Joker. But Luke Skywalker isn’t the typical action hero.
Luke’s arc in the original trilogy ends with him not only refusing to kill the bad guy, but refusing to even fight a worse villain. This is why Luke’s force projection standoff with Kylo in The Last Jedi is so perfect. It's the ultimate expression of everything Luke has learned.
The fact that an iconic figure like Luke Skywalker was explicitly framed as weak for fighting a murderous villain like Darth Vader is a pretty subversive message, especially for a male hero in Hollywood. And it’s something that, 35 years later, some fans still refuse to accept.

Max Gladstone

Responding to a comment lost to the sands of time, affirming my own disdain for the Jedi.

I see where you’re coming from, but I don’t buy it. Admittedly, in part because I have no difficulty either rejecting prequels or considering them as schlocky historical dramas produced in the period between VI and VII. That said, you’re spot on with respect to Luke’s moral issues in VII and VIII being natural outgrowths of his character in IV-VI. On bias I think the evidence of the prequels is that the Jedi were terrible Jedi. Which kicked me in the feels the way I think some feel kicked by the Luke thing.
The whole plot of the Prequel Trilogy (I-III) rests on the Jedi being so bad at the most basic of human interactions that they don’t recognize fascism and Palpatine’s general skeeviness staring them in the face, and never think through the underpinnings of the civil war. If we sort of go with the prequel trilogy where it seems to lead us, here’s the story as I see it:
I-III: The Jedi are an ossified order so devoted to strength and self-righteousness that they forget their role and allow a great crime to take place.
IV-VI: Luke learns the Force but resists exactly the old Jedi bullshit that got the galaxy into this mess. (In this light, walking out on Yoda turns out to be one of the wisest things he does in the whole trilogy …)
This tacking into personal connection ends up saving the galaxy from the Emperor: Luke going to save Han and Leia leads to him reconnecting with Vader (traumatic as that is), and reaching out to Vader leads to the Dark Side eating itself. But, we get to the New Trilogy (VII-IX): Luke’s rudderless when he encounters the limits of his philosophy, and petrified precisely because his iconoclastic mysticism has left him so alone. And he’s aware enough to see himself recapitulate old Jedi mistakes. That leads to his breakdown, and I think that’s the root of his recovery at the end of VIII. At least that’s how I see it.

Brendan Hodges

This week taught me loads of people think the Jedi in the prequels were Good Guys who did everything right, instead of inhuman militarized priests whose hypocritical arrogance directly contributed to the fall of The Republic. The Jedi steal children from their parents, never let them talk to their parents again, generally act like inhuman robots and “training” is forcing kids to play party games seeing if they guess a speeder or a cup is on their iPad. What could go wrong!
When Anakin goes to Yoda for spiritual support, mortified Padme might die, Yoda responds: “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.” If Yoda had a more nurturing & accepting hand, Anakin never would’ve become Darth Vader. Instead, it’s a culture of Catholic Guilt. Brendan Hodges
It’s significant the only Jedi to stand up to the Council in all 3 prequels is Qui-Gon Jinn, the first Jedi to learn to become a Force Ghost. Lucas is demonstrating knowledge and wisdom go deeper than fundamentalist attitudes and over-reliance on arbitrary dogma.
The Jedi think they’re “keepers of the peace, not soldiers,” only using the force for “knowledge and defense.” Yet, from the opening of I: The Phantom Menace, Jedi are deployed as armed enforcers for The Republic, shaking down CEOs of trade companies. They live by none of their values. II: Attack of the Clones is especially damning. Yoda and Mace are anguished their “ability to use the force has diminished.” Ultimately, they cover up their failure from the Senate, the same toxic attitude of cover-ups with the police & the Church, an image of power above all else.
When Luke ultimately realizes the cycle of violence and fundamentalist hypocrisy must end, he’s right.
“Now that they are extinct, the Jedi are romanticized, deified. But if you strip away the myth and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure. Hypocrisy, hubris.” Luke hides on Ahch-To out of guilt, but also in fierce ideological opposition to propagating a toxic religion. Until Rey, he doesn’t see a way of reconciling the virtues of the Jedi with a new outlook (syncretism). IX: The Rise of Skywalker should have deepened these ideas, but alas.
While the Star Wars Prequels (I-III) may fail as entertainment or drama, they persevere as rich, rewarding and sadly relevant texts by a very strange man, George Lucas. And Rian Johnson is the only post-Lucas storyteller to meaningfully reckon with them. They’re a magnificent work of art.

Redford headcanon

2025-09-24T15:44:00.000-07:00

I have a headcanon that Robert Redford’s characters from Three Days of the Condor, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Spy Game are all the same guy — and also appears in Sneakers, if you understand that he is played not by Redford in that film but by Sidney Poitier.

After the events of Condor, the Rockefeller Commission subpoena’d the documentation which Joe Turner provided to the New York Times. After testifying to Congress, Turner got tapped to work on reforms within the CIA. To avoid reprisals from dirty agents, he took the new name “Nathan Muir”.

As Condor demonstrates, Turner is a nerd with a surprising knack for fieldwork, so by around 1980 “Muir” had secured a place as a mid-level CIA insider with a mix of friends and enemies. Among those friends: then-young S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Nick Fury.

In the Reagan era Turner saw enough dirty business and geopolitical chaos to become bitterly disillusioned. The Hydra network paperclipped into the CIA turned him, and he became an effective Hydra recruiter, bringing in S.H.I.E.L.D. agents Sitwell & Rumlow and countless others. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hydra wanted to re-deploy this nerd good at fieldwork into the increasingly-important hacker underground. Spy Game depicts Turner on his way out of the CIA, securing the loyalty of rogue agent Tom Bishop (played by Brad Pitt) to bring in yet another Hydra recruit.

Turner took the name “Donald Crease” and joined the Sneakers crew; recall Sneakers’ running gag of “Crease” (played by Sidney Poitier, not Redford) coyly refusing to explain why he left the CIA. Turner saw guys like Redford’s Sneakers character Martin Brice as useful idiots. (He did eventually recruit the amoral Carl, played by River Phoenix, into Hydra.) “Bernard Abbott” — actually high-ranking Hydra CIA mole James Greer — allowed Brice to “trick” him out of Janek’s decryption box confident that Turner would just bring the box to Hydra later.

Stealing the box blew Turner’s relationships in the hacker underground, but having the tech meant Hydra no longer needed as much hacker support anyway. Hydra now needed political power to enact Project Insight, which would use the intel gathered using the box to target dissidents for mass assassination, so Hydra directed Turner to build a political power base.

Nick Fury, unaware of Hydra, set up yet another new identity for his buddy from the old days; when Fury tells war stories about working with “Alexander Pierce” at the “State Department”, he’s offering a classic intelligence operative’s cover. “Pierce” landed a position in the World Security Council, where he enabled Hydra infiltration of S.H.I.E.L.D. and other institutions. Exercising Hydra’s resources and his personal networks at CIA, S.H.I.E.L.D., and elsewhere, Turner manufactured incidents which burnished “Pierce”’s reputation — Fury tells us he came close to a Nobel Peace Prize! — eventually winning “Pierce”’s appointment as Secretary of the WSC. In that position, Turner nearly succeeded in orchestrating a global Hydra takeover.

This all started with Leonard Atwood, CIA Deputy Director of Operations for the Middle East, attempting to avoid embarrassment over a botched rogue op by burning a nerd who just read books and wrote reports. It took nothing less than a team of superheroes lead by Captain America to finally stop that angry nerd. The moral of the story is fear blowback from burning your nerds.

Charlie Kirk and Ezra Klein

2025-09-11T12:02:00.000-07:00

Ezra Klein’s New York Times editorial Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way is bad.

The headline

That headline is worse than the editorial itself. It is so unconscionable that Klein has a moral obligation to either:

publicly apologize for it and demand both that the Times both change it and publicly apologize for using it
resign from his position as an editorial writer at the Times

I do not expect him to do either, which indicts both him and the NYT. I regret that I had only one subscription to cancel, and exercised that measure quite some time ago.

I say this headline is worse than the content of the editorial because it takes Klein’s point out of context:

You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.

Klein says this in service of rejecting the assassination of Kirk as a form of political violence which we should not exercise for any reason.

Political violence is a virus. It is contagious. We have been through periods in this country when it was endemic.

As far as that goes, I vigorously agree with Klein. Persuasion is the right way to do politics.

But that points to the failings of the editorial. Klein had an obligation to name the odiousness of both the content of Kirk’s politics and the method of Kirk’s rhetoric. He did not. Very bad.

Charlie Kirk was not the person Klein describes

Many Americans have not heard of him. Klein’s editorial will be many people’s introduction to him, and will become the core of what they know; him failing to explain Kirk and his place in American politics betrays those readers.

Kirk was a nasty piece of work. So it is disingenuous when Klein says this …

American politics has sides. There is no use pretending it doesn’t. But both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project — we are all, or most of us, anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment.

… because no, Kirk was not trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment. He was part of the far right ecosystem deliberately attacking American fundamentals. Turning Point USA helped organize people attending the “Stop The Steal” rally which turned into the 6 January 2021 insurrection against the US government, and Kirk baldly denied the plain truth of J6:

It’s bad judgment, all of a sudden, to climb the Capitol steps and walk in the rotunda; it’s just not wise. However, ‘not wise’ does not mean you’re an insurrectionist, ok? Let me be very clear.
Just because you do something stupid, does not mean you’re Timothy McVeigh. Just because you do something that is regrettable does not mean that you are planning an armed insurrection against the United States government.

The New York Times should be embarrassed that their editors have so much to learn from Teen Vogue and their article Who Was Charlie Kirk? What to Know About the Turning Point USA Founder and His Views.

Far-right political activist Charlie Kirk was shot dead on September 10 while speaking at Utah Valley University. Kirk, the CEO and co-founder of Turning Point USA, was 31.
The shooting occurred as Kirk was speaking in front of a crowd at the Utah university, a kickoff event for Turning Point’s “American Comeback” national tour that had received nearly 1,000 petition signatures calling for it to be canceled, reports the Associated Press. According to CNN, Kirk was asked about the statistics of transgender people linked to mass shootings, an active — and misleading — talking point on the right; Kirk was answering the question when he was fatally shot.
[⋯]
A Trump ally, Kirk was popular among the far-right, known for rallying young people around conservative ideas and around the President. Kirk often travelled to college campuses, where he would debate with students on popular right-wing talking points. He is often credited with rallying young conservatives in a new wave of political activism. During these appearances, Kirk frequently spoke out against abortion and reproductive rights, espoused anti-trans ideology, spread COVID-19 misinformation, spread other controversial and, often, prejudiced opinions. Kirk was gifted at digital attention-grabbing throughout his career as a right-wing commentator; in 2024, prior to another “debate” campus tour, his appearance on the video platform Jubilee debating young liberals went viral.
Kirk has been outspoken against gun control legislation, frequently defending access to guns during debates and speaking engagements. In a Turning Point speech last year, Kirk called shooting deaths as a result of gun access the “cost to liberty,” comparing gun deaths to the risk of driving and auto accidents. He made similar comments in 2023, calling gun deaths “worth” it in exchange for Second Amendment rights shortly after a mass shooting killed three children and three adults at the Christian Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. Around the same time that Kirk was shot, a shooting at a Colorado school was also unfolding. According to the Denver Post, two teens were injured, with one still in critical condition, and the teenage shooter dead after turning the gun on himself, as of the morning after the shooting.
[⋯]
[Turning Point USA] has long maintained a “Professor Watchlist” to allegedly “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” In 2023, an Arizona State University professor on TPUSA’s “Watchlist” was physically attacked by someone associated with Turning Point USA. In 2017, TPUSA was the subject of an investigation by the Chronicle of Higher Education over allegations they had violated their 501(c)3 status by funneling money to student government candidates on campuses across the country.

In short, Kirk was dedicated to destroying the viability of the American experiment. No, that is not practicing politics the right way.

Teen Vogue has more, and I have more below.

Commentaries

Seth Cotlar

As someone who spent many hours listening to Kirk’s show on AM radio, I would say that he made Rush Limbaugh seem like Walter Cronkite by comparison, in terms of rhetorical tone and empirical rigor. The subtext of every show was “You don’t hate the left enough.”
That is the message Kirk devoted his life to spreading. I don’t see how it honors him to turn him into a paragon of democracy, when that is not how he saw himself.

Has anyone seen a compilation of clips or quotes that show Kirk speaking to his audience in a manner that illustrates the civic virtues he’s being eulogized for having embodied? If so, I’d be interested to see it. If not, that seems notable, no?
When we eulogize political figures who have died we usually do so with snippets of their own words that exemplify the essence of their life’s work. So let’s see them, all of the Kirk quotes in which we see him urging his followers to embrace the better angels of their nature.
He was a very talented shitposter who was adept at creating selectively edited, “own the college kid libs” content that made his boomer billionaire funders and MAGA Republicans happy. That’s what his fans admired him for. There’s no need to pretend like he was something other than what he was.
I’m choosing to remember Charlie Kirk’s contribution to American civic life in his own words.
Hillary For Prison
If Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or John Adams saw drag queen story hour, they would mobilize the Minutemen
Residents of Springfield, OH are reporting that Haitians are eating their family pets, another gift of the Biden-Harris mass immigration replacement plan. Liberals will soon be lecuting Americans on why they need to sensitive to Haitian culture and accept this …
It’s just so nauseating where this wife … who comes in with her sweet husband who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go and, you know, have a nice life, provides for the family. And then she lies to him, saying, “Oh yeah I’m going to vote for Trump” and then she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret in the voting booth.
Derek Chauvin has been found guilty on all three charges leveled against him — Second Degree Murder, Third Degree Murder, and Second Degree Manslaughter
Biden’s “prayers” were answered.
Maxine Waters got her way.
Will it be enough to keep America from burning?
Only a dishonest media would care more about Trump allegedly paying $750 in taxes than Hunter Biden taking in $350 Million from the Russians.
The New York Times game of “gotcha” with the president makes them look petty and small.
This is a tragic and all too familiar sight right now: Athletes dropping suddenly.
All men are created equal but not all cultures are created equal
The West is superior to every other culture because it is the most prosperous, tolerant, and innovative culture to ever exist
That's why America is the only country where even those who hate it refuse to leave
American culture is most accepting on Earth
The world is a better, stronger, and more peaceful place, thanks to the Western values

When a conservative gun enthusiast tried to assassinate Trump, Kirk immediately tried to fan the flames of division by blaming it on “them,” by which he meant the “them” he always blamed everything on, “the left.”
If an NHL enforcer known for taking out players on the opposing team died, we wouldn’t eulogize him for his grace and nimbleness on the ice. Kirk was a skilled propagandist who had a very loose and opportunistic relationship to what most people would call “the truth.” Why pretend otherwise?
On the GOP FB pages I follow I’ve seen dozens of comments from Kirk’s fans in which they say it’s time to “take off the gloves” and do to Democrats what they did to Kirk.
we don’t know who the killer is.
I thought we didn’t do vigilante violence and collective guilt in “the west.”
No one is responsible for what their followers say or do. But it’s noteworthy that so many of Kirk’s admirers are calling for political violence in response to this act of political violence. They apparently didn’t get the memo from him that such attitudes run counter to his beliefs.
One final thing. It’s odd to see Ezra Klein, a total policy nerd, say Kirk did politics the right way when Kirk had almost no interest in either policy, or the empirical rigor necessary to get policy right. Kirk’s approach to politics was 99% culture war rage stoking with almost no policy content.
There’s a reason Kirk rarely engaged with his fellow adults who knew things about things. It’s because Kirk was not interested in or adept at knowing things about things … which, IMO, is not an admirable quality in a figure whose entire brand is to engage in public/political debate.
As we learn from the New York Times Daily podcast, Kirk cut his teeth as the manager of Don Jr’s social media accounts. From a young age Kirk aspired to be the Rush Limbaugh of his generation. His goal was to be the most polarizing figure possible.
So again, one might ask how an empirically-grounded journalist who wrote an entire book lamenting the polarized state of American politics, might describe one of the most intentionally polarizing fabulists of our era as someone who did “politics the right way.”

Seth Cotlar again

American politics has sides. There is no use pretending it doesn’t. But both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project — we are all, or most of us, anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment. We can live with losing an election because we believe in the promise of the next election; we can live with losing an argument because we believe that there will be another argument. Political violence imperils that.
Kirk and I were on different sides of most political arguments. We were on the same side on the continued possibility of American politics. It is supposed to be an argument, not a war; it is supposed to be won with words, not ended with bullets. I wanted Kirk to be safe for his sake, but I also wanted him to be safe for mine and for the sake of our larger shared project. The same is true for Shapiro, for Hoffman, for Hortman, for Thompson, for Trump, for Pelosi, for Whitmer. We are all safe, or none of us are.
I read this part of the Klein article and asked myself, “hm, I wonder what Charlie Kirk said about the 2020 election? Did he ever acknowledge that Biden won?” The answer, unsurprisingly, is no.
Charlie Kirk did not believe in recognizing the results of elections his side lost, which, in my opinion, is the definition of doing politics the wrong way.
This is just a tiny sampling of his election denial posts.
WOW. Director Tulsi Gabbard confirms that she’s uncovered multiple “burn bags” tucked away in safes and random back offices, that contain intel on the politicization of the 2020 election.
Was 2020 really the most secure election in history?
And when will that all come out.
[Video from TheStormHasArrived]
STEVE BANNON:
“You are the sovereign will of the American people. Handed down generation to generation. Through every patriot’s grave, down to the current time.
They steal the 2020 election. Did you give up? Did you go back and cry? Did you go into the fetal position and suck your thumb? Hell no. You didn’t.”
Republican Wisconsin senate candidate Eric Hovde breaks his silence:
“At 4am, Milwaukee reported ~108K absentee ballots, with Sen. Baldwin receiving nearly 90% of those ballots. Statistically this outcome seems impropable.”

Eric Hovde was up big in Wisconsin on election night. But just like in 2020, in the middle of the night, Milwaukee County posted a huge number of absentee ballots (~108K) all at once, that overwhelmingly went for Democrat Tammy Baldwin (~90%), and erased Hovde’s lead completely.
A new study by The Heartland Institute finds that mail-in ballot fraud significantly impacted the results of the 2020 election and that Trump would have “almost certainly won” without the massive, often illegal expansion of mail-in voting.
zerohedge.com/markets/mail-b…
Republicans who ignore the con of the 2020 election should leave the party.
Why haven’t the any of the 2,000 mules who committed multiple crimes surrounding widespread ballot trafficking in the 2020 Election been arrested yet?
🤔
[Blurry images of election workers]
If Twitter hadn’t interfered in the 2020 election, there never would have been any issue on January 6.
Imagine how many of these pro-Hamas thugs we could have deported if Joe Biden and the Democrats hadn’t rigged the 2020 election.

Isaac! At the Butler! responds to Klein

I feel like I am taking crazy pills. Charlie Kirk’s ultimate goal, which he said time and time again, would have been the suppression, through threat of violence and the use of state power, of the rights of those he disagreed with, including freedom of expression.
Like, yes, what Kirk built, the speed at which he did it, and his ability to speak to college students etc. is impressive. But you can’t lionize that without also explaining what he actually stood for and what he was actually advocating.
I think I understand where this is coming from— we’re all scared about the violence of our political culture spinning wildly out of control— but this kind of dishonesty simply abets Kirk and his allies’ project.
I’m also fairly sure Klein didn’t write anything like this after the assassination of multiple Dem politicians in Minnesota. I’m not saying this as a gotcha, but rather the show the implicit assumption of our discourse, which is that Right Wing violence is to be expected, and thus tacitly accepted.
On some level this bugs me way more than the Times’s euphemistic way of describing Trumps’ authoritarian power grabs, because the not-very-online segment of the Times readership likely has little idea who Kirk was, and are going to come away very misinformed from the way they’re treating this.
Like … my parents have no fucking idea who Charlie Kirk is. What they’re going to get from the Times coverage is that he was a compelling speaker and gifted organizer who was martyred for free speech.
Also, sorry, too worked up and my first cup of coffee just hit… Kirk was part of the effort to overthrow the elected government of the United States on January 6th! In what sense was that “practicing politics the right way”????
Charlie Kirk may have been good at showing up at college campuses and talking to anyone who would listen etc. But the org he headed built a database of professors to target with harassment campaigns in the hopes of drumming them out of academia. Is that practicing politics the right way?
It’s also interesting that Klein mentions the reichstag fire because what’s going on feels a lot more like the canonizing response to the murder of Horst Wessel, a response that Klein is now participating in with this reprehensible piece.
Btw since this thread has now escaped the ecosystem of people I normally interact with I just want to reiterate / clarify something: i am very pro free expression. I think Skokie was correctly decided etc. if all Kirk was doing was saying hateful nonsense into microphones, Klein would have a point
But that’s not what Kirk actually did. Beyond frequent comments that could arguably amount to incitement, his actual operation (Turning Point) is a Thiel backed intimidation racket that explicitly opposes academic freedom and targets people for harassment campaigns.
He also provided material support to an effort to overthrow the government. You can’t lionize his persuasion campaigns and not mention these things. He was an outspoken defender of free expression for people he agreed with and worked to silence those with whom he disagreed.
If you’re going to write an appeal to our better angels piece after Kirk, it’a gotta be an appeal to do politics the way he pretended to do it.

Mother Jones | Charlie Kirk Doesn’t Really Seem to Mind White Nationalism

Worth reading the whole thing. Mentions of two of my anti-favorite people jumped out at me: Sailer & Yarvin:

In October, he invited veteran white supremacist Steve Sailer, whose bonafides include writing for overt white nationalist publications including VDare and the Unz Review, on his podcast. During their interview, Kirk called Sailer his favorite “noticer”—a word frequently used in internet conservative spaces as a euphemism for individuals willing to publicly draw bigoted conclusions linking race and criminality. Sailer did exactly this during their conversation, insinuating that Black people commit crimes because of innate characteristics: “Blacks tend to commit murder about 10 times as often per capita as whites… it’s not just all explained by poverty.”
“Steve, what you’re doing is so important,” Kirk gushed.
In January, Kirk hosted Curtis Yarvin, a neo-reactionary, anti-egalitarian who has described slavery as “a natural human relationship” and argued the biological roots of intelligence vary between populations. (He has tried to walk such claims back.) While Kirk seemed uncomfortable when Yarvin’s expressed his affinity for monarchy, he mostly remained effusive and praised his guest for “thought-provoking ideas” that “I love.”

Noah Berlatsky | Whitewashing Charlie Kirk Promotes Political Violence

The main problem with this is that it is a lie. Kirk was not especially interested in persuasion. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the January 6 insurrection; his organization, Turning Points USA, bussed people to the coup — including one man who stormed the capital and beat police with a fire extinguisher. Kirk continued to defend the insurrection and TPUSA’s role in it for years.
Kirk’s assault on democracy did not start on January 6. TPUSA has been touted (by Klein and others) as some sort of righteous free speech advocacy group promoting debate on campus. But that (again) is a lie. In fact, TPUSA’s main purpose is summed up by its “Professor Watchlist” a website which lists teachers and professors who TPUSA believes “discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”
In short, the Watchlist is intended as, and functions as, a mechanism to stifle academic freedom by targeting those on the left—especially women and BIPOC professors — for stochastic terrorism and harassment. Professors on the list say that they regularly receive hate mail and death threats — and that the threats accelerated after January 6, the insurrection that TPUSA supported. The link to the recent firing of a children’s literature professor reported by a conservative student for talking about “gender” is quite clear. TPUSA was a leader of a conservative moral panic designed to terrorize liberal professors and drive them from the academy—a moral panic which has metastasized into Trump’s unprecedented, openly ideological campaign to defund universities.
Kirk has also just openly called for political violence himself; he praised as Biblical and “perfect” the idea of stoning LGBT people to death, and argued that gun deaths were “worth it” to preserve Second Amendment rights. Klein says it’s not fair to argue that Kirk deserved to die by gun violence because he was opposed to gun control, and that is true. What Klein refuses to grapple with, however, is that, Kirk claimed that the Second Amendment needed to be preserved through violent death. That’s an argument which explicitly says that we should see children killed in school shootings as an inevitable necessary sacrifice to politics. It’s a justification of political violence

Kirk quotes via Brad Johnson

I think it’s worth it. It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal.

Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco. We got a big military. We should be willing to use it.

Kamala Harris wants to see the elimination of the United States of America.

Kamala Harris seeks to kidnap your child via the trans agenda.

Jews are experiencing the hate that we white people have been experiencing the last decade, and we've been warning against

We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.

You might go out to dinner, go see a movie and come back to a bunch of illegals sitting in your living room, and it will then become their home.

The American Democrat [sic] Party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white. They love it when America gets overwhelmed.

The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.

They hate those of you that own land and have guns and believe in a better country, and they have a plan to try and get rid of you.

You believe in God, country, family, faith, and freedom, and they won’t stop until you and your children and your children's children are eliminated.

By the way, I would totally tune in to see some pedo get their head chopped off.

The problem is that the MAGA patriots on January 6th, when they went into, for example, the Senate — where the Senate votes, or they went into some of the hearing rooms, they should have stripped naked and filmed themselves having gay sex. That would have solved all the problems.

Native-born Americans, you better buy weapons, everybody. Have a lot of guns at your disposal. I would never leave your home without a weapon.

I can say declaratively this guy [Martin Luther King, Jr.] is not worthy of a national holiday. He is not worthy of godlike status. In fact, I think it’s really harmful.

The left would love to see a race war.

Climate change is the wrapper around Marxism. You have Marxism at its core and you have climate change on the exterior. Climate change activism, environmentalism, pseudo-paganism — we call it a Trojan horse, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, it all sounds so cliché but it’s totally true.

I know this sounds controversial, but peaceful and constitutional defiance of the federal government will actually strengthen the nation.

If they can make you put a mask on, they’ll take your guns. They can make you take a vaccine, they control your children.

Black people tend to be more athletically inclined to be good at basketball. It’s just the way it is.

Twelve thousand Haitians are now your fellow citizens. Did they earn it? Did they come here the right way? Did they apply? Did they wait in line? No.

We’re going to talk about how the other side has openly admitted that this is about bringing in voters that they want and that they like and honestly, diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America.

A properly defined government is a government supposed to fear the people, not the people fear the government. And one of the ways this is possible is to be able to have hundreds of millions of people own firearms."

Ketanji Brown Jackson — is what your country looks like on critical race theory. KBJ is your country on CRT. KBJ — Ketanji Brown Jackson — is an embodiment of the tyranny that we currently live under. She’s an ideological, unintelligent, yet confident fanatic.

Let’s talk about this war on white people. That’s a thought crime … the one type of racism you’re not allowed to talk about, of course, is the war against people who look like you and I.

Kamala Harris has now become the jive-speaking spokesperson of equity.

Ideological purity tests are an interesting approach, but let’s break up the federal government first and then we’ll go from there.

There is a deliberate and venomous anti-white campaign in our country and it drives me crazy and we shouldn’t put up with it.

Western culture is better and it’s a thoughtcrime to say it out loud. Blacks were sold into slavery by other Blacks. Thomas Sowell wrote that in great detail. When Blacks were given opportunities to return home, they did not want to return home. Blacks didn’t want to leave.

I don’t believe Black History Month is worth the kind of full month that it is, at all.

I’m not a fan of democracy.

Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.

Men know the game is rigged against them — especially young white men.

Women are wired to be more emotional and liberal policies appeal to their emotions. The women project’s a whole different thing. Men are rational, hopefully so, in their politics.

Joe Biden is a bumbling dementia-filled Alzheimer’s corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.

Now, the 14th Amendment is unbelievably important, obviously, but it’s way too broadly written.

This is left-wing ideologues that allowed the island to burn. That there is blood on the hands of the water worshippers. Christianity broke us free of pagan slavery … Could it be that Maui did not have to burn if they didn’t believe such wacky, goofy, pagan stuff?

If you have a male brain versus a female brain in chess you have a competitive advantage … Chess is very similar, by the way, to why women do not get into coding. Some do, but most do not. Why women don’t get into science, technology, engineering, and math.

Women are notorious for still remembering the details of arguments that they had from years ago.

We should not send women into the frontlines of a conflict nor should we send men into the frontlines of educating our preschoolers. Let's understand our differences and the denial of them creates moral chaos, panic, and confusion.

If you’re a Christian, they consider you a terrorist. If you’re a gun owner, they consider you a terrorist.

The entire Third World is moving into America, and the Democrats want that

I used to love New York City. It’s an unrecognizable city, but that’s what the left does. They’re parasites. The left are cockroaches. They just take things over. They don't build anything. They take stuff over and they destroy it.

Hakeem Jeffries and the Democrats, they are cleaning up. They’re raising record amounts of money … We’re dealing with maggots, vermin and swine here. This is not — these are not good people, they’re not even a little bit good. They are coming after our throats.

Jews have been some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas and supporters of those ideas over the last 30 or 40 years … Until you cleanse that ideology from the hierarchy in the academic elite of the west, there will not be a safe future.

You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously. You had to steal a white person's slot … It’s very obvious to us you were not smart enough to get it on your own.

We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.

I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made up New Age term that does a lot of damage.

They’re trying to make the country less white. They’re trying to make the country more like the third world, the dumping ground of the planet is the United States southern border.

It’s important to note that Haiti is legitimately infested with demonic voodoo.

The Mamdani effect is going to metastasize in the Democrat [sic] Party … A very dark and sinister vision — one that is anti-Western, anti-American, anti-civilization.

“We will flood your country with unvetted foreigners, mutilate kids, worship criminals, and demonize half the population for simply breathing and existing.” … I want to see a Democrat [sic] Party at peace, not a Democrat [sic] Party at war with the country.

The only men who are gravitating toward the Democrat [sic] Party are men who want to become women.

We have to tell our babies to stop crying. … I believe we’re broken by sin upon birth.

White privilege is a myth and a lie. It should be completely destroyed. It is a racist idea. Why don’t they ever talk about Asian-American privilege?

Just because you have a group of people who look the same doesn’t mean they think the same, and we have great intellectual diversity in our organization.

We are up against a group of individuals that are going to use the rest of their lives and all their resources to try to take our freedoms and liberties away. These are liberals.

If we do not have the capacity to defend our freedoms, which the Second Amendment allows us to do, then our rights and freedoms can be just written away in an instant.

The rise of anti-Americanism on college campuses is so dramatic. I believe the greatest threat to Western civilization is what's happening on our college campuses today. I really do.

Professors that never could have succeeded on the outside … Bitterly unhappy people that want to try to indoctrinate and deprogram America’s youth away from our fundamental values, because they’re just so malevolent towards the world that they could never succeed in themselves.

Are liberals really unhappy people or is it just me? It seems like a liberal would rather see rich people become poor than poor people become rich. A liberal would rather tell you how to live your life than actually improve the life of their own.

We as conservatives, as free thinkers, and as members of the National Rifle Association, we're never gonna tell you how to live your life.

The left would like nothing more than the most effective, the most powerful grassroots organization in America — the NRA — to be decapitated, because they know as long as the NRA is powerful, they cannot obtain unilateral political power.

The six million members of the National Rifle Association are the greatest threat to the American left that exists today and the greatest protector of American freedom now and for the rest of 21st century.

Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.

If you actually believe that climate change is an existential threat, which is complete gibberish, nonsense and balderdash—and all of you guys should be unafraid to push back against all that garbage, because it’s designed for one thing: power and control and let me just tell you something that is a general rule, if your biggest worry in life is existential, you live a great life. If your biggest worry is the sky falling and not sanitation, nutrition, getting murdered on the way home, or being beaten, you live a very nice life.

This climate change nonsense can only happen in a rich, generally peaceful society. You think that the people in the slums of India, the 300 million that don't have access every single day to functioning toilets, you think that they're worried about the sky falling?

There’s not this huge call for gun control, even from the citizens of Chicago. We have a lack of father problem in the Black community … and that has contributed to this endless cycle of gang violence and gun violence … the bottom line is a broken culture problem.

You look at what Mayor Giuliani did in New York in the early 2000s, that’s how he cleaned up the streets. He did not divide people based on racial ethnic lines, he built strong partnerships and he cleaned up the streets.

We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one. You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel.

Never give up our guns! If we do, only criminals will have guns.

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

The only purpose of a federal gun registry would be eventual confiscation.

“Gun control” is not about safety, it is about power.

Every time there’s a tragedy, the left talks about banning guns. But you cannot prevent evil by restricting the rights of the innocent.

The statistic out there is that 35,000 people die of gun deaths in America … Two-thirds of that number are death by suicide with a gun. We have a horrible mental health crisis. It’s deceiving to say it’s a gun death. It’s a suicide with a gun.

One in five gun deaths are gang violence, men between the ages of 18 to 30. That's a byproduct of institutional poverty. You’d argue that’s more of a problem of failing schools, failing government programs, lack of economic opportunity, than have much to do really with guns.

New York City councilman Yusuf Salaam, who once took part in the gruesome gang rape of a jogger in Central Park, is now furious that an NYPD officer dared to pull him over for having illegally tinted windows. Salaam wasn’t even arrested or given a ticket, but after getting away with gang rape he apparently thinks he deserves to be completely above the law.

MLK, in my opinion, and based on every objective analysis, he actually gave us more race focus and less emphasis on character and conduct.

[MLK] would be actually to be closer to a race Marxist, almost akin to DEI-type philosopher, if you go deep into his writings, especially later in his life.

Who was MLK? A myth has been created and it has grown totally out of control. While he was alive most people disliked him, yet today he is the most honored, worshipped, even deified person of the 20th century.

Maybe once you break the mythical sainthood of someone like MLK, black voters will realize it’s being used against them to suppress the individual, and even more will realize they are on our side.

Telling the truth about MLK should not be trampling sacred ground. He was just a man. And a very flawed one at that. Worship God, not a mythological anti-racist creation of the 1960s.

MLK was awful. He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.

Husbands should do everything he can to not force his wife into the workforce.

How many of you, every single day, it’s your purpose for being is finding a husband? Every hand should go up. But I thought you said you wanted an amazing family. You have to prioritize and aim at what you want the most.

If you’re not married by the age of 30, you only have a 50% chance of getting married. And if you don’t have kids by the age of 30, you have a 50% chance of not having kids … Having children are are a gift from the Lord. And unfortunately, our culture deemphasizes it.

I don’t think the church talks enough about purity, right? I think it’s incredibly important and we should tell young men and young ladies to save themselves for marriage.

Young men have serious problems. We’re working on fixing that. And it’s easy to laugh, but you need young men. Young men are in a far sicker position right now than young ladies are. They’re committing suicide more. They’re checking out of society.

It’s easy to make fun of young men, but a society needs strong men and we need husbands and we need fathers. And everyone in this room should be part of that project of making men strong again. Everyone.

Young ladies need to be willing to submit to a godly man when you meet one. And if you’re not willing to do that, then you got to pray about that because a lot of young men in the dating pool say, “I don’t want to be bossed around all the time.”

The hypertoxic feminism is very off-putting to young men.

They’re called toxically masculine. They're called, you know, “Who needs men,” “the patriarchy,” and so then they just largely disengage or they do even a worse thing, which is they get involved like, “I’m just going to sleep with a bunch of women, but not going to marry them.”

Men will do anything to solve the problem of scarcity. And if men can get you quite easily, that is not an attractive quality to be able to have a man go on a journey with you … And there is one thing that men want more than anything else and it’s not Bitcoin. You know what it is.

As women have not been saving themselves for marriage and men too in the last 30 or 40 years, we’ve seen marriage rates collapse. There is a one-to-one correlation on those two things.

If everyone here basically said, “Nope, we’re going to combine our our power and be pure and trust in Jesus and in God for our future husband,” you would be shocked at how much the dating pool improves.

You must understand that a man might forget to shower for three days because he’s too worried that we’re going to go to a nuclear war with Iran. Men are obsessed with the macro and they often forget the micro.

Corporations want to hire you so badly because you are incredibly good at microtasks. That is why young women have been so well paid in the corporate environment because when it comes to getting details done, women are much better than men.

Obviously your marriage actually comes before your kids … Your relationship with your kids is important. But it’s not covenantal. Your marriage is a covenant. Your relationship with your kids is an outgrowth of a covenant. They’re under your stewardship.

Of course you should be able to use whips against foreigners that are coming into your country. Why is that controversial?

Don’t follow your heart. It’s a bad idea. Do not do that. You laugh, but the Bible is very clear. The heart is wicked. Do not follow your heart.

The most important thing as a parent is that you must instill self-control, not self-esteem for your kid. Whatever it takes, you must have them understand the power of restraint, which is a fruit of the spirit. Remember, self-control is a fruit of the spirit.

You are not your kid’s friend. You are their parent. It is an up-and-down relationship. It is not a horizontal one.

I see in public these parenting displays, that it’s so sad, where it’s just placation. The parent is being held hostage by the child. It is an ongoing blackmail operation. Where it’s like, give me candy or else I riot. It's no different than BLM.

He doesn’t need a whole feeling session. We don’t need that as men. We don’t need emotionality. No. You need conviction and order and a challenge. And we need high stakes.

You must understand God wired us a lot differently … Men look at we we have a problem where we think we are the firefighter to put out a fire. We see problem, we want to fix it … Sometimes the solution is just talking about the problem which for us is an incomprehensible thing.

Our brains work differently. For women, conversation, especially conversation about nothing, is therapeutic. It’s very cathartic. For men, it’s exhausting. And for us, we like to unplug and we like to watch or see somebody else do something hard. That’s what sports is.

Do not talk down to men, do masculine masculinity bashing of men. Not only do we need men, the civilization is God created men and women. And it’s very tempting to get into the whole kind of girl-dominant society. You do not want to live in that world.

The proposed gun ban for trans people

2025-09-05T17:19:00.000-07:00

The Trump administration trying to deny gun rights to trans people has very ugly implications. Many Trump supporters talk a lot about how gun ownership is a “fundamental human right” which provides a necessary bulwark against “tyrannical” government. Do the math.

A wise friend passed this along, from a person they respect who asked folks to share it without attribution:

However you feel about guns, please understand that the move to restrict trans people specifically from gun ownership would create legal precedent that is dangerous and far-reaching. We are in a very bad situation here.
I don’t post here anymore. I don’t trust US corporations or the United States, so, yeah.
But I’m going to do this post. Because right now, there is a very real move to ensure trans people in the US are stripped of their rights in a further step towards our extermination. The most recent bit is reported talks within the DOJ to consider us unable to own firearms.
Regardless of how you feel about gun ownership, I need you to understand how they plan on doing this: 18 USC 922(g)(4). It’s illegal to own a firearm if you’re “adjudicated as mentally defective”.
What this means? From the federal register:
A person is “adjudicated as a mental defective” if a court, board, commission, or other lawful authority has made a determination that a person, as a result of marked subnormal intelligence, mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease:
Is a danger to himself or to others;
Lacks the mental capacity to contract or manage his own affairs;
Is found insane by a court in a criminal case; or
Is found incompetent to stand trial, or not guilty by reason of lack of mental responsibility, pursuant to articles 50a and 72b of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, 10 U.S.C. §§ 850a, 876b.
Which means? They can in essence restrict the rights of every trans person to defend themselves in an increasingly hostile country with the wave of a hand by saying that by our trans status we are mentally defective.
I want you to think about what this means. It means, that by “adjudicating as mentally defective” every trans person in the United States, that the ability to imprison us without trial is right there, on the doorstep. I saw this coming 10 years ago. Everyone thought I was being paranoid. Unfortunately, I wasn’t.
So.
To my US based cis friends
There aren’t many trans folks out there. And even if we had a loud enough voice? There are enough transphobic pricks in both parties (looking at Newsome-stans) that no one would give a shit. We need you to be our voice. We need you to protect us. We need you to shout so damn loud, that what I see coming, doesn’t.
To my non-US based friends
The US is no longer a safe country for LGBTQA+ folks, for migrants, for a lot of people. Please. Petition your governments on removing the US as a safe country for asylum reasons.
To my US based trans friends
If it’s not time, it’s getting real close. Get ready, please. Have a plan to run. Get your documents in order, get a go bag ready. Have a destination or 3.

I have a big index post about guns & policy if you need it.

The National Rifle Association

A widely reported pleasant surprise from the National Rifle Association:

As a dogwhistle for transphobes, this does leave a window open for “due process” targeting trans people, but even given that, this is pleasant surprise.

The Abundance agenda

2025-09-04T20:58:00.000-07:00

Having said that the Democratic Party needs a vigorous agenda which both is and reads as a break from the past, I have had an eye on the “Abundance” movement around the proposals of the Abundance book by the journalists / commentators Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson. It is the kind of thing I think the Dems need to do.

Even considering that K&T have done an extensive promotional tour, it has generated a surprisingly vigorous constellation of commentary, which I take as a sign of the appetite for ideas which I think the Dems need to offer.

Abundance calls for a government agenda of more active intervention to make more resources available. It seems unmistakable to me that this attempts to articulate a next generation of the post-neoliberal Dem policy agenda which Biden was moving toward but did not name.

For Klein, the central policy exemplar is housing and urban infrastructure. He is a YIMBY who wants to reduce the cost of housing by eliminating roadblocks which prevent us from building more of it, and wants to support that with investments in transit and other resources. Having lived through the damage left-NIMBYism did to the San Francisco Bay area, that’s music to my ears. But I have fundamental ~~ambivalence about~~ distrust of Klein. I first encountered him in the early blogosphere days, and admired his serious interest in policy wonkery. I thought for a long time that there was a place for his voice despite his transparent careerism seeking a place as a political insider … but we now see him in ugly alliances credibility-washing far right voices. As I’ll detail, alliances like that plague the Abundance movement.

Thompson I understand less well. He seems to be the driver of the Abundance note of starry-eyed “tech” industry optimism, which arouses my skepticism, and him doing an interview with repugnant racist Richard Hananina about Abundance demonstrates mortifying bad judgment.

I have not read the book, but I have wound up listening to a lot of interviews with K&T about it while doing chores, and looking at a lot of commentaries which I have been threading on Bluesky.

I am not just wary of K&T; Abundance has other supporters I like even less. And I doubt that most policy domains suffer the same problems I know about from housing & urban infrastructure.

Despite those reservations — despite standing well to the left of K&T — I feel a contrarian impulse to stand up for Abundance because most of the critiques I have seen from lefties have been gawdawful. I see a lot of people calling it just a fresh coat of paint on Reagan-ish neoliberal deregulation, which is risibly false if one looks at anthing K&T actually say. As even many of the critiques I link to below admit, there are a lot of things to like about the Abundance agenda.

I find a lot of criticisms of K&T’s take on specific policy domains more persausive. Jeff Hauser summarizes those by snarking …

I finally figured it out: Abundance is to economic policy what “Invade Iraq in order to bring democracy to the Middle East” was to foreign policy.
It’s baseless optimism as strategy, and then mocking the cautious people pointing out the downsides of, eg, natural gas plants to fuel AI data centers.

… which I think is too strong, but not wrong. Even just at the level of a podcast discussion, even given Klein’s knack for making policy proposals he likes sound more sophisticated than they are, it seems obvious that Abundance over-generalizes from SF Bay Area administrative NIMBYism. So while K&T do not have the Reagan-ish neolib presumption that all de-regulation is good which critics misread them as offering, they do seem to imagine that most domains are burdened with policy cruft that clear-eyed people could easily tidy up. I am very skeptical of so much low-hanging fruit.

Worse, the Abundance movement is so cozy with support from bad actors on the right that it may be a dead letter. Check out the example of bad bedfellows at the 2024 Abundance Conference, below.

On Bluesky, Starshine sums up the state of the Discourse:

i think part of the reason it gets such strong reactions is no ones talking about the same things. theres
yimbyism + green energy
trojan horse for thiel / yarvin / collison / manhattan institute / heritage policies
and then anti abundance is
leftist affect nimbyism
people sketched out by 2

Maybe I’m posting this right at the point when this has become a dead letter, but if one is catching up:

Justine Underhill
The Simple Plan To Save Democracy

A 30 minute video-essay making what I consider the strongest case for the Abundance agenda. I like its use of the term “the shackled state” as a way to summarize the Abundance argument about the problem with the status quo.

Niskanen
Varieties of Abundance

How can Abundance be one thing, but also many? At its base, Abundance is best understood as having one central aspiration that requires tackling two interlocking challenges. The aspiration is to escape from a political economy defined by artificial scarcity, to create a world in which we solve problems primarily by unlocking supply. This vision is not inherently hostile to redistribution—my version certainly is not, and in fact, I think a strong system of social insurance is essential to an abundant future. But what makes it Abundance is an obsession with reducing zero-sum conflicts by creating more—more energy, more housing, more high-quality schools, more scientific discovery, more world-leading firms, and more, cheaper healthcare. Abundance seeks to create a surplus rather than divvy up a shrinking pie.
How do you get that bigger pie? All varieties of Abundance believe the path goes through two chief obstacles. The first is the problem of asymmetric power between concentrated incumbent interests and diffuse challengers. Yesterday’s winners, whether they are homeowners seeking to block new housing or doctors using licensing to prevent competition, have a strong incentive to organize to obstruct new entrants by gaming the rules to their advantage. When enough of these interests have captured the laws that govern the economy, the consequence is the seeming paradox of slowing growth and increasing inequality.
Abundance advocates seek to intervene in this toxic cycle of economic decline by changing the rules to favor market entrants over incumbents, to empower builders, whether public or private, over blockers. They also try to create new forms of participation that mobilize those who would benefit from a societal surplus. In doing so, they take inspiration from the YIMBY movement, which cracked what seemed like an impossible collective action problem by organizing those in favor of new housing over the NIMBY interests that social scientists were certain would always dominate politics.
The second challenge Abundance advocates agree on is helping the government regain its ability to manage complex tasks competently and decisively. This problem of diminished “state capacity” is both a cause and an effect of the power asymmetries identified above. ⋯

The article offers a taxonomy of different strains in the movement:

Red plenty — “Abundance for those who dream of state-led economic development aimed at publicly determined goals”
Cascadian Abundance — “combines deep environmental commitments, especially around the need for rapid decarbonization, a commitment to urbanism, and a faith in technological solutions to environmental problems”
Liberal Abundance — “wants government to do big, ambitious things (just as the varieties to its left do) but thinks that this is a project of restoration through idealistic reform, rather than revolution”
Moderate-Abundance synthesis — “victories require defeating ‘the groups’ in the Democratic Party, both to deliver on Abundance policy goals and to avoid thermostatic electoral backlash”
Abundance dynamism — “syncretic with libertarianism [⋯] interested in spurring mostly decentralized, privately managed, and financed innovation”
Dark Abundance — “seeks to wield national power to disrupt deep-seated institutions in American life to spur economic growth and revive American hegemony”

The Atlantic
A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems

Thompson’s original 2022 article which led to the book.

Zoom out yet more, and the truly big picture comes into focus. Manufactured scarcity isn’t just the story of COVID tests, or the pandemic, or the economy: It’s the story of America today. The revolution in communications technology has made it easier than ever for ordinary people to loudly identify the problems that they see in the world. But this age of bits-enabled protest has coincided with a slowdown in atoms-related progress.
[⋯]
In the past few months, I’ve become obsessed with a policy agenda that is focused on solving our national problem of scarcity. This agenda would try to take the best from several ideologies. It would harness the left’s emphasis on human welfare, but it would encourage the progressive movement to “take innovation as seriously as it takes affordability,” as Ezra Klein wrote. It would tap into libertarians’ obsession with regulation to identify places where bad rules are getting in the way of the common good. It would channel the right’s fixation with national greatness to grow the things that actually make a nation great—such as clean and safe spaces, excellent government services, fantastic living conditions, and broadly shared wealth.

New York Times Editorial
The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting

Ezra Klein’s 2021 argument for “supply-side progressivism” linked by Thompson above.

I don’t think these various policies have cohered into a policy faction, a way progressives think of themselves, at least not yet. But I’d like to see that happen. Political movements consider solutions where they know to look for problems. Progressives have long known to look for problems on the demand side of the economy — to ask whether there are goods and services people need that they cannot afford. That will make today fairer, but to ensure tomorrow is radically better, we need to look for the choke points in the future we imagine, the places where the economy can’t or won’t supply the things we need. And then we need to fix them.

The Nation
The Abundance Debate Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It.

Progressive skepticism of the contemporary abundance framework often stems from how closely it appears to echo the Atari Democrats and neoliberals of the 1980s. But the abundance coalition fundamentally diverges from the Atari Democrats on key ideological grounds. While today’s abundance advocates similarly highlight efficient governance, market-oriented reforms, and streamlined regulatory frameworks, their agenda isn’t merely a neoliberal revival: its proponents clearly frame their project as restoring robust state capacity, expansive public infrastructure investment, and effective governance—rather than deregulation or corporate dominance alone.
While the Atari Democrats distanced themselves from New Deal–era labor protections and Keynesian social spending, courting suburban professionals and embracing deregulation, many of today’s abundance proponents draw directly from a New Deal–inspired vision of active government, especially through ambitious public investments in infrastructure and industrial policy.
Yet this encouraging side of the abundance vision remains vulnerable to legitimate skepticism, given some of the prominent people floating around the movement. ⋯

Bad bedfellows at the 2024 Abundance Conference

Check out the speakers list at last year’s Abundance conference. It includes Derek Thompson, notoriously wrongheaded-yet-influential center-left commentator Matthew Yglesias, and … people Dems should refuse to share a stage with. Paul Crider called attention to the problem, cautioning:

This thread of fascist ghouls present (and presenting!) at the Abundance conference is worth reading. But I caution against assuming this is what “abundance” means. There are fascists calling themselves liberals too (e.g. Stanford's “Classical Liberalism Initiative”). Socialism has its ghouls too.
As I like to say, something like the abundance agenda is a precondition for a Green New Deal. If the GND gains traction, you'll see fascists touting Green Gulags powered by wind and solar, and mass deportation as a jobs guarantee for white workers.
Wouldn’t mean the Green New Deal is bad.
[⋯]
I’m starting to suspect Abundance is a nefarious plot to discredit YIMBYism.

Worrisome, since I am an enthusiastic YIMBY myself. Doing my own digging has been unnerving. Like Crider, I don’t want to throw out a baby with the bathwater, but the bathwater looks pretty gross.

Garrett Jones is known for his book Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, which argues that the West is rich because the people are smarter, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make The Economies They Move To A Lot Like The Ones They Left which argues that immigration from poor countries drags rich countries down, and talks about the cost of ethnic diversity. He doesn’t seem to rest his argument on genetic superiority, mind you, it’s something about culture so don’t call him a racist, heaven forbid.

I don’t want to blame Thomas Hochman for having a brother who is a fascist, but he also has a creepy sense of humor about concentration camps, is worried about the fantasy “issue” of public schools teaching critical race theory, celebrated Trump’s 2024 win, and boasts about his affiliation with the Foundation for American Innovation …

… who are among the think tanks on the right very well-represented on the speaker list. FAI are a weird tech-right affiliated org who feed a lot of policy & staff to the Trump regime. Max Bodach and Samuel Hammond (who offers the Effective Altruists case for Trump) are also among the speakers.

From the American Enterprise Institute (sponsors of such luminaries as Dick Cheney, Dinesh D’Souza, and Jonah Goldberg) we have Kevin Kosar & Vincent Smith (who seem to be ordinary conservatives), James Pethokoukis (Tech Right bootlicker), and Adam White (who tells us Justice Samuel Alito is a great American).

The Manhattan Institute has an even bigger footprint. This is an organization with ties to the Koch brothers, Big Tobacco, creepy transphobic anti-antiracist Christopher Rufo, and other shenanigans on the right. Institute members on the speaker list include their president Reihan Salam, Charles Lehman (who jokes about “deportation abundance” and advocates more prisons with nonsense), and Oren Cass (a Trump policy apologist who worries about doing too much to address climate change).

And a lot of conference speakers have bylines at their publication City Journal: Kosar from AEI, Alex Armlovich, Jon Askonas, Timothy Bartik, Arnab Datta, Eli Dourado, Christopher Elmendorf, Samuel Hammond, Alex Termbath, and Gary Winslett.

I don’t want to cast having a City Journal byline as an indictment. A lot of those people seem to be pretty good. It seems evident that City Journal publishes a wide range of YIMBYs who seem entirely respectable. But they also have Heather Mac Donald (“The Thinking Bigot’s Ann Coulter”) as a contributing editor, Andy Ngo (fascist-aligned psuedojournalist), John Yoo (the Torture Memo guy), Victor Davis Hanson (creepy warmongering Trump apologist), and Walter Olson (in “race science” Steve Sailer’s “Human Biodiversity” discussion group), and other creeps. It sure looks like a project of credibility-washing bad voices & ideas by publishing them alongside smart voices & ideas, in the Quillette model.

So all this suggests a Big Tent which is so big that it allows far right entryism.

Niskanen | Hypertext
What left-wing critics don’t get about abundance

While most of the reviews have been positive, there is a particular and peculiar line of left-wing critique. As a figure in the academic discussion, I haven’t been surprised by this reaction, but I have been somewhat surprised by how uncurious these reviews are. They seem to have studied one or another of the new books, but done almost no reading beyond the four corners of the work they are reviewing. That’s not a criticism of the books but of the readers; the books incorporate a lot of ideas by reference and do not take the form of party platforms. Instead, they are efforts to either address specific policy areas (Stuck, On the Housing Crisis) or to provide a broader ideological orientation (Abundance, One Billion Americans). A critic should make an effort to familiarize themselves with the broader milieu in which the book sits, to click through some of the links. Most of these reviews don’t. As a result, it’s worth noting what the reviews miss.

The UnPopulist
Abundance Offers a Sounder Way Forward for the Left than Degrowth or Redistributive Progressivism

Abundance, perhaps unsurprisingly, has attracted a slew of left-of-center critiques. Some have been measured; others have analytically relied on targeting the authors’ class position (“the abundance vision … [an] upper-middle class experience that might well reflect the authors’ lives … reads like a rich suburb gone green.”) or on subsuming Abundance within Silicon Valley reactionary futurism (“Abundance is a de facto book-length companion piece to [Marc] Andreessen’s pandemic-era essay ‘It’s Time to Build.’”), despite Klein explicitly disavowing key planks of that perspective in print. One consistently leveled charge is that the book is neoliberal: it celebrates the market and denigrates government — or, as a swarm of angry people will yell at you if you mention Abundance on Bluesky, “Abundance is just rebranded Reaganism.” Despite Klein and Thompson’s repeated defenses of government, there is a certain crowd that is convinced that Abundance is just a stalking horse for a familiar Republican program of deregulation and tax cuts.
[⋯]
A suspicion of the authors on a personal level appears to be at the core of much of the criticism. But then, if you announce that you are coming to slaughter the sacred cows, you should not be surprised when the cows object. But this is the big political bet of Abundance: that Klein and Thompson can go around the progressive intellectual gatekeepers and speak directly to the progressive base, to ordinary people. This is not a matter of speculation; they discuss the place of Abundance in a hoped-for political realignment in some detail in the concluding chapter.
[⋯]
But in all this I have not answered a simple question: Is Abundance right? In the broad strokes: absolutely.
[⋯]
What I disagree with is Klein and Thompson’s confrontational strategy. But progressives are right: Corporate power is also a problem! Wealth inequality is also a problem!
[⋯]
This is the power of a master narrative to shape intellectual terrain. If your narrative is about disciplining capital, then anything that looks like capital discipline seems good — even if it strangles the green energy we desperately need. On the other hand, the abundance narrative is not immune to such seductions. If your narrative is “regulations are hampering growth,” then anything that looks like a regulation might be a candidate for attack — even if there’s no evidence that it’s the source of our problems. It does not take much imagination to understand how this can serve right-wing ends.

Jacobin
Abundance for the 99 Percent

Perhaps the most common charge that Abundance is neoliberal rests upon its alleged promotion of “deregulation.” But this is either a willful misrepresentation or, more generously, a result of not reading the book.
[⋯]
If Klein and Thompson are only offering a new version of “warmed over neoliberalism,” they go to great lengths in the book’s conclusion to argue the opposite. They situate their “abundance” framework as a contender to replace the crumbling “neoliberal world order,” deploying the analysis of historian Gary Gerstle. They also point to the state-led expansion of solar technology in the 1970s — an effort crushed by Reagan’s form of slash and burn neoliberal austerity — as a lost opportunity for a more abundant future.
Another common critique from the Left is that Klein and Thompson’s approach is explicitly opposed to the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor and working class. But more accurately, they are simply pointing out that redistribution alone is not enough unless the public sector can actually reliably deliver and build real public goods cheaply and efficiently. As Klein recently put it in an essay for the New York Times, “If Democrats are taxing people to build high-speed rail, that high-speed rail should exist; if they are taxing people to build electric vehicle chargers, those chargers should get built; if they are promising lower drug prices in Medicare, those lower prices should show up quickly.”
[⋯]
We applaud Klein and Thompson’s advocacy of a “liberalism that builds” through effective capacity. But they underplay the extent to which capitalism and class power will prevent their agenda from yielding the political fruit they envision. ⋯

Washington Monthly
The Broadband Story Abundance Liberals Like Ezra Klein Got Wrong

In late March [2025], the New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein went on the Weekly Show with Jon Stewart podcast to talk about his new book, Abundance, which Klein had co-authored with journalist Derek Thompson, then of The Atlantic. The book’s thesis is that over the years Democrats, often bowing to left-wing interest groups, have encouraged various forms of red tape — from federal environmental statutes to local zoning rules to minority contractor set-asides — that have gummed up the workings of government to the point that it is no longer possible to build things the country desperately needs, like new housing and clean energy infrastructure, in a timely and cost-effective manner. To illustrate his point, he regaled Stewart with a tragicomic tale of the government failure to expand rural broadband access.
[⋯]
In a subsequent New York Times column, Klein admitted that he had gotten some of the facts wrong—that “portions of [BEAD’s] 14-stage process were insisted upon by congressional Republicans.” But rather than concede the broader argument, he doubled down, saying that after further talks with “various people who’d been part of the broadband program,” he discovered that “much of the process was worse than I’d known.” One official, he wrote, told him that “he’d wasted 40 to 50 percent of his time on internal government requirements he judged irrelevant to the project,” though Klein didn’t name the official or the specific requirements the official was referencing. Similarly, Klein’s coauthor, Derek Thompson, acknowledged in an interview with the journalist Mehdi Hasan that Klein initially “got some things wrong” about BEAD, but insisted that “rules we’ve put in our own way” (he didn’t specify which) had derailed the program.
So, what’s the real story here? Was it liberal proceduralism or corporate power that incapacitated Biden’s rural broadband effort?
[⋯]
To resolve this question, we spoke with nearly two dozen government officials and outside experts who were involved in the design and implementation of the BEAD program, pored over hundreds of pages of program documentation, and researched rural broadband policies of previous administrations going back to the 1990s. What we found is that while abundance liberals are certainly right that some infrastructure projects have been slowed or stalled by regulations and public engagement processes put in place by Democrats to placate progressive interest groups, that is simply not the case with Biden’s rural broadband initiative. Rather, the complexity and delays of the BEAD program and the broader failure of Washington over many years to solve the digital divide is overwhelmingly the result of telecom monopolies whose economic and political power previous administrations unleashed. And this misjudgment by abundance liberals is not a one-off mistake, but part of a pattern.

Techdirt
ARPA Is Delivering The ‘Abundance’ Ezra Klein Claims To Be Looking For

The primary culprit of bad regulation isn’t progressive reform. It’s corruption and regulatory capture. It’s careerist revolving door regulators who stopped caring about the public interest a decade earlier, assuming they ever did. It’s a Congress so heavily lobbied by corporate interests it’s literally too corrupt to function or pass even the most basic reforms (see: our lack of internet privacy laws).
As somebody who has studied and written about telecom policy for several decades, corruption is at the very heart of that sector’s bureaucratic dysfunction. If you’re talking about abundance and you think corruption and consolidated corporate power is some kind of afterthought in the conversation of why the government consistently fails to deliver, I’m going to have a hard time taking you seriously.

Boston Review
The Real Path to Abundance

The strongest argument I have seen that K&T’s book is too enthusiastic about deregulation.

The authors back these claims with anecdotes of regulations and bureaucrats supposedly stifling development. This is not rigorous argument, however, but a “story,” as the authors themselves put it on the last page of the book. The problem is that stories can be deeply misleading. Where this one doesn’t give a mistaken impression through sins of omission, it simply gets things wrong. It often blames government for bad outcomes where it should be blaming the whole structure of the market—including other government policies (among them too little regulation of the private sector) and, especially, the nature of private investment (even when spurred by government subsidy).

Jacobin
To Get Abundance, We Need to Discipline Capital

I think this article rests too much on an assumption that Abundance “really” means neolib-ish assumption that private industry can be “unleashed” from regulation, but it offers an instructive warning about the financial logics of private development.

Proponents of abundance sometimes couch their fundamentally deregulatory project as an effort to shore up “state capacity.” These claims shouldn’t be taken at face value, as some on the Left seem all too willing to take them. Rather than interrogating the assumptions underlying abundance, some on the Left are allowing themselves to be led down a primrose path. Despite the occasional nod to, say, bringing outsourced project consulting back in-house, what abundance advocates mean when they invoke “state capacity” is not a powerful state steering, directing, and commanding private capital, or investing and provisioning on its own. Rather, abundance advocates offer a rather more constrained vision: what economist Daniela Gabor has called a “derisking” state.

Liberal Currents
Is Abundance based?

As a testament to this agenda’s appeal, some conservatives argue they are the natural home for abundance. Conservatism is supposedly best suited for promoting abundance and prosperity through its focus on free markets and disinterest in the supposed things that hold back the American economy: regulations, “wokeness”, and an obsession with trying to solve problems by throwing money at them.
While this may have been true in your father’s conservatism, the unfortunate reality is that conservatism today is difficult to reconcile with the Abundance Agenda. ⋯
[⋯]
This is not to say that people on the right cannot be allies in the Abundance Agenda. But abundance must be led by those who prioritize material concerns, common dignity for all people, and a “live and let live” approach to social values.
The sort of folk you might know as liberals.

Liberal Currents
Abundance Does Not Offer A Viable Electoral Strategy

Klein and Thompson establish early on that abundance will be the way for Democrats to come back from the political wilderness. They argue that this will happen if, on the state level, Democrats model what successful governance looks like. “A good way to marginalize the most dangerous political movement is to prove the success of your own. If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen, they need to offer the fruits of successful governance.” Make abundance work in California and Massachusetts, and voters in Pennsylvania and Georgia will want that too. This logic on its own is not wrong. When Franklin Roosevelt ran for president in 1932, much of his argument was showing that he could bring his success in New York to the entire nation. But that depends on voters linking those specific policies to the Democratic government in charge.

Liberal Currents writer & editor Samantha Hancox-Li disagrees with that critique:

part of being a home for mere liberalism means accepting a diversity of viewpoints--which is to say, sometimes we publish pieces i do not agree with. so, in the spirit of collegial disagreement, some remarks on why i think glick is wrong.
to start: glick argues that yimby reforms will lower housing prices, leading to an electoral loss. i think this is wrong both economically and politically.
on a political level, we don’t need to speculate--we can just look to jurisdictions that have made yimby-style reforms. the Minneapolis 2040 plan, for example, radically upzoned minneepolis--but did not lead to an electoral wipeout for its authors. scott weiner is a popular senator!
likewise, glick argues that harris campaigned on abundance and lost. this is true … but it’s also true that harris ran a good, persuasive campaign and lost. she did better in the areas she campaigned in! she lost because of association with biden and inflation--as were incumbents across the west.
more deeply, as demsas and broockman discuss here, the “homevoter hypothesis” doesn't appear to be true. nimbys are ideological, not cynical. they'’e not in it for housing prices--they want to save the neighborhood / the environment / etc. and the thing is, the economics of yimby reform are more complicated that the simplistic homevoter hypothesis allows. most homeowners are also landowners. while yimby may decrease the price of housing, it should increase the price of land. where that balance falls for any given tract is … complex.
and this is setting aside the boon to home equity (and one’s economic fortunes generally) that should follow from overall increased growth
fundamentally, as i argued here, blue states and cities should be the showroom floors of the democratic party. and they are, demonstrably, not well governed. we need to unfuck our own house if we want america to trust us!

Dave Karpf
Abundance is a book for an alternate timeline

I don’t have a grand solution to that problem. But my main critique of the book — or at least the publicity tour surrounding the book — is that Abundance is being treated as a big, ambitious solution to the woeful current state of the Democratic Party. And it really is only partway there. We’re also going to have to do something about the tech billionaires and the private equity ghouls who have amassed such power and accept no social responsibility. We’re going to have to face up to the malicious propaganda machine that is the conservative media ecosystem (the topic of Ezra’s previous book, incidentally). We’re going to have to fight the antiscience ideologues head-on, rather than hoping a grand social vision will win them over to our side.
No single book ever has all the answers. And Klein and Thompson at their best are really quite good. In the alternate timeline where we weren’t dealing with the collapse of the goddamn Republic, I think this would be a vital-but-incomplete book, setting the table for some quite-necessary conversations. But we do not live in that timeline.

Critical Point with Kevin Riggle
Climate, Energy, & the Future —
The Future is Literally Bright

Video of an interview. (There’s also a transcript.) I greatly admire Chachra’s book How Infrastructure Works, which Riggle praises thus:

She does the ‘abundance’ pitch from a place of deep knowledge and understanding

Revolving Door Project
All About Abundance

Another overview of commentaries. It’s a little too sympathetic to readings that take Abundances as just neoliberalism by another name, but is quite good on the Big Tent being so big that it admits a lot of bad bedfellows. See also Revolving Door’s mapping of movement sponsors and critique of movement ideas.

Ned Resnikoff
When Is A Tent Too Big?

The differences between Dark Abundance and Red Plenty or Cascadian Abundance run considerably deeper than, say, those that separate left-YIMBYs and libertarian YIMBYs. Left-YIMBYs and libertarian YIMBYs may very often chafe at one another, but I don’t think one wing of the coalition would summarily execute the other, even if they could get away with it. I can’t exactly say the same of Dark Abundance, which includes people who have cheered on the ethnic cleansing campaign being run out of Trump’s DHS and people who think the entire trans community should be erased from existence. If cosmopolitanism is at the heart of YIMBY thought, then it can’t possibly occupy the same movement as a faction that wants to violently purge U.S. cities and is currently cheering on the military occupation of Washington, D.C.
[⋯]
The thing about having a tent, even a big tent, is that you have to place its outer boundaries somewhere. Personally, “deportation abundance,” and the entire worldview it implies, falls well outside of where I would mark those boundaries. I don’t think you can have a coherent abundance coalition that makes room for such a thing. And even if you could, it certainly wouldn’t include me.

Roosevelt Institute | Ned Resnikoff
Lessons from YIMBYism: Taking “Abundance” Back to Its Fundamentals

Once we abandon the nominal goal of unifying all varieties of abundance into a single political program, we’re left with less a unified movement than a powerful, pragmatic set of policy heuristics drawn from the basic insights of the YIMBY movement. This essay restates and reemphasizes those heuristics, and describes what a generalized YIMBY approach to policymaking might look like. In particular, this essay describes in a general way how YIMBY conceptual tools can help achieve progressive outcomes across various policy domains.
I use the term YIMBYism instead of abundance throughout to emphasize that this essay is about a particular policymaking approach, and not about the larger ideological debates that have become part of the abundance discourse. While I draw most of the examples to illustrate my points from housing policy, YIMBYism is broadly (although not universally) applicable when it comes to grappling with contemporary American economic and social problems.

Late, but maybe not too late

2025-08-27T12:32:00.000-07:00

My social media feed has a lot of people pointing to Chris Armitage’s post I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0%. I want to complicate it.

Once they win elections, it’s already too late.
[⋯]
Based on the historical record, there are exactly three ways this goes. Option one: Stop them before they take power. Option two: War. Option three: Wait for them to die of old age.
They tried anyway.
But here’s the thing: we already missed our chance. The window isn’t closing; it’s closed.
The Supreme Court declared Trump above the law. He’s threatening to arrest political opponents. He’s already sent the FBI after elected officials when they haven’t committed crimes. Congress is his. Most state governments are his. Billionaire oligarchs openly coordinate with him. The window slammed shut.
So let’s stop pretending we’re in the “prevention” phase and start talking about what you do when fascists already control the institutions but haven’t fully consolidated power yet. Because historically, nobody’s been here before, not like this.

I recommend reading the whole thing. I have had a number of conversations with folks over the last few months in which I said pretty much the same thing.

And I want to expand on that last point. Nobody’s been here before, not like this. Armitage observes:

No wealthy democracy with nuclear weapons has ever fallen to fascism. The 1930s examples everyone cites were broken countries. Weimar Germany was weakened by World War I and hyperinflation. Italy was barely industrialized. Spain was largely agrarian. They didn't have the world’s reserve currency. They didn’t have thousands of nukes. They didn't have surveillance technology that would make the Stasi weep with envy.
America has all of that. Plus geographic isolation that makes external intervention impossible. Plus a population where 30-40% genuinely wants authoritarian rule as long as it hurts the “right people.” The historical playbook is useless here. We’re in unprecedented territory.

All of that is both true and scary. But other unique aspects of our situation point to opportunities and give me hope.

The US military

If you know anything about authoritarian takeovers, you know that there typically comes a moment when the police & military take sides. If they side against the regime, the regime falls.

I am profoundly pessimistic about American police. But listening to people who understand US military structure & culture makes me optimistic that the US military is structurally resistant to becoming an instrument of domestic authoritarian control.

It is hard to imagine US soldiers killing other Americans. We have a uniquely strong political culture of distinguishing domestic law enforcement from military action outside our borders. We have a particularly strong military culture of refusing illegal orders. (Yes, we still do plenty of war crimes; mortifyingly, our contemporary military really is better than most on this score.) Our military is profoundly hesitant to act on American soil. We have a longstanding problem of our far right in our military — as every military does — but our volunteer-with-economic-coercion troops are significantly poor, Black, and brown, with every reason to reject the MAGA dream.

Plus Iraq & Afghanistan have produced military protocols favoring decentralization of command initiative, which makes it harder for the President to order the military around. It is hard to make them do things and there is no winning them over as a bloc.

Federalism

The complexity of American governance institutions is not quite unique, but it is pretty weird. Our overlapping municipal, county, state, and federal institutions are an unruly mess. If you ask me, the governance problems which this creates contributed to our current crisis. But it also makes it tough for the MAGA regime to command all government institutions from DC. We can already see this demonstrated in the theatre of intervention in cities including the nation’s capitol … and how badly that has mostly gone for the regime.

American ideals

Democracy and universal rights hold a uniquely important place in our “civil religion”. In many ways, this has made us vulnerable to hypocritical perversions of those ideals in this moment, which should surprise no one who knows our history. But our history also shows ways in which it has been a sword & shield in the hands of our better side. It may serve us that way again.

The information ecosystem

We are in a new moment of communication & information infrastructure. Everyone recognizes the profound impact of the internet on political culture & process in the last decade or two, and how destabilizing it has been.

I believe that on top of that we have also seen a phase shift over just the last few years. Our messy information ecosystem is at once poweful and fragmented. It seems unmistakable that this helped MAGA fascism spread and seize power. But it remains to be seen whether it is compatible with authoritarians holding power.

No, the public has not resisted as vigorously as we need to. But many informed observers have remarked on how, compared to historical parallels, a lot of us have named what is happening early, a lot of us have demonstrated resistance, and resistance has ramped up quickly.

Hope

The situation is dire. I do not believe a Restoration to the status quo ante is either possible or desirable. We all need to step up more.

But no doomerism, please. It helps the fash, and it does not reflect reality. We still have strong cards to play.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
U.S. Democratic Backsliding in Comparative Perspective

The paper establishes that the Trump administration’s overall political project conforms to the general model of executive aggrandizement, and is best understood as taking place at three interrelated levels:
Establishing the president as supreme within the executive branch ⋯
Making the executive branch dominant over other parts of government ⋯
Weakening societal constraints on executive power ⋯
The paper then compares the path of U.S. politics under Trump to seven other recent or ongoing cases of democratic backsliding—Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Hungary, India, Poland, and Türkiye—highlighting distinctive features along three comparative dimensions:
Focus: The Trump team’s agenda has several priorities that set it apart from other backsliding cases. These include its unique emphasis on intra-executive dominance, delegitimization rather than institutionalized attacks on horizontal checks, and coercive use of the robust federal funding ecosystem to pressure U.S. civil society.
Rapidity: The administration has carried out its political program with striking speed. Compared to other backsliding cases, it has sought to centralize power with greater momentum and rapidity. And while other leaders often eroded democratic checks piece by piece, Trump’s team is working to weaken such checks across multiple levels all at once.
Severity: The degree of democratic erosion in the United States is not yet as severe as that of most of its backsliding peers. The country has not yet seen the deep-rooted institutional changes that have characterized many of the comparative cases. And repressive measures like coercive force or criminalization have been limited by U.S. democratic norms and institutions.
While some comfort can be taken from the fact that the relatively deeply rooted U.S. democratic norms and institutions compared to those in the other cases have resulted in a less institutionalized process of backsliding thus far, the distinctive speed and aggressiveness of Trump’s aggrandizement agenda is cause for serious concern. Numerous avenues and sources of resistance to democratic erosion continue to exist, but U.S. democracy is being put to the test as never before in the country’s modern history.

Miniver Cheevy

Today we must draw a line

Congress and others in power

Citizens

The new covenant

Murc’s Law

Facts have a YIMBY bias

Ned Resnikoff

The vacant housing canard

Building “luxury” housing

Policy

Housing the unhoused

Two encounters with the grift

A call from a boiler room

Short con on the street

Republic Dogs

Republic Dogs

One cheer for “‘AI’ art”?

Reconstructed movies

Ones I have seen

The Abyss — Extended Edition Aliens — Special Edition

Ones I want to see

Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut

Once Upon A Time In America — Extended Director’s Cut

More fan edits

More official releases

I Am Legend — Alternate Version

Kingdom of Heaven — Director’s Cut

Conservatism as fear and “instinct”

Campism

Virus-cautious socializing

Indoors

Outdoors

Divination and “AI”

The tale of RMS Carpathia

Clarifying common social justice praxis

Fundamentals

Social justice

Understanding from lived experience

Campism

Oppression Olympics

Manifestos for a new America

Visions

The mainspring of governance

A world of abundance

America for all

Manifestos for a manifesto

Wank

The end of the Social Justice Détente

Related

A racial and sexual hypocrisy

Romney bitterness

“Cancel culture” and criticism

What are we even talking about?

Commentaries

Contrapoints | Canceling

The Ballads of Malcolm Reynolds

Luke Skywalker

A word about violence

Moviebob

So Uncivilized

Redford headcanon

Charlie Kirk and Ezra Klein

The headline

Charlie Kirk was not the person Klein describes

Commentaries

The proposed gun ban for trans people

To my US based cis friends

To my non-US based friends

To my US based trans friends

More

The Abyss — Extended Edition
Aliens — Special Edition