cyrusnaim.bsky.social

i am inviting anyone from a legacy media organization to explain to me why the house judiciary dems report on trump’s epstein’s ties and multiple allegations of rape isn’t worthy of extensively reporting on. i’m serious. i want to understand.

It's like everyone decided "If the president was plausibly accused of child sex trafficking, it would be the biggest scandal of all time" and went from there to "It's not the biggest scandal of all time, so I guess he's not plausibly accused of child sex trafficking." But he is.

Appropos of nothing and for no one, this is the most succinct summation of where I am on AI. It's one of those cases where the more I hear the arguments against it being truly intelligent, the less I'm convinced.

Every so often I think about the number and scale of catastrophes Trump has baked into the global economy/security situation that haven’t eventuated yet and then sort of shrug and pour another cup of coffee because I can’t do anything about it.

I have not yet read the majority opinion in full, but an unstated principle here is, IMO: if a person can be indefinitely detained on the allegation that they are in the country unlawfully, then a CITIZEN can be indefinitely on the erroneous allegation that they’re an alien

a good metaphor for politics is when you have a drill for boring holes in a board, and you find a hard board, and you immediately give up

If you’re young enough to wear a costume and say trick or treat, you are young enough to get candy.

Let them have the damn candy

the routine, pay for play pardons are all by themselves one of the worst corruption scandals in american history!

OUT: We must heed the wisdom of the founders, who sought a republic free from tyranny, for they were the finest thinkers the west has ever produced IN: if my imagination can conjure an illiterate drunk 250 years ago with monarchical sympathies, we must give Donald Trump the powers of a king.

Trump *himself* filed a financial disclosure form this year that asserted he made over a billion dollars last year. That's not a claim from the fake news, or the crazy liberals. That is Trump's own filing.

Ossoff: "Tech titans dig bunkers while warning us the AI they're creating risks human extinction. Meanwhile, our Congress debates youth sports and the president builds a ballroom ... I refuse to leave my girls a world as dark and dangerous and cruel as this one threatens to become"

i’m just so fucking sorry that my muslim friends have to be hit with this despicable racism every single day. it’s not ok and you should not have to tolerate it. this country belongs to all of us.

What’s astounding to me is how “the president builds himself a palace with money given directly to him in secret by the richest people in America,” literally the most straightforward and worst executive-branch corruption story in US history, just gets shrugged at because Trump is unapologetic

The trick is that events of immense importance to the survival of America as a democratic nation of laws are re-characterized as “process issues” about correct adherence to the federal appropriations system.

will try to answer these in a piece next week but for now i will say that part of the *point* of court expansion, in my mind, is to create a disequilibrium — a potential race to the bottom — that will force a truce.

"Cannonball" by The Breeders

That $366 million Elon is spending to try and convince voters that Congress should stay Republican? It's more money than McCain's 2008 campaign spent. But it's also, relative to Musk's net worth, the same as a household at the median income spending $32.

Remembering that time when some big name accounts were arguing that X is all good now and the algorithm has been de-Elon'd. Wait, that was yesterday. The same time this was happening.

Remember this when pundits and politicians tell us it would be a "weaponization of law enforcement" to hold Trump officials accountable for their crimes. *This* is what actual weaponization looks like.

Team Trump is telling you, in effect, that 4 years of Biden were so high-impact and transformative that they're utterly helpless to make their own mark.

I mean, you can just see it happening! bsky.app/profile/poli...

if Elon is spending millions of dollars of his own money to push this message with paid media, what do you think he does to the black box algorithm on his platform that chooses which posts you see and which of your posts are shown to others?

The term everyone is dancing around is "secret police", a hallmark of totalitarian regimes.

My man ended USAID, condemning millions to death

It is a very easy task. He sounds like he understands that they have to be punished. End of.

WE DON’T HAVE TO TOLERATE THIS DETESTABLE FOOL

“Illegally detaining and brutalizing a racial minority until they agree to flee the country” isn’t immigration enforcement, it’s ethnic cleansing. There’s no legal standard here - these people meet the standard! What differentiates them is not their legal status but their race and color.

They’re live-streaming the execution of the person they think they can get away with doing that to first. It’s a test. If they can do that, they’ll expand the margins of permission.

what I had to say turned out not to be a column

Really was one of the dumbest and most harmful things possible for “virtue signaling” to become some kind of epithet. Sending externally visible signals that you are engaging in pro-social behavior is normal, natural, and good, it’s how society works. Other people can’t read your fucking mind.

"why would I ever need a task to be done faster" come on, guys. Because we're dying. Because we are literally all dying all the time. Because we're running out of time. The fact that it's often hard to measure or stupidly measured doesn't mean "saving time" isn't an important thing to human beings

I'm just gonna bookmark this for future reference when Dem pundits complain about how the party has trouble communicating its message to voters. The reason you keep running into trouble with your branding isn't campus radicals. The reason is that your opponents purchased all the media outlets.

You do not have to be a parent to feel anger at the details in the latest investigation by @isabelaalhadeff.bsky.social and @samanthamichaels.bsky.social. But the white-hot rage I felt as a dad reading this is going to stick with me for some time.

This is a community note for the ages.

feels like at least part of what is happening is that a lot of people want politics to solve the "my life feels empty" problem and the populist right is directly appealing to them

I'm not naive enough to actually believe this will happen, but Democrats could be preparing, right now, lists of impeachment charges against (at a bare minimum) Hegseth, Kennedy, Mullin, Patel, Blanche, & Trump, as well as Bondi, Bovino, & Noem (still worth doing!) that rely purely on public facts,

The idea that we *can't* rebuild a thing that we built once already seems deeply flawed. It will cost a lot of money but we can in fact do it.

Adorable 🥰 Gorilla 🦍 Family

feels like there is a group of smart and well-intentioned people who long ago made up their minds that AI Is Bad, swore off using it, and now get all their info about AI from each other. not saying they're wrong that ai is bad! but i think they're gradually losing touch with what it is and does

Yup, absolutely. I think it’s wrong to treat the Iran War as simply one bad error that happened to the Trump Admin rather than the entirely logical consequence of the way it operates. If it wasn’t Iran, it would almost certainly have been something else