Frenchfold

Republicans are the party of rape.

A new survey of 1,000 American adults found that the strongest supporters of transgender sports bans are not the people who admire women most: they are the people who hold the most hostile views about women. www.helenwebberley.com/news/transge...

And then he stiffed them!

A really great piece, but the interesting bit is at the end: our representations of the physical world have mathematical consequences Stop drawing lies: Why chemistry needs hypergraphs www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/stop...

Republican politicians are *obsessed* with schoolchildren coming home a different gender because of pro-trans teachers, WHICH NEVER HAPPENS. But they are completely indifferent to schoolchildren not coming home *at all* because of guns, WHICH HAPPENS ALL THE TIME!

What even is GOP’s sales pitch for the midterms? Inflation - up Gas prices - way up War in Ukraine - still going War in Iran - still going Houthis - out of control Beef prices - record highs Public health - people are dying from the fucking measles No wins to speak of.

Goldberg: with the embrace of denaturalization “[t]he logic of this brand of politics moves inexorably toward atrocity.” While the Turner Diaries types may be excited by this, the rest of Americans should send this incarnation of the GOP into the wilderness. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/16/o...

🧵🧵🧵 The NY Times posted a 15-minute video today in which I got to tell NYT what’s wrong with its coverage. They said they saw my critical posts on Bluesky and invited me to do a video with them to air my grievances. Weird, right? I didn’t hold back. I blasted their sanewashing of MAGA extremism.

Excellent thread!

But under cover of these real factors is a cohort of what Matt Stoller calls "economic termites," parasites that have infested the walls of our economy and are devouring it from within.

As Tim Wu says, this is the moment when a company that's supposed to be helping becomes a predator, acquires "main character syndrome" and makes every transaction all about the middleman, at the expense of the people buying and selling: pluralistic.net/2026/08/05/a...

This, too, is characteristic of monopolization: whenever a monopoly takes over part of its supply chain, the rest of the supply chain consolidates to prevent itself from being ripped off by the new giant.

The Amazon Tax is a prime (you should forgive the expression) example of enshittification, in which an *intermediary* (a business that sits between buyers and sellers, AKA, "a platform") screws *both* customers *and* sellers to benefit itself.

This didn’t wasn’t a thunderstorm or a heatwave: it was done to everyone deliberately and strategically as government policy, with very broad buy-in at the top tier. Who did that? What are their names.

“Why is the public realm now so fucked and wrecked?”: a very good question that should be directed at all of the smart lads who backed austerity then united to crush and destroy the organically arising anti-austerity movement

And: if this party gets complete control they’ll try to put me out of business.

This is one reason I've never really understood the weakness & passivity of the US political media. If I live in a system where one of two parties can only win if people believe lies, and I am in the truth-telling business, I should take the ongoing success of that party as a personal insult.

The Putin-Trump diesel deal is disastrous and illegal — but it is also a sign of the desperation of both men, one fearing to lose a war, the other to lose an election.

NEW: Inflation data came in and Donald Trump’s failed economic agenda has raised prices for Americans by 5.9%. That means families are paying $3,772 more thanks to inflation under Trump.

American firms used to be incredibly good at selling their products and persuading customers to believe in them - in technology especially. The fact that the best elite accelerators can do is suggest hack ragebait is IMO a sign of genuine hollowing out of a pillar of American dynamism.

Let this be a lesson to all Starlink customers: this is a service that Elon is happy to weaponize against you. Sudden Starlink Restrictions Hamper Ukraine Just as Russia Escalates www.nytimes.com/2026/10/14/w...

This is so moving to read, in light of where we are now.

Well, well, well, here’s a fine GOP shaped pickle: here’s what the hostility to health officials and huge foreign aid, public health, and science cuts gets you. Was this the plan all along? FAFO? If so, the pandemic conveniently arrives after the midterms. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

I am sort of curious what gives MAGA voters a permission structure to admit error - and a focus group context where they see other people doing so might be just the thing. Wonder if there is a way to scale this.

For decades, Republicans in Washington have told us that tax cuts would trickle down to workers. Instead, wealth and power have accumulated in the hands of the richest 1% at the expense of the rest of us. Trickle-down economics was never supposed to work. It was a hoax.

guys that cloudflare chart is about automated content crawling not social media bots, Yandex is an indexing site, when one of its DCs go down they do less crawling of the web. please learn to read.

This is proof it is a manufactured global movement.

We’ve been talking about this for years. None of these far-right movements are organic.

Kajuji Temple, Yamashina Ward, Kyoto, Japan. Photography by Katsu

Why David Brooks is a waste of time, volume CXV, plate 241.

Beautiful!

Well, it’s a quick take, and no doubt data will come in, but it sure looks like based on today’s evidence that a lot of pro-Trump and pro-AfD bot work depends directly on Russian data centers.

What a weird world we live in - Ukraine hits a data centre deep in Russia - Irish twitter users see racist posts about IPAS centres in Offaly fall off a cliff

We are conceding the very possibility of democratic governance to allow a corporation to determine the moral rights of a machine. surely moral concern for actual humans and how we relate is better preserved democratically than it is by a corporation.

Does anyone know what’s up with the CAST Foundry website (Cooperativa Anonima Servizi Typografici www.c-a-s-t.com)? It’s been unresponsive for a week.

The pro-lifers are livestreaming a public execution.

184 new cuneiform tablets ✍️ (total), dating to c.1400 BCE. “Preliminary examination of the texts has revealed references to military activities, epidemics, the death of an infant princess & requests for assistance sent to the king by Hittite military commanders” www.heritagedaily.com/2026/10/184-...

Telling that Wes Streeting considers someone diagnosed with ADHD has been 'written off'. Also telling that the government commissioned a review in the face of independent reviews finding there is no overdiagnosis, just increased awareness & historic underdiagnosis of girls & women.