larelli

The president's reaction to Obama's Cheesecake Factory joke, however, is mentioned on the homepage twice

There was a brand new allegation that the president raped a woman in the 1990s yesterday and it appears to not be on the NYT homepage at all right now

you didn't see them people "Triple wash" those greens a green that you never saw washed is an unwashed green

RFK Jr is being a racist shitgibbon today, so I'm just going to throw this back into the universe.

this is not top of the list by any means but I would like to hear what NYU has to say for itself here

… (This level of insightful political commentary is probably why BlueSky gave me the blue check)

… Also, not to be too nerdy and pedantic, but in the interview Bessent said that Obama’s library looks like “Darth Vader’s tomb,” when obviously Vader’s body was burned at the end of ROTJ, and the proper comparison is with Darth Vader’s Fortress on Mustafar.

The US is not about to have a free and fair election. The state has put its thumb on the scale to favor the ruling party in multiple ways. It's a mostly free, somewhat unfair election. But still one where the ruling party can be overwhelmed by numbers. Hence the term "competitive authoritarianism."

zeteo.com/p/inside-dem...

All the millions of tax dollars spent creating a structure to combat these trump-led onslaughts is a dollar that could have conceivably gone to something else and money that should not have to be spent in the first place and it would be completely irresponsible at this point to *not* spend those…

It is atrocious we have to operate under this constant credible and explicit threat from one political party, the fact we keep calling it a “free and fair election” needs some light revising

House Judiciary Democrats have just released a 50-page report that pulls together years of assault allegations against Trump and his reported connections to Jeffrey Epstein. The report calls for a special counsel to investigate Trump's ties to Epstein.

from a certain perspective it almost starts to look like you actually enjoy existential risks, if we're just laying all our cards on the table

sorry, but it's very hard to take your warnings of existential risk seriously when you are simultaneously throwing up to $120 billion at Elon Musk

denying engagement and discussion exploited the algorithms that pushes right-wing talking head front and center against itself. Starve them of attention and push your own material en masse, and you can drown even bot armies.

Literally enlisting people in using growth hacking tactics *against* the networks themselves. I don't know that this is replicable, I don't know how this changes down the line against an adversary who might be even more brazen in their interference, but it worked this time.

What's striking to me are the rules of engagement and the methodology of action here, which more or less is predicated on burying liberal delusions about "debate" or the "marketplace of ideas". The rules were ultimately very simple: amplify your own message and suppress your opponent's.

At one point he had a Whatsapp group with 10 million people in it, coordinating action. Which I didn't even think whatsapp was infrastructurally designed to support. And yes, whatsapp is of course a meta network, but the strategy was to be everywhere, to act redundantly, to be unbannable.

And credit to him, it worked. A sort of digital levee en masse, literally raising an army to counteract the forces that artificially amplify far-right messaging. He did that through organizing and messaging, both on the streets and online, that was so relentless that he put himself in the hospital.

I don't know that there is a template or a "secret sauce" or a clear-cut lesson to take from this. But if there is one it's the idea of treating social media as the hostile territory that it is, of actually acting like you are a participant in propaganda warfare and not like a consumer.

when people say the two parties are the same, one thing they aren’t just different but extremely meaningfully different on is Dems rank and file and the elite level very quickly shouted down or ignored the BlueAnon weirdos saying 2024 was stolen; the Republicans and Trump just put theirs in power

special Buckeye edition, episode 3 bsky.app/profile/disp...

we’ll dive into that next here on cnn but first lets take a look at the latest election news brought to you by our official election day prediction partners over at kalshi

are you telling me the anonymous right-wing degenerates on polymarket got it wrong?

I will never stop being furious at the people who voted to put this monster in charge of the United States. 

The POTUS and VP hyping the Acton ad is like Springfield “eating the pets”. You think the guys at the highest levels won’t go so low — surely they’ll leave the gutter swimming to their minions — but no they will absolutely go to the depths. You have to conclude, they like it.

like vance, ramaswamy is a hateful, resentful orc of a human being, and the reason i think this will hurt him politically — where this stuff didn’t hurt trump — is that ramaswamy, like vance, is also profoundly unlikeable. he has no charm or charisma or anything. just a dipshit.

Latest piece. The discussion of a possible Russian escalation against European NATO often misses the main point that it indicates. It is not about Europe, it is about the USA. phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/the-key-po...

i mean they tried: idk if "the guy eager to prove something faltered because he was confused" is very accurate framing here

And, around us, the world that made that world feasible has fallen in part. Destroyed on purpose, I’d say, by a combination of omission and commotion

That didn't use to be our job! We got our local paper and bought toilet paper from the guys selling ads on 60 Minutes. We had a few magazine subscriptions and downed a book every trimester or so. We did our part.

The ultra-Far Right/neo-Nazis are joining forces in Europe, which should worry anyone with even a passing acquaintance with history. Germany’s AfD and Italy’s Future Nationale have announced a partnership. Everything old is new again.

This year’s El Niño is on course to be the largest in at least *1,000* years. That’s going to drive excess heat into the atmosphere and combined with man-made heating will make 2027 the hottest year ever recorded. #climatecrisis

Brazilian President Lula to CNN: “The leaders with the biggest economies, technology, militaries and nuclear arsenals are the ones who should stop wars and make peace. “Instead, they keep fomenting confrontations. Where are we going to end up with this?”

The Republican Project for literally my entire life has been to warn us that the Federal Government was Too Powerful and Overreaching and would Strip Our Freedoms and now they have gotten into lockstep behind this loon who's like "I might fuck around and ban muffins"

I am maybe built different but I would be ashamed to show my face in public if I were caught on live tv saying anything close to what they’re all saying about Somalis

I mean, yes

bsky.app/profile/dfri...

Britain has spent nearly $40 million on SpaceX's satellite services for its military in a deepening reliance on Musk's company despite European concerns about dependence on US security infrastructure.

Why why why would any gvt want to bind themselves to him. Especially if he has that kind of control over the communications. He already shut down com links during the early days of the War in Ukraine and he shut them down for the good guys. Installing his product is incredibly shortsighted.

Those downfalls just aren’t happening fast enough.