Magic Rectangle

When crime goes up, the media cries out how rising crime hurts us. When crime goes down, the media cries out about how ... DECLINING crime hurts us.

The complete elimination of Meta would yield unambiguous, far reaching benefits for global society.

so fucking rich that while he was talking AP reported this: "Writer E. Jean Carroll can collect $5.8 million awarded to her after a jury found that President Donald Trump sexually abused and defamed her, a federal judge ruled Wednesday. Trump’s lawyers immediately appealed to stop the payment."

What a wonderful day for discourse.

this is why corporations spend billions of dollars buying television advertising even though everyone in the world knows that tv ads are paid content designed to deceive you. they work anyway!

even if you have an implacably hostile audience that is treating every claim you make skeptically, the way human psychology works, repeating the claim still reinforces it. many are likely to retain the false information and forget where they heard it.

i feel like the model here is anti-union captive audience meetings, which are stupid in the exact same way but absolutely do work. propaganda works, even if it's ham-fisted and obvious! it's tempting to think that it inherently backfires but it doesn't

Q for the rest of 🌎: Did you really not see this coming? What did you think was going to happen when you let us host the world cup under this president?

When even scientists are shocked by extreme weather, the only conclusion to draw: we're in trouble. Must-read story by @eroston.bsky.social 🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

The right to bear baloarms

How old were you when you first learned that JFK didn't kill himself? Tune in this Thursday for more undeniable truth.

people need to go to jail over this, its the only thing the democratic party should be saying right now. all of them, in unison, no matter the question or topic, needs to be saying “insider trading is against the law”

God damn it how do I filter out World Cup talk. I can’t just filter every country name.

it's smart politics, frankly. trump and republicans recognize that increased violence and crime rates in our society help reactionaries politically even if they are themselves the direct cause of the increased violence and crime.

Listen if New York pulling off free childcare, the rest of us finna start asking questions

Paine was also an early — maybe the first! — Land Value Tax Guy en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agraria...

I was reminded of the passage when reading this part of @laurajedeed.bsky.social's thread on yesterday's celebration. The bipartisan effort set out to do this. Trump hijacked the effort so he could line his own pockets. bsky.app/profile/laur...

So, you know,, sorry to the individuals who wanted a nice thing but I wanted a nice thing too and instead I got thi Maybe, when you don't celebrate the whole country, EVERYONE who belongs here and lives here, the celebration should go to shit and everyone should be miserable

What if I told you they are STILL GOING OFF, now, at 12:38 AM, and the smoke is so thick you can't even see them?

Now friends, this has been a post full of schadenfreude We've all had a good time here What if I told you the best was yet to come What if I told you that after waiting for HOURS--miserable, soaking wet, desperate and disappointing hours--our view of the fireworks was.......this

What if I told you that they've been going off for half an hour now and that at no point has anyone waiting anywhere along the line had a better view than this one?

Standing, standing, standing. Quiet despair. One of the projectors shining on the Washington Monument briefly malfunctions so that, as God Bless The USA finishes playing, it reads REE instead of FREEDOM

If the left even thought about blocking traffic to this extent the entire town would smell like tear gas and the NYT would already have written two op-eds about this Not Being The Right Way Instead, ambulances are creeping through at like 2mph, sirens blaring, as everyone gets soaked

Maybe the next president can open a denaturalization proceeding against him based on the fabrications/false representations made in his visa process. You don’t think our democracy should exist? Good for you. Now get the fuck out.

Elon is one of those foreigners who never assimilated to American culture.

Thursday nights at 8 p.m. ET, all summer long! You can watch the first full episode here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnz6...

I'll summarize this: Mamdani asked NYers to keep air conditioning at 78 degrees. A wave criticism hit online. A MSNBC broadcast pointed out the US Department of Energy recommends that 78 degree figure. Immediately after, the US Department of Energy deleted 6,000 web pages related to energy saving.

Water fountains disappeared from the Longleaf Trace in June as the board that governs it grew concerned about how homeless people were using its facilities. Runners and bikers who use the 44-mile trail fear the decision could have dire consequences in Mississippi's summer heat. buff.ly/pBXSvrI

Very thankful for this letter to Becky Pepper-Jackson (the 16 year-old trans girl SCOTUS ruled against yesterday) from James Dale, a gay man whose expulsion from the Boy Scouts was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2000.

The funny thing is outside his "too stupid for a 7th grader to entertain" conclusion about blowback, Richard Hanania is right. If you killed certain bad people, things would indeed be fine.

As a commenter elsewhere said, Democrats always have to run against the imaginary Republicans who are strong on defense, manage the economy well, respect the troops and balance the federal budget.

America had a model of scientific innovation that clearly worked and is now being attacked by people who don't understand science. The market will not just produce less science and train fewer scientists; it will also be less likely to share scientific breakthroughs for the public good.

if I were an elected representative and my constituents were coming up and saying "our daughter can't go to college unless she gets an athletic scholarship" I would be like "this is why we need universal free college" not "we'll pretend to solve this by being cruel to trans people." crazy right

I’m curious if justified Biden haters who unjustifiably protest-voted for Trump think Kamala would have green-lit Israel invading Lebanon (again). The “these candidates are exactly the same” discourse was exhausting, I think wrong, and I suspect partially astroturfed.

Too many Americans still retain a presumption of normalcy, that institutional guardrails will kick in and the Trump era will become a historical period for the textbooks. They need their imagination widened by comparative-historical analysis. Things both can be bad *and* can get so much worse.

One thing that I’ve learned in my study of backlash politics from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Movement is that backlashers are a persistent bunch. The undoing of Reconstruction took several decades, and post-WWII backlashers looked back on that patient counterrevolution as a model.

As the majority notes, this question essentially came up during the debate around ratification and the Senate sponsor of the bill said of course it applies to these people

Just shocking this was a 5-4 ruling. This Court is so so badly broken.

Statements from Dems like this one make it harder to press for Supreme Court reform. This ruling was a near-disaster and shows how unhinged SCOTUS has become—now just one vote away from overturning the 14th Amendment. But a sitting senator says they "applaud" the ruling.

I would become a catholic this week if the pope did anything significant to hinder the giant sect of bigots and fools trying to start their own pre-civil rights catholic church.

Ben Cullen, a leading figure of the "Raise the Colours" campaign, will stand trial for three separate charges regarding a total of 78 indecent images of children. I have only seen this covered in local newspapers, so far. Grim as it is, it needs wider coverage www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/2624087...

Ezra Klein is a disgraceful media figure, and to boot he’s the exact stereotype of a liberal who has stuffed his head all the way into his own ass to smell his own farts as deeply as he possibly can.

To start, Rufo says, "The left is over-institutionalized, and the right is under-institutionalized." Klein chips in with, "I say this all the time, man. The left is overformed by institutions, the right is underformed." What? Where is the left wing Federalist Society, Fox News, or Turning Point?/4

Absolutely. For example, Trump obliterating USAID, the Dept of Education, and CFPB, plus arbitrarily refusing to pay appropriations to states, cities, and grant recipients, should all have been non-starters—but SCOTUS jumped in to make clear the laws passed by Congress don't matter.

I wrote about how Trump may have burned his bridges by rounding people up en masse and putting them in camps before the administration had managed to suppress dissent.

The House will vote on an amendment that would block funding to Israel. It should be a no brainer: Our tax dollars should not fund a genocide. We cannot continue to be complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.