川上信 (Shin Kawakami)🇯🇵🇨🇳🇺🇸

My 2026 prediction: Dems win the House. My 2026 hot take: Dems take the Senate through AK, NC, OH, ME. My 2028 hit take: Ruben Gallego over Nikki Haley.

Every news story is like “DSA-backed candidates win big in municipal elections; National Hoe-Scaring Committee furious, demands answers”

People always have such a derogatory view of voters in the aggregate because they spent too much time rage-reading NYT’s cherry picked portrayals. But in the aggregate the median voter is pretty stupid but they aren’t completely infantile and are quite capable of discerning these kinds of stuff.

Ethics aside, this take could use some contact with reality. Biden's expanded CTC didn't motivate recipients to vote to maintain it. Trump offered $5000 checks and it hurt him in the polls. The empirical claim that welfare creates single issue voters just doesn't hold up.

Fukuda Yasuo, prime minister from 2007-2008 and a lifelong advocate for closer relations between Japan and its neighbors, passed away at ninety years old. He was memorialized across the political spectrum at home and remembered fondly in Beijing. observingjapan.substack.com/p/fukuda-yas...

a weird set of people who only exist online are people who celebrate the defeat of global fascism in every other country and are then horrified and appalled at the idea that they should also be expected to vote for their domestic opponent of global fascism if some of their stances are Problematic

I can think of one other reason that makes sense.

Last week, I met with young leaders from the My Brother's Keeper Alliance at the Obama Presidential Center. They shared more about the work they’re doing at school, their goals for the future, and even gave me an update on their class elections. Take a look!

You have to really, really, really fucking suck for your 8th grade teacher to come out and shame you like this. Damn.

Man I bet he hoops exactly like your local Bay Area Indian uncle.

New Liberals Twitter account is legit a hack, even subreddit it purports to represent hate that account.

*ANTHROPIC FILES PUBLICLY FOR US IPO www.sec.gov/Archives/edg...

I’ve been bragging to Bsky for a while now but what makes my daughter special is she’s already 3K nerd and I will be intensely focused on fostering that passion as she grows up.

if only there had been a way to predict this might happen based on nearly every midterm election cycle in modern american political history

So I watched this Chinese movie about some dudes traveling back in time to kidnap Qin Shi Huang, And there was a scene where a tacticool dude waded into a bunch of fully armed Qin soldiers and started to beat them up in melee and had to turn it off.

Watching NHK world in a hotel and really wish it was more like actual NHK instead of CNN-lite with a Japanese anchor who speaks flawless American English.

Because there are 10s of thousands of Democratic electeds in the United States, and you have positioned yourself directly into a media environment that is designed to find every statement a Democrat makes that is even vaguely transphobic as soon as it happens.

My theory is with rising interest rates there’s just gonna be less cash in general, and so frivolous spending like on influencers are the first to go. It’s amusing but it’s the story of everything. People just took the good economy for granted and did everything they can to undermine it.

A 75,000-year-old Neanderthal from Shanidar Cave, Iraqi Kurdistan, shows evidence of a potentially lethal spear wound, offering rare insight into violence among our ancient relatives. The findings are published in Scientific Reports. 🧪🏺

The only people more online than the left, are the far right.

Immensely funny in an ironic way that far-right nationalism has become far more internationalist than communism ever was because of the Internet and Social Media.

Canada I am in you (your airspace)

Ever notice how you don’t really get any think-pieces whenever a bunch of left wing parties get elected all at once?

In his acceptance speech, Lula says he will work to regulate digital platforms in Brazil. “Digital crimes must be dealt with like real-life crimes.” This comes after Meta directly interfered with the Brazilian elections, favouring Flávio Bolsonaro.

between serbia, brazil, and hopefully november 3, a good reminder: voting works it’s not the end, there’s always work to be done after the vote, but if you want to beat the motherfuckers and keep them out of power: vote your asses off

Lula won in part by banning online gambling

BRAZIL'S LULA WILL BE REELECTED PRESIDENT IN RUNOFF VOTE, CEO OF POLLSTER ATLASINTEL SAYS

Serbia RN.

Its like this man was born with aura

Vibes from Brazil

pundits are basically bored by the idea that these democratic candidates are not meaningfully behind with black voters and so are trying to conjure a controversy into existence

interestingly this interest in black voters doesn’t extend to the republican effort to deprive them of federal representation, nor do they seem interested in asking whether republican candidates are burdened by the fact that trump talks like a klansman

marine corps boards crossing out their instructions "expel trans marines" and writing in "we keep this trans marine" is, frankly, a great example of what it means that a society is more than just its government

Filling out my CA ballots and I'm just begging for a new proposition that just ends props altogether. Direct democracy is so dumb.