Zone Guide

Brazil’s results tonight are a big endorsement for the idea that every country should have a second “are you you sure about that” election a couple weeks after the first one for the important stuff

The fetishisation of "debate" as some sort of grand public good that everyone should do is so thoughtless and jarring to me because the more you actually do it the more it becomes apparent that genuinely constructive debate is actually a pretty niche thing.

They like Trump and want to help him rule us like a king. They think they are his little helpers

Your takeaway from the Israeli statement should be to remember that the 3.4 million Palestinians of the West Bank live under a permanent and unaccountable military-security state that has existed for nearly sixty years, and that every major political party in Israel is committed to maintaining it.

we gotta bring back shame, man society doesn’t work real well without consequences for being an enormous piece of shit in public

corruption and fraud above a certain amount should be treated as seriously as murder. because fraud kills. corruption kills. when a congressman pushes a bill to, say, build a highway because they personally will make $3 million selling land for that project, we should lock them up for life.

I agree with this. One amendmwnt that I think could pass is to modify the electoral college so that winning > 50% nets you some number of bonus electors but that if no candidate reaches 50% there is a second round of voting.

Two things that are good policies in their own right and would also hopefully make people less stupid about inflation: - Peg the minimum wage to inflation, so it automatically scales with inflation - Require employers to scale wages/salaries with inflation and represent failures to do so as pay cuts

ultimately it's shit like this that makes the decline of birth rates and resulting demographic skewing towards old people self-reinforcing. Greedy, wealthy retired people voting to destroy the funding for public services they relied on throughout their life now that they no longer need them

Hard not to notice that Democrats who are doing the best are the ones who are leaving this whole civility-and-norms, we-go-high, we-need-a-strong-Republican-Party bullshit behind and are simply giving Republicans exactly what they all ought to get at all times, which is undisguised contempt.

Any Democrat suggesting that there is any political mission other than bringing all elected Republicans to justice for their participation in an insurrectionist hate group needs to be booed and hissed without cease until they can be fired at the next available opportunity

This is the most articulate and impactful piece I've read regarding the Pentagon's planned livestreamed execution of Nidel Hasan. Please read it.

I'm tired of transphobes hijacking our talking points and weaponising them against us to ostracise and invalidate us further. I don't "identify as a woman", I just am a woman. I am not a "biological male feeling like a woman", I just am a woman. NEW VIDEO: youtu.be/FFJuA8dycwI

I could be wrong but pointing out that Republicans are, in fact, Nazis, and then explaining in detail why they are Nazis, might be an effective line of attack!

My thing specifically about cultivating an entire public persona of detached, ironic sarcasm; is that it makes it impossible for me to take a person seriously when it's eventually time to be sincere.

Welp, if you're wondering why The Onion produced a "parody" video saying that the DNC was going to pre-emptively bungle its messaging to lose and the autopsy would be funded by AIPAC, I think we have an answer to that, which is that The Onion is increasingly run by unhinged psychopaths

If you are arguing that there is no innocent [person of any nationality whatsoever] then you are making the case for genocide

The median voter is not a sapient being

@pmeyers7.bsky.social and @tobiasharris.bsky.social make very good points here. One of the reasons we are in the quagmire we are in is because the antisocial nihilism or "edgelord" culture of 4chan more or less won the war to define large chunks of Internet culture back in 2013-2014 against Tumblr.

“how do we win back trump voters in 2026” we don’t. we create an environment where admitting to voting for trump is so socially embarrassing as to render them completely inert. you don’t “win back” trump voters. you demoralize them into staying home. you make it a dunce cap

The US Democrats need to look at their next Presidency as an endless sprint to obliterate MAGA, every day for years. Until the cancer is gone then there should be no time wasted on MAGA tears or conciliation. Only endless justice and rebuilding the democracy. Govern like every day is the last day.

I do think it's important to give grace to people who realize they made the wrong choice. I don't want to. but other nicer people def should do that. I dont give a shit.

For that matter I also do not know how we “stop punishing rural America” when rural America has not been punished for a single Christ-damned thing it’s done since 1964 and that’s exactly the problem

The common thread in Pete Hegseth's rant to the troops, JD Vance suggesting Talarico is a pedophile, Brendan Carr calling the Trump ads aired with tax dollars "normal force PSAs," and Eric Schmitt fabricating a Jack Smith conspiracy is the whole GOP is incentivized to be performatively evil.

One of the more profound takeaways from Mahmoud’s book talk last week was when he said that his green card, which the Trump administration has been trying so desperately to revoke, was the first ID he had ever received in his life that had the word “permanent” on it.

I will say this until I am dead; the average American voter is a consumer first, a citizen second and a global citizen a distant third.

I do not have children but I would like the lives of parents to be made easier with the abundance of wealth we have in this country because, say it with me now, we live in a society. Thank you.

Anyways, Doc Vivi's patented Fiction Writing Advice: - Touch grass and consume a variety of media outside your genre, including nonfiction - Be vulnerable, the best fiction comes from a place of vulnerability - Don't listen to Brandon Sanderson his books are bad and his advice is worse

The two main tendencies in national Israeli politics right now are "expulsion and annexation of the Palestinian territories" vs "civil separation under the authority of an Israeli police state", and virtually all mainstream US commentary simply refuses to engage with this.

Watch the official trailer for NAZA, an award-winning documentary produced by the Guardian that details the systems behind Israel’s mass killings in Gaza. It will be released in cinemas in more than 50 countries in the coming weeks, and then will stream on the Guardian’s website, for free.

Never been a more appropriate time for this tweet

Here's the official announcement of Parton's passing from her reps, along with the request that in lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations to be made to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library at www.imaginationlibrary.com

If your reaction to this is, “we can do whatever we want because Taiwan has no choice” and not “how do we help Taiwan have choice,” you are not much different than the administration.

i think you can fairly say that the second trump administration is the most racist federal administration since woodrow wilson and honestly i'm not sure that it isn't more racist than wilson's

some idiot pundit: wow, libs hate him this much but they don't want him to die, this must be a sign they're interested in healing *Evelyn Normielib leaning into the mic* I want him to suffer

"what if the democrats become labour on trans rights" is the nightmare scenario for trans people in the united states and avoiding that is why I think we need to continue pushing back on dems who waver as hard as possible

Well well well, someone said the quiet part out loud

Eye popping. Court just unsealed Summary Judgment motions in New York Times v OpenAI / Microsoft. Easy to see why the AI companies had so many redactions (pink). Their own people wrote the lede for NYT, the "largest theft of labor in human history"... "more and more substitutive..." /1

Rupert Murdoch should be sent to the Hague

For a certain kind of white man, there is no fear more primal than the fear that the people they have abused will gain power and treat them the same way.

“Elon Musk destroyed USAID as a mechanism for killing off as many of the global poor and non-white as he can before they kill him first (as he, insanely, believes)” is not a conspiracy theory. In truth, it’s very hard to conclude anything else.