hasn't he been pretty openly MAGA for almost a decade now?

It has Dee Reynolds in it, doesn't it?!

getting extremely mad about the empirical robustness of the headline for an NYT opinion piece about dating

hobbes still has it

ah i see. surely there is something *deeply* illiberal about attempts to "correct" the hierarchies named above, no? more commonly i think liberals attack this or that hierarchy (rank, sex) while preferring another (merit).

And moreover why would I wish for a world in which relationships like parent/child didn't exist? You kinda lost me here.

I guess I still disagree or maybe just a bit lost. Why are money and hierarchy bad in the way that pain is bad?

Afraid I'm going to have to report this, Janet

I'd need you to say more. I often feel like Burke in the opening ~20 pages of the Reflections here--not sure what can meaningfully be said about power/hierarchy (or liberty/equality) if considered only in the abstract.

I think I'd need you to say more, but my view on this is that hierarchies are not only inevitable but in fact in a number of *crucial* cases both good and necessary. Parents/children; teacher/pupil; boss/manager/employee; priest/lay person. I wouldn't wish a world of *absolute* equality on anyone!

liberals cannot wish for the (impossible) world devoid of hierarchy but rather one in which hierarchy is disciplined by various moral and institutional mechanisms

hierarchy is as close to a necessary condition of social organization as we've discovered.

why one would cede the very concept of hierarchy to one's bitterest ideological enemies, i'm not sure

The amount of armchair media critique of the NYT on this website is unbelievably tedious and very revealing about the median user of this site.

i'll take my anti-AI takes from someone who wasn't very recently and very publicly caught plagiarizing, thanks!

does the earnest moralism extend to social media faves or not

head bureaucrat is indeed a job for which one can be "qualified" in the way she means. president, unfortunately, is not.

I am too smart to get my Civil War history from Matt Walsh over on twitter

I will get it from anime avatars on Bluesky

Immense depths of thought in expressions of common speech; holes dug by generations of ants.

(Baudelaire, describing emergent order with characteristic disdain)

26.4 - On Critical Liberalism On reclaiming liberation

I'm convinced that the oldest branch of liberal thought remains its most emancipatory.

It aims at freedom from harm, and it uses sympathy to interrogate power from below.

Let's call it "critical liberalism". Early notes at link. Quick summary below: [1/6]
uncanonical.net/26-4-on-crit...

by now the average twitter/bluesky user should be well aware of the speed with which flattering half-truths (or outright fabrications) can be picked up and turned into lore--eg Marx and Lincoln bromance.

the JSM/HTM debate is a long one. the authors of the stylometric analysis make relatively modest claims that can, without injustice, lead to attributing it to both of them.

making wild and unsubstantiated claims about either one of them is just poasting

silver lining is that mullin is the kind of operator you would absolutely wish on your worst enemy

When you look at the nominations, this shifts from being a hard-luck story to a "does she know a lot of academy voters or something" story

Political "reviews" of things at least aspiring to be art are just so tedious and dumb. They proliferate on here because they are so easy to perform!

"premature"!

I will miss Kristi Noem's inimitable constitutional insights, as when, asked by Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H. at a Senate hearing to define "habeas corpus," she replied, "Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country."

🔥🔥🔥Bulwark headline guy🔥🔥🔥

yes, the charm of the "ain't i a stinker" schtick runs dry pretty quickly once you think about it for more than two seconds

The longer MAGA drags on, the more my mind returns to THE REVOLT OF THE MASSES. Perhaps populism was inevitable. But it was seen as a moral-political project, and its boosters were at least as common on the left as they were on the right. What a disaster; what a disaster.

Trump is repulsive, but he displays at times qualities that come off as "ornery" rather than morally irredeemable. Hegseth has none of those qualities. He is simply the very worst person you'll ever meet, the kind of guy you cannot wait to be rid of.

It is one thing to conduct operations with 100x the firepower of your opponent--operations that kill little girls. It's another thing to brag about it.

It's yet another thing to believe that in doing so you look *tough.*

that we've been at war with iran since 1979 or whatever is one of those views you'd encounter among rightwingers--usually after a few drinks, when the inner crank would emerge from otherwise polished "conservatives"

webb hubbell, wherever you are: lay low my man