No, I think telling people what to do is better than telling them how to feel

Are there people who aren't worrying who should be? Absolutely, but I don't think many take their cues from Ezra Klein. Telling people to worry is also not a great form of political mobilization. On its own it fixes nothing, and often it makes people feel too much despair to act.

How AI is going so far:

Clippy's back, bitches, and this time it looks like HE'S writing a letter.

Now that law and order are in complete and utter free fall, I think I've decided it's okay to just put a little squiggle when they ask for my signature at the grocery store.

I guess @nytimes.com does their charts in MS Paint now

What's messed up is framing a set of issues many of which are supported by the majority of Americans as identitarian voter constituencies ("special interests") individually competing for the favor of the party, like Dems can only be for one popular thing at a time.

source: https://seths.blog/2018/09/kettle-logic/

It's called kettle logic.

The news is what happens when the impulse to make your friend try the disgusting food you just ate is unwaveringly pursued to its logical conclusion

Focusing on details is famously inefficient

NYT excerpt showing the 29 Jan DC plane crash was likely due to understaffed control towers

Obviously the real government waste is the money spent determining not enough money was being spent.

I.e. We drastically overestimate how informed about Important Things we have to be before we take action

You do not put out a wildfire by counting how many houses it has burned.

@chrislhayes.bsky.social is right that attention is not a moral faculty but I think he misses an important implication of this. It's not just that we attend to whatever blares loudest, good or bad, but also that there's nothing morally valuable about attending to the things "most deserving" of it.

"We never thought they would steal the data *we* stole," sobbed the leaders of the Companies Stealing People's Data Party.

#leopardseatingpeoplesfacesparty

As an American, the thing my education completely failed to prepare me for was the workplace expectation that you must never do a good job or tell the truth if doing so would jeopardize the feelings of people more powerful than you.

Horace Fletcher - Wikipedia

Nature will castigate those who don't masticate

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_...

Is the Center a part or a whorl?

Most people mostly do things they mostly know they're mostly good at it. Perfectionism is how the mind shuts down the desire to do something else.

2 reminders:
1) The news is not the world.

2) Being informed about all the awfulness in the world is not possible and, even if it were, it would not make anything better. Watching something happen cannot stop it from happening.

Go do something.

It's 2025 and the NYT editorial leadership still seems to believe the two ideologies in this country are possible-fascism and civil-opposition-to-possible-fascism.

Until further notice I declare a public moratorium on all recommendations of the book Middlemarch.

One of the surprising simplicities of the world as we find it is that the human race may be neatly divided into two groups: people who are humanists and people who have an ongoing awareness of what human beings are like

Call me old-fashioned but I think things were better back when CEOs had their nervous breakdowns in private instead of live on a podcast

Obviously Tom Holland's alphabet is none of my business but getting engaged to Zendaya is extremely gay

an asylum for decayed merchants

strangely deliver'd by Pyrates

The conservative definition of heroism is being scared to go outside without a gun

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Can Maintenance Phase please cover rolfing @michaelhobbes.bsky.social? I have several questions.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolfing...

It's definitely not good, but not normal? Lack of clear-cut examples is the fuel that makes lots of "debates" possible: Ghosts, UFOs, people who can pull off fedoras, etc.