Since people are still relentlessly abusing me over this, here’s why the so-called “boots theory” doesn’t make any sense. First, what is it? Some people have suggested I haven’t done the background reading, but it’s not a deep idea. It’s from a passage that’s four sentences long.

So, the thing is, this is a reasonable take on Israel and Palestine...but you don't *look* reasonable on Israel and Palestine when you campaign with Hasan freaking Piker! You look like you're just pandering to far-left antisemites!

Ron Skolnik@ronskolnik.bsky.social · 21h ago

El-Sayed: "I believe in equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination, for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike... If that’s 2 states, I’m for it. If it’s 1 state, I’m for that. If it’s this 'land for all' model, ... or whatever they decide." www.newyorker.com/news/the-new...

I do not see how the Democratic Party has any path to building a lasting bulwark against fascism in America if its primary voters keep choosing clueless, media-illiterate clowns like this. You cannot act this way and expect to be taken seriously.

Bill@bill-of-lefts.bsky.social · 19h ago

i really think it’s gonna go badly

I think you can get people to vote for demsoc economic policies. I don’t think you can get them to vote for wokescolding thanksgiving

I feel like decades of treating China as essentially the successor to the USSR as our near-peer Communist adversary have perhaps blinded a lot of Americans to what 77 years of inept and corrupt single-party totalitarian governance has done to that country.

Aaron Grote@aarongrote.com · yesterday

Some of purges were for reasons like, "We checked and this missile force commander sold most of his rocket fuel on the black market and all these missiles are empty shells."

I would simply have not purged the military before the US made a catastrophic error

I thought we all understood this in the year 2026, but in general quality of goods increases with price, but price increases much faster. There may be a point where you can “save by spending” but it’s typically a lot closer to the bottom of the range than the top.

It's going to be really important in 2029 for Democrats--and the people on the ground investigating these strikes--not to get hung up on whether the victims were actually drug traffickers or not. IT DOESN'T MATTER. Even if every person killed was a trafficker, the strikes were still war crimes!

CNN@cnn.com · 2d ago

The US military’s strikes on alleged drug boats have likely illegally killed “individuals who are not involved in narcotrafficking,” Sen. Tim Kaine told the White House, following “a careful review” of classified information he has seen so far.

Francesca Hong is a fantastic object lesson for why Woke 1.0 failed and produced such a seismic backlash among normies. Woke 2.0 really, really, really needs to be more media savvy and keep stupid fringe stuff like this under wraps.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · yesterday

Francesca Hong was asked last night by Kaitlin Collins if she still believes Thanksgiving should be canceled. Her answer was not 'no.'

Even healthcare is kind of a complicated case. In the past you were paying for treatments that didn't work, or sometimes not paying because no treatment was available. Yes, treating cancer costs a fortune... but fifty years ago, a lot of the time, the treatment plan was "wait for death"

Josh Sternberg@joshsternberg.com · yesterday

had this convo w/my folks just over the weekend, explaining to them that the things that were expensive 50yrs ago (TVs, VCRs, etc) are now cheap, but the things that were cheap are now expensive (housing; healthcare; etc).

also, cheap stuff has actually gotten way better quality now. this is a 1985 chevy cavalier. 88hp engine (although it was fuel injected!), and basically no creature comforts [a/c was an option, same with an FM radio]. it would last you maybe 100k miles. It cost the equivalent of $27,000 today.

Will Stancil@whstancil.bsky.social · yesterday

I guess my question is, when was the time that consumer goods were mostly high-quality, durable, and a good value for the price? What decade was the ideal time to be a consumer in America? Not saying you’re wrong but I’m inherently suspicious about any kind of declinist narrative like this

"Make haste and bring thy bagpipe money" is an incredible bar

Chaucer Doth Tweet@levostregc.bsky.social · 2d ago

Ich have a wagon as large as leviathan And we wende ower way nowe to the Shack of Love - Drawn by fyne palfreyes, it seateth wel twentye So make haste and bringe thy bagpipe moneye

One of the things that sticks in my brain is how Jeffries suggested representatives not come to Minneapolis, supposedly because they'd be a distraction. No one on the ground wanted national politicians to stay away. We wanted people to come see what was being done to us. It infuriated me.

Eric Blair@protecttruth.bsky.social · 2d ago

How can we see this? if Schumer and Jeffries wanted to rally the grassroots they’d have been on the streets in Minneapolis and other cities leading, like Brad Lander. Instead they’ve been courting $$ into the DSCC and DCCC.

Information asymmetry ‘lemon problem’ - unable to tell at a glance *which* goods are high quality, consumers assume they are all relatively low quality and thus only pay for cheap ones

Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈@maxdubler.com · 3d ago

I think my most genuinely unpopular take is that a widely held and genuine consumer preference for cheaper, lower-quality goods, not private equity, is driving the decline in quality of consumer goods like clothing and housewares.

Extremely related point: people don’t want to pay more for quality, they want to be cheap and complain!

Reconstruction 3 Enthusiast@squalortoballer.bsky.social · 3d ago

This is why flying is bad now. People will say they want full service airlines and wax nostaligic about the golden age of jet travel (when it was unaffordable), but revealed preferences are that people choose the lowest up front price option when spending their own money.

MAHA is a eugenicist movement and you do not negotiate with eugenicists. This is a thing a high proportion of people who will tell you not to frequent the Nazi bar apparently forget when the patrons of the Nazi bar share their priors about food dyes or whatever.

In the United States, on January 20, 2025, the air, the food, the medicine, the water were all as clean and pure and safe as they have ever been in this country. Yeah, sure, there were and are real problems, and our army of nerds in lab coats devoted to solving them was the envy of the world.

Turns out war is options trading by other means

Secretary of Defense Rock@sodrock.bsky.social · 2d ago

Still wild to me we’re literally fighting a war entirely outside of trading hours

You also run into the issue is that you will never promise to shoot glonzo more convincingly than the people who fully believe he's real. This dynamic just got done eating the Republican party and it would be wise to be cautious

“They are behind all your problems” quickly becomes “(((they))) are behind all your problems” Dems can win some of the cranks, some of the time, but a democratic republic can’t survive with an electorate that can’t do anything but scapegoat

Crank convergence theory means Democrats need to be actively adversarial to conspiratorial thinking

Chatham Harrison dba TRUMP DELENDUS EST@chathamharrison.bsky.social · 2d ago

I understand the impulse to campaign with this guy because he has a ton of pull with young people most likely to be engaged on the left. It's an apparently huge opportunity. But it's playing with fire, no less than Gavin Newsom with Charlie Kirk.

We're rapidly approaching an environment where every single new written work is going to be subjected to Monty Python-style witch testing where people employ various totally spurious techniques to try to divine the presence of AI. It's really, really bad.

Anthony Michael Kreis@anthonymkreis.bsky.social · 2d ago

I saw someone say that sentence length variation is a sign of AI. I’m just out here like, no:

There is a charitable interpretation of this, which is that there is a small but real segment of MAHA that mostly does care about food additives and harmful chemical use in agriculture, and AOC feels like she can reach them. But even *that* interpretation leaves her looking disqualifyingly naïve.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez@ocasio-cortez.house.gov · 2d ago

There is pervasive corruption across our healthcare and agricultural systems that defy party lines. I meet with MAHA activists because a lot of their concerns are bipartisan issues that major corporations paint as partisan. The fight isn't left and right, it's top and bottom.

This is an extremely disappointing “three people in a diner in Omaha” bothsidesism. MAHA uses ‘big evil pharma corps” as a shibboleth to make it seem as if it is not entirely about returning medical care to a pre-industrial level. It is a death cult.

One of my lessons from the last few years is that maintaining a firewall against the absolute crank loons is far more important than ever, and it’s so depressing to see so many prominent politicians with the exact opposite takeaway

Dad gum right. Also, elected Democrats should be saying stuff like this a lot louder and more explicitly: do not participate in this administration's corrupt schemes, because we will come after you in 2029 and you will pay a stiff price.

Denny Carter@dennycarter.bsky.social · 2d ago

heard an interview recently with an anonmyous wall street bro who said his employer would not subscribe to the president's truth social insider trading scheme because they did not want to go to prison when the rule of law returns

This also happened back in like 2023, before the Trump administration fried the entire immigration system. Back then, the process was difficult, complicated, expensive, and ridiculously time-consuming, but it was theoretically possible. Now, it's not even that for most people.

Jonathon M. Floyd@jfloyd314.bsky.social · 2d ago

Even getting a green card is incredibly difficult. I had a college roommate who became engaged to a woman from Mongolia who he had met as a missionary in the Philippines, and they spent six months struggling through the visa process before giving up and canceling their engagement.

Wanna become a US citizen? Here's your instructions. Good luck! (You're going to need it!) alt text for more info

Genuinely, the vast majority of American voters believe that only laziness or criminal intent could be stopping the average immigrant from obtaining US citizenship. The truth is that becoming a US citizen takes years upon years of work and requires navigating a baroque bureaucratic nightmare.

Secretary of Defense Rock@sodrock.bsky.social · 2d ago

I remember a family member of mine saying “isn’t it like going to the DMV?”

It's genuinely a massive problem that the median voter both 1) believes "criminal illegal immigrants" to be an astronomically more serious threat than they actually are, and 2) believes that the legal immigration process is substantially easier than it actually is.

Sunsette / Cynthia Skye@sunderedmarches.com · 2d ago

I understand your position, but those are different situations. People straight up both envision a system much milder than exists and cannot imagine a modern world without that imaginary system. By default they have no real grasp of reality on the matter, but are usu. sympathetic to individuals.