Steve Randy Waldman
for a minute there, it seemed he was a lame duck rather than a horseman of the apocalypse.
January 10, 2026 at 11:24 AM
morons learn lessons.
January 10, 2026 at 7:05 AM
come spring the ice melts.
January 10, 2026 at 3:40 AM
Reposted by Steve Randy Waldman
I wrote this almost 11 years ago theweek.com/articles/444...
January 10, 2026 at 2:14 AM
Reposted by Steve Randy Waldman
It's incredibly demoralizing to constantly see the highest institutions of government and academia and the most important and widely seen news outlets knuckle under one after another, but then to see the gulf between that and the bravery of communities and neighbors and teachers - that's something
January 10, 2026 at 12:33 AM
Reposted by Steve Randy Waldman
It’s interesting that Trumpism itself is one of the most obvious negative examples of this, where participation in a bad political project has had a morally corrupting effect on people who started out somewhat decent
January 10, 2026 at 12:40 AM
the fundamental mistake the contemporary right makes is to confuse the product of successful institutions with personal characteristics of the people that perform them. since they think good outcomes are about good people, they happily dismantle the institutions under which people become good.
"western psychology"
January 10, 2026 at 12:16 AM
Reposted by Steve Randy Waldman
January 9, 2026 at 1:02 PM
Reposted by Steve Randy Waldman
What a year this week has been.
January 9, 2026 at 2:24 AM
Reposted by Steve Randy Waldman
Gizmodo has 2.5 MILLION followed on X, and this has been up for 14 hours.

All of you still using it for The Engagement: what am I missing here???
December 9, 2025 at 8:22 AM
Reposted by Steve Randy Waldman
The world in 2026
January 9, 2026 at 1:14 PM
Reposted by Steve Randy Waldman
i would like things to stop happening
January 9, 2026 at 1:43 AM
i will accept your straight-A report card if you give it to me.

ht @kagrox.bsky.social
Trump tells Hannity he will accept Machado’s Nobel Prize when she gives it to him.

So embarrassing.
January 9, 2026 at 7:44 AM
it’s worth pointing out that which abstract, polled issues the public cares about and what *stories* the public cares about may be entirely different things, and the stories may matter much more. 1/
New YouGov polling shows more people say inflation is their #1 issue now than said the same at any point in 2023-2024 today.yougov.com/politics/art...
January 8, 2026 at 10:21 PM
Reposted by Steve Randy Waldman
This is also why I've been mostly uninterested in alignment work. I'm not sure why the technical problem is interesting when the "alignment to whom" question just overrides everything
January 8, 2026 at 5:04 AM
just waiting for the argument, “if they don’t burn down portland it shows how racist the left is against white people.”
January 8, 2026 at 2:30 PM
Reposted by Steve Randy Waldman
really aggravating that the NYT has a huge pack of the best journalists on the planet, and then nearly all of the key decisions regarding attention, framing, and overall coverage are driven by a crypto right wing nepo baby and a dozen-ish of his toadies
January 8, 2026 at 2:21 PM
Gotta get down to it
ICE agents are gunning us down.
January 8, 2026 at 2:22 PM
Reposted by Steve Randy Waldman
The New York Times states it plainly in display type:

Videos Contradict Trump Administration Account of ICE Shooting in Minneapolis
Video: Videos Contradict Trump Administration Account of ICE Shooting in Minneapolis
An analysis of footage from three camera angles shows that the motorist was driving away from — not toward — a federal officer when he opened fire.
www.nytimes.com
January 8, 2026 at 12:40 PM
Reposted by Steve Randy Waldman
You have to do stuff that rich people like, or else you are unproductive.
January 8, 2026 at 7:18 AM
Reposted by Steve Randy Waldman
The whole recent set of Events has persuaded me that there's not really a majority for the new right authoritarianism in the Anglophone world. The public don't actually like it when they see what it is these people revel in. But also various failures in our democracies mean that might not stop them.
A friend in Minneapolis just sent me this video. Looks like thousands have come together for a vigil after an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good. This was my neighborhood for several years before coming to Portland.
January 8, 2026 at 6:46 AM
the masculine energy on X is all men playing dress-up of their favorite dolls via grok.
January 8, 2026 at 6:22 AM
it’d be nice to have a few days when something impossibly horrible doesn’t happen.
January 8, 2026 at 6:15 AM
a change of administration would not be sufficient. the united states needs a refounding, something on par with the post-Civil-War amendments (hopefully in the instance more effective than those amendments) signaling that a durable change in the nature of the polity has occurred.
January 8, 2026 at 6:10 AM