I hate how the people who are right are annoying, particularly for making me feel bad about being wrong, and implicitly accusing me of being a bigot for doing bigoted things. Thus, the people who are right are the real problem, and the reason I won’t be doing the right things. Truly shameful of them

Over 100 Brown U students & 20 faculty members gathered outside
the campus today to demand that the university reject Trump’s loyalty oath compact. Professors & students taped their mouths shut to symbolize the compact’s threat to free speech, #academicfreedom & diversity of thought.
#DefendHigherEd

Modernism: Big, if true

Today: True, if big

Is there some kind of trend or retrospective or national mood causing all the coffee shops to play Pink Floyd this fall? i am old, out of touch & confused

Millenial / Gen-Z gap here really fascinating and encouraging (in terms of polarization, and internationalization of the right)

A funny move in a hypothetical left liberal internationalist West Wing would be to have a Pedro Sanchez stand in leader put 1% of GDP to global famine prevention as a way of fulfilling Trump and Mark Ruttke’s security spending demands. The one problem is it actually works to reduce migration and war

The EU, China, the Gulf States, or even ASEAN and South America could just fund the most critical USAID projects for 1-2 years until working out a better long-term famine-prevention structure. Canada alone could do it and think of the soft power coup! And yet no one does. Military 5% of GDP for NATO

In the fire zones, an immigrant workforce warily carries out cleanup

@cshalby.bsky.social

www.latimes.com/california/s...

Falling condo prices are a policy success. Yay having a place to live! We just need to use public money and zoning / construction reforms to keep housing getting built at a lower cost basis. And to give seniors a dignified retirement or youth a college education funded other than by real estate.

Definitely need to be teaching people that “AI is making YOUR power bill go up”, not just the more impersonal environmental side of the data center footprint

NVIDIA and OpenAi:

Concerns that their “increasingly complex and interconnected web of business transactions is artificially propping up the trillion-dollar AI boom.“

@bloomberg.com $NVDA 👀
www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

The politically useful analytical error that it's enough to tax the 1%. Not e.g. Bernie's fault as their movements put forward inclusive visions of public abundance that sacrifice low-use-value consumption. But most people sure will embrace whatever atrocities needed to keep the bribes of empire...

More materially the top 30% ofworking home & stock owners, is probably correct that the only slim chance for them to keep the exact lifestyle they think they're owed (single family homes, SUVs, steaks, beach vacations), won by labor movements then inflated & frozen by neoliberals, is with the Right

Weirdly again, the US is becoming a bright spot. Because of the revival of anti-fascism as the necessary central struggle (when their's paramilitaries parading around your street). The staffers and airport book writers double down on their bullshit but their audience returns to being only themselves

I still lack an adequate explanation for the sharp right cultural turn by the mainstream of social democrats and liberals in the West. My best guess is the total embrace of (very stupid) culture-war-right inversions of "feminism" and "diversity" (as anti-trans & anti-Islam) as a permission structure

“In the fight for the West, I know who my allies are. And my allies are not the people who, looking at facile, external markers of my identity, one might imagine... My allies are people who believe that America is good. That the West is good. That human beings —not cultures-are created equal”

This literally pro-fascism car oriented Czech political party which just won 13 seats in parliament seems like something we’re destined to see in Canada

There's things to hate about union / cooperative bureaucracies, and party "democracy." But it's another related point in most socialisms' favor that making hard tradeoffs necessarily isn't one of them. Maybe considering tradeoffs & difficult data theoretically rather than tacitly (& often badly) is

Fair and all but "academic socialist" is so vague and loaded. And like, depending on one's socialism, the ecosystem as a whole can work if the median academic is mediocre but a few people are doing sharp, deep, useful work (ofc it's a problem that influencers/popularizers are shallow & embarassing)

“OpenAI launch of video app Sora plagued by violent and racist images: ‘The guardrails are not real’“. Who Could Possibly Have Seem This Coming. It’s almost like fostering consequence free, atomized, violence and toxicity is a feature of AI slop & not a bug..
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

important for us in the US to note: even a solidly right wing government can't ignore this.

“'The fact that we don't have money to pay journalists, but we have money to pay Bari Weiss between $100 and 200 million is indicative of what the Ellisons' true goal here is,' a network correspondent said. 'And it's not journalism.'"

Sure would be nice if the Toronto Star didn’t quote as experts culture-war-right think tanks with fashy-dogwhistle names and a penchant for genocide denial

Isn’t the thing there though that conservative climate policy was surprisingly good, rather than Starmer’s climate policy being especially bad? In terms of seeking more North Sea oil exploration, (mostly symbolically given how exhausted and uneconomical it is).