Having seen several abductions up close, it is really hard to convey how much the thing they’re doing is roaming in military convoys until they see someone who is alone and isn’t white, and then jumping out in large numbers, pulling them into a van, and screeching off, all in 90 seconds or so.

The great @usefulnoise.bsky.social made a request that we all write something about what life in Minnesota is like for folks who live elsewhere or might be outside our normal neighbothis-Bluesky footprint. So I went to cursed Facebook and wrote this. Maybe it will help you share your own thoughts.

It's striking that progressives like Tim Walz and Zohran Mamdani evoke the middle American attitude that, "Yes, we can fix these social problems because we're Americans and it's the right thing to do!" While the "America first" right only emulates failed and failing nation-states elsewhere.

this is just basic psychological self defense.

ads - not all ads, but many ads - want to make you FEEL BAD.

they want to create in you a feeling of loss, a feeling of absence, that they can promise to fill with their product.

don’t let them! turn that shit off the moment it comes on.

Today I am once again making loads of new Bluesky friends by insisting on one of my most sincerely held beliefs that makes way too many people fucking furious: that teenagers are autonomous beings who are not their parents' property and who possess independent volition and interiority

The real question is not "Why is Bluesky so left-coded," the real question is "Why can't the right exist in a social media environment without algorithmic assistance, where people can ignore them"

Today is the 70th anniversary of Rosa Parks' arrest. Six myths: 1) She wasn't old or tired. 42 years old that day, she had a "life history of being rebellious" & had spent two decades helping to turn the Montgomery NAACP into a more activist branch alongside ED Nixon and Johnnie Carr.

Look around. The case for more, not less, liberal arts education - actual, real education in reading, writing, thinking, arguing, analyzing, & synthesizing by doing the actual hard work for which there is no substitute - is stronger than it’s ever been at any point in human history.

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

Kurt Vonnegut

We aren’t machines, we don’t learn like them - we learn by being bodies in the world, by moving. Can’t forget that because shortcuts are being forced on us…

what if you never got out of that basement? what if you carried it in your pocket for the rest of your life

We think of fear as purely negative, but fear feels "good" to the extent that it explains, it clarifies, it removes the complicated, difficult work of sifting through truths, feelings, communicating, thinking. Negative affects are powerful (just look at how the fash draw all their power from shame)

Fear is seductive. It is powerful, it is explanatory, and we have learned to trust it, often at great cost and through trauma. Fear is a warning system, a message from your limbic system, it is one piece of information not a transcendent truth, and if you spread fear to others do the fascists' work

You: They did the math.

Me: ᵀʰᵉʸ ᵈⁱᵈ ᵗʰᵉ ᵐᵒⁿˢᵗᵉʳ ᵐᵃᵗʰ

You: What was that?

Me: Nothing.

Me three hours later in a whisper: ᴵᵗ ʷᵃˢ ᵃ ᵍʳᵃᵛᵉʸᵃʳᵈ ᵍʳᵃᵖʰ

I need people to understand how important this rule-by-vibes principle is; it's offensive to a conservative's sense of self to think that science or evidence or reality could contradict their unthinking assumptions. They experience even the suggestion as an attack on their epistemic authority.

"I am not my thoughts" comes to mind here

the four year old: “I’m not playing with my marbles, I’m just touching them!”

if you want to understand why lawyers exist as a profession, spend five minutes around a small child who doesn’t want to go to bed

In 1890, the X and Y chromosomes were discovered. It was found that the men who were tested had 46 chromosomes, including an X and a Y, while women who were tested also had 46 chromosomes, including 2 X chromosomes.
So obviously the conclusion was that the Y chromosome defined masculinity.

I mostly lurk on social media and comment once in a blue moon...anyways, hello Bluesky