John

Writer, opera singer, actor and director, arts advocate. Autodidact. Recovering brand designer and advertising creative director. Former drag queen, househead, club kid. Generally lost at all times.

I am verbose. 🤷‍♂️

Anti-fascist. Everything is politics. Team #NOVID: extremely COVID competent

Anarchy-curious.

Queer/Gay, He/They. I got Pre-Existing Conditions.

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Last Notes

2026-08-24 17:37:49 UTC

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My galaxy brain is telling me that there's some reason the Dem party in WI wants a Republican governor, but my experienced political observer is telling me that this is just "classic Democratic party hubris assuming they'll win no matter how bad their candidate because of the cycle"

2026-05-14 16:25:29 UTC

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I think this has played a real part, but if you watch "cop shows" pre-1980 and post-1990, the difference is *significant* along the lines of "these restrictions are extremely important" in the pre-time and "these restrictions are liberal propaganda!" in the post-times.
Dirty Harry movies are actually extremely dystopian and he's presented as a fucking psychopath.

2026-05-14 15:47:43 UTC

You know, we may have gone awry about the time we decided that police and Feds could flagrantly and with impunity violate all of the laws that they have been armed to enforce on us.
TBH, I can't imagine being incompetent or foolish enough to decide that's the way forward, so I gotta choose malice and indifference as the primary reasons why we ended up here.
EDIT: and virulent, unaddressed, personal and systemic racism of course
Anyway, abolish all cops, they've always been bastards, tralala

2026-04-26 06:08:24 UTC

The funniest part of the shooting at the WHCD is that Trump is going to be super disappointed when his approvals don't go up and the recession still happens.

2026-04-24 14:48:25 UTC

I don't think Western governments and media establishments understand how much credibility they've lost through their entirely uncritical support for Israel, or how durable that loss is going to be for the foreseeable future.
I expect that in 10 years or so people will look back and see that entire political ideologies were upended and discarded and entire media empires were decimated simply because they chose Israel over truth, justice, decency and reality.

2026-04-22 14:13:29 UTC

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Neurodivergent people are begging you to understand that your normally-functioning brain is a *blessing* gurl

2026-04-22 14:09:03 UTC

If the cognitive effects of LLM use turn out to be real, and recovery requires treatment, I could see this entire push to shove LLMs down employees' throats becoming a serious legal liability around workplace injury.
And from anecdotal reports in the tech industry from anti-LLM people I know really well, the cognitive effects are worse than the studies indicate.
Let's put it this way: for the same reason I'd do just about anything to avoid COVID, I'd also do just about anything to avoid LLMs.

2026-04-17 18:57:24 UTC

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Also occurs in kids at the same rate as in adults: ~20-30% chance per infection (depending on definition of symptoms and study)
But hey, I'm sure all those lagging educational indicators and behavior problems are because some of them spent 12 weeks doing remote schooling, or maybe because of ~*social media*~, not because they've gotten a brain-damaging virus 3-4x since then.

2026-04-15 18:15:05 UTC

Every time I see an announcement of a mass firing as just business-as-usual I remember being a kid in the 80s watching PBS News Hour and seeing CEOs get called before Congress and grilled for firing like 500 people.
Straight-up marinated in acid, lambasted, raked across coals, and then served up to be ate. I can literally remember thinking how funny it was that they were sweating so much.
Literally everything people think is "just how it is" was *very, substantially different* <40 years ago.

2026-04-15 14:06:10 UTC

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https://cdn.masto.host/dicecamp/media_attachments/files/116/409/102/894/258/211/original/83edfdac643ab967.mp4

2026-04-09 16:07:14 UTC

RE: https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission/116375194345663426
Hey! New PR term just dropped: "AI Factories"
I guess "data center" went belly up so they needed another way to say "facility that destroys literally everything around it and eventually the planet for no purpose other than to enrich a couple hundred already obscenely rich people"
Edit: One thing I will say: PR people are *also* getting super rich off of "AI", cause it's the rotten egg that just keeps on stinkin'.
#note1p5a…w0vg

2026-04-09 16:05:30 UTC

RE: https://fediscience.org/@FerRacimo/116375195712630051
This is what I mean by "scientism": when you define all exercises of power as needing to be "determined by science and data", those who wish to exercise power simply...change the science and the data.
The strange, infantile idea that somehow science is immune to the urges and appetites of the powerful, and can therefor be centered, creating "impartial" systems of control that can't be abused, needs to die in a fire.
#note1vk2…s625

2026-04-09 00:57:44 UTC

Maybe this will help.
A bigot being shouted down and run out of town kind of *looks* like a bunch of bigots chasing a marginalized person out of town.
But here's two oranges. One of them is a candle that smells like blood and shit and will kill you if you eat it.
Are the oranges the same?
Now try this one:
Are the bigot and the marginalized person the same, or is one of them a candle that smells like blood and shit that wants to kill you *pretending* to be an orange?"

2026-04-07 13:33:49 UTC

Got my first "AI is going to revolutionize the world" dude to that thread from yesterday.
But, I want to be very clear to anyone else thinking "I'll debate this person about AI's value because-"
Let me stop you there.
If you tried to engage me in a debate about eating my own shit, I'd also tell you to fuck off.
*Just* the *extant* externalities of this technology make it, independent of its "value", worthless. Add to that the fact that it's garbage, and again, debate is worthless.

2026-04-06 13:57:56 UTC

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But that's not even the most planet-destroying liberal thing about Scott Jensen's takes on "AI" discourse on Mastodon:
He also thinks that "AI" propagandists are just like Black people facing racism here and that excluding AI zealots is *the same* as not creating safe and positive spaces for maginalized people.
It's literally one of the whitest, most liberal posts I've *ever read*.
4/
https://cdn.masto.host/dicecamp/media_attachments/files/116/358/105/338/546/762/original/8e4aac844403bc85.png

2026-04-06 13:55:50 UTC

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Scott Jensen's concern, in a nutshell, is the abuse and harrassment that AI propagandists have to face here, on Mastodon.
His concern about the unethical, immoral, and destructive externalities of yes, even "local AI models"? His concern about the deliberate, strategic conflation of ML applications like medicine and materials development? Protein folding? Physics modeling?
Apparently not urgent enough to even mention.
No, it's the propagandists receiving rudeness he finds alarming.
3/

2026-04-06 13:52:39 UTC

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To a liberal, "reasonableness" isn't a practice, a function of critical thinking, or even the result of a well considered heuristic.
It's a fetish.
Yup; just like some people like to suck on toes, liberals like to be "reasonable". It toots their horn to be "the only adult the room", to the point where they'll notice a consensus forming and scream
"WAIT A MINUTE obviously the *correct* and *adult* answer is ~somewhere in between~!!!!!"
This happens literally on *every issue*.
2/

2026-04-06 13:49:49 UTC

I screenshot this because I don't have the energy to throw myself into a pit of half-braindead liberal vipers this morning.
But this *entire thread* is incredibly important, because it's why Donald Trump is president.
This is a thread about how liberals destroyed the world.
https://cdn.masto.host/dicecamp/media_attachments/files/116/358/064/543/507/476/original/0914935b71f61bfa.png

2026-04-03 21:24:30 UTC

Any analysis of what's happening that takes it as a matter of fact that the Democrats are a good alternative, rather than the controlled, diplomatic wing of the same ideology as the GOP (not MAGA; the GOP) is bullshit. It's making a category error.

2026-04-03 21:12:46 UTC

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Of course, all of this is rooted in the origins of the 13 colonies and the European nations we "bought" the rest of the country from, while genociding the First Peoples.
This inflection point is an *opportunity* for USians to seek the Just Peace by standing back for a second and recognizing how deeply Trump is connected to the entire history of the United States.
/fin

2026-04-03 21:11:41 UTC

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4) it was always thus, since the US dragon uncoiled in the 1890s and became the world's largest economy for the first time by disregarding the value of human life and pursuing a cataclysmic industrialization effort
5) acknowledging this is *absolutely essential* if USians want to make it to the other side without being a pariah for *literal generations* everywhere else in the world
We're not gonna be able to just cover this shit up, folks. *Every* system and *every* secret is fraying.
/2

2026-04-03 21:08:02 UTC

As we analyze Trump, we have to consider:
1) the "world order" created by America was neocolonialist, imperial, abusive, and characterized by what is essentially outsourced slavery + sophisticated piracy
2) for most of humanity, it was *not* better than the era before it
3) for client States and the Emeritus Empire in Europe, it was better (for some, very much so, for others, marginally)
2/

2026-03-30 21:01:05 UTC

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My doctor's literally check a website for that.
Anyway, I'm not saying you shouldn't see a doctor. Or that you should take meds without seeing a doctor, first, and getting a recommendation. I'm saying doctors as gatekeepers for access to medicine is bullshit.
The only argument against it is "some people are foolhardy fuckwits" and
Why should everything suck to protect foolhardy fuckwits? Is what I ask myself

2026-03-30 18:31:07 UTC

I do not think prescriptions should exist.
I think all drugs should be available to everyone at all times without cost. AND expert healthcare consultation should be available to everyone at all times without cost. AND all the social determinants that lead to addiction and drug abuse should be addressed. AND that addiction and drug abuse should have free treatment. AND that not all regular drug use is addiction.
Whew.

2026-03-29 18:54:25 UTC

You know, they got rid of the draft and increased the size of the standing military because after Vietnam they realized that *requiring* the people of the country to fight their wars threatened their ability to transmute what they see as worthless and surplus lives for pretty treasure and imperial dominance, and ultimately would mobilize the vast lazy middle in ways that they couldn't control.
Haven't you ever wondered why there's no "war taxes"? Why after 2001 we stopped passing AUMFs?

2026-03-26 18:25:14 UTC

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The Culture novels are extraordinary partly because Banks' presentation of the Culture is so nuanced and cynical, but also contains a germ of admiration for its ruthless practicality and confident indifference to most "threats" that aren't actually threats.
Anarchists, I think, fall under the latter category in this instance.

2026-03-26 17:03:08 UTC

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Yeah, I'm really at the point where Occam's Razor indicates that we should just assume that vast secret conspiracies of the powerful exist by default, and liberal insistence that they do not exist is literally an op.

2026-03-26 13:46:19 UTC

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Personally, I think politicians like Mamdani, and their families, are explicitly threatened by police when they take office.
Police fraternal orgs are national concerns; they can find and murder anyone without there even being an investigation.
Because otherwise it is *honestly* extremely hard to explain how not one single anti-cop politician has *ever* remained anti-cop after taking office.
The simplest answer is that cops are a national organized crime syndicate

2026-03-22 04:38:49 UTC

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This article literally calls price gouging "seller's inflation" with a straight face and
smh 🤦‍♂️
How can people be so obtuse?

2026-03-20 19:36:09 UTC

It's easy to make fun of people under 25 for making thrifting and gardening/farming and foraging into pop trends, but to paraphrase my niece:
"older clothes fit better, feel nicer, look cooler, are cheaper, and cost less.
"You can alter them, you can decorate them, you can get clout for finding extremely cool shit
"My friends and I don't understand why anyone would buy new clothes. Fast fashion is destroying the world, and everything it makes sucks."
So there. The kids are alright.

2026-03-20 16:31:25 UTC

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Don't forget that Democrats and Republicans both agree that the "solution" is to pump billions in subsidies into private real estate investors and contractors to build, build, BUILD! while at the same time cutting essential regulations that stop houses from falling apart within a decade of when they were built.
You know, to help regular folks "afford" housing. Somehow. At some point in the next 50 years.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5788573-housing-affordability-bill-house/

2026-03-19 14:22:14 UTC

So, the term "micro-aggression" is almost certainly one of those things someone somewhere came up with in a paper that some undergrad seized and started using vernacularly and it's truly an abomination of communication.
Because what it is - what it actually *is* - is so much worse, and more simple, than what it conveys.
It's when someone who knows better, who knows what the boundaries are, repeatedly violates them in small ways to test if you'll continue to enforce them.

2026-03-18 13:12:54 UTC

They are not *using* "AI" to attack hospitals, schools, water, etc.
*THEY* are attacking hospitals, schools, water, etc. and *saying* that "AI" told them to.
Please do not be confused: "AI" is not attacking anything.
Human beings are committing war crimes and *lying to you* about what told them to do it.
That's why if "AI did it" should have the same legal weight as "I was just following orders".
These distinctions are why *how* we say things is *just as important* as what we're saying.

2026-03-17 13:25:31 UTC

The fact that Democrats have not taken to calling Trump "the Epstein President" is simply further proof that they're a joke as a political party.

2026-03-17 12:16:39 UTC

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I feel like it's important to mention that without guns, currencies are worthless and so is property.

2026-03-15 16:46:20 UTC

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When I see these arguments I'm like "you're *almost* there!" bc
It was never about whether or not we had the money. Pointing out the mendacity of politicians who use "fiscal conservatism" to destroy society is only effective if you call them damn liars and demand they resign.
Cleverly observing that war is expensive but everything we actually want is less expensive simply continues the framing they want, which is around money and not humanity and decency.

2026-03-15 16:26:15 UTC

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The hard part of all of this for many who woke up before MAGA is that while there is an increase in scale and prominence to the depravity you mention, and a marked reduction in deniability or even attempts to deny the atrocities, pretty much all of them were happening every day in the US long before Trump was anything more than a failed real estate developer and a key partner in a vast, secret child rape and blackmailing cabal with members all over the world. (as you know)

2026-03-13 18:47:44 UTC

"the President is going to do a draft"
No, he isn't. Not only is he not empowered to do that, but the Federal govt isn't capable of enforcing a draft that is extremely unpopular. It's not going to happen.
But everyone is talking about it and not Trump's pedophilia and child rape and his utterly catastrophic illegitimate military adventure.
Like, at some point can we *stop* being the most easily manipulated people in world history?

2026-03-12 23:13:16 UTC

Sam Altman: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”
I see a future where I'm a beautiful, immortal winged Pegasus with a 12-inch dick and all of you have to buy me hamburgers.
These are equally plausible futures.

2026-03-06 20:43:50 UTC

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Every USian needs to reexamine the *why* of our list of adversaries and study the origin of the enmity. For most, it inevitably resolves into a question of capital interests in the US controlling the US government and desiring something in the target nation they are not being allowed to steal.
Essentially, the US is a burglar armed like a Navy Seal that, if you refuse to just hand them all your shit, will burn your house down and kill your family just to pick through the ashes.

2026-03-06 20:39:29 UTC

Iran is the US' enemy because they rebelled against being our client State and took back their oil. A lot like Cuba is the US' enemy because they refused to bend the knee to our capitalist owner/operators. And Venezuela.
Understanding where the enmity originated highlights how responsibility for the state of its relationships with those nations falls firmly on US shoulders.

2026-03-06 15:12:26 UTC

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ICE is spending $250 million a day? That's great news.
They're gonna burn through that $90B in just under a year.

2026-03-04 18:22:26 UTC

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Even more worrying, according to the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative out of Tulane University, of the 51 million people who have been est to have been infected in 2026 so far, statistically ~20% of those who were infected will now be sick in a way that impacts their day to day lives for more than 12 months (the proscriptive definition of "long COVID")
And 25% of *those* will never recover.
https://www.pmc19.com/data/index.php
https://cdn.masto.host/dicecamp/media_attachments/files/116/172/283/148/684/156/original/ee3ed3d350b1821e.png

2026-03-04 13:39:16 UTC

Here's the thing: when a government makes something everyone wants to do "illegal" people don't stop doing it; they simply stop regarding the government as a valid arbiter of what's allowable.
Weed is a perfect example of this. In the US, individual States were like "A significant majority of our populations smoke weed regularly, so we're making it legal" and the Feds were like "nope still very illegal" and you know what?
It's legal.
Bc unpopular laws *don't actually exist*
1/

2026-02-28 16:31:43 UTC

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Well, the story of the 2020s is that it's basically the decade the Western political class decided that "what people think" and "what we want" didn't have to align at all, because of entrenched structural advantages for the established powers.
The story of the 2030s will be that history has a way of repeating when rulers forget the lessons of the past.

2026-02-28 15:23:01 UTC

The smart move for any competent SE fired bc of LLM-pilling is to start an anti-LLM company that replaces one of the pieces of infra that LLMs are going to FUBAR in the next couple years.
There is no scenario where vibe coding results in anything but catastrophic failure without any way to fix it bc nobody knows the codebase.
For critical services this will lead people to immediately switch a la Xitter to Bsky or Masto.
So make tomorrow's Block, cause this one ain't long for this world.

2026-02-27 01:09:04 UTC

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I'm saying put the sick people in masks

2026-02-26 17:59:06 UTC

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O, If only there were some cheap, easy to use technology that could protect healthcare workers and their patients from measles! If only we lived during a time in which we could somehow remove the virus from the air we breathe!
IF ONLY
But it looks like we'll just have to all catch all the diseases, because such technology does not exist. Maybe in some future paradise!!!?!

2026-02-25 18:57:02 UTC

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Trump et al.'s lack of curiosity, knowledge, prudence, or strategy, combined with their hubris and worship of supremacy through "hard" power, is what's going to end them before they do anything *but* absolutely kneecap and mortally wound the neofascist State they were trying to replace.
He's like a tempest that wipes the board, a hyperlight glaciation of negating energy that is reshaping the landscape and stripping away what was.

2026-02-25 18:53:14 UTC

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His incompetence at wielding or even understanding "soft" power or economic power is what makes his insistence at immediately ending our ecumenopoly so foolish.
If he had started the process and then his successors had continued it, for a decade, he may have been able to achieve it.
But the reality is that the way he's doing it - all "hard" power - is going to implode the US *long* before it makes the US self-sufficient.

2026-02-25 18:51:06 UTC

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Yeah, but you gotta get from here to there, is the problem.
Trump thinks you can just yell at farmers and they'll *completely transform their fields into food production*, overnight. Which is not how that works. Nor *can* it work that way.
He thinks you can just snap your fingers and manufacture technology and exploit resources in Greenland.
But that takes decades because of the physical realities of building the infrastructure and skilled workers capable of doing that.

2026-02-25 18:26:52 UTC

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Let's not underestimate how much of an ecumenopoly we are.

2026-02-25 17:42:28 UTC

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...hand-in-hand with US "hard" power.
Basically, we spend a lot of money on nothin' but the right to say we spend a lot of money. Our real "hard" power was our control of the reserve currency and de-facto control of the global banking system.
Our capacity for modern warfare - cyber ops, infosec, sabotage, corruption, etc - is practically nil compared to many of our "weaker" adversaries. As you point out in your thread, we can't seem to win "hot" wars...

2026-01-30 04:46:46 UTC

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See this last one is where I disagree. I think psychology is real, and neofascists constructed a psychological kettle that held the population in check, probably better than they could have ever hoped.
Everything fits together into this interlocking prison in a way that is just too precise to be coincidental. Sure, the details have varied; but the overall mechanisms were made with affordances.
You see USians as a people with agency in a democracy; I see them as prisoners.

2026-01-06 18:12:29 UTC

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What you're saying is you blame the electorate for the (continued, expected) catastrophic betrayals of the Democratic party and President Biden, who took their mandate (and trillions of $) and squandered it on nonsense and the foundation of what has become Trump's nascent police State (incl ICE, CBP and natsec forces)
But the people to blame are sitting in DC with a (D) next to their name. Sure, they're "less" evil, whatever that means.

2026-01-06 03:09:45 UTC

I wish we had spent the last 26 years teaching people that the reason the 2000 bug didn't destroy a significant amount of our infrastructure is because *we caught it* and *spent thousands of hours fixing it* BEFORE the year 2000
Because within that little perplexion - people thinking the problem was a hoax because it was fixed before it destroyed shit - is an encapsulation of the current era of Western politics, including COVID mitigation, lesser evil politics, fascism, and crime rate hyperbole

2025-11-10 16:50:24 UTC

In case you thought *politics* was the most salient disaster facing the US I would like to remind everyone that there's a good chance we will have a bird flu pandemic this winter with a Refrigerated Truck-level CFR, no actual public health, a completely broken government, and a population that has been gaslit into thinking that the way you deal with pandemics is by *catching it*.
So that's gonna be fun.

2025-09-26 14:22:27 UTC

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Well, leading and planning military operations is a legit *discipline*. West Point is a rigorous academic institution.
It's telling that most retired generals are like "this is suss"; these used to be current generals' bosses and mentors.
A large group of generals quitting would completely destroy military cohesion and morale. Not to mention its readiness to be deployed and ability to succeed.
There is a lot of "reality meets ideology" going on right now in MAGA.

2025-09-26 14:09:39 UTC

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We'll see. I think that level of subservience is a relatively new phenomenon, acculturated by neoliberalism and an out of control natsec State since the late 70s.
I'm also not as convinced as many that the US military is one of our many broken institutions. But wouldn't be surprised if they are.

2025-09-09 19:15:41 UTC

I still think that a serious leftist political movement would produce a television/webseries called "US vs The World" that simply compared services/stuff people in the US have to services/stuff people in other countries have.
Too many USians think that we've got it better than most other countries, when there are what we call "third-world" nations doing laps around us on multiple fronts. And modern countries like South Korea, China, Japan, most European nations?
Faggedaboutit.

2025-08-25 22:51:43 UTC

Something I will hand to the modern right wing (I know you don't have to hand it to them, but hear me out) is that they are, without a doubt, more committed to openly doing evil shit than any group of people I can think of. Like, maybe the Nazis, but even Hitler was like "we've gotta do a Reichstag Fire before we can declare an emergency, idiots!"
These numbnuts really just don't give a fuck if everyone sees them as truly fucking evil. Like "Event Horizon bizarro dimension"-level evil.

2025-08-22 20:39:35 UTC

The Carney/Starmer switcheroo - running as center-left saviors and suddenly becoming hardcore conservatives in office - is a sign of the weakness of the liberal estate whose purpose has been to codify and make permanent radical right-wing policy of previous admins.
Basically, centrism is profoundly unpopular, but their entire brand is founded on the idea that they are broadly liked and trusted. So they run as progs then switch to being right-wing, while gaslighting us that they never changed.

2025-08-11 15:05:12 UTC

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And, believe it or not, despite a piddling amount of money spent on USAID or our propaganda wing VOA, the US has overall been a force for evil in the world since WW2.
We've fought a half-dozen declared imperial proxy wars, and hundreds of undeclared ones, killing tens of millions of innocents without anyone batting an eyelid. We've destabilized or destroyed dozens of democratically-elected governments because we wanted to steal something. We've led the destruction of the biosphere.

2025-07-29 13:45:41 UTC

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Yeah, but rather than make those difficult choices and increase the hardship and stress of one's life, why not instead use that energy to figuratively beat the living crap out of the politicians who collude with business?
"I was going to protest, but the heat exhaustion from not using AC and the 15-mile walk in 90 degree weather had other ideas" is not how this is going to change.

2025-07-29 05:23:33 UTC

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You hit the nail on the head when you place responsibility on the publishers and book printers.

2025-07-28 17:34:52 UTC

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Basically, if I know less than I do and my first encounter with a climate activist is "you shouldn't be running AC when it's 85 degrees out" I'm telling that person to fuck off.
If they tell me I have to increase the stress and inconvenience of my life by getting rid of my car, Imma like fuck off.
If they tell me they're gonna string up all the evil-ass people who are poisoning my kids and destroying nature and causing wildfires/floods just to be super rich, I'm like "where do I sign up?"

2025-07-28 14:04:56 UTC

I am begging climate activists to stop blaming people for driving cars and using AC, and start organizing people to end the pols/corpos that are flagrantly destroying the planet through war, pollution, waste, and decadence.
"You can have your car and your AC, but first you've gotta take these people you don't like anyway and put them in a pit" is actually a *VERY STRONG ARGUMENT*.
You deal with the AC and car *after* everyone has public trans and solar panels paid for by the government.

2025-07-21 13:36:01 UTC

About once a month I am struck by how useful the way we categorize political beliefs is to the people in power, and how damaging it is to political discourse otherwise.
Are you right wing? Wait - conservative? Or are you a liberal? Are you a "leftist" - or is that a liberal? Are centrists liberals? Or are they right wing? Or conservative?
Your answer may determine what other people assume you want, based on their *own* biases, no matter what else you tell them explicitly.

2025-07-15 17:09:21 UTC

The more I roll it around in my mouth, the more certain I am that the "AI" mania *perfectly* encapsulates neoliberalism in its entirety.
- doesn't work and never has
- steals everything around it
- produces nothing of value
- destroys all things with actual value
- lies
- creates the illusion of efficiency while vastly increasing both monetary and social costs
- is supported by militant zealots with tiny minds and hearts
- enriches a tiny group of individuals at the cost of destroying Earth

2025-07-14 13:53:02 UTC

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But - and hear me out - what if when the money was sent, Oregon immediately used it to buy gold, and then hid the gold?

2025-07-14 13:42:29 UTC

You know, an enterprising State government could pretty easily hoodwink the Feds into sending them billions and billions of dollars with little to no oversight, because the Maggots fired all the auditors.
Like, if Oregon was like "we're creating a brutal program of oppression against immigrants!" and then used the billions that flooded into the State to build free housing for immigrants, what would the Feds do? Like, demand it back?
"Sure, champ! You can take it out of our tax receipts."

2025-07-11 13:28:27 UTC

I think about how 80% of people have just...erased the pandemic, and the obvious, proven consequences of catching COVID over and over again, from their minds - and it reminds me of how many have absorbed and discarded the facts of Israel's genocide and concentration camps in the same way.
The West has relied on a kind of psychic and ideological opium for so long to keep consuming and ravening the world that it can't cope with reality now that we can't bully or bribe our way out of this mess.

2025-07-07 13:59:01 UTC

This thread is interesting to me because it's well-reasoned and plausible. But it also strikes me as similar to the moral panics re: video games in the 1990s. It observes phenomena ("they're in spiritual anguish", "they're falling for propaganda", "techniques to motivate...don't work anymore", etc) and decides that there's likely a causal relationship between the ubiquity of access to mass comm and these behavioral and social problems
https://retro.social/@ajroach42/114811505328252889
hat tip: @npub12aq…ems2
1/x

2025-07-01 01:50:22 UTC

If Republicans cut Medicaid, hospitals are *fucked*, especially in major cities.
Hospitals have a legal requirement to treat anyone who shows up, regardless of their ability to pay. (That this law is from the late 70s tells you a LOT about the United States as a country)
This is why so many poor people go to hospitals for everything.
Medicaid is what covers very poor, very sick people. If it goes away, emergency rooms are going to be flooded by people who need meds, treatments, dialysis.

2025-06-28 17:33:34 UTC

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I think about old friendships and actually long-term relationships (15+ years), and how my experience of them has been that they are barely real until you hit some pretty intense intervals of maturation.
Helped someone deal with the death of a parent, poverty from the loss of a job, held people when they're sick, laughed at inside jokes from the 00s, created 10+ year traditions, friend holidays, and anniversaries that have nothing to do with marriage.
What if we stayed put for 10 years?
3/x

2025-06-28 17:24:57 UTC

I've been thinking a lot about the anti-COVID isolating that my husband and I have been doing since Dec 2021. We've not traveled, only hung out with people who tested negative, and masked literally anywhere we go.
I think (?) it's been successful; the fact of 50% asymptomatic COVID + preexisting chronic illness flare ups has really fucked up my math. 🤷‍♂️
The last year we've sortof hit a...steady state, I guess I'd call it. It's just not that hard anymore. Our lives are pretty great?
1/x

2025-06-15 22:12:45 UTC

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I'm sorry you spent the four years under Biden damaging your body and brain because you trusted him to be competent and science-based, not sell your future up the river so the economy would grow, grow, grow.
Joe Biden was a miserable piece of shit *his entire career*.
I'm done venting so try to, I don't know, READ something before you show up in my replies next time.

2025-06-15 21:57:46 UTC

I...know more about the pandemic and its history than probably 99% of people. I know more about it's etiology and its method of spread and its virulence and its post-acute sequelae and its variants and the efficacy of the vaccines than 99% of people.
I will tell you it is an incontrovertible fact that Joe Biden murdered more than a million people with his pandemic policies and set up the United States to be literally fucked for generations.
I won't argue about it because *it is a fact*.

2025-06-15 16:58:04 UTC

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USians have a *completely fucked up* frame of reference, because overall everything has been getting worse, slowly, for a half century. Boiled frogs and all that.
Every other fascist and authoritarian regime has taken at least ~10 years to go from "election victory" to "despot". Trump's a child with serious impulse control issues who wants what he wants NOW.
For example:
"Putin and Ukraine: be peaceful. Now. I said NOW, dammit!"
We're lucky AF.

2025-06-01 14:06:27 UTC

Transactionalism is a key cultural component of neoliberalism's dominance. It demands an "equal exchange". In the West, we've been raised to believe that *all* interactions are transactions.
IN this environment, you're required to acknowledge that your opponent "has a point" in order to state your position. You transact "credibility".
Neoliberals who don't see this transaction happen will say one or the other of the participants is "extremist" or "unwilling to consider other viewpoints".

2025-05-13 13:54:01 UTC

"Surely," Newsom continued, "the problem is the camps, not the poverty that created them."
"This is why I know, if we outlaw the camps and enslave the people we catch while doing it, we'll have far fewer camps.
There's no poverty a good dose of slavery can't fix!"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/12/newsom-california-ban-homeless-encampments

2025-05-06 14:11:18 UTC

You cannot trust people, so why did you put yourself in a position where people could infect you? We live in an age of callous indifference.
You *cannot* trust people.
I know it's hard, but you have to accept this as hard facts.
You *cannot* trust people.
The vast majority of people have been morally deformed by accepting mass death to avoid inconvenience. They can't accept this, so they avoid it by denying the plague exists and rewriting history to make themselves look better.

2025-03-06 14:57:06 UTC

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What a funny idea we have about how untouchable and impunious the ruling classes have "always" been. It's almost like the last century has been a cultural project to convince people that nobody has ever killed a rich, powerful person because they were a piece of shit.
I wonder what would happen if people realized that in past eras everyone knew what to do with rich pieces of shit.

2025-02-12 15:54:38 UTC

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BTW, this is what I mean when I say that this current crop of robber barons and oligarchs aren't *aware* enough to survive their own coup.
They've got a "sometimes you have to break 50 million eggs to make another trillion dollars" attitude toward society, but don't understand that about 5 million eggs in the other eggs are gonna guillotine their asses. And no amount of private armies or paradise bunkers will prevent it.

2025-02-12 15:51:31 UTC

"Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, made the same point more succinctly last week when commenting on Musk’s slash-and-burn tactics as Trump’s commissar for government efficiency. “There’s a revolution,” he said. “Some people are going to get their heads cut off.”
Oh, baby boy. You're *almost there*.
Take a second and read about who gets their heads cut off during a revolution, please. (HINT: it's not who you think it is)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/12/musk-revolution-lessons-20th-century-deleted-far-right-silicon-valley

2025-02-07 06:26:25 UTC

All these politicians being like "we were denied entry"
Why did we hire you, again?
Like, pretend you're one of the most powerful people on Earth. Go ahead. It'll be fun.
Now, pretend a oily, barely out of puberty little pimplebitch is telling you, one of the most powerful, accomplished people on earth, that you can't have access to a building owned by a government *you run*.
Whoever rises up in you - *embody* that motherfucker. That's who you need to be.

2024-11-10 20:42:03 UTC

There's something extra piquant when you take a moral injury for the team and all you get is a GOP trifecta and the elders of the party you forced yourself to vote for talking shit about you.
I say this with respect to all the weird liberals who will take a bullet for their failed political party, and yet Strongly Disagree with the question "I am an ultra-partisan":
You are going to have to *earn* my vote next time. If I have a new party that represents me, you'll have to earn my alliance.

2024-09-05 01:35:23 UTC

Money..........ISN'T REAL.
We can "afford" anything we need to, because THERE IS AN INFINITE AMOUNT OF MONEY.
Because it ISN'T REAL.
If your options are the destruction of the planet (REAL) or spending $1 quadrillion dollars (not actually REAL), you just PRINT MONEY. You don't say "welp, I guess HUMANITY WILL DIE whoopsie"
When I say neoliberals are fundamentally unserious people, THIS IS WHAT I MEAN. They literally are saying "welp" right now.

2024-08-24 18:43:27 UTC

Boeing is remarkable because it's a nearly perfect exemplar of the outcomes of our current economy, whether on society, the planet, or even companies themselves.
Boeing used to be well known for how well it treated its employees. It used to have tons of "lifers" who worked there until they retired. It used to make a respectable profit, and enjoyed almost universal praise for its product quality.
Then, modern capitalist goons showed up.