Top recent posts by Online Political Thinkers on Bluesky

Chauvin was, in fact, the cause of Floyd’s death. He used a technique that MPD and most other agencies have banned, specifically because it causes death. And the crime for which he was convicted is unintentional second-degree murder, which by definition does not require intent to kill.

When your government says it’s planning to open multiple prisons that will house up to 3,000 children, it’s time to demand a new government. There is no context in which this is legitimate or acceptable.

Spoken like someone who has never taken a biology class in their life

Darth Vader spoke in favor of Flock cameras at a San Diego city council meeting yesterday

“And please, when I fail, will you tell me? You have the absolute right to cuss me out, if need be, when I deserve it, because no one knows or cares about me more.” … “With all my heart, Natalie”

As a professional science communicator, I am less worried about the general public accepting mRNA cancer vaccines, and more worried about mRNA cancer vaccine development being stalled due to people in power believing in conspiracy theories.

this is psychotic but a genuinely valuable articulation of a thing many drivers actually believe

I don't think we should accept fundamentally right-wing framings about how people who work in offices don't have real jobs and are unmanly.

i think one of the hidden keys to politics right now is "how can our side make sure that the 'trump is gonna kill a bunch of beautiful wild horses' story gets in front of the millions of otherwise apolitical consumers of social media horse-related content"

Oh so now we know the bear’s state of mind

Irony alert: The Minnesota officials who charged an ICE agent for shooting a man through a door in Minneapolis and then lying about it say he may be planning to flee to Mexico and get legal residency there through a sham marriage. Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott is refusing to extradite.

Maybe I'm in the minority here but if people who support AI are being shamed into silence then it's working. The shame is working as intended. The left's biggest problem is that it's afraid to hurt the feelings of folks who need to have their feelings hurt. Let them experience introspection for once

if you are a restaurant in Los Angeles and you cannot compete with a taco truck you should not be a restaurant in Los Angeles. this is very basic “slowest zebra on the savanna” stuff

the GOP did almost exactly this with gay marriage in 2004-2006– made a meal out of it in 2004, went back to the well heavy in 2006 when they didn’t have other issues to run on— and got their dicks kicked in

Lin-Manuel Miranda is a generational talent at a thing that may or may not be For You and that’s fine

Type of guy who wants a completely planned economy but also constantly disparages spreadsheet people is an amazingly common type of guy on the Internet. Who exactly do you think is going to be planning your socialist economy.

A year ago, the New York Times reported that Musk was disillussioned and exiting politics. Now he is going to set a record as the biggest Republican donor in history. Why did they print such a false and inaccurate story? www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/u...

Hey look it's the libertarian currency that's entirely dependent on government action to gain value

I'm thoroughly convinced every AI stan secretly uses the chatbot feature more than they'll ever admit and believe it's their friend. It's a good explanation for someone going to the mattresses for something backed by all the worst people in the world whom they don't agree with on anything else

AI did not discover a cancer vaccine. Scientists discovered it because their research was supported and funded.

They claimed everyone would leave when Zohran was elected, but now NYC is such a vibe that even the otters are coming back

this reminds me of the general consensus among educators in China that the gaokao (universal college entrance exam) is a highly problematic system that is also better than any other option

And to be clear, this is just 185 potential noncitizens who are *registered* to vote, not 185 potential noncitizens who *voted.*

this is who they're talking about when they say "the spreadsheet people"

i think there's a kernel of truth that the benefits of LLMs have mostly accrued to spreadsheet people because spreadsheet people are the most likely early adopters of agentic LLMs

US president declares “any country that allows” economic institutions “to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences.” China, Russia, and every other country trading with Iran shrugs. No credibility. Americans voted to make the country’s word worthless.

liberals will need to distance themselves from hasan piker about as much as conservatives had to distance themselves from rush limbaugh, which is to say no one who is remotely persuadable will possibly care.

Technology that makes cancer vaccines a reality should be treated like Operation Warp Speed. Instead, the government has cancelled $500 million in mRNA vaccine research.

In retrospect, it was probably not a great idea to make the most prestigious, best-paid, and most stable jobs in journalism ones where people with no special training or qualifications just kind of make stuff up based on vibes.

If Obama can reverse a recession in 4 months, why can’t Trump improve any economic measures at all in 18?

It rules that we have a Treasury Secretary who can't sell bonds, a Defense Secretary who can't win a war and an Attorney General who can't enforce the law

It's crazy that Republicans are suddenly losing against the platform below after campaigning on: - death penalty for abortion - no vaccines - burn books - Bible-based math in school - a data center in your town - surveillance cameras - tariffs to raise grocery prices - wars to raise gas prices

“I don’t speak politician” is a hell of thing for Darline Graham, specifically, to say

this is writing in a way afraid of what people on social media will say about it, which is a bad way to be

I love it when a city adopts an otherwise-unloved car

The tech that wowed us in the early days of 90s Silicon Valley was connectivity. Shit like email, access to the internet, shopping at places you couldn't drive to, etc. These were all things that the technology made possible. LLMs aren't doing anything a lazy human couldn't do on their own.

Duffy tells his daughter, on a government-sponsored video, that he won’t allow her to go to Harvard. Then he visits Harvard. Now he’s salivating at the idea his kid might go to Harvard.

grouchy "we live in a society" old man type take: people care way too much about 'nepo babies' in entertainment, as though the 'be hot on camera' industry was ever going to be a representative cross-section of society, and not nearly enough about them in things like journalism

Is it just me, or does Nathan Cofnas look like an AI rendering of Mark Zuckerberg?

Cabinet secretaries (yes, plural) spending their time making reality TV is what Americans voted for. Do you want experts addressing real problems? No, said a plurality of voters. We want people who don’t understand this—and don’t care that they don’t—to BS us using this particular style of video.

Pretty rich they they’re dong this at the same time that his neglect and stupid ego war have turned an aircraft carrier into Lord of the Flies.

well just as well that Palantir has never politicized its own work then wait a moment I'm getting a note

Elections have consequences: New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed legislation that bars the state from extraditing individuals facing out-of-state investigations over reproductive or gender-affirming care. newjerseymonitor.com/2026/08/20/s...

I don't understand why major outlets keep writing about this phenomenon like it's cute or interesting... it's not, we know that substituting chatbots for real human relationships is terrible for your mental health, could we stop already?

Once again imagining the reaction from the media if a Dem President, especially one who never served in the armed forces, tried to rename a carrier after themselves while their approval rating was 30%

This should forever be Elon Musk's legacy. Not spaceships. Not electric cars. Starvation. Misery. Mass murder.

The police were never defunded. Won’t stop people from blaming it for the pandemic-era increase in crime, though. johnfpfaff.com/2026/08/18/t...

Newsletter is out and it's about how instead of a Joe Rogan of the left we need to recreate Anthony Bourdain in the aggregate link.heartlandsignal.com/v/443/b6619d...

Looking forward to all the "fiscal conservatives" who have never said a thing about runaway war spending or costly tax cuts for a rich to immediately become fiscal hawks again the moment a Democrat becomes president www.nytimes.com/2026/08/19/b...

Are you telling me that an administration filled with antisemites wasn’t sincere about its antisemitism investigations? Who could’ve known? www.washingtonpost.com/education/20...

Could be she had something in particular to hide. But I wouldn't neglect the possibility of "I just don't wanna" because these people are lazy and entitled and dimwitted.

They're all stupid, evil, pieces of shit. Every last one. They are not part of society. They are trying to kill people, and make children suffer horrible, painful deaths.

NEW from @immcouncil.org: the Trump admin is cutting legal services to migrant children facing deportation, making it harder for kids to find safety. Read more about what’s happening. 👇 www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/trump-a...

More than 150 wallets on Polymarket International may have traded on inside U.S. military information, attracting copycat ​bets and raising concerns that the market could broadcast signals exploitable by foreign adversaries. www.reuters.com/business/fin...

Raises the question: Does the mayor of Los Angeles even like Los Angeles?

They attack and kill our people then deny us justice. Intolerable.

you can't fool me, this is a campaign prop for a King in Yellow game.

I see the NY Times is on the weird story about Pete Hegseth's wife, but I want to flag that I wrote about it a year ago. www.salon.com/2025/09/15/p...

and the foundation of US agricultural might which is the foundation of so much else. the current admin is trying to ruin it.

i keep saying this but LLMs are almost ideally shaped for collective ownership. the union idea is a super interesting direction to go with that

Trump's revenge on California — befouling our coast and damaging our economy to spite us for voting for Harris. Intolerable.

looking at the Capitalization I have to conclude she is some kind of East German sleeper agent

With all these recalls, the only left that’s safe to eat is the rich

oh we're in 'come the fuck on' territory here. The whole point was that the Liverpool John Moores investigation was inept; not only was there significant plagiarism but also multiple discrepancies in accounts of what and when supposed research subjects said stuff.

Hegseth looks like a low polygon count Tekken 3 character

Even now there’s still no consistently stated reason we went to war with Iran

Exactly. They're pulling the whole "you better jump on or you'll miss out" argument scammers and fuckbois have been using since the dawn of time. If it was such a useful and life-changing experience for the general population, you wouldn't need to say all that

“August is solidly Covid season,” said Dr. Caitlin Rivers, at Johns Hopkins. “Right now, the South and the West are sort of the leading edge of this Covid season.” “The traditional respiratory virus season hasn’t started, but Covid is already climbing” www.cnn.com/2026/08/20/h...

me: I will help people learn about this this guy: why, you condescending fuckhead

I promise you this is the least offensive thing that particular guy has ever said.

fortunately such problems would never emerge in the United States, now to have a big swig of coffee and check in on my favorite acting couple William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman

Hey, I have an idea! With apologies to the people who live near Bedminster, NJ.

I think the GOP was bound to get a Trump-like figure at some point given its trajectory. And whoever that figure was would be uniquely bad, because the GOP has been selecting for ignorance and fascism really since at least Reagan.

Brooke Rollins has kicked millions off food stamps and lies to insist it was about fraud. 19 Democrats voted to confirm her (including Schiff, Klobuchar, Booker, and Ossoff) and I'm never going to stop being mad about that.

"1984" is George Orwell's visceral depiction of the totalitarian nightmare that all English people fear: what if an irish guy was your boss

A big problem with threatening to take territory from, and imposing economic penalties on, countries that didn’t do anything, even allies, is that it disconnects punishment and behavior. Doing what the US wants doesn’t avoid tariffs and sanctions, so why react to threats by doing what the US wants?

"The burden is likely to grow significantly next year, when U.S. employers expect their healthcare costs to go up by 11.1%, according to a new survey from WTW, another big benefits consultant—the steepest rise in more than 20 years."

Wife and I were literally talking about this last night because she couldn't wrap her mind around the idea that intelligent people would fall for this shit but I said that these companies know humans are a.) lonely and b.) prone to addictions of all kinds. It'll get you too if you open the door

Darth Vader got booted from the Death Star HOA so he moved to San Diego and got really woke

Her name is literally Overton?

one thing you learn from reading old Dragon magazines and contemporary reddit threads is that the quality and expectations of the average gaming table has generally improved a *lot* - not least because the gender balance is so much better nowadays

When I worked for the California state legislature and my job was to help figure out what the state's K-12 education budget was going to be next year, 70% of my job was spreadsheets and the other 30% was explaining what my spreadsheets were telling me.

The regime is paying local law enforcement 5 figure bounties to kidnap kids from our communities. Kids whose parents or caregivers they already abducted. They're building these concentration camps - that's the term for sites holding civilians without due process - to torture then traffic kids.

In hell?

You tell me this place isn't like old Twitter but today it's been interpersonal sub-skeets all over the timeline. It's like watching a mid season ep of RHOBH and having to quickly get caught up on who's been secretly beefing since two seasons ago and it involves a cast member no longer on the show

The most transactional marriage ever

Amazingly, neither Jared Kushner nor Steve Witkoff is currently the most in over their head, doesn’t know what they’re doing person with influence over US foreign policy that foreign interests use as a conduit to contact and manipulate the president.

i am losing a great deal of faith in natural intelligence today

Not going to link to it, but the story that's starting to circulate claiming that Penguin Random House is moving wholesale to AI copyediting and proofreading? The story itself is AI slop from an AI slop farm. It's bullshit.

AI makes it easy to manipulate popular opinion which is why everyone hates data centers

I think this is true of literally every top tier school. Heck, you could probably go two or three sets deep.

Dress for the job you want.

tho i gotta say not much is more satisfying than when someone is being an asshole to you online and someone else DMs you out of nowhere to be like "hey i know that guy irl and hes a piece of shit in person too"

As always, he's worse, but we should have never started naming carriers after presidents as a matter of routine. My pet law on this would be you can have Washington and Lincoln but no others. We don't need a USS Bill Clinton and USS George W. Bush, either (Biden did those on his way out the door).

This is one reason why there's a very strong market for low-quality, methodologically suspect papers that "disprove" the YIMBY argument.

Trump’s New Iran Plan: After ending JCPOA while saying “maximum pressure” via economic sanctions would get a “better deal” Which failed so we bombed Which failed so we did economic sanctions Which failed so we bombed Which failed multiple times. So we’ll do… Economic sanctions! That’ll work.

Kentucky I didn't bother you about the McGrath-Booker primary but now I'm going to demand you vote for 7.

I do not think he hates to say it

🚨🚨 Cook Political Report just moved a bunch of races to Democrats: #TXSen goes from Lean R to Toss-up #TXGov from Solid R to Lean R #IAGov from Toss-up to Lean D #IASen goes from Lean R to Toss-up Say with with me now: ¡Dios Mio! www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/sen...