domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
Tanista
1m ago
can increase its appeal to young men.
A nickname like "Momala" attached to AOC will take on a whole different sheen with Zoomers men, that's for sure.
Being hot worked for Trudeau.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3m ago
I’m okay with the DNC pivoting to “no step on snek,” but I’m not holding my breath.
We’re getting Newsom 2028 and we’re going to like it.
Pynewacket
5m ago
I mean, maybe one can say that parts of the Secret Service seemed remarkably unconcerned should something happen to him under their "protection," but 'if someone should take him out for us, that would be good' ≠ 'we need to take this guy out'.
too many weird issues with the situation and handling of it, to be just a lone wolf attack without institutional backing.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12m ago
This week in the dankest timeline: Satire publication The Onion buys Alex Jones’ Infowars at auction with Sandy Hook families’ backing.
Yes, a site for unbelievable comedy playing to the biases of the gullible is now owned by the Onion. It appears they intend to use it to promote gun control. I can only hope this is presented in the style of existing InfoWars schlock.
While I deeply disagree with gun control activists, I’d much rather the site goes to them than to Jones’s merchandising companies. One of them was apparently the runner-up. But it’s alright for Jones: he’s allegedly on the short list for Trump’s next press secretary. Wait, no, that was last year. It was also only ever going to be a temporary fling, but that’s a given for the position.
I suppose Jones will have to keep shouting at globalists under a different brand.
Tanista
16m ago
Ezra Klein actually brought up Obama's lie to the Pod Save America guys who worked for him. No one contested that it was a lie btw.
He identified a different reason the trans stuff sunk Harris: both her and the ACLU are fucking stupid.
That sounds harsh but that was the tone. He was as angry as Klein gets He was furious that the ACLU would even send out an exam (a paper trail!) on a policy that was almost designed to be maximally offensive and that Harris was dumb enough to say she supported and actioned it on tape instead of ignoring it or simply handing it in.
In essence, they didn't lie as good or as smart as Obama did.
I think the trans thing legitimately is a heavier lift but I think he has a point.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
20m ago
And regardless, the message this sends to guys is that they can lose enormous chunks of wealth in a divorce (and thanks to no-fault, the cheating part is optional!) and so they probably shouldn't risk getting married if their assets are considerable.
Bezos married Scott before founding Amazon; his wealth was made while he was married to her.
naraburns
nihil supernum
20m ago
Breastfeeding has not received quite as much cultural attention as childbirth, for reasons I can only guess at.
Yes, yes it has. Screaming about breastfeeding has been A Thing for a while now.
I'm well aware, which is why I said "not . . . quite as much . . . as" rather than "none at all."
Tanista
22m ago
How well that plays in four years will depend on how badly Trump's border policy is carried out over his second term, but since the worst case for her is "Trump's Executive Orders don't make any big photogenic mistakes and the civil service who has to carry out his orders also don't make any big photogenic mistakes", I'm betting she still ends up with some swing-voter-friendly territory to stake out.
No. The worst case is that the left makes mistakes and punches itself out trying to stop deportations of the wrong sorts (they love a lost cause) and blow all their powder.
Then Trump's deportations proceed and go even further, the numbers drop compared to Biden and the Overton Window is shifted because people feel deportation wasn't so bad. Maybe let little Elio stay but still.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
23m ago
I think even if they “distance themselves” this one is going to be hard to get trust back on. They’ve already been caught several times outright lying on this issue, and worse, lying about exactly what they’re doing in schools. Millions of parents are not only aware, but angry. I know a person I’m working with who has a daughter who briefly decided she was queer. Her mother was absolutely terrified of this because she knew what would happen the minute a psychiatrist heard any sort of gender confusion from her daughter. At school, this stuff was encouraged. The girl seems to be growing out of it now, bullet dodged. But multiply that by all the parents out there knowing that the schools are teaching this and going behind their backs, who know that trans identified men can go into any locker room they want, and that books that are nearly pornographic are available to grade school kids. I don’t think you can slip one by here.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
26m ago
nearly two decades ago, I was introduced to the term "titalitarian" specifically in reference to the La Leche League's emphasis on breastfeading.
faceh
28m ago
It was their money and it was divided in a divorce settlement. Losing a big chunk of the fortune you were able to accumulate because your wife was loyal enough to support you into building a business that turned into the most profitable one in the world is a fair penalty for deciding to cheat on her.
Is it, though? The law says that she is entitled to some percentage of what he earned/acquired during the marriage. But that law presumably was not written with billionaires in mind.
As far as I understand divorce law (admitting it varies between states), the goal is to ensure that the less endowed spouse is not left destitute and is given enough support to live approximately the lifestyle they enjoyed during the marriage for the foreseeable future. Punishing the other spouse is not really part of the calculation.
I think $100 mil would be more than sufficient for that purpose. Maybe you disagree.
And regardless, the message this sends to guys is that they can lose enormous chunks of wealth in a divorce (and thanks to no-fault, the cheating part is optional!) and so they probably shouldn't risk getting married if their assets are considerable.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
33m ago
Because I don’t honestly think she was cheating. There just aren’t any statistical red flags of cheating that I’m aware of in any direction. There are no wild swings that don’t match the polling data, there aren’t any places with oddly high turnout. Even in the other direction, the places she lost match perfectly with the places with high Pro-Palestinian sentiment who might well have chosen not to vote for her out of anger over her tepid support of Israel. Those numbers are pretty consistent with ordinary population growth.
hydroacetylene
36m ago
Breastfeeding has not received quite as much cultural attention as childbirth, for reasons I can only guess at.
Yes, yes it has. Screaming about breastfeeding has been A Thing for a while now.
07mk
39m ago
So what needs to happen is that trans friendly politicians need to lie, and then quietly do it anyways. Don't worry, trans friendly advocates in media, and trust and safety teams on social media will cover for you.
I've noticed that trans advocacy seemed to be copying along with the successful gay marriage advocacy of the past, and this looks like another possible example. Back in 2008, when presidential candidate Barack Obama came out explicitly against gay marriage, it was considered just common knowledge among my peers that he was lying in order to help the good guys gain power. Obama's stance on gay marriage hasn't been relevant in a long time, but as of the last time I talked about it with friends, they seemed to still believe that Obama had been lying at the time, rather than that his position changed at some point while he was in office.
I have no idea how many people actually believed his lie, assuming that it was a lie, but certainly telling such lies in order to sneak in more "extreme" positions wasn't disapproved of and, by my perceptions, quite lauded. So it does seem reasonable to suspect similar things going on with trans advocacy. However, this doesn't seem to be working in this case for a variety of reasons, including the fundamental physical differences between what gay marriage and trans advocacy demand. There seems to be a sort of cruel cosmic joke here with trans advocates trying to follow in the successful footsteps of the gay marriage movement but as a cargo cult just copying along the superficial aspects.
yofuckreddit
41m ago
On one hand I agree.
On the other this took serious intent from AOC or her Twitter admin. It only took seconds, but why remove it at all? Thousands of software suites have been updated to allow pronouns and gender spectrums whenever dealing with people. They fought so hard for this - why back down on the signal?
SteveKirk
46m ago
we had a professor banned from teaching first-year mandatory courses because he donated to the Republican party in 2012,
Do you have a link for this? I want to use it next time the "there's no discrimination, conservatives are just too stupid for academia" card gets played.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
51m ago
It's just that afterwards they can still be friends / work together, and arguably the fight helps to facilitate that to begin with.
OK, I did misinterpret that a bit, but I don't think it changes much. "Fighting it out" then working together later isn't how Trumpworld works, as Trump is quick to hold grudges. Sometimes if figures are particularly powerful like McConnell then Trump restrains himself somewhat, but usually Trump becomes very bitter when he thinks someone has "betrayed" him (with a very loose definition of "betrayal").
celluloid_dream
54m ago
It's frustrating to me, and I think other Canadians, that our government allowed this to happen. I can't stress enough how much it didn't have to be this way. We had a good thing going. We were a pro-immigrant country. We liked newcomers.
You see bar charts like this and it's just baffling. Even at the vastly increased rate of immigration over the last 4 years, you'd see less backlash if those bars had been kept more even.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
55m ago
"Past peak" only means the first derivative has turned negative, not that there will be no new examples.
AppleyOrange
1hr ago
In 2020, Biden got 2,473,633 votes in Georgia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United _States_presidential_election_in_Georgia
In 2024, Harris got 2,548,014 votes in Georgia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election_in_Georgia
I hear that Republicans stopped the democrats from stealing the election again with their superior election observation efforts this year.
But how come we haven't seen any evidence of the fraud Harris had to perpetuate to maintain and improve on Biden's 2020 numbers in Georgia?
johnfabian
1hr ago
I think it kind of smacks of desperation to take a politician changing her twitter profile as some kind of great paradigm shift. This reaction alone makes me think we have not yet reached "peak woke."
Aren't lots of high-profile people leaving twitter anyways? It might be more of a prelude to her jumping ship off the platform than anything else.
2rafa
1hr ago
Yeah they’re gonna run in 2028 on “man isn’t all this culture war shit about abortion and god and deporting random Mexicans kind of lame and cringe and try hard? Why not just, like, be chill, live and let live maaan”…and it’s going to work. The public has a short memory.
roystgnr
1hr ago
explicitly talking about why crying in front of border fences was good then but doesn't conflict with an immigration stance that isn't "open borders" now.
If AOC had been running this year, she could have threaded the needle between "we don't need to enforce our borders" and "Trump's border enforcement was nothing to cry about" by asserting that Trump just did it badly. Harp on things like kids unable to be reunified with families because they didn't collect enough data when separating them.
How well that plays in four years will depend on how badly Trump's border policy is carried out over his second term, but since the worst case for her is "Trump's Executive Orders don't make any big photogenic mistakes and the civil service who has to carry out his orders also don't make any big photogenic mistakes", I'm betting she still ends up with some swing-voter-friendly territory to stake out.
On the other hand, the "I'll do what you want but I won't screw it up" card works in any player's hand. Even if Trump does end up taking the blame for any big problems, he won't be the one running in 2028, and it'll be easy enough for any Republican (except Vance) to simply say "well, he had good goals, and I'll be the one to achieve them, without any mistakes this time."
Harris tried, and while it wasn't the only argument against, plenty of Trump campaign hay was reaped from her stated 2020 policy positions and Senate votes.
It was a pretty good argument against. "My values have not changed" probably sounded like a tough focus-group-approved thing to memorize out of context, but without some explanation for Harris' changing positions it was just an obvious attempt to weasel out of an incredibly important question when she was asked about the changes. When someone is obviously trying to mislead you, the only safe thing to believe is that an honest answer would be the one you didn't want to hear, so it wasn't too crazy that many moderates and progressives concluded that Harris wasn't to be trusted.
HaroldWilson
1hr ago
Not because of that, just that she is pretty far off the reservation as far as apologia for Putin, Assad etc. goes, even relative to Trump, having blamed America for the invasion of Ukraine. Seems unlikely the more hawkish Republicans are willing to swallow this one.
This, but there's also another problem: changes in values can go either way. If anyone can become American by adopting "American values"… what if they change their mind about said values? What about natural-born citizens who stop believing in those American values? Do they lose their citizenship?
Of course not, for several reasons, one of which is the difficulty of verification you note. But notice that this creates a ratchet — there are multiple ways to become an American, but far narrower paths to cease being one. (AIUI, renouncing American citizenship is actually very difficult.)
(One might draw a comparison here to how an atheist (ethnic) Jew and a gentile convert to Judaism are still both Jewish.)
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