Look, Pete. I like you, but you had your chance to settle Brigida v. US Department of Transportation, and you didn't. Now is not the time for you to try to spin it into a political victory. You failed. Take accountability.

https://twitter.com/PeteButtigieg/status/1885013865676562491

https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1853578599502094803

Not to pick too much of a feud with an institution I quite like, but to pick a feud with an institution I quite like, young liberals need to snap out of reflexive revulsion and mockery every time someone raises a conservative-coded problem.

Look. I get it. "DEI this" and "DEI that" are annoying. And anything that becomes an Approved Conservative Explanation will be embraced by some of the most obnoxious and unpleasant people in the world. One time an unambiguous white supremacist called it DEI when I pointed out he was lying about Asian IQ graphs. That stuff's real. It happens.

But you know what else is real? The 2014 air traffic control hiring scandal as one of the clearest and most pressing causes for the ATC shortage @CNLiberalism dismisses here. With explicitly racial motivation, people actually substantially weakened the test used to hire air traffic controllers. Then, with explicitly racial motivation, they actually replaced it with a blatantly rigged "biographical questionnaire." Then, with explicitly racial motivation, one person leaked the answers to this questionnaire to people in a race-based organization.

All of this actually, unambiguously happened. As a direct result of it, the air traffic control hiring pipeline was shattered. People who had spent years in school planning to become ATCs—fully qualified, ready to go, having already passed relevant tests—were dismissed with no chance of appeal. Those same people have been fighting for justice for a decade now.

I've spoken with several of these people fighting for justice. They're not fringe firebrands. Their politics are all over the spectrum; their backgrounds are everything from a woman working passionately to get more women involved in aviation to a moderate Latino man who spent years fighting through courts to get his FOIA requests approved so he could piece together the story to instructors who watched the government trample and dismiss their livelihood, then cover it up, lest it interfere with Diversity Goals.

You know who's stood in their way? Look, I hate it as much as you do, but it wasn't the crank conservatives. It was the Reasonable, Centrist, Smug Liberals who, every time they heard a conservative-coded criticism, refused to air it in their media, turned their brains off, and mocked it.

I was glad to have some small role in bringing their story back to prominence during the Biden administration, when Buttigieg--one of the politicians I respect most--was in charge of the FAA and had his name on the lawsuit that's been trying to settle this for years. He could have repaired it. He could have been honest, could have fixed what Trump 1 failed to do. He did not.

So now--guess what? The conservatives get a dunk. They get to score a point. They win a round in this game of politics, and liberals lose. They have the opportunity to fix something that everyone who understands the story knows is a massive scandal, something that makes liberals look terrible, and you know what? If they actually settle this lawsuit, patch things up with the CTI schools that the FAA screwed over all those years ago, bring justice to the individuals harmed, and repair a broken pipeline? Good. Let them rub that in our faces. Let them drink liberal tears, because in this case, the libs deserve it.

@SeanDuffyWI is the new US Secretary of Transportation. As one of his first acts, he should settle the class action lawsuit formerly known as Brigida v. Buttigieg, soon--presumably--to be known as Brigida v. Duffy, issue an official apology to the victims of years of knowing incompetence on the part of the FAA, and repair a broken pipeline. No more excuses. No more waiting. It's been a decade. The time is now.

And if all liberals can do while that's going on is call it "tiresome"? Look: the Obama admin made that bed, the Biden admin failed to fix it, and I don't really care how "tired" people are of hearing the phrase DEI, there is a problem that needs fixing and someone had better fix it. If the New Liberals can't help with that, can't even face it down honestly, then they need to step aside so others can. For those just tuning into the story now:

https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752091831095939471

I’m not clued-in enough to AI to understand why R1 is a big deal, but a lot of the bright sorts on my timeline are incredibly excited about it

like, I understand the “comparable to o1” part but after that I get a bit lost in the weeds

has anyone legibilized it yet?

https://twitter.com/jxmnop/status/1882169838027882884

hm this is helpful

https://x.com/yishan/status/1882300555911122969

I confess with some shame that I'm growing to accept the term "Woke Right" as basically reasonable

populist identitarian right-wing-ism with Social Media Mob characteristics: group-focused, power-aware, and looking to cast heretics out and control the politics of the country now obviously this is basically just another term for the dissident right, but the way they have begun to organize themselves and aggressively purity-test people for compliance is, if not wholly new, at least growing more notable

see eg replies here

https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1880062257641714059

When I analogized the barrier between childhood and adult language learners to other skills, some people pushed back on the premise: do children learn languages better than adults?

What do researchers say? Yes, but It's Complicated. Highlights below. First: children do not learn straightforwardly faster than adults. Many people rightly point out that an adult with one or two years of experience can outpace a child. Over time, though, they keep improving in areas adult learners falter in.

that barrier between people who learn languages as children and those who learn it as adults? realistically, it exists in many more fields. we're not culturally equipped to understand what native-level proficiency even looks like on most topics. these are all research-backed. but we have no systematic understanding of critical and sensitive periods, only glimpses in some of the most obvious fields and observational lessons from intensive training programs. minds do not remain open forever.

https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1877745360539353323

thinking I should probably read an Ayn Rand book at some point to figure out what all the fuss is about

will I become (more) insufferable upon doing so which one should I read?

I could very easily believe something like this is happening, but this is an atrocious test of it and should be wholly disregarded. You can’t compare politicians to commentators without a ton of confounding factors entering in, and the only difference they found was for views.

https://twitter.com/chriso_wiki/status/1857734822799540684

This is either dishonest or a simple misreading of the paper. The paper found comparable increases in retweets and favorite counts for the Republicans and Democrats. The Democrats are starting from a much lower baseline because, again, they’re not comparing like with like.

https://twitter.com/chriso_wiki/status/1857736106017439938

It may be too early for an election retrospective. It's still election night, and technically things haven't been called. It's a good time to speak candidly, though:

There is not a single moment this election that I felt heard or represented by Kamala Harris. Not one.

But—people, and especially leftists, will say—you're a centrist! she ran to the center, did she not? spoke of unity, focused on fundamentals, stayed disciplined? And I confess: she did. But let's consider the nature of that "running to the center": well-oiled, precisely tuned gears of the Machine, turning and calculating that to win the vote, they needed to present as Normal.

Not that they were ever wrong. Not that any of their priorities were mistaken, that they had ever seriously overstepped, that they needed any serious re-examination. Just that they needed to slow-walk things, to be calm, to rely on running against Trump and repeating platitudes to waltz into the presidency.

"What will you do differently from Joe Biden?" A bold answer from Kamala: I'm not him, and I'm not Trump. Great. "What are we to make of your positions during the 2020 primary?" Well, it's not 2019 anymore, is it? "Did you ever, even once, go too far?" A laugh and a charming slice-of-life quip.

The Democrats tried to run an election on vibes alone. Kamala is brat. Kamala is normal. Kamala is all things to all people. Kamala is with the good guys and against the bad guys, with the good things and against the bad things, and shouldn't that be enough?

Look, I've been adamantly against Trump from the day he entered the national scene. I have never wavered on that. But I spend my time and my energy writing, shouting, begging someone to listen that people do not trust the Machine, and they do not trust it for good reason. Young, educated professionals are far to the left of the average American, and they are the ones in control of every institution. Institutions systematically represent their views, treating them as natural and everyone else as aberrant.

I'm on the fringes of that group, right-wing by young, educated professional standards, dead center by the standards of the country. And it's frustrating, alienating on a deep level, to go to law school and watch prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters and people who want to tear gifted education down treated as sane and normal and Respectable while knowing that if I don't voice perspectives sympathetic to the majority of the country, nobody will voice them at all.

Kamala Harris never represented me. The Democrats never signaled to me that they heard and understood my voice and voices like mine, only that they wanted to pull the right levers and press the right buttons and twist the right knobs to convince that mystical creature, the Centrist, that they were on their side.

I don't know what will happen under what looks to be four more years of Trump. I don't think it will be as dire as the worst predictions, and hope it won't be, but I remain now as ever wholly convinced that he is temperamentally unfit to be President and the country is a more volatile and uncertain place with him in charge.

But what I hope is this: the Democrats don't take this moment to lament to themselves how everyone fell victim to misinformation and imagined grievances, that they were fine and good and the people were the problem, that their problem is they were simply not pure-Left enough. Now is the time for recognition that they fundamentally, wholly failed to understand and reach the frustrated center. They have four years to get serious about doing so. and yes this essay is an extended form of this but dangit I stayed in the coalition of a candidate I never wanted and never trusted from day one, and now she lost and I actually would like my priorities to be understood, thank you very much

https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1854005533990080801

as a reminder, this is what people fought to put and keep on her Wikipedia page, suppressing every hint of accurate info for ideological reasons

I have no stake in women’s boxing and prefer a live-and-let-live approach but I really, really hate being lied to

https://twitter.com/runthinkwrite/status/1853356349263917257

my prior thread on the matter

https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1823761772433563684

I'm getting a lot of understandable pushback on this, including from people I respect, which means it's worth expanding on at length. What was I sloppily gesturing towards with this throwaway line? In short: the fundamentally foreign nature of the "MAGA chud" archetype to me.

I grew up in Utah. Everyone knows Utah is sort of its own thing, but liberals still often clumsily lump its culture in with conservative culture more broadly. It's worth outlining my impression of white Southerners as a suburban Mormon schoolchild:
- These are the people who tell me I'm not a Christian, spread lies about my religion, and picket outside my religius events.
- These are the people whose ancestors drove my ancestors out of Missouri, in part because they worried my people would be anti-slavery.
- These are the people whose ancestors fought against my country in defense of slavery, then fought the government in defense of segregation.
- ...but these are also my allies in a sense against the godless, hedonistic Democrats and Hollywood, who misunderstand, misrepresent, and slander my morality, try to foist gay marriage on me, etc

Of course real history, and real culture, are always more complex than the self-interested stories one absorbs as a child. But the cultural tension points were real and strongly felt. Inasmuch as I recognized my heritage and culture, it was distinctly Northern, emphatically Mormon, and quintessentially American suburban middle class.

None of this has anything to do with Appalachian culture in specific, arguably the one most specifically gestured to in the quoted post. That's because I didn't think or learn about Appalachian culture at all, outside of, say, vaguely positive sentiments about Daniel Boone and frontiersmen.

The book Albion's Seed argues for the presence of four distinct settler groups in America that make this clearer: the northern Puritans (New England) and Quakers (Pennsylvania), the southern Cavaliers (Virginia) and Borderers (Appalachia). Mormons are best seen in that light as a peculiar Puritan offshoot, and the natural narrative for me can be parsed in that light.

Alongside that, I was drawn to the aesthetics and culture of (particularly Victorian) England. Many of the best childhood books I read were British classics. Lewis and Tolkien seemed obviously right about everything important (except their regrettable lack of opportunity to convert to Mormonism). E. Nesbit and Roald Dahl spun charming worlds; Arthur Rackham's illustrations defined how the fae ought to be and set me up to be frustrated with Disney forevermore. I was caught up by and inspired by the beauty and the history of institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, and more broadly the notion that there were plenty of stuffy, learned, Cultured people around who would tell me everything I was doing was wrong for esoteric reasons.

When Trump took over the Republican Party, he ushered in a period of dominance for an aesthetic and a frame that combined my natural enemies of southern culture and the hedonism, sin, and excess I associated with Hollywood and Vegas. Suddenly it really sank in just how many of the people I had vaguely assumed were my co-tribals were fundamentally foreign to me, how little my culture, my experiences, and my hopes seemed to have in common with theirs.

This was compounded by my growing sense of unease with Mormonism - not on moral grounds, as I clung to my faith's doctrine on gay marriage all the way through Obergefell, but on intellectual ones. Suddenly, awkwardly, I found myself increasingly alienated not just from the friendlier-seeming political tribe, but from my own ethnic/religious one. All around the same time, I started realizing the extent to which my imagined vision of an academic culture of stuffy old Tasteful professors in tweed jackets arguing about Matters of Consequence had become a modern-progressive monoculture, with its own off-putting and alienating mores.

I paint in broad strokes here. But I hope you understand the gestures. I was hungry to see a refined moralist conservatism somewhere—one that, even if I rejected it and it me, could credibly claim a certain moral authority in the frame I recognized—and all I saw was what Freia colorfully called "feral hillbilly amerikaners" yelling vulgarities about guns and deportations.

I have complicated feelings about this. Obviously I don't precisely relate with that tribe as a tribe, and I'm conscious at once of not wanting to judge them harshly and Noticing the harsh judgment, and misjudgment, many of them toss at me (particularly now that I'm a Gay Godless Lib and all). I'm wary of those who seek to lionize dysfunction of any sort, and in posts like Freia's I see a certain "noble savage" mythologizing. But I've also been impressed by e.g. Darryl Cooper's dives into Amerikaner culture/history, and have slowly gotten a sense of the side of the picture I was missing, and what all of that feels like from the inside.

All of this to say: I have no particular quarrel with "low-class feral hillbilly amerikaner" culture, except inasmuch as they pick fights with me and mine over things I value. I recognize why two flippant lines are nowhere near enough to convey the sort of sentiment I vaguely aimed to outline. But it is not my culture, it never has been, and it rose to prominence seemingly in place of a culture I had seen here and there, in books and hints of conversations, and hoped to find as part of the world I grew up into.
this is an important note from a frank exchange that touches on part of my sentiment. the trope-character Freia references defends Your right against Them. that sounds great until you realize you're Them, and the "defense" includes "no family for you."

https://x.com/moonbeamdreams_/status/1851366362373038154

every once in a while I catch something intelligent from Vance or see Elon do something cool and think “…could I support MAGA?” and then I remember that I like immigrants and hate conspiracists and can’t stand tariffs and want nothing to do with Trump’s inner circle ever inspired by the below

https://twitter.com/annakhachiyan/status/1850648036512616673

Were these three images real xray images of injured children taken in Gaza after October 7, 2023? Very likely yes. Do these demonstrate who specifically injured the children? No, and the op-ed author does not claim they do.

Warning: graphic images in thread.

Although the quoted bet is still pending resolution on the off chance more pertinent info comes out, it's worth outlining where I'm at and why. I want to emphasize that my task is very narrow here: not to adjudicate the tone and scope of the article, certainly not to adjudicate the war in Gaza, only to verify whether the New York Times published fake or substantially misleading images. I will briefly address implications and extrapolations, but my focus is the images. For context, the article claimed this about the images, placing them immediately after the author's story of having regularly treated children with gunshot wounds to the head:

These photographs of X-rays were provided by Dr. Mimi Syed, who worked in Khan Younis from Aug. 8 to Sept. 5. She said: “I had multiple pediatric patients, mostly under the age of 12, who were shot in the head or the left side of the chest. Usually, these were single shots. The patients came in either dead or critical, and died shortly after arriving.”

When I reached out to the article's author, @FerozeSidhwa, for additional details, he was extremely helpful, providing videos of the full CT scans and photographs of two of the three patients and giving me permission to publish them. Given the nature of the photographs, I will not include them in this top post; those wishing to verify can view them downthread. The middle image is a radiograph; the other two scout images from a CT scan (2D images taken to aid with positioning for the full CT scan).

I checked in with an independent radiologist, presenting the images and videos with as little context as possible to understand his reaction to them in isolation. I've attached the relevant conversation. Per him, the photographs, CT scans, and radiographs all match up. Many people reported concerns about the pixellation in the final scout image; he mentions that "quite a bit of artifact" is typical and it is not out of the norm. Bullet appearance tends to be highly variable, and the images are within the standard range of variance. Online commenters also found a number of similar-looking x-rays; I will link them below.

This aligns with the response from the New York Times. Many are inclined to distrust the Times, but my conviction is that distrust should be bounded. Framing, tone, and goals can and should be treated with skepticism. Publishing literal fake images, then doubling down on it, would do immense harm to their reputation. I do not believe they did so and I do not think anyone has presented strong evidence that they did so.

I cannot personally verify the precise provenance of the images and scans, but any hoax would have to be elaborate at this point. More to the point, it would be odd: Gaza is a war zone. Horrible things happen every day in war; doctors even in regular situations see horrible things constantly. The cleanest explanation is that the images are exactly what the caption purported them to be: pediatric patients in critical condition from her clinic in Khan Younis, tragically shot.

When I asked the author, he emphasized that there is no possible way the doctors could know how the children were shot—"killed by Hamas, Israel, Martians, the United States"—no way to know. They're physicians sitting in hospitals. He also noted that patients and family consistently report Israelis shot them—not that they know or that their testimony should be treated as fully reliable, but that that's what they say.

Now, a few words on the author: some have noted he is not an impartial observer, pointing to some anti-Israel articles he wrote on the Electronic Intifada some years ago, his appeals to messaging from pro-Hamas organizations like the National Lawyers Guild, his anti-Israel activism in the "Uncommitted" movement and elsewhere, and his belief that what is happening in Gaza is genocide. That he was explicitly an advocate for one side is, I believe, well established in the opinion article, but bears repeating. He was honest and forthright with me and is certainly sincere in his convictions. I believe he should be seen in a light akin to a prosecution attorney, not a judge. His frame is one of explicit anti-Israel advocacy. Take that for what you will, but it does not change the nature of the evidence.

It is also worth looking briefly at the specifics of other claims and advocacy in the article. These are not connected to the veracity of the images; they are independent statements at other points in the article.

The story from Dr. Khawaja Ikram:

“One day, while in the E.R., I saw a 3-year-old and 5-year-old, each with a single bullet hole to their head. When asked what happened, their father and brother said they had been told that Israel was backing out of Khan Younis. So they returned to see if anything was left of their house. There was, they said, a sniper waiting who shot both children.”

The Times questions to Israel:

"A spokesperson for the I.D.F. responded with a statement that did not directly answer whether or not the military had investigated reports of shootings of preteen children, or if any disciplinary action had been taken against soldiers for firing at children."

The article's later advocacy:

"American law and policy have long forbidden the transfer of weapons to nations and military units engaged in gross violations of human rights, especially — as a 2023 update to the United States Conventional Arms Transfer Policy makes clear — when those violations are directed at children. It is difficult to conceive of more severe violations of this standard than young children regularly being shot in the head."

The conclusion:

"The horror must end. The United States must stop arming Israel."

"And afterward, we Americans need to take a long, hard look at ourselves."

The article never outright states with certainty that Israelis are deliberately shooting children in the head, but it certainly implies it in those instances. The scout images and the author's explicit claims offer only indirect support for this, and again, the article is an advocacy piece in the Opinion section, not an investigative report into the nature of the shootings. The article certainly did not go out of its way to hedge by eg reminding readers that physicians do not know the details of how their patients were injured; it was written with intent to persuade.

My judgment on this is that the facts in the article as literally written are supportable, but that the implications drawn from them are used to support as anti-Israel a narrative as can be managed in order to sway public sentiment against Israel in the Gaza war. People can make of all of that what they will.

To return to the bet: officially, the bet will resolve on 11/24/2024, unless the parties want to resolve it earlier. There's always a chance more information will come out before then, but as things stand, I believe it is more likely than not that the 3 images in the NYT article are real xray images of injured children taken in Gaza after October 7, 2023. I make no claims and take no position on who shot the children or in what circumstances they were shot. If I were to resolve it today, I would do so in favor of @raspy_aspie. Pictured: the images I was provided of the patients in question, alongside other photographs of the x-rays. Marked sensitive for obvious reasons; use your discretion.

Incredible. The abstract mentions nothing about only interviewing people from "Abolish the police" organizations. It's just an examination of how young people experience policing.

The number of sociologists defending this is a good reminder of the state of sociology.

https://twitter.com/JustinTPickett/status/1844742425299779814

I understand the frustration of being criticized in public by a senior scholar. But once you publish papers, you step into the arena. You cannot look to influence public conversation without receiving public scrutiny in return.

https://x.com/its_Serrano/status/1844916673960346082

"Grade-level standards" are a myth. They do not exist in any other skill. There is no level of mathematical knowledge a 13-year-old is "supposed" to have, any more than there is for chess or piano.

And yet schools refuse to teach students at their levels. They hew to the myth.

https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1842200949827190946

Teaching is already a difficult job. LA, and other places, insist on making it impossible. You cannot meaningfully help a classroom of students at wildly different levels in the way you can when they're all at around the same level.

this is a provocative claim that I first heard from a Reliable Source (pictured) but have never had a chance to look into closely. reading about diagnoses of specific learning disabilities reminded me.

I've never closely examined dyslexia. how much truth is there to this?

https://twitter.com/triplebankshot/status/1840526559834509640

ok, so yeah:

per this paper, dyslexia was originally just defined as a discrepancy between full-scale IQ + age and reading ability.

but people criticized that definition...

learning the history of Philadelphia's most selective public school

It was established as a middle school for advanced students. In 2021-2022, Philadelphia switched all schools to a unified lottery system, and the school's focus on excellence was systematically dismantled. 1/x With the change, the school (along with all other Philly schools) had no discretion over who to admit. Its pipeline was broken: students from the middle school no longer received even priority at the high school.

What did this ruling involve? Thread to follow.

The core question: Does the Tennessee Public Records Act require the Nashville Police Department and Nashville city government to release public records related to the Covenant School mass shooting?

Answer: No. Why?

https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1828442972356256010

How did the case arise? Multiple people filed public records requests to see the shooter's manifesto. The city denied them. The individuals sued. The church, school, and one victim family filed to intervene, joining the lawsuit to argue against release.

grateful that Wikipedia can always be trusted to provide a neutral overview of what Reliable Sources say about ongoing controversies President of the European Boxing Confederation? not a Reliable Source

this 1888 map is one of my favorite American historical artifacts

it perfectly encapsulates the unapologetic moralism of so many in its era

"The evil of Jamestown has always been and is to-day at war with the good of Plymouth." "The grand and noble thoughts recorded, the wonderful inventions, our free schools, the many blessings we enjoy to-day and all that tends to elevate mankind are heirlooms handed down from the Puritans and their children. While nearly every evil which exists in the political economy of our beloved country can be traced back to the pernicious teachings of the Jamestown settlers and their children."

Yes, I will vote for Kamala Harris.

Someone sent me this comic the other day, though, and I confess I've lost my patience. I will vote for Kamala Harris. But in return—well, as my relief at Biden dropping out a year too late has settled into disgust, I do have a few words.

For my entire adulthood, Donald Trump has been on the ballot. Like many Utah Mormons, I needed only to see him to hate what he had to offer. He is vulgar, self-absorbed, dishonest—look, I'll bore you if I continue. You've heard it all before. I did not need the media to see his flaws, but many better writers than me have already laid them out in detail. Subsequent events have only confirmed those flaws.

I voted McMullin in 2016, alongside 21% of Utahns, watching family leave the Republican Party in response to Trump. By 2020, then in Omaha, I'd made my reluctant peace with the two-party system and voted Biden. Since 2015, I have wanted Trump off the ballot, out of the picture, far away from US politics. Now I am in Pennsylvania, I have a platform, and I can hardly pretend my vote and my voice don't matter this time around. So yes, I will vote for Kamala Harris.

With that clear: who, precisely, will I be voting for?

I will vote first, it must be said, for a Machine: the Machine that has the allegiance of the bulk of my country's civil servants and professional class, no matter who is in office; the Machine that coiled up tightly around Biden while it thought it could hide his decline, then spat him out with a thousand beautifully written thinkpieces when it realized it could not. I will vote for a Machine that sneered at a few of its more independent-minded members—Ezra Klein, Nate Silver, others—when they pointed out the obvious truth that Biden should have dropped out a year ago. I will vote for a Machine that knows it needs my vote but can hardly hide its scorn for independent voters who push against parts of its plan, one that put an ostensible moderate in office before crowing about accomplishing the furthest left political agenda in decades.

I will vote for a Machine that now invites me to line up behind one of its very own, a politician who long ago sold any semblance of individuality for its promises of power. I will vote for an individual who secured her first public office via an affair with a man twice her age, then climbed until she became a prosecutor who flinched from her own record when prosecution became unpopular and who will wear it proudly now that the winds are shifting. I almost flinch to point it out—as if it is uncouth to notice the compromises people make for power, but not to make those compromises in the first place.

I will vote for an individual who made disingenuous, pre-planned accusations of racism (buy her T-shirts!) against the man who would later coldly, calculatingly invite her to be his running mate, then laughed it off with "It was a debate!" I will vote for someone whose voting record was further left than almost any other Senator, who has never met a progressive platitude or invented census demographic holiday she does not embrace, but who I am expected to treat as a sort of moderate because she does not actively want to destroy capitalism. I will vote for someone who has never once shared a political idea that inspired or excited me, a weathervane who panders to whoever promises power. I will vote for someone I and all who voted in Democratic presidential primaries resoundingly rejected once before, a plastic candidate who elected long ago to become simply an avatar of the Machine.

I will vote alongside millions who made the same weary calculation, the same pivot, people who have shrugged and moved, unburdened by what has been, from Dark Lich Brandon memes to coconut trees and visions of what can be. The Machine does so try to make itself Cool, and many convince themselves it succeeds. I will vote for Kamala and not a candidate who emerged out of a hard-fought primary because the Machine grew overconfident and was left scrambling when everyone saw an octogenarian act like an octogenarian.

I will vote for Kamala because after and despite all of this, the Republicans remain unworthy of defeating the Machine. They repel the talented and capable, they decry their opponents' abuses of power before abusing every shred of power they get their hands on, they have for a decade built a tragicomic cult of personality around an old man who has always been unfit to rule. I will vote, and I will encourage others to do the same, to vote against the Republicans until the message well and truly sinks in that I have been sick of Donald Trump and his effect on politics for a decade, as sick of hearing that my objections to him are "Trump Derangement Syndrome" as I am of hearing that I ought to blind myself to other candidates' flaws because he exists.

I will vote for Kamala Harris, but if she loses, it will not be my fault, nor the fault of any other disillusioned moderates and eccentric swing voters. It will be the fault of a Machine that for the third election in a row with (in its telling) Democracy itself on the line convinced itself that it could do no better than Kamala Harris, that bare lip service to moderation is enough. If she wants a shot at winning an election she's currently losing, she should give centrists clear, convincing, genuine reasons to vote for her and not simply against Trump. She should understand that her circumstances are unusual and handle criticism with grace.

I will vote for Kamala Harris. But I won't pretend to like it.

otoh Vogel makes a compelling case

in all seriousness, in the longer term this sort of move is how centrists and disillusioned voters should organize in the United States. forget third parties. you want a bloc of votes that politicians have to pander to

https://x.com/PrinceVogel/status/1816079802694054054