onfocus

Meanwhile, the BM’s political reporters decided that inflation was Biden’s fault because of all the government spending on COVID relief, infrastructure and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US. This was a lie.

This post-election analysis resonates with me. It does feel like many of my own habits, patterns, and assumptions need to change.

Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators' work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable.

It's always good advice to avoid Substack because they’re platforming Nazis and racists. And if for some reason you need another reason to avoid it, why not consider their truly hostile web user experience:

I absolutely despise that a Substack publication’s home page is, typically, nothing more than a sign-up field for your email address to get the publication by email, and a small “No thanks” link to actually read the damn thing. Half the time when I see that page, I just close the tab out of spite. In what world is “No thanks” a good link to convey the meaning “Let me read the thing I came here to read”?

Their awful fade out to sign-up popup as you scroll is also a dark pattern. Willingness to treat readers as rubes you need to trick into subscribing should be a red flag about how the company will continue to make decisions. The fact that so many talented writers and podcasters go along with this is disappointing.

Who in the White House is bothering, while the bully pulpit remains theirs, to educate the public about how the Constitution is supposed to operate?

Excellent questions here. Democrats have power for a brief window, they should be maximizing it while they can.

I’ll be looking for ecosystem growth in directions that enable survival independent of the company. In the way that email is independent of any technology provider or network operator. Just like Mastodon and the Fediverse already are.

This is a good take on how to analyze social media. I also don't want to put any energy into a service that has the full ability to alter the connections at any point. Bluesky is yet another service with high switching costs. That's attractive to investors and advertisers, bad for users.

Many of the shadowbanned site owners attempted to politely push back and point out that the reason all 20 of us were there was specifically because our entire site was deranked from Google in a single night. He continued insisting this didn’t happen and then looked confused that anyone would disagree with him. 

This account of a meeting at Google for de-listed site owners is surreal.

At the very least, put him to the task. Make him execute on what he’s trying to do. It won’t be easy and there are a lot of ways to make it even less easy. That’s the first role of a political opposition.

Yeah, that's enough doomerism. Time to start thinking like an opposition party.

That’s why the people who love him love him so passionately. He is them. And he tells them that being what they are is OK. He never for a second requires America to be better than it is. He never expects more of America than it is able to give. Trump tells America to be garbage. Garbage is easy.

It's like the collective better angels of our nature have been locked away.

Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, Garland, et al. utterly failed to grasp the threat posed by Donald Trump’s Republican Party, including its Supreme Court branch. They sentimentally overestimated the attachment of American whites to the liberal order. They failed to take seriously that vast numbers of Americans inhabit far-right information communities. They undervalued the importance of showing cultural solidarity with working-class voters. And so on and so forth.

This is what I have been most disappointed about. Watching our institutions erode under a democratic President has been hard to take. Most disheartening was the supreme court commission that felt like an excuse to keep the failing status quo. Our leaders let us down.

This is why it is so horribly wrong to hear the likes of Chris Matthews smugly declare on Morning Joe that identity politics is dead because identity politics are to blame for Harris’ loss. Can he not hear himself? The election of Trump is the product of identity politics: white identity politics, dismissing, disdaining, and threatening people of every other identity.

LOL, the idea that this election wasn't won on identity politics is the definition of white supremacy.

Nobody likes to lose. So when your side loses an election, there’s huge social and psychological pressure to change your stance, to moderate what you believe so you don’t feel like a loser. Don’t do it. Things are worth believing and fighting for.

Good, necessary rant for today.

It's frustrating because the truth is much simpler and also doesn't put these two genders at loggerheads: Harris is better for both men and women, and Trump is much, much worse for people of any gender.

Revenge and chaos isn’t good for any human. Please vote for stability.