@jmoiron.bsky.social Due to the distorted framing of US politics, centrists think they are straddling some enlightened middle, but they are actually just ordinary conservatives. You can tell this is true because there is no electoral result for which their answer is not "Democrats should move to the...
jmoiron plays the blues
@jmoiron.bsky.social TIL that the words dale (meaning valley) and dollar ($) are related.
The late medieval silver coins minted in the mining town Joachimstal ended up being called "taler/thaler", from which we get the word dollar. The "tal" in Joachimstal is the German form of dale.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Teach a man a fancy AI text editor and they can hate it for a day, but teach a man vim and he can hate it for a lifetime.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Basically all astrophotography is not what your eyes can see but it is still pretty awesome.
@jmoiron.bsky.social I know he is more famous for the late Kurosawa films he did, but I always liked Tatsuya Nakadai's performance in Dai-bosatsu Toge (called "Sword of Doom" in the west).
RIP to a real legend of Japanese cinema.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Ezra Klein is a smart guy, but he's too credulous of people who want to smuggle extremist positions through moderate language (eg. he likes Douthat) and he's incapable of judging a game of checkers because he thinks all board games are 4d chess.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Sadly I think he'd have a good chance, even though voting against him again would be fun.
@jmoiron.bsky.social AMOC shutdown is unfathomably catastrophic. You know how Toronto is the latitude of Marseille, but much colder? Imagine European latitudes with Canadian climates.
During the last AMOC shutdown, the winters in Paris were similar to Winnipeg, UK summers similar to Reykjavik.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: I'm not sure why, but we still don't fully understand the false efficacy of deploying state violence against protests.
The dispersal may have ended the news story and killed the media attention, but people don't somehow become convinced just because they were silenced.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Columbia, in NYC, was the epicenter.
Students took to their campus quads to protest complicity in what is plainly a genocide, and they got a fascist crackdown as reward.
Student leaders here on visas were detained and threatened with deportation for thought crimes.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Gen Z voters turned out big for Mamdani, which you can view as a rejection the false equivalence of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
After all, many of them have been subject to a similar campaign accusing them of being antisemitic for not being Zionist.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: IMHO, Mamdani set the battle grounds for this election to be fought on, affordability. His messaging made it the issue NYC residents said they cared most about.
The classic ploys of trying to make it about crime and public safety were attempted and failed. Mamdani owned the atte...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: This becomes more stark when you look at the accounts of the Israeli reaction, where its right-wing leaders attempt to equate Zohran with the 9/11 hijackers among many other clear Islamophobic claims:
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/w...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: I'm not an expert in the interplay between Zionism, Islamophobia and antisemitism, and I'm not part of any of these groups.
It's nonetheless pretty clear that Zionist groups were relentless in this characterization (eg. the ADL), and non-Zionist groups weren't:
bsky.app/profile...
@jmoiron.bsky.social When I wrote about Mamdani's primary victory, I focused a lot on how Islamophobia formed the unspoken core of the campaign to label him antisemitic.
Predictably, his opponents tried to turn this up to 11 during the election, and I'm glad it failed.
jmoiron.net/blog/zohran-... (...
@jmoiron.bsky.social New York in Autumn is not too bad. Let's hope we can pull out the old R L Stine quote later tonight.
@jmoiron.bsky.social Fewer than 10 users block me on bsky apparently, but among them is my favorite band, who:
1. last released an album in 2012
2. I saw live at least 20 times
3. follows me on twitter
Oh! turn to water, sublimate to steam,
then form a cloud and pour on me.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Centrists never seem to think the answer is to fight for your convictions and move the public.
In the 90s, "liberal" was a political smear. Self-identified Liberals co-opt this term, and its potency has been lost. The GOP has to call anyone left of Mussolini "far-left radical ma...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: "D's are too liberal" is conventional wisdom in the US, but this is a product of the information environment. As Rufo clearly stated, their strategy is to establish a label and then poison the public's association with that label. Woke, DEI, Green New Deal, Democrat.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: The three most high profile congressional Democratic leaders are Schumer, Pelosi, and Jeffries. They are written about constantly. The first two have been in power for decades.
Can you name a single issue that animates them?
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: As Klein himself says, aligned independents and progressive policies tend to outpoll the Democratic brand. So which is more likely to be right? That the policies are too liberal and Dems should moderate, or that the filling the halls of power with empty suits void of conviction i...