elikahn.bsky.social
Urban/environmental policy guy, YIMBY, sci-fi/fantasy writer, liberal. đłď¸âđ. Californian in the DC area. All posts represent my views, not those of my employer.
where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?
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illinoy-ans
(at least thatâs how Iâve usually heard it. Iâm not from there)
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so you ended up with lots of photos of weddings, widely considered a happy occasion, against angry opponents. iow a lot of people probably went from âthey just want love uwuâ to âtheir opponents are weird creepsâ to âgay rights are an important civil rights fightâ to âgay sex is fineâ
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ie one of the ways gay people are marginalized is we donât benefit from the euphemisms that straight people get when their sex lives are discussedâespecially in weddings. Pushing for SSM turned that to our advantage by using the familiar language straight ppl use to legitimate their own sexuality
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so I will defend it as the correct strategic focus! I think what both the advocates and the strongest opponents understood, that the leftist critics and other intellectuals often donât, was that marriage was the most effective policy proxy for *approval of homosexuality*
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iirc the newspaper with the highest readership *in California* is the New York Times
CA should create a subsidy for independent, local, public-interest journalism so that Californians arenât dependent for their news on East Coasters who look down on them when they think of them at all!
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I can only speak for myself but personally, I feel deeply negative and wish people would stop using âcrusadeâ that way!
and moreover, I feel *much* more strongly about that than in either direction about âintifadaâ
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âoh this is the foreword so actually this is page xxviiâ bro, what?
yeah good thing you brought in Roman numerals, otherwise I wouldnât be able to use the same page numbers for different editions of the main text, a thing I can definitely do now,
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yeah, I didnât take a CS class in college but my impression was that the CS department was valiantly trying to teach coding as a set of habits of mind and techniques that belong in a liberal arts curriculum, and both wider society and most students were intent on treating it as Employability Studies
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richard florida has basically found roughly this as a quantified empirical finding!
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Itâll be hard to know this for sure before the later-round results come out bc I think Jews would have been disproportionately likely to rank Lander first, but my hypothesis is non-Orthodox Jews basically voted the same re Cuomo/Mamdani as white voters generally (ofc not all Jews are white etc)
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libertarian kook in the 90s: in my manifesto I invented Operation Torment Nexus as a delusional conspiracy theory
self-styled libertarians today: at last we have created Operation Torment Nexus from classic libertarian manifesto âBeware the Imminent Deployment of Operation Torment Nexusâ
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probably a generational thing as much as anything else
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Steven Universe: somehow all three of the above
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CHOOSE YOUR FIGHTER:
-understanding politics via a grimdark fantasy about feudalism
-understanding politics via a Buddhist-Campbellian space opera about whether evil is genetic
-understanding politics via a boarding-school Bildungsroman where a hat tells you if youâre Good, Evil, Smart, or Nice
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perhaps that arc in Game of Thrones resonated especially strongly with men of that ideological tendency because they can imagine nothing more humiliating than being asked to accept the leadership of a woman
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The most comprehensive summary Iâve found is by Ginny Monk at the CT Mirror, though Iâm not sure itâs up to date about the governorâs position:
ctmirror.org/2025/06/03/c...
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ah yes, the old âreverse Toyotomi Hideyoshiâ
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but no, every day in urban America itâs this
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we as a society have already perfected âcommunity engagementâ: our system for engaging the community and building support for a policy program is called an election. once you get peopleâs votes, you implement your agenda! if you will the ends you must also will the means to those ends!
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the way bike lanes, or traffic improvements generally, should work is the city should just do them, and if youâre that pressed about it, you can vote against your city council member at the next election!
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âUGH I canât BELIEVE weâre talking about this again, now to click on posts about it from big accounts to see how many of the replies are going to get me upsetâ
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I was taught a list of logical fallacies in a philosophy class once, and I think if I had to teach that material Iâd want to emphasize â*why* do people reason in these ways? in what situations might these arguments convey useful information?â instead of just âaha, appeal to emotion! thatâs a foul!â
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this thought has occurred to me about enough things people have said that it was time to make this meme
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Charitably, itâs the logic of TV ad buys, where you spend a big chunk of your campaign money to propagate a 30-second message and have to make hard choices about what to emphasize (even then, âitâs a distractionâ is something to tell your staff, not the voters). Social media doesnât work like this!
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boring probably accurate gloss: they suck you into eternal debates
more-fun gloss: theyâre conspiracy theorists who donât believe in the La Brea Tar Pits
even-more-fun gloss: theyâre pedants who will pop into any discussion of the Tar Pits to go âactually itâs pitch, not tarâ
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Oh I mean my grand theory of world politics is that liberalism used to be unable to win elections alone, but increased connection and education has broadened the base of dyed-in-the-wool liberals, and formerly cross-pressured voters now see liberalism as the biggest threat
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I think the most important effects are on the center-right - in the US the center-right sees the far right as the alcoholic sibling who has to be in the wedding even though theyâll make a scene; in European countries the center-right sees the far right as *crashing* the wedding
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a related and Iâd say even more important lesson is Democrats absolutely have to appoint Democrats to all male-coded roles like SecDef, FBI head, DNI etc, especially law enforcement ones. If you need to appoint a Republican for ~bipartisanship~ points put them at HHS or Dept of Ed or something
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oh and South LA: the Bronx obvs, right down to the embarrassing whiteness-related reasons I forgot to put it on the list at first lol
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the main things about LA that people who havenât spent time there get wrong arenât LA specific imo - people think everything is closer together than it is and mix up stuff with similar names
(The Westside, Westwood, Westlake, West Hollywood, and West LA all annoyingly mean different things tho)
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I donât actually know NYC geography super well but aiui:
Westside LA: Manhattan
Eastside LA: Brooklyn (ish)
the Valley: New Jersey
the SGV: Queens
Lancaster/Palmdale/Santa Clarita: Staten Island
Orange County: Connecticut
Santa Monica Mts and north to the Central Coast: Westchester Co
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a compromise position everyone can get behind: blame it on Ohio