benvanloon.com - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

A guide to various resources for tracking what Trump-Musk are up to. choosedemocracy.us/tracking-tra...

submitted 1 day ago • 14 comments

"Of all man's miseries, the bitterest is this: to know so much, and to have control over nothing." - Herodotus

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Eventually, it will be: To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

"In the royal MAGA court, “Christian” [...] is a privileged status awarded by the Great Leader to politically useful religious people. With this sleight of hand, Trump’s “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias” order licenses persecution groups he declares disloyal." contrarian.substack.com/p/what-anti-...

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

"Law and order" in the Trump era: if you bow down to the head of the U.S. government, he may help you - whether you're awaiting trial for sex crimes in Europe or doing time in the USA for physically assaulting police.

submitted 5 days ago • 513 comments

The rightward drift of Silicon Valley didn’t come out of nowhere. In 2014, Corey Pein detailed the then emerging connections between tech elites and neo-fascist thinkers like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land.

submitted 5 days ago • 8 comments

I wrote about Elon Musk and Gavin Kliger and acknowledging the reality of what they are: Nazis.

submitted 5 days ago • 113 comments

SCOOP: The top US election security watchdog has frozen all of its efforts to aid states in securing elections. The move represents the first major example of the country’s cyber defense agency accommodating Trump’s false claims of election fraud and online censorship.

submitted 8 days ago • 262 comments

#ValentinesDay, not just about romantic love. Copper engraving from the wonderful Le Centre de l’Amour (ca. 1687), a French emblem book on the subject of love. More here: buff.ly/2l3z2Yj

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

1/2 "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse...

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

"Foreign national intelligence organizations will be quick to take advantage of both the chaos and the new insecurities to steal US data. Each day of continued unrestricted access ... increases the risk of irreversible damage to these critical systems." foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/11/d...

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

"The current Polity score for the United States is much less democratic than it was in 2020. On its front page, Polity states flat out: The USA is no longer considered a democracy and lies at the cusp of autocracy." open.substack.com/pub/danieldr...

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

feels similar to how the Soviet dictatorship was set up. the nominal presidency is quickly becoming meaningless, while dictatorial power accumulates at DOGE by planting commissars in every agency talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/not-h...

submitted 10 days ago • 62 comments

If you've ever used the Polity data, read this from Monty Marshall. tl;dr Polity is coding recent US events as an executive self-coup and an adverse regime change.

submitted 10 days ago • 56 comments

All of these headlines say US inflation rose "unexpectedly." Guess they weren't paying attention to every damn signal and forecast and prognostication over the past year.

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state... This is by far the best, clearest and most realistic analysis of what we're in for that I've seen.

submitted 11 days ago • 51 comments

submitted 11 days ago • 885 comments

Steve Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die "the U.S. is sliding toward a more 21st-century model of autocracy: competitive authoritarianism" www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv... "A failure to resist... could pave the way for authoritarian entrenchment" www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

submitted 11 days ago • 11 comments

1/ To temper the ongoing (mis)information assault in the US, it's helpful to filter new information into three different "interests": a) Musk/Thiel/Vance/DOGE = the Nazi interest b) Project 2025 = the KKK interest c) Trump = the mafia/criminal interest

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

Great job by Ruben (@rubenbolling.bsky.social).

submitted 16 days ago • 485 comments

An important announcement from the Governor of Illinois.

submitted 15 days ago • 587 comments

And there it is: Russell Vought is confirmed. I wrote a long profile of him, his worldview, his political project: He’s one of the architects of Project 2025, an avowed Christian nationalist, and a radical ideologue of the “post-constitutional” Right. He is at war with pluralistic democracy.

submitted 16 days ago • 190 comments

ICE operations continue at their normal, pre-Trump pace, but now exploit Google algorithms to make their pace appear more aggressive (re: "shock and awe") = food for the cult, empty calories for everyone else. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” ― Mark Twain

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

➡️ January 20: FAA director fired ➡️ January 21: Air Traffic Controller hiring frozen ➡️ January 22: Aviation Safety Advisory Committee disbanded ➡️ January 28: Buyout/retirement demand sent to existing employees ➡️ January 29: First American mid-air collision in 16 years Making America Great Again!

submitted 23 days ago • 1414 comments

"The leader may dissolve or render powerless the national legislature and unlawfully assume extraordinary powers. Other measures may include annulling the nation's constitution, suspending civil courts, and having the head of government assume dictatorial powers." en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments