mx. clara sparks

the year is two thousand and four. I am listening to “1985” on my headphones. the pc in my bedroom is not connected to the internet. I have never heard of william stencil, aaron rodrigo, or jessy single. the sky outside my window is blue.

This is actually a pretty minor lapse by @nytimes.com standards; usually when they do one of these undecided voter stories it turns out to be a literal card-carrying local Republican Party official.

Here's a secret to a happy marriage: No law says you have to share blankets just because you share a bed You can curl up in your own lightweight summer blanket while your spouse is rocking a winter duvet You can each have your own favorite color and texture Go wild

Anti-trans propagandists present trans people as making new and radical demands because they don't want to admit that they're stripping trans people of rights that they've enjoyed for DECADES.

Fuck this cult of personality elevator pitch "tell your story" bullshittery. Stories are fiction. I'm doing shit in the real world. Tell me what the thing does, how it does it, and what you want from me, and do it on the goddamn form. Ideas as ✨ personal stories✨ is how we get Elizabeth Holmes.

Total tangent: at my workplace (enormous, siloed, bureaucratic), there's a real culture of I Know A Guy, and I've made it my personal mission to eliminate it wherever I am empowered to do so. Most of the time it's small potatoes, but the acceptance of working this way breeds toxicity in the end.

Never forget, a 13-year study found that protected bike-lanes led to a drastic decline in fatalities for all road users. ALL ROAD USERS. What about painted bike-lanes? No safety improvement at all. For sharrows, it’s actually safer to NOT have them. Via @usa.streetsblog.org @nyc.streetsblog.org

The Lynch department of justice under Obama did a filing in court in 2016 saying transgender women are biological women because biology is a mixture of many elements and one of them is the brain. To the Obama white house this was simple. Now we're supposed to treat the 2016 mainstream as unthinkable

i am about 40 and george w bush and obama are the only presidents we had that i have not heard predatory allegations against. even before the repeal of dobbs we regularly forced pregnant children to get their rapists to sign permission slips to be allowed abortions

i don't really think it is an issue of "becoming". george washington was a rapist. slavery as an institution was about rape. rape has been used by american troops in every war and is inflicted on the areas surrounding every foreign base.

The US government poured all its resources into fabricating evidence that day laborer Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a criminal (all because he embarrassed the despot) even as it now rolls out the red carpet for an actual criminal who happens to be an ally of Trump

Damn, who could have seen this one coming?

Now their descendants refuse to believe their beloved family members could really be racist enough to immiserate the country, the entire planet, just to hurt black people worse. No, it's just rich people brainwashing, no way gutter bigotry is grandma's bedrock politics bsky.app/profile/mc-h...

bluntly this is also what destroyed LBJ and led to the nixon landslide, yes vietnam also mattered and was probably #1, but the white working class was infuriated that black folks would also benefit from the great society programs

People talk about trans women in public the way they talk about cis women in private

Monstrous beyond all reckoning. The US is using remote sensing *designed for humanitarian purposes* for the opposite purpose, potentially drowning civilians en masse. Trump hates Somalis. His troops appear to be exploiting the weather to help slaughter them. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

i also hate how some folks viewed it as proof of it being a phase rather than a lack of support. or that some folks view it as "mere semantics" instead of "this language better reflects my understanding of my identity".

Kavanaugh stops in action: ICE tackled a non-verbal kid near his school, left him with injuries requiring surgery, and then left the scene when they realized he wasn't the person they were looking for www.independent.com/2026/10/23/i...

I appreciate that people want a new Mass Effect, but the future where fans advocate for the work itself and not the people who make it is the one the vultures at EA want. If you'll take it however you get it, they can keep treating people who make what you love as expendable.

Kind of funny, in an Ancient Greek Hell kind of way, that this guy handed Trump the presidency in 2016, and as a reward Trump is kicking him in the teeth forever. www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...

Hungary's recent election was less free and more unfair than the upcoming US midterms, and pro-democracy forces still won. Similar point about Serbia's election this weekend. In normal democracy terms, America is in bad shape. But in consolidated authoritarianism terms, we're looking pretty good.

correct states further down the path of autocracy than us have had those autocracies overthrown by sufficiently large voting numbers recently we can do it here too

People imagine picking up and finding *something better* is an easy solution. But how is that supposed to work, when all your time and energy goes to staying alive? You have almost nothing to set aside to actually fight your way out.

When I tell people about my recent cycling injury, if I mention it's an ebike people have a bunch of untrue assumptions, such as that I was zipping along somewhere at 30 mph when I crashed, as opposed to normal trail riding.

i think cities should enable development according to impersonal rules and then levy impersonal taxes on land to pay for impersonal social services free_speech.png

looked at in longer perspective, it's striking how much this resembles the premodern system of exclusion, rents, and personalist connections, which was--and this part's important--radically worse than the modern system of impersonal rules and general taxation

there is an argument to be made that transphobia is based in a desire for (biological) reproductive control, and that's maybe tactically useful for getting reproductive justice types on board but I don't think that's actually at its root. imo, transphobia is based in a desire for ontological control

Whenever we move away from that vision, leftists get conned into helping rent-seekers get richer. “Building homes might make people rich!” That is what confiscatory top tax rates are for. “Imports could hurt US jobs!” That is why we need a jobs guarantee not just here but around the world.

My vision of socialism is based in sufficiency. Whatever mechanism we use for distributing stuff, the goal is to have enough of it for everyone.

New: "For the last 30 years, our institutions have propped up Bibi, telling us not to question, often refusing to heed even mainstream Israeli partners asking us not to do that. As someone who's worked my whole career to build bridges, I've resisted writing this piece. But– if not now, when?"

The lessons from Brazil and Serbia? Don't concede one inch of ground to the far right. Don't appease. Don't triangulate. Don't grovel. Don't say they have "legitimate concerns". Mobilise your base, and fight them with all the democratic means at your disposal.

The full weight of the UK establishment - NHS, the Times, Baronesses of the House of Lords, all misrepresenting an actual full blown scandal of acute child harm. My research (with @sandraduffy.bsky.social) captures the real situation, centring patient voice journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

If the real priority was actually protecting girls from actual men who pose a risk to them in sports, it would make much more sense to advocate for banning male coaches and male doctors. And I’ve never, ever ever heard that suggestion, because that’s not really what this is about.

this is a perfectly reasonable list, imo these four are all monumentally awful on trans issues and this is a more than fair place to draw the line, especially given how the elections currently look - three of them are in the house, where dems will romp regardless, and iowa can do better than turek