Elizabeth Spiers

I still have my well worn copy of Design for Community

Jack liked the bsky idea because he thought by turning Twitter into a protocol he would be excused from having to do the messy community work that’s the actual hard part of social media - an ethos that almost destroyed bsky in the beginning and still lies at the root of all their bad decisions.

Something very funny about Trump shattering American power by running out of weapons losing an unpopular war he started for no reason. Like, we all knew this was the final season for the Pax Americana, but that’s a heck of a swerve. Hats off to the writers’ room.

Folder: War
SKILL.MD

No chatbot ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making some other poor dumb chatbot die for his country.

Also, this one is Sunday!

Quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Sooner or later people believe writers rather than the government.

I'm teaching an opinion writing workshop next Tuesday. The workshop includes a one on one follow up Zoom where I help develop and edit a column, which is why it's priced at $350. But if you JUST want to attend the workshop, you can now audit for $100. www.elizabethspiers.com/workshops/

Now that Republicans have done Trump's bidding by blocking limits on his war powers, remember that in doing this, they are also relieving *themselves* of the obligation to vote on the enormously consequential decision of whether to go to war. Craven abdication.

newrepublic.com/article/2072...

Wait maybe it was a bad idea to gut the State Department

Blacamán the Good, Vendor of Miracles | Esquire | JANUARY 1972 Let the buyer beware, and therefore the seller be afraid

Actually, I like this translation a lot better, but it's harder to read: classic.esquire.com/article/1972...

Archive | Blacamán the Good Miracle Seller by Gabriel García Márquez - The London Magazine From the archives, this short story by Gabriel García Márquez originally appeared in the March 1970 edition of The London Magazine.

This is my favorite short story of all time: thelondonmagazine.org/archive-blac...

(Gabriel Garcia Marquez quote via The Paris Review.)

Quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Sooner or later people believe writers rather than the government.

I'm teaching an opinion writing workshop next Tuesday. The workshop includes a one on one follow up Zoom where I help develop and edit a column, which is why it's priced at $350. But if you JUST want to attend the workshop, you can now audit for $100. www.elizabethspiers.com/workshops/

There's been a lot of debate within the Democratic establishment about what rhetoric to use via ICE.

Well, an incumbent doesn't lose by 48 percentage points very often—and her vote on collaborating with ICE was the defining issue here.

Winter getting shorter in 80% of major US cities, new data shows Researchers find that across 195 US cities, winters are on average nine days shorter than they were in 1970-1997

That is not correct, and we are already seeing shorter winters www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

@karlbode.com's new newsletter is a must-read for any one who wants to keep up on the politics and democratic implications of media and tech policy. He is one of the very best journalists on the beat and he deserves our support!

Their crappy misleading polling is the least of my issues with them, but still.

(If you follow me, you know I generally loathe Third Way.) if they wanted to actually know what people think (research to know) they’d ask the question differently. But they don’t

One of the first things I learned about polling from @peterfeld.bsky.social was the difference between “research to know” and “research to show”. This is the latter. The question is framed in a way that makes abolition look like an extreme and conflates it with no enforcement

Yeah, maybe in your community, which sounds like it's mostly military people who are least taught responsible gun safety. Where I grew up, the people stockpiling guns are not experts on antique Smith & Wessons

This is basically the Trump admin's explanation for everything they fuck up: we poured kerosine all over the house and dropped a lit match into it but the fire, you understand, is someone else's fault--and we're gonna fix it!

Ok, well, that's fair. I think that makes you a BIG exception to the rule though.

Pres Trump told me tonight the US had identified possible candidates to take over Iran, but they were killed in the initial attack. "The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates," Trump told me. "It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead."

complete insanity

I'm not worried about people collecting antique firearms, and I think you know that. I'm talking about the people like the guy in the story who are amassing all sorts of firearms and protective equipment and large capacity magazines.

Although gun ownership is associated with positive feelings about firearms within “gun culture” (Pierre, 2015; Kalesan et al., 2016; Metzl, 2019), most research comparing gun owners to non-gun owners suggests that ownership is rooted in fear. While long guns have historically been owned primarily for hunting and other recreational purposes, US surveys dating back to the 1990s have revealed that the most frequent reason for gun ownership and more specifically handgun ownership is self-protection (Cook and Ludwig, 1997; Azrael et al., 2017; Pew Research Center, 2017). Research has likewise shown that the decision to obtain a firearm is largely motivated by past victimization and/or fears of future victimization (Kleck et al., 2011; Hauser and Kleck, 2013).

I'm sure it won't. But I'm sure you're not prepared to dig into why you find them fascinating either. And for most gun owners, it boils down to fear:

More Guns Do Not Stop More Crimes, Evidence Shows More firearms do not keep people safe, hard numbers show. Why do so many Americans believe the opposite?

And gun ownership does not reduce crime: www.scientificamerican.com/article/more...

The Relationship Between Gun Ownership and Firearm Homicide Rates in the United States, 1981–2010 Objectives. We examined the relationship between levels of household firearm ownership, as measured directly and by a proxy—the percentage of suicides committed with a firearm—and age-adjusted firearm homicide rates at the state level. Methods. We ...

I see that you have a vested interest in gun ownership, but the data is against you re: per capita gun fatalities and gun control laws. Higher levels of gun ownership = higher levels of gun related homicide: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Drugs to treat to HIV are a triumph of science and public health. Restricting these drugs imperils those losing them and risks the virus to mutating into resistant forms. Like the cuts to USAID before them, what a waste of life, hope and progress.

You cannot talk like this about any other minority in America.

And if it was any other president’s adviser who said something like this about any other minority, it’d be the instant end of their presidency.

Yeah, that's how I remember it growing up. Not so much now.

The shooter here got a fairly light sentence and it seems like the only reason he was convicted at all was because the GIANT STOCKPILE OF GUNS did not reflect well on his him and what his intentions were.