punished brian

Modern Republicanism is making up a thing to be scared about and then using that as the basis for policy

"Cars are the most absurd means of transport in a city. They are parked 95 per cent of the time. It takes two tonnes to move someone who weighs 70 kilogrammes. And the denser the city, the more absurd it is."

people say the right is a death cult, but it just seems like all america is one. they want us to all die with them.

i used to prefer chunky, but my family and society pressured and conditioned me not to.

This is precisely why the “big tent” concept is a red herring that only serves as a force of conservatism. A big tent means inviting reactionaries and expecting everyone on the left to just eat shit because where else are we going to go?

my winter's long nightmare is finally over

$200 a barrel is misleading. You're not just paying for the container, but also the valuable crude oil inside of it.

This is the most important thing I’ve ever done. Please watch and spread my message

A day after a poll shows California voters want to tax oligarchs, the oligarchs announced plans to simply buy all of California's elections.

What stage of oligarchy is this?

The South ending Reconstruction and plunging their populations into a backward looking culture and economy until it was forced to modernize by the Civil Rights movement is imo a very clean parallel.

gosh it would be nice if the enormous police state even tried to prevent terrorist hate crimes instead of deporting children and college students

it would also be great if the big “Stop Antisemitism” machine would actually stop antisemitism instead of being mad when someone criticizes Netanyahu

yeah, my dream would just be a one car household.

i just want viable alternatives to driving. but when i say that, i say it knowing it only works if it works for everyone. but furthermore, car dependency is a huge barrier to mobility for a lot of people.

Map of the straight of hormuz with peak oil graph superimposed on top of it. This is very clever and funny

Can this be a solution?

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor Let there be as much outrage from politicians in Washington when kids go hungry as there is when I break bread with New Yorkers. Quote Coach Tommy Tuberville @SenTuberville · 4h The enemy is inside the gates. x.com/EndWokeness/st… 12:50 PM · Mar 12, 2026 · 82.6K Views

رَمَضان كَريم

this is still the realest thing ever said about america

this is a lot like polling on health insurance. do you like your employer based health insurance? well, i hate it but it's better than the alternative, which is no healthcare.

People will say this and then complain about traffic, parking and the price of gas in the next sentence. Cars are machines for cognitive dissonance.

"Americans prefer a car-dependent lifestyle."

I can't tell you how much I hate this glib sentiment. The only way to determine someone's true, enduring preference is to give them full familiarity with their options. Americans have no familiarity with their options! They've only seen sprawl!

I think the national nostalgia and idealization around college campuses really undercuts this assumption, too imo.

Narratively having Ever Given getting stuck in 2021 to set up Hormuz in 2026 is great foreshadowing. You want your audience to understand the basics of international shipping in a lower stakes context so you drop the real plot without a lot of saggy exposition about the minutiae of cargo logistics.

Folks should learn the history of how Miller McClintock, Paul Hoffman, and the auto lobby brought car dominance to Los Angeles in the 1920s.

There's a great @thewaroncars.bsky.social episode about it: thewaroncars.org/episode-161-...

The car lobby is why they kept adding more lanes to freeways in California instead of investing in public trans. California got labeled environmentally conscious somehow by adding electric cars and hybrids to the mix. Still more cars. Losses touted as wins. Waymo is the next verse in the same song

2008 was a great opportunity for a green new deal. needed jobs, needed to fix the grid, energy independence was already critical. the us owned gm, for christs sake and just gave it back with no strings attached. instead we doubled down on fracking.

The “we” here of course is billionaires, rich right wing pedophiles and the worst people you’ll find in suburban Houston

nigel farage tweet: The Bank of England is replacing Winston Churchill with a picture of a beaver on our bank notes. This is the definition of woke.

i, for one, am delighted that we finally have a definition of “woke”

Reaching net zero by 2050 is often framed as a cost burden.

The UK Climate Change Committee’s latest analysis suggests the opposite.

The real risk is fossil fuel dependency.

this mystery driver drove through a bike lane and up over the curb before smashing through 2 signs & uprooting an entire streetlight.
but hey those darn cyclists are a menace.
#DriversBehavingBadly

I was over on x dot com scoping out things to talk about on youtube dot com and across a unique and cunning plan for dealing with the strait of hormuz