Neil O'Brian

Interesting thoughts from other people

[ettingermentum @ettingermentum]

His party hasn’t lost a senate race in Georgia for a decade but yeah let’s all bow down and worship McConnell because he flipped a bunch of R+35 seats previously held by retiring blue dogs in 2014.

[ettingermentum @ettingermentum]

My stupidest revisionist opinion is that he’s actually what people think McConnell is. He’s managed his party into like an 80% swing state win rate over 10 years despite only being given one true wave cycle. It’s an impressive record!

[Matthew Zeitlin @MattZeitlin]

When you look at budgets, staffing, and how people engage with NYC government on a day to day basis, the NYPD and DOE are a huge chunk of that and for all the stuff and vision Mamdani has, there’s not much on police or K-12 thats different from the status quo

[James Medlock @jdcmedlock]

One day I hope to convince conservatives that we should enforce the rule of law, reduce the deficit, and not carelessly tear down the institutions prior generations built, but today is not that day.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Mike Johnson: "When people are promising free things to you, you must ask what the real price is. It is your freedom. It will drive costs up. It will ruin the economy. It will make people more dependent upon government, and that's the communist's ultimate goal."

(Trump literally just proposed giving people $5,000 if they vote Republican ... )

[Zaid Jilani @ZaidJilani]

MTG is the reverse Fetterman

[1926 Live @100YearsAgoLive]

Katherine Slaughterback, a dryland prairie homesteader on the Colorado plains, kills 140 rattlesnakes, allegedly in self-defense.

Kate plans to use them to make a dress.

[Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma]

It’s funny how no one in progressive circles calls you anti-labor if you disagree with them on something that is pro-growth—you have 100% permission to be a scab as long as it’s in the interest of degrowth

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

In these accounts it looks like engaged parents can help broader school life, but they can't really control the core reading and math functions, and that's why they implement their own parallel at-home schooling instead.

[Chris Pavlovski 🏴‍☠️ @chrispavlovski]

The tariffs will go down in history as one of the smartest moves in American global trade history.

Bookmark this and come back in a year.

[Zachary Donnini @ZacharyDonnini]

Trump now has the lowest net approval of any president at this point or earlier in their presidency since polling began in 1945.

It's now more than 10 points worse than both his own first term and Biden's at the same point.

[Eric Nelson @literaryeric]

Trump is building a military bunker in the White House he wants done before he has to leave in January 2029, and we wants his arch to have a sniper's nest and drone launchers and be done by January 2029. That's all normal and cool and nothing to worry about, right?

[1776 Live @250YearsAgoLive]

A fire in New York City destroys 10-25% of the city and results in mass looting.

Both the British and the Americans blame one another.

One Hessian Major writes that “we are paying ourselves well by plundering houses near by the fire.”

[Neil O'Brian @nobrian]

In midterms since 2010 the president's party has won only 33% of House races rated as toss-up.

[Nate Silver @NateSilver538]

So yeah, the expert ratings don't make any sense. They're assuming roughly a D +2 or D +3 national environment. That's inconsistent with pretty much all the current and historical evidence. While I'd never rule out a systematic polling error, that shouldn't be your baseline.

[Sean T at RCP @SeanTrende]

$$$ to victory margin is a roughly logarithmic function. $10k to $100k makes a big difference, but $100k to $190k doesn't. $100k to $1M makes a big difference, but $1M to $2M doesn't. $1M to $10M makes a big difference, etc.

[Michael Beschloss @BeschlossDC]

LBJ breaks ground for JFK's national memorial-- the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts--December 1964, a year after President Kennedy's assassination (Robert Kennedy stands in rear):

[BabelColour @StuartHumphryes]

This is the 16-year-old English actress Ellen Terry. But you haven't seen her in any recent blockbuster, not least because the photo was actually taken 162 years ago, during the height of the American Civil War, and 3 decades before moving film was even invented! I have cleaned-up this astonishingly modern-looking portrait which was taken in 1864 by photographer Julia Cameron on the Isle of Wight. She simply called the portrait "Sadness".

[Chris Hayes @chrislhayes]

Donald Trump: climate champion!

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

Listen if your model of what has happened is that the EAs have launched a coup I think you have very bad judgement.

Here is what actually happened: a very large number of people have slowly grown aware of the potential AI has to radically transform human society. Most people who contemplate this are uncomfortable with this—because they do not like change, because they do not like ceding agency and control to something they do not understand, because they distrust Silicon Valley, because they fear the apocalypse, because they fear the dystopian-lite future many AI futurists advocate as a the “good” outcome. Take your pick, it could be any of those. The point though is that the majority of people who become aware of the technology’s trajectory are not comfortable with it.

For a long time this did not seem to matter because people kept these feelings to themselves. They weren’t confident they understood the issue; the entire problem seemed far-out there and sci-fi; they didn’t want to look bad; and if they were politicians, they did not want to needlessly upset an engine of the National economy.

Nevertheless the unease has been growing for months and months and months now and if you did not realize this you were living in a bubble.

Well now your bubble has popped. An event occurred that made it suddenly OK for folks to express the anxieties that had slowly been building up this year, and the expression came in one big flood. It is a classic “preference cascade.”

The people who are trying to gin this up to some master plan of a group of activists have their head stuck in the ground—it reminds me of the liberals who refused to see Trump’s genuine grassroots popularity until they were whacked in the head by it.

[Zaid Jilani @ZaidJilani]

Exactly. America is a massive immigration success story. Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis who would never be friends overseas are interchangeable in the United States. https://t.co/6tf2ZYJA57