iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

what the hell is his problem with beards. regular Americans haven’t had bad associations with beards since the 1960s

Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈

Why the news media considers it acceptable to make calculations of newsworthiness based on "is there already coverage of other scandals related to the same individual elsewhere in the paper" is an exercise I'll leave up to the reader

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 8h

Even conceding that Democrats would benefit from having more loudly Christian candidates, I think what white Christian progressives imagine that to be is not necessarily what would resonate with Black or Latino Christian progressives, or with swing voters, or any other particular group

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 8h

I’d guess that of the algo-speak euphemisms, the ones that sound almost serious are going to survive whereas the silly, juvenile ones are going to fade. “Unalive” has a kind of grave Victorian decorousness to it, whereas a serious news broadcast is never going to report from the scene of a “pew pew”

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 22h

i think the perfect compromise on “too much STEM, we need more liberal arts majors” discourse is that the only people given power should be Russian literature majors with dramatic arts minors who later got a masters degree in public policy

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

when politics seems hopeless that makes it even more important to commit to finding joy. it’s one thing to say you’ll be happy when the world improves if that’s just a matter of winning one election, but if you think the world will never improve, then what, just be miserable until you die?

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

literally the only reason anyone who doesn’t share at least 25% of Lindsey Graham’s DNA would consider buying a ticket to this would be prurient curiosity about whether he says he’s gay in it, so I’m worried that Paramount is going to market it by heavily implying he does

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

i feel like the correct response to “you [read: us] coastal liberals are out of touch if you [read: we] don’t know and enjoy the following culture items!!!” discourse is just to dramatically assert that you are the monoculture and all your interests are universal

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The lesson of Hasan Piker is that Democratic politicians have to be doing vice signaling, because if they don’t, influencers with no party loyalty and less well-calibrated understanding of where to stop will do it instead, capturing the ambient desire for it against the party instead of for it.

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Not sure if I have a thesis for why, but it is striking that within big-city Democratic politics, the intellectual heft and innovative energy is overwhelmingly on the left

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

this post on the part of the Bass campaign makes me a lot more optimistic than the poll itself, I’m not gonna lie

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Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈

The Fact of Other Minds Stan Account @csilverandgold.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Everybody deported 2025-2028 should be brought back and immediately made a US citizen unless they have a conviction for a violent crime. Even then, they should lowkey get a free flight to wherever they would prefer to live aside from the US.

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

i do not believe the statistic in this headline, and neither does the article, which tells you that “forty percent of women who responded to [the survey] said they have concerns… about hormonal birth control” and “33 percent named social media as the reason they don’t want to use it”

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

the fact that some industrial workers felt they had a right to rip up democracy and freedom not just for *a* job but for *their preferred* job is really galling. no one has ever treated my career frustrations as a public policy issue, and they never will. was that a possibility the whole time?

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

if bret is really peeved about this there’s nothing stopping him from creating his own book award. the National Book Awards, like almost all awards, are ultimately just some guy, not the final word on books. go make your own if you feel so strongly! unless he’d rather just complain, of course

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

so is the rule just that Republican presidents have to be given six years’ worth of taking a blowtorch to the country before Americans decide that’s bad?

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Only true if you count coastlines as borders (not even then! what about Illinois?) and moreover, enough with this “ThE hEaRtLaNd” nonsense. No one before now has ever defined that term to exclude anything with a border!

post by Bloomberg reporter Steven T. Dennis: “Democrats have just 4 senators from states without an international border - Colorado and Nevada. The Iowa / Kansas Nebraska sudden battlegrounds are doubly interesting- not just for control of the Senate but whether Ds figure out how to win again in the heartland.”

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Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈

Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

why would you want to live in a place that it snows instead of the same state as Yosemite, Death Valley, and Mount Shasta

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

time until social battery depletion: -talking IRL to a friend: infinite -talking IRL to non-friends: a couple hours -video or phone call with a friend: 2ish hours -video or phone call otherwise: 45 minutes -text-based convo where there may be an expectation of real-time response: 20 seconds

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

at this point I’ve gotten used to most genres of short-form video content that are a guy doing stuff except he’s hot and that’s the real draw, but it’s still depressing when it’s tradespeople. like what do you MEAN you run a concrete pouring business with your gym bro

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Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈

opfuchs.gay @opfuchs.gay · 19/09/2026

The Enlightenment was simply correct. We shall fight for it.

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

hilarious how somehow, against all odds, “fowl” is a monophyletic clade

en.wikipedia.org

Fowl - Wikipedia

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

so, here’s the thing. All of the following are distinct claims: A) It’s morally right to use Americans’ sex-negativity to bring about reasonable regulation of AI B) Some leading rationalists are sex pests C) Influential voices on AI all know each other, so what they say is tainted by groupthink

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

imo his friends are lying to him, or the actual conversations he’s having are him heavily prompting them to say something negative about Mamdani followed by them expressing mild/equivocal criticism

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

i DEMAND a politically significant sex cult centered on My Immortal

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

“I didn’t need to know about—“ skill issue, personally I need to know everything

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I considered a bunch of answers that might be more original/thought-provoking, but ultimately it’s Crime and Punishment, hands down

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Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈

the abbot of unreason (a returned archaeologist) @merovingians.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

every serious Dem has to promise trials. not 'investigations'. actual legal consequences.

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I feel like people are overrating the odds of “AI means the only jobs left are manual labor and nursing” and underrating the odds of “AI means the only jobs left are being the person who gets fired if the AI makes a big enough mistake, and nursing”

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Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈

J. C. Cantwell 🌻 @segfaultvicta.aludel.xyz · 17/09/2026

clowning is fun for everyone but the problem is that the normie takeaway is, now, "tech people have weird sex" and not "tech people have incestuously tangled power/consent structures the contours of which are worryingly relevant to domestic policy and the future of technology"

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

HEARTBREAKING: a guy who you once had a bad interaction with on social media independently arrived at a clever insight you also had

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

people are allowed to mute whatever terms they please, but personally I would much rather this site talked about questionable people and their orgy-related dataviz all day every day than do another round of Between Liberals and Leftists, Who’s Being Unreliable Coalition Partners discourse 🤷‍♂️

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

model dialogue: DASTARDLY CORPORATE MEDIA DEBATE MODERATOR: And now to you, Senator. Rapid-fire: abolish ICE, yes or no? OUR INTREPID 2028 CANDIDATE: We can’t abolish border enforcement, but we need to get rid of ICE and start from zero. DCMDM: So is that a yes on abolishing ICE?

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

even if we did have common ground, it’s not enough because we actually need comprehensive immigration reform. there’s stuff that needs to get done that Republicans are dead set against! “common ground” is not an end in itself!

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

i know I’m in a bubble because 100% of posts i see about Ed Zitron on here are negative, even though Zitron clearly has a large following that itself sees itself as swimming against the tide of public opinion probably a sign of a well-calibrated set of follows on my part, it’s just funny

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

possibly the best one-sentence summary of politics in the 21st century so far:

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

part of the issue with social media is the globalization of formerly regional brainworms you can see this in the number of non-US posters who start parroting US-based culture war talking points, and you can also see it in the importation to the US of formerly foreign varieties of antisemitism

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

i am suddenly reminded that in 2010 when Obama’s approval rating was maybe in the mid-forties, people in the media floated the idea that maybe Clinton should run in 2012 instead of Obama running for reelection, or take Biden’s place as the VP nominee

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

people who are trying to come up with populist things for Democrats to do are really overindexing on “cutesy ways to hand out money” and underindexing on “public spectacles in which enemies of the people are tormented”

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

many people are saying right-wingers are against men being hot this is also why Grassley tweeted about Rob Sand having been a model in his younger years as though that was disqualifying

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

the world if the Democratic Party were actually in a position to be the string-puller behind all the other string-pullers

the meme image of a utopian future with flying cars and gleaming round-edged buildings on a green campus

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

This phenomenon reinforces to me that: -The widely shared perception of a “border crisis” is ~entirely made up by the media -I will never forgive voters in like North Dakota whose top political priority was attacking my neighbors, about whom they’re totally ignorant, because the TV scared them

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

seltzer is gross and the name “sparkling water” is a low-down dirty scheme to normalize it as if it’s water. it’s “water” in the same sense orange juice is water, and if you give customers seltzer by default instead of water you should get shut down by the health department.

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

class in the US is completely illegible and I know this because I’ve heard someone who works as a lawyer for the government identify as “blue collar”

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

i am ready for the American vernacular to move on from the phrase “the math isn’t mathing” in fairness, now-old-timey math-related lines like “you do the math” and “go figure” are also insufferably corny and always have been. maybe just stop trying to make quips about math?

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

it’s really remarkable how completely I’ve lost any faith in the justice system to hold criminals accountable if they’re rich white Republican men

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

“there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is a literally Panglossian sentiment—it’s exactly like saying “tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes”, both because it hand-wavingly alludes to a magic better world someday (socialism, God’s kingdom) and because it excuses inaction

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

the Berkeley climate science professor who opposes infill housing has been dunked on enough, but i will say it’s pretty depressing that people are still taken in by the same old NIMBY arguments about “it’s out of scale with the neighborhood” and “the community wasn’t consulted”

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