iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Acting like your opponent is actually a bad person, instead of like your lovably goofy friend who’s good at heart but maybe shouldn’t housesit for you, has very little downside and considerable upside

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 4h

100%, and also this is on a separate axis from policy proposals. Did he promise to pass Medicare for All, or talk about Palestine in the exact terms leftists prefer? Not that I’ve seen anyone posting about, but some of the same people on here who’ve been far-left wreckers before were cheering him on

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 9h

BUUUUUT I kinda have the same feeling about person/character x Y/N fanfic, so idk that this is an AI phenomenon as opposed to a difference in taste

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 9h

I think this is his model of what he thinks other people will want rather than what he himself wants, but it’s still a shockingly different understanding of art from mine. A game where my avatar is me sounds unbearable. At that point it’s more like a Zoom meeting than a game

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 10h

maybe this is sanewashing, but I interpreted this as his guess about what *other* people want from video games, which is less sociopathic but equally bizarre

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

part of the issue about “kitchen-table issues” or whatever is that some people have always meant that as a coded way of telling Democrats what *not* to say, and engaging with “kitchen-table issues” by saying “these guys are crooks and they’re stealing your money” is a way to call their bluff

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

we need roughly 95% less telling other people how to live, and much more delight in living

m.youtube.com

Billy Joel - My Life (Official Audio)

YouTube video by billyjoelVEVO

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

here is my centrist platform: -if people don’t cook for whatever reason, that’s fine (as long as they understand getting other people to make their food costs money) -if people are estranged from their family, they probably have a good reason, or at least you have no business second-guessing them

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

iow I’m not sure we can set aside the problematics of Great Man theory—if the goal is real impact, most of the people known to history as “great men” really just changed lines on maps and what language people spoke, and killed a bunch of people along the way

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

the thing is if there were any true Great Men, the first examples that come to mind are John Snow (the cholera wells study guy / father of public health), Jonas Salk, Nelson Mandela, and maybe B. R. Ambedkar, and I don’t know who they mentally cast themselves as

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

so I guess what I’m saying is he is “this dumb” in the sense that he selectively turns off his reading comprehension in order to score ideological points

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

someone once said he has the cadence and instincts of an obnoxious leftist tumblr poster but on the right, and I can’t unsee it you can imagine the reverse that’s like “I THINK CAPITALISM IS WHEN SOCIETY DECIDES CORPORATIONS GET TO EAT BABIES AND BE WORSHIPPED FOR IT”

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I sorta think one of the facts that clear up a lot about politics is how antisemites hate Jews both for being socialists and for being capitalists, because both socialism and capitalism stem from modernity

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

aiui this is not unique to Americans. I’m not an expert but “socialism is when traditional social hierarchies are challenged” is also a belief that shows up in the Mozambique civil war, and I think also in the South African apartheid era and the Indonesian ‘year of living dangerously’, among others

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Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈

Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

In other words, a 10 percent contraction in one of Britain’s most successful exports. If it were steel or fish or other infinitely less profitable sectors, people would be having a meltdown.

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I assume you have YouTube premium then lol

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

There are also a decent number of people whose take was “why are we splitting hairs about whether what’s happening is a genocide; debating one word isn’t what matters”, and I think this kind of stuff is why we can’t have nice things (fuzzy “I know it when I see it” definitions for high-stakes words)

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

sounds like two good reasons to keep up the harsh rhetoric, then

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

it’s not even that a blob with a face can’t be an effective mascot: when I was a kid there were these Zoloft ads with a bouncing blob with a face that got depression, and that blob was really cute! It was easy to get invested in its journey! but Liberty Biberty is solidly in the uncanny valley

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

It looks like a disembodied head, it’s anthropomorphic without being cute in any way, it makes its appearance in at least some ads via jump scare, it has a weird nasal voice with no emotional affect: neither effusively cheerful nor endearingly grumpy, it has no motivation or interests

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I was thinking about this, and I think that while part of why people hate Liberty Biberty so much is because we’re fed up with the Liberty Mutual Cinematic Universe continuing to expand without anyone ever asking for more, ultimately the bigger part of why people hate it is because it’s creepy

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

This dynamic has also always stood out for me in the genre of pieces that are like “my husband, who I’m still married to, doesn’t pull his weight around the house, and I’m sick of it” bc yes that is a real issue in opposite-sex couples but OTOH publishing your grievance with your spouse is not great

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I also think that if urban cores allowed much taller buildings with much larger footprints and more freedom for innovative design, eventually there would be more opportunities for relatively affordable giant homes, one of the things people want from suburbia, without contributing to sprawl

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

it doesn’t even have to be a Dem politician—it could be a media commenter or even a random private citizen and it doesn’t even have to be unkind, just susceptible to bad-faith interpretation

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

this is important data for the next time someone claims “omnicause” is just a meaningless buzzword bc this is the omnicause: insisting that all causes are connected and that a small community of academics should get to prioritize among them for everyone, in some kind of planned attention economy

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Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈

geoffrey 💀 (scary now) @parsnip.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

very tired of being told it is the responsibility of urban democratic voters never to risk possibly maybe by chance seeming less than respectful of rural red state life and then watching thousands in nebraska cheer on the president joking about a nuclear strike on me and millions of my neighbors

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

there is no end to the DARVO in the mainstream media about which parts of the country are guilty of “contempt” towards which other parts, and our representatives in Washington really need to start being way less chill about it

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

also, you can make up a narrative about US culture prizing natural talent over hard work in contrast to other cultures, but a) you’re just saying stuff & b) prizing natural talent over hard work seems bad! & the kind of maladaptive tradition that an influx of immigrants with fresh eyes could fix!

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

OP’s post is literally the thinnest possible veneer for anti-Asian/anti-“model minority” racism

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

also, a) selfishness in humans is the object of entire fields of scientific study, b) “Naturalists Shocked By ‘Banana-Hoarding’ Monkey” could absolutely be the cover headline of a popular science magazine, and c) “what the heck is this one monkey’s deal” isn’t usually enough for a research design

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

“Intermission” is a choice lol. I would say it’s their darkest/saddest song, which is saying something

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

if the Brazil election turns out the way it’s looking, the Trump and Bolsonaro regimes will obviously be coordinating closely. liberal parties around the world need to be coordinating just as closely instead of getting held back by obsolete niceties about “internal matters” and “interference”.

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Orcas are great but they’re disqualified on account of being dolphins. Real answer is the basic but correct one: blue whales. We’re probably sharing the earth with the largest animal ever to exist, which is pretty cool

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

yeah I saw the post and was like, “I wonder what idiot he’ll say could have done this, probably some post-left clown or a Republican politician” and then I saw the image and uh. I had failed to be cynical enough

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

it’s strange to me how many people seem to think that the “let people enjoy things” ethos has gone too far, when there are multiple prestige publications whose entire editorial philosophy is finding new things to scold people for enjoying

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

also, it’s very frustrating how almost all participants in this discussion dogmatically deny the idea that anyone is motivated by forms of status other than money

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

it’s easier to make something look aspirational than it is to scold people into aspiring to it, but the people writing these takes would rather just do the scolding part. they don’t care what happens to society; they only care about having something to berate their peers about.

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

if America’s elite really wanted more children regardless of class to aspire to be plumbers, the right thing to do is not yell “stop looking down on plumbers!” at prestige magazine readers; the right thing to do, among others, is start an awards ceremony for America’s best plumbers

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

this week’s innovation is I decided since I always end up curving North America all the way around, I might as well lean into that and treat it as the projection someday I will remember what Uzbekistan looks like, but not today (the real problem is putting the Fergana Valley in the wrong place)

map of the world drawn in pen on a notebook, with coastlines in black, areas of high population density in red, and land borders and a few country names in blue

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

concrete pouring is a very non-consolidated industry (concrete sets quickly after being mixed, so it can’t be shipped long-distance, unlike cement) so my guess would be that one of the big cement companies gets the general contract, then subcontracts out the project in segments

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

In other words, if what you want (like me) is for housing in California or New York to be cheaper than housing in Texas or Florida, there’s still a ton of work to do, and we can’t just pretend that the red-state reform packages are no big deal.

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The two biggest examples are Montana and Texas, but Florida’s Live Local Act also appears to be getting a lot of housing actually built. And the comparison to blue states is misleading because red states are generally starting from less zoning and less burdensome permitting processes to begin with.

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I sometimes see people asserting that there is no real right-of-center YIMBYism and look, that’s just false. There’s much less underlying public conversation about a balance of values, that’s true, but there have been actual reforms in red states that equal or exceed stuff in blue states.

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

something тольстий, you might say

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Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈

Alex @alexanotherone.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Increasingly becoming convinced that what plays out in an authoritarian state is not a metaphor, allegory or in parallel to an abusive marriage, its just functionally an abusive marriage

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

roughly exactly this happens in Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake”, so maybe he got the idea from there, or they both got it from the same urban-legend source

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

THAT SAID the one time in college when I emailed the NYT corrections address to tell them to “correct” Thomas Friedman’s employment at their paper, I signed off as “President, Americans Against the Mixing of Metaphors” so maybe I’m just part of the problem

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

to be fair, some of the best policy shops out there are just a couple guys. but I’ll agree with you that if they write a column somewhere “President” is a misleading thing to let them call themselves

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Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈 @elikahn.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

also I see people saying that his job was to “look pretty on tv” and… …him? I mean, no judgment, I’ll say every day that attraction is morally neutral and there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging your physical attraction to a bad person, but. some people have very different tastes from me!

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