iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Would be nice if pundits telling Dems what they have to do to in order to win in red states actually, I dunno, listened to Dems who have repeatedly won in red states time.com/article/2026...

Screenshot from article quoting Andy Beshear: “I won reelection as a pro-diversity, pro-LGBTQ-plus rights Governor in a deep-Red state at a time when people were questioning if that was possible," Beshear told the room of monied gays. "Now some people may have told you that somebody with views like that can't win a statewide election in a place like Kentucky. Folks, I'm living, breathing proof that it is possible to win everywhere if we stand firm on our values of compassion, of empathy, and of doing right by our neighbors. All of them, no exceptions."

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Edsall, to his credit, did print my recommended response to anti-trans attacks, which uses the Race Class Gender Narrative. He again omitted, though, the research backing up its efficacy. An RCGN argument beats an anti-trans argument on sports 54%-46%

Screenshot of survey question: “Which of the following best represents your view, even if neither is exactly right?” The RCGN message defeats the anti-trans position by 54-46% overall, and 79-21% among Dems.
RCGN: “Kids of all races, genders, and backgrounds should be free to learn, play, and thrive. But the same politicians invading kids' privacy with gender checks, bullying transgender kids off sports teams, and abducting immigrant children are also gutting school funding to hand more to their billionaire friends. Let's fully fund our schools so all children - Native or newcomer, transgender or not - are respected and free to pursue their
dreams.”
Anti-trans position: “Left-wing radicals are denying girls the ability to compete safely and have a fair shot to win competitions and scholarships by forcing them to play against biological boys. To keep sports fair and protect our girls, we need laws ensuring only biological girls are allowed to play girls sports.”

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

And that is precisely what played out in November. As @jonovoss.bsky.social showed, public opinion shifted dramatically against trans people from June 2024 to March 2025, esp among dads - a core group targeted by Trump’s as blitz

Chart showing that dads moved from believing “transgender people should have the freedom to be themselves and live their lives” over “there should be policies in place to ensure transgender views and lifestyles do not harm society” by 55-34 in June 2024 to 47-45 in March 2025

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

He conveniently also omitted these results from Research Collaborative and Data for Progress, directly testing his approach for Democrats against ours. Guess who won.

Screenshot of a survey question: “When it comes to the treatment of transgender people, which of the following Democratic candidates would you be more likely to vote for?” By 40% to 25% among respondents overall, and 75%-15% among Dems, voters prefer “A Democratic candidate who fights for all of our freedoms to be ourselves, pushing back against
Republican attacks on people
based on our races, backgrounds,
or genders” over “A Democratic candidate willing to work with Republicans to stop the
transgender agenda, keep boys out of girls' sports, and end federal funding for transgender surgeries,” when also offered the chance to say they instead “would never vote for a Democratic candidate.”

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

We’re traveling (in Australia 😢) so did a celebration in felt

Green felt with a felt hanukiah and 2 lit felt candles + shamash (it’s night 2 in Australia)

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

Gotta love when a piece of your plane falls off and hits you in the head as you land 🥴 US air travel keeps going great!

Me holding the long cover to the side lights on the plane upright with the bulb uncovered above me

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

Appreciate google news for this one.

Menacing image of a slimy and fearful looking Mike Johnson over the headline “Netflix casts child star as Unabomber Ted Kaczynski”

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

Oh good, Chuck Schumer is confirming the Onion’s reporting on his strategy. They just missed the full theory of change: see, once he’s played dead long enough, Republican Senators will save the day!

Democratic Leaders Stand Real Still in Hopes No One Notices Them

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

While basically an aside in this blockbuster story, shit like this REALLY lays bare how police departments are just modern slave patrols. Jesus.

He moved to Las Vegas and, at the age of 25, became an officer in the metro police. Kinch came to serve in elite detective units over 23 years in the force, hunting fugitives and helping take down gangs like the Playboy Bloods. Eventually he was assigned to what he called the “Black squad,” according to court records, tasked with investigating violent crimes where the suspect was African American. (A Las Vegas police spokesperson told me they stopped “dividing squads by a suspect’s race” a year before Kinch retired.)

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

I humbly submit the NYT morning newsletter from the day after Harris’s “most lethal fighting force” DNC speech

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Ha just had a similar scene! My tuxedo cat hissed at it

Two sceptical cats surround and sniff at LEGO cat

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

Again, NYT assessment after her DNC speech

This Morning: Why Harris’s centrism is working

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

More on the limits of trying to message our way out of actually tackling structural problems. From @anatosaurus.bsky.social www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

To wit, post election, 51 percent of voters agreed that “Democrats talk about protecting democracy to try to get elected but haven’t tried to do anything meaningful to protect it,” as opposed to thinking Democrats had protected democracy or given it an earnest try.

But until Democrats show, not tell, they are fighting for everyday people’s lives and livelihoods and against billionaires, corporations, and MAGA Republicans hell bent on harming them, they cannot hope to fend off the twin lures of authoritarianism — rooted in the siren song of blaming some “other” — and cynicism — rooted in the assessment that “both sides” are beholden to the money and not the many. In other words, “it’s neoliberalism, stupid.”

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Love this analysis from @gbbranstetter.bsky.social, but also read the whole thing.

“Love has never been a popular movement,” James Baldwin told an interviewer in 1970, “and nobody, really, wants to be free.” It would be foolish and ahistorical to suggest suppression of select outgroups and the false stability of autocracy has never had appeal. Trump benefitted from decades of austerity, ideology, and ignorance that leaves people and communities isolated, exploited, and ambivalent to the well-being of their neighbors, captured by the fear that freedom—other people’s or their own—is a dangerous thing and that a common good cannot exist. The answer to this is not to shrink our vision and, in effect, become more like Trump. The answer is a politics that rejects the false choice of “us” and “them,” a politics that recognizes individual freedom—for “us” or “them”—is our collective responsibility dependent upon our solidarity with one another.

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

Introduce yourself with four video games

The Neverhood - yes I know a 90s pc cd-rom computer game but it ruled

Liara from Mass Effect, yay gender-expansive/gender-weird alien lore

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

For the most part I don’t think blame is very useful right now. But holy shit, this quote from a Republican stating what we’d been screaming for months — showing they built a strategy around what the major Dem $ dismissed from us — might just break me.

“Clearly, you had a White liberal demographic that hated Donald Trump. That was without question. You could see that coalition everywhere. But once you get past White progressives, every other historical demographic stronghold from the Democrats just started to drop off,” Tyson said about the effort. “What did exist was a tremendous amount of voters on the left that were disaffected. And the only persuasion question was whether they could be persuaded to vote.”

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

Can’t believe it’s taken me this long to post a cat pic

My cats snuggled together- grey cat left, tuxedo cat right. Both looking deceptively dignified

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

Scrolling thru my pics and rediscovered these two screenshots from August 22nd and 23rd saved back-to-back. Hits even harder now. Well done, @aprilwolfe.bsky.social. NYT… maybe take a break from blaming trans ppl to reread your own coverage 🙃

Screenshot of April Wolfe tweet, Aug22 (end of the DNC): Night 4 has the energy of the CIA harmonizing “We Are the World.”

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Jay Marcellus @jmappel.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

Watching For All Mankind, so looked up Wernher von Braun to learn more than just what Tom Lehrer taught me as a kid and… welp, this is grim to read right now

Von Braun's later attitude toward the Nazi regime of the late 1930s and early 1940s was complex. He said that he had been so influenced by the early Nazi promise of release from the post–World War I economic effects, that his patriotic feelings had increased. In a 1952 memoir article he admitted that, at that time, he "fared relatively rather well under totalitarianism". Yet, he also wrote that "to us, Hitler was still only a pompous fool with a Charlie Chaplin moustache" and that he perceived him as "another Napoleon" who was "wholly without scruples, a godless man who thought himself the only god".

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