iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Justin @justinskolnick.com · 15h

Went to this and got motivated to change my behavior for the worse

A photo of the Portland Poetry Confluence 2026 schedule. My finger points to:

“Poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and prose writer Omar El Akkad will discuss writing about and against the unfolding genocide. The conversation will be moderated by David Naimon.”

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 02/10/2026

Me when the Dicastery finally responds to my book proposal

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 02/10/2026

I have doubts about their commitment to democratic values

Screenshot of an IG post by pdxmetrochamber:

Transparent process matters more now than ever, but some on the City Council decided to increase a voter-approved tax without referring it back to Portland voters, despite the city's charter and the Oregon Constitution.

Our city should demonstrate commitment to democratic values by giving residents more opportunities to vote, not less.

The litigation does not dispute the importance of what the Arts Tax funds, only how changes were made without the voters' consent.

Andrew Hoan, President & CEO

I commented:

The former City Commission raised fees for the Clean & Safe ESD in November 2024 without voters' consent. District boundaries were extended in the same proceedings, which took place right around the election, when the news was dominated by other stories.

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 30/09/2026

Fair. Probably need an exception for ballot measures and candidates. Right now, candidates are required to create candidate committees unless they're sort of just winging it sos.oregon.gov/elections/Do...

When to Create a Candidate Committee

A candidate must file a Statement of Organization not later than three business days after first receiving a contribution or making an expenditure or not later than the deadline for filing a nominating petition, declaration of candidacy, or certificate of nomination, whichever occurs first.

Exception to Creating a Candidate Committee

A candidate is not required to form a candidate committee if the candidate meets all three of the following conditions:

 The candidate serves as the candidate’s own treasurer;
 The candidate does not have an existing candidate committee;
and
 The candidate does not expect to receive or spend more than $1,500 during a calendar year.

A candidate that has an existing candidate committee but meets the other two conditions may discontinue the candidate committee and close the bank account in order to meet the statutory exception.

The $1,500 includes funds spent for any campaign-related costs, such as the candidacy filing fee; however, state or county voters’ pamphlet filing fees and de minimis costs associated with printing and circulating a petition in lieu of paying a fee for inclusion in a voters’ pamphlet, are not included when calculating contribution or expenditure totals. In general, the use of pens, paper, clipboards, and printer ink from existing household supplies qualifies as de minimis costs if the total combined value of using the items is less than $50. Items purchased specifically for the petition circulation effort do not qualify as de minimis costs. If a candidate uses personal funds, those purchases are considered contributions.

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 30/09/2026

We know who's agreed to be the face of each PAC, at least. Requiring principal players and stakeholders to self-identify would be difficult to legislate, I think, if only because it's not immediately clear who exactly we'd be talking about

Screenshot of Orestar's "Persons Associated with Committee" screen for the DitchMitch PAC #25329

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 26/09/2026

Alright so yes I’m insane but could twitter lurker Robert Prevost have read my tweets circa 2016-19? Because holy shit: “and how it classifies people and situations. If a system is designed or used in a way that treats some lives as less worthy, or excludes them without the possibility of appeal …”

boundaries of human possibilities. In this process, political responsibility is also lost, not just empathy toward those excluded, which can, after all, be simulated. The exclusion of the vulnerable becomes cloaked in a veneer of neutrality and objectivity, against which it becomes difficult to raise objections. In this way, injustice goes un-noticed, and compassion, mercy and forgiveness—understood not as mere appearances but as real political actions-gradually disappear from view.

104. From this follows a simple but compelling consequence: we cannot consider Al to be morally neutral. In reality, every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations. If a system is designed or used in a way that treats some lives as less wor-thy, or excludes them without the possibility of appeal, then it is not merely a tool "to be used well," since it has already introduced criteria that contradict the inalienable dignity of the human person. For this reason, ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes; it must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it. (126)

105. For Al to respect human dignity and truly serve the common good, responsibility must be clearly defined at every stage: from those who design and develop these systems to those who use them and rely on them for concrete decisions. In many cases, however, the internal processes leading to a result remain obague making it harder to assign responsibility and correct errors. This is where accountability becomes crucial: the possibility of identifying who must account" for decisions, justify them, monitor them, and, when

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 26/09/2026

Get yourself a mayor who hosts Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor on their “End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World” book tour

This event has passed.
Town Hall Seattle presents
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor with Mayor Katie
Wilson (SOLD OUT)
End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World
This event has already occurred
Date: Thursday, September 24
Time: 7:30 pm PDT

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 23/09/2026

Well that's a lot of money

A screenshot from a spreadsheet showing several rows. One row is highlighted:

CITY HALL
R246102
1220 SW 5TH AVE PORTLAND OR
Business
9/30/26
14,054.52

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 22/09/2026

Look at that gap. Who did this. Use a ligature

A photograph of text from a printed book with the lowercase letters f and l circled in the word “briefly” to indicate the absence of the common fl ligature

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 21/09/2026

LMAO years of hard work to get here

ENGAGEMENT PATTERNS
@justinskolnick.com

Ragebait 51%
Provocation 70%
Argumentative 68%
Dunking 73%
Drama-seeking 74%
Engagement bait 44%

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 18/09/2026

Our life in time consists of terrible and intolerable ironies that we learn to live with, leaning on the strength of the love and support of the people around us. Dario’s response is reasonable and human and unbelievably immature

For Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, the effort is personal. A disease killed his father only a few years before a cure came about, he said in a recent essay. Kauderer-Abrams echoed the sentiment.

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 18/09/2026

What a fascinating thread to highlight. If memory serves, this was in response to an argument circulating DSA at the time, which held the chapter shouldn’t involve itself in racial justice protests. Mitch appears to be countering that race is a crucial lens on capitalist oppression — tl;dr let’s go

The current uprising against police brutality has been useful for separating thoughtful and penetrating critique from superficial and self-indulgent essentialism. For example, consider the #superstructure pod that @MaxSeijo and @agoingaccount account are producing. 1/

I have spent the last week in the streets in Portland demonstrating for an end to police brutality. I'm finally catching up on The Bellows episodes and find myself gobsmacked by how well positioned and novel their analysis is for this moment.
You don't get there by accident. 2/

Whereas the self-indulgence and superficiality of a CL*SS UN*TY or JORDAN PETERSON, BUT FROM THE LEFT, analysis of political change is reactive, the political economy embedded in the #superstructure's critique holds up, because it takes pains to avoid that essentialism. 3/

Imagining the future letters from an old left to new: it seems to me the most lamentable ones will be penned by those that were so whipped by a Bernie loss that they stared right through the obvious lesson and instead embraced a reactionary politics of class essentialism. 4/

Anyway, I think everyone should get this podcast on their list. It slaps. 5/5

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 18/09/2026

In that multi-network interview last night, he reminded me of someone ...

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 17/09/2026

Tabbouleh on the falafel and the Taxi theme on the playlist

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 17/09/2026

Maybe we can stop calling her a "moderate"

A screenshot from the same user's likes. Two liked comments are featured:

Robert S Miller
4d

Portland reformed its city election system and reinvented Tammany Hall machine politics.This time the machine is run by socialists who actually call each other "comrade."

My latest piece for the Northwest Examiner breaks down how the new math and a coordinated slate actually works.

Bob Weinstein
5d

PGE conducts long-range utility planning and almost certainly already knows what these "future project phases" entail in detail. The city shouldn't let PGE piecemeal this project by getting a "first phase" approved, and then come back later to CLEARCUT the rest. Instead, the city should require that all phases be submitted together as a …

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 17/09/2026

How many Olivia Clarks are there in Portland?

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 16/09/2026

This is a species of Calvinism. Venture capitalists are in the throes of a faith crisis

Andreessen was not an outlier among the tech elite. Like many other Silicon Valley executives, he was a largely apolitical technocrat who had been told his entire career that progressivism and capitalism were not only compatible but mutually reinforcing, and that amassing wealth was proof of both moral virtue and entrepreneurial grit. The techlash-and especially the rise of the tech worker movement-shattered that illusion.

Out of this disillusionment emerged a new billionaire consciousness, a distinctly reactionary turn that broke with the old Californian Ideology that had defined an earlier cohort of Silicon Valley billionaires. Where worker autonomy had once been celebrated as a key to creativity and innovation, it was now being dismissed as indulgence, even weakness. What was once framed as a partnership between management and workers, united under a common mission, was openly recast as a power struggle-and management was determined to win.

Even before mass layoffs began, Andreessen was eager to frame tech workers for the bust, derisively calling them the "laptop class," which he described as "Western upper-middle-class professionals who work through a screen and are totally abstracted from tangible physical reality and the real-world consequences of their opinions and beliefs."

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 16/09/2026

Read up: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_...

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 16/09/2026

LMAO the gang's all here

This is a screenshot of the likes on Max Steele's substack post where he's pretending to be outraged about Mitch Green's posts. Notable likers include:

Andy Chandler
Brian Owendoff
Richard Cheverton
Olivia Clark

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 16/09/2026

Posting my police tweets from 2020

A tweet thread in reply to AP news story posted by Mike Balsamo @MikeBalsamo1 (“I spent the weekend inside the Portland federal courthouse w/ the US Marshals.
Mortars were being fired off repeatedly, fireworks & flares shot into the lobby, frozen bottles, concrete, cans & bouncy balls regularly whizzed over the fence at high speeds.”). I replied:

“important to keep in mind that there are real people behind these loaded assault rifles.
They are only following orders. Thank you”

Another user (Darwin @darwinwoodka) replied to me:

“just following orders was proven to not be a valid excuse in the Hague”

I replied to this user:

“Uh oh”

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 16/09/2026

@shanedkavanaugh.bsky.social Max Steele proposed to hire me to concern troll. Something for you to look into, after the bottom falls out at Oregon Live

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 13/09/2026

The person who started this painting is deeply unwell and will be busy for a while

A fragment of an in-progress painting of winter trees

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 13/09/2026

Sophie’s article indicates there are two Jewish members but identifies only EPG, leaving open the possibility that Zimmerman is the other. If that’s not the case, the paragraph should be rewritten

And Councilor Elana Pirtle-Guiney, one of two Jewish members of the council, said that the council's discussion has at times "become
deeply antisemitic in places."

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 12/09/2026

The bar is playing my adolescence

Shazam has identified Hip Hop Hooray by Naughty by Nature

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 11/09/2026

So honestly the last time I went there I bellied right up, no line. It was March 8, 2020, and I’d just skipped out of the mayoral debate at Rev Hall, ahead of the crowd

A photo from the bar on March 8, 2020. Train POV on the big screen

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 09/09/2026

LaVonne Griffin-Valade, former Oregon Secretary of State and auditor for both the city of Portland and Multnomah County, hit a relevant criticism in her 2016 endorsement of Chloe Eudaly over Steve Novick: www.wweek.com/news/2016/08...

Griffin-Valade overlapped with Novick at City Hall for two years. She says she's voted for him twice, once when he ran for the U.S. Senate and again when he ran in 2012 for the city council.

But now, as a community member and voter, she says she finds herself "disappointed" with Novick's style and his sometimes glib responses to questions about his actions. "He really thought he knew everything and he didn't," she says.

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 05/09/2026

If state Dems were capable of acting without their help you could’ve passed anything. We could have expanded Trimet service instead of cutting routes. Zero reason to cross the aisle bikeportland.org/2025/07/02/h...

BikePortland

So pretty early on, party leadership was saying, 'Let's get Republicans in the room? And you feel like there was time spent on that and that it didn't go anywhere?

Gamba

And not only that, the more frustrating thing is that there were a lot of bills that were given consideration this session - that were given hearings and work sessions and passed out of committees - that should have never seen the light of day in a state as blue as Oregon. There were a lot of bills that died on the altar of appeasing Republicans.

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 05/09/2026

We can’t keep doing this shit, pretending we can’t tell the difference between militarized tactics and identities, pretending certain identities just get to be brutal. 1996 was thirty fucking years ago en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard...

Al Gore-Israel controversy

In 1995, Vice President Al Gore personally offered Marius a White House speechwriting position heading into the 1996 presidential campaign. Marius had previously written, without pay, several speeches for his fellow Tennessee native, including a 1993 Madison Square Garden oration for the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and parts of Gore's 1994 Harvard commencement address attacking the "culture of cynicism". Marius accepted the offer to join the White House, took an eighteen-month leave of absence from Harvard, rented out his home, and prepared to move to Washington, D.C. But Gore rescinded the offer after New Republic editor-in-chief and part-time Harvard social studies lecturer Martin Peretz pressured the vice president to reverse Marius' hiring.

In a favorable 1992 review of the book A Season of Stones: Living in a Palestinian Village by Helen Winternitz, Marius had written this in Harvard's alumni magazine:

Many Israelis, the Holocaust fresh in their memory, believe that that horror gives them the right to inflict horror on others. Winternitz's account of the brutality of the Shin Bet, the Israeli secret police, is eerily similar to the stories of the Gestapo ... arbitrary arrests in the middle of the night, imprisonment without trial, beatings, refined tortures, murder, punishment of the families of suspects.

Peretz, a passionate supporter of Israel, sent Gore a copy of the 1992 review, accusing Marius of antisemitism. He told Gore, his former student when Gore was an undergraduate at Harvard, to reverse the hiring; Gore complied. According to press accounts, a Gore staffer called Marius and asked him to announce that he had changed his mind about accepting the position. But when reporters called him, Marius declined to pretend that the decision had been his.
Peretz told The Washington Post:

It's a very simple matter. What Richard Marius wrote did not go unnoticed in Cambridge and beyond, because it was the Harvard alumni magazine. When you make the Nazi analogy, it cannot be tossed off as, 'Oh, how silly of me to have done this.' When you write that, you believe it. So, once the vice president knew, he had to figure out if he wanted someone who believed that on his staff.

Marius allowed that his Gestapo-Shin Bet comparison may have been "a little bit extreme", but he refused to disavow it, insisting that he was criticizing only the harch tactice of the secret police

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 04/09/2026

The Portland Business Alliance, in the guise of Downtown Clean & Safe, has employed hawks to haze the natural crows of the city’s downtown — no doubt at below-market rates. Surprising no one, in their intolerance for uncontrolled life, they’ve gone all-in for the artificial kind

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 03/09/2026

Huh, who knew Oregon had its own postal service www.kptv.com/2026/09/03/p...

Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read said in a statement: "We will continue to challenge this USPS plan, and we will continue to have safe, accurate, and fair vote-by-mail elections in Oregon - regardless of what happens with the USPS."

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 01/09/2026

That plastic sign in the fourth photo belongs to Portland Solutions, who are famously committed to safe infrastructure

A photograph of a sign like the one in Olivia’s photo

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 31/08/2026

Front and center on goportlandgo dot org

A screenshot from goportlandgo dot org:

PORTLAND IN CRISIS

Portland was once a national model for livable cities. That took competent, pragmatic leadership.

We now rank near the bottom on almost every measure that matters. Our leaders are debating a ban on foie gras when they should be reducing homelessness and 911 response times.

Portland doesn't have a money problem. It has a leadership problem. The next election is our chance to change that.

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 31/08/2026

Local conservatives deploying “foie gras“ as a wink-wink and an eye roll are making the same argument used by opponents of the 19th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act: “these people can’t be trusted to look after their own interests”

Screenshot of a LinkedIn comment I wrote:

“The chatter on my feed has nothing to do with the morality of the food product. It has everything to do with residual feelings about the rollout of an expanded city council and district representation. Foie gras is a luxury item and a frivolity; “foie gras” is a drop-in signifier of lament over Portland voters having voted for broader access to government. The implication here is that when voters are trusted to choose their government, we end up with leaders who waste massive amounts of government resources on frivolous things like banning foie gras. The numbers don’t support that narrative at all — matters directly related to business, housing, and public safety have dominated council’s time, as much on the dais as in lobbying records. The businessmen beating the “foie gras” drum know this, and are beating that drum on LinkedIn to drum up support for the restoration of a less-representative government.”

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 29/08/2026

Dietrich Bonhoeffer considered Martin Niemöller naive. Here’s Bonhoeffer, writing friends from the prison in Tegel, having a little fun at Niemöller’s expense. The “nearly seven years” refers to a gathering in Dahlem (whose congregation Niemöller was serving) on the day of the arrest: July 1, 1937

“Please harbour no regrets about me. Martin has had nearly seven years of it, and that is a very different matter.”

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 28/08/2026

I honestly forget Brian Owendoff exists until somebody tips me off to another of his prissy and weirdly violent screeds, like this one wish-casting the interest of “outside authorities” in the nothingburger scandals he keeps inventing and trying to exploit substack.com/@brianowendo...

A screenshot from the linked substack note showing a screenshot of my exchange with Genderless Rodent and Kori about the NW Examiner pretending to be mad

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 28/08/2026

Can’t talk, got a date

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 25/08/2026

The reason Steve Jobs never talked about being homeless is because his Reed classmate who founded the commune he joined taught him how to manipulate people into believing his lies and giving him everything he wanted, and what he wanted was to be revered as a godlike entity and filthy rich

Screenshot from the wikipedia page for Reality Distortion Field:

Steve Jobs

In the book Steve Jobs, biographer Walter Isaacson states that around 1972, while Jobs was attending Reed College, Robert Friedland "taught Steve the reality distortion field." The RDF was said by Andy Hertzfeld to be Jobs's ability to convince himself, and others around him, to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement and persistence. It was said to distort his co-workers' sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and to make them believe that whatever impossible task he had at hand was possible. Jobs could also use the reality distortion field to appropriate others' ideas as his own,
sometimes proposing an idea back to its originator, only a week after dismissing it.!"

The term has been used to refer to Jobs's keynote speeches (or "Stevenotes") by observers and devoted users of Apple computers and products, 2) and derisively by Apple's competitors in criticisms of Apple, for example a post on Research In Motion's official BlackBerry blog titled "RIM Responds to Apple's 'Distortion Field'". [3]

Bill Gates talked in an interview about Steve Jobs using his reality distortion field to "cast spells" on people. Gates considered himself immune to Jobs's reality distortion field, saying, "I was like a minor wizard because he would be casting spells, and
would see people mesmerized, but because I'm a

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 23/08/2026

Torres is positioning herself as a “collaborative” alternative to Morillo and TKL and many people you consider friends and/or intelligent are going to fall for that line. The question she needs to be made to answer is “what parts of the city are you going to help the mayor sell off to business?”

philanthropy, nonprofits, businesses, labor, and community organizations work together, we can deliver projects that would not otherwise be possible.
A Read More
• Expand public-private partnerships that improve parks, recreation, community centers, public spaces, and neighborhood infrastructure.
/ Leverage philanthropic
investment, sponsorships, volunteerism, and private expertise to maximize taxpayer dollars and expand opportunities in every district.
/ Build long-term partnerships that create lasting community benefit rather than one-time
transactions.

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Justin @justinskolnick.com · 23/08/2026

I want to be clear about this: I don’t want to come to your meeting or rally, I want to get pizza and ice cream and play with your dog

Screenshot showing me a new instagram follower named “workers.rising”

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