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mollrat

@mollrat.bsky.social
319 followers 731 following 622 posts

Lover of democracy and of fun silly things like musicals

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Reposted by mollrat
Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈 @maxdubler.com · 12/10/2026
Corporations publicly celebrating LGBT+ equality is a good thing and I am glad to see it coming back.
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franciscOOoOo👻 varela fan club @paleopragmatist.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
the only real live question at this point is whether somebody can replicate the specific trump rizz that papered over the obvious ideological contradictions in the trump coalition. i'm skeptical but would prefer if we never had to find out
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McBoo-lie @mcjulie.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Republicans never actually believe that Republicans are in charge of anything, it’s one of their more baffling pathologies.
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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
In practice though, it really seems like we're moving towards, "AI is a productivity tool that enhances the employee you have, but often doesn't really let you replace them, so much as get more out of them, in some fields. In others, it's mostly useless so far."
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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
Nonsense. ~70% of Americans agree on all kinds of things. The problem is our deeply antidemocratic institutions, which empower the 30% to control the government & regularly block all of the many policies favored by the 70%. That, & the fact that the GOP is now a far right authoritarian party.
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Starfire’s Deranged Neocon Foreign Policy Podcast @irhottakes.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
It’s very simple. A reality TV host became dictator because he turned down a role for Sharknado 4 and that’s why the king of outer space, who cheats at Diablo, got to kill Africa. Now the economy is controlled by a sex cult that has something to do with Harry Potter fanfic because of robots.
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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
i think its because they know she likely more of an elder care technician than a mistress
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Shana @shanamd.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I am SORRY for sharing something that was posted on the other place, but this is too good.
The future pope at a party with a caption “they don’t know I’m the future pope”
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Reuters @reuters.com · 17/09/2026
New cat species identified in Bolivia, first in over a century reut.rs/4yIJjwO
reut.rs
New cat species identified in Bolivia, first in over a century
A diminutive wild cat that inhabits Bolivia's cloud forest has been identified as a previously unknown species, marking the first time a new living cat species has been formally named and described ​in more than a century.
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Sam (ABeardedPanda) @abeardedpanda.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Not to get too gender about it but this is a major driver behind most reactionary mindsets because ultimately it is about the ability to control your wife and children
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Alan Elrod @aselrod.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
The Texas Republican Party is made up of authoritarians, racists, misogynists, perverts, and criminals. It’s powered by right-wing Christians, MAHA influencers, and fascist-curious tech bros. If you want to see what the GOP after Trump looks like, it’s Texas. www.liberalcurrents.com/the-future-o...
liberalcurrents.com
The Future of the Republican Party After Trump Is in Texas
The white male supremacists of the Texas GOP embody what the national party has become.
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Mike Black @mikeblack114.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I agree that the Ossoff Admin jailing uday and qusay won't and shouldn't be enough to just make everything go back to 'normal,' but I'd argue that's a more likely outcome at this point than "dems win and just try to go back to 2015"
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The Fact of Other Minds Stan Account @csilverandgold.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I really hope Americans learn the lesson that all Republican presidents WILL get our country into expensive, pointless wars. It is what Republicans do. It is one of the few things that punches through their incompetence: the desire to blow some shit up. That and racism is all they understand.
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Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu · 14/09/2026
Your regular reminder: If the Russians stop fighting, the war ends. If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their land will be occupied, their leaders will be killed, their history and language will be erased, their children will be kidnapped to serve Russia.
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Jared, Fried Man 🇺🇦 @silkscreenfiend.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
"The Musk class" is better than "the Epstein class" in several ways.
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Liberal Currents @liberalcurrents.com · 09/09/2026
"We are more connected, more informed, more agitated than ever; we can manifest across the globe in flash mobs for any cause you care to name. And yet the relations of ruling remain unchanged. We’re depressed. Despondent. Posting alone. What gives?" www.liberalcurrents.com/the-end-of-h...
The End of History and the Final Girl

Anton Jäger’s "Hyperpolitics" is, at its best, late marginalia for "The End of History and the Last Man." At its worst, Jäger, like Fukuyama, is a prisoner of his political pieties.
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Micah @rincewind.run · 10/09/2026
if he could have spent eight years not actually being president but getting to do campaign rallies every night while people called him “Mr. President” we would all be significantly happier, him included
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Laura Chapin @laurachapin.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
The largely unregulated global "wellness" industry makes six times as much as heavily regulated Big Pharma, $6.8 trillion globally vs $1.7 trillion. MAHA is as much of a corporate industry as Big Pharma, it's just a much dumber and more dangerous one.
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Shipwreck @shipwreck75.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Never thought I would live to see the day when 18 service members lost their lives and it’s being dismissed as small potatoes.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 31/08/2026
my sense for why data centers have become heinously unpopular in the space of one year prospect.org/2026/08/31/d...
The AI rollout has been the ne plus ultra of Silicon Valley arrogance. A handful of billionaires—whose steadily more incomprehensible podcast appearances indicate participation in some truly unhinged group chats, or consumption of heavy-duty chemicals, or membership in literal, no-joke cults, or all three—declaimed that AI was going to revolutionize all human society, take everyone’s job, and/or maybe wipe out the human race. Therefore they needed to spend trillions and trillions of dollars building AI data centers everywhere, as fast as possible. When the tech barons blearily realized that this wasn’t the best sales pitch, and pivoted to ads about how AI had dull business applications, the damage was already done.

In the meantime, it turns out that while AI technology might not be at the HAL 9000 level yet, the various models are unsettlingly capable and potentially dangerous. Some models seem to touch off psychotic episodes in some people. A “swarm” of hundreds of OpenAI agents recently went rogue and hacked the Hugging Face site used by open-source AI development, causing severe damage. The potential AI use for mass surveillance is particularly troubling.

In short, AI is manifestly a technology in need of democratic deliberation and regulation, and the Big Tech billionaires manifestly are not going to listen to anyone but themselves, unless we force them. Take the simmering unease about AI risk, add in irritation at 20 years of Silicon Valley megalomania, as well as the increasing popular backlash against tech companies—Meta recently settled an enormous lawsuit about harming children for almost $17 billion—and you get a good old-fashioned NIMBY frenzy against the one Big Tech thing Americans can obstruct: data centers. And this time, Big Tech has no one to blame but themselves.
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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Funny how the AI corps walked into negative PR of their own making
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Fascism Heckler @fascismheckler.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Look capitalism is not and will never be a moral system. BUT things would be better if more "capitalists" were just capitalists. People like Musk, Thiel, and Zuckerberg are bigots who are willing to throw away profits for their deranged ideologies!
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Joy-Ann Reid @joyannreid.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
All of this tracks. Most white journalists cant conceive of white nationalism as anything but fringe, so they report the open white supremacy of the MAGA movement as something else (economic anxiety!) as they did with the tea party. Tough to admit that it's just the same old basic white nationalism.
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
There's no forgiving this. No living it down. It's a stain on our humanity. When all this is over, the monsters who did this should be pariahs. And the soulless thugs who cheered it on while dehumanizing Haitian immigrants should be reminded of what they did every day of their lives.
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Aubrey Gilleran @aubreygilleran.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Democrats are the Mommy Party. And it's Mommy's fault Dad trashed the house, apparently.
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Aubrey Gilleran @aubreygilleran.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
"Demand the Democrats restore everything" really treats the damage this administration has done incredibly trivially. Sorry, you can't make it 2015 again. That's not going to happen, even if you do throw this administration in jail.
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Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
This is also I think why you can imagine getting to the other side We call our present period "modernity" but it's clear that the premodern thing, the "old system," is still very much alive You can imagine a world where it's been killed dead
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Greg Sargent @gregsargent.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
On some level, I think a lot of Dems just aren't willing to say flat out that Trump and Trumpism have failed in a very profound way. Dems have internalized the idea that this is too much for voters to hear. That's the source of a lot of problems. It's needlessly self-constraining.
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Sam @samd.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
important reminder that donating to swing seat state legislature candidates is the best way to stop these fascist weirdos
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Ghoul-in’ Dickey @colindickey.com · 19/08/2026
The Natalie Harp thing is important because the brute fact of the matter is that Trump is no longer mentally/physically capable of governing on his own, and he relies on sycophants like Harp for basic functioning. And he knows this and is humiliated by it, which is why he's hollering like a hit dog.
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Right, MAGA takes Trump's infidelities as a sign that he's a real macho alpha male. Harp being another mistress wouldn't cause a problem at all. They'd probably applaud him for it. But if Harp is there to cater to a feeble old narcissist who's too fragile to handle the news? Oof.
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🎃GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE🎃 @golikehellmachine.com · 18/08/2026
whatever’s actually going on with trump and harp, they are deeply afraid of it breaking containment
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Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 17/08/2026
it's striking that the people who most hate the line that "america is an idea, not a people" are themselves totally enraptured by a pan-nationalist ideology known as "civilizationism" so are mass killers, it turns out. so are the people running our government.
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Dan Seitz @dseitz.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Chump voters don't understand (and wouldn't care if they did understand) the position they've put others they supposedly love into, and are mad that their decisions are having long-term, serious consequences.
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Dan Seitz @dseitz.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
The basic reality is starting in 2016 I think a lot of people were put in the impossible position of figuring out how to deal with somebody they loved failing a very simple moral test, and then embracing the results of that failure, failing the test again, sometimes failing it a THIRD time.
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Dan Seitz @dseitz.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Yeah, as somebody who is sensitive to this particular Discourse for personal reasons, it's telling how quickly the perspective has shifted from adults making this decision about their parents to parents insisting they have been unjustly punished for one teeny widdle mistake.
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Sarah Taber @sarahtaber.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
The ag lobby really, really, really, really, really, really, really wants you to think AI is the reason reservoirs are going empty. It's not. It's agriculture.
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ellie lockhart (she/they) @eleanor.lockhart.contact · 18/08/2026
they lie about us because they do the things they say we do.
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Shocked to learn that the political party led by pedophiles and dedicated to protecting pedophiles has created a police force filled with pedophiles.
A new report by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, released today, pulls back the curtain on a stunning level of sexual criminal behavior within ICE and CBP. Out of 152 cases of identified immigration officials or contractors accused or convicted of criminal behavior, 131 of them, or 86.2 percent, were charged with sex offenses. Seventy-eight of them—51 percent of the entire cohort—"committed sex offenses against children—the single largest category on the list," the report states. Cases involving a CBP officer, the report finds, "are more likely to involve underage victims" than those of an ICE officer. Yet fully half of ICE officers accused or convicted of sex offenses (12 of 24) had a minor as their victim.
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Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 18/08/2026
"For this kind of predator, the thing about teenagers is that they are just adult enough to be worth desiring, but not adult enough to stand up to you." www.liberalcurrents.com/we-need-to-t...
liberalcurrents.com
We Need to Talk About Pedocon Theory
The connection between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein is no accident, but reveals a deep logic at the heart of reactionary politics.
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Matthew Downhour @matthewdownhour.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
In terms of scale, beating Russia is utterly doable. We simply on principle refuse to do it
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 15/08/2026
feels like a lot of the mind-bending weirdness right now is being caused by “a small but influential minority of elites and their vassals desperately trying to force a hard-right vibe shift on an equally-increasingly uncooperative general public.”
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Bill Kristol @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
"Living through a global resurgence of fascism, the greatest difficulty has proved to be not arguing against it, but convincing non-fascists that fascism’s adherents mean it. They believe what they are telling us they believe—and they will act accordingly." www.liberalcurrents.com/fascists-rea...
liberalcurrents.com
Fascists Really Believe It
Millions could die because of ideas intellectually and morally equivalent to the ‘lizard people’ conspiracy theory.
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Protect Democracy @protectdemocracy.org · 05/08/2026
Defending the midterms is only half the job. Building a stronger democracy is the other. @vox.com's @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social joins @amandacarpenter.bsky.social and @farbodnagra.bsky.social to discuss the structural reforms that could renew our democracy. 🔗 RSVP here: protdem.org/AfterTrump
The image is a promotional graphic for an event titled "American Democracy After Trump" scheduled for Wednesday, Aug 19 at 12:30 PM EST. It is hosted by Vox and Protect Democracy. The speakers listed are Zack Beauchamp from Vox, Amanda Carpenter, Alicia Menendez-Brennan, and Farbod Faraji from Protect Democracy.
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Vox @vox.com · 12/08/2026
One week out. We're continuing America After Trump live with @protectdemocracy.org on Aug. 19 at 12:30 PM ET: the threats to the 2026 midterms and how proportional representation could end the gerrymandering wars. Register: protdem.org/AfterTrump
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Democracy Defenders Action @democracydefendersaction.org · 11/08/2026
Tennessee lawmakers split up the state’s only majority-Black congressional district. The response? Democratic primary turnout in majority-Black Shelby County more than doubled from 2024, reaching its highest level in a decade. You can redraw the map. You can’t erase the voters.
washingtonpost.com
Voter turnout surges in Tennessee after Black-majority district is erased
High Democratic turnout for House primaries in Shelby County, which includes Memphis, is the latest sign that redistrict
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Erin Reed @erininthemorning.com · 11/08/2026
Trans men used the bathroom they were required to use in Kansas under their new incredibly severe statewide bathroom ban. As a result, the police were called on them. They call themselves the Kansas Compliance Crew. Subscribe to support our journalism.
erininthemorning.com
Police Called on Trans Men Using Women's Restroom As Required By Kansas Law
“As a trans man, I have the immense privilege of blending in. But these laws force me to choose between safety and obeying the law.”
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The Guardian @theguardian.com · 11/08/2026
Syrian court sentences Bashar al-Assad to death in absentia for war crimes
theguardian.com
Syrian court sentences Bashar al-Assad to death in absentia for war crimes
Verdict relates to atrocities committed during the country’s 14-year civil war in which about 500,000 people died A Syrian court has sentenced the country’s former president Bashar al-Assad and his brother Maher to death in absentia for crimes against humanity and war crimes during the 14-year civil war, in which about half a million people died. The two men fled to Moscow after being ousted by a lightning rebel offensive in December 2024 which toppled the dictatorial regime in just 11 days. Continue reading...
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