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ryan cooper

@ryanlcooper.com
116K followers 1.4K following 31K posts

Senior editor at The American Prospect, cohost and producer of the @leftanchor.bsky.social podcast www.patreon.com/leftanchor Newsletter: www.ryanlcooper.com

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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 28/09/2026
only in America lol
From multiple points to the northeast and northwest of the substation, it was easy to see the transformers lined up inside, about 150 yards away. I parked and climbed a hill, and the only thing slowing me down was thistle. I had brought my binoculars; I trained them on an area inside the wall. I had an unobstructed view of the bushings sticking out of the transformers like lightning-struck hair, the vulnerable cooling fins jutting out of their side bulk.

Incredibly, there are five gun ranges in the hills around the substation, including a 200-yard range meant for high-powered rifles. As I scanned the facility with my binoculars, I could hear them all. From a pistol range I heard an announcement, “OK, shooters, we’re in a safe-fire zone,” followed by a flurry of two-beat reports. It was not difficult to imagine what the valley would have sounded like the night the snipers opened fire.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 16/09/2026
propaganda on my doorknob. don’t threaten me with a good time!
Republican door hanger: The socialist left is destroying America, only your vote can stop them. It’s got pictures of Bernie, AOC, Zohran, and Paige Cognetti
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 16/09/2026
way to go, you fucking morons. I hope you're happy with how things are going
Going beyond the necessary cost cutting, tech’s newly radicalized billionaires used this moment to wage class war and enforce discipline on what they saw as an unruly workforce. Gone were the days of coddling tech workers and viewing them as the industry’s most valuable assets. Instead, the progressivism and idealism that had come, in part, from the techno-utopianism of the 2000s and 2010s was now seen by Silicon Valley’s executives and investors as an explicit threat. And so, these billionaires set their sights on winning the culture war and dismantling the left-liberal foundations they believed had turned their own workers against them. To do so, and to avoid another bout of Biden-esque regulation, they threw in their support with Trump, laying the foundations of what would soon be known as the tech oligarchy—a power bloc uniting capital and politics under a shared project of restoring control.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 10/09/2026
still thinking about this, why MAGA is celebrating the new Uwe Boll movie about a piece of shit landlord who murders people
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 09/09/2026
my insurance company is apparently convinced that I have diabetes and keeps trying to give me a free diabetes monitor kit. I do not have diabetes
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 08/09/2026
Harold Ford is not so good though
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 08/09/2026
lol
Donald was practically vibrating when we left Cluely. “Dude, he’s just a scared little boy,” he said. “He’s scared he’s not doing the right thing, and because of the fucked-up world we live in, people who should be in The Hague are giving him twenty million dollars. Something bad is gonna happen here, something really fucking bad is gonna happen.” He sighed. “I just want Zohran’s nonbinary praetorians to march across the country and put all these guys in cuffs.” I found it hard to disagree. It did not seem like a good idea to me that some of the richest people in the world were no longer rewarding people for having any particular skills, but simply for having agency, when agency essentially meant whatever it was that was afflicting Roy Lee. Unlike Eric Zhu or Donald Boat, Roy didn’t really seem to have anything in his life except his own sense of agency. Everything was a means to an end, a way of fortifying his ability to do whatever he wanted in the world. But there was a great sucking void where the end ought to be. All he wanted, he’d said, was to hang out with his friends. I
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 08/09/2026
suing a mother with a 9-month-old baby over *129 bucks* and then garnishing her fuckin bank account. Republicans: the party of, by, and for evil pricks
“I had every intention to pay, I was just struggling,” said Kellie Clutts, whom Mr. Marshall sued in 2015 over a $129 bill. Ms. Clutts said the charge was from a postpartum visit shortly after her daughter’s birth.

Mr. Marshall sued Ms. Clutts when her baby was 9 months old and eventually garnished her bank account.

“I was recently divorced, trying to do everything on my own,” said Ms. Clutts, 45. “I told them I could make partial payments, but it seemed like no matter what I said, they wanted the full amount at once.”
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 08/09/2026
or put another way, strong growth tends to defuse extremism of all stripes. as Hobsbawm put it in Age of Extremes
What chances of stability there were in such regimes could not survive
the Great Depression. The Weimar Republic fell largely because the
Great Slump made it impossible to keep the tacit bargain between state,
employers and organized workers, which had kept it afloat. Industry and
government felt they had no choice but to impose economic and social
cuts and mass unemployment did the rest. In mid-1932 National Socialists
and communists between them polled an absolute majority of all German
votes, and the parties committed to the Republic were reduced to little
more than a third. Conversely, it it is undeniable that the stability of
democratic regimes after the second World War, not least that of the new
German Federal Republic, rested on the economic miracles of those
decades (see chapter 9). Where governments have enough to distribute
to satisfy all claimants, and most citizens' standard of life is steadily rising
in any case, the temperature of democratic politics rarely rises to feverpitch. Compromise and consensus tended to prevail, as even the most
impassioned believers in the overthrow of capitalism found the status quo
less intolerable in practice than in theory, and even the most uncompromising champions of capitalism took social security systems and regular
negotiations
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 08/09/2026
barely managed 12 percent growth since 2008, and flat for the last decade. when more income must come at someone else's expense, it plays right into friend-enemy politics
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 31/08/2026
god damn lol
Perhaps it has been his guilty conscience regarding his position at MIT along with a hubristic overestimation of his own capacity for individually grasping the essence of any global matter that led Chomsky to saddle himself with the task of producing counter-propaganda rather than searching for truth; perhaps it was the idea of himself as an American statesman trying to advise policy rather than an international organizer that led him to prioritize a friendship with someone who could provide access to figures like Ehud Barak and Steve Bannon over consideration for his victims. Whatever the case, Chomsky’s lasting legacy will be the impressive feat of having combined the worst aspects of just about every leftist and progressive tendency: anarchists’ lack of economic theory and class analysis, Marxist-Leninists’ defense of state atrocities and insistence on viewing politics as a global chessboard, and liberals’ elitist disdain for the masses’ ability to be trusted with interpreting information.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 31/08/2026
yep
Manifestly insane and idiotic people are running our government. They are using its tools to punish and humiliate their enemies. What country are we living in?

It’s easy to dismiss Loomer and Yiannopoulos as two particularly flamboyant and strange characters, but they are just exaggerated caricatures of a broader right wing that broadly shares their features. The state has been captured by influencers and propagandists. This is how these people fight each other: They are low, miserable bastards and bitches. You can expect an uptick in doxxing, lawfare, and the release of kompromat—remember that fun term?—as factions position themselves for the Trump succession. If this is how they treat their former friends, how will they treat their enemies?
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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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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 29/08/2026
literally found this on the ground
it’s fake! FAKE!!!
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 28/08/2026
Ezra Klein said almost exactly this same thing the other day. also Piker was not remotely "hard in the paint" on Platner www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/o...
But in a world where Israel is going to be as brutal as it has been in Gaza — and is going to play much more of a role of a regional hegemon militarily, which is what it has stepped into — people are going to have very strong opinions — including strong negative opinions — on what it means for there to be roughly 7 million Palestinians who do not have equal rights and who are under Israeli control.

It’s very important. You just have to be able to be against what the Israeli state has become and not antisemitic.

I think it’s an incredibly dangerous game that pro-Zionist people have played trying to conflate those things. Because if you tell people enough times that opposing Israel is to be antisemitic, at some point they’re going to say: Then I guess I’m antisemitic.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 26/08/2026
galaxies. as in, more than one. the things that are 2.5 billion+ light years away
For the past few years, at happy hours and dinner parties in San Francisco, Leopold Aschenbrenner kept confusing people by sharing his favorite outlandish idea. 

He wanted to buy galaxies.

Some of his friends weren’t always sure what to make of Aschenbrenner’s intergalactic ambitions. He once left the room and they debated whether he was referring to physical galaxies or a type of private plane. 

No, he assured them when he came back. He meant galaxies. 

His idea was that advances in artificial intelligence would soon unlock resources on a cosmic scale, enabling humans to colonize faraway planets. He planned to save money now so he could spend on galaxies, he told them, and make his mark across the universe.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 24/08/2026
important piece of how journalism works right here www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/never-apol...
The Post, a truly immoral scumbag tabloid that is simultaneously the most skilled tabloid journalism publication in America in a way that we can all learn from, ran the story, and then it was picked up over the next few days by other right wing outlets making essentially the same “hey this left winger is a rich kid” joke, and then yesterday the story was picked up by the New York Times, which had profiled Gordillo earlier, and once that happened it instantly became acceptable fodder for non-right-wing reporters and pundits. This is a textbook case of how to shepherd a shallow partisan smear into the mainstream news cycle. You may find it distasteful, but you should admire its efficacy. Any competent cutthroat political communicator must be able to replicate this process on demand.

(When I worked at Gawker, we frequently played a similar but less political role in this general process, by writing about stories that the Times was interested in but considered disreputable, which would then allow them to write follow-ups framed as “People are talking about this thing,” which provides them an entry point to feed their readers salacious news while still maintaining an analytical, hands-off pose. Once you understand this dynamic you will see it all the time.)
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 24/08/2026
couple key points
So what does that mean in practice? The authors draw on the work of scholars like Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Charles Mills, who have showed many ways that racists have exploited ostensibly liberal norms to perpetuate bigotry. They combine that work with the critique of free speech from literature scholar Ulrich Baer, who argues that when free speech protects “speech that proposes that some humans are innately inferior to others, and thus undermines the baseline assumption of human equality … free speech degenerates into an exercise in domination.” Explicit racism, defending slavery or colonialism as good for the subjected peoples, arguing that homosexuality is a disease, or similar bigoted views thus have no place in the university.

Many liberals instinctively resist this idea. It sounds like censorship, and in a sense it is. But virtually no one actually believes schools should always consider every idea under the sun. Aside from Professor Sandy Hook Truther above, there are dozens of ideas that are de facto banned from the academy: flat earth theory, geocentrism, phlogiston, and so on. The authors provide a handy list of additional indefensible guest lecture topics, like “the Jews had it coming,” “vaccines cause autism,” “climate change is a hoax,” and “phrenology has much to teach us.” (For the latter lecture they offer to measure the skulls of audience members to determine “who among us is most likely to become a perpetrator of violent crime.”)If I had to levy a criticism of Bérubé and Ruth, it would be here. On the question of whether there is any hope for even modest government action on speech, they throw up their hands. “There is, we are finding to our collective horror, a destructive and potentially murderous libertarianism baked into the country’s very foundation,” they write. But this is entirely too pessimistic. While it surely is hard to imagine any kind of speech regulation akin to the ban on publishing Holocaust denial or Nazi slogans in Germany (and several other nations) in the U.S., there are quite a few more modest measures that are much more consonant with American history. There are still considerable regulations on political spending, for instance, and the Supreme Court decision that gutted the previously more-strict regime is deeply unpopular.

Indeed, it’s quite plausible to argue that such regulations are necessary to ensure the American people actually enjoy the benefits of free speech. The idea that the best argument will naturally win out in the “free marketplace of ideas” is every bit as ridiculous as saying that financial deregulation will improve the efficiency of investment. Free speech and free discussion are public goods that require regulation to preserve just like any other kind of public good. Absent regulation, ruthless ultra-rich monopolists and their flat-earth allies will barge in and befoul the collective speech commons.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 21/08/2026
she went Republican in 2008 *because* of Sarah Palin. now that's what I call good judgment www.wsj.com/articles/SB1...
Amy Siskind does not fit that demographic, but she's excited nonetheless.

A big fundraiser for the Democratic Party, Ms. Siskind said she has voted Democratic, "up and down the ticket," all her life. She resolved earlier this week not to support Sen. Obama because she felt he slighted Sen. Clinton in not seriously considering her as a vice-presidential pick. Still, she wasn't 100% sold on Sen. McCain -- until he appeared at a rally with Gov. Palin at his side. "I'm voting Republican," Ms. Siskind said.

Ms. Siskind, a former Wall Street executive, disagrees with the Republicans on some issues she used to consider crucial, such as legal abortion, but is willing to overlook those differences for a chance to see a woman standing on the Capitol steps in January 2009 -- for the inauguration she once hoped would usher Hillary Clinton into the White House.

"Roe v. Wade has been used for a long time to control women politically," Ms. Siskind said, referring to the Supreme Court case that legalized abortion. "I don't think that's the case any more… I'm not the only one, I'm sure, who has decided to back [Sen. McCain] now."
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 19/08/2026
boy is this kind of thinking common. I see it all the time on here www.programmablemutter.com/p/no-one-mak...
Again, none of this helps explain what Acemoglu and Johnson are saying, but it is absolutely helpful in explaining Noah’s own thinking. He is riffing on the notion of consumer sovereignty: that consumers know what they want, and can get it thanks to free markets. That people buy iPhones tells us that they like iPhones. That they sign up for Facebook tells us that they like Facebook. That they shop on Amazon tells us that they like to shop on Amazon. And so on. That, then, transfers into people’s broader attitude to Big Tech. We know that Big Tech is popular, because people like to buy the products of Big Tech.

Noah himself is doing a tautology here. He assumes that we know what people want because they buy it, and we know that they buy it because they want it. I suspect (but don’t know) that Noah doesn’t realize that he himself is engaged in tautology, because it’s so fundamental to the way that he thinks. In fairness, there are a lot of people who think that way.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 13/08/2026
I will say this style is the best phone I've ever used for writing, bar none. typing on a screen sucks ass and it somehow manages to get worse every year
Nokia N97 I think? a slider phone with a full size keyboard
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 13/08/2026
I had one of these for my whole time in South Africa, 2009-11. battery lasted for like 6 days
Nokia dumbphone, c. 2009 model
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 12/08/2026
www.gawkerarchives.com/punch-drunk-...
It's getting so that white people are afraid to speak their minds:

Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing.

This is a well-documented and obvious point, only for some reason it says "Under p.c. culture" instead of "everywhere." As I'm sure Chait is aware, women who write cutting and incisive columns about politics are constantly subject to sexist abuse of the sort he never has to deal with, and people of color who write the same sorts of things as Jonathan Chait face similarly endless torrents of racist abuse. Straight, white men, though, are sometimes called racist, which we can all agree is hurtful in its own way.

It's not just angry Twitter nobodies, either! "[Political correctness] also makes money," Chait says, using, as his example, one BuzzFeed post about microaggressions that has "received more than 2 million views." I'm guessing that Chait makes quite a bit more money than the person who compiled that post. In fact, that's true of nearly everyone who is presented as a victim of political correctness in Chait's essay, from millionaire comedian Bill Maher to the anonymous professor at a prestigious university: They all enjoy superior social status to the people who are supposedly silencing or terrifying them. It's hard to see how democracy was significantly harmed by Condoleezza Rice not giving a commencement address.But if Chait can't prove his thesis, he can at least repeatedly assert it. "While politically less threatening than conservatism (the far right still commands far more power in American life), the p.c. left is actually more philosophically threatening. It is an undemocratic creed."

I.e., while The Left still has no real power in American politics and only some small pockets of influence in academia and the media, they still concern me a great deal because they are more likely to wound my pride and sense of self-worth as a good liberal than conservatives are, and so therefore they pose a real threat to democracy.

As we get to the end of Chait's essay, we can tally up the casualties of political correctness. One anti-abortion protester was shoved and had her sign vandalized. A few millionaires were disinvited from college campuses, and performances of two plays were canceled. Various people feel disinclined to engage in online debates. Participants in a Facebook group had to deal with a Bad Thread. And a college student was fired from his school newspaper. That's one person whose life was in any meaningful way made materially worse by the scourge of political correctness, in nearly 5,000 words of dire warnings about the philosophical threat posed by left-wing speech policing.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 06/08/2026
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 05/08/2026
very good point about Zohran's grocery idea
This is the key to understanding, for example, the question of why groceries cost so much in New York. I won’t link to them because I don’t want to start fights, but a lot of the commentary on this subject has attempted to bring Data to bear by looking at supermarket profit margins, and asking whether a state-owned retailer would be more or less efficient.

But that’s very much the wrong way to look at this sort of question. Supermarket profit margins will tend to be the same roughly everywhere, and will tend to a very low level. In exactly the same way, and for exactly the same reason, that 19th century tenant farmers’ income was almost always at roughly the same subsistence level whatever the quality of the land, and despite huge productivity improvements in farming machinery.

That reason being that David Ricardo and his Law of Rent are not easily denied. Two essential inputs into the grocery retail trade are land and business permits. Almost everything else in the industry is a commodity with a price set in the free market, but these two aren’t, and they don’t have any close substitutes.

Which means that, in general, when you look at the recorded profit margins of a retailer in the accounts, what you are learning about is how good a job the real estate investment bankers did. And that when you’re comparing the (acknowledged to be anomalously high) prices of groceries in New York City to the (acknowledged to be more or less in line with the rest of the industry, and not showing obvious scope for fat to be trimmed) profit margins of New York supermarkets, what you are seeing is the amount that has been extracted by a sort of “permit Raj”.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 03/08/2026
credit to this lady for constructing the perfect Do Your Own Research sentence heated.world/p/the-influe...
“My belief is when some people very, very pompously hold their science above other people’s science, I say to them, there’s actually no way of knowing if yours is the right science,” she told me.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 03/08/2026
Laura, and I can't emphasize this enough, LOOMER doing this. what the fuck man
By Loomer’s account, her views on Ukraine started changing gradually over the past year and a half as she noticed other right-wing podcasters spreading conspiracy theories and criticizing Trump’s support for Israel and attacks on Iran, then being promoted by Russian state media’s propaganda outlet, RT, and other pro-Russian social media accounts. She increasingly clashed with anti-war influencers online.
“Russia is running a foreign influence operation on social media to sow chaos and division in American politics and to radicalize people, specifically right-wingers,” Loomer said. “There’s a lot of conservatives who have been totally radicalized and brainwashed by Russian propaganda.”
In June, Candace Owens and other right-wing internet personalities traveled to Russia for an annual conference that Putin has long promoted as his country’s version of Davos, the gathering spot for the global economic elite. That same month, a producer working with Loomer, Andrew Moore, attended a security conference in Odesa, Ukraine, and told her people there liked how she was calling out Russia. Loomer said that made her want to go herself.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 03/08/2026
good question, how on earth did they even think of this
Second, if you are going to create a public Medicare Advantage plan, why not just create that inside the Medicare program itself? The private insurers that operate in the Medicare Advantage market are basically criminals, but seniors nonetheless like the idea of an all-in-one insurance plan that incorporates Medicare Parts A, B, and D. The obvious solution to that would be to cut out the fraudsters and have CMS offer its own Medicare Advantage-type plan, not to create yet another health insurance entity.

There is something also quite comical about the Medicare Advantage aspect of the plan. When you run the clock back, what you see is Congress inviting private insurers to administer Medicare plans and then this whole thing turning into a vehicle for defrauding the government out of tremendous sums of money. Now, our policy response to this is to see if the American Health Gateway can somehow convince the nation's elderly to turn away from whatever Medicare Advantage plan Joe Montana is hocking on daytime TV in favor of the American Health Gateway, which sounds just as scammy if not more so. This is needlessly circuitous, at best.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 03/08/2026
oh yeah the broader newspaper industry is turbo fucked. down ~80 percent since 1990
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 03/08/2026
more than 8 percent of all American newspaper journalists work in Manhattan, up from 2 percent in 2005 www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 30/07/2026
reminded of this piece I wrote after a half dozen right-wing radio guys killed themselves by refusing to get the Covid vax theweek.com/politics/100...
On the other hand, for decades the conservative base has been primed to always make the most grossly irresponsible choice possible, and been told over and over that "American freedom" means they never have to do anything other than whatever they want, all the time. Being told to make any sacrifice, no matter how microscopic, on behalf of any person — even themselves or their own family — thus creates boiling outrage among the loudest and angriest conservatives. 
The frankly disturbing fact is that a lot of the pressure to turn Republicans against the vaccine came from the base itself, even while ICUs were being stuffed full of unvaccinated conservative voters. When Hannity issued a mildly pro-vaccine statement one night, he was deluged with furious complaints and backtracked instantly. When Trump urged a rally to get their shots, he was booed. If there's one thing conservative media does, it's pander to their viewers' desires — because if they don't, they will quickly be out-pandered by a yet more insane media network.
At bottom, a huge chunk of movement conservatives would rather die than admit they live in a society with other human beings who also deserve consideration and respect, and these radio hosts did just that. They weren't the first and they won't be the last.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 27/07/2026
web.archive.org/web/20150828...
Longtime readers of my blog will know that I think the corporatist approach is wrong on basically every level. Asking the boss to be uncle sugar based on some notion of company communitarianism is misguided about the true nature of the labor-management relationship, which is antagonistic at its core. Additionally, asking bosses to be uncle sugar while also having them compete within market institutions is a recipe for disaster: all it takes is a few ruthless duty-shirkers to seriously compromise the viability of corporations that sincerely try to play their corporatist role. Most importantly, the corporatist model doesn't actually work. Corporatist countries like Switzerland and Germany look good by American standards, but the social democracies crush them on basically every indicator of the well-being of vulnerable populations.

The only problem with the social democratic way is that there simply are no advocates of it in the US mainstream. What this means though, to bring us back to the original point, is that the scores of people complaining about "employer subsidies" won't go away and can't (ideologically) go away.

So long as people in this country continue to subscribe generally to the ideologies 1) that stuff that comes from the employer is truly yours in ways stuff that comes from elsewhere isn't, 2) that the government should largely stay out of substantive labor regulation, 3) that unions are essentially discretionary institutions and only really appropriate on a workplace-to-workplace basis, and 4) corporations have duties to provide for the well-being of their workers, you are going to keep seeing this same story play out again and again.

The upper half or so will enjoy cushy (albeit inefficient) corporatist welfare systems heavily subsidized by the federal government. The bottom half will live in a more liberal market system with so little corporatist protection that many of them must rely (where it's even available) on skimpy public protection, which
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 18/07/2026
not too shabby for an old fart given the beastly climb in the middle
40 mile bike ride report, including 3000 feet of elevation gain
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 17/07/2026
for the record median voters basically don't give a shit about affirmative action, which does not exist, or banning trans kids from sports. they got real problems www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2026/7/...
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 17/07/2026
dang it, I guessed Yale, but should have gone with the obvious choice
David French got a JD from Harvard
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 16/07/2026
I know what to do
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 07/07/2026
Why would this be good? It’s critical to make the outcome of cases less predictable. At the moment, the right knows they’ve got five or six “sure thing” votes for basically anything they want that isn’t completely absurd on its face. Meanwhile, the corrupt justices know they are entirely insulated from any accountability. This uncertainty about who will hear a case reduces the incentive to game the process with concocted cases. More importantly, I think it creates an incentive for justices to render opinions which are at least facially reasonable and rooted in law and history. Otherwise a different panel might come back a year or two later and just undo your decision. Just as appellate judges don’t want to be overruled by the Supreme Court, I think this creates a similar incentive. If your decision is well-reasoned, responsive to Constitution and precedent, it’s more likely that future panels will at least operate within the structure of your decision even if they don’t simply rubber stamp it. On both fronts, these kind of randomly selected panels create a benign uncertainty and reduce the incentives for corrupt actions.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 06/07/2026
correction on this post, Norway didn’t spend any GPFG money for the first 20 years of its existence, but they did tap it in 2016 for the first time, and repeatedly since then due to the pandemic and rearmament post-2022 www.ipe.com/norway-takes...
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 26/06/2026
hell yea brother. 52% hopepilled, that's about right
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 26/06/2026
I'm reminded of this old Pareene distinction between the rude press and the anti-P.C. press newrepublic.com/article/1556...
And even worse things have survived. Much as there is a parallel right-wing media that’s insulated from market forces by the ideological mission of its wealthy funders, there is another media that superficially resembles the endangered rude media, but effectively pursues the opposite agenda. It is the anti-P.C. media, where the audience’s vicarious thrill comes not from watching scrappy underdogs heckle their supposed betters, but from watching guys sitting comfortably atop social hierarchies belittle and dominate their lessers. The difference between a rude press and an anti-P.C. press is in each enterprise’s respective relationship to power. The anti-P.C. press certainly delights in titillating its audience, but it always, unfailingly, endorses a completely servile relationship to authority. The very idea of standing up to your boss is described as childish; the mature thing to do is accept domination and even abuse, unless and until you yourself manage to accrue some power over others. Mainly because the audience for this kind of posturing from a position of maximum privilege is male, and young, and probably has some money to throw around—and little to no interest in overthrowing existing power structures, even when they are victimized by them—the same corporate money that is terrified to be associated with a left-wing site that sometimes writes “Bitch McConnell” can only be deterred from sponsoring the anti-P.C. media by mass organized action.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 24/06/2026
righteous paragraph. I don't think I'm alone in being sick to fuckin death of hearing about Donald Trump
For a year and a half, we have watched an 80-year-old demented, effluvient, affluenza patient stifle our economy, trample our constitution, terrorize our neighbors, insult our sacred traditions, threaten our allies, promise genocide, guarantee holocaust, and start (then promptly lose) an illegal war, the consequences of which we will be living with for a generation. They call him the “king of deals,” but he’s bankrupted six casinos. At every turn, we’re reminded why. We’ve watched as a talentless totem of meaningless celebrity gutted scientific research, pardoned traitors, paid off terrorists, tortured families, murdered innocents, and wrapped himself in the flag of freedom while demanding our gratitude for each humiliation. We see the rosy-cheeked marionette, Speaker Mike Johnson, stumble through some absurd denial of any knowledge of the day’s most significant event to avoid the risk of an octogenarian making a mean post about him. The Supreme Court scrapes and bows and invents new dogmas to crown him godking. The media stumbles around, drunk on the fumes of his power and attention, no matter how bitter the glass. Meanwhile, we are treated as if we cannot taste, read, or hear.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 17/06/2026
curious that Trump is not getting the screaming hysterical condemnation from the media that Biden got when he faced facts and ended the Afghanistan occupation
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 12/06/2026
he put the work in there like few others. funny story about that www.nbcnews.com/think/opinio...
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 12/06/2026
Wall Street people will straight up say this. oh Elon has lied literally hundreds of times about what Teslas will be able to do for 15 years, you ask? well,
Bloomberg headline: 'I wouldn't bet against Elon Musk," Morgan Stanley CEO says
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 10/06/2026
TIL there are already somewhat obscure stock indices that use the kind of rules Elon Musk foisted on Nasdaq, and the result according to research is billions in losses for index fund investors prospect.org/2026/06/10/e...
It turns out we already have evidence for the consequences of fast-track rules. Two other index providers—the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) and Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI)—have already had five-day fast-tracking in place for years. The practice siphons money out of index investors’ pockets, according to a 2025 study by Harvard Business School researchers Marco Sammon and Chris Murray.

Sammon and Murray found IPOs fast-tracked by CRSP cost 15 percent more for funds tracking their indexes, including some of Vanguard’s largest. The price hike comes from hedge funds and other financial insiders—knowing large index funds would have no choice but to buy in the following days—picking up the stock in anticipation of the IPO’s listing on CRSP indexes. Once the IPO is listed, the demand from the index funds themselves gives the price a further bump. Insiders selling their shares to index funds on the day of inclusion make a hefty profit, a cost ultimately borne by the fund investors when the stock price reverts immediately following index inclusion and continues to underperform in the long run. This “shadow tax” for index investors totaled over $5.8 billion between 2017 and 2023.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 04/06/2026
I have plainly seen it a million times, "mate." I grew up in Colorado ranch country
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 03/06/2026
aw man I sure hate it when operational decisions directly affecting combat on the ground are being influenced in real time by a foreign country. really feeling bad for the IDF guys here us18.campaign-archive.com/?e=2128a5bfb...
Meanwhile, senior IDF officers said on Wednesday that the military suspended planned attacks that required extensive preparation in Beirut and other major Lebanese cities at the last minute following direct orders from Trump.

Senior commanders expressed discomfort with the situation, with many saying they had never before operated under conditions in which operational decisions directly affecting combat on the ground were being influenced in real time by a foreign country. According to the officers, a situation in which authority over the use of force is not entirely in the hands of the Israeli government or the IDF general staff – but is instead influenced by decisions made by the White House – is unprecedented.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 03/06/2026
yes, I got into that in the article! prospect.org/2026/06/03/a...
A third more ominous factor is that the world has been heavily drawing down existing stocks of oil and natural gas. Many people saw the Iran war coming, and filled up every oil tanker and storage facility they possibly could. A great deal of that has since been used up. The vast storage complex at Cushing, Oklahoma (regarded as a storage benchmark), has declined from 33 million barrels to 24.5 million—and they can’t be fully emptied. “You can’t draw them down to zero because there is gunk at the bottom of the tanks,” oil analyst Matt Smith told CNN.

European nations have about 640 million barrels of storage capacity; they are down to perhaps 500 million. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve had about 415 million barrels before the war; it is down to 357 million, and being drawn down by another nine million per week. The Japanese reserve had about 350 million barrels; it is now down to about 270 million. China is undoubtedly tapping its own vast reserve, which is the largest in the world, but it does not publish official figures. (And what is true of the Cushing tanks is also true of these national reserves; the milkshake, as it were, cannot be fully drunk.) “We’re approaching unheard of inventory levels,” Exxon Senior Vice President Neil Chapman said at a recent conference. “Once you get to that point, then you’ll see price shoot up.”
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 29/05/2026
we need a clear regulatory line between bike-type devices and motorcycle-type devices. and a scooter this fast should probably not be legal at all. dude was wearing a full face helmet and he still died
The Blade GT II scooter is one of many high-speed devices that are illegal to operate on city streets or bike lanes, but it is easy to order one online and have it delivered to an city address.

“Zero to 53 in 3.9 seconds,” states the website for the $1,700 Blade scooter, made by Teverun.

In the wake of the crash, City Hall spokesman Jeremy Edwards said the Mamdani administration would continue to fight illegal vehicles.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 28/05/2026
quite the resemblance!
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