iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

From Mille et Un (a Franco-Korean bakery), clockwise from left: black sesame flan; a "Paris-Seoul" (Paris-Brest but with black sesame cream instead of hazelnut cream); and matcha roulade.

A slice of black sesame flan; two pieces of choux pastry sandwiching black sesame cream; and a green cake rolled around a green matcha filling.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

From Pleincœur (again): the noisette (again), tarte au sucre chocolat, and flan a la vanille Noisette continues to be delicious. The tarte au sucre was really interesting - kind of like if a chocolate chip cookie was made of brioche? Really tasty. The flan had a very intense vanilla flavor.

Left: a striped croissant-like pastry in the shape of a seashell. One side is covered with hazelnut; the other is striped. Right: a large chocolate chip cookie, except it's made of a bread dough.

A vanilla flan in a scalloped pastry shell.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

From Brigat': myrtille and hazelnut tart and chocolate mousse tart with hojicha. The myrtille tarte was INCREDIBLE - the compote was so sweet and fresh, the whole myrtilles were nice and tarte, and the hazelnut cream was smooth and delicious.

On the left, a tart covered in whole European blueberries. Right, a tart shell filled with chocolate mousse.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

From Diamande (clockwise from top left): cigare amande cardamone & pavot; bananement votre; baklawa aux noix; enveloppe à la fleur de jasmin; and trèfle aux coquelicots. Diamande is a French-Algerian bakery that specializes in small treats (and very cheap - about €2 each).

A cigar-shaped pastry made of almond dough, flavored with cardamom, and covered with poppy seeds; a round almond pastry, flavored with banana and covered with sesame seeds; a walnut baklava; a parcel flavored with jasmine flower; and a bright red pastry, shaped kind of like a poppy flower, and flavored with poppy.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

From Des Gâteaux et du Pain: Initiales (bilberry/European blueberry tart) and Brown Sugar (tart of almond cream and pear compote topped with crème brûlée). DGEDP was our first "favorite" bakery in Paris, but we haven't loved their offerings as much in recent years. This was a return to form.

Left: a tart of small European blueberries. Right: a tart of pear compote topped with golden cream brulee.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

From Chapon Chocolaterie: a chocolate mousse cornet - specifically, the Madagascar 75% and Venezuela 75%. (Didn't get a pic because it was raining, so please enjoy this random picture I got off the internet. It's chocolate mousse in a cone, you get it.)

A hand holding up a paper cone filled with chocolate mousse in front of the Chapon Chocolaterie store.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

From Mori Yoshida: a Paris-Breast aux Citron (choux pastry sandwiched with hazelnut cream flavored with lemon) and Mont Blanc (chestnut cream with rum, candied chestnuts, and whipped cream on a base of phyllo). Mori Yoshida is one of our favorites - they do French classics SO well, with a lil twist

Left: a Paris-Brest - a ring of choux pastry sandwiched around hazelnut cream. Right: a Mont Blanc - a tower of piped chestnut cream sitting on a phyllo dough base.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

epiloguegaming.com/what-do-we-d... Very good essay. (Content note for discussion of sexual assault)

"A society that claims to believe people can change must construct some imaginable future for people who actually do. Otherwise, every incentive points in the opposite direction. Why admit wrongdoing if admission and denial ultimately produce the same permanent identity? Why undertake the humiliating work of confronting what you have done if nothing you become afterward can possess moral significance? Why should someone who has caused harm believe in rehabilitation when the rehabilitative society itself demonstrably does not?

I’m broken up about this news, obviously. This heinous revelation does not merely destroy an adoring relationship to an artist whose work mattered to me. It also forces several moral convictions I hold simultaneously into uncomfortable proximity. I believe victims of sexual violence deserve to be believed and protected. I believe nobody is owed forgiveness. I also believe human beings can change, that punishment and justice are not synonyms, that privacy still matters when wrongdoing has occurred, and that reducing a person permanently to the worst act of their life is incompatible with any serious commitment to rehabilitation. I refuse to solve the contradiction by sacrificing whichever principle happens to be inconvenient today, as so many online seem to."

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

From Boulangerie Utopie: noisette and black sesame seed tarte au citron vert. The noisette (chocolate and hazelnut) tasted kind of like a refined candy bar. It was good, but not mind-blowing.

A noisette (chocolate with hazelnut cream) and a tart with a biscuit base, covered in black sesame mouse. (Not visible: lime curd.)

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

From Carl Marletti (clockwise from top left): religieuse a la rose, salted caramel eclair, and Saint-George (a blackcurrant and raspberry mousse around a vanilla core and on top of a dark chocolate biscuit). Really fantastic pastries!

A religieuse a la rose: a small choux bun on top of a larger choux bun, with a "collar" of pink fondant and coffee buttercream, and another piece of pink fondant acting as the "hat." An eclair topped with salted caramel. A dark purple mousse with white stripes, topped with a raspberry and a shard of dark chocolate.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

From Stohrer: iconique framboise (raspberry entremet with cream cheese frosting) and tarte framboise-passion (raspberry and passionfruit tart). Pics from their website because I forgot to grab one before eating.

An entremet consisting of raspberry confit surrounded by cream cheese icing. Not visible is the shortbread and Savoy biscuit layers inside.

A small tart with a brilliant yellow passionfruit curd on top. Not visible is the raspberry curd beneath.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

And the feuilleté - viennoiserie dough shaped into a double bun and filled with rice pudding - was fantastic. The pastry was light and fluffy and with amazing layers. The rice pudding perfectly cooked. The sesame seeds contrasted delicately with the caramel on top.

The two halves of a feuilleté being pulled apart - they look a bit like Chelsea buns, but coated with sugar and sesame seeds on the outside, and with visible layers.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

But the other two were *outstanding*. The noisette - croissant dough filled with hazelnut praline and cream - was SO flavorful. The pastry was light and immaculately layered, and somehow stayed fluffy even quite close to the filling. I don't know how they managed that.

The inside of a noisette - you can see layers of pastry, dark brown hazelnut praline, and pale hazelnut cream.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

From Pleincœur, clockwise from left: noisette, feuilleté au riz au lait, and kouign aux pommes. The kouign aux pommes - basically an apple turnover with what I assume was kouign-amann dough - was good, but not amazing. The apple filling was less flavorful than I was hoping.

Three pastries. The left, a noisette, is a seashell-shaped pastry. The broad end is covered in a brown topping, while the rest is striped. On top is a feuilleté au riz - two spirals of layered pastry, each topped with caramel. On the right is a kouign aux pommes, a round, heavily baked disc of spiraled layered pastry.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Her campaign website has a bunch of "coalitions" of different identity groups, but when you click it just takes you to a sign up page?? None of these appear to represent actual groups supporting her???

A webpage from Saritha Komatireddy's campaign website that lists a bunch of "coalitions" - African Americans for Saritha, Democrats for Saritha, Jewish New Yorkers for Saritha, etc.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

From Patisserie Cyril Lignac: tarte au citron, chausson aux pommes, and baba au rhum Pretty good! Nothing blew me away but I enjoyed it all. The baba tasted strongly of rum but it wasn't overpowering. I'd happily go back but I don't think I'd go out of my way.

Clockwise from top: a lemon tart topped with a square of white chocolate; an apple turnover-style pastry; and a cake soaked in run and syrup and topped with whipped cream.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Incredibly On Brand for the Brooklyn Democratic establishment to try to hang on to power by doing elder abuse

Hell Gate asked 10 of the seniors what brought them to the courthouse. Most declined to comment on the record. One woman using a walker, who declined to give her name, said she was there because Traynham-Cooper, her district leader, had asked her to come. Asked what she thought of the case, she said, "I was more on the sleepy side than anything. I'm tired, I need to get home." Another elderly couple, who declined to give their names, also seemed uncertain about the case, but said they were there to support the establishment Dems.

They erroneously told Hell Gate the case was about judges who had improperly appeared on the ballot. Others had reportedly been told to attend by members of Bichotte Hermelyn's office, and didn't know what the hearing was about.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I just hope the judge rules we can all be community

The theme continued into the elevator, with the establishment supporters chanting, "We are the community" at reporters right until the moment the elevator doors closed. Hell Gate asked Kenesha Traynham-Cooper—another one of the representatives who lost her race in June, but still voted through the rule changes (though didn't want anyone to know at the time)—what she hoped the outcome of the hearing would be: "Well, obviously, so we can all be community," she said.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

me 3 seconds after pounding back a flight of immunity shots

Dr. Manhattan floating and emanating with power. also his dick is out

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

They got Young Link looking like a curséd doll brought to life.

A screenshot of a very wet Young Link from the new Ocarina of Time remake. His eyes are huge, like easily 40% of his face. His skin is upsettingly smooth. People are saying it looks like a DLSS5 slop meme, and while I don't think it's quite that uncanny, it's definitely in the same neighborhood.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

And another thing: I'm not mad. Don't put in the newspaper that I got mad

Screenshot of article quoting the Brooklyn Democratic Party's attorney as saying "I'm not angry at all"

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

some incredible legal analysis happening in the replies

A screenshot of a reply reading "Had Luigi killed the CEO for profit, he would not have been charged. How many Americans has UnitedHealthcare killed for profits?"
Lawyer's note: murder for hire is absolutely a crime that they do in fact prosecute people for.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

what is described here is concrete organizing in the name of cross-racial, cross-class solidarity. this is exactly what Harper claims to want! but he is too blinkered by his own ideological priors to recognize it as such. anything that is deliberately anti-racist must, for Harper, be purely symbolic

$One of my colleagues in Africana was among the most visible faculty organizers in the unsuccessful campaign to establish a wall-to-wall union of staff and adjunct professors. He was a white male anthropologist who ultimately worked as a contingent professor at Bates for nearly a decade, eventually having to depart despite a well-reviewed book and a college-wide teaching award. One thing I remember from that especially grim season is his courage. He had a young family; he worked on a short-term contract, meaning he could effectively be fired in retaliation for outwardly opposing the administration. But he was on the front lines of labor and racial justice campaigns that were turning increasingly fractious. He stood in solidarity with workers and tenure-track Africana colleagues like me, even though we were paid more than he was to do the same job. His sense of intersectional justice, and his bravery in acting on his beliefs without the benefits of comparative job security, inspired me. When Harper’s article landed, I thought about that anthropologist immediately. He was the archetypal deserving white dude disinherited during Peak Woke. What did he think about this mess? I asked him. “One of the major functions of Africana was to provide a space of community and care,” he responded, while acknowledging the limitations of our attempts under institutional pressure. “I’ve been telling former students who ask that I feel exceptionally lucky to have been trusted as a white guy in a space where I was a clear minority, because it let me see all this in a way I never would have otherwise.”$

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

weird that Harper's concern for the material working conditions of professors didn't see any issue with the chronic understaffing of Africana studies!

More importantly, we understood how badly under-resourced Africana and ethnic studies were at Bates. These programs, which did not have the same institutional status as full departments, were consistently treated as second-class citizens. Their workloads were mostly shouldered voluntarily, by faculty members housed in departments with their own heavy demands on our time. In institution-speak, the programs had too few FTEs (“full-time employees”). Africana had one, at a time when the English department had as many as nine. And we were being increasingly burdened by white administrators’ squeezing maximum value from minimal investment. Senior leadership expected us to produce a splashy new curricular initiative to pitch to students and alums. It would significantly raise student demand in some disciplines, while leaving others untouched. We surmised from experience that the institution would not provide corresponding resources. The demand would be absorbed overwhelmingly by pre-tenure and adjunct faculty members of color with scant means to resist labor exploitation, as well as by those senior scholars who cared enough to share the load.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

newsletter.thedriftmag.com/p/racism-and... Absolutely searing rebuttal of Tyler Austin Harper by Andrew Baker, another Black professor who worked at Bates

Many black students I knew at Bates, including majors and minors in Africana, were from immigrant backgrounds. Harper was not affiliated with the program, so perhaps he never spoke with them frankly about the issues they faced. We did. They all had stories. They were tired of telling them. The idea that they imagined persecution while peacefully frolicking on an idyllic campus is pure fantasy.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

an instant classic in the Hater's Review canon. one of the most precise eviscerations I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Excellent explainer! This is such funny reasoning - oh no, our members might vote for AOC just because they support her and think it would be good if she was president! What a catastrophe that would be!

Ahead of the meeting Sunday, Marxist Unity Group and Springs of Revolution jointly proposed an amendment to the Presidential Exploratory Committee proposal that eliminates the all-member, nonbinding poll. They worry that a simple “yes”/“no” online poll could result in many DSA members instinctively voting in favor of endorsing AOC simply because they like her and want her to be president, without fully considering how DSA will relate to her presidential campaign.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Like, there's a lot about his platform that sounds good to me. But this is weird! It's a weird thing to say!

In Poindexter’s view, Democrats’ struggles with men like him owe less to policy than to culture. “It’s all vibes,” he said. “The Democrats have catered too much to, you know, the softer side. "

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

This essay - about philosophy and AI, but also fundamentally about the point of thinking and writing and communicating at all - absolutely slaps blnreview.de/en/ausgaben/...

Philosophers have a knack for missing the forest for the trees: In a time when OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google vie to hold the privileged role in active killing missions abroad and surveillance projects at home; when AI’s primary value proposition is the prospect of mass unemployment; when the founders of AI companies materially support an at-best proto-fascist presidential regime; when the entire enterprise of LLMs is built on the backs of staggering levels of copyright infringement; when the viability of AI depends on a Green New Deal in reverse, wherein the construction of highly materials- and energy-intensive data centers drives catastrophic levels of wealth inequality; when the public has lost trust in higher education in part, according to my institution, because universities no longer seem to be a place where students actually learn: What is the politics of eagerly embracing AI to do philosophy, of all things? And I do not just mean here, what is the ideological message conveyed by this posture towards AI? I mean also: What are the concrete practical effects of such vigorous proselytizing about the wonders of AI? The answer is surely in part: a contribution to and reinforcement of the hype that is structurally necessary for the investment cycles that keep the AI ecosystem afloat, despite the world-historical chasms between revenue and debt that characterize the economy and threaten its future viability. But I digress.

When philosophers do express concern about AI, they tend to focus on AI’s impact on the process of learning philosophy—the impact of AI in the classroom and on graduate training. Already, widespread use of AI has made it virtually impossible to assign students standard take-home essays. Nearly all of the assessments in my courses are now based on in-person assignments. Whatever take-home essays that I still assign are now coupled with oral exams. One obvious reason for these changes is to ensure that assessments continue to track reliable markers of student aptitude and mastery of material. But most philosophers (and teachers more generally) are concerned not just with rational schemes of evaluation but also with the effects of AI reliance on students’ cognitive capacities and development. Research has already shown AI usage to be associated with deteriorated memory recall, critical thinking, and basic skill acquisition. Offloading cognitive effort—surprise—turns out to leave a lasting effect on cognitive capacities.

And yet, from some philosophers’ heavy use of AI in their own work, it stands to reason that they are not similarly concerned with the effects of using AI on themselves, their capacities, and their philosophizing. Their divergent attitudes toward their students’ research practices and their own suggests that they believe there to be important differences between learning philosophy and doing philosophy. Using AI as a student of philosophy poses many risks to one’s ability to learn the activity, but once one is “fully fledged” as a philosopher, the risks are, apparently, greatly minimized.

In any case, focusing on deskilling itself as the primary problem with using AI in doing philosophy is misleading, insofar as it detaches the skills and practices of philosophy from the activity of philosophy itself. But there is an intimate connection between that set of skills and practices and the actual doing of philosophy, such that, as teachers rightly worry, if you never acquire those skills, you have never learned how to do philosophy. The ability to transcend one’s own perspective, anticipate another’s, and strive through reasoned argument towards a more objective view of things is perhaps the very hallmark of philosophical thinking, such that if one never learns these skills and practices, then one never learned how to do philosophy.

But by the same token, if one is not actually engaging those skills and practices, because one has outsourced them, then one is not doing philosophy. Basic philosophical practices like locating yourself in logical space, reading others charitably, and handling objections, are not just practices of skill acquisition, merely preparatory to the subsequent doing of philosophy. They are constitutive of the very activity of philosophy. There is no asymmetry between learning and doing philosophy in this respect. What makes it the case that one is doing philosophy is not the mere possession of philosophical skill or theoretical ability to deploy it but its active use and practice. Offloading in this regard poses equal risk to the student and teacher of philosophy alike: the risk that you did not in fact end up doing philosophy at all.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

I think my favorite part of Bluesky is the sophisticated political discussion

A post reading "But if you allow people to call you a progressive, then it comes freighted with a lot of other meanings.

Now it means you don't care about the environment and actively disdain civil rights, which most Liberals don't have truck with. It means you're antisemitic, and that you prefer"

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

what on earth does "minus the adjectives and hyperbole" mean in this case? Alito says this case is about "birth tourists" and goes on an unhinged racist conspiratorial rant. This is not a useful or succinct summary of the question presented or what the majority decided.

A screenshot of the first paragraph of Justice Sam Alito's racist dissenting screed in Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case: "This is one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court, and in my judgment, the Court has made a serious mistake. As interpreted by the Court today, the Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship on virtually everyone who happens to be born in this country, including the children of “birth tourists,” women who come here solely for the purpose of giving birth to a child and then promptly return home. Careful analysis of the text of the Fourteenth Amendment and the process that led to its adoption shows that it does not degrade the concept of United States citizenship in this way. Instead, the Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship on only those children who, at birth, owe
allegiance solely to this country."

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

curious how the NYT decided to frame the issue as whether candidates support Israel's "right to exist," as opposed to whether the US should provide unlimited material and financial support for ongoing war crimes and genocide

In Brooklyn, Brad Lander, the former city comptroller, hammered his opponent, Mr. Goldman, for receiving support from pro-Israel donors and AIPAC. The congressman supports Israel’s right to exist, while criticizing its current leadership, and does not refer to the war in Gaza as a genocide, as Mr. Lander does.

In a bitter race in Upper Manhattan, Ms. Avila Chevalier called out her opponent, Mr. Espaillat, for receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in AIPAC donations over his decade in Congress and for not using the term genocide. Like Mr. Goldman, Mr. Espaillat has criticized Israel while defending its right to exist.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

was looking up pictures from the Star Trek TOS episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of" (AKA the one where an evil scientist puts Kirk onto a big spinny wheel that makes a robot clone of him), and I had completely forgotten there's a scene where Kirk is just holding a big stone dildo

Captain James Tiberius Kirk, from Star Trek: The Original Series. He is wearing an uncharacteristically ugly two-tone navy and brown tunic. he is holding a massive pink chunk of stone that is shaped uncannily like a big penis, with a shaft and head and balls and everything.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

The legal equivalent of this

A classic tweet from Mike F: "Check this shit out motherfucker [I slide one foot out from under me and fall on my ass, its not clear what kind of move I was trying to do]"

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Story makes it sound like she asked for permission and was denied, which maybe makes it worse?

The committee said the letters “should be sufficiently specific so as to make clear to the recipient the sexual misconduct for which the judge is apologizing.”

The letters she sent, dated May 27, were three sentences long and identical.

“Thank you for your contributions to our court during your clerkship,” Judge Ross wrote, according to a copy obtained by The Times. “I convey my deepest apology for not taking steps to ensure that it was a more positive experience. I wish you all the best in your future legal endeavors and in life."

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Fanfic is real life actually

Then, one night in 2023, Costa and Silvério watched ‘Love In The Villa’, a rom-com that follows a pair of enemies who fall in love while sharing a villa, and Costa realised her true feelings for her friend.

She admitted her feelings to Silvério, who kissed her in return.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

union soldiers were literally marching to John Brown's Body!

The lyrics to John Brown's Body as written by William Weston Patton:

Old John Brown's body lies a moldering in the grave,
While weep the sons of bondage whom he ventured all to save;
But though he sleeps his life was lost while struggling for the slave,
His soul is marching on.

Glory Hallelujah!

John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true and brave,
And Kansas knew his valor when he fought her rights to save;
And now, though the grass grows green above his grave,
His soul is marching on.

(Chorus)

He captured Harper's Ferry, with his nineteen men so few,
And frightened "Old Virginny" till she trembled through and through
They hung him for a traitor, themselves a traitor crew,
But his soul is marching on.

(Chorus)

John Brown was John the Baptist of the Christ we are to see—
Christ who of the bondmen shall the Liberator be,
And soon throughout the Sunny South the slaves shall all be free,
For his soul is marching on.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

like... these are the same song

Lyrics to the first verse of All Fall Down, the theme song to The Vampire Lestat (and, in universe, one of Lestat's songs):
I'm the little killer
I'm the lonely one
I'm the chill creepin’ up your spine
Tellin’ you to run
I'm a hangin’ shadow
I'm a lost love
I'm the past and the future
The last of the sutures
The cooin’ dove

Lyrics to the first verse of Alexis Rose's critically reviewed song A Little Bit Alexis from Schitt's Creek:
I'm a Lamborghini, I'm a Hollywood star
I'm a little bit tipsy when I drive my car
I'm expensive sushi, I'm a cute huge yacht
I'm a little bit single even when I'm not

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

I don't think it's true that everyone on the left is a misogynistic antisemitic racist transphobic islamophobe

The Norman Rockwell painting of the guy in a blue flannel shirt and bomber jacket standing up to bravely announce his opinion

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Had a wonderful time moderating the Best Superpowers for Banging 8 panel (or "Superfanging") at @wiscon.bsky.social last night with @thingswithwings.bsky.social @eruthros.bsky.social and @essaysays.bsky.social ! We created this beautiful tier list of vampire powers for sex. Please enjoy.

A tier list of various vampire powers. S tier: mind control, super senses, enthralling realtors. A tier: turning into mist, extremely long hollow tongue like a straw, having no bones or maybe thousands of bones, giving really enthusiastic oral sex to your partner while they're on their period. B tier: gaslighting, accents. C tier: flying, going about in lizard fashion, make boat go fast by huffing and puffing, sparkling. D tier: turning into bats, being a billionaire, projectile vomit

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Seen a few people denouncing the striking LIRR workers as greedy because they're fairly well compensated. Appreciated this @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social piece as a counterpoint to that narrative.

More than 3,000 LIRR workers from five different unions are now on strike, for the first time in more than 30 years. Nothing prompts angry denunciations from the city’s reactionary media outlets like a public sector strike, particularly one involving blue collar workers who make six figure incomes. The very concept offends the most basic values of the sort of person who owns the New York Post. Rather than descend into the muck of manufactured anger, I prefer to take a big picture view: Union power is rare; here is an important economic chokepoint that is subject to union power; these workers are using that union power to get themselves the best deal that they can; strikes that successfully demonstrate the power of organized labor are good.

The mood was fairly happy out there, among the giddy Springsteen fans, with the Empire State Building looming in the background like a giant needle. But that was just the first day. Today is Monday, and the strike is still on, and that means that it is the first day that commuters are fucked. This can’t go on too long. There will be much grumbling. But look up Seventh Avenue and you will see Billionaire’s Row, and look down Seventh Avenue and you will see Wall Street. There are worse things than a few thousand well-paying union jobs for the people who drive our trains. Don’t be mad when union workers make a good living. Instead, get a union of your own, and join them.

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Sam @spratt.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Certainly there's stuff to critique in this quote, but I do not think it's accurate to say Sanders was denigrating the concept of equal rights

Bernie Sanders: “Yeah that’s what the liberal elite try to do… I would hope that everyone watching the program would agree that we as a nation need to fight all forms of bigotry…and I start that off as a basic assumption… When it is racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, whatever it is. And you know, liberal Democrats talk about that all the time. And then you get to what we call “identity politics. You’re black?, ‘you’re wonderful, you’re tremendous.’ You’re gay? ‘You’re the greatest human being on earth…’ Rather than say ‘what do you stand for?’ You’re gay? That’s fine, who cares? But what do you stand for?… Is every gay person great and brilliant? No. Of course they aren’t, every person is a human being…We should instead be asking ‘which side are you on? Are you going to stand with working families? Are you going to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, or not? Are you going to fight to guarantee health care for all, or not? Are you going to demand that the wealthiest of people pay their fair share of taxes, or not?’ Those are the issues. No one cares what color you are, what your gender is, etcetera, etcetera.”

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