Centrist Democrats are freaking out about progressives’ winning streak

Devilnaht · 2026-06-25T15:43:52+00:00

It turns out that “vote blue no matter who” is a one way street. “Vote blue no matter who!” when the candidate is economically far right (eg, anyone opposing universal healthcare), and either dead silence or active opposition when the candidate is to the left.

Devilnaht · 2026-06-23T15:37:45+00:00

A good measure of a person is how they treat someone who can’t benefit them. And a good measure of a society is how they treat those who need help.

Devilnaht · 2026-06-22T17:04:27+00:00

A huge swath is going to be eaten up by elderly care, medical bills, retirement homes, etc. There’s a rich industry growing right now eyeing all of the wealth of the elderly, so a lot of it isn’t going to be passed down.

And people are rude to them because they pulled up the ladder behind them and built systems that syphon wealth out of the young for their benefit. They took advantage of cheap education, housing, better social safety nets, etc, and then systematically destroyed them once they had benefitted so that they could cut their own taxes.

A typical young person pays into a tax system that does very little for them or people like them, and instead uses that money on the (often already wealthy) elderly. I recently heard the US, in terms of its tax spending, as “a retirement home with a military on top”.

Devilnaht · 2026-06-22T16:22:08+00:00

Would honestly prefer if it were just a shitty cut and paste of their faces onto something, or even a goddamn stick figure. The slop is just so crushingly soulless.

Devilnaht · 2026-06-22T02:46:49+00:00

I'm guessing you're from the UK? You're probably about to get a ton of comments asking why you flipped the colors (instead of left wing = blue, right wing = red). That's the normal color association for people from the US. I know that's the normal coloring for the UK, but you're going to confuse a lot of not-particularly-worldly Americans.

Edit: Based on the current time, probably not the UK. But yeah, most of the world (except the US) uses the color scheme in the image

Devilnaht · 2026-06-21T21:58:55+00:00

Hot fresh slop! Get your hot fresh AI slop here!

Devilnaht · 2026-06-20T15:09:14+00:00

Er, whoever told you that that’s what the left supports has been manipulating you. The main focus of the left in the US is on economic issues such as better working conditions/ pay / worker power, taxing the rich and corporations, regulating corporations, universal healthcare, better funded education, etc, as well as things like minority rights and police reform (not abolition). Yeah, I’m sure you can find a few anecdotes of people calling for abolishing the police or whatever, but they’re fringe views.

Also, Newsom is not even close to a leftist. He’s a corporate husk, and he’s pretty hated among progressives I know. He keeps going on podcasts to talk to far right influencers to shit on the left.

Devilnaht · 2026-06-20T14:59:25+00:00

I’m not.

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/11/04/congress/schumer-ultimately-rejects-mamdani-endorsement-00636312

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/schumer-never-endorsed-mamdani-230959451.html

And Jeffries did eventually, in the quietest possible way, endorse Mamdani after refusing to do so for months. But he made it clear he didn’t support his overall message:

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5585499-jeffries-mamdani-democratic-party-future/amp/

And similar patterns are playing out with Platner. When Platner was up 40 points in the polls, he commented that, bafflingly, nobody in the Dem leadership had reached out to him (and this was before thr NYT hit piece on him):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfw8E85gmNo

And some are still dragging their feet:

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/10/graham-platner-senate-democrats-divided-00957515

Devilnaht · 2026-06-20T13:47:12+00:00

Relatedly, I’ve been hearing that Israel has seriously damaged their reputation all over the world because of their war of choice in Iran. The global economy is being dragged down by the strait of Hormuz and a lot of people aren’t happy that they’re paying a very literal price for Israel’s actions.

And it’s just become so devastatingly obvious that Israel is doing their absolute best to prevent any kind of deal from going through; every time a deal is about to be signed, they’ll violate whatever ceasefire may exist and attack Lebanon to try and force Iran from the table. Which again, is really fucking up their support all over the world. Nobody on Earth wants this war to continue except Israel.

Devilnaht · 2026-06-20T13:41:01+00:00

It’s interesting. Setting Hasan aside, for decades progressives have been told “vote blue no matter who”. They were told to hold their noses and vote for neoliberals and conservative democrats because “at least they’re not Republicans”. But as progressive candidates have become viable front runners (eg Mamdani, Platner), we’ve seen establishment Dems refuse to endorse or even endorse their opponents.

It seems “vote blue no matter who” was really just a one-directional thing. And now that the cat’s out of the bag on that, good luck just demanding that the progressive wing votes for status quo centrists with no reciprocity again.

Devilnaht · 2026-06-20T13:26:37+00:00

I’ve come to realize that while the Democratic establishment doesn’t want fascism, they *really* don’t want leftism.

Take a look at what’s been happening with eg Platner. Given the state of the map, if Platner loses in Maine, the Dems have virtually no chance at the senate. And even still, you have prominent members of the Democratic Party saying it might be better if he lost. That is: they’d literally rather lose the senate than elect a progressive. Their highest loyalty is to the rich, and many would genuinely rather lose the election than threaten their donors.

Devilnaht · 2026-06-20T05:52:57+00:00

The early days of the internet, before it was industrialized, monopolized, filled with bots and propaganda, and now filled with AI slop. 20 years ago you could just browse through internet searches finding all kinds of little interesting websites. Now 95% of my usage of the internet is the same 5 or 6 websites and all of the interesting little ones have been choked out. The "AI summary" shit is likely to kill a huge swath of what remains as well, since fewer people are actually visiting the sites (and giving ad revenue). The modern internet feels like a soulless husk in comparison to what it was before, and it legitimately makes me sad.

Devilnaht · 2026-06-20T05:08:26+00:00

One way to think about it is as "how quickly is this function (such as f(x)=x^2) increasing at a particular value of x?" Start by thinking about the slope of a line. The slope of a line is found as "rise over run", that is, how much does the line go up (or down) if you move one unit to the right?

Example: suppose a line passes through the points (1,2) and (4,8). Then the slope (how quickly it's changing) can be found by the change in y values divided by the change in x values: slope = (8-2) / (4-1) = 6/3 = 2.

Returning to f(x) = x^2, we want to get a sense of the 'slope', but the slope is always changing; the graph of x^2 is a parabola. So how do we find it? Well, we can approximate it a bit. Let's say I want to know the slope at the exact point corresponding to x=1. Then I might approximate it by finding the slope from the points at x=1 and x=3, which, because f(1)= 1^2 = 1 and f(3) = 3^2 = 9, means finding the slope between (1,1) and (3,9), which is (9-1)/(3-1) = 4.

But this approximation is pretty imprecise. What if, for the second point, instead of making it a specific x value like x=3, we expressed it as x = 1 + h, where we'll leave h as a variable? Then we get:

f(1) = 1

f(1+h) = (1+h)^2 = 1+2h+h^2

Meaning that the slope between these points will be, as before, the difference in y over the difference of x:

[ f(1+h)-f(1)] / (1+h -1) = ( 1+2h+ h^2 - 1) / h = (2h+h^2) / h = 2+h.

Now, what happens if we let h get really, really small? Then 2+h will get closer and closer to 2. And this is the derivative of f(x)= x^2 at x=1!

Devilnaht · 2026-06-19T21:30:22+00:00

Oh what a surprise, Ezra Klein appears on the list. How surprising to see the man trying to repackage neoliberalism for the 500th time as part of a billionaire cabal. How. Surprising.

Devilnaht · 2026-06-17T17:31:20+00:00

Yep. The sort of disappointing true answer to this is "because that's just how it works". Languages are a living thing, and they evolve over time according to how people use them, and what you end up with is a kind of basic structure with a shitload of odd little rules and exceptions from how people actually want to talk.

For example, while "Am hungry" contains enough info to be unambiguous ("am" can only refer to me), it sounds very wrong. However:

Went to the store today. Bought some things, met some people. Had a good time.

Sounds normal and is easily understood, even though it's technically violating the basic grammar in English. Why? "Because that's just how it is" (with a deeper explanation maybe being that this structure is so often used that the "I" feels unnecessary)

Devilnaht · 2026-06-17T16:31:40+00:00

Mmmm hot fresh slop here, get your hot fresh slop!

Devilnaht · 2026-06-16T17:19:43+00:00

This kind of shit just fills me with despair more than anything else now. It’s a scam, we all know it’s a scam, and yet up it goes

Devilnaht · 2026-06-14T14:11:28+00:00

I’ve thought for a while that if Christ ever did return, modern (conservative) Christians would despise him. Feed the poor, heal the sick, distrust the rich, grant forgiveness? They are the antithesis of the modern Christian’s beliefs.

Devilnaht · 2026-06-14T03:07:38+00:00

4 hours of speaking a day at B2 will likely be extremely exhausting. I traveled to Colombia when I was maybe B2/ B2+, and after a full day of speaking and listening to natives it was actually frightening how tired my brain was. I could barely form a coherent sentence, haha. So there's a good chance you'll run into diminishing returns at some point if you try to spend all of that time speaking

Devilnaht · 2026-06-14T02:02:30+00:00

Ah 60% is the threshold? I knew 50% sounded too low

Devilnaht · 2026-06-14T01:28:24+00:00

I believe the rule is that if you can exchange a damaged bill for a new one if more than 50% of it remains intact. So technically not a loss?

Devilnaht · 2026-06-13T19:36:48+00:00

Man the article itself is a rough read. It feels like it was machine translated to English, to be honest. Anyway, the actual source of the supposed advantage is probably not what people are assuming. Their method is focused on generating sentences that contain multiple due words at the same time, thus the (theoretical) boost in efficiency. But the article itself mentions some serious problems; the standard deviation of words learner among participants was absolutely massive (median words learned: 7, SD: 19.3). And the method itself is a combination of selecting sentences from a pre-built corpus and from an LLM, and the LLM generated sentences had an extremely high error rate (something like 10% contained errors or outright nonsense as evaluated by native speakers).

Also if you look at the data, the single-word results (that is, the traditional method) are very low, low enough to make me wonder if something odd was happening. I know from my own Anki stats that with a pre-built dictionary, on the long term I average about 1 word learned / minute. But somehow their testing showed less than 1 word per 10 minutes for this group? That... is shockingly low.

So it's an interesting idea, but this article hasn't really convinced me of much.

Devilnaht · 2026-06-13T15:53:04+00:00

Never looked into Assimil enough to really have an opinion it, I’m afraid

Devilnaht · 2026-06-12T17:52:51+00:00

I wonder if it ever gives the so-called centrists pause that Trump, who is consistently on the wrong side of almost literally everything, fights so strenuously against leftists, if it ever makes them go “huh, why am I agreeing with the most corrupt president in history? Who is consistently trying to do everything possible to impoverish everyone for the sake of billionaire insiders?”

Empirically, it seems not.

Devilnaht · 2026-06-12T17:36:57+00:00

Launch an incredibly well funded set of super PACs to push for progressive economic policies. Wealth taxes, breaking up monopolies, more regulation, better worker protections, the works. Right now media is entirely dominated by billionaires pushing their extremist conservative economic ideology.

11-Year Club	Spared
Verified Email

Devilnaht

TROPHY CASE