Excellent advice for people who are looking for a therapist:

Avoid therapists whose websites/listings use therapy-speak buzzwords

Safe space, holding space, healing journey, holistic, energetic, parts work, shadow work, gratitude, narcissistic abuse, toxic, inner child, trauma-informed, self-love, self-care🚩

What are your🚩buzzwords? https://t.co/T7tkAVxdZ1

— Jonathan Shedler (@JonathanShedler) October 29, 2025

All these buzzwords are gigantic, pulsating, neon red flags.

I have changed my mind about China and have become a fan. That happened because I discovered the only fast food I like, and that is Panda Express. Which I know has the most tenuous connection to actual Chinese food but who cares? It’s still very enjoyable.

Of course, I don’t get the rice and only ask for very specific items on the menu in very small boxes. But it’s done. I’m now pro-China.

This is the same woman from before who bragged that the guy filled her water bottle and heated her bagel:

if i wake up in the middle of the night and try to get a glass of water, fiancé immediately mumbles with his eyes still closed, "why are you getting your own water when I could go get it for you?" https://t.co/Oa78Yvvr94

— emily may (@emilykmay) October 29, 2025

I’m genuinely worried about her. I’ve recently watched a true crime documentary where the husband addressed his wife in the same subservient tone while she rode him like a tired old mare. And then he murdered her and the kids.

She needs to run far, far away from this maniac but it’s impossible to tell such women that this is not normal.

It is the assumption that, since I’m now conservative, I should be devoted to Reagan and Bush that gets to me. I despise those fuckers. People keep bringing them up to me like it’s 2002. I wasn’t for them then, and I’m not for them now. I’m for the nation-state.

Political realignment happens all the time. In the 1990s, every left-wing party of every developed country embraced neoliberalism. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the Left went far into neoliberal direction, economically and in every other way. As a result, part of the Right pivoted and started walking away from neoliberalism. Part, not whole. I’m the Right that wants to leave neoliberalism. We are still finding our way to our freshly non-neoliberal position. We fumble and make mistakes. But at least we are trying. Everybody else is still free-marketeering and choicing their way into the neoliberal future of lonely godlike selves with detachable body parts and endless freedom to discard every attachment.

The economy doesn’t decide everything but it does decide a lot. Neoliberal economic principles (deregulation, mass migration, weakening of the nation-state, globalization) will inevitably bring into existence the neoliberal selfhood. People adopt the shape of capital and become rootless, movable, unattached and valuing freedom and choice above everything else. A neoliberal who expresses conservative cultural beliefs always brings about the destruction of conservative culture. There is no conservative culture, no family, no community, no permanence or stability in the neoliberal economy.

Reagan is the perfect example of this neoliberal sleight of hand. He said culturally conservative things and turned California mega liberal for generations to come because he was a neoliberal open-border fanatic.

AI has caused a miracle and cured climate change:

Bill Gates thinks climate change is still a serious problem, but says it's time to focus on fighting poverty and preventing disease.https://t.co/dBxfiP22Qv

— ABC News (@ABC) October 28, 2025

AI needs an enormous amount of energy, which motivated our eager overlords to drop their concerns about climate change. The shamelessness of these people knows no limits.

In the current debate about SNAP (food stamps), my position is as follows:

1. The program should absolutely exist.
2. It should not cover anything remotely resembling junk food.
3. It should not cover anybody who was not born in the US.

This is reasonable and would make the program more sustainable.

Today I had to explain to my child about men who pretend to be women because we came across one in Olive Garden.

Sorry but “my father’s cousin” absolutely qualifies as “aunt” in brown people speak. Hardly a “distant cousin” either.

My kids absolutely refer to & think of my cousins as their aunts and uncles, and it would seem odd for them to refer to them as “my father’s cousin”. https://t.co/tFCPYWrFPp

— christoph (@Halalcoholism) October 28, 2025

I’m very annoyed by the expression “brown people.” It clearly means people from the subcontinent. There’s no “brown people speak” that includes Bolivians and Guatemalans, is there?

I can just imagine referring to my Latin American students as “brown people.”

No, I can’t. They’d think I have developed sudden dementia. I’d never live it down.

Why can’t Indians and Pakistanis call themselves Indians and Pakistanis? The quoted post will become instantly understandable as a result.

In winter of 1944, Franco’s diplomat in Hungary Ángel Sanz Briz saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from being murdered by Nazis. He was recognized for his heroic actions by Yad Vashem decades ago but talking about his feats has been difficult in Spain. Sanz Briz was acting on orders from the Franco regime, and that messes with people’s understanding of the dictatorship as unadulterated evil. Journalist Arcadi Espada, who is very liberal, found that his research into this story always led people to ask, “but isn’t it true that Franco hated Jews?”

“Would you prefer that he loved Jews but let them die?” Espada would answer.

This is the difference between saying and doing that plagues our existence these days. What matters more, things that people say or what they do? Do the reasons behind their actions matter? Of course, Franco decided to save the Hungarian Jews because it was clear that Germany was losing the war and Franco wanted to make nice with the Allies. He did achieve that goal, and the Allies allows him to stay in power long after Hitler was gone. Does that matter, a little or a lot? Or do the thousands of lives that Franco’s diplomat saved in conditions of great risk to himself matter more?

Since nobody in Spain was interested in telling Sanz Briz’s story, some Italian dude who was marginally present in a few of the rescue operations took all the credit and made a whole career out of pretending to have been far more important to the story than he actually was. Espada unravels all this in his fascinating research. He’s a liberal who is tired of leftist excesses and wants to do serious, old-fashioned journalism. I never read anything by him before but he’s a gifted author with a unique voice, and this book was extraordinary in how free Espada feels to speak without taking recourse in any leftist pieties.