Links - 4th July 2026 (2 - Left and Right Wing Violence)

Batya Ungar-Sargon on X - "An example of how they cook the books to absolve the Left of violence in the WSJ today: A graph it published that seems to show near parity between Left and Right wing political violence is sourced to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which by its own admission reclassified pro-Palestinian violence as "ethnonationalist". It classifies all antisemitism as Right-wing, and all pro-Palestinian "attacks on Jewish individuals or institutions" as "ethnonationalist." This is just nakedly partisan propaganda presented as "data" and then mainstreamed in the American press."

Debunking the Data That Claims to Show Most Political Violence Comes From the Right - "The Right points to the assassination attempts on the President, the murder of Charlie Kirk, the rise of Islamist terrorism, the rabid violence of the George Floyd riots, the elevation of political violence fan Hasan Piker to celebrity status in the Democratic Party, and the recent polling showing that the more liberal a person is, the more likely they are to support political violence.  On the Left, people point to January 6 as well as data purporting to show that most political violence comes from the Right. After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, The Economist ran a piece claiming to explain “what the data show,” which suggested that most political violence was a Right-wing phenomenon. Other publications cited studies from the Center for Strategic & International Studies or the CATO Institute. The problem is, the “data” that these outlets have been relying on is deeply flawed.  One of the major sources is the Prosecution Project, an initiative of the University of Cincinnati, which analyzes felony criminal cases involving political violence and sorts them by ideology. “The project examines criminal complaints, indictments and court records, looking for crimes that seek ‘a socio-political change or to communicate’ to outside audiences,” per The Economist. “Its data show that extremists on both left and right commit violence, although more incidents appear to come from right-leaning attackers.”  Yet if you pull up the data center yourself, you can see immediately that it is deeply flawed.  The data set doesn’t include either of the previous two assassination attempts on President Trump’s life, as far as I can tell; a search for the time frame and the names of the would-be assassins turns up zero hits. Nor does it include the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The data set is based on prosecutions, which might explain the absence of Thomas Crooks, who died at Butler. But what explains the absence of Trump’s other would-be assassin, Ryan Wesley Routh, or Tyler Robinson, who killed Charlie Kirk? I couldn’t find Elias Rodriguez on the list either, who shot and killed two people outside the Jewish Museum in D.C. in May of 2025 to protest the war in Gaza.  It’s pretty easy to say that the violence is coming overwhelmingly from the Right if you overwhelmingly edit out any political violence from the Left.  The editing goes deep. During the summer of 2020, the George Floyd riots were in full swing. Political violence claimed the lives of dozens of Americans and caused $2 billion in property damage. Yet the data set from the Prosecution Project lists a grand total of five incidents “left wing” incidents that summer, two of them “eco-animal focused,” meaning it counts just three incidents of left-wing violence during that time. Compare this to a list compiled by Forbes of 19 people who lost their lives during the first 14 days of George Floyd riots. Why don’t these people merit a mention in the Prosecution Project? They were killed during a politically motivated explosion of violence and rioting. These were, to cite the Project’s own criteria, “crimes that seek ‘a socio-political change or to communicate’ to outside audiences.” Yet they do not appear in the dataset.  Surely we can all agree that their omission massively skews the data.  Maybe you think that people murdered during political riots shouldn’t count as victims of political violence. But what about a meth dealer who happens to belong to the Aryan Brotherhood? Should their meth dealing count as political violence? The Prosecution Project thinks so! Among the Right-wing examples it makes sure to include, you’ll find an Aryan Brotherhood meth gang that merited 10 entries for drug-related crimes. I’m no fan of the Aryan Brotherhood, but can you honestly say this is an example of Right-wing political violence? In what world does producing meth constitute “crimes that seek ‘a socio-political change or to communicate’ to outside audiences”?  You can also find people on the list who did things like vandalize an LGBTQ crosswalk—though not people who vandalized entire neighborhoods in 2020 in the name of racial justice.  Is vandalism political violence? I guess only if you’re conservative. The Prosecution Project also counts every time and every person who blocked access to an abortion clinic.  You may not agree with blocking access to an abortion clinic, but a tally of political violence that counts those instances and not Charlie Kirk’s assassination is deeply, deeply flawed.  And amidst a historic rise in massive political violence against ICE agents, the data set records a grand total of six cases of left-wing violence for the first year of Trump’s second term.  I couldn’t find a complete dataset for the CSIS graphs, yet in their methodology, they note some glaring absences. For starters, the information it cites is culled from data provided by the ADL, which “uses public records such as media reports and police filings to reach their numbers,” and the Southern Poverty Law Center—the same organization that was just indicted for actually manufacturing the racist violence it was “chronicling.” Needless to say, if you are relying on the media, wildly skewed to favor the Left, for your data set, it’s not data; it’s propaganda. Moreover, even when acknowledging that left-wing political violence is on the rise, CSIS admits it went out of its way to absolve the Left of even more violence. In a recent report, it excluded pro-Palestinian terrorism from the Left, reclassifying it as “ethnonationalist incidents rather than left-wing ones,” despite the Palestinian cause becoming the most important litmus test for belonging on the Left these days. This is just a naked attempt to absolve the Left of a signature issue because that issue inspires violence and the people tallying up the crimes want the Left to win.  The report also excluded the massive anti-Tesla terrorism of last year, and it refused to include any of the anti-ICE political violence across the nation we saw over the last year, arguing that these incidents “did not reach a level of violence” that satisfied their criteria. I just don’t understand that. It is a textbook example of trying to change politics through acts of violence."
Every time someone does a deep dive into the data that purports to show that right wing violence exceeds left wing violence, he finds it to be fatally flawed. Rubbish, in short. What a coincidence that it all pushes the left wing agenda

We Don't Have a Political Violence Problem in America. We Have a Left-Wing Political Violence Problem in America - "25% of very liberal Americans consider political violence justified—compared to 3% of very conservative Americans. Another 17% of liberal Americans say it’s justified, compared to just 6% of conservatives.  The more liberal you get, the more likely you are to justify political violence, whereas the opposite is true on the Right. Young conservatives are less likely to justify political violence than moderates, and half as likely as liberals overall. Is it any wonder, with influencers like Hasan Piker justifying the murder of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson in the pages of the New York Times, and Democrats clamoring over themselves to appear on his podcast?... A widely circulated Economist poll failed to cite a single instance of violence from the Black Lives Matter riots, and meanwhile counted any violence committed by people incarcerated and white as Right-wing violence, even when it occurred years later between family members.  Democrats also cite the tragic case of Melissa Horton, the Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota who was killed, as proof of Right-wing violence targeting Left-wing politicians. But her killer, Vance Boelter, is obviously deranged; he claimed in a letter to the FBI that he was acting on the instructions of Democrat Tim Walz, who asked him to kill Horton—which is obviously not true but it is proof that he wasn’t motivated by Right-wing politics. Meanwhile, avowedly Left-wing political ideology was behind the murder of Charlie Kirk. It was behind the murder of Brian Thompson. It was behind most of the violent rioting and protesting we’ve seen over the last decade (including at Charlottesville!). It’s been behind three assassination attempts on the President.  The Democrats and the media routinely call President Trump a fascist and a Nazi. They accuse him of being an authoritarian, a king. They accuse him of being a huge threat to democracy.  This rhetoric has led to an embrace of political violence among their followers and consumers. And it’s got to stop.  Other Democrats have blamed gun violence for the rise in political violence, which is of course ridiculous, given that conservatives are much more likely to own guns, yet much less likely to engage in and justify political violence.  It’s time for the Left to take responsibility for the violence it is fomenting, justifying, and carrying out. Cole Allen’s manifesto justifying his attempted murder of the President doesn’t read like the ravings of a lunatic. It sounds like the kind of rhetoric you hear every single day from Democrats and their media. They are radicalizing their side every single day, and refusing to take down the temperature."

Tyler on X - "At the Tommy Robinson rally, the left were heard chanting: "Shoot him in the neck like Charlie Kirk." At the recent protests in Brighton, the left were heard chanting to Rhiannon Whyte's mother: "Your daughter deserved it." Today, the left are mocking Young Bob after he was violently assaulted in the street.  Don't ever let a lefty tell you that you're a hater or a bigot or a thug. They are everything they accuse you of."

Erin Derham on X - "I have been screaming this for months.   Their “data” doesn’t even list Charlie Kirk’s assassination as left-wing violence.  Thank you Batya for the thorough research.  What stands out the most??   The OMISSIONS of left-wing violence:   Datasets ignore or undercount events like the 2020 George Floyd riots (dozens dead, ~$2B in damage, yet only ~3–5 incidents tallied as left-wing),   BOTH prior assassination attempts on Trump,   the m*rder of Charlie Kirk,   pro-Palestinian shootings (Elias Rodriguez’s 2025 D.C. incident),   anti-ICE attacks,   and anti-Tesla actions.   These are often reclassified as “ethnonationalist” or dismissed as insufficiently “political.”  We cannot fix the problem until we identify the problem.  If you are still identifying as someone on the left, you might want to stop.  This has been the most widespread example of gaslighting in national history."

Meme - "I want you guys to think about this. The left has become so damn emotional they don't care if they keep encouraging violence against so called "Nazis" that it will inevitably lead to people from the other side attacking liberals including the minorities and trans people they claim to care so much about, their complete hatred of conservatives is enough for them to justify it. They would rather they themselves potentially get in the process or their friends and family then stop promoting political violence against conservatives even if it's for simple self preservation and nothing more. They're that emotionally fucking stunted and stupid and if it did happen they would only further blame conservatives instead of having the basic common sense have of "I shouldn't have encouraged it even if I thought he was a terrible person because they make up half the fucking country and its gonna inevitably cause a civil war if most of my fellow leftists follows suit.""

Meme - Existential Comics: "If I woke up tomorrow and my boss told me that today at my job I had to shoot rubber bullets and throw tear gas at people protesting racism because one of my coworkers killed someone in cold blood, I would simply quit that job and do something useful like stock grocery shelves."
Existential Comics (find me on bluesky): "It's good to riot in the face of oppressive, racist, State violence. What do you want, people to hold up signs showing their disapproval for a day and have it all forgotten in a week? That has never changed anything. Real resistance must have a real threat to power behind it."
Left wing violence is good. "Right wing" violence is bad

Robert Sterling on X - "25% of very liberal people say political violence can “sometimes be justified.” Among very conservative people it’s just 3%. In other words, the far left is 8x more likely to support political violence as the far right. Stop pretending this is a “both sides” problem. It’s not."

HowlingMutant on X - "If you think you can spend two months gloating over Charlie Kirk being shot, mocking his widow and kids, and then pivot back to “Look at how RUDE Trump is!”, you’re out of your fucking minds"

Mark Penn on X - "Shots fired. With shots fired at the bipartisan press dinner, maybe it’s time for the media and the politicians to stop platforming extreme influencers (like Hassan Piker or Candice Owens) preaching as Piker did the other day at the NYTimes “social murder” and trying to depict the most freedom-loving country on earth as an evil force to be taken down by violence and looting. Enough is enough."
Naturally, I saw left wingers claiming it was a false flag for the midterms, or that it didn't happen because there was no video (this was the same night)

Richard Hanania on X - ""I’m not saying my parents and their fellow lefty radicals were perfect — far from it." What a way for a NYT op-ed to describe the Weather Underground."
Clear proof that right wing violence is the real problem

Meme - Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok: "Slate quietly changed this headline where they threatened conservatives that they will be killed. The internet is forever. We know what they meant."
"Conservatives Are Terrified That People Like Me Are Buying Guns Now They Should Be."
"My Gun and Me"

Thread by @ArthurMacwaters on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - ""They don't kill you because you're a nazi - they call you a nazi so they can kill you."
> 95 % of media coverage of ICE is negative
> anyone not far left is framed as "gestapo" "nazi" "lacking basic human empathy"
> now, 25% of very liberal people say violence can be justified to achieve political aims
This not a mistake, it is the direct result of propaganda. Extremists are highly susceptible to moral absolutes, and the media and politicians are giving it to them This is evil.
many examples of moderates or even moderate democrats being totally terrorized by people on the far left. I've heard direct stories of people getting death threats and having to get security based on *not being left enough* in their public statements or posts.  this is not how America is supposed to work"
Meme - "The Atlantic. MAGA's War on Empathy. This crisis in Minneapolis reveals a deep moral rot at the heart of Trump's movement. By Hillary Rodham Clinton
VIOLENCE MUCH MORE ACCEPTED BY THE LEFT
"VERY LIBERAL" 25% - Yes, violence can sometimes be justified
"VERY CONSERVATIVE" 3% - Yes, violence can sometimes be justified
"Young people and Democrats were also more likely to say political violence is sometimes acceptable.""
Clearly, though left wingers are much much more supportive of violence, it's the right wing that's responsible for violence

All About Animation | Facebook - "I want to take a brief moment to talk about these two events that happened in Ontario California and Indianapolis Indiana. The man who allegedly set fire to his warehouse that refused to pay him and his fellow employees a living wage, and a City Councilman who voted yes for a data center despite his constituents telling him not to getting his house shot up.  Good. For so long people have said "well violence isn't the answer." Really? Cause violence seems to be their answer against us every single time.  You work here 40+ hours a week in one of the most expensive states in the union with shit healthcare or no healthcare. Your wife gets sick and she can't afford her medication under your insurance? That is violence.  A councilman put a data center in your backyard polluting your air, contaminating your drinking water, giving your children asthma, and poisoning your land to shorten your lifespan. That is violence.  You protest this. You organize and they call the cops to break up your protest and crack your skulls and you have no legal recourse? That is violence. So I say it's about fucking time these god damn ghouls get a taste of their own medicine. Luigi Mangione did nothing wrong. These people did nothing wrong. "An eye for an eye makes us all blind." Fuck. That. Shit. I hope these fucking ghouls get buried."
On the guy who committed arson in the toilet paper factory
Proof that the right wing supports and is responsible for violence, and we need to imprison the "far right" to keep people safe

When a murder becomes a musical: The Left's celebration of Luigi Mangione - "From nearly the moment Mangione was arrested, he was celebrated. Praise was quickly heaped on him by people who believe his alleged actions were justified. What’s more, they view him as a sort of martyr for the cause. To them, killing Thompson was necessary because of his work as a health insurance CEO. The healthcare industry as a whole is responsible for harm, and Thompson, as an executive in that field, was to blame...   To make matters worse, a new musical comedy about Mangione is set to open the same month his trial starts. This is the kind of news that is unbelievable to decent human beings, no matter their political persuasion...   I can’t imagine how Thompson’s family must feel. Not only did they experience the tragic loss of his life, but they have surely noticed the sheer glee from those who think Thompson had it coming. They have to prepare for the upcoming trial and media frenzy. And now, an entire stage production has been created making light of his murder.  Certain moments reveal the health of a society. While the killing of Thompson was the action of one man, the rationalization and jubilation that followed reflect something broader. To say it’s deeply disturbing doesn’t go far enough. It treats human life as expendable based on nothing more than dislike. And in the case of Thompson, that dislike was solely based on guilt by association. His position in a certain industry earned him death in the mind of his accused killer. That warped perspective is shared by his accused killer’s fans. And now, audience members will watch and laugh at the story of Mangione.   The internet helps to spread news of horrible events such as Thompson’s killing. Social media is also used to desensitize others to the horror surrounding his murder. Thompson becomes just a name representing bad healthcare or insurance outcomes. The further we get away from December 2024, and the more Mangione is lionized, the less anyone cares about the victim.   Instead of recoiling at the flippancy, an entire production has been created. The goal is to cement Mangione as some misunderstood, only slightly bad hero. Thompson did nothing to these people to earn their rage. Yet, in his death, and with this mockery, he receives the brunt of it.   We can expect the trial of Mangione to be a circus. Mangione’s youth, appearance, and growing fandom vault him to an undeserved status. His supporters have no problem if he is found guilty. In fact, many probably want that. He represents their own rage. And they idolize him for that.   Even more troubling, a poll conducted less than two weeks after Thompson’s murder found that 41% of people under 30 considered the killing to be somewhat acceptable or completely acceptable.   Mangione isn’t the first alleged killer to be treated like a celebrity. But the support for him should only belong to a shunned fringe. Instead, it’s an alarmingly large minority. And now there is a musical comedy. When an innocent man’s murder becomes lighthearted entertainment, something far deeper than one killing has gone wrong."
Clearly, right wingers are responsible for violence and we need to jail the whole of the "far right" to keep people safe

Matt Walsh on X - "I’ll never forget when the health insurance CEO was shot and killed in cold blood and I got ratioed to hell in the comments on YouTube because I said that I was opposed to it and it’s bad to commit murder. The celebration of Luigi Mangione was very much mainstream. It was in fact the more popular, more widely accepted position. I knew at that point that we’d crossed the rubicon."

Meme - Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog: "This was just one of thousands of comments along these lines. I was “dividing the poor and middle class” by saying that we shouldn’t murder people in the street."
@CopeAcidic: "If you watch this and don't realize that Walsh's whole purpose is to divide the class for the interests of the rich then idk what to tell you"
When left wingers accuse right wingers of "dividing us", this is what they mean: stopping random street murders of people left wingers disapprove of

Andy Ngo on X - "There is a crisis in the U.S. of far-left violent extremism. Significant numbers of leftist extremists believe they can assault people, kill people, carry out arson attacks and riot anytime and anywhere for their causes. “By any means necessary.”"

Meme - Adam Mockler @adammocklerr: "Political violence is not a "both-sides" problem. It's also not a fringe problem. It comes from the mainstream Right."
Adam Mockler @adam...: "If you're an unironic fan of Stephen Miller you should be taken out back and put down"

New York Post on X - "Alleged Palisades arsonist became 'fixated' with Luigi Mangione, started blaze 'out of resentment of the rich': prosecutors"
HowlingMutant on X - "Gee I wonder if this will be categorized as a left wing terrorist attack"

Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "Palisades Fire ends up being one of the most destructive acts of left wing terrorism in modern history. The arsonist Rinderknecht searched “free Luigi Mangione,” “let’s take down all the billionaires” and “let’s kill all the billionaires” before setting the Lachman Fire which ultimately ignored the Palisades conflagration.  12 killed, 6,800 homes destroyed"
Wilfred Reilly on X - "This fire had nothing to do with "the complications of climate change," etc. A fucking left-wing terrorist set it. On the right and hard-center, we need to OWN the frame on crime, migration, welfare, and fraud. Enough of these endless "root causes" distractions. Who cares  if it's .6% (I looked) more dry?   WE CAUGHT THE ADULT MALE FELON WHO SET THE FIRE!!!"

State Department Severs Ties With Armed Queers-Affiliated NGO; Marxist Group Nukes Socials - "A State Department source confirmed to Blaze News that any ties to Utah Global Diplomacy, "which existed indirectly via an external implementer, are being completely severed and dismantled." As we reported earlier, Armed Queers SLC founder Ermiya Fanaeian had been recognized by the NGO... Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller announced an all-of-government approach to disrupt and dismantle "left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country."...  "The revolution against the West spans thousands of organizations that may not be formally linked but are marching in unison toward the revolution.""

Cato Institute on X - "The risk of being killed in a politically motivated attack in the US is low, a Cato study shows. Excluding 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing, most deaths come from right-wing attackers, followed by Islamists, and then left-wing attackers."
Justin DeBerry on X - "“Excluding the 2 deadliest terror attacks in American history, your not likely to be killed in a politically motivated attack.” Oh and also Cuban exiles killing each other counts as “right-wing terrorism.” CATO is a joke."
PoIiMath on X - "What is hugely embarrassing for @CatoInstitute is that this dataset has been debunked multiple times and they haven't even bothered to respond to the objections or make any changes to it. They know it's bad data, they just don't care"

The Hidden Cost of Comfort

The Hidden Cost of Comfort

In the 1950s, over 90% of toddlers were potty trained by 18 months. More recently, that number is about 4%. The average age of potty training has drifted to nearly 37 months.

What in the world is going on with our kids? Their skill and aptitude hasn’t changed. Neither has biology. The answer applies to so much more than potty training. It helps explain performance, creativity, and maybe even part of our mental health issues. So what is it?

A part of it is parenting philosophies changed. In the early 20th century there was a push to potty train early and often, so much so that many kids were trained before they reached a year old. Starting in the 1970s, we switched to a philosophy where letting the child indicate they’re ready became the go-to practice.

But another change had as big of an effect and explains so much more: We moved from cloth to disposable diapers. When you use a cloth diaper, it’s not just that mom and dad have to deal with quite a mess, the child actually feels the mess themselves. They feel the wetness. In disposable diapers, not so much. The absorbent material makes it where there’s a disconnect. Little Suzy or Johnny go pee, but they don’t really feel it. We’ve disrupted the signaling cycle.

A 2021 systematic review by Breinbjerg and colleagues at Aarhus University concluded as much, finding that disposable diapers are associated with delayed continence. By eliminating the sensation of wetness, they disrupt the bladder-brain feedback loop. A 2025 prospective study took it a step further. When kids were diaper-free, they were more likely to give off visible cues that they were about to pee — squirming, wiggles, facial expressions. When they wore a diaper, they didn’t react to peeing. The sensation was absorbed before it registered enough to produce a behavioral response.

The bladder still fills, the nerves still send the message. But the diaper removes the consequence of that signal (the feeling of wetness), and without that feedback, the child’s brain doesn’t learn to connect “this internal sensation” with “something is happening that I need to respond to.”

We call this interoception. It’s our ability to read our internal signals. And it doesn’t just apply to diapers. It’s what allows runners to pace and navigate fatigue, it’s at the heart of our gut instincts, and it’s the thing that helps us stop eating when we’re full. Research on everyone from stock traders to elite performers finds that the better we’re able to understand our internal signals, the better we perform.

For toddlers, the diaper muffles the response before the kid learns to listen. But we’ve done the same thing elsewhere: we’ve engineered away the signal, and lost the capacity to read and respond to it.

The diaper trade-off is small. Your kid potty trains six months later. No real harm done. But the same mechanism plays out in places where the trade-off is much bigger. There are always trade-offs.

Consider the following:

• We don’t experience boredom anymore. We have a built-in signal blocker: our phones. You can see it when we’re standing in line or sitting at a restaurant waiting for our food — people grab their phones instead of sitting with the discomfort and filling that space. Boredom is a signal to go search for something better to do. It’s at the heart of creativity. Just think back to how many games you invented as a kid because you were bored and didn’t have a tablet to grab and soothe that feeling.

• Playgrounds and free play are risk calibration tools. Researchers have found that when risk is removed from play, children are more prone to anxiety disorders, because they never develop the ability to cope with fear-inducing situations. 74% of kids preferred more challenging equipment when given the choice at a playground. Safetyism and the design constraints that come with it restrict kids from developing the signal and feedback mechanism that helps them learn how to take appropriate risks. When we never have to look at a high platform, feel our stomach tighten, and decide whether to climb anyway, we never calibrate the balance between fear and capability.

• We’re never alone in our head. Go for a walk, listen to a podcast. On a run, fill that space with music or a podcast. When we make our internal world foreign, something to escape from, is it any wonder we treat it as a threat? Headphones are the disposable diaper for our internal monologue, or if we’re working out, our effort signals.

• Air conditioning and Heating. There’s even early research that points to our perfectly temperature-controlled environments contributing to the obesity epidemic. One study found that after just one month of sleeping in cooler conditions during the winter months (so not using the heater), subjects showed a 42% increase in brown fat volume and a 10% improvement in insulin sensitivity. We’ve muffled our body’s internal thermostats, shutting down our thermogenic system because it’s not needed anymore. We spend 90% of our time indoors where it’s constantly between 68 and 74 degrees year round.

• Metrics everywhere. We outsource our pacing to GPS watches, our sense of recovery and readiness to our rings and trackers, and the quality of our sleep to a device on our wrist. Instead of learning to read what fatigue, freshness, and rest actually feel like, we wait to be told.

• Navigation. When GPS does the navigating, your brain stops building the map. Eleanor Maguire’s research at University College London found that the hippocampus actually shrinks or grows based on how much navigation we’re doing. London taxi drivers, who memorized 25,000 streets, had measurably larger hippocampi than the general population. We don’t need to build a mental map when we can outsource it. The cognitive workout that built spatial reasoning was muffled by a device that could tell us precisely where to go.

Every single one follows the same pattern: remove the signal, lose the capacity it was building. I’m not suggesting we throw away GPS, and I’m certainly not getting rid of air conditioning. Lord knows I’d never survive in Houston, Texas without it.

But what is clear is that there are always trade-offs to dampening a signal. And too often, we default to whatever feels easier in the moment, not realizing the capacities we’re detraining or letting go.

Let’s start with the minor ones. It might not feel like a big deal to listen to a podcast on a run or always have music playing. But what happens is that you lose one of the most valuable skills in running: the ability to listen to your body. Your ability to pace by feel declines. Instead of being like the seasoned vet who can lock into a pace by listening to your breathing and feeling your legs turn over, you’re lost without that external marker guiding you.

You also can’t read and respond to the very things that control your performance. Those with poor interoception mistake early signals of discomfort or unease as signs that they’re going far too hard. They have hypersensitive alarms that get triggered at the slightest hint of fatigue. A pro at interoception can slice and dice the signals, understanding what each one means and calibrating it against what they’re actually capable of. They can ride the line because they have confidence in knowing how much fatigue they can handle, given the demands they’re facing.

We can see the same thing with anxiety. Those with strong interoception can understand what is just pre-race stress — a signal their body is getting ready to do something hard — and what is genuine anxiety warning of a real danger. And away from the sporting fields, recent research has demonstrated this for generalized anxiety. A 2024 systematic review examined the relationship between interoception and anxiety across 71 studies. They found that anxious individuals don’t necessarily feel more ,they’re just really bad at interpreting and describing the experience. They have what researchers call “high interoceptive attention with low interoceptive accuracy.” They notice the heart rate spike but can’t tell if it means danger or excitement. They feel the tension in their chest but can’t decode whether it’s a threat or just being tired.

While the science is still young, interoceptive disruption is being studied in everything from eating disorders to addiction. And so far, a similar pattern emerges. The body is sending information and the brain doesn’t read it correctly. The consequences differ depending on what part of the system breaks down: eating disorders if hunger and satiety signals are misread, anxiety if threat signals are over-amplified, depression if reward signals are dampened, PTSD if all bodily sensations get coded as danger, and so on.

Steven Hayes — the psychologist who developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) — coined the term “experiential avoidance.” He found that the more you treat your inner world as a threat to be managed, the more it becomes one. Three decades of research has confirmed it: experiential avoidance is one of the strongest predictors of anxiety disorders, depression, PTSD, and substance abuse.

A Disconnected World

Too often, we hear the argument that “kids can’t handle discomfort anymore.” But I think that’s the wrong framing. The real piece is this: we’ve broken the system that lets humans read their internal world, and the consequences show up as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, and PTSD.

When we put earbuds in for every walk, fill every silence with a podcast, and distract every moment of boredom, we’re practicing experiential avoidance. We’re training the brain that our internal world is something to escape from. We’ve put diapers on every sensation we experience. Mostly in the form of phones.

We’ve engineered away the very signals that help us connect our internal and external worlds, our experience and our response.

The toddler who never feels wet doesn’t learn to read their bladder. The driver who never gets lost doesn’t build a mental map. The child who never feels afraid on the playground doesn’t learn to calibrate risk. The teenager who never sits with boredom doesn’t develop sustained attention. The runner who never runs without music doesn’t learn to read their effort. The student who gets extended time on every test never builds the ability to perform under the pressure of a clock.

We padded the world. And now we’re wondering why nobody can feel anything.

So what do we do? Take the diaper off occasionally on the signals that are important to you.

• Go music and podcast free on some runs, walks, or even commutes. Spend time alone in your head. This is especially true on harder or longer workouts where you want to be a pro at understanding discomfort. Sure, rocking out to music might help you get through one workout a little better, but it doesn’t train the skill that will help you on race day.

• Embrace boredom. Put the phone away. Stand in line without reaching for your pocket. Or pull out a pen and notebook and jot down your thoughts.

• Get a little lost. We may never have the navigation ability of our grandparents’ generation, but there’s something to taking a new route on a run, or driving across town without relying on navigation. A small workout to remind your brain to have a touch of spatial awareness.

• Have a digital sabbath. Take one day off technology a week. Or put the tech away a few evenings a week. Whatever it is, reconnect with your body.

• Mindfulness and meditation are interoception trainers. This doesn’t have to be some complicated practice — just deliberate time being mindful.

We need to wrestle with discomfort. Whether it’s helping your kids with the first sign of struggle on the playground or with their homework, or with yourself in reaching for the quickest solution to the slightest feeling of unease, we need to let folks sit with that experience. We’ve largely engineered it away. It’s time to deliberately bring it back.

 

Links - 4th July 2026 (1 - Karmelo Anthony)

Meme - shoe @shoe0nhead: "whats wild is this wasnt even like a "cop kills black guy" thing where there *might* be some debate about the police or whatever it's just straight up a black kid stabbed a white kid and they're losing their minds that he's going to prison over murder. fascinating."
"Fuck it dig Austin Metcalf up and stab his ass again"
"Black people please carry more than a pocket knife. Get their asses before they can get you"
"Stop sending your kids to the white schools."
"35 years on your first offense is over sentencing. Yea there has to be a retrial. This is blatant injustice."

Meme - Preet Shahi: "Which way White Man?
1. Chud the Builder = Defend yourself. Be arrested and thrown in prison with a 1 milion bond and impossible to meet stipulations. Your attacker survived and is not charged for assauiting you.
2. Austin Metcalf = Die. And your death is celebrated due to racial animus towards your whole entire race. Your killer let out on 250k bond. And the jury will most ikely be intimated to let your killer off easy."

Meme - Isaac Hayes Ill @lsaacHayes3: "The Karmelo Anthony verdict shows that the justice system has reverted back to the Jim Crow South era. It is no longer about evidence. It is no longer about right or wrong. It is about keeping racial score through the prosecution and imprisonment of Black people. It was no surprise that an all white jury would find a 19 year old kid, who was bullied and harassed by two 6’1” bullies, guilty of murder while he was minding his business. We have seen this story before. A young Black man is put on trial, and somehow the burden shifts from what happened to him, to why he should not have defended himself. The facts become secondary. The optics become everything. The outcome feels predetermined long before the verdict is read. People will tell you not to make it about race. But race has always been part of the story in America. The hard truth is that many Black people no longer believe they will receive the benefit of the doubt when their freedom is on the line. And verdicts like this are exactly why. At some point, we have to stop pretending that everyone is playing by the same set of rules. Because the people watching this case saw something very different than what that jury claimed to see"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "Clarification: While the jury in K Anthony's murder trial had no Black jurors, it was not all White. Reports confirm a diverse panel including White, Hispanic, Asian, and other jurors (e.g., 5 White males noted in coverage, plus women of color)."

Meme - Wanjiru Njoya: "These are the replies he got from blacks when he said murder is wrong"
Pastor Ben @BenjaminPDixon: "my dearest goofy ass nigga. the money for coons was all spent on candace owens. all they have left for you is hot plate. you can stop it now"
Fuck You, I'm from Texas @ScamNetwon: "Hey bro, we don't really give a fuck. The only reason it became a thing is. because his GoFundMe was in response to white folks giving a bitch a million dollars for calling a 4 y/o the n word. Talk to them white folks you pandering to, leave us alone coon"f

Meme - Ames @Real_ Ames: "Funny how some people online keep saying these photos are the same. One photo shows Austin and Hunter Metcalf outdoors in hunting gear, holding hunting rifles while dressed for a hunting trip. The other shows Karmelo Anthony indoors posing with a rifle, flashing gang-style hand signs and giving the middle finger to the camera. Whether you support someone or not, pretending these images send the exact same message requires ignoring the obvious differences. What do you think - are these photos really comparable, or are people forcing a narrative?"

Meme - "Your honor, this is only his first murder"
Don Moolio @_ReeMiddleChild: "35 years on your first offense is over sentencing. Yea there has to be a retrial. This is blatant injustice."
Readers added context: "Karmelo Anthony was found guilty of murder, not a standard "first offense" misdemeanor. Under Texas law, a first-degree murder conviction carries a sentence of 5 to 99 years or life in prison. The 35-year sentence falls well within legal guidelines."

Meme - Aly @XxMurderBabexX: "Imagine getting a nose job instead of a lawyer with your gofundme money..."

Erica Day | Facebook - "I read a post saying the defense in the Karmelo Anthony case was incompetent, underfunded, and that something smells wrong. That the punishment phase was too thin. That only his mother testified. Here's what actually happened: The defense had a strategy. They went all in on "sudden passion" — a legal argument that would have capped his sentence at 20 years. That was their bet. They put his mother on the stand, asked for mercy, and pushed that angle hard. The jury took two and a half hours and said no. That's not a conspiracy. That's a bad bet that didn't pay off. Now because the strategy failed, people want to call it incompetence. Want to call it a setup. Want to find a reason — any reason — that explains this outcome that doesn't include the possibility that Karmelo Anthony stabbed a boy over a tent and a jury of his peers said so. Here's what I know. His classmates testified he was looking for a fight. He told people to touch him and see what happens. He brought a knife to a track meet. He refused to leave. A 17-year-old boy died. The defense tried self defense. The jury said no. They tried sudden passion. The jury said no again. At some point you have to ask yourself — what verdict would actually satisfy you? Because it sounds like the only acceptable outcome was walking free. And when that didn't happen, suddenly everything is suspicious. That's not skepticism. That's just not being able to accept what happened."

Mark Dice | Facebook - "It's long over due for the country to have a serious talk about race... ...and why so many black people online (especially on TikTok and Twitter/X) support violent and murderous black people when they're arrested and want them to go free and spew vile hatred about wanting to harm innocent White people to get revenge. The Karmelo Anthony guilty verdict has sparked some of the most evil and vile antiwhiteism since the Black Lives Matter insurrection of 2020. Slavery ended over 150 years ago. We had a black president nearly two decades ago (who wouldn't have been president if tens of millions of White people didn't vote for him), and a black VP in the last administration. Black privilege has been systemic for decades through affirmative action and countless social programs. More black people are racist at this point than White people. Enough is enough. Black Crimes Matter."

Sujata PG | Facebook - "For the past few days, I've been completely captivated by the Karmelo Anthony trial in Texas. Obviously, it's a devastating tragedy all around. Two young men whose futures are either gone forever or effectively destroyed. But what compelled me to write about it wasn't the case itself. It was the reactions coming from certain corners of the internet. It's one thing when anonymous social media users and street protesters rush to defend what appears to be a clear-cut murder. It's another when a university professor publishes an article titled "Dear Jeff Metcalf: Your Son Is Dead Because You Failed to Teach Him That Black Boys Have Boundaries." At that point, you're left staring at the screen wondering what exactly you're looking at. When a highly educated academic responds to a fatal stabbing by blaming the victim and his grieving father, words like "delusional", "detached", and "unreachable" naturally come to mind. Because this isn't a mere disagreement over politics or public policy. This is something far more disturbing. What we're looking at is narcissistic victimhood in action. When people hear the word narcissism, they usually picture the grandiose extrovert who can't stop bragging about how great they are. But there's another type: the vulnerable narcissist. The vulnerable narcissist derives their sense of specialness not from superiority, but from victimhood. Their suffering is always more profound, their grievances grander than anyone else's, and therefore, in their worldview, infinite empathy must flow toward them, while accountability should apply to everyone else. Once someone gets trapped inside that psychology of perpetual grievance, facts no longer matter. Reality becomes bendable. Everything is filtered through a very primitive psychological defense mechanism psychologists call DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. And because Dr. Stacy Patton is an academic, she doesn't DARVO in plain language. She does it using sophisticated academic terminology: autonomy, systemic entitlement, power dynamics, historical context. But the packaging doesn't change the underlying mechanism. By reframing a fatal knife attack at a high school track meet as a grand sociological lesson about "boundaries," she achieves three goals that fit perfectly into the narcissist's defense structure: 1. She strips Austin Metcalf of his humanity. His killing is not a tragedy to be mourned. He is reduced to a symbol of "entitlement." This is a hallmark of narcissistic thinking: people are not fully human subjects, only objects in a story centered on the narcissist's emotional and ideological needs. 2. She elevates herself. She becomes the brave truth-teller who can see what lesser minds supposedly can't. This allows her to defend an indefensible act while avoiding the shame that should naturally arise from doing so. 3. She gets the intoxicating reward that social media now offers to professional provocateurs. Every outraged response from her followers, every accusation of cruelty serves as narcissistic supply, evidence not that she is wrong, but that she is important. The ultimate destination of this entire framework is total immunity through identity. Because if you can successfully convince people that a person's behavior can only be judged through the lens of historical or personal trauma, then you've effectively destroyed the concept of personal responsibility. Under those rules, a person is never a murderer, they are just a tragic byproduct of an oppressive system, and the person they killed is just collateral damage, or worse, their oppressor, who finally got what they deserved. One of the most astonishing claims in Dr. Patton's article is that the absence of Black jurors meant there was nobody present who could truly understand Karmelo Anthony's fears, vulnerabilities, and lived experience as a young Black man. But that argument flips the entire point of a jury on its head. The purpose of a jury is not to find twelve people who identify with the defendant. It is to find twelve people who can evaluate the evidence despite their identification with anyone involved. By her logic, every defendant should be entitled to jurors who share his race, background, ideology, religion, and life story. Then, we're no longer talking about impartial justice. We're talking about tribal representation. And the whole point of a jury is to rise above that impulse, not institutionalize it. This is precisely why the jury's swift, three-hour verdict stands as a massive rejection of that entire framing. The jury didn't play the academic game. They didn't look at sociological theories or historical essays. They didn’t get pulled into Patton's grievance-based inversion of accountability. They looked at a video of a young man taking an unarmed classmate's life with a knife, and they applied the law. It was an absolute, objective declaration of accountability. No matter how many unhinged articles are written to satisfy a collective delusion, that 35-year prison sentence stands as a firm reminder that reality cannot be rewritten."

Lucky Teter on X - "W. Burlette Carter went to Harvard Law School and is now Professor Emerita ar George Washington University Law School. She apparently believes that a "jury of your peers" means that Karmelo Anthony was entitled to a jury of black teenagers. She also admits she hasn't even read the transcript so she gets basic facts wrong about the case. One of the coaches testified that he put Austin Metcalf in charge of watching over the tent. Additionally, self defense requires proportional force. A light shove, in which you don't claim you feared for your life, does not allow you to use deadly force. How did this woman get accepted to Harvard Law? How is she now teaching at GW Law?"

Savanah Hernandez on X - "One of the most shocking things I witnessed today was this woman in pink screaming “you gon end up like Metcalf, you gone be pushing up daisies”. I caught the tail end of her saying this to Metcalf supporters in the clip below. I also witnessed several Karmelo supporters get extremely aggressive when ANY media tried speaking with them. One female reporter went up to the group to ask questions (linked below) and they immediately got angry saying “we told y’all to stop coming the f*ck over here” (this was her first attempt at speaking to them). At this point I started warning every reporter who was trying to speak with this group, as earlier, another local reporter had tapped on the shoulder of the man who leads their chants. This man immediately squared up and acted like the reporter had punched him. I’ve been covering protests for 7 years and this is some of the most violent and racially charged rhetoric I’ve ever encountered."
The American Tribune on X - "They know Karmelo did it. They don’t think he is innocent. They think he should be able to get away with it. Oh, and they’re there protesting in favor of a murderer on a weekday afternoon because our tax dollars pay for the welfare programs that allow them to do so"

Viva Frei on X - "The irony is had Karmelo Anthony “retreated”, gone to the police, and asked them to charge Austin Metcalfe with assault, they would have laughed him out of the precinct. The other irony is that had Karmelo Anthony said to Austin Metcalfe “put a finger on me and I will stab you in the heart”, Karmelo would have been guilty of uttering a threat. It’s murder. Pure and simple, and nothing in the evidence - even that presented by the defense - has attenuated that conclusion. It’s just an indescribable tragedy that we are discussing this as a matter of law, when as a matter of life, there is a dead kid and family and friends devastated for the rest of their lives."

Matt Walsh on X - "This is so devastating. Imagine being a black parent tonight. How do you protect your children? If they go out and stab just one person, they might go to prison. It’s like a black man in America can’t even murder anyone anymore. Unimaginable. Jim Crow all over again. I’m furious."
i/o on X - "At our heart, we are a nation of Black juries acquitting Black men when they kill white people. If we lose this, what have we become?"

OutspokenSamantha on X - "Keep teaching your kids to hate white people, and that they will get away with anything as long as the victim is white.. And they'll end up throwing their life away like Karmelo Anthony did. Hate will absolutely destroy your life."

Meme - David Santa Carla: "And while his father was on national tv forgiving Anthony for murdering his son, Anthony's black supporters donated money to him with a simple message."
"GiveSendGo. SHINE BRIGHTLY
Help Karmelo Official Fund Goal: USD $600,000
Raised: USD $518,115
Death to the white man $ 5.00 USD"

Meme - "Democrats finding out that it's illegal for Black people to just stab White people to death. *Joffrey clutching chest at the Purple Wedding*"

Jasmine Crockett suggests she also would have stabbed Austin Metcalf in stunning defense of Karmelo Anthony - "Lame-duck Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) suggested during an unhinged episode podcast that she too would have stabbed track star Austin Metcalf — after Karmelo Anthony was convicted of first-degree murder in the racially charged case. On Tuesday’s episode of “Clock It with Crockett,” the failed Senate candidate let loose a torrent of falsehoods to paint a picture of the brutal slaying of 17-year-old Metcalf that had virtually no basis in reality... Contrary to Crockett’s fact-free assertions, there was no “beating,” Metcalf was never “on top” of Anthony and Metcalf weighed nowhere near the formidable 300 pounds the congresswoman alleged. X users flooded posts sharing clips of Crockett’s podcast with comments pointing out her misstatements of even the simplest facts in the case... Crockett, an attorney, has previously made gaffes indicating a twisted understanding of the criminal justice system, including the infamously ponderous statement “Just because someone has committed a crime, it doesn’t make them a criminal” on Jonathan Van Ness’ “Getting Better” podcast, for which she was widely ridiculed."
The most revealing bit of this episode has been what it shows about black people and how many of them believe that it's justified to kill people if they insult or touch you, and that Anthony was really defending himself. Which proves that lots of black people die at the hands of other black people due to slavery, racism and white supremacy

Karmelo Anthony found GUILTY of murder of Austin Metcalf, 17, in stabbing that shocked America: Jurors deliberated for less than three hours after defense was repeatedly demolished in court : r/law - "I feel like just in yesterday’s post I read that the defense’s defense is just claiming self-defense (chaotic sentence, I know). I don’t see how the defense thought it was enough to claim that, without giving the jury a plausible story as to why he felt threatened enough to pull a knife, told by the defendant himself. I guess they weighted the possibility of perjury, possibility of self-incrimination and thought it best to not give him the opportunity to do either of the above."
"Which is very puzzling for a jury. If self-defense, the defender's story is very important. If you claim self-defense and can't testify, you're cooked."
"Most likely the defense attorney perceived Karmelo Anthony to be lacking in credibility, and therefore thought his testimony would only make things worse."

𝒯𝒞⁷⁷⁷ on X - "We should’ve stayed segregated"
Riley Gaines on X - "Mind you, this is because they can't murder innocent white people without consequences. I have no words."

Meme - Tamorah Shareef Muhammad @ModestyQueen19: "Karmelo Anthony being found guilty is an exact representation of black boys never being afforded the luxury to make a mistake, as it clearly is in today's society. They are not afforded the same empathy that many Caucasian males are, nor the"
Merman @larecon78: "Here's just one example of a black man only being afforded the luxury 14 prior mistakes before the last one." *14 Decarlos Brown mugshots*

Meme - Anti-fascist and proud: Rando Calzone: "Austin Metcalf was a white supremacist."
Jessica Schaffer-Cline: "A dead one. The best kind."
Left wingers just hate white people and love violence. If white people don't let black people murder them, that's "fascism" and "white supremacy"

Meme - Sistas aren't the Democratic...: "Your son is dead. Go get grief therapy and tell the other kid to keep his hands to himself. He got 35 years. Accept it, shut the fuck up and move on."
Collin Rugg: "Austin Metcalf's father says Karmelo Anthony's family has shown zero remorse after his son was murdered, says they decided to play the race card instead..."
HowlingMutant @Howlingm...: "I don't know if you're aware of this but all the slaves are dead too, so I assume you'll be shutting the fuck up about that"

Links - 3rd July 2026 (2 - Feminism)

Meme - Emerald Apple @AI_EmeraldApple: "Rebecca is a short adult woman. You can't hate tourists enough. I guess the height of consent strikes again. The word pedo is rapidly losing any real meaning in 2026, just as the same as words like Nazi and racist."
Kai @saikaifan: "Ofcourse the pedo incel game is attracting pedo incels"
Rock Solid @ShitpostRock2: "Sooooooo ... is Wuthering Waves a good game? Cuz GOOD LORD"
"Below Height of Consent"

Environment Agency boss says he was sacked for not being a feminist - "An experienced manager is suing the Environment Agency claiming he was discriminated against for not being a feminist. Kevin Legge alleges that he was forced out after resisting what he says was his boss's agenda to promote women rather than men... Mr Legge has taken the Environment Agency to an employment tribunal claiming discrimination based on a philosophical belief, sex discrimination and unfair dismissal."

Elisabeth Stone (@elisabethstonee) - "The irony of feminism is that casual sex and hookup culture are a direct result of feminism, and so essentially women have fought for the ability and the right to be treated like pieces of meat"

Brandon Warmke on X - "Anyone who's been inside academia very long can see that the dominant narrative about gender bias is risible. But it's one of those dogmas you're not supposed to question because that makes you a bad "ally" or something. "The reality is the opposite of what is believed""
Colin Wright on X - "A zombie belief I frequently encounter in woke papers is that there's a tenure-track hiring bias against women in STEM. A new paper combining all research on faculty ratings for identical CVs for men vs. women show that not only is this belief false, the opposite is true."
Will Kinney on X - "One of the things that happens over and over in social science when it pertains to politically charged results is that early, poor studies are cast as definitive — listen to the science — and then more rigorous studies that debunk them are ignored because the narrative is set."
Organized Dogmatism Controls the Message about Gender Bias in the Academy - "The “dominant gender narrative” in science holds that bias against women is pervasive and occurs in every domain, including tenure-track hiring, letters of recommendation, awards, grants, journal publications, authorship assignment, citations, salaries, promotions, and teaching evaluations. Many of these claims are repeatedly broadcast despite their nullification by larger, stronger studies and meta-analyses that do not find gender bias. Because these stronger studies are cited less often, there exists a false belief among many faculty that gender bias is omnipresent in the tenure-track academy. As an example of this false belief, 248 U.S. faculty were surveyed about their beliefs regarding gender bias. They overestimated the extent of such bias in every domain. We illustrate this misalignment of beliefs by focusing on just one of the many domains in which bias against women is alleged but has been nullified by stronger studies: tenure-track hiring. We show that the dominant narrative of pervasive bias in favor of hiring men is not supported by the evidence. The reality is the opposite of what is believed, with women preferred over comparable men: multiple sources of evidence demonstrate that in tenure-track hiring in the United States and many European countries, women have an advantage over equally-accomplished men. Yet, the claim of bias against hiring women faculty continues to be widely cited in the premier science media. Challenging the gender narrative should be part of normal scientific discourse; however, doing so often evokes a backlash—as documented in testimonials by researchers who have been attacked."

Steve Stewart-Williams on X - "Offenders who killed men received shorter sentences than those who killed women. As the table shows, the average sentence when the victim was male was 17.5 years, compared with 22.4 years when the victim was female."
Proof that Patriarchy doesn't value women's lives

Tanya on X - "“Feminism is just about choice” “feminism is good for women” Also feminism:
In The Second Sex (1949), de Beauvoir wrote: “No woman should be authorized to stay at home… Women should not be allowed to have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make it.” The mother of modern feminism believed women had to be denied freedom, because freedom would make them choose traditional roles.
Firestone: In The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Firestone wrote: “The end goal of feminist revolution must be… not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally… The tyranny of the biological family would be broken.” The goal was never equality, it was the destruction of sex-based reality.
Betty Friedan: “women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps...they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.”
Kate Millett: Sexual Politics (1970) argued: “The chief institution of patriarchy is the family. The family unit must go…”
Gloria Steinem: “We Became the Men We Wanted to Marry” Steinem’s vision of feminism wasn’t about honoring womanhood, but replacing it, with a female iteration of male ambition.
Friedrich Engels: In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels (Marx’s collaborator) wrote: “The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife.”To destroy capitalism, you had to destroy the traditional family. That’s why early socialist movements embraced feminism, not to liberate women, but to dissolve the structure that made civilization sustainable."
Feminism is not about choice

‏ً on X - "It’s really a statistical finding so stark that when women get cancer or become terminally ill, the healthcare workers are trained to gently prepare them for the likelihood their husbands will leave. But when men get sick, wives are reminded to step up and do their “wifely duties.” Women also donate living organs far more often than men. So let me get this straight - men are patients, women are support systems. Women are warned about abandonment. Men are promised care. And internet misogynists continue to live in their own delusional world."
Femme on X - "Oh darn. "widely reported finding that the risk of divorce increases when wives fall ill — but not when men do — is invalid, thanks to a short string of mistaken coding that negates the original conclusions, published in the March issue of the Journal of Health and and Social Behavior..""
More than 10 years after the research was corrected, feminists continue to spread misinformation

Dr. Mia Brett on X - "If you’re asking why Russel Brand feels so comfortable admitting to raping a 16 yo publicly it’s because age of consent in Britain is 16. It was perfectly legal for him as a 30 year old man to pick a 16 yo girl up from school for sex. These men know they’re protected"
"love is love is love" got thrown out the window the moment gay marriage got rammed through. Now you're a rapist for having consensual sex with someone of legal age

Sima Bahous on X - ".@UN_Women’s new #EU funded study finds a surge in sophisticated online violence targeting women in public life, driven by AI, anonymity, and weak safeguards. This is silencing voices and eroding rights. We must #ACTtoEndViolence now!"
James L. Nuzzo, PhD on X - "210 male journalists also appear to have completed UN Women's survey. However, UN Women did not disclose the results from the male journalists. If the results from the male journalists are similar to those of the female journalists, then this would invalidate UN Women's suggestion that only female journalists are targeted."
James L. Nuzzo, PhD on X - "This is now the second report on online abuse that UN Women has published using this dataset. The first report was published in December 2025, and the second report was published in April 2026. In both reports, UN Women has not revealed the results from the 210 male participants. Arguably, not publishing the results from the men who volunteered their time to complete the survey violates norms of research ethics. The survey was funded by the European Union."

Meme - James L. Nuzzo, PhD @JamesLNuzzo: "The UN continues to ignores these polls, which show both male and female prevalence rates of ever experiencing any online abuse or harassment. Instead, the UN biases the conversation from the start by only surveying females or by only reporting female data."
"Prevalence of Ever Experiencing Any Online Abuse or Harassment
In the United States, a greater proportion of males than females report ever experiencing any online abuse or harassment.
In Australia, no sex difference exists in ever experiencing any online abuse or harassment."

Karma KΞN on X - ""Online violence" is a made-up feminist oxymoron. Feminists cherry-pick data to paint themselves as eternal victims, perfectly earning their title:
> The Sisterhood of Perpetual Victimhood"

The Mismeasure of Male Feminists - "It’s hard to pinpoint the exact mix of emotions that come up when yet another male feminist is revealed to be less than enlightened towards women in his private life. There’s disappointment, yes, but there can also be a gotcha glee at hypocrisy exposed; joy at the downfall of a sanctimonious type. And that gut sense—I could have guessed—that a dude so proud of publicly checking his male privilege and so aware of why women might fear men, was a man women have reason to fear. But when the feelings fade what’s left looks strikingly like a double standard: Self-proclaimed male feminists are suspected of being hypocrites whether or not they’ve done anything yet to warrant that suspicion and when hypocrisy is involved, our bar for misconduct is lowered... the list of fallen male-feminist icons keeps expanding: There was—is—Louis CK, so attuned to white male privilege in his comedy, yet so cavalier about exposing himself to women colleagues. Also, fellow comedian Aziz Ansari, celebrated as a hyperaware male ally until a story broke about his pushiness on a date … all culminating in his recent re-emergence as yet another comic insisting that political correctness has gone too far. Michael Kimmel, go-to scholar of masculinity and privilege, proved problematic, as have Hugo Schwyzer, Jian Ghomeshi, and former New York attorney Eric Schneiderman. The conventionally handsome and generally admired are not immune: Actor James Franco showed his support for the feminist Time’s Up campaign at the Golden Globes only to stand accused shortly thereafter of sexual misconduct with five women. Even Canadian Prime Minister and feminist icon of not-Trump-ness Justin Trudeau has not escaped #MeToo entirely unscathed: There was, fleetingly, a groping scandal... The ambiguity of male feminism’s motives is matched by that of feminist women’s attitudes towards the role. The same progressive institutions and think pieces celebrating men for getting it are also the ones that can seem most dismissive of the very idea of the male feminist when a male ally is found to have transgressed.  Among the most recent male feminists to disappoint: Jack Smith IV, a now-former senior writer at progressive website Mic."
Male feminists promote the standard by which they fall short, so there is no inconsistency between hoisting them on their own petard and not adopting those ridiculous standards for the rest of society

Meme - "Opinion. I'd rather the police investigate a crime of misogyny than burglary. Suzanne Moore"

Meme - Tihanah @Funkiessss: ""Can I kiss you?" Lmao why are you even asking me Just kiss me ffs!"
Abraham @The_Don_Abbey: "Next day on Twitter *a thread on how I was sexually assaulted"

Meme - *Pressing a Boot on Your Own Head*
*Crying Handmaid with boot on head*
*Boot is placed by Handmaid herself*

Meme - venom @venom1s: "It's real news, you can go search yourself. Girls are always considered victims in this country. Even if a girl rapes a boy, he's the one arrested. No feminist girl will say anything on this. But I expose their reality, so they hate and abuse me."
"12-year-old boy booked under POCSO Act for raping, impregnating 17-year-old girl in Tamil Nadu"

Natania Marshall ✞ on X - "Everyday feminists take their computers (invented by men), power them with electricity (generated by men), access the internet (created by men) and log into Twitter and Facebook (designed by men). To ask the question, “Who needs men?”"

Stay out of it - FML - "Today, my disgusting coworker made a comment about "women versus accountability" and I couldn't even yell at him for being a sexist scumbucket, because my wife threw coffee at me yesterday for pointing out that she'd left the chips open and they went stale. FML "

Yonan on X - "Dave Ramsey tells a nurse to dump her boyfriend after he refuses to propose until she pays off $90K in debt
Caller: "I’m a 26 year old nurse with $90K in student loans. My boyfriend makes $250K a year, but he won’t propose until I’m completely debt free"
Dave: "Dump him. He’s making you prove your worth based on money. You’re having to buy your way into this relationship"
"The No. 1 cause of divorce in North America today is money fights and money problems and guess what this is? This is a money fight""
Chairman on X - "Feminists could've probably sold the whole "patriarchy hurts men too" bit much better if they talked more about stuff like this rather than wearing skirts and shit. Literal boomer patriarch on TV telling you to man up and get into debt for his surrogate daughter"
Feminism is about benefiting women, not gender equality, after all

Emil Kirkegaard on X - "Nordic countries have absurdly generous paid child leave. But this wasn't enough for the feminists, so they looked for a way to make it worse but cost more, and they found it: force men to take some of the leave, thus leaving less for mothers.  How bad was it? Danish study shows. One can do a simple before and after check on satisfaction, women declined from 90% satisfied to 50%, men from 85% to 60%."

Meme - Feminist with punk short white and brown hair: "DID You KNOW HOUSEWIVES IN THE FIFTIES WERE ALL ON BARBITURATES?"
Normal woman with 2 kids: "WELL, I'M NOT. ARE YOU ON ANY MOOD ALTERING MEDICATION?"
Feminist: "I DON'T SEE WHY THAT'S RELEVANT
*Zipping close bag with SSRIs, ADDERALL*
The cope is that even more women are on drugs now proves that more women are now aware of how bad Patriarchy is

Lisa Britton on X - "This NPR article focuses on how we have "missing economically stable men” boiling it down to not enough going to college. But why is this happening? They never mention how, for decades, we’ve only given support, encouragement and resources to girls and women. We’ve told boys and men to “step aside.” They make it sound like it’s all the men’s fault without taking a good hard look at what society has down to hurt our boys and men and ensure they don’t succeed.  If we can’t call out the true problem, we’ll never find real solutions."

Meme - "Women with a Time Machine
Tradwife: Hang in there, sister. One day you will have the freedom to show your butt-hole to millions people on the internet
Nun in wimple: Ahhh... No thank you, child
Men with a Time Machine
Fear not, Little Aisha. I've come to rescue you"

Meme - Fantasy woman with chainmail bikini: "Why can't I have non-sexualized, useful armor like the boys?"
*Male barbarian in loincloth showing his muscular body*

Meme - "FIRST WE EMASCULATE ALL OUR MEN.  THEN WE ACCUSE THEM ALL OF BEING RAPISTS. THEN WE TELL THEM WE'RE STRONG AND INDEPENDENT. Then we constantly whine on FB about, "what happened to All the Real Men...?""

TerryGiant on X - "Women outlive men. Dominate education. Control consumer spending. Have entire legal systems built for their protection. And still call themselves oppressed. Name another oppressed class that lives longer, safer, more comfortably than the group allegedly oppressing them. I'll wait"

Meme - "HANDMAID'S TALE OUTFIT
XS S M L XL 2XL 3XL (sold out) *obese Handmaid Doomer Girl*"

Meme - Nova @novasyndrome: "Being m*rdered by a man is the leading cause of death in 18-44 year-old women globally but were concerned about male loneliness epidemic."
Readers added context: "Globally the leading causes of death among women 18-44 are
1. HIV
2. Maternal Mortality
3. Non-communicable disease
4. Tuberculosis (TB)
5. Injuries
Homicide by male intimate partner or family member falls outside of the top 10."

Clint Warren-Davey on X - "The Barbie movie was unintendedly right-wing. All the scenes that apparently show "patriarchy" are just dudes having an awesome time, with both men and women having fun. The matriachy depicted in the film is just complaining and moral hectoring."

Drunk businesswoman, 39, who glassed a pub drinker after he wrongly guessed she was 43 is spared jail after female judge says 'one person's banter may be insulting to others' - "A drunk businesswoman who glassed a pub drinker after he wrongly guessed her age has been spared jail after a female judge said 'one person's banter may be insulting to others'.  Mother-of-one Joanne Dodd, 39, flew into a rage and attacked Carl Cooper after he suggested she was 43... Mr Cooper fled to the toilet in a bid to get away from the heated situation, but when he came out Dodd ran towards him and twice shoved her wine glass in his face.  He was left with a four inch laceration to his face, narrowly missing his eye, and an injury to his thumb.   When quizzed Dodd, who runs a firm which organises children's sleepover parties, said she was suffering from 'low self esteem' at the time and said the banter was 'disobliging' towards her. At Manchester Crown Court, Dodd, who is from Swinton in Salford, faced up to three years in jail under sentencing guidelines after she admitted inflicting grievous bodily harm.  However, she was spared jail and handed a suspended sentence after Judge Elizabeth Nicholls said she was a 'dedicated, hardworking woman' who posed no risk to the public... 'You were seen to be approaching him, throwing your drink over him and then striking him deliberately in the face with the glass that you had. Your conduct was incomprehensible.  'The only explanation that can really be put forward is that you were under the influence of drink, which does you no credit.""
Male privilege strikes again. We all know that patriarchy prizes men and hates women, so men who attack women are let off, while women who attack men get the harshest punishment possible.

New study finds that when people learn that an artist is accused of sexual assault, they are more likely to support censorship of that artists’ work compared to when the artist is accused of other crimes, including murder. : r/psychologyofsex
Proof of rape culture, as no one cares about rape

Democrats call lack of menstrual leave 'economic violence' in push for new federal law
"Violence" is anything a left winger disapproves of. But of course, violence they approve of is speech

Breitbart News on X - "WOKE OVERLOAD: Democrat lawmakers Yassamin Ansari, Adelita Grijalva, and Rashida Tlaib recently held a press conference on how much their periods hurt -- and how it is "economic violence" when employers don't pay women to stay home from work when they are menstruating."
Dr. Naomi Wolf. 8 NYT Bestsellers. DPhil, Poetry. on X - "There goes 40 years of a feminism in which we argued that treating women as impaired because they menstruate, is discriminatory"
Clearly, paying women less because they need to stay home from work when they are menstruating is misogyny

Meme - Feminist News: "More women than men attending med school for the first time ever"
Erica Cudkowicz: "I can't be the only one who finds it strange that a movement claiming to champion equality sees a female dominated field as a victory and a male dominated one as a problem."
Feminism isn't about equality, but benefiting women

Anti-AC as Fiscal Consolidation / Air Conditioning for Pigs

I have no idea why either was blocked by iFunny:

The Fat Electrician: "Every day I become slightly more convinced that Europe's disdain for AC is the result of an EU psyop to make old people die off before they put too much strain on the universal healthcare and pension systems."
Degen CPA: "They really think this is what's happening"
*Air conditioner in North America chilling the continent and blowing hot air to bake Europe*

Gael @Kyyles94: "Va dans une maison de pauvre on verra si y'a la Clim dedans"
宏都拉斯大白蝦 @shrimphead83002: "窮人農戶的院子"

Links - 3rd July 2026 (1 - Housing)

Council tenants keep social housing for life – even if they earn £100k - "A Labour-run local authority has brought back lifetime tenancies for council house residents after a botched Tory crackdown.  Westminster City Council has announced it is bringing back lifetime contracts for all its new and existing tenants, and scrapping fixed-term five-year tenancies.  It means council house residents will have an automatic right to keep their home regardless of how much they go on to earn... After the death of a council house tenant, a property can be passed down to the council by their spouse, child or another member of the family. Paul Swaddle, the Conservative leader of Westminster council’s opposition, warned that the move “risks turning council homes into a permanent asset for the few, rather than a vital safety net for those who need them”... “Westminster has some of the longest housing waiting lists in the country.  “We should be helping those most in need [and] not creating a system where high earners can hold onto council homes for life, regardless of changing circumstances while others wait for years in temporary accommodation.”... Meanwhile, the borough – which Labour won control of for the first time in 2022 – is embarking on a radical shake-up of its housing policy."

An Urban Density-Based Runoff Simulation Framework to Envisage Flood Resilience of Cities
Explainer: Why storm overflows exist and how to minimise spills - "As the UK population grows and the density of housing increases, more and more permeable surfaces are being paved over. This factor, along with changing rainfall patterns and the growing ingress of groundwater into the ageing network, means that ever more water is entering the combined sewer system. This, in turn, is resulting in huge numbers of spills from outfall pipes.   In 2022 alone, there were more than 300,000 recorded spills in England, 83,000 in Wales and 14,000 in Scotland. There is growing public concern that all these discharges are causing excessive ecological damage in the affected rivers and coastal waters."
I was told that there was no downside to allowing housing of any density to be built anywhere, and also that having any regulations about what kind of housing you can build in an area where you can build housing is "commie horseshit" and "a deliberate attempt to keep housing expensive for Boomer NIMBYs and racists". Presumably, government regulation is to blame for higher density housing contributing to flooding risk or sewage overflow

The Folk Economics of Housing - "Why is housing supply so severely restricted in US cities and suburbs? Urban economists offer two primary hypotheses: homeowner self-interest and political fragmentation. Homeowners, who outnumber and have organizational advantages over renters, are said to lobby against development to protect their property values. The fragmentation hypothesis emphasizes that development's negative externalities are borne locally while most of the benefits accrue regionally or nationally, leading localities to block housing. This paper offers another explanation: ordinary people simply do not believe that adding more housing to the regional stock would reduce housing prices. Across three original surveys of urban and suburban residents, only a minority of respondents say that a large, positive, regional housing supply shock would reduce prices or rents. These beliefs are weakly held and unstable (suggesting people have given the issue little thought), but respondents do have stable views about who is to blame for high housing prices: developers and landlords. Large, bipartisan supermajorities support price controls, demand subsidies, and restrictions on putative bad actors, policies which they believe would be more effective than supply liberalization for widespread affordability. We discuss the implications of these findings for efforts to expand the supply of housing."

Radical call to tax Aussie family homes per spare bedroom to solve housing crisis - "A new tax on spare bedrooms has been proposed as a bold solution to fix Australia's crippling housing shortage.  As the federal government struggles with its goal to build 1.2 million new dwellings within the next four years, property researchers have warned that the right homes may not be being built.   New data has revealed more than 60 per cent of Aussie households consist of just one or two people, yet the majority of dwellings are being built for families, with three or more bedrooms."
But if smaller houses are built, left wingers will bitch that they're too small, and that this is why people are not starting families (of course, their anti-natalism has nothing to do with it, and is good, because the earth is overpopulated)

New Zealand’s house prices are finally falling. Could this happen elsewhere? - "According to government-owned property valuer QV, national averages have fallen 13% since 2021, while Auckland has dropped nearly 20% and Wellington 30% - prompting questions about whether New Zealand has finally managed to turn around its housing crisis, and what it could mean for other overheated markets around the world... Multiple factors are driving the downward trend, Rush said. The incredibly low pandemic-era interest rates had increased from roughly 2% to as high as 7-8% in recent years, making borrowing “incredibly difficult”.  High unemployment in New Zealand, and record numbers of New Zealanders moving overseas has also reshaped the landscape, Rush said.  Meanwhile, policies to promote intensification are starting to bear fruit, says Dr Michael Rehm, a senior lecturer in property at the University of Auckland.  “At all levels of government, they want to promote housing supply,” Rehm said, adding that as demand slows and supply increases, the perception that housing is a safe investment has slipped... Like New Zealand, Australia does not have many institutional investors in the market."
This can't have anything to do with the population growth rate falling, and must be due to less greed

Fears as new homes set to be built on edge of Bristol... 'soon we will have no green land at all'
Damn greedy corporations and landlords keeping housing expensive!

The little-known quango choking off Britain’s housebuilding - "Britain is not building homes quickly enough. Housebuilding has fallen to the lowest level in almost a decade, and the number of housing starts dropped by 26pc between July and September compared to the previous three-month period, according to industry analyst Glenigan.  The picture is especially dire in the capital. “It’s disastrous. The number of new starts in London has fallen by over 70pc in the past year. Only 4,170 homes were started during the last financial year,” says Ben Hopkinson, of the Centre for Policy Studies think tank. “A huge reason for that is the Building Safety Regulator.”  The BSR was established in 2022, in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster to raise safety standards across all buildings, setting out rules for their construction and design. The strictest rules apply to residential blocks over 18m or with seven or more storeys. These buildings must go through a new three-stage approval process overseen by the regulator before, during and after construction."

REtipster with Seth Williams | Facebook - "Blue states talk about affordable housing. Red states just build it. This graph says it all: Southern states like South Carolina, Florida, Texas, and Georgia build homes at more than twice the rate of coastal blue states. You can argue policy all day, but at the end of the day, permits tell the truth. You either make it easier to build… or you make it harder to live."

Solving the housing crisis isn’t easy – just ask New Zealand - The Globe and Mail - "New Zealand has been a pioneer in working to alleviate the housing crisis affecting much of the Western world.  Some of their measures have worked, others have been an abject failure. But in introducing some of the braver measures designed to increase supply and bring down prices, they have also provided policy makers with some cautionary tales.  In 2020, the New Zealand Labour Party government of then-prime minister Jacinda Ardern brought in a bill that forced municipalities to “up-zone” residential areas in the country’s major cities. It required population centres to raise building-height limits around mass-rapid-transit stops in urban areas.  It also introduced the Medium Density Residential Standards, which allowed for buildings of up to three storeys and three dwellings on all existing residential parcels of land in the country. This did not go over especially well, in part because the government kept the bill a secret until the last minute. City councils felt blindsided. The bill would eventually pass into law, but not without significant political damage being incurred.  Moral of the story? Don’t be dishonest or sneaky about your intentions. Have the courage of your convictions... KiwiBuild was a highly-touted endeavour of Ms. Ardern’s administration. Launched in 2018, the government set out to build 100,000 affordable homes in 10 years. By the time the program wound down last year, just 2,389 housing units were completed... Why was KiwiBuild such a failure? The authors of the MEI study suggest it was partly because of the government’s overreliance on prefabricated homes. The study found that shipping in a prefab home in some instances was far more expensive than just building on-site."
Of course, left wingers just dismiss this with ad hominem as usual

Medium-Run Impacts of Immigration on the Housing Market: Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Shift-Share Instrument
Jonatan Pallesen on X - "The increasing cost of housing in Denmark since 1999 has been caused 88% by mass immigration! If it wasn't for mass immigration, you would be able to purchase housing and pay rent essentially at 1999 prices. This would have been a complete life-changer for many."
Clearly, the solution to expensive housing is for the mass migration of unskilled minimum wage (or lower) workers

Rent control and the supply of affordable housing - "We generate the first cross-city panel dataset of rent control reforms and estimate their effect on the supply of rental housing overall and across varying levels of affordability. To identify reforms, we use machine learning algorithms to analyze over 76,000 newspaper articles from 7000 news outlets, spanning 27 metropolitan areas and >4000 census places across the US between 2000 and April of 2021. We then manually validate identified articles to ensure accuracy and combine these data with rental unit counts by affordability level, created using Census microdata. To assess the impact of rent control reforms on rental supply, we employ a two-way fixed effects model with place specific time trends and examine the robustness of our results with a staggered treatment design. Our results provide evidence that more restrictive rent control reforms are associated with a 10-percent reduction in the total number of rental units in a city. When stratified by affordability (based on U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development definitions of affordability), these reforms lead to an increase in the availability of units affordable to extremely low-income households by about 52 % (with a lower-bound effect equal to 11 %), offset by a decline in units affordable to higher-income households of about 46 % (with a lower-bound estimate equal to 4 %). These findings highlight the complex trade-offs inherent to rent control policies, illustrating differential impacts across income groups and underscoring the nuanced nature of such interventions."

Meme - realmillennialmortgageguy: "I love this one. For all my haters on affordability and the comparison to the 80's. It's more affordable today than it was then."
"House Payments as a % of Median Income: 1967-2024
1981 - 47.5%
Housing Bubble 1 - 2006 - 38.1%
Housing Bubble 2 - 2024 - 39.4%"

Don’t blame landlords for damp – it’s almost always tenants’ fault - "96pc of owner-occupied homes do not have damp, according to the most recent English Housing Survey 2024 to 2025.  Could this be because owner-occupiers look after their homes and want the best for their building?  If they dry their washing inside (and let’s face it, most of us do) they know they need to crack open the window for a bit of ventilation, or they run a dehumidifier. When they have a shower, they use a squeegee afterwards. When they’re cooking, they use saucepan lids and the extractor fan. When they sleep at night, they have the window open a little, or at the bare minimum open the windows for fresh air when they wake in the morning... Humans create a huge amount of water vapour per day – almost half a litre, just through breathing. When you add in drying clothes indoors (around 2l per load), bathing/showering (up to 1.7l per person) and cooking (up to 3l per day), you’ll soon find yourself in a muggy mess unless you ventilate.  Once it’s in the air, this water vapour will condense into water once it hits a cold surface, so if you’re not heating your property adequately either, you get a double-whammy of a problem... The Germans have a system called Stoßlüften, which roughly translates to “shock ventilation”. It’s also referred to as “house-burping”, and it’s very simple: you briefly open windows and doors for a few minutes every day to replace the stale, humid indoor air with fresh, cold air.  By doing this, you’re improving the property’s airflow and wicking away excess moisture, which prevents mould without losing structural heat."
Time to blame landlords but not doing maintenance and ban airing houses to combat climate change

Apparently discrimination against poor people is now legal thanks mamdani : r/circlejerknyc - "I would never put section 8 in my apartments. I know about 15 people that did and the apartments went from nice to roach infested, holes in the walls, broken kitchens and bathrooms and one apartment caught on fire because the lady was putting her clothes in the oven to dry the clothes. Can’t make this shit up. Section 8 is probably the worst of the worst. Not one person had a good experience. These tenants don’t care about anything. They think the city will fix everything for them. And a lot of hoarding situations going on too. Not sure why these people hoard everything. It’s crazy."
Damn greedy landlords!

New York Could Lose Seats in Congress Because It Won’t Build Housing - "The other states that are projected to lose multiple congressional seats and electoral votes are California and Illinois, according to the research. All three states consistently support Democrats at the statewide level and in presidential elections.  On the other hand, two states are projected to gain multiple seats and electoral votes: Florida, and Texas. Both are set to add four seats, and both consistently support Republicans at the statewide level and for president...   One reason why blue states are losing ground: The red states build far more housing than they do.  From 2021 to 2024, Florida and Texas issued permits for over 1.7 million new homes. California, Illinois, and New York issued fewer than 700,000 total, despite having a combined population over 15 million people larger than Florida and Texas’s total... New York’s housing shortage is driving people out of the state, to places with cheaper options, according to research from the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.  Even when moving to a low-tax state like Florida, middle-income people save significantly more on their rent or mortgage than they do from lower taxes, FPI’s research found... As the legislature stalls, Governor Kathy Hochul is taking on a project that could boost housing statewide: relaxing New York’s state’s environmental review law. As it stands, the law can require developers to spend years seeking approval for even minor new projects, and leaves them open to lawsuits by NIMBY communities seeking to derail new housing altogether.  Hochul’s proposed change would allow small and medium-sized developments to skip the state environmental review process. This wouldn’t turn building into a free-for-all — developers would still have to follow all relevant environmental regulations and protections in New York law."

Why are There so Many Unfinished Buildings in Peru? - "Likely one of the first things you’ll notice upon landing in Peru, besides the reduced oxygen in the air, is the prevalence of unfinished homes everywhere.  You think: these cities have around for centuries, is it possible that they are still expanding?  A quick google search will reveal that it has looked unfinished for decades.  With exception of the wealthy neighborhoods in Lima, this problem is widespread throughout Peru.  But why?... In 1990, a new president, Fujimori, took office.  Among his top concerns was stabilizing the economy.  He enacted a series of neoliberal policies that he called Fujishock.  While extreme, many of the policies were necessary to fix the devastated economy.  One of his policies was aimed at the unfinished buildings.  Fujimori had noticed all of the unfinished homes and that the homeowners just did not have the money to complete them.  To help the homeowners, a new policy did away with property taxes while homes were being constructed.  This was done to encourage construction, which would provide jobs for workers and finished homes for residents.    While this might have worked in a few cases, the abundance of half-finished homes clearly demonstrates it wasn’t really successful.  The law was ripe for abuse.  Peruvians could finish their homes just enough to be comfortable to live in but not all the way, so they can avoid taxes. Still to this day, countless of these homes exist with inhabitants in the lower floors but incomplete upper floors.  While they may look abandoned, if you go inside, you’ll see the first floor is completely furnished and decorated.  Often the upper floor is used for a water tank, laundry, or just an outdoor patio – despite all the rebar hanging around or half walls."

Hunter📈🌈📊 on X - "Fun fact: when large investors, like Blackstone, enter the housing market in the suburbs, rent prices in the area decline. Levels of class and racial segregation also fall."
Diversifying the Suburbs: Rental Supply and Spatial Inequality

Alex Z on X - "There is a similar study from the Netherlands showing that banning rental homes just increases the income of the neighborhood and doesn't decrease prices."
Francke, Hans, Korevaar and van Bekkum - Buy-to-Live vs. Buy-to-Let: The Impact of Real Estate Investors on Housing Costs and Neighborhoods - "How does homeownership affect local housing markets and neighborhood composition? Exploiting the Netherlands' 2022 buy-to-let ban, which prevents investors from buying homes to rent out, we find the policy significantly reduces investor purchases and increases owner-occupancy. Despite removing investor demand, the ban does not negatively impact prices or transaction volumes as neighborhoods become more desirable to owner-occupiers. This desirability emerges through residential sorting: New homeowners have higher incomes, are more often Dutch-born, move shorter distances, and stay longer than the renters whom they replace. Thus, promoting homeownership may improve neighborhood quality but reduce mobility and housing opportunities for low-income renters."
What happened when the Netherlands banned landlords - "Properties that were part of the ban saw minimal impact on housing prices, with only a slight increase of 0.1%.     In Rotterdam neighborhoods where the ban was implemented, there was a significant decrease in the availability of rental properties, resulting in a 4% increase in rents.     Unfortunately, this rent rise unintentionally led to the displacement of lower-income individuals from these neighborhoods while attracting higher-income individuals to move in."

Meme - sam @sam_d_1995: "my most NIMBY take is that I don't like this building. but the real reason this happened is *because of anti-housing laws*. NYC has a floor area ratio cap rather than a height limit. as a result, developers are incentivized to build pencil-thin towers rather than maximize housing"
Micah Springut @mspringut: "It's not that they did this "to demoralize us." It's that they (the city's leaders and planners) have no taste and don't give a shit."

Why Are 50,000 New York City Apartments Vacant? - "The city now has nearly 50,000 empty units, absent from the market either because their operating costs exceed legal rents or because they require considerable renovations... In a city where 100 percent of people owned their homes, the housing stock would be in pretty good shape. Owners have an incentive to keep their properties in good order both because they live in them and because they want to increase the value of their assets. But anyone who can’t or doesn’t want to buy would find that arrangement inconvenient. Such people—students or recent arrivals, for example—would usually prefer to rent.  Where there’s a renter, there’s a landlord who stands to profit—though that profit is by no means guaranteed. To profit, the landlord must make sound decisions as to maintenance, capital investment, and marketing. These costs must be paid; only after they’re met can the owner potentially make a profit. The legal environment also has to permit some return on investment.  But in New York City, that’s not always how it works...   One-bedroom units in the building average $3,500— except two of them, subject to the city’s rent-stabilization laws, which hold rents below $900 per month.  As a result, both units have been allowed to fall into disrepair, because the cost of restoring them to habitability is greater than what they’d generate in rent. “We’re talking a minimum of $100,000 for [the studio we first visited], which requires a complete remodeling,” Michael Johnson, a vice president at the New York Apartment Association, explained.   The cost: $10,000 for an architect to review the plans and obtain a permit; $50,000 for kitchen and bathroom materials and labor; $20,000 for the floors and ceilings; $6,000 for appliances; $25,000 in electricians’ fees; and a miscellany of other significant fees. These figures add up to the typical $100,000–$200,000 costs of renovating a studio apartment like the one we visited. It’s the same story upstairs in the second unit.  Then there are the operating costs associated with each individual unit. As of 2023, these amount to $1,028 for a small building in Manhattan, according to the Rent Guidelines Board. Fuel, hot water, and labor costs go up with each additional unit that’s rented and must be taken into consideration. Fixed costs, like insurance, can be shifted from rent-stabilized to market-rate units, but that drives up everyone else’s rents.   In order to afford to renovate the two units at the building on East 6th Street, the owner could request a rent increase from New York’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal. But the maximum rent increase allowed would be $347, bringing rents to $955 and $1,211, respectively. Any bank could see that the $100,000 investment would never be paid back.   So, the units stay empty. “The owner can’t really figure out what to do with them,” Johnson said. “It’s just wasted space.”  That story is, unfortunately, not an isolated one... Much of the predicament at the East 6th Street building and the apartments on Valentine Avenue can be traced back to one piece of legislation: the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA). Passed by a Democratic majority in the state legislature, HSTPA eliminated landlords’ abilities to raise rents after units were vacated, or when they exceeded $2,775 per month. In doing so, it also eliminated their ability to make improvements profitably and reset the stabilized rent.  “New York is unique in its rent-control system,” Kenny Burgos, who heads the New York Apartment Association, said. “Even Los Angeles [gives landlords] an ability to reset rents after [apartments] become vacant.”...  eliminate rent stabilization entirely. This would let rents rise to meet demand while also making renovations profitable again. New Yorkers whose incomes are below a certain level could get a housing voucher, thereby restoring the investment required to maintain, construct, and operate buildings. New Yorkers would gain a sustainable solution to rent burdens while also keeping the existing housing stock in good shape.  Until one of these solutions is adopted, the problem of “ghost apartments” will only get worse—regulated rent increases will continue to undershoot inflation and renovation costs will continue to increase"
Clearly, the solution is for the government to seize them

Meme - Sar Haribhakti @sarthakgh: "Landlords and private equity firms mysteriously decide to be less greedy in the cities where developers can build more homes easily"
Peter Mallouk @PeterMallouk: "Rents dropping across the country..."
"Top 15 Cities - Biggest Rent Cuts since 2022"