UPDATED at 5:25 pm to add another link.

I’m trying a new thing. Well, it’s really an old thing, but it’s new for me. About six billion years ago, people used blogs to share links they thought were cool. Then social media killed blogs and people started sharing links on Twitter. Now, social media is unbearable so I’m sharing them here.

A few months ago, I wrote about the Democratic Party’s dismal efforts to connect with young people. As part of that, I mentioned a $20 million campaign to reach young men in online spaces, codenamed “Speaking with American Men.” Well, I feel validated in my prediction that this effort would be about as useful as simply setting that money on fire because the people running this thing are arguing in the pages of the New York times that Democrats should emulate Charlie Kirk:

The takeaways from Mr. Kirk’s playbook aren’t complicated. In fact, that’s the problem. They’re the fundamentals of modern politics. And they can be done without alienating young women. Yet many Democrats, election after election, skip them. Until that changes, they will continue to lose ground.

Ah, but of course! Charlie Kirk’s contributions to modern politics were undeniable: Busing people to the Capitol for January 6! Being openly racist! Advocating violence to keep trans women out of sports! These are all “the fundamentals of modern politics.” Fuck off.

By the way, this ugly story about a Texas A&M faculty member who was fired after video secretly recorded by a conservative student went viral is another piece of Kirk’s legacy:

[Kevin McClure, a professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington who specializes in higher education leadership issues] pointed to a growing trend of students recording professors and posting clips online to try to get them fired, saying it will be “incredibly hard for us to build a learning environment built on trust if as faculty and staff, we’re constantly worried about whether or not we’re being recorded by someone.”

Turning Point USA’s so-called “Professor Watchlist” was created to encourage precisely this kind of surveillance and harassment of professors. Kirk used tactics that were, by any objective measure, the exact opposite of open debate and good-faith engagement — and that will be his legacy, more than anything else.

Bad Arguments Against Free Buses (From June, still germane):

The largest bus system in the country, which by some estimates is larger than every urban bus system in the country combined, is almost entirely fare-free. It’s the school bus system. A modest fare — say, 50 cents a day — could raise billions in revenue. And yet, when I have pressed people who talk about the impracticality of fare-free busing, I have yet to find a single one who is willing to charge even a cent for school bus fares.

Israel killed thirty one journalists and media staffers in a single attack on Yemen last week:

Israel struck a newspaper complex in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, which housed three Houthi-connected media outlets on 10 September. At the time, members of the Yemeni army’s press arm were finishing the weekly print edition, according to the publication’s editor-in-chief, which increased the number of journalists present during the strike.

At least 35 people were killed in the attack, including one child who accompanied a journalist to the office, and 131 were wounded, according to the Houthi ministry of health. All of the journalists worked for either the Houthi-affiliated 26 September newspaper or Yemen newspaper.