Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈
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elikahn.bsky.social
Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈
@elikahn.bsky.social
Urban/environmental policy guy, YIMBY, sci-fi/fantasy writer, liberal, atheist. Californian in the DC area. All posts represent my views, not those of my employer.

where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?
got a spam text that just said “Tomorrow morning at ten o’clock?” and even if it weren’t from an unknown number, the way I knew it wasn’t someone I know because ten o’clock on a Sunday morning is the middle of the night for me, lol

you too can be safe from spam by cultivating insane habits!
January 4, 2026 at 2:46 AM
we are where we are because people in power chose, time and again, to give Republicans’ feelings veto power over the justice system. we will be back here time and again until people in power make a deliberate choice to restore the independent judiciary by ensuring Republicans aren’t above the law.
this is me saying this: the bare minimum acceptable response from Dems in 2026 will involve rounding up and punishing every single human in the chain of command who performed these actions to the fullest extent to which it is possible and it frustrates me that we DON'T have effective means of demand
January 3, 2026 at 7:23 AM
Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈
this blood isn’t for oil. it’s just for nothing. nothing but toxic masculinity and fragile egos destroying lives for their gratification. we will hold them accountable.
January 3, 2026 at 6:51 AM
Most of what went well for me in 2025 was personal life stuff I don’t want to post about, but one exception was that my work at my last job tracking state YIMBY legislation helped create what imho is the best roundup of such legislation out there:
Framing Futures: Pro-Housing Legislation Goes Vertical in 2025
With no relief from high home prices and rents, more and more state legislators are interested in pursuing housing reform. As a result, state legislatures set new records for the number and strength o...
www.mercatus.org
January 2, 2026 at 10:03 PM
happy early new year from the good mirror on the landing of my friend’s apartment building
January 1, 2026 at 1:47 AM
Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈
[slaps roof of liberal institutions] this bad boy can assimilate everyone and everything, provide shared prosperity, and the only culture it can't tolerate is intolerance

need to end decades of civil strife? generate economic growth? have you tried LIBERALISM? order now, supplies are unlimited
December 31, 2025 at 11:52 PM
Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈
Hot take: the city is for everyone
December 31, 2025 at 8:28 PM
the new Avatar movie is good partly because it really ties together what Cameron wants to say about family (his main interest besides realistic effects) and what he wants to say about humans’ relationship to nature
December 31, 2025 at 8:00 PM
Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈
you can counter this with “it does, actually, your dreams of a glorious technological future are still about showing dominance over the natural world,” but that’s only if we believe that technology negates nature, which it does not when it’s properly designed. we are part of& an expression of nature
December 29, 2025 at 8:15 PM
The Virgin Chad
The most rigorous studies of loneliness have largely been in Europe and America. But the loneliest place of all is Madagascar. Our correspondent went there to find out why econ.st/4anRohC
December 29, 2025 at 12:04 AM
yes, and that was bad. it was bad that that happened.

i don’t think “therefore there should be congressional hearings about anything where the evidence that it causes suicides is equal to or greater than for heavy metal” is a very compelling conclusion tbh!
We had congressional hearings when parents just suspected heavy metal was leading some kids to suicide.
i don’t see how any of the benefits of chatgpt and other consumer-facing LLMs can possibly outweigh their incredible ability to induce suicides
December 29, 2025 at 12:00 AM
The thing about “Avatar has had no impact on broader culture” is that sometimes I wonder if people saying that really just mean “i never see any gifs from it”
December 26, 2025 at 6:34 PM
Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈
the first one is far worse because a coward will surrender but a true believer will not
What’s worse, philosophically: being a sincere and devoted bigot, or being someone perfectly willing to go all-in on bigotry because it works politically?
December 25, 2025 at 7:13 PM
Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈
"We have a different and particularly bad electoral system" is the simple reason behind so many problems that people want to attribute to the character or culture of Americans.
the only three countries in Europe with a higher rate of tertiary education are Ireland, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom.
From an extranational perspective, America giving rise to Trump was seen as absolutely, disappointingly inevitable. An uneducated, insular society will allow all sorts of aberrant people to lead them. And so long as America remains an idiot nation, it will just keep happening with different idiots.
December 24, 2025 at 8:14 PM
Roses are red
Baths are ablutional
The NORAD Santa tracker
Is unconstitutional
December 24, 2025 at 7:40 PM
Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈
The internet is revolutionary to free speech because it empowers individuals and citizens to route around censorship in all its forms—even a captured “free” press.

This is why private platform governance; law on internet access or online content, and anonymity online will always matter.
December 23, 2025 at 9:45 PM
It seems like the instructor in question doesn’t want to talk publicly about this (she isn’t even named, let alone asked for comment, here) but if the left wing media worked like the right wing media she’d have a sinecure as a news commentator ready to go, and it would be a better world if she did.
December 23, 2025 at 3:58 AM
I don’t think the anti-woke takes market would survive if liberals collectively declined to hate-read/hate-watch.

if CBS is going to warp news coverage to favor Trump, it needs to hurt CBS’s business. that depends on all of us maintaining discipline and not watching it.
December 22, 2025 at 8:22 PM
hottest new game in town: Mr. Beast Video, Or Plotline From a Magic Realist Novel?
In Mr Beast’s new video, a woman is alone for two weeks on a platform in the sky. and each day, a balloon is released at an inopportune moment for her. And if she fails to shoot the balloon with an arrow, they take a small portion of the platform that is her home
December 22, 2025 at 8:18 AM
Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈
there's no such thing as a "heritage american" and brain-damaged constitutional law professors and members of the vox cinematic universe treating it with respect is bad, and they should be berated

borders are fake, and america is what it is in the best sense due to periodically recognizing that
December 21, 2025 at 6:17 PM
what I’d like to see is more people developing a hair-trigger extremely angry reaction to anything that even vaguely resembles “real Americans” rhetoric or even slightly implies that the opinions of college-educated urbanites should be discounted because we’re college-educated urbanites
December 21, 2025 at 9:01 PM
Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈
Ask any gay person what "theater kid," when used as an insult, means. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/u...
Move Aside, Snowflake: ‘Theater Kid’ Is the New Go-To Political Insult
www.nytimes.com
December 21, 2025 at 7:29 PM
Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈
incredibly crowded field, some truly elite options, but I think this remains this era's most insulting thing we were asked to believe was real
So did Havana Syndrome get sorted out?
December 19, 2025 at 3:23 PM
Reposted by Eli Kahn 🏳️‍🌈
Impersonal bureaucratic systems are liberation from the tyranny of the village and the tribe. Long live modernity
"village" mentality is what sustains conservatism. not being able to do anything without the Grandma Gestapo reporting your every move. depending on the easily withdrawn kindness of others instead of impersonal but reliable services. and of course obeying aristocratic landowners
Its gonna be hard to have a family in a single family house when you have to bring your prospective girlfriends to your parents' house instead of your own place.
December 20, 2025 at 6:12 PM
teaching people to draw should really be a part of every school curriculum

I know people say that about everything and it doesn’t count for much if you’re not willing to say what you’d *stop* teaching to make room for it, but there’s literally nothing I wish more that I’d been taught as a kid
December 19, 2025 at 11:04 PM