Matthew Haugen
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mjhaugen.bsky.social
Matthew Haugen
@mjhaugen.bsky.social
4.7K followers 2.9K following 1.2K posts
Research and Editorial Manager @cplusc.bsky.social (opinions expressed are my own) • sometimes writing at www.terrain.news • based in Tuscaloosa, AL
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mjhaugen.bsky.social
Dan Campbell
Homer Simpson wearing tiny reading glasses while writing on a pad of paper
November 9, 2025 at 10:52 PM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
Al Pacino in THE INSIDER
September 4, 2025 at 12:57 AM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
Let’s go!!! A must-read! 🫡 @triofrancos.bsky.social
Cover of book called “Extraction: the Frontiers of Green Capitalism” by Thea Riofrancos including an overhead image of a lithium brine extraction site. Quote by Naomi Klein: “Dazzling in the bold questions it asks. An immense contribution.”
August 7, 2025 at 1:05 AM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
This is excellent defector.com/why-do-fasci...
Of course, American alligators—the actual living animals, rather than the snapping beasts of the White American imagination—are not on anyone’s side, particularly. They would much prefer cracking open a turtle or taking a bird than a person. They rarely attack humans at all, and not for want of opportunities. To the extent that they will have anything to do with their namesake camp, it will likely be dying on the road that leads to it, hit by an ICE van carrying a new group of prisoners. But the real animal is subsumed by the fantasy, in the way that the real human lives under threat—every man, woman and child under the gun of a government carried away with its own gleeful cruelty—become nameless statistics or worse, fodder for photo-ops. They really all might as well be figures on a postcard or a matchbox, the prospect of their pain digested into merchandise. What we are left with is something characteristically Trumpian: memetic alligators eating memetic undesirables, leading to a fascist policy where real humans will be placed into a concentration camp in sight of real alligators. All of this is in the service of an ugly dream, spoken through gnashing and lipless teeth, grins as fixed as any you’ll find out in the swamp, and significantly more malicious.
July 11, 2025 at 4:16 PM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
this was tough
my top 10 movies since 2000: Ocean's Eleven, Moonlight, Miami Vice, Children of Men, Before Sunset, Collateral, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, Interstellar, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
June 24, 2025 at 7:25 PM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
text message conversation: sender: what's going on with the stock market replier: lmao replier: don't worry about it babe sender: okay ❤️ yay ❤️
June 6, 2025 at 7:44 PM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
May 25, 2025 at 1:30 AM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
movie poster for Miami Vice (2006) with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx wearing sunglasses movie poster for Blackhat (2015) with Chris Hemsworth
May 19, 2025 at 1:29 AM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
This is patently untrue and a ridiculous thing to say. What's embarrassing is the difference in media and elite reaction. Imagine President AOC saying you must ditch your F-150 for a walkable community. adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-...
The embarrassment for advocates of the Green New Deal and Bidenomics is that in pursuit of their visions of the future, Trump’s national economic strategists are far bolder in what they demand of the American public than their opponents in the Democratic party ever were. Trump’s trade policy is, in fact, what Green New Deal advocates never dared to be: A direct challenge to prevailing norms of American consumerism in the name of a better future.
May 7, 2025 at 3:33 PM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
Damn
The current overclass wishes to destroy this world of thinking because they’re feckless and venal and almost inconceivably greedy, a battalion of the oiliest smash-and-grab conmen and bigots and sociopathic ghouls you could ever imagine, but not because they’re afraid of anything that might be fomented there. They hate us, and the whole of the world we inhabit, but that’s different from saying they regard us as, say, a threat. Our best ambitions, to their way of thinking, are provincial and weird and contemptibly nonremunerative, so why would they? We’re more an inconvenience—a minor drag on the fantasy of frictionless profit and dominion—and thus just another dole-fattened workforce to be brought to heel. Maybe. But then I think of the legions of young people who come through campus semester after semester. I think of their devotion, their drive. With fixed concentration, I try to think especially closely of the tenacity—the bare and indestructible hunger to learn—that got them here and, in turn, keeps them here. It’s useful. It reminds me that, however contused by the contemporary moment, this place we share remains a kind of living astonishment, maybe not itself indestructible but built up around human impulses and aspirations whose tensile strength you would be very, very foolish to underestimate. In this way, I start to think differently as well about that grasping and felonious overclass, the one that looks at us and sees only something small, helpless, as good as servile. I don’t know what gets you out of bed in the morning. The hope that they might one day learn to spell out the gravity of their error, in letters of blood and fire, works pretty well for me.
April 28, 2025 at 2:47 AM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
A reminder of what corporations do to food without significant regulations and oversight, the likes of which Trump and Musk are currently dismantling www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/o...
Many experts now believe food poisoning outbreaks will spread farther and last longer. If too many precautions are removed, then there’s a real chance that we’ll rediscover how dangerous a less regulated food system can be. It takes only a brief look back at the 19th century to realize what that means. Not only did Wiley and his chemists find widespread fraud in the food supply, their work also helped reveal a routine use of poisons. Red lead was used to make Cheddar cheese more orange; arsenic was used to color candy and cake decorations green; the toxic embalming agent formaldehyde was used to preserve milk. So many children were sickened or killed by formaldehyde that by the 1890s, newspapers regularly reported on “embalmed milk scandals.” All of this food adulteration was legal, of course.
April 21, 2025 at 6:31 PM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
very important insight
The stock market would change very differently if suddenly, a week from now, all the major stock traders were scientists. What they would price in, especially around things like climate change, would be very, very different from the current set of participants. So it's important. The way people talk about markets is that there is an objective measure. That they just take information from everywhere and process them. But really, it's a specific set of people. As I say in that piece, you would have to have a specific mindset and be a specific person in the world to believe that Donald Trump would be better for the stock market than Joe Biden. To believe not only that Donald Trump would be good for the stock market, that he'd be so much better than having four years of Kamala Harris or whatever, that you can track the odds of Trump winning with the stock market going up when Trump's odds of winning were going up.
April 20, 2025 at 6:51 PM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
🤔
Screenshot of Elon Musk replying to a tweet about the Amtrak RFQ process for the Texas high-speed rail project with the thinking emoji U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy Announces Agreement to Save Taxpayers Over $60 Million by Ending Grant for Texas High-Speed Rail Project Monday, April 14, 2025 ‘My department will continue to look for every opportunity to save federal dollars and prioritize efficiencies’ WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy today announced an agreement between the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and Amtrak to terminate the $63.9 million grant awarded to Amtrak under the Corridor Identification and Development (CID) Program for the Amtrak Texas High-Speed Rail Corridor previously known as the Texas Central Railway project. This project was originally announced as a purely private venture, but as the cost estimates dramatically ballooned, the Texas Central Railway proposal became dependent on Amtrak and federal dollars for development work. The project capital cost is now believed to be over $40 billion – making construction unrealistic and a risky venture for the taxpayer.
April 14, 2025 at 9:40 PM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
This is quite disturbing www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...
Isaac Chotiner: What is your broader concern with empathy right now? Albert Mohler: I think the broader concern is that it’s an artificial virtue, and I want to lean into authentic virtues. And I think it is used politically in ways that are very destructive and manipulative. Isaac Chotiner: So what’s an example? Albert Mohler: Well, on the immigration issue, the open embrace of empathy in that platform is on the part of people who basically are using empathy as an argument against having any meaningful citizenship, nationality, national borders, etc. Here’s the thing—I’ve never said it this clearly before, but feel like I need to say it now. Empathy means never having to say no. Because the whole impulse of empathy is feeling with people as they feel. It’s a therapeutic category rather than a moral category. I’m a Christian. I believe in moral categories. I believe in the importance of sympathy and even more in the responsibility of compassion. But that takes action and it’s based in truth. It’s not based on validating anyone’s self-perceived situation, nor identifying with their own read of the situation as valid.
April 2, 2025 at 5:38 PM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
Best part
“A Bit” with the bitcoin symbol as the B
March 22, 2025 at 8:10 PM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
Why is this piece of shit always talking about AI? You run the Environmental Protection Agency, not a Silicon Valley scam startup. archive.ph/okMPY
The EPA’s commitment to permit reform cannot be overstated. By cutting through red tape and resolving the backlog of state and tribal implementation plans, we are creating an environment where businesses can thrive and infrastructure can be built. This is how America will become the artificial-intelligence capital of the world—by removing barriers to ingenuity and investment and advancing cooperative federalism. Our work to end Good Neighbor Plan emission requirements and work in partnership with the 19 states whose air-quality plans were rejected by the previous administration recognizes that states and communities know best how to address their environmental challenges. Today marks the death of the Green New Scam. The EPA recognizes that environmental protection and economic prosperity aren’t mutually exclusive goals. Under President Trump’s leadership, we are recommitting to the core American values of innovation, growth, exceptionalism and opportunity. Critics may claim that these changes signal a retreat from environmental protection. Nothing could be further from the truth. Under the Trump administration, the EPA’s core mission remains safeguarding human health and the environment. The difference lies in how we achieve these goals—through partnership rather than prescriptive bureaucracy, through collaboration rather than regulation.
March 13, 2025 at 12:01 AM
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March 12, 2025 at 4:19 AM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
screen cap from THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001) of Aragorn looking at Frodo with the text "You have my sword"
March 3, 2025 at 5:47 PM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
Bowie as Tesla in THE PRESTIGE
Screencap of David Bowie (white man with brown hair and a mustache wearing a suit) as Nikola Tesla in THE PRESTIGE
February 26, 2025 at 10:04 PM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
Incredible artwork on this
a drawing of Elon Musk smiling with his hands on the shoulders of two boys burning tiny people with magnifying glasses and also smiling
February 25, 2025 at 2:45 AM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
Outstanding piece from @bentarnoff.com www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...
February 8, 2025 at 2:26 AM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
It's so wild that data centers already account for more than 25% of Virginia's electricity consumption
February 2, 2025 at 6:25 PM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
January 29, 2025 at 5:57 AM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
Funny that OpenAI compares building tons of data centers for AI infrastructure to mass car production. A good comparison, but not for the reasons they think. cdn.openai.com/global-affai...
January 29, 2025 at 4:21 AM
mjhaugen.bsky.social
Butlerian Jihad
January 21, 2025 at 8:44 PM