Tom Scocca
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tomscocca.bsky.social
Tom Scocca
@tomscocca.bsky.social
66K followers 210 following 7.3K posts
Editor of Indignity.net. This Bluesky is about the Machines.
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tomscocca.bsky.social
People need to stop retconning literally the worst era in American popular music history into something it wasn't, just because there were also some amazing records that like 250 people happened to be hunting down and listening to
Screenshot of URL bar saying "wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_singles_of_1989" with list below No. Title Artist(s) 1 "Look Away" Chicago 2 "My Prerogative" Bobby Brown 3 "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" Poison 4 "Straight Up" Paula Abdul 5 "Miss You Much" Janet Jackson 6 "Cold Hearted" Paula Abdul 7 "Wind Beneath My Wings" Bette Midler 8 "Girl You Know It's True" Milli Vanilli 9 "Baby, I Love Your Way/Freebird Medley" Will to Power 10 "Giving You the Best That I Got" Anita Baker 11 "Right Here Waiting" Richard Marx 12 "Waiting For a Star to Fall" Boy Meets Girl 13 "Lost in Your Eyes" Debbie Gibson 14 "Don't Wanna Lose You" Gloria Estefan 15 "Heaven" Warrant 16 "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You" Milli Vanilli 17 "The Look" Roxette 18 "She Drives Me Crazy" Fine Young Cannibals 19 "On Our Own" Bobby Brown 20 "Two Hearts" Phil Collins
October 29, 2025 at 4:16 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
How did this become a thing at all, let alone the default?
Screenshot of Amazon button reading "Tomorrow / 4 AM - 8 AM"
October 23, 2025 at 1:45 AM
tomscocca.bsky.social
OK the leak came from someone even worse, got it
Screenshot of text: Giunta claimed the release of the chat is part of “a highly-coordinated year-long character assassination led by Gavin Wax and the New York City Young Republican Club” — an allusion to a once obscured internecine war that has now spilled into the open.
October 14, 2025 at 6:27 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
Oh boy
Screenshot of text reading "The 2,900 pages of chats"
October 14, 2025 at 5:41 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
"Students who...oppose Israel’s war in Gaza...rarely have to worry that their campus speakers will be disrupted by protesters or generate security concerns"
Screenshot of text: Students who object to policies of the Trump administration or oppose Israel’s war in Gaza or who advocate abortion rights rarely have to worry that their campus speakers will be disrupted by protesters or generate security concerns related to the backlash of a student mob. Security concerns, real or fabricated, arise when a
October 13, 2025 at 4:54 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
Name of the game since at least 2019 hmmdaily.com/2019/04/25/d...
Screenshot of text: doctor thumping a nerve, to have those expectations met so exactly. The Bari Weiss story does not depend on content; it is a form that has existed from the beginning and never needs to change. Bari Weiss has friends, and she has enemies, and to her friends the existence of her enemies is proof that the world is vicious and unreasonable. Every controversy is the same, and all of them are unfair. This liberates her supporters from ever having to talk about anything the intellectual provocateur actually says or writes. Here is a roundup of the case for Weiss, as
October 12, 2025 at 7:19 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
Still dying at Flanagan accidentally writing one true sentence in her blog through her own illiteracy
Screenshot of text: Not now but soon enough, there will be major stories about The Free Press being the creation of three female founders who constructed a hugely successful digital business out of whole cloth.
October 12, 2025 at 7:12 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
Please nobody tell professional writer praising professional journalists Caitlin Flanagan what "out of whole cloth" means
Screenshot of text: Not now but soon enough, there will be major stories about The Free Press being the creation of three female founders who constructed a hugely successful digital business out of whole cloth.
October 12, 2025 at 7:09 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
Deep sourcing, fact-checking, publishing chain letters
Screenshot of text: build a culture of ideas. This is exactly what she’s done at The Free Press, which covers a variety of stories, the most popular of which—[Highlighting begins] Uri Berliner’s explanation of NPR’s decline, for example [Highlighting ends]—are those that hold powerful institutions to account.
October 12, 2025 at 6:59 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
Describe the opposite of The Free Press in a sentence
Screenshot of text: It’s a business story. [Highlighting begins] Everyone in journalism has known for years that there’s been a huge opportunity for a publication that employs the traditional methods of U.S. journalism—reporting, deep sourcing, fact-checking, fearlessness—to subjects that either don’t get covered enough or get covered only from a certain perspective. [Highlighting ends] If creating such an enterprise seems simple
October 12, 2025 at 6:55 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
Thanks Google for sending more robots to read through my email to produce this very useful and informative new feature
Screenshot from Gmail of a "Happening soon" box with a tiny photo of a bottle of orange juice and the message "39 items from Fresh Direct / Expected tomorrow," directly above an email line with the sender "FreshDirect" and the subject line beginning "Your order for Sunday,"
October 11, 2025 at 7:07 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
The endless circular inside deals where the AI and chips industries keep paying each other the same money may look bad, but let's listen to the informed perspective Washington D.C. brings to the question www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
Screenshot of text: In Washington, some have adopted a laissez-faire attitude to all the activity in a sector viewed as vital to competing with geopolitical rival China. “It’s up to them,” White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks told Bloomberg on Monday. “We want American companies to be successful.” The Trump administration, for its part, is also connected to the sprawling web of AI investments through its stake in Intel Corp., not to mention its plans to take a cut of Nvidia and AMD’s chip sales to China.
October 8, 2025 at 12:24 AM
tomscocca.bsky.social
Nothing really to say that wasn't there to be said six years ago hmmdaily.com/2019/04/25/d...
Screenshot of text: The insistent emptiness of it all, after a while, began to seem like the true point of the profile, and of Bari Weiss. Weiss is a success because she has dissolved the boundaries between online and offline, to apply the pure transactional logic of social media to meatspace. She doesn’t convince people, she gets them to give her likes—likes from verified people, within the network of the verified. And here I am, so disgusted by it all that I’m quote-tweeting her.
October 6, 2025 at 1:19 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
"In the absence of a lucid and engaged president, there's a free-for-all as to who gets to use those powers in his name" www.indignity.net/indignity-mo...
Screenshot of text: And next to that, just above the fold on the right hand side of the page, is a piece about Russell Vought of Project 2025, “Ticking Boxes on His Checklist To Make Trump All-Powerful,” a long look at how Vought, the White House budget director, has implemented a scheme to vest unprecedented power, including the power to rewrite spending on the fly, in the unitary executive. Early on, this story also contains the revelation that while the power may be unitary, the executive is not. Again, in the absence of a lucid and engaged president, there's a free-for-all as to who gets to use those powers in his name. And so the story begins with the revelation that Vought “was preparing the Trump administration's 2026 budget proposal this spring when his staff got some surprising news. Elon Musk's cost-cutting team was unilaterally axing items that Mr. Vought had intended to keep. Mr. Vought, in numbers wonk, who rarely raises his voice, could barely contain his frustration, telling colleagues that he felt sidelined and undermined by the haphazard chaos of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency. According to six people with knowledge of his comments, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.”
October 3, 2025 at 4:34 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
Here let me poach an egg real quick
Photo of a Moog Modular 55 synthesizer: a wood-trimmed piano keyboard below a two-part console replete with dozens of knobs and even more jacks
October 1, 2025 at 4:56 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
Sup Brett Kavanaugh
Screenshot of text: But like in Lyons, plaintiffs have no good basis to believe that law enforcement will unlawfully stop them in the future based on the prohibited factors—and certainly no good basis for believing that any stop of the plaintiffs is imminent. Therefore, they lack Article III standing: “Absent a sufficient likelihood” that the plaintiffs “will again be wronged in a similar way,” they are “no more entitled to an injunction than any other citizen of Los Angeles; and a federal court may not entertain a claim by any or all citizens who no more than assert that certain practices of law enforcement officers are unconstitutional.”
September 30, 2025 at 9:31 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
The medium is the message
An online ad showing a brownish-black charred-looking fruit or nut ripped open to reveal lumpy brown insides glistening like a fetus. The text below says "Featured Ad / Holistic MD Journal / Parasitologist: One Teaspoon Kills All Parasites In Your Body."
September 30, 2025 at 2:01 AM
tomscocca.bsky.social
It's not just that he's calling for war against Portland, Oregon, it's that the call for war is one more thing being sold alongside all this other shit www.indignity.net/what-is-dona...
Screenshot of text: When I reloaded the page, the Lovecraftian horrors were replaced by a pulsating top ad showing Trump in the Oval Office, with some smirking bearded person beside him and the message "Revealed: Something Big Happening Behind White House Door / 'TRUMP'S NEXT MOVE WILL SHOCK THE WORLD.'" Below that, the feed was littered with ads offering 50 percent off on red Trump hats, a MyPillow discount code, Damascus-steel-look folding knives, and a persistently recurring image of some kind of black-brown fruit, ripped open to expose glistening fruit-viscera, with the caption "Parasitologist: One Teaspoon Kills All Parasites In Your Body!"
September 30, 2025 at 1:58 AM
tomscocca.bsky.social
Embrace the liberating truth that you're not paid to be a sports executive or a political strategist, and you don't owe these people constructive criticism!
Screenshot of text: When the experts fail, no one is under any obligation to explain how they personally might have been a superior expert, themselves. Who should the Orioles have signed instead of Charlie Morton or Gary Sanchez? I don't know, somebody who wouldn't get shelled in his first seven starts or break down for the year after 29 games with a -0.4 WAR. Mike Elias is getting millions of dollars a year to identify which players are going to be healthy and successful and which ones aren't. After seven seasons at that job, he's won zero playoff games and currently presides over a last-place team. Mike Elias is a bad baseball executive!
September 29, 2025 at 5:33 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
Yeah man I know what the point is
Screenshot of text: The real gap that Klein's praise of Kirk fell into, however, was not between the left and the right. It was between a thin top layer of the liberal establishment—commentators, editors, Democratic party leaders, political strategists—and the vast, horrified public they think they're leading, and from which they've come completely delaminated. It was the separation between people who believe the challenge in American politics today is to reverse the degradation of forms and manners and reason, and those who believe the challenge is to fight back against a government bent on rampant corruption and brutality.
September 28, 2025 at 1:13 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
What did she say after that, Ezra Klein? What was the next thing she said in this speech you say you have been obsessing about, that you are organizing your current theory of politics around?
Screenshot of text: If we want to talk about writing them off, let’s start here. I’ve been obsessing, for a piece I’ve been writing, about the Hillary Clinton “deplorables” comment. I want to play it. Archived clip of Hillary Clinton: You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables, right? [Audience laughs and applauds.] The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that, and he has lifted them up. He has given voice to — their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, meanspirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America ——
September 28, 2025 at 12:59 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
Glad Google's going all-in on "AI" technology while somehow letting this hit the inbox
Screenshot of email header: Security alert: new or unusual X login Inbox X <hQxAMmRHvThQxAMmRHvT@jwso.mail.kmutt.ac.th> to me
September 27, 2025 at 4:26 AM
tomscocca.bsky.social
Here are two of the most influential people in liberal media, David Remnick and Ezra Klein, telling each other outright lies about what the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate said because years of exposure to conservative grievance media pounded the original facts of the case out of their skulls
Screenshot of text: both our liberalism and our illiberalism inside himself. After him, I think, this began to break down. Trump rises and you have, say, the Hillary Clinton “deplorables” speech, which is— Which was a deplorable speech. The worst word in that speech is “irredeemable.” She says that people voting for Trump are “irredeemable.” When you begin to talk like that, it’s a severing of political community.
September 26, 2025 at 10:21 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
How it's going / How it started
Screenshot of op-ed header: Opinion Bret Stephens Now the Left Cares About Free Speech Again Sept. 23, 2025 Screenshot of story header: I Called Bret Stephens a Bedbug. Then He Tried to Squelch My Freedom of Speech. What a Day. This, after embarrassing himself on Twitter and on national television. By David Karpf Published: Aug 27, 2019 6:51 PM EDT
September 24, 2025 at 6:52 PM
tomscocca.bsky.social
Seems like the confusion begins at home, where Daddy is mad that his little daughter isn't just being given the nice children's books in her college course
Screenshot of text: Soon after, a social media user named Son_of_Aragorn posted images of McCoul’s course materials on X, writing that she was “getting kids to read the worst filth.” The user later posted that his daughter was enrolled in the course and has kept them “in the loop of everything this WOKE professor has been saying for weeks.” The user posted about McCoul and the course four times on July 9, one of which was reposted by Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, a veteran of the first Trump administration who has more than 80,000 followers on X.
September 23, 2025 at 5:04 PM